Chapter II

The other incident is briefly told. On our last day in the line Harry's platoon were working stealthily in the hot sun at a new section of trench connecting two saps, and some one incautiously threw a little new-turned earth over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom molested any of the regular, established trenches with shell-fire, but hotly resented the making of new ones, opened fire with a light high-velocity gun, of the whizz-bang type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and the first experience of a whizz-bang is very disturbing. The long shriek of the ordinary shell encourages the usually futile hope that by ducking one may avoid destruction. With the whizz-bang there is no hope, for there is no warning; the sound and the shell arrive almost simultaneously. Harry's platoon did not like these things. The first three burst near but short of the trench, filling the air with fumes; the fourth hit and removed most of the parapet of one bay. Harry, hurrying along to the place, found the four men there considerably surprised, crouching in the corners and gazing stupidly at the yawning gap. It was undesirable, if not impossible, to rebuild the parapet during daylight, so he moved them into the next bay. He then went along the trench to see that all the men had ceased work. He heard two more shells burst behind him as he went. On his way back two men rushing round a corner--two men with white faces smeared with black and a little blood--almost knocked him down; they were speechless. He went through the bay which had been blown in; it was silent, empty; the bay beyond was silent too, save for the buzzing of a thousand flies. In it he had left eight men; six of them were lying dead. Two had marvellously escaped. The first whizz-bang had blown away the parapet; the second, following immediately after, had passed miraculously through the hole, straight into the trench--a piece of astounding bad luck or good gunnery. The men could not be buried till dusk, and we left them there.

Two hours later, as we sat under a waterproof sheet and talked quietly of this thing, there came an engineer officer wandering along the trench. He had come, crouching, through those two shattered and yawning bays: he was hot and very angry. 'Why the hell don't you bury those Turks?' he said, 'they must have been there for weeks!' This is the kind of charge which infuriates the soldier at any time; and we did not like the added suggestion that those six good men of the 14th Platoon were dead Turks. We told him they were Englishmen, dead two hours. 'But, my God, man,' he said, 'they're black!' We led him back, incredulous, to the place.

When we got there we understood. Whether from the explosion or the scorching sun in that airless place, I know not, but those six men were, as he said, literally black--black and reeking and hideous--and the flies...!

Harry and I crouched at the end of that bay, truly unable to believe our eyes. I hope I may never again see such horror as was in Harry's face. They were his platoon, and he knew them, as an officer should. After the explosion, there had been only four whom he could definitely identify. Now there was not one. In two hours...

* * * * *

I do not wish to labour this or any similar episode. I have seen many worse things; every soldier has. In a man's history they are important only in their effect upon him, and the effect they have is determined by many things--by his experience, and his health, and his state of mind. But if you are to understand what I may call the battle-psychology of a man, as I want you to understand Harry's, you must not ignore particular incidents. For in this respect the lives of soldiers are not uniform; though many may live in the same regiment and fight in the same battles, the experiences which matter come to them diversely--to some crowded and overwhelming, to some by kind and delicate degrees. And so do their spirits develop.

These two incidents following so closely upon each other had a most unhappy cumulative effect on Harry. His night's scouting, in spite of its miserable end, had not perceptibly dimmed his romantic outlook; it had been an adventure, and from a military point of view a successful adventure. The Colonel had been pleased with the reconnaissance, as such. But the sight of his six poor men, lying black and beastly in that sunlit hole, had killed the 'Romance of War' for him. Henceforth it must be a necessary but disgusting business, to be endured like a dung-hill. But this, in the end, was inevitable; with all soldiers it is only a matter of time, though for a boy of Harry's temperament it was an ill chance that it should come so soon.

What was more serious was this. The two incidents had revived, in a most malignant form, his old distrust of his own competence. I found that he was brooding over this--accusing himself, quite wrongly, I think, of being responsible for the death of seven men. He had bungled the scouting; he had recklessly attracted attention to the party, and Trower, not he, had paid for it. He had moved four men into a bay where four others already were, and six of them had been killed. I tried hard to persuade him, not quite honestly, that he had done absolutely the right thing. In scouting, of all things, I told him, a man _must_ take chances; and the matter of the two whizz-bangs was sheer bad luck. It was no good; he was a fool--a failure. Unconsciously, the Colonel encouraged this attitude. For, thinking that Harry's nerve might well have been shaken by his first experience, he would not let him go out on patrol again on our next 'tour' in the line. I think he was quite mistaken in this view, for the boy did not even seem to realize how narrow his own escapes had been, so concerned was he about his lost men. Nor did this explanation of the Colonel's veto even occur to him. Rather it confirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it seemed to him that the Colonel, too, must look upon him as a bungler, a waster of men's lives....

All this was very bad, and I was much afraid of what the reaction might be. But there was one bright spot. So far he only distrusted his military capacity; there was no sign of his distrusting his own courage. I prayed that that might not follow.