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[Page 198]
8
can be understood by one who has passed in some measure through the risks and chances of this war.
See that pale blood-splattered face, those startled eyes, and note the hand which trembles like a leaf. The man is not a coward, see, he buries his poor face in his hands awhile. And would you know more? He is no coward, but perhaps you may never know from him that he counts himself almost as base as that.
It is only now that ideas become clear to him, that the relief of safety and full significance of loss, by strange conflict, we set the scattered members of his mental vision; piecing in sequence of reason those vivid events which had so far shocked the brain as to retard this establishment of memory.
He has been brave through shell fire, beneath shrapnel, brave and lucky for a time. After the charge he had gone out into no-mans-land and brought in a wounded comrade, and had still been lucky. Then again he had gone out there, and with assistance of another had dug out his dearest friends saving him with nothing worse or better than a broken leg. "You'll get me back safe Tom" this friend had implored him; "yes sure" so he had carried the streatcher, leading, and all seemed well in spite of shells bursting near, when suddenly the very world seemed to break and he had to scramble out of a heap of soil and smoke and blood and while trying to understand through a dizzy brain he had found parts of a streatcher and a quaking hand, severed; and oh horror, the head of his friends with its poor eyes still bright and imploring, then those eyes had glazed over and blood form the jagged neck had soaked into the earth.
Ah, at this he had fled, fearing as he never feared before, and then remembering his assistant streatcher bearer he had returned through the honeycomb of shell holes, a braver man than ever against the new born dread and terror that pulsed through his whole being, just to see if his fellow helper of the streatcher was alive and could be saved. But, oh merciful Heaven, to find that he was perhaps too late, and that a more recent explosion had dislodged and broken to death the man he sought and who it seemed to him had in the first place been but buried alive needing nought but