The Glory of the Trenches | Page 7

as a Christ in khaki.
The other face is of a girl--a sister I ought to call her. She's the nearest
approach to a sculptured Greek goddess I've seen in a living woman.
She's very tall, very pale and golden, with wide brows and big grey
eyes like Trilby. I wonder what she did before she went to war--for
she's gone to war just as truly as any soldier. I'm sure in the peaceful
years she must have spent a lot of time in being loved. Perhaps her man
was killed out here. Now she's ivory-white with over-service and
spends all her days in loving. Her eyes have the old frank, innocent
look, but they're ringed with being weary. Only her lips hold a touch of
colour; they have a childish trick of trembling when any one's wound is
hurting too much. She's the first touch of home that the stretcher-cases
see when they've said good-bye to the trenches. She moves down the
ward; eyes follow her. When she is absent, though others take her place,
she leaves a loneliness. If she meant much to men in days gone by,
to-day she means more than ever. Over many dying boys she stoops as
the incarnation of the woman whom, had they lived, they would have
loved. To all of us, with the blasphemy of destroying still upon us, she
stands for the divinity of womanhood.
What sights she sees and what words she hears; yet the pity she brings
to her work preserves her sweetness. In the silence of the night those
who are delirious re-fight their recent battles. You're half-asleep, when
in the darkened ward some one jumps up in bed, shouting, "Hold your
bloody hands up." He thinks he's capturing a Hun trench, taking
prisoners in a bombed in dug-out. In an instant, like a mother with a
frightened child, she's bending over him; soon she has coaxed his head
back on the pillow. Men do not die in vain when they evoke such
women. And the men--the chaps in the cots! As a patient the first sight
you have of them is a muddy stretcher. The care with which the bearers
advance is only equalled by the waiters in old-established London
Clubs when they bring in one of their choicest wines. The thing on the

stretcher looks horribly like some of the forever silent people you have
seen in No Man's Land. A pair of boots you see, a British Warm flung
across the body and an arm dragging. A screen is put round a bed; the
next sight you have of him is a weary face lying on a white pillow.
Soon the chap in the bed next to him is questioning.
"What's yours?"
"Machine-gun caught me in both legs."
"Going to lose 'em?"
"Don't know. Can't feel much at present. Hope not."
Then the questioner raises himself on his elbow. "How's it going?"
It is the attack. The conversation that follows is always how we're
hanging on to such and such an objective and have pushed forward
three hundred yards here or have been bent back there. One thing you
notice: every man forgets his own catastrophe in his keenness for the
success of the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty
did I hear a word of self-pity or complaining. On the contrary, the most
severely wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they had
got off so lightly. Since the war started the term "lightly" has become
exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is justified in saying he's got
off lightly when what he expected was death.
I remember a big Highland officer who had been shot in the
knee-cap.
He had been operated on and the knee-cap had been found to be so
splintered that it had had to be removed; of this he was unaware. For
the first day as he lay in bed he kept wondering aloud how long it
would be before he could re-join his battalion. Perhaps he suspected his
condition and was trying to find out. All his heart seemed set on once
again getting into the fighting. Next morning he plucked up courage to
ask the doctor, and received the answer he had dreaded.
"Never. You won't be going back, old chap."

Next time he spoke his voice was a bit throaty. "Will it stiffen?"
"You've lost the knee-joint," the doctor said, "but with luck we'll save
the leg."
His voice sank to a whisper. "If you do, it won't be much good, will it?"
"Not much."
He lay for a couple of hours silent, readjusting his mind to meet the
new conditions. Then he commenced talking with cheerfulness about
returning to his family. The habit of courage had conquered--the habit
of courage which grows out of