Part 3 (1/2)
”It was. Also the Hun. The gun of small variety; the Hun of large--very large. I don't know which of us was the more surprised--him or me; we just stood gazing at one another.
”'Halloa, Englishman,' he said; 'come to leave a card?'
”'Quite right, Boche,' I answered. 'A p.p.c. one.'
”I was rather pleased with that touch at the time, old son. I was just going to elaborate it, and point out that he--as the dear departing--should really do it, when he was at me.
”Bill, my boy, you should have seen that fight. Like a fool, I never saw his revolver lying on the table, and I'd shoved my own back in my holster. He got it in his right hand, and I got his right wrist in my left. We'd each got the other by the throat, and one of us was for the count. We each knew that. At one time I thought he'd got me--we were cras.h.i.+ng backwards and forwards, and I caught my head against a wooden pole which nearly stunned me. And, mark you, all the time I was expecting his pal to come back and inquire after his health. Then suddenly I felt him weaken, and I squeezed his throat the harder. It came quite quickly at the end. His pistol-hand collapsed, and I suppose muscular contraction pulled the trigger, for the bullet went through his head, though I think he was dead already.” d.i.c.k O'Rourke paused, and looked thoughtfully into the fire.
”But why in the name of Heaven,” I cried, irritably, ”have you kept this dark all the while? Why didn't you tell us at the time?”
For a while he did not answer, and then he produced his pocket-book.
From it he took a photograph, which he handed to me.
”Out of that German's pocket I took that photograph.”
”Well,” I said, ”what about it? A very pretty girl for a German.” Then I looked at it closely. ”Why, it was taken in England. Is it an English girl?”
”Yes,” he answered, dryly, ”it is. It's Moyra Kavanagh, whom I proposed to forty-eight hours previously at Ciro's. She refused me, and told me then she was in love with a German. I celebrate the news by coming over here and killing him, in an individual fight where it was man to man.”
”But,” I cried, ”good heavens! man--it was you or he.”
”I know that,” he answered, wearily. ”What then? He evidently loved her; if not--why the photo. Look at what's written on the back--'From Moyra--with all my love.' All her love. Lord! it's a rum box up.” He sighed wearily and slowly replaced it in his case. ”So I buried him, and I chucked his gun in a pond, and said nothing about it. If I had it would probably have got into the papers or some such rot, and she'd have wanted to know all about it. Think of it! What the deuce would I have told her? To sympathise and discuss her love affairs with her in London, and then toddle over here and slaughter him. Dash it, man, it's Gilbertian! And, mark you, nothing would induce me to marry her--even if she'd have me--without her knowing.”
”But---” I began, and then fell silent. The more I thought of it the less I liked it. Put it how you like, for a girl to take as her husband a man who has actually killed the man she loved and was engaged to--German or no German--is a bit of a pill to swallow.
After mature consideration we decided to present the pill to her garbed in this form. On me--as a scribbler of sorts--descended the onus of putting it on paper. When I'd done it, and d.i.c.k had read it, he said I was a fool, and wanted to tear it up. Which is like a man....
Look you, my lady, it was a fair fight--it was war--it was an Englishman against a German; and the best man won. And surely to Heaven you can't blame poor old d.i.c.k? He didn't know; how could he have known, how... but what's the use? If your heart doesn't bring it right--neither my pen nor my logic is likely to. Which is like a woman.
CHAPTER II
PRIVATE MEYRICK--COMPANY IDIOT
No one who has ever given the matter a moment's thought would deny, I suppose, that a regiment without discipline is like a s.h.i.+p without a rudder. True as that fact has always been, it is doubly so now, when men are exposed to mental and physical shocks such as have never before been thought of.
The condition of a man's brain after he has sat in a trench and suffered an intensive bombardment for two or three hours can only be described by one word, and that is--numbed. The actual physical concussion, apart altogether from the mental terror, caused by the bursting of a succession of large sh.e.l.ls in a man's vicinity, temporarily robs him of the use of his thinking faculties. He becomes half-stunned, dazed; his limbs twitch convulsively and involuntarily; he mutters foolishly--he becomes incoherent. Starting with fright he pa.s.ses through that stage, pa.s.ses beyond it into a condition bordering on coma; and when a man is in that condition he is not responsible for his actions. His brain has ceased to work....
Now it is, I believe, a principle of psychology that the brain or mind of a man can be divided into two parts--the objective and the subjective: the objective being that part of his thought-box which is actuated by outside influences, by his senses, by his powers of deduction; the subjective being that part which is not directly controllable by what he sees and hears, the part which the religious might call his soul, the Buddhist ”the Spark of G.o.d,” others instinct.
And this portion of a man's nature remains acutely active, even while the other part has struck work. In fact, the more numbed and comatose the thinking brain, the more clearly and insistently does subjective instinct hold sway over a man's body. Which all goes to show that discipline, if it is to be of any use to a man at such a time, must be a very different type of thing to what the ordinary, uninitiated, and so-called free civilian believes it to be. It must be an ideal, a thing where the motive counts, almost a religion. It must be an appeal to the soul of man, not merely an order to his body. That the order to his body, the self-control of his daily actions, the general change in his mode of life will infallibly follow on the heels of the appeal to his soul--if that appeal be successful--is obvious. But the appeal must come first: it must be the driving power; it must be the cause and not the effect. Otherwise, when the brain is gone--numbed by causes outside its control; when the reasoning intellect of man is out of action--stunned for the time; when only his soul remains to pull the quivering, helpless body through,--then, unless that soul has the ideal of discipline in it, it _will_ fail. And failure _may_ mean death and disaster; it _will_ mean shame and disgrace, when sanity returns....
To the man seated at his desk in the company office these ideas were not new. He had been one of the original Expeditionary Force; but a sniper had sniped altogether too successfully out by Zillebecke in the early stages of the first battle of Ypres, and when that occurs a rest cure becomes necessary. At that time he was the senior subaltern of one of the finest regiments of ”a contemptible little army”; now he was a major commanding a company in the tenth battalion of that same regiment. And in front of him on the desk, a yellow form pinned to a white slip of flimsy paper, announced that No. 8469, Private Meyrick, J., was for office. The charge was ”Late falling in on the 8 a.m. parade,” and the evidence against him was being given by C.-S.-M. Hayton, also an old soldier from that original battalion at Ypres. It was Major Seymour himself who had seen the late appearance of the above-mentioned Private Meyrick, and who had ordered the yellow form to be prepared. And now with it in front of him, he stared musingly at the office fire....
There are a certain number of individuals who from earliest infancy have been imbued with the idea that the chief pastime of officers in the army, when they are not making love to another man's wife, is the preparation of harsh and tyrannical rules for the express purpose of annoying their men, and the gloating infliction of drastic punishment on those that break them. The absurdity of this idea has nothing to do with it, it being a well-known fact that the more absurd an idea is, the more utterly fanatical do its adherents become. To them the thought that a man being late on parade should make him any the worse fighter--especially as he had, in all probability, some good and sufficient excuse--cannot be grasped. To them the idea that men may not be a law unto themselves--though possibly agreed to reluctantly in the abstract--cannot possibly be a.s.similated in the concrete.
”He has committed some trifling offence,” they say; ”now you will give him some ridiculous punishment. That is the curse of militarism--a chosen few rule by Fear.” And if you tell them that any attempt to inculcate discipline by fear alone must of necessity fail, and that far from that being the method in the Army the reverse holds good, they will not believe you. Yet--it is so....