My Comrades

I carried depressing memories from Nieuport for it was here that I lost one of my best pals. He was killed whilst taking some of our wounded down to the dressing-station and I attended his funeral in the tiny military cemetery near Coxyde.

He was a quiet well-educated lad who hailed from Lancaster, and we had a love of literature in common.

I wrote a detailed account of the circumstances of his death to his parents and then, having a shrewd suspicion that it might be censored at the battery office I sent a duplicate copy in a green envelope, these being a special Army issue that were only censored at the base.

As I suspected, only the last got through, but I had the satisfaction of learning later how much comfort it had been to poor Bill’s parents. He was an only son.

Then there was Gunner Bell, better known as Ding-dong. He was a walking wounded case and I went down to the dressing station with him myself.

It was in a cellar near Suicide Corner and I shook hands with him and wished him luck with his ”blighty”. When we met a year later in Brighton he was in hospital with an artificial leg and I was acting as gunnery instructor in the Artillery cadet school. He came from Somerset and a decent, good-humoured fellow he was.

“FOR LUCK”

And there was Corporal Norman, killed by a shell-splinter which went clean through a steel mirror he carried in his breast pocket. He was a reserved but kindly chap who had recently joined us from the trench-mortar batteries.

I carried that mirror about with me for luck all through the rest of the campaign, which goes to show how superstitious one can get, living under constant strain.

I could recall so many more, but what was the use? The astonishing thing was, not the stark, unheroic courage, the patient endurance, the calm resignation to whatever fate held in store, but the sense of fatality that seemed to lie beneath it all.

As though we, the youth of the early 20^th century, were offering ourselves as a sort of sacrifice for the mistakes and follies of the civilization which bore us, as though we were working out a penance for the sins of our fathers and that such a holocaust was the only way in which we could satisfy an outraged Creator.

I can think of no other explanation.