There was a
foreknowledge of death in his eyes.
One of the officers had spoken to me privately.
"I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that
thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that
wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows."
I hated to leave him there to his agony. . . The colonel himself was
all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the
mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the
dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young
subaltern was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing
the glint of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver
ricocheted from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for
having fired.
The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-
logged trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and
buried men in wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers
waiting for English heads, and then the mines--oh, a cheery little
school of courage for the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war
for the devil and General Squeers!
VII
The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from
the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it
stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as
a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit
of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the
fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts.
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