Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of the little house
where I lived at that time with other onlookers. It was an untidy
garden, with a stretch of grass-plot too rough to be called a lawn,
but with pleasant shade under the trees, and a potager with
raspberries and currants on the bushes, and flower-beds where red and
white roses dropped their petals.
Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, came to gossip
with us, and read the papers, and drink a little whisky in the
evenings, and pick the raspberries. They were not professional
soldiers. One of them had been a stock-broker, the other "something in
the city." They disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred
and contempt. They hated war with a ferocity which was only a little
"camouflaged" by the irony and the brutality of their anecdotes of
war's little comedies. They took a grim delight in the humor of
corpses, lice, bayonet--work, and the sniping of fair-haired German
boys. They laughed, almost excessively, at these attributes of
warfare, and one of them used to remark, after some such anecdote,
"And once I was a little gentleman!"
He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his heart--I saw
him touch the petals of living roses with a caress in his finger-tips-
-and with a spiritual revolt against the beastliness of this new job
of his, although he was a strong, hard fellow, without weakness of
sentiment.
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