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I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my
friend went into the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way
of life became a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and
afterward sat in shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that
death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with
one man whom afterward I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near
Arras, on an afternoon when a shell had killed three of his men
bathing in a tank, and other shells made a mess of blood and flesh in
his wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the first to
recognize a face from the world of peace. After his greeting he swore
frightful oaths, cursing the war and the Staff. His nerves were all
jangled. There was another officer in the 47th London Division whom I
had known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, not twenty
when he had fought through several battles. He and hundreds like him
had been playing at red Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years
before an August in 1914.


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