"Can I get through?" asked the officer.
"I've got through," was the answer, "but it's chancing one's luck."
The officer "chanced his luck," but did not expect to come back alive.
Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.
"I had no sense of fear," he said, "but a sort of subconscious
knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a
conscious determination to go on at all costs and find out what had
happened."
He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the
unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when
in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an
amiable suggestion.
"Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack
upon the enemy?"
There was something in those words, "a slight attack," which is
irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern
trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.
So the cavalry did its "bit" again, though not as cavalry, and I saw
some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone
through that bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful
word as they passed with their horses.
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