In the
quietude of the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered
by flower-beds, I had had strange conversations with boys who had
revealed their souls a little, after dinner in the darkness, their
faces bared now and then by the light of cigarettes or the flare of a
match.
"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down from the Somme
fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a damn
for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its
uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the
animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck. . . My nerves
are like fiddle-strings."
In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between
their stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and
ditches under frightful fire which had "wiped out" their platoons or
companies. A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling
gull, used to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his
wing, and its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on
the figures in khaki--until suddenly it would clap its long bill
rapidly in a wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire--"Curse the
bloody bird!" said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent
noise--and caper with ridiculous postures round the imperturbable
gull.
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