It was their luck. Why worry
about the other fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a
trench might make all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead
bodies were being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had
smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat
under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped
nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective
egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous
places when I saw them in the line. In a little way, not as a soldier,
but as a correspondent, taking only a thousandth part of the risks of
fighting-men, I found myself using this self-complacency. They were
strafing on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty
for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I
was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank Heaven for that!
"Here," said an elderly officer--one of those rare exalted souls who
thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's
sake--"here we may be killed at any moment!"
He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged
as a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.
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