It was indeed
a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall,
that being the reverse side of the argument.
I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many
times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the
Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our
front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette,
on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-l0th Gordons
were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It
was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos,
and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters
located under some sand-bags in a German dug--out. All the way up to
Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and
of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire.
Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half
buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with
enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate
battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees.
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