“They did try to come back, but not very much. …
“Then when I began to feel sure of having got hold of the trench for good, I began to realise just how tired I was and how high the sun had got. I began to look about me, and found most of the other men working just as hard as I had been doing. ‘We’ve done it!’ I said, and that was the first word I’d spoken since I told my two Germans to come out of it, and stuck a man with a wounded leg to watch them. ‘It’s a bit of All Right,’ said Ortheris, knocking off also, and lighting a half-consumed cigarette. He had been wearing it behind his ear, I believe, ever since the charge. Against this occasion. He’d kept close up to me all the time, I realised. And then old Park turned up very cheerful with a weak bayonet jab in his forearm that he wanted me to rebandage. It was good to see him practically all right too.
“ ‘I took two prisoners,’ I said, and everybody I spoke to I told that. I was fearfully proud of it.
“I thought that if I could take two prisoners in my first charge I was going to be some soldier.
“I had stood it all admirably. I didn’t feel a bit shaken. I was as tough as anything. I’d seen death and killing, and it was all just hockey.
“And then that confounded Ortheris must needs go and get killed.
“The shell knocked me over, and didn’t hurt me a bit. I was a little stunned, and some dirt was thrown over me, and when I got up on my knees I saw Jewell lying about six yards off—and his legs were all smashed about. Ugh! Pulped!
“He looked amazed. ‘Bloody,’ he said, ‘bloody.’ He fixed his eyes on me, and suddenly grinned. You know we’d once had two fights about his saying ‘bloody,’ I think I told you at the time, a fight and a return match, he couldn’t box for nuts, but he stood up like a Briton, and it appealed now to his sense of humour that I should be standing there too dazed to protest at the old offence. ‘I thought you was done in,’ he said. ‘I’m in a mess—a bloody mess, ain’t I? Like a stuck pig. Bloody—right enough. Bloody! I didn’t know I ’ad it in me.’
“He looked at me and grinned with a sort of pale satisfaction in keeping up to the last—dying good Ortheris to the finish. I just stood up helpless in front of him, still rather dazed.
“He said something about having a thundering thirst on him.
“I really don’t believe he felt any pain. He would have done if he had lived.
“And then while I was fumbling with my water-bottle, he collapsed. He forgot all about Ortheris. Suddenly he said something that cut me all to ribbons. His face puckered up just like the face of a fretful child which refuses to go to bed. ‘I didn’t want to be aut of it,’ he said petulantly. ‘And I’m done!’ And then—then he just looked discontented and miserable and died—right off. Turned his head a little way over. As if he was impatient at everything. Fainted—and fluttered out.
“For a time I kept trying to get him to drink. …
“I couldn’t believe he was dead. …
“And suddenly it was all different. I began to cry. Like a baby. I kept on with the water-bottle at his teeth long after I was convinced he was dead. I didn’t want him to be aut of it! God knows how I didn’t. I wanted my dear little Cockney cad back. Oh! most frightfully I wanted him back.
“I shook him. I was like a scared child. I blubbered and howled things. … It’s all different since he died.
“My dear, dear Father, I am grieving and grieving—and it’s altogether nonsense. And it’s all mixed up in my mind with the mess I trod on. And it gets worse and worse. So that I don’t seem to feel anything really, even for Teddy.
“It’s been just the last straw of all this hellish foolery. …
“If ever there was a bigger lie, my dear Daddy, than any other, it is that man is a reasonable creature. …
“War is just foolery—lunatic foolery—hell’s foolery. …
“But, anyhow, your son is sound and well—if sorrowful and angry. We were relieved that night. And there are rumours that very soon we are to have a holiday and a refit. We lost rather heavily. We have been praised. But all along, Essex has done well. I can’t reckon to get back yet, but there are such things as leave for eight-and-forty hours or so in England. …
“I shall be glad of that sort of turning round. …
“I’m tired. Oh! I’m tired. …
“I wanted to write all about Jewell to his mother or his sweetheart or someone; I wanted to wallow in his praises, to say all the things I really find now that I thought about him, but I haven’t even had that satisfaction. He was a Poor Law child; he was raised in one of those awful places between Sutton and Banstead in Surrey. I’ve told you of all the sweethearting he had. Soldiers Three was his Bible; he was always singing ‘Tipperary,’ and he never got the tune right nor learnt more than three lines of it. He laced all his talk with ‘b⸺y’; it was his jewel, his ruby. But he had the pluck of a robin or a squirrel; I never knew him scared or anything but cheerful. Misfortunes, humiliations, only made him chatty. And he’d starve to have something to give away.
“Well, well, this is the way of war, Daddy. This is what war is. Damn the Kaiser! Damn all fools. … Give my love to the Mother and the bruddykins and everyone. …”
§ 19
It was just a day or so over three weeks after this last letter from Hugh
