Think of it for a moment. He appealed to their sporting
instinct; he turned their thoughts from death and wounds and introduced
a jest into every dug-out that night; and he indicated, without
boasting, that he was going to be first over the parapet. He made it
certain that every sportsman in the company--and what British regular is
not--would strain every nerve to be first across. And the cream of the
jest was that, stalwart athlete that he was, he was first across
himself! The same may be said of the officer; he wins more than
obedience from his men. I have seen senior N.C.O.'s crying like children
because their young officer was dead.
Along with this courage and comradeship and humour there is often a
great deal of fatalism. It expresses itself in many ways, in the reading
of Omar Khayyam--'The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes'--for
example, in the indifference so often shown by men if they lose through
their own fault some 'cushy job' and have to go back to the line, or in
the doing of really foolish things, foolish because dangerous, but
useless. I remember sitting outside the dug-out of Captain Chree (who
afterwards laid down his life on the Somme) at battalion headquarters,
and watching the shelling of one of our batteries of 18-pounders some
five hundred yards back.
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