The
striking comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience
and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that
impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness
but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities
so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the
hour may snatch life from him. I thought I knew the head in front of me,
and, leaning forward, saw it was my brother-in-law. It has always struck
me as quaint that he, who had been with his battery for a year and a
half, and I, who had been out for nine months, should have met again
under such circumstances. I had pictured a stricken field and much
coolness exhibited in an admittedly dramatic moment--something in line
with Stanley's 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' It was comforting to find
it otherwise, but, as Smee says in _Peter Pan_, it was 'galling too.'
First when looking into a shop window, and now in a concert hall, in all
these months of war! We said, 'Not a bad show, is it?' 'Not half bad.'
But there have been some strange meetings in this war.
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