on the subject he was
obsessed by. He had come, unconsciously, for this and this only, to talk
war to Lilly: or at Lilly. For the latter listened and watched, and said
nothing. As a man at night helplessly takes a taxi to find some woman,
some prostitute, Herbertson had almost unthinkingly got into a taxi and
come battering at the door in Covent Garden, only to talk war to Lilly,
whom he knew very little. But it was a driving instinct--to come and get
it off his chest.

And on and on he talked, over his wine and soda. He was not
conceited--he was not showing off--far from it. It was the same thing
here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this
Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat
in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on
the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under
the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every
time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a
man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn't know where
to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of
war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by
a vision that the soul cannot bear.

In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of
bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in
the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of
unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation
was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only
with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover.

"I used to be awfully frightened," laughed Herbertson. "Now you say,
Lilly, you'd never have stood it. But you would. You're nervous--and
it was just the nervous ones that did stand it. When nearly all our
officers were gone, we had a man come out--a man called Margeritson,
from India--big merchant people out there. They all said he was no
good--not a bit of good--nervous chap. No good at all. But when you
had to get out of the trench and go for the Germans he was
perfect--perfect--It all came to him then, at the crisis, and he was
perfect.

"Some things frighten one man, and some another. Now shells would never
frighten me. But I couldn't stand bombs. You could tell the
difference between our machines and the Germans. Ours was a steady
no