w what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know
anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't
know.

"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.

"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in
your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of
fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over
_that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a
place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it
was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me
alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in
the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the
time.

"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole
war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got
out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of
detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified
it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up
I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God
somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments
when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter
injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.

"Not know what fear is!

"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject,
abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the
night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."

"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"

"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn
itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."

And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.

Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie
had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him
looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his
brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to
that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after
their mother--things died hard.

He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.

Viola told us what happened.

It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of
Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wo