lear, hard voice. A faint
glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage window. There were not many
minutes more. The two guards shifted their feet. "Now," said the man,
"we'll sing 'God Save the King.'" The two guards rose and stood at
attention, and the chaplain sang the national anthem with the man who
was to be shot for cowardice. Then the tramp of the firing-party came
across the cobblestones in the courtyard. It was dawn.

XIV

Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were generals who said:
"There is no such thing as shell-shock. It is cowardice. I would
court-martial in every case." Doctors said: "It is difficult to draw
the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as
mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by concussion,
or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a shock of
horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not generally
the slight, nervous men who suffer worst from shell-shock. It is often
the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being utterly without
nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no
resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in
nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man,
the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of
his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that
bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand
self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him in war; whereas the yokel,
or the sergeant--major type, is splendid until the shock comes. Then
he may crack. But there is no law. Imagination--apprehension--are the
devil, too, and they go with 'nerves.'"

It was a sergeant-major whom I saw stricken badly with shell-shock in
Aveluy Wood near Thiepval. He was convulsed with a dreadful rigor like
a man in epilepsy, and clawed at his mouth, moaning horribly, with livid
terror in his eyes. He had to be strapped to a stretcher before he
could be carried away. He had been a tall and splendid man, this poor,
terror-stricken lunatic.

Nearer to Thiepval, during the fighting there, other men were brought
down with shell-shock. I remember one of them now, though I saw many
others. He was a Wiltshire lad, very young, with an apple-cheeked face
and blue-gray eyes. He stood outside a dugout, shaking in every limb, in
a palsied way. His steel hat was at the back of his head and his mo