28
The Ypres Times.
camp bedthe candle illumines but faintly the shadows of my steel tunnelthere is
nothing to warn the intruder that I am an officer.
Hallo," I answer. Been out on the wires
Yes. My God, it's weird out there, all by oneself. There's something rummy
about old Wipers to-night."
The voice stops. To me, it is the voice of a man who has been feeling intensely,
mutely, hour after hour, till the craving for expression has become an ache. It is the
voice of one who has been striving to keep a secret, a secret that the night has entrusted
to his keepingand now the secret must out.
What division are you I ask. Something tells him I am not really a mate."
Third Division, sir." Discipline has come back into his mouth but I can see
the longing for human converse in his eyes. My candle has drawn him out of the lone blue-
ness of the night, he has dropped in for a fag and a yarn only to find
an officer a superior being with whom he may not talk as man to man.
Cigarette query, taking the box from the table. He looks at me curiously.
Thank you, sir." I give him a match.
I may be no soldier, but I know the tactics of the pen, know them from the first glimpse
of my copy to the last passed for press on the proof-sheetand my linesman has
forgotten my rank, is talking to me as he would to his mate before the first ash falls
from the cigarette I have given him.
I can hear his voice as I write, but I cannot hear the Cockney in itfor he is speaking,
out of his heart.
Funny, isn't it he is saying. I suppose I've been over those old wires fifty
times. Up the canal bank, down that communication trench, past the cross-roadsthat's
a bad bitright up to Suicide Corner. But I've never known it like it is to-night. Weird,
that's what it is. I'm not a nervy chap, but it seems to me as if there were ghosts about.
Once or twice, I tell you straight, I almost turned back."
The voice goes on. Not that they were shelling much, either. I have known it
fifty times worse. Had to get down to them once or twice, of course." There is a pause
here a long, ruminating, puzzled pause, then, I saw the wife and kid plainer than I
ever saw them before. You know, sir, I always think of them when I'm being shelled.
But to-night I saw them as plain as if I were at home."
And then the spell breaks he is just a common soldier I, his officer, a giver of
cigarettes, possibly (I hope this is so), a comforter in affliction. My intruder gives me,
Good night, sir," salutes, departs into the eeriness whence he came.
Even the machine-gun stutter is silenced now. I am alone, a rabbit in a dank burrow,
gazing wide-eyed into the Whistlerian night. Men who work with their handsbrave
because they have no imagination," my wordless thoughts return, phrased, to jeer at me,
as I sit thinking of my visitor. Unknown, just a numbered atom, one of millions, he came
to me out of the blue darkness in the hour of my pride unknowing, he has taught me yet
another lesson of this unending trade of minethe lesson of humility.
He has made me realize that not only poets have imagination, not only public school
boys courage. And, because I am perhaps a poet, I see him clearly I see the shell whistle,
watch him dive for cover I feel the very mud caking on his fingers as he ties the reef-knot
in the frayed wire, smears on the insulation, makes the joint good. But I see more than
thatI see the soul and the heart of him.
Even as his body leaves the safety of the telephone dug-out, the comforting gossip
of his mates, something tells himas it told methat the dead are abroad in The City
to-night. They are all about him, almost tangible warning him of pain, of the death
they died. Something weird," he calls ithe is no poet, this linesman of mine, only
one of the unlettered who has crossed the borderland for an hour or two. He is no poet
but he goes on. The unknown grips him at each slipping stride, grips and rends him
