Hornung Ernest William - Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front стр 34.

Loyalty to one's own, when so impassioned, is by way of draining the plain man's stock: perfect home lives are not so common that the ordinary middle-aged ratepayer makes haste to give up one for the wars. But the anthologist had not been 'wrapped up' like the rest of us. His loyalties did not even end at his country. That first afternoon, I remember, he told me he had been 'a bit of a Theosophist.'

'Aren't you one now?'

'No; but I still have a warm corner in my heart for them.'

I thought that very finely said of a creed outlived. Give me a warm corner for an old love, be it man, woman, or sect!

Daily he dropped in to read and chat; not to take out a book until his turn came for the Line. It was just when the German push seemed imminent to many, was indeed widely expected at a date when my friend would still be at his dangerous post. He knew well what it might mean at any moment; and I think he said, 'The wireless man must be the last to budge,' with the smile he kept for the things he meant; but for once his eyes were not doing their part. 'Well, thank God I've had it!' he said of his happy past as we locked hands. 'And nothing can take it away from you,' I had the nerve to say; for these may be the comforts of one's own heart, but it seems an insolence to offer them to a younger man with a harder grip on life. Happily we understood each other. 'And many happy chats had we,' he had written on the back of the photograph he left me. He had also written his wife's address. David Copperfield went with him when we parted. I wondered if I should ever see either of them again.

Sure enough, on the predicted night, came the roll of drum-fire, as like thunder as a noise can be; but it was our drum-fire, as it happened, and down came my friend next day to tell me all about it. No-Man's Land had been 'boiling like cocoa' under our shells; he was full of the set-back administered to Jerry, of the fun of underground wireless and the genius of Charles Dickens. I sent him back with Joseph Vance , and we talked of nothing else at our next meeting. It was our last; but I treasure a letter (telling of 'the ruined city of our friendship,' among other things), and a field-card of more recent date; and have every hope that the writer is still lighting up underground danger-posts with his wise twinkle, and still adding to his field anthology.

Yet another hard reader was a Coldstream Guardsman, a much younger man, and one of the handsomest in the hut. He, too, if you will believe me, had brown eyes a thing that could not happen to three successive characters in a novel but of another order altogether. If they had never killed a lady in their time, their molten glow belied them. This young man liked a classic author of full flavour. Tom Jones was probably his favourite novel, but we had it not. De Maupassant would have enchanted him but not the coarse translations on vile paper or Rousseau's or Cellini's open secrets. As it was he had to put up with Anatole France, and oddments of Swift and Wilde; nor do I forget his justifiable disgust on discovering too late that our Gulliver was a nursery version. He was a delightful companion across the counter: subtle, understanding, soft-spoken, in himself a romantic figure, yet engagingly vulnerable to romance.

'I'm feeling sentimental, Mr. Hornung. I want a love-story,' he sighed one afternoon. I reminded him that he would also want Good Stuff, and succeeded in meeting all his needs with Ships that Pass in the Night .

Next day we had our Quiet Room Evening with Tom Hood; and that was the time I strayed

upon delicate ground by way of 'The Bridge of Sighs,' from poem to subject before I knew where I was. The men took it beautifully, and touched my heart by impulsively applauding the very things I should have feared to say to them upon reflection. As for our Coldstreamer, he came straight up to the counter and took out Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying !

WAR AND THE MAN

'Do you want a green envelope?' he asked point-blank.

'As a matter of fact, I do.'

'Then I'll see if I can't get you one.'

Now, the point about the 'green envelope' is the printed declaration on the outside, that the contents 'refer to nothing but private and family matters'; this being signed by the sender, your letter is censorable only at the base, and will not be read by anybody with whom you are in daily contact. There is, I believe, a weekly issue of one of these envelopes per man. This I only remembered as the generous soul was turning away.

'Don't you go giving me anything you want yourself!' I called after him.

He just looked over his shoulder. 'Then it wouldn't be much of a gift, would it?' was all he said; but I shall never give a copper to a crossing-sweeper without trying to forget his words.

That man was a driver in the R.H.A., and beyond the fact that he had just been reading The White Company I know nothing about him. They cropped up under every cap-badge, these crisp, articulate, enlightening men; they had shaken off their marching feet the dust of every walk in civil life, and it was only here and there a tenacious speck caught the eye. I have heard a Southern in Jock's clothing work in a word about the season-ticket and the 'silk hat' of his City days; but as a rule a soldier no more thinks of trading upon his civilian past than a small boy at a Public School dreams of bragging about his people. More than in any community on earth, the man at the front has to depend upon his own personality, absolutely without any extraneous aid whatsoever; and the knowledge that he has to do so is a tremendous sharpener of individuality.