“My God—­it’s you, Mac!” I said, deeply shocked.

“Yes,” he said, quietly.  His voice had changed, greatly.  “Yes, it’s I, Harry.”

He was almost totally blind, and he did not know whether his eyes would get better or worse.

“Do you remember all the lads you met at the billet where you came to sing for us the first time I met you, Harry?” he asked me.  “Well, they’re all gone—­I’m the only one who’s left—­the only one!”

There was grief in his voice.  But there was nothing like complaint, nor was there, nor self-pity, either, when he told me about his eyes and his doubts as to whether he would ever really see again.  He passed his own troubles off lightly, as if they did not matter at all.  He preferred to tell me about those of his friends whom I had met, and to give me the story of how this one and that one had gone.  And he is like many another.  I know a great many men who have been maimed in the war, but I have still to hear one of them complain.  They were brave enough, God knows, in battle, but I think they are far braver when they come home, shattered and smashed, and do naught but smile at their troubles.

The only sort of complaining you hear from British soldiers is over minor discomforts in the field.  Tommy and Jock will grouse when they are so disposed.  They will growl about the food and about this trivial trouble and that.  But it is never about a really serious matter that you hear them talking!

I have never yet met a man who had been permanently disabled who was not grieving because he could not go back.  And it is strange but true that men on leave get homesick for the trenches sometimes.  They miss the companionships they have had in the trenches.  I think it must be because all the best men in the world are in France that they feel so.  But it is true, I know, because I have not heard it once, but a dozen times.

Men will dream of home and Blighty for weeks and months.  They will grouse because they cannot get leave—­though, half the time, they have not even asked for it, because they feel that their place is where the fighting is!  And then, when they do get that longed-for leave, they are half sorry to go—­and they come back like boys coming home from school!

A great reward awaits the men who fight through this war and emerge alive and triumphant at its end.  They will dictate the conduct of the world for many a year.  The men who stayed at home when they should have gone may as well prepare to drop their voices to a very low whisper in the affairs of mankind.  For the men who will be heard, who will make themselves heard, are out there in France.

CHAPTER XX

It was seven o’clock in the morning of a Godly and a beautiful day when we set out from Tramecourt for Arras.  Arras, that town so famous now in British history and in the annals of this war, had been one of our principal objectives from the outset, but we had not known when we were to see it.  Arras had been the pivot of the great northern drive in the spring—­the drive that Hindenburg had fondly supposed he had spoiled by his “strategic” retreat in the region of the Somme, begun just before the British and the French were ready to attack.