carry on.  Closely allied to the sensation of nameless dread caused by high explosives is that caused by gas.  No one can carry out a relief in the trenches without a certain anxiety and dread if he knows that the enemy has gas cylinders in position and that the wind is in the east.  But this, again, is not exactly the fear of death; but much more a physical reaction to uncertainty and suspense combined with the threat of physical suffering.

Personally, I believe that very few men indeed fear death.  The vast majority experience a more or less violent physical shrinking from the pain of death and wounds, especially when they are obliged to be physically inactive, and when they have nothing else to think about.  This kind of dread is, in the case of a good many men, intensified by darkness and suspense, and by the deafening noise and shock that accompany the detonation of high explosives.  But it cannot properly be called the fear of death, and it is a purely physical reaction which can be, and nearly always is, controlled by the mind.

Last of all there is the repulsion and loathing for the whole business of war, with its bloody ruthlessness, its fiendish ingenuity, and its insensate cruelty, that comes to a man after a battle, when the tortured and dismembered dead lie strewn about the trench, and the wounded groan from No-Man’s-Land.  But neither is that the fear of death.  It is a repulsion which breeds hot anger more often than cold fear, reckless hatred of life more often than abject clinging to it.

The cases where any sort of fear, even for a moment, obtains the mastery of a man are very rare.  Sometimes in the case of a boy, whose nerves are more sensitive than a man’s, and whose habit of self-control is less formed, a sudden shock will upset his mental balance.  Sometimes a very egotistical man will succumb to danger long drawn out.  The same applies to men who are very introspective.  I have seen a man of obviously low intelligence break down on the eve of an attack.  The anticipation of danger makes many men “windy,” especially officers who are responsible for other lives than their own.  But even where men are afraid it is generally not death that they fear.  Their fear is a physical and instinctive shrinking from hurt, shock, and the unknown, which instinct obtains the mastery only through surprise, or through the exhaustion of the mind and will, or through a man being excessively self-centred.  It is not the fear of death rationally considered; but an irrational physical instinct which all men possess, but which almost all can control.

VIII

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

II

    SCENE. A dug-out in a wood somewhere in Flanders.  Officers at
    tea.

HANCOCK.  Damned glad to be out of that infernal firing trench, anyway. (A dull report is heard in the distance.) There goes another torpedo!  Wonder who’s copt it this time!