THE FIGHTING MEN’S SECRET.

Hokitika Guardian, 6 April 1918, Page 4

THE FIGHTING MEN’S SECRET.

(By Cameron Mackenzie.)

It was no great way from the ; front. Two columns of 'tommies, were passing—oue column, limp, white, dirt-scarred, coming out of. the trenches ; another column, fresh tidy, firm-stepped going in. The faces ol each line of men held me. In the features of the outcomiug troops there showed with singular uniformity no signs of. relief or of jubilation—just the lassitude and indifference of fatigue; and,as they glanced casually at the others moving forward, there was neitliei interest, nor compassion, nor sympathy: But there was that which I read for understanding. As for the men advancing, in scarcely one of the countenances was it possible to detect unhappiness or distress, nor anything else save only a consummate matter-ot-factness. Looking over, as in unison they tramped along, at the released contingent, they did so utterly without curiosity or envy, or pity. But in their eyes I detected, as clearly as before, that self-same curious, elusive quality of understanding. No words were spoken, no shouts exchanged, no salutes back and forth were given ; no head nodded, no lips smiled ; nothing had occurred and yet everything had occurred. Between those two columns of fighting men there had, half uneonscious'ly, mutely, mysteriously, instinctively, passed the great secret sign of the western front —a sign that has naught to do with maps and plans and much to do with the soul. I saw the thing as certainly as if a mountainous lorry had crawled between. y .- What was it ?

I put that question to a man who was standing beside me. He was very much a person—that leanvisaged, slim-waisted Britisher to whom I turned. For more than two years he had done the heaviest kind of stint in trenches in France. He shrugged and laugaed shortly. “ Oh, I don’t know,’’ he answered. It was the familiar old reply. #*. * #

No great ti me thereafter chat same •Britisher and I stood overlooking a grim strip of one of the grimmest of the battlefields of France. Just below us had been fought an engagement, as tense as any, oif the first day of the Somme advance. My companion had been in the “ show.” “ Exactly where were you ? ” I asked. “ There,” he rejoined laconically, and pointed across the Bapaume road to a hideous malformation of earth, a shell-flattened trench that had once been known as “ Glory Hole.” My friend said nothing ; further, nor did I. The spirit of that battlefield was heavy upon me. Countless times I had heard and read ot the desolation that one might expect in parts of France to-day ;• I had been utterly unprepared for that which met the eye. Like dead arms, the stumps of Manietz and Delville Woods seemed to beseech heaven ; upon three sides, a 'grey, remorseless sky dipped down to entomb a landscape so harried and stripped and torn that even the tiny wooden cross-sticks here and there, markingsoldiers’ graves seemed to have become, veritable signs of life. A sensation visited me not unlike the sensation one might experience when gazing upon a restless spot in a trackless se'a where an armada, freighted with lives, had sunk, leaving not a mast-head showing. A phrase arose of itself—the pleasant land of France ; and I thought of the trim villages and cheerful lives, of the acres of ripening grain, of fat pastures, of much beside, that, without vestige left, was, not only to the vision, but also to the very' imagination, hopelessly’, monstrously gone.

I glauced covertly at the man near me. His eyes, rather pinched up, were still fixed across the road : his entire expression forbade speech. I fell to Avondering what might be in liis mind. . . . And this time it was a word that sprang before me. Not Calvary, but Gethsernane! More than all else those mutilated wastes seemed to me a Gethsernane—a place of agony more pre-eminently even than a place of death. The mortal angnish to which every inch ot that ravished land seemed so gruesomely, eloquently, to testify J The prayers that had risen from, and the terrors that had quaked upon, every foot of that soil! The lightning-flashes of self-revelation that had struck to the souls of numberless British boys along every/rod of those dreary, now sordid, reaches! The hopes surrendered. the sobs choked down, the warm, joyous, youthful loves renounced. . . The Britisher and I walked together from the wind-bitten little knoll in silence.

* * *■ *- We had been riding for some time in the motor-car. Little by little it had been coming to me, such was my companion’s mood, that then, if ever, he could have imparted to me that secret thing which for three years I had desired to know. Presently, to break the silence, I made an observation—expressed in as casual a voice as I could, something much <0 the fore with Americans to-day. “ A,” I said, “ but you Britishers know how to stick it!” Quietly and with great simplicity, he made reply. “ Yes,” he said, “we know how to stick it, but we also know something else—that is, the fighting men do.” I looked to him inquiringly but he did not co on. - “Well?” T prompted. “ Well, he rejoined with hesitation, “ we—l mean the men who are fighting—also know—the price.” “ The price of sticking it ? ” “The price of and my friend used an honest old AngloSaxon word that merits no place in barred usage, *• The price of ‘guts.’ ”

In a flash, as the motor-car wheeled ahead, it came to me; the idea, thus chanced upon and finally, for the first time isolated, now fairly trembled its way forth.' “ You mean,” said I, j “ that knowing the price—under- } standing, actually realising in the J soul what it does cost to stick it— J what the quality of having ‘ guts ’ j does actually imply—you mean that that is the fighting man’s secret ?”-■

He nodded. “ And the great unwhisperect password of the western front ? ” I persisted, like some plirase-maker at Judgment Day. No answer. I lertned forward and tried to peer at my companion. The thick twilight of Northern Fiance had fallen; ,wo were rushing off crazily into mysterious banks of fog and between flat fields, of snow that had turned to indigo. Within the motor-car I could see nothing but I could literally feel, rolling in to mingle with the cold gloom, vast oceans of British reserve, and nothing more was said.