THREE "FUNK" STORIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16600, 25 January 1916, Page 6

THREE "FUNK" STORIES

(By W. Bbaoh TnOitAS, in the Daily Mail.)

" Tho man's a born coward. Take my word for it, ho'U bo missing one ot those days." So said one oflicci'. The other was of much the samo opinion, hut ho added, " All the same, I've seen those nervy fellows turn up trumps." Tho man they spoko of was one of the obvious cowards, because he w:iti :i scJfoonscious coward, always thinking of his own cowardice. Unlike many others, he was Iras afraid at night, when he could not bo seen, than by day, when the eyes of critics were upon him. Tho darkness might havo eared him; but one day someono said iu his hearing' that the worst of having a coward in the trench was the effect on the other men; and in truth fear and courage aro just about equally courageous. But tho maxim was unfortunate. The coward kept saying to himself, "If I make tho others funk I had bettor be away," and daily, against his will, schemes of escape of the maddest sort waltzed round his brain, but brought no decision. At last this rage of indecisive misery reached a pitch that became intolerable. Tho night was moonless but clear, and from the pit of tho trench the stares seemed to look down with a pi tiles? scrutiny which added to his wretchedness more than any sane and solid mind could well understand Before ho knew what ho was doing tho coward slipped over tho parapet and began to make his tremulous way towards tho German trenches. Further fears now seized him, and he sidled off to the left, afraid to surrender, afraid to return. So for a while ho wandered, an insane vagrant, through the purgatory of No Man's Land beneath the accusing stars. Ho could not remember afterwards how he came to see so suddenly the thing n front of him, but his belief, from a muddled recollection, was that he had fallen flat on his face upon seeing tho explosion of a star shell. At any rate, there within a yard or so of his eyes wa3 the muzzle of a machine gun hidden with devilish cunning in a pit well outside the German lines.

He heard a gruff whisper and tho muzzle moved. With as little reasoned thought as when he fled from his trench, ho jumped past the muzzle, pulled aside a mudcovered plank over tho hole, and when sanity returned to him ho found himself in a spacious enough room with two—he thought two—dead Germane lying in front of him. At any rate, the machine gunners were dead, and he had killed them.

In his excitement he was conscious, ho said, of a sense of being born again. He had meant to call "Kamarade!" to tho first Germans ho approached. He had rehearsed all sorts of forms of surrender, but somehow instead of obeying reason he had attacked tho Germans as a ferret attacks a rabbit, and had killed them dead, stono dead. His brain and will were clear.

Quickly and silently he released the machinS gun, dragged it out of the hole, took it on his back, and returned to his trench, helped by tho light of tho now kindly stars and a faint hint of dawn. Tho next day, much against his will, ho was sent into hospital with a very severe strain in tho back and a flesh wound in tho calf, got somehow in the struggle. While ho lay there he longed, as not one in a hundred to go back to the trenches, that he • might exercise this new possession of his, this strango thing called courage. Tho surgeon saw his name in the honours list a few days after he left tho hospital for the convalescent camp. 11. It was a foregone conclusion that the verdict would be guilty, and the sentence—to be shot at dawn. One might well bo sorry, with Wordsworth, for " what man has maae of man," if this lusty sergeant, of sufficiently long and honourable service, had become deserter. Would anyono two or three months ago have picked out this man of all men for coward or even " skrimshander " ?

The fact is steadily dawning on even the Judge Jeffreys type who still remain that the delicate, sensitive, complex mind of man may induce actions which cannot be judged as bare, isolated facts and labelled with such-and-such a degree of criminality. Under this dawning notion, this nascent sense of psychology, or mind science, tho sergeant was sent to a great nerve specialist. At tho interview they sat together in a room looking over the Channel, studded now, as throughout tho German menace, with craft of every sort and kind. The doc tor had failed to find in his patient any malady, named or unnamed, but he was not going to give the man up to death without wrestling as hard as a doctor could wrestle with a mortal illness.

The two began to talk of shipping. "Is that a torpedo-boat or a destroyer?" asked the doctor, nodding towards the sea, and at the word drivmg a needle into the soldier's leg as his head' was turned away. Quite quietly, in the even, depressed voice in which he had spoken throughout, the man replied that it was a British destroyer. Ho did not start, he did not seem even aware that his leg had been tampered with. The" doctor heaved a sigh of infinite relief.

It is not necessary to describe tho rather complicated and numerous tests whim followed the primitive trial with the needle. It is enough that they proved beyond all doubt that the burly sergeant was in this strange condition: that the nerves on one side cf his body wore absolutely numb to painful sensation, though perfectly sound on tho other sjiile. What the malady i§ nam-:d does not matter. may describe it as hysteria, as a form oi paralysis or shock, or what not. The fact was that something had reduced the man to a one-sided state, and his actions ■were likely to be as one-sided as his nerves, 'iho pretty mechanism of tho cells of the brain was out of gear, and the man was for the while only half a man, and therefore unmanly. The firing squad wero not wanted in the morning, and their almost victim will probably fight again, as well as ever. The doctor who discovered the malady also discovered the cure. Both were mental. 111.

The young lieutenant was brought into hospital, wounded rather badly in several places. But his wounds wero not so serious as they looked. All were doing well, ajid ho .showed unusual impatience to be cured. " I must get back to tho trenches," he said; I must get back." The uneasiness of mind was the only thing that hindered his progress. Something, it seemed, was on his mind, and was likely to stay there till it was confessed and faced. The confession camo quietly and unexpectedly. _ - A friend went to see him, just as he was waking from a doze and ho began to talk freely as a child will talk when it is tired. "We were to go over tho parapet at 5.5 a.m., and I never was so frightened in my life. I heard one of the men say, ' The lootenant don't look half green, does he! 1

"Then the moment came.. As soon as we got on the run I saw with the tail of my eye tho captain fall, and for 20 yards I was thinking of nothing in the world but this —whether I could pretend not to sco that I was left in command. It would have been a rotten way to die, shirking like that. Bnt I think I shall do better next time if I can got tho chance." Then the friend told him what had happened in the action. Tho self-styled_ shirker had reached tho barbed wire, which had been untouched by the bombardment, an absurd distance in front of his men. He was hit twice while trying to cut it. He was hit onco again as lie lay on the ground. Tho fourth wound was got 15 hours later while he was helping a Tommy, hist about as badly wounded as ho was, back to the trench. Tho acoount cheered the invalid, but iiill, he says, the one vivid impression left_ in his mind is that he pretended for a while not to see that it had fallen to him to lead the company.