II

son very slowly across the lawn in a long wheeled bed. The son was sallow and sulky, as he well might be, having lost one of his legs. The father was all solicitude, but somehow I inferred that the pair of them hadn’t hit it off too well before the War. More than once I had seen the son look at his father as though he disliked him. But the father was proud of his disabled son, and I heard him telling one of the nurses how splendidly the boy had done in the Gommecourt attack, showing her a letter, too, probably from the boy’s colonel. I wondered whether he had ever allowed himself to find out that the Gommecourt show had been nothing but a massacre of good troops. Probably he kept a war map with little flags on it; when Mametz Wood was reported as captured he moved a little flag an inch forward after breakfast. For him the Wood was a small green patch on a piece of paper. For the Welsh Division it had been a bloody nightmare.⁠ ⁠… “Is the sun too strong for you here, Arthur?” Arthur shakes his head and frowns up at the sky. Then the father, with his neatly-trimmed beard and elegant buff linen waistcoat, begins to read him Haig’s latest despatch. “There is strong evidence that the enemy forces engaged on the battlefront have been severely shaken by the repeated successes gained by ourselves and our Allies.⁠ ⁠…” The level cultivated voice palavers on until the nurse approaches brightly with a spouted feeding-cup. “Time for some more beef-tea!” Nourishment is administered under approving parental eyes.