the prospect of persecution stimulating and almost enjoyable. No; my loss of confidence was in the same category as my diffidence when first confronted by a Vickers Machine-Gun and its Instructor. While he reeled off the names of its numerous component parts, I used to despair of ever being able to remember them or understand their workings. “And unless I know all about the Vickers Gun I’ll never get sent out to the front,” I used to think. Now, sitting late at night in an expensive but dismal bedroom in Jermyn Street, I internally exclaimed, “I’ll never be able to write out a decent statement and the whole blasted protest will be a washout! Tyrrell thinks I’m quite brainy, but when he reads this stuff he’ll realize what a dud I am.”
What could I do if Tyrrell decided to discourage my candidature for a court martial? Chuck up the whole idea and go out again and get myself killed as quick as possible? “Yes,” I thought, working myself up into a tantrum, “I’d get killed just to show them all I don’t care a damn.” (I didn’t stop to specify the identity of “them all”; such details could be dispensed with when one had lost one’s temper with the Great War.) But common sense warned me that getting sent back was a slow business, and getting killed on purpose an irrelevant gesture for a platoon commander. One couldn’t choose one’s own conditions out in France. … Tyrrell had talked about “serving the world by thinking independently.” I must hang on to that idea and remember the men for whom I believed myself to be interceding. I tried to think internationally; the poor old Boches must be hating it just as much as we did; but I couldn’t propel my sympathy as far as the Balkan States, Turks, Italians, and all the rest of them; and somehow or other the French were just the French and too busy fighting and selling things to the troops to need my intervention. So I got back to thinking about “all the good chaps who’d been killed with the First and Second Battalions since I left them” … Ormand, dying miserably out in a shell-hole. … I remembered his exact tone of voice when saying that if his children ever asked what he did in the Great War, his answer would be, “No bullet ever went quick enough