Go on doing it and exercise your usual tact, and you’ll get me two years’ hard labour for certain, and with any luck they’ll decide to shoot me as a sort of deserter.” He looked so aggrieved at this that I relented and suggested that we’d better have some lunch. But David was always an absentminded eater, and on this occasion he prodded disapprovingly at his food and then bolted it down as if it were medicine.
A couple of hours later we were wandering aimlessly along the shore at Formby, and still jabbering for all we were worth. I refused to accept his well-meaning assertion that no one at the Front would understand my point of view and that they would only say that I’d got cold feet. “And even if they do say that,” I argued, “the main point is that by backing out of my statement I shall be betraying my real convictions and the people who are supporting me. Isn’t that worse cowardice than being thought cold-footed by officers who refuse to think about anything except the gentlemanly traditions of the Regiment? I’m not doing it for fun, am I? Can’t you understand that this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life? I’m not going to be talked out of it just when I’m forcing them to make a martyr of me.” “They won’t make a martyr of you,” he replied. “How do you know that?” I asked. He said that the Colonel at Clitherland had told him to tell me that if I continued to refuse to be “medically-boarded” they would shut me up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of the War. Nothing would induce them to court martial me. It had all been arranged with some big bug at the War Office in the last day or two. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked. “I kept it as a last resort because I was afraid it might upset you,” he replied, tracing a pattern on the sand with his stick. “I wouldn’t believe this from anyone but you. Will you swear on the Bible that you’re telling the truth?” He swore on an imaginary Bible that nothing would induce them to court martial me and that I should be treated as insane. “All right then, I’ll give way.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I sat down on an old wooden breakwater.