It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was “immune” from shellfire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thièpval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite—not knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of G.H.Q.
“Why the hell don’t we get a word?” he asked. “Haven’t we done as well as anybody, died as much?”
I promised to do what I could—which was nothing—to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in self-revelation.