trick, I'll be bound.

A laugh and a sigh, a kiss and good-bye, is our life. Is it worth so
much fretting? It is a merry life on the whole. Courage, comrade. A
campaign cannot be all drum and fife and stirrup-cup. The marching and
the fighting must come into it somewhere. There are pleasant bivouacs
among the vineyards, merry nights around the camp fires. White hands
wave a welcome to us; bright eyes dim at our going. Would you run from
the battle-music? What have you to complain of? Forward: the medal to
some, the surgeon's knife to others; to all of us, sooner or later, six
feet of mother earth. What are you afraid of? Courage, comrade.

There is a mean between basking through life with the smiling
contentment of the alligator, and shivering through it with the
aggressive sensibility of the Lama determined to die at every cross
word. To bear it as a man we must also feel it as a man. My philosophic
friend, seek not to comfort a brother standing by the coffin of his
child with the cheery suggestion that it will be all the same a hundred
years hence, because, for one thing, the observation is not true: the
man is changed for all eternity--possibly for the better, but don't add
that. A soldier with a bullet in his neck is never quite the man he was.
But he can laugh and he can talk, drink his wine and ride his horse.
Now and again, towards evening, when the weather is trying, the sickness
will come upon him. You will find him on a couch in a dark corner.

"Hallo! old fellow, anything up?"

"Oh, just a twinge, the old wound, you know. I will be better in a
little while."

Shut the door of the dark room quietly. I should not stay even to
sympathize with him if I were you. The men will be coming to screw the
coffin down soon. I think he would like to be alone with it till then.
Let us leave him. He will come back to the club later on in the season.
For a while we may have to give him another ten points or so, but he
will soon get back his old form. Now and again, when he meets the other
fellows' boys shouting on the towing-path; when Brown rushes up the
drive, paper in hand, to tell him how that young scapegrace Jim has won
his Cross; when he is congratulating Jones's eldest on having passed
with honours, the old wound may give him a nasty twinge. But the pain
will pass away. He will laugh at our stories and tell us his own; eat
his dinner, play his rubber. It is only a wound.

Tommy can never be ours, Jenny does not