I shall rush off to the
recruiting office in a burst of emotion ... and I must think of Rachel
and Eleanor!..."

"I don't see why you should go before I do, Roger," Henry interjected.

"Are you going, Quinny?"

Henry flushed. It hurt him that there should be any question about it.

"Yes," he said.

"I don't think of you as a soldier, Quinny!"

"I don't think of myself as one!" He paused for a moment, and then,
impetuously, he turned to Roger.

"Roger," he said, "do you think I'm ... neurotic? Would you say I'm ...
well, degenerate?"

"Don't be an ass, Quinny!"

"I'm serious, Roger. I'm not just talking about myself, and slopping
over!"

"You're highly strung, of course, but I shouldn't say you were neurotic.
You're healthy enough, aren't you!"

"Oh, yes, I'm healthy enough, but I'm such a damned coward, Roger, and
sometimes some perfectly uncontrollable fear seizes me ... silly
frights. I never told you, did I, how scared I was when Mrs. Clutters
died!..." He told Roger how he had trembled outside the door of the dead
woman's room. "Things like that have happened to me ever since I was a
kid. I make up my mind to join the Army, and then I suddenly get
panicky, and I can almost feel myself being killed. I'm continually
seeing the War ... me in it, crouching in a trench waiting for the order
to go over, and trembling with fright ... so frightened that I can't do
anything but get killed ... and it's worse when I think of myself
killing other people ... I feel sick at the thought of thrusting a
bayonet into a man's body ... squelching through his flesh ... My
God!..."

"Yes, I know, Quinny!" Roger said. "One does feel like that. But when
you're there, you don't think of it ... you're more or less off your
head ... you couldn't do it if you weren't. They work you up to a kind
of frenzy, and then you ... just let yourself go!"

"But afterwards! Don't you think a man 'ud go mad afterwards when he
thought of it? I should. I know I should. I'd lie awake at night and see
the men I'd killed!..."

A passenger in the train had told a story of the trenches to Henry, who
now repeated it to Roger.

"One of our men got hold of a German in a German trench, and he
bayonetted him, but he did it clumsily. There wasn't enough room to kill
him properly ... he couldn't withdraw the bayonet and stick it in again
and finish the man ... and there they were, jammed together ... and the
German was squealing, oh, horribly ... a