nd our men had to come and haul
the British soldier out of the trench. He'd gone off his head!..."

"One oughtn't to think of things like that, Quinny!"

"But if you can't help it? What terrifies me is that I might turn funk
... let my lot down!..."

"You wouldn't. You're the sort that imagines the worst and does the
best. I shouldn't think of it any more if I were you. A month at
Boveyhayne'll pull you all right again...."

"It's dying that I'm most afraid of. Some of these papers write columns
and columns of stuff about 'glorious deaths' at the front, but it
doesn't seem very glorious to me to be dead before you've had a chance
to do your job ... killed like that ... blown to bits, perhaps ... so
that they can't tell which is you and which is some one else!..."

Roger nodded his head. "Our journalists contrive to see a great deal of
glory in war ... from Fleet Street, don't they, Quinny!"

"Sometimes," Henry proceeded, "I think that the worst kind of cowardice
is to love life too much. That's the kind of coward I am. I love living.
I used to cry when I was a kid at the thought that I might die and not
be able to run about and look at things that I liked! And that makes you
funky. You're afraid to take risks, for fear you should lose your life
and have to give up the pleasure of living. I suppose that's what the
Bible means when it says that 'whosoever shall lose his life, shall find
it.' This hunt for security melts the marrow in your backbone!..."

"Perhaps," said Roger. "Where you go wrong, I think, is in imagining
that courage consists in hurling yourself recklessly on things ... in
not caring a damn. I don't think that that's courage ... it's simply
insensibility ... a sort of permanent imperceptiveness. Really, Quinny,
if you don't feel fear, there's not much of the heroic in your acts.
That kind of man isn't much braver when he's plunging at Germans than
he is when he's plunging at a motor-omnibus or getting into a 'scrum' at
Rugger. He simply doesn't see any difference. It's something to plunge
at, and so he plunges. I haven't much faith in the Don't-Care-a-Damn
Brigade. They're more anxious to get V. C's than to get victories. Their
courage is just egoism ... they're thinking, not of their country, but
of themselves. The real hero, I think, is the man who makes himself do
something that he's afraid to do, who goes into a thing, trembling with
fright, but nevertheless goes into it. Did you ever meet Leon