found the keen scrutiny of a
fellow trooper upon me. "No good waiting for him," I said with an
affectation of indifference. But all through the night I saw him again,
and marvelled at the stupendous absurdity of such a death. I was a
little feverish, I remember, and engaged in an interminable theological
argument with myself, why when a man is dead he should leave so queer
and irrelevant a thing as a body to decay....

I was already very far away from London and Burnmore Park. I doubt if I
thought of Mary at all for many days.

Sec. 3

It isn't my business to write here any consecutive story of my war
experiences. Luck and some latent quality in my composition made me a
fairly successful soldier. Among other things I have an exceptionally
good sense of direction, and that was very useful to me, and in Burnmore
Park I suppose I had picked up many of the qualities of a scout. I did
some fair outpost work during the Ladysmith siege, I could report as
well as crawl and watch, and I was already a sergeant when we made a
night attack and captured and blew up Long Tom. There, after the fight,
while we were covering the engineers, I got a queer steel ball about the
size of a pea in my arm, a bicycle bearings ball it was, and had my
first experience of an army surgeon's knife next day. It was much less
painful than I had expected. I was also hit during the big assault on
the sixth of January in the left shoulder, but so very slightly that I
wasn't technically disabled. They were the only wounds I got in the war,
but I went under with dysentery before the relief; and though I was by
no means a bad case I was a very yellow-faced, broken-looking
convalescent when at last the Boer hosts rolled northward again and
Buller's men came riding across the flats....

I had seen some stimulating things during those four months of actual
warfare, a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger,
patience, brutality, courage, generosity and wasteful destruction--above
all, wasteful destruction--to correct the easy optimistic patriotism of
my university days. There is a depression in the opening stages of fever
and a feebleness in a convalescence on a starvation diet that leads men
to broad and sober views. (Heavens! how I hated the horse
extract--'chevril' we called it--that served us for beef tea.) When I
came down from Ladysmith to the sea to pick up my strength I had not an
illusion left about the serene, divinely appointed empir