“Oh, they’ll pass you all right,” Eliot said.  “They’ll give you an expensive training, and send you into the trenches, and in any time from a day to a month you’ll be in hospital with shell-shock.  Then you’ll be discharged as unfit, having wasted everybody’s time and made a damned nuisance of yourself....I suppose I ought to say it’s splendid of you to want to go out.  But it isn’t splendid.  It’s idiotic.  You’ll be simply butting in where you’re not wanted, taking a better man’s place, taking a better man’s commission, taking a better man’s bed in a hospital.  I tell you we don’t want men who are going to crumple up in their first action.”

“Do you think I’m going to funk then?” said poor Colin.

“Funk?  Oh, Lord no.  You’ll stick it till you drop, till you’re paralyzed, till you’ve lost your voice and memory, till you’re an utter wreck.  There’ll be enough of ’em, poor devils, without you, Col-Col.”

“But why should I go like that more than anybody else?”

“Because you’re made that way, because you haven’t got a nervous system that can stand the racket.  The noises alone will do for you.  You’ll be as right as rain if you keep out of it.”

“But Jerrold’s coming back. He’ll go out at once.  How can I stick at home when he’s gone?”

“Heaps of good work to be done at home.”

“Not by men of my age.”

“By men of your nervous organization.  Your going out would be sheer waste.”

“Why not?” Does it matter what becomes of me?”

“No.  It doesn’t.  It matters, though, that you’ll be taking a better man’s place.”

Now Colin really did want to go out and fight, as he had always wanted to follow Jerrold’s lead; he wanted it so badly that it seemed to him a form of self-indulgence; and this idea of taking a better man’s place so worked on him that he had almost decided to give it up, since that was the sacrifice required of him, when he told Queenie what Eliot had said.

“All I can say is,” said Queenie, “that if you don’t go out I shall give you up.  I’ve no use for men with cold feet.”

“Can’t you see,” said Colin (he almost hated Queenie in that moment), “what I’m afraid of?  Being a damned nuisance.  That’s what Eliot says I’ll be.  I don’t know how he knows.”

“He doesn’t know everything.  If my brother tried to stop my going to the front I’d jolly soon tell him to go to hell.  I swear, Colin, if you back out of it I won’t speak to you again.  I’m not asking you to do anything I funk myself.”

“Oh, shut up.  I’m going all right.  Not because you’ve asked me, but because I want to.”

“If you didn’t I should think you’d feel pretty rotten when I’m out with my Field Ambulance,” said Queenie.

“Damn your Field Ambulance!...  No, I didn’t mean that, old thing; it’s splendid of you to go.  But you’d no business to suppose I funked.  I may funk.  Nobody knows till they’ve tried.  But I was going all right till Eliot put me off.”