He was learning very fast the meaning of that war he had so confidently played with.  I believe I am a merciful man, but as I looked at him I felt no vestige of pity.  He was dreeing the weird he had prepared for others.  I thought of Scudder, of the thousand friends I had lost, of the great seas of blood and the mountains of sorrow this man and his like had made for the world.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see the long ridges above Combles and Longueval which the salt of the earth had fallen to win, and which were again under the hoof of the Boche.  I thought of the distracted city behind us and what it meant to me, and the weak, the pitifully weak screen which was all its defence.  I thought of the foul deeds which had made the German name to stink by land and sea, foulness of which he was the arch-begetter.  And then I was amazed at our forbearance.  He would go mad, and madness for him was more decent than sanity.

I had another man who wasn’t what you might call normal, and that was Wake.  He was the opposite of shell-shocked, if you understand me.  He had never been properly under fire before, but he didn’t give a straw for it.  I had known the same thing with other men, and they generally ended by crumpling up, for it isn’t natural that five or six feet of human flesh shouldn’t be afraid of what can torture and destroy it.  The natural thing is to be always a little scared, like me, but by an effort of the will and attention to work to contrive to forget it.  But Wake apparently never gave it a thought.  He wasn’t foolhardy, only indifferent.  He used to go about with a smile on his face, a smile of contentment.  Even the horrors—­and we had plenty of them—­didn’t affect him.  His eyes, which used to be hot, had now a curious open innocence like Peter’s.  I would have been happier if he had been a little rattled.

One night, after we had had a bad day of anxiety, I talked to him as we smoked in what had once been a French dug-out.  He was an extra right arm to me, and I told him so.  ’This must be a queer experience for you,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ’it is very wonderful.  I did not think a man could go through it and keep his reason.  But I know many things I did not know before.  I know that the soul can be reborn without leaving the body.’

I stared at him, and he went on without looking at me.

’You’re not a classical scholar, Hannay?  There was a strange cult in the ancient world, the worship of Magna Mater—­the Great Mother.  To enter into her mysteries the votary passed through a bath of blood-----I think I am passing through that bath.  I think that like the initiate I shall be renatus in aeternum—­reborn into the eternal.’