As a man at night helplessly takes a taxi to find some woman, some prostitute, Herbertson had almost unthinkingly got into a taxi and come battering at the door in Covent Garden, only to talk war to Lilly, whom he knew very little. But it was a driving instinct—to come and get it off his chest.
And on and on he talked, over his wine and soda. He was not conceited—he was not showing off—far from it. It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn't know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear.
In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover.
"I used to be awfully frightened," laughed Herbertson. "Now you say, Lilly, you'd never have stood it. But you would. You're nervous—and it was just the nervous ones that did stand it. When nearly all our officers were gone, we had a man come out—a man called Margeritson, from India—big merchant people out there. They all said he was no good—not a bit of good—nervous chap. No good at all. But when you had to get out of the trench and go for the Germans he was perfect—perfect—It all came to him then, at the crisis, and he was perfect.
"Some things frighten one man, and some another. Now shells would never frighten me. But I couldn't stand bombs.
