And in the middle of all this inferno, with the sight of men with ashen
faces limping, crawling, or being dragged to the rear, with the leaves
on the ground smoking from the hot, jagged shell-casings buried among
them, the Subaltern suddenly discovered that he was not afraid. The
discovery struck him as curious. He argued with himself that he had
every right to feel afraid, that he ought to feel "queer." He said to
himself, "Here you are, as nervous and temperamental a youth as ever
stepped, with a mental laziness that amounts to moral cowardice, in the
deuce of a hole that I don't expect you'll ever get out of. You ought to
be in an awful state. Your cheeks ought to be white, and there they are
looking like two raw beef-steaks. Your tongue ought to cleave to the
roof of your mouth; and it isn't. You ought to feel pains in the pit of
your stomach, and you're not. Devil a bit! You know, you're missing all
the sensations that the writers told you about. You're not playing the
game. Come, buck up, fall down and grovel on the ground!" But he did
not. He did not want to. He felt absolutely normal.

A man sheltering behind the same tree suddenly spun round, and, grasping
his left arm, fell with a thud to the ground. He reeled over, with knees
raised and rounded back, and staggered immediately to his feet. "Oh, my
arm, my arm!" he moaned plaintively, and turned away towards the rear,
whimpering a little as he went, and tenderly holding the wet,
dark-stained sleeve as he went. The Subaltern felt that he ought to have
winced with horror at the mutilation of the poor stricken thing, but
beyond a slight sinking sensation between the lungs and the stomach, the
incident left him with no emotion. He picked up the man's rifle, leant
it against the tree, and continued to scan the skyline with his glasses,
feeling all the while a bit of a brute.