at first, as a third soldier was standing close in front of him and
speaking encouragingly to him, while at the same time he sheltered
him from the crowd. But he moved away, and at the same moment the
young officer lifted his head, displaying a drawn and sunken face,
a brow compressed with pain, and looked wildly and in a terrified
way round him, with large melancholy eyes. Then he began to beat
his foot on the ground, and struggled to extricate himself from his
companions; and then he buried his head in his chest and sank down
in an attitude of angry despair. It was a sight that I cannot
forget.

Just before the train went off an officer got into my carriage, and
as we started, said to me, "That's a sad business there--it is a
young officer who was taken prisoner by the Germans--one of our
best men; he escaped, and after enduring awful hardships he got
into our lines, was wounded, and sent home to hospital; but the
shock and the anxiety preyed on his mind, and he has become, they
fear, hopelessly insane--he is being sent to a sanatorium, but I
fear there is very little chance of his recovery; he is wounded in
the head as well as the foot. He is a wealthy man, devoted to
soldiering, and he is just engaged to a charming girl . . ."


3


Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from
the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or
discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life
entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems: