Then he rolled over on his back." "Partings of this kind are sad
enough," says an Irish Dragoon, "but we've just got to sigh and get used
to it."
Their own injuries and sufferings don't seem to worry them much. The
sensation of getting wounded is simply told. One man, shot through the
arm, felt "only a bit of a sting, nothing particular. Just like a sharp
needle going into me. I thought it was nothing till my rifle dropped out
of my hand, and my arm fell. Rotten luck." That is the feeling of a
clean bullet wound. Shrapnel, however, hurts--"hurts pretty badly,"
Tommy says. And the lance and the bayonet make ugly gashes. In sensitive
men, however, the continuous shell-fire produces effects that are often
as serious as wounds. "Some," says Mr. Geoffrey Young, the _Daily News
and Leader_ correspondent, "suffer from a curious aphasia, some get
dazed and speechless, some deafened"; but of course their recovery is
fairly rapid, and the German "Black Marias" soon exhaust their terrors.
A man may lose his memory and have but a hazy idea of the day of the
week or the hour of the day, but Tommy still keeps his nerve, and after
his first experience of the enemy's fire, to quote his own words,
"doesn't care one d---- about the danger."
As showing the general feeling of the educated soldier, independent
altogether of his nationality, it is worth quoting two other
experiences, both Russian.
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