The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me by William Allen White

Author:William Allen White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Published: 2010-02-15T05:23:32+00:00

[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening to another man's story in his own mouth]

"Well, what do you know about—"

Then Henry checked me with, "You weren't expecting it? Did he make no warning sign?"

"Not a peep—not a chirrup," answered the Doctor, still diffidently. Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a rather remote past: "It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two men who stood where we were together—I, who had put my hands in his live flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, and he who was clinging to my body for support—you would think we had come together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was over for him!"

The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His mouth set. He went on: "This man should have abandoned his military conscience. But no—," the Doctor shook his head sadly, "he was a Prussian before he was a man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years to make a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a doctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's all very scientific, this German warfare—scientific and fanatical; Nietzsche and Mahomet, what a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and the Sultan."

Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, in submarines, in air, in their planes bombing hospitals, and on land, looting and dynamiting villages—in all their martial enterprises, think unlike the rest of civilized men. They are a breed apart—savage, material-minded, diabolic, unrestrained by fear or love of God, man or devil. We talked of these things for a time; but something, the quiet beauty of the garden maybe, took the edge off our hate. And gradually it became apparent to me, at least, that the Young Doctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell him something of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For the Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand? What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuaries of lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, to fight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehow or somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and we knew it. So Henry asked: "You received your letter?" And when he thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: "Did she tell you that the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?"

"Only in a pencilled postscript after she had decided to send the letter to me by you," answered the Doctor.

That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the Young Doctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably she had not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to him after the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicate that she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis, and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth.

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