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A SOLDIER OF LIFE

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My name is James Wood, and my story is so extraordinary that though I have small hope that it will be believed, I feel it is my duty to put it as faithfully as possible on record.

Duty is the right word. To write about myself is contrary to my inclination and contrary to my intention. The business is a nuisance. I am not a hero, not a fine fellow in any guise: simply an ordinary young man with some aptitude for the quiet enjoyment of things, who, after serving in the war and being wounded in the war, quite honestly and gladly felt that he had done with duty for the rest of his life. There is nothing heroic in my make-up.

In one way I am completely ordinary, distressingly and painfully ordinary. My difficulty will be that of the sheep who tried to distinguish himself from his woolly brethren by bleating. His cries were eloquent, but failed to convince the passer-by, who hardly got so far as realising which sheep was bleating. I might help you to believe what follows if I confessed to punching the housemaid in the eye at the age of eight, or to some other precocious enormity, but I regret to say I did not do so. My misdemeanours were trivial and infrequent, and common

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to every other little boy. I zealously cribbed with the French master, and was zealously honest with the form master. I did as others did. Perhaps I was slightly less gregarious; but I never found any difficulty in getting as much privacy as I wanted. I was never bullied by my fellows; never felt wronged or unjustly treated by my parents or masters. I only hope that this confession to the most complete and uneventful usualness may help to win conviction for my story; for I have noticed a tendency among men to like, at times at any rate, to be considered unusual, below or above the average in some way. At times, too, I have shared that liking, which plants me more firmly than ever on the average levelthe level of my flock, you understand-whose brand signifies public school and 'Varsity-and a very good brand, too, as brands go.

The war found me unattached. I had just failed to obtain a fellowship at one of the minor colleges at Oxford, and was on the lookout for a youth of means whom I could escort round the world as a tutor. In fact, such a youth had actually been discovered, the route had been mapped out, I was to start in the spring, ship the following winter-oh, two years at least, or even three, were arranged to enchant a far less exacting person than I have ever been, when war was declared and my life was changed, like the lives of half the other inhabitants of Europe.

At first I was appalled by the idea of war, by the awfulness of the destruction which modern contrivances meant, by the horror at the thought of the

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suffering that would come. I was angry at the frightful senselessness, like every one else, and was certain that, but for some bungling or stupidity somewhere, war could quite certainly have been avoided. However, general ideas soon passed before their personal and particular application. What must I do? There was really no question. I had been a member of the O.U.O.T.C., and possessed a certificate that I was adequately trained. I applied for a commission, which I instantly got.

I never felt heroic, however; or only for a brief moment when I donned my uniform for the first time. My chief thought was not patriotic, of laying down my life for my country. My chief dread was not of German bullets, but of the extreme unpleasantness of living gregariously in quarters with other young patriots, for I had come to value privacy more than ever, to become more swiftly tired of company that was not of my choosing. All high thoughts of war and patriotism and so forth went after I had joined the colours. One thing and one only obsessed my mind; one enemy alone I fought hour by hour, minute by minute; and that was the unheroic, unromantic, commonplace fact of boredom. No words of mine can describe it this active, fierce, insistent boredom. Fresh air and exercise kept you well alive to the full torture of it. It was bad enough at home; but at the front, after the first few days .. boredom is a cumulative force.

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And please do not think I am peculiar in this; companies used to sing, as they trudged about in the mud:

Nobody knows how bored we are,
Bored we are, bored we are.
Nobody knows how bored we are,
And nobody seems to care."

You awoke from boredom to sights of hell - sordid filth and beastliness-sank back into blacker deeps of boredom; mud for our minds blacker than the mud in which our bodies floundered.

Fortunately I was wounded. I say fortunately with entire seriousness. Badly wounded, yet the pain I suffered in my body from the wounds was nothing to the pain I suffered elsewhere from boredom. I am disabled, and still I regard the wound as fortunate, preferable to the disablement that boredom was working on my spirit. Dirt and horror bore a man more than anything in the world.

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You may think that I exaggerate this state of torture. I do not. Imagine being obliged to play hour by hour, day in day out, often too during the night, a game which you thought tedious and silly. That would be bad enough. Our game was worse than that. Our game, played under conditions of filthiness and discomfort the stench of putrefying corpses made you retch; my body often was lousy as an old cheese was tedious and silly; and also it was mischievous and destructive. It couldn't even do its own stupid business of destruction - for you can't destroy a nation. Yet we were forced into it. No way at all out of it. The temptation was, not to run away, but to put your head up so that a kindly sniper might give you a final change of experience. Young succumbed to that temptation such

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