the Front, he learnt almost over-night the tremendous lesson that it’s the spirit that counts—the thing that a man is essentially inside himself and not the thing which his social advantages make him appear to other people. A man cannot camouflage under shell-fire; in the face of death his true worth becomes known to everybody. When war started, Judgment Day commenced in the world for every man who put on khaki. God estimated us in the front-line, and God’s eyes were the eyes of our fellows.
I believe the Captain had expected that he would prove himself a coward—most of us expected that for ourselves. When he found that he could be fearless, the relief was so triumphant that he became possessed by an immense elation. He took the wildest chances and was always trying to outdo in heroism his own last bravest act. Promotion came rapidly; at the end of eight months he was a sergeant and before the year was out had gained his commission. He joined our brigade as an officer in September of 1916, when we were waiting on the high ground behind Albert, preparatory to being flung into the cauldron of the Somme offensive. He was treated with suspicion at first; no one expected much from a chap who had been a painter. The Colonel sniffed contemptuously when he reported at the tent which was brigade headquarters.
“What were you before you became a soldier?”
“A painter, sir.”
“Of houses?”
“No. Of landscapes and portraits.”
To a hustler who has flung railroads across continents, outwitting nature and abbreviating time, to have been a painter seemed a sorry occupation—an occupation which indicated long hair, innumerable cigarettes, artists’ models and silken ways of life. The Colonel himself had been in the North-West Mounted Police and had lived furiously, tracking outlaws and rounding up Indians.
“So you’ve been a painter, Heming,” he sniffed. “Out here we don’t do much that’s in your line. We deal in only two colours: the mud-brown of weariness and the scarlet of sacrifice. We don’t copy
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