On the other hand, it certainly is true that our soldiers'
courage--that is, their apparent unconsciousness of danger--strikes one
as very remarkable. You need not believe more about the _light of
battle_ and the _warrior's lust_, and all that sort of thing, than you
want to. There is very little excitement in a modern battle, and the
English soldier is not an excitable man, but this only makes the display
of courage more striking. Nothing can be more terrible than one of our
_slow_ charges, a charge in which all the peril which used to be
compressed into a hundred yards' rush in hot blood is spread out over an
afternoon's walk. I am sure any man who has ever taken part in one of
those ghastly processions, and, at thirty yards interval, watched the
dust-spots, at first promiscuous, gradually concentrating round him, and
listened to the constant soft whine or nearer hiss of passing bullets,
and seen men fall and plodded on still, solitary, waiting his turn,
would look upon the maddest and bloodiest rush of old days as a positive
luxury by comparison.
What I think about our soldiers' courage is that it is of such a sort
that it takes very little out of them. One of the foreign officers on
Lord Roberts' staff, in a criticism in one of his own papers, has
written that the English infantry, more than any he knows, has the knack
of fighting and marching and keeping on at it, day after day, without
getting stale or suffering from any reaction.
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