12 
LAND 6? WATER 
October 10, 1918 
I.— The Fifth Man*: By Centurion 
This is the first of a new series of stories by Cen- 
turion lehich will appear simitllaneottsly in Land & 
Water and, in America, the "Century Magazine." 
The ecrlier scries of Centurion's stories has nojv been 
published by Mr. Heinemann under the title of " Gentle- 
men at Arms." 
SIX officers, each of them young in years, but in- 
credibly old in experience, sat over their port one 
summer night in the mess of the Downshires. Tlie 
hospitality of the Downshires has been famous ; a 
silver loving-cup, a tribute from the Green Jackets, 
was there in the middle of the table-cloth, its votive inscrip- 
tion an epitaph of guest-nights that are gone never to return, 
festive nights when, after the mess-sergeant had withdrawn 
and the cloth was removed, the mess president solemnly 
locked the door and threw the key out of the window. That 
gesture had been part of the ritual of the Downshires for 
two hundred years ; in these days, when all things have 
passed away, it is forgotten, for there is no one left to remem- 
ber it. Except one. He sat apart in a morose silence. 
His eyelids twitched incessantly, his pupils were dilated, 
and when he passed the decanter his hand shook — which is 
a way shell-shock often takes you. Letcher's questing eyes 
roved from the snarling leopard on the wall to the right of 
the entrance-door to the heads of kudu, oribi, and sambur 
on the left, until they finally came to rest in a fixed 
stare on the loving-cup in front of him. Of the other five 
of us, four were honorary members of the mess — temporary 
officers of other units posted to the depot for an Army "cure." 
These four had endured more service in the field in three 
years than fell to the lot of the regular officers of the old 
Army in a lifetime, and it had left its mark upon them all. 
One had the pallor of anaemia, the skin of another was yellow 
as a piece of chamois-leather, a third had cardiac trouble 
and that hint of premature asthma which betrays the effects 
of gas. The fourth had been "knocked out" by a H.E. 
shell on the Somme. He was under thirty, though his hair 
at the temples and behind the ears was already white. But 
the mind has its wounds as well as the body and the stigmata 
that they leave behind them, though less visible to the eye, 
are indelible.- These men's minds were seared with memories. 
The wounds of the soul never heal. 
"Damn that bugler! He does it every night." Letcher 
uttered that same malediction at the same hour every even- 
ing ; the others let "it pass like an expiration. The night 
was too hot for protest. A moist heat hung over the barrack- 
square as though the earth were perspiring from fever ; the 
candles drooped in the silver sconces like the stalks of dying 
Hlies, with an efflorescence of melting wax ; the sweat ran 
down our faces and each* man exhaled into an atmosphere that 
was close and stifling as that of a gas-ihask. The windows 
were wdde open. The corners of the room were dark. 
Rutherford, whose eyes were still sore from the African sun 
and a sharp touch of dengue fever, had switched oi? the electric 
light. Silence fell upon the room like sleep as the notes of 
the "Last Post" died away upon the barrack-square. The 
buzz of an infatuated moth, as it danced round the candles, 
was as distinct as the ticking of a clock. Suddenly it 
"crashed" to the table-cloth, and lay there with a convulsive 
movement of its scorched wings. 
"His number's up," said Tracy, as he gazed at the dying 
insect. "Some scientific Johnny calls them the minor 
horrors of war. Flies, I mean. He hadn't been in Gallipoli. 
The Turk slew his thousar^s, but the fly his tens of thousands. 
Dysentery, you know ! My bully-beef was black with them." 
"Wait till you meet the jigger," said Rutherford. "It 
burrows under your toe-nails. Lays its eggs there. After its 
accouchement you get twinges like the gout. "Only worse." 
"The most loathly thing in Mess-pot was the water," 
interjected Penruddocke. "It was a case of 
' Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.' 
Every drop of it was rank poison. And no wonder. I 
remember when I was evacuated down the Tigris, after 
Ctesiphon, our dhow passed scores of swollen corpses. They 
were chucked into the. river, and on the third day they rose 
again inflated with gas, like a balloon. A swollen body's a 
beastly thing. It looks like a man who's died first and got 
blind drunk afterwards. Look at that ruddy candle." 
A taper was drooping into a note of interrogation, and the 
hot grease dripped on to the pedestal of the silver candle- 
stick. He stretched out a hand to straighten it. 
* Copyright in U.S.A. 
"The Wiltshire rustics call that a winding-sheet," remarked 
Tracy languidly. "Thej- say it always means a death in 
the village. They're a superstitious lot." 
"It's a curious thing," said Penruddocke, "that though 
we've all seen hundreds of dead men, we've never seen a 
ghost. Out there, I mean. At least, I haven't. And I 
never met any fellow who had. All the spooks of these 
spiritualist cranks seem to be home on leave." 
"There's nothing curious about that," snapped Letcher. 
"The trenches arc about the last place a deacl man would 
want to return to. He wouldn't be such a bloody fool." 
"Well, you won't believe what I'm going to tell you " 
began Meredith. 
"No, I shan't," interjected Letcher. "I never do. Damn 
this heat. Pass the syphon." 
"But it's true, all the same," continued Meredith quietly. 
"I've never told this story before " 
"Which is more than you can say of any other story of 
yours,'-' snarled Letcher. 
"Dickie, Dickie, dry up," said Tracy. "Don't be so cross. 
If j'ou don't behave j'ourself, I shall put you to bed. It's 
time little boys went to bye-bye." Letcher was six foot two, 
a dandy with the gloves, and topped Tracy, who was a light- 
weight, by eight inches. Which may have accounted for 
the fact that Tracy was the only man who could do any- 
thing with him. 
"And I hope it won't go outside this room," pursued 
Meredith dispassionately. "My CO. didn't want it talked 
about. You know a CO. doesn't exactly like people jawing 
about his battalion having got the wind up. One never 
hears the end of it." 
The me^s nodded, and lit their cigarettes. 
"Well, it was near Fromelles ; in Maich of last year. We 
had just taken over a new bit of the line, and nine-tenths of 
the battalion were new drafts. We were a Welsh regiment. 
There'd been nothing doing in that part of the line except a 
strafing with 'Minnies,' and the fire-trench had been thinly 
held. My company had only one platoon on a front of 
8oo yards, distributed over four posts ; I kept the other 
three platoons in support. On the first night I sent certain 
details over the top for patrol and working parties. It was 
their first experience of No Man's Land, and they were 
curious. Perhaps a bit 'windy,' too, as new men generally 
are ; the fellows they were reheving had been trying to 
make their flesh creep, which is a way the old hands have. 
The night was as black as a hat. The Boche suddenly sent 
up a star-shell, and the men stood as still as statues — which, 
as you know, is the only thing to do. All except one or two, 
who moved. They never moved 'again. Then night de- 
scended once more like a drop-curtain. But that peep had 
been quite enough for the drafts. They'd seen hundreds of 
bodies tying out there among the rank grass- — they'd been 
there for months, their uniforms bleached by sun and rain, 
loose and shrunken on their bones like the clothes of an old 
man. They were Aiistrahans — eight hundred of them. 
They'd attacked and been" caught in No Man's Land by 
macliine-guns, and no stretcher-bearers or burying-party had 
ever been able to get near them. So they had lain there 
till they died, and rotted. The rats had done the rest. The 
new drafts didn't quite like it. I heard one of the platoon- 
sergeants next morning talking to them like a father, and 
explaining to them, gently but firmly, that war was quite a 
bloody business, and the sooner they accepted the fact the 
better. They were a tough lot — Welsh miners, in fact — 
and they were afraid of nothing alive. But they had the 
civilian's unfamiliarity with the dead, and one cioesn't get 
over that all at once." 
"The words of the wise are as goads," said Penruddocke ; 
"you're right, my son. It all depends on whether you're 
used to the point of view. I've got accustomed to seeing 
scores of dead men at the front without turning a hair ; but 
when I came home on leave, and saw my old uncle washed 
and combed like a baby", and laid out in his coffin, withja 
face like wax, and not the trace of a wound, it gave me quite 
a shivftr. It seems so unnatural to die in your bed." 
"Well, that's the converse of my proposition," resumed 
Meredith. " It seemed so unnatural to my fellows to die 
anywhere else, and especially in such a multitude. However, 
the mood soon passed, and they slept like dormice the next 
day, after the night's shift. On the second night I w-ent 
my rounds of the front-line trench, visiting each post in turn 
with my runner and my batman, and found everything O.K. 
I'd better explain the configuration of that trench, as it 
