Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser Page B

entitled to be scared.
    There is the consolation that once the shooting starts,the higher thought takes a back seat. Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do. Seeing Gale killed shocked me as our first casualties had done, and I think enraged me. I wanted a Jap then, mostly for my own animal pride, no doubt, but seeing Gale go down sparked something which I felt in the instant when I hung on my aim at the Jap with the sword, because I wanted to be sure. The joy of hitting him was the strongest emotion I felt that day; I notice I've mentioned it twice. *
    Perhaps I'm too self-analytical, but I'm trying to be honest. It's hard to say where fear and excitement meet, or which predominates. The best way I can sum up my emotions in that wood is to say that a continuous nervous excitement was shot through with occasional flashes of rage, terror, elation, relief, and amazement. So far as I have seen, most men are like that, by and large, although there are exceptions. A few really enjoy it; I've seen them (and I won't say they're deranged, because even the most balanced man has moments of satisfaction in battle which are indistinguishable from enjoyment, short-lived though they may be). Some are blessed with the quick reflexes which, combined withexperience, enable them to keep cool, like the little sergeant. Others seem to be on a “high”, like the man who cried “Look what I've got!”
    I was glad to come out of it, but even then I felt what I feel now, and what every old soldier feels: a gratitude for having been there, and an abiding admiration amounting to awe for the sheer ability of my comrades. Nowadays the highest praise a soldier can get is the word “professional”. Fourteenth Army weren't professionals. They were experts.
    The aftermath was as interesting as the battle. Fiction and the cinema have led us to expect certain reactions from men in war, and the conventions of both demand displays of emotion, or a restraint which is itself highly emotional. I don't know what Nine Section felt, but whatever it was didn't show. They expressed no grief, or anger, or obvious relief, or indeed any emotion at all; they betrayed no symptoms of shock or disturbance, nor were they nervous or short-tempered. If they were quieter than usual that evening, well, they were dog-tired. Discussion of the day's events was limited to a brief reference to Gale's death, and to the prospects of the wounded: Steele had been flown out on a “flying taxi”, one of the tiny fragile monoplanes to which stretchers were strapped; it was thought his wound was serious. * Parker was said to be in dock in Meiktila (and a few weeks later therewere to be ironic congratulations when he returned to the section with a romantic star-shaped scar high on his chest; penicillin was a new marvel then).
    Not a word was said about Tich Little, but a most remarkable thing happened (and I saw it repeated later in the campaign) which I have never heard of elsewhere, in fact or fiction, although I suspect it is as old as war.
    Tich's military effects and equipment—not, of course, his private possessions, or any of his clothing—were placed on a groundsheet, and it was understood that anyone in the section could take what he wished. Grandarse took one of his mess-tins; Forster, his housewife, making sure it contained only Army issue and nothing personal; Nixon, after long deliberation, took his rifle, an old Lee Enfield shod in very pale wood (which surprised me, for it seemed it might make its bearer uncomfortably conspicuous); I took his pialla, which was of superior enamel, unlike the usual chipped mugs. Each article was substituted on the groundsheet with our own possessions—my old pialla, Forster's housewife, and so on—and it was bundled up for delivery to the quartermaster. I think everyone from the original section took something.
    It was done without formality,