Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet, and the influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for the moment, was founded on vanity.
"Courage," he said with that gallant look of his which I had seen with admiration when he walked up the old duckboards beyond Ypres, with a whimsical smile at "crumps" bursting abominably near—he had done bravely in the old days, as a battalion commander—"Courage is merely a pose before the mirror of one's own soul and one's neighbours. We are all horribly afraid in moments of danger, but some of us have the gift of pretending that we don't mind. That is vanity. We like to look heroes, even to ourselves. It is good to die with a beau geste, though death is damnably unpleasant."
"I agree, Colonel," said Charles Fortune. "Always the right face for the proper occasion. But it wants a lot of practice."
He put on his gallant, devil-may-care face, and there was appreciative laughter from his fellow-officers.
Harding, the young landowner, was of opinion that courage depended entirely on the liver.
"It is a matter of physical health," he said. "If I am out-of-sorts, my moral goes down to zero. Not that I'm ever really brave. Anyhow I hate things that go off. Those loud noises of bursting shells are very objectionable. I shall protest against Christmas crackers after the war."
