But when on my way to visit
India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the
fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand
casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things
together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do
alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly
certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw
men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot
through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a number of
Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker,
some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched
a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly
cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out
and lying still until every other man was down. . . . Not one man
would have gone up that hill alone, without onlookers. . . ."
Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his
life had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was
alone.
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