E-text prepared by David Clarke, Barbara Tozier,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
)
This is the story of Doggie Trevor. It tells ofhis doings and of a girl in England and a girlin France. Chiefly it is concerned with the influencesthat enabled him to win through the war. DoggieTrevor did not get the Victoria Cross. He got nocross or distinction whatever. He did not even attainthe sorrowful glory of a little white cross above hisgrave on the Western Front. Doggie was no hero ofromance, ancient or modern. But he went throughwith it and is alive to tell the tale.
The brutal of his acquaintance gave him the nameof “Doggie” years before the war was ever thoughtof, because he had been brought up from babyhoodlike a toy Pom. The almost freak offspring of elderlyparents, he had the rough world against him frombirth. His father died before he had cut a tooth.His mother was old enough to be his grandmother.She had the intense maternal instinct and the brain,such as it is, of an earwig. She wrapped Doggie—hisreal name was James Marmaduke—in cotton-wool,and kept him so until he was almost a grownman. Doggie had never a chance. She brought himup like a toy Pom until he was twenty-one—and thenshe died. Doggie being comfortably off, continuedthe maternal tradition and kept on bringing himself up like a toy Pom. He did not know what else todo. Then, when he was five-and-twenty, he foundhimself at the edge of the world gazing in timorousstarkness down into the abyss of the Great War.Something kicked him over the brink and sent himsprawling into the thick of it.
That the world knows little of its greatest menis a commonplace among silly aphorisms. With farmore justice it may be stated that of its least men theworld knows nothing and cares less. Yet the Doggiesof the War, who on the cry of “Havoc!” have beenlet loose, much to their own and everybody else’sstupefaction, deserve the passing tribute sometimes,poor fellows, of a sigh, sometimes of a smile, oftenof a cheer. Very few of them—very few, at anyrate, of the English Doggies—have tucked their littletails between their legs and run away. Once a brawnyhumorist wrote to Doggie Trevor “Sursum cauda.”Doggie happened to be at the time in a water-loggedfront trench in Flanders and the writer basking in themild sunshine of Simla with his Territorial regiment.Doggie, bidden by the Hedonist of circumstance toup with his tail, felt like a scorpion.
Such feelings, however, will be more adequatelydealt with hereafter. For the moment, it is onlyessential to obtain a general view of the type to whichTrevor belonged.
If there is one spot in England where the presentis the past, where the future is still more of the past,where the past wraps you and enfolds you in thedream