United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I never told you you should lie," said Tom with straightforward simplicity, "and I admit I forgot about the cabins. I was away two summers. I had a lot of different things to think about. I got shell-shocked the very same night I met that fellow, and that's got something to do with it, maybe. But I wouldn't stand here, I wouldn't, and try to prove that I didn't tell a lie.
Such whisperings of secrets and intrigues and scandals in high places! Such careless hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in places that were far so very far from G. H. Q.! There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our quarters women's voices, excited, angry, passionate.
I was moved to a nursing home for the month of August, as the hospital closed for cleaning, and there, quite forgetting to instruct the people about strangers, I was beset by another one afternoon. A cousin who has been gassed and shell-shocked had come in to read to me. There was a tap on the door. "Mrs. Fierce," announced the porter, and in sailed a lady whom I had never seen in my life before.
He poohpoohed the idea that immodest dancing with frisky matrons or abandoned spinsters was necessary to restore the shell-shocked nerves of temporary captains, locally-ranked majors, or the recently-joined subaltern. He was far too busy for twaddly tea-fights and carping at hard-worked generals who were doing their best and a good best too.
The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier; circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an innocence that was forlorn.
Glenn Kilbourne had returned from France early that fall, shell-shocked and gassed, and otherwise incapacitated for service in the army a wreck of his former sterling self and in many unaccountable ways a stranger to her. Cold, silent, haunted by something, he had made her miserable with his aloofness.
In the frothy suds she tried to sculpt the rough external shapes of the ice sculptures that she and Kato had made during the snow festivals of Sapporo. With her fingers she traced these suds-sculptures the way they once were as ice, but the suds only lasted for a moment, a reminder that time went by like a shell-shocked soldier.
Then later her father suggested she should see me to the road, and on the way I mentioned the thing said I was afraid I had upset the driver somehow and she got embarrassed at once, told me the man was shell-shocked, implying that he was queer, and switched off on to another subject so pointedly I had to let it go at that." Hilliard's eyes glistened. "Quite a good little mystery," he said.
She was eager, voluble, curious, and most disconcertingly oblivious of a possible sensitiveness in Lane. "Dare, you look like a dead one," she said. "Did you get shot, bayoneted, gassed, shell-shocked and all the rest? Did you go over the top? Did you kill any Germans? Gee! did you get to ride in a war-plane? Come across, now, and tell me."
Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked. "I am skeptical of the German offensive" said Mr. Bonar Law. Nobody believed the war correspondents.
Word Of The Day