'You remember last night,' he said, 'I had been detailed to look after the baggage when we disembarked, and take charge of the unloading-party? As far as I know I did the job all right, except for losing old Tompkins' valise--but you can't think how much worry and anxiety it gave me _beforehand_. All the time on the sweeper I was imagining the hundreds of possible disasters: the working-party not turning up, and me left alone on the boat with the baggage--the Colonel's things being dropped overboard--a row with the M.L.O.--getting the baggage ashore, and then losing the battalion, or the working-party, or the baggage. It all worked out quite simply, but I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it's always the same. That's really why I didn't take a commission--because I couldn't imagine myself drilling men once without becoming a permanent laughing-stock. I know now that I was a fool about that--I usually do find that out--but I can't escape the feeling next time.
'And now, it's not only little things like that, but that's what I feel about the whole war. I've a terror of being a failure in it, a failure out here--you know, a sort of regimental dud. I've heard of lots of them; the kind of man that nobody gives an important job because he's sure to muck it up (though I do believe Eccleston's more likely to be that than me). But that's what I was thinking just now. Somehow, looking at this view--Troy and all that--and thinking how those Greeks sweated blood for ten years on afternoons like this, doing their duty for the damned old kings, and how we've come out here to fight in the same place thousands of years afterwards, and we still know about them and remember their names--well, it gave me a kind of inspiration; I don't know why. I've got a bit of confidence--God knows how long it will last--but I swear I won't be a failure, I won't be the battalion dud--and I'll have a damned good try to get a medal of some sort and be like--like Achilles or somebody.'
Sheer breathlessness put a sudden end to this outburst, and since it was followed by a certain shyness at his own revelations I did not probe deeper. But I thought to myself that this young man's spirit of romance would die hard; I did not know whether it would ever die; for certainly I had never seen that spirit working so powerfully in any man as a positive incentive to achievement. And I tell you all this, because I want you to understand how it was with him in the beginning.