But unless
a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does not groan or scream! They
are just brave. If you ask them how they feel it is always one of two
things: either they say quietly that they are very bad or else they say
there is nothing the matter....
He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone tells
me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often under fire.
He has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam War Lord has taken
since the war began. He keeps himself acutely informed upon every aspect
of the war. He was a little inclined to fatalism, he confessed. There
were two stories current of two families of four sons, in each three
had been killed and in each there was an attempt to put the fourth in a
place of comparative safety. In one case a general took the fourth
son in as an attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately
torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident while he
was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those stories we came
to the question whether the uneducated Italians were more superstitious
than the uneducated English; the king thought they were much less so.
That struck me as a novel idea. But then he thought that English rural
people believe in witches and fairies.
I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king of the
new dispensation.
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