

E-text prepared by David Clarke, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team http://www.pgdp.net)



THE ROUGH ROAD

by

WILLIAM J. LOCKE







First Edition... September 1918

John Lane
The Bodley Head Ltd




TO
SHEILA

THIS LITTLE TALE OF
THE GREAT WAR
AS A MEMORY FOR AFTER YEARS




THE ROUGH ROAD




CHAPTER I


This is the story of Doggie Trevor. It tells of his doings and of a
girl in England and a girl in France. Chiefly it is concerned with the
influences that enabled him to win through the war. Doggie Trevor did
not get the Victoria Cross. He got no cross or distinction whatever.
He did not even attain the sorrowful glory of a little white cross
above his grave on the Western Front. Doggie was no hero of romance,
ancient or modern. But he went through with it and is alive to tell
the tale.

The brutal of his acquaintance gave him the name of "Doggie" years
before the war was ever thought of, because he had been brought up
from babyhood like a toy Pom. The almost freak offspring of elderly
parents, he had the rough world against him from birth. 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--his real name was James
Marmaduke--in cotton-wool, and kept him so until he was almost a grown
man. Doggie had never a chance. She brought him up like a toy Pom
until he was twenty-one--and then she died. Doggie being comfortably
off, continued the maternal tradition and kept on bringing himself up
like a toy Pom. He did not know what else to do. Then, when he was
five-and-twenty, he found himself at the edge of the world gazing in
timorous starkness down into the abyss of the Great War. Something
kicked him over the brink and sent him sprawling into the thick of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

That the world knows little of its greatest men is a commonplace among
silly aphorisms. With far more justice it may be stated that of its
least men the world knows nothing and cares less. Yet the Doggies of
the War, who on the cry of "Havoc!" have been let loose, much to their
own and everybody else's stupefaction, deserve the passing tribute
sometimes, poor fellows, of a sigh, sometimes of a smile, often of a
cheer. Very few of them--very few, at any rate, of the English
Doggies--have tucked their little tails between their legs and run
away. Once a brawny humorist wrote to Doggie Trevor "_Sursum cauda._"
Doggie happened to be at the time in a water-logged front trench in
Flanders and the writer basking in the mild sunshine of Simla with his
Territorial regiment. Doggie, bidden by the Hedonist of circumstance
to up with