Not a Hawk
“I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that I would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again.
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“The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted.” — Ernest Hemingway; The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway—In Another Country, p. 270
Tyler Scott
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