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Page 58
The softness of the warm September day, the calm trees, and the flowers
that were pure untroubled beauty (how I envied them their dispassionate
lives, their tranquil growth, their effortless attainment of perfection,
and their unconscious dying!)--all these had a strangely harmonizing
influence upon my discordant spirit. We spoke little, and of the war not
at all. Indeed, the war suddenly seemed curiously remote and I could
hardly hear the throbbing of the guns. I knew that this afternoon would
never be lost, that I would often think of it when back at the front. It
would remain a dream of tranquil beauty that would haunt me at
unexpected moments. I felt that for this alone my leave had been worth
while.
The last morning came. I made a successful effort to control myself. I
said good-bye. It was all over.
* * * * *
When I got back to camp all the men were out at work. I sat down alone
in my tent. I felt slightly dazed, but not as miserable as I had
expected to feel. I did not know how to occupy my time. I had brought
several books with me, but I felt no inclination to read. Life seemed
empty and purposeless. I waited impatiently for the return of the
others.
They arrived and the evening passed quickly in talk. My friend, whose
place was next to mine, remarked that I was far more cheerful than men
returning from leave usually are.
The next day and many days after I was unable to shake off the feeling
of mental torpor and a vague regret for what had been and what had gone
for ever. My leave seemed like a thing I had dreamt of long ago.
Sometimes I asked myself in a puzzled manner: "Have I really been home
on leave?"
The end of the war, no one could tell when that would be. But the next
leave--it might come in eight or nine months--that was something to look
forward to and I began to think of all the things I would do when it
actually did come.
IX
ACROSS THE RIDGES
"And Cuchullain ... deemed it no honour nor deemed he it fair to
take horses or garments or arms from corpses, or from the dead."
(TAIN BO CUAILGNE, 5th Century).
There were only a few stars visible above, but the whole eastern horizon
was flashing and scintillating. Down in the valley, where several
British batteries were in action, long thin jets of flame darted forth
incessantly.
As the day dawned we could see that the distant ridges were enveloped in
drifts of dense, white fog. From time to time patches of the fog would
glow redly and then become brilliantly incandescent and throw up sheets
of lurid flame. German shells came whistling over and burst with angry,
reverberating roars. Black fountains of earth and smoke spurted up from
the fields and left slowly thinning clouds that hung suspended for a
while and then dissolved in air. Sepia-coloured puffs appearing in the
sky above were followed by sharp explosions and the rattle of descending
shrapnel.
For several hours the tumult continued unabated and then the whistle of
German shells became less frequent until at last it died down
altogether.
Towards noon about a hundred German prisoners passed by under armed
escort.
The ridges had been taken.
* * * * *
Our new camp lay at the foot of a gloomy hill. A disused trench ran
right across it. Rifles, bayonets, bandoliers, grenades, water-bottles,
packs, articles of clothing and bits of equipment lay scattered
everywhere. Barbed wire rusted in coils or straggling lengths. Rusty
tins and twisted, rusty sheets of shrapnel-riddled corrugated iron
littered the sodden mud. Water, rust-stained or black and fetid,
stagnated in pools and shell-holes. The sides of the trench were moist
with iridescent slime. Dead soldiers lay everywhere with grey faces,
grey hands and mouldering uniforms. Their pockets were turned inside out
and mud-stained letters and postcards, and sometimes a mildewed
pocket-book or a broken mirror, were dispersed round every rotting
corpse. In front of my tent the white ribs of a horse projected from a
heap of loose earth. Near by a boot with a human foot inside emerged
from the black scummy water at the bottom of a shell-hole. An evil
stench hovered in the air.
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