The sentry-in what time he had left-would remember it. He knew at once that the runner meant exactly what he said about the pistol; he had proof of that at once-of the flat side of it any-way-when he almost stumbled over the sprawled bodies of the orderly officer and his sergeant in the tunnel before he saw them. But it would seem to him that it was not the hard muzzle of the pistol in the small of his back, but the voice itself-the glib calm rapid desperate and despairing voice carrying, sweeping them into the next dugout where an entire platoon lay or sat along the earthen shelf, the faces turning as one to look at them as the runner thrust him in with the muzzle of the pistol and then thrust the old Negro forward too, saying: 'Make the sign. Go on. Make it,' The tense calm desperate voice not even stopping then, as it seemed to the sentry that it never had: That's right, of course he doesn't need to make the sign. He has enough without. He has come from outside. So have I, for that matter but you wont even need to doubt me now, you need only look at him; some of you may even recognize Horn's D. C. M, on Thursday that tunic. But dont worry; Horn isn't dead any more than Mr. Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe; I have learned to use the flat of this-' he raised the pistol for an instant into sight '-quite neatly now. Because here is our chance to have done with it, be finished with it, quit of it, not just the killing, the getting dead, because that's only a part of the nigh'I'mare, of the rot and the stinking and the waste-'
The sentry would remember it, incorrigible still, merely acquies-cent, believing still that he was waiting, biding the moment when he or perhaps two or three of them at once would take the runner off guard and smother him, listening to the glib staccato voice, watching the turned faces listening to it too, believing still that he saw in them only astonishment, surprise, presently to fade into one concert which he would match: 'And neither of us would have got back in if it had not been for his pass from the Ministry of War in Pans. So you dont even know yet what they have done to you. They've sealed you up in here-the whole front from the Channel to Switzerland. Though from what I saw in Paris last night-not only military police, the French and American and ours, but the civilian police too-I wouldn't have thought they'd have enough left to seal anything with. But they have; the Colonel himself could not have got back in this morning unless the pass bore the signa-ture of that old man in the castle at Chaulnesmont. It's like an-other front, manned by all the troops in the three forces who cant speak the language belonging to the coat they came up from undei the equator and half around the world to die in, in the cold and the wet-Senegalese and Moroccans and Kurds and Chinese and Malays and Indians-Polynesian Melanesian Mongol and Negro who couldn't understand the password nor read the pass either: only to recognise perhaps by memorised rote that one cryptic hiero-glyph. But not you. You cant even get out now, to try to come back in. No-man's Land is no longer in front of us. It's behind us now. Before, the faces behind the machine guns and the rifles at least thought Caucasian thoughts even if they didn't speak Eng-lish or French or American; now they dont even think Caucasian thoughts. They're alien. They dont even have to care. They have tried for four years to get out of the white man's cold and mud and rain just by killing Germans, and failed. Who knows? by killing off the Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans whom they have bottled up here, they might all be on the way home tomor-row. So there is nowhere for us to go now but east-'
Now the sentry moved. That is, he did not move yet, he dared not: he simply made a single infinitesimal transition into a more convulsive rigidity, speaking now, harsh and obscene, cursing the rapt immobilised faces: 'Are you going to let them get away with this? Dont you know we're all going to be for it? They have already killed Lieutenant Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe-'
'Nonsense,' the runner said. 'They aren't dead. Didn't I just tell you I have learned how to use the flat of a pistol? It's his money. That's all. Everyone in the battalion owes him. He wants us to sit here and do nothing until he has earned his month's profit. Then he wants them to start it up again so we will be willing to bet him twenty shillings a month that we will be dead in thirty days. Which is what they are going to do-start it up again. You all saw those four aeroplanes yesterday, and all that archie. The archie were blank shells. There was a German general in the hun aeroplane. Last night he was at Chaulnesmont. He would have to have been; else, why did he come at all? Why else wafted across on a cloud of blank archie shell, with three S. E. 's going through the motion of shooting him down with blank ammunition? Oh yes, I was there; I saw the lorries fetching up the shells night before last, and yesterday I stood behind one of the batteries firing them when one of the S. E.'s-that pilot would have been a child of course, too young for them to have dared inform him in advance, too young to be risked with the knowledge that fact and truth are not the same-dived and put a burst right into the battery and shot me in the skirt of my tunic with something-whatever it was-which actually stung a little for a moment. What else, except to allow a German general to visit the French and the British and the American ones in the Allied Commandery-in-Chief without Thursday alarming the rest of us bipeds who were not born generals but simply human beings? And since they-all four of them---would speak the same language, no matter what clumsy isolated national tongues they were compelled by circumstance to do it in, the mat-ter probably took them no time at all and very likely the German one is already on his way back home at this moment, not even needing the blank shells now because the guns will be already loaded with live ones, merely waiting for him to get out of the way in order to resume, efface, obliterate forever this ghastly and in-credible contretemps. So we have no time, you see. We may not even have an hour. But an hour will be enough, if only it is all of us, the whole battalion. Not to kill the officers; they themselves have abolished killing for a recess of three days. Besides, we wont need to, with all of us. If we had time, we could even draw lots: one man to each officer, simply to hold his hands while the rest of us go over. But the flat of a pistol is quicker and no more harm-ful really, as Mr. Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe and Horn will tell you when they awake. Then never to touch pistol or rifle or gre-nade or machine gun again, to climb out of ditches forever and pass through the wire and then advance with nothing but our bare hands, to dare, defy the Germans not to come out too and meet us,' He said quickly, in the desperate and calmly despairing voice: 'All right: meet us with machine-gun fire, you will say. But the hun archie yesterday was blank too,' He said to the old Negro: 'Now, make them the sign. Have not you already proved that, il anything, it means brotherhood and peace?'
'You fools',' the sentry cried, except that he did not say fools: virulent and obscene out of his almost inarticulate paucity, strug-gling now, having defied the pistol in one outraged revulsion of repudiation before he realized that the hard little iron ring was gone from his spine and that the runner was merely holding him, he (the sentry) watching, glaring at the faces which he had thought were merely fixed in a surprise precursive to outrage too, looming, bearing down on him, identical and alien and concerted, until so many hard hands held him that he could not even struggle, the runner facing him now, the pistol poised flat on one raised palm, shouting at him: 'Stop it! Stop it! Make your choice, but hurry. You can come with us, or you can have the pistol. But decide,'