He would remember; they were topside now, in the trench, he could see a silent and moiling group within which or beneath which the major and two company commanders and three or four sergeants had vanished (they had taken the adjutant and the ser-geant-major and the corporal signalman in the orderly dugout and the colonel still in bed) and in both directions along the trench he could see men coming up out of their holes and warrens, blinking in the light, dazed still yet already wearing on their faces that look of amazed incredulity fading with one amazed concert into dawning and incredulous hope. The hard hands still grasped him; as they lifted, flung him up onto the firestep and then over the lip of the parapet, he already saw the runner spring up and turn and reach down and pull the old Negro up beside him while other hands boosted from beneath, the two of them now standing on the parapet facing the trench, the runner's voice thin and high now with that desperate and indomitable despair: The sign! The sign! Give it us! Come on, men! If this is what they call staying alive, do you want that on these terms forever cither?'
Then he was struggling again. He didn't even know he was about to, when he found himself jerking and thrashing, cursing, flinging, beating away the hands, not even realising then why, for what, until he found himself in the wire, striking, hitting back-ward at the crowding bodies at the entrance to the labyrinthine passageway which the night patrols used, hearing his own voice in one last repudiation: T... them all! Bugger all of you!' crawling now, not the first one through because when he rose to his feet, running, the old Negro was panting beside him, while he shouted at the old Negro: 'Serve you f... ing well right! Didn't I warn you two years ago to stay away from me? Didn't I?'
Then the runner was beside him, grasping his arm and stopping Thursday him and turning him about, shouting: Took at them!' He did so and saw them, watched them, crawling on their hands and knees through the gaps in the wire as though up out of hell itself, faces clothes hands and all stained as though forever one single name-less and identical color from the mud in which they had lived like animals for four years, then rising to their feet as though in that four years they had not stood on earth, but had this moment returned to light and air from purgatory as ghosts stained forever to the nameless single color of purgatory. 'Over there too!' the runner cried, turning him again until he saw that also: the distant German wire one faint moil and pulse of motion, indistinguishable until it too broke into men rising erect; whereupon a dreadful haste came over him, along with something else which he had not yet time to assimilate, recognise, knowing, aware of only the haste; and not his haste but one haste, not only the battalion but the German one or regiment or whatever it was, the two of them run-ning toward each other now, empty-handed, approaching until he could see, distinguish the individual faces but still all one face, one expression, and then he knew suddenly that his too looked like that, all of them did: tentative, amazed, defenseless, and then he heard the voices too and knew that his was one also-a thin mur-muring sound rising into the incredible silence like a chirping of lost birds, forlorn and defenseless too; and then he knew what the other thing was even before the frantic uprush of the rockets from behind the two wires, German and British too.
'No!' he cried, 'no! Not to us!' not even realising that he had said 'we' and not T for the first time in his life probably, certainly for the first time in four years, not even realising that in the next moment he had said 'I' again, shouting to the old Negro as he whirled about: 'What did I tell you? Didn't I tell you to let me alone?' Only it was not the old Negro, it was the runner, standing facing him as the first ranging burst of shells bracketed in. He never heard them, nor the wailing rumble of the two barrages either, nor saw nor heard little more of anything in that last sec-ond except the runner's voice crying out of the soundless rush of flame which enveloped half his body neatly from heel through navel through chin: They cant kill us! They cant! Not dare not: they cant!'
Except of course that he couldn't sit here save for a definitely physically limited length of time because after a while it would be daylight. Unless of course the sun really failed to rise tomorrow, which as they taught you in that subsection of philosophy they called dialectics which you were trying to swot through in order to try to swot through that section of being educated they called philosophy, was for the sake of argument possible. Only why shouldn't he be sitting here after daylight or for the rest of the day itself for that matter, since the only physical limitation to that would be when someone with the authority and compulsion to resist the condition of a young man in a second lieutenant's uni-form sitting on the ground against the wall of a Nissen hut, had his attention called to it by a horn or whistle; and that greater condition which yesterday had sent three fairly expensive aero-planes jinking up and down the sky with their Vickerses full of blank ammunition, might well invalidate that one too.
Then the first limitation had been discharged, because now it was day and none to know where the night had gone: not a dialec-tic this time, but he who didn't know where night had gone this soon, this quick. Or maybe it was a dialectic since as far as he knew only he had watched it out and since only he in waking had watched it out, to all the others still in slumber it still obtained, like the tree in darkness being no longer green, and since he who had watched it out still didn't know where it had gone, for him it was still night too. Then almost before he had had time to begin to bother to think that out and so have done with it, a bugle blowing reveille confounded him, the sound (that sound: who had never heard it before or even heard of it: a horn blowing at day- Thursday break on a forward aerodrome where people did not even have guns but were armed only with maps and what Monaghan called monkey-wrenches) even getting him up onto his feet: that greater condition's abrogation which had now reabrogated. In fact, if he had been a cadet still, he would even know what crime whoever found him sitting there would charge him with: not shaving: and, standing now, he realised that he had even forgot his problem too, who had sat there all night thinking that he had none evermore, as though sitting so long within that peaceful stink had robbed olfactory of its single sense or perhaps the Sidcott of its smell and only getting up restored them both. In fact, for a moment he toyed with the idea of unrolling the Sidcott to see how far the burning had spread, except that if he did that and let the air in, the burning might spread faster, thinking, with a sort of peaceful amazement hearing himself: Because it's got to last; no more: not last until, just last.
At least he wouldn't take it inside with him, so he left it against the wall and went around the hut and inside it-Burk and Hanley and De Marchi had not stirred, so the tree was not green yet for some anyway-and got his shaving tackle and then picked up the Sidcott again and went to the wash-room; nor would the tree be quite green yet here either, and if not here, certainly not in the latrines. Though now it would because the sun was well up now and, once more smooth of face, the Sidcott stinking peacefully under his arm, he could see movement about the mess, remembering suddenly that he had not eaten since lunch yesterday. But then there was the Sidcott, when suddenly he realised that the Sidcott would serve that too, turning and already walking. They-someone-had brought his bus back and rolled it in, so he trod his long shadow toward only the petrol tin and put the Sidcott into it and stood peaceful and empty while the day incremented, the infini-tesimal ineluctable shortening of the shadows. It was going to rain probably, but then it always was anyway; that is, it always did on days-off from patrols, he didn't know why yet, he was too new. 'You will though,' Monaghan told him. 'Just wait till after the first time you've been good and scared'-pronouncing it 'skeered.'