Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at ease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought iron support for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily-veined hands. Dead he would be different. Martin’s mind could hardly grasp the connection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughts and desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his arm round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for long walks, with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night drinking and talking-and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform half-buried in the mud of ditches.
“Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fine May morning?” asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if he had guessed Martin’s thoughts.
“I wonder what they think of it.”
“It’s not that I’m resigned... Don’t think that. Resignation is too easy. That’s why the herd can be driven by a boy of six ... or a prime minister!”
Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand were squeezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel the smooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would that feel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? A momentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomach contract with nausea.
“I’m not resigned either,” he shouted in a laugh. “I am going to do something some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in all the circles of hell.”
“I’d play the part of Virgil pretty well,” said the aspirant, “but I suppose Virgil was a staff officer.”
“I must go,” said Martin. “My name’s Martin Howe, S.S.U. 84.”
“Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You’ll probably carry me back in your little omnibus.”
When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the village square, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:
“D.J.’s to-morrow.”
“What’s that?”
“The attack. It’s to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions are going to be given out to-night.”
A detonation behind them was like a blow on the head, making their ear-drums ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled to the ground.
“The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out of you.”
“Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?”
“No.”
A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from him.
“It’s put off,” he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. “D.J.’s not till day after to-morrow at four-twenty. But to-morrow we’re going up to relieve the section that’s coming out and take over the posts. They say it’s hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can’t smell at all. The other section’s got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them have broken down. The posts are shelled all the time.”
“Great,” said Tom Randolph. “We’ll see the real thing this time.”
There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed amid the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress tree at the other end of the village street.
“Talk about the real thing!” said Martin.
“Ole 410 evidently woke ’em up some.”
It was the fifth time that day that Martin’s car had passed the cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky where the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam. The rain made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from the cracked feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure hung out from the tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of the rain. Martin was wiping the mud from his hands after changing a wheel. He stared curiously at the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes that had meant for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of pain. Suddenly he noticed that where the crown of thorns had been about the forehead of the Christ someone had wound barbed wire. He smiled, and asked the swaying figure in his mind:
“And You, what do You think of it?”
For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.
He leaned over to crank the car.
The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery sunset. Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat and misery of troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained and colourless and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their necks and their backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the helmets, tilted to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like the face of the figure that dangled from the cross.
Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads at the edge of the woods.
Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the column.
One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up at the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the sharp twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.
The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross fell forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.
The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire with a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then up the hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green and gold in the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs covered with branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors decorated with rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters made of wattled sticks, Camp des Pommiers.
A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and splashing in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the pong, pong, pong of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the rustling trees.
“Looks like a camp meetin’ ground in Georgia,” said Tom Randolph, blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a pole between them get out of the way.
The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and, turning into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at the turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped off halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and of turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.
Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with their great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the direction of the lines.
At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of their section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to occasional shells whining far overhead. All through the wood was a continuous ping, pong, ping of batteries, with the crash of a big gun coming now and then like the growl of a bull-frog among the sing-song of small toads in a pond at night.