moans down . . — Will ye have a gasper, Stanley? — Yes, thank you, Willis, don’t mind if I do. . and falls short on the rockery, lifting all of its artfully arranged stones, stunted shrubs and winsome alpines almost as high as the parabola it has just described. The rockery is now suspended: an earthy cloud trailing filthy plumes that lazily rearranges itself into a rippling curtain of dirt that whips across their faces and the trellis behind them. Looking up from the lit tip of his cigarette, Stanley sees the deep funnel of the crater — the rockery has been obliterated, gone also is the housemaid, who, making her way along the brick path that runs between two stone soubrettes, liaised with the Minnie at the point of impact. The tray she was carrying — buckled and scorched — slams back down on to the table from which it was but lately removed, and a dark stain of tea, milk and water spreads through the damask — shattered crockery is smeared with jam, the skins of crushed grapes slugupon Adeline’s bleeding hands. Of the maid nothing remains — her corpse, Stanley imagines, will have been subsumed into the yielding wall of the crater, where it will occupy its own neat cubbyhole, death and interment having been achieved simultaneously. — Would you mind passing the ashtray, Bertie? More vampiric rooks limp from the eaves of the house — and there is further bestial aftermath, for, from where they have been crouching in the leopard-skin shadow of a silver birch, passing a fag from cupped hand to cupped hand, the other two members of the section come running — caddies, dragging between them the ammo box. The trestle table, the tea things, the cloth, the napkins and their silver rings — all are swept aside. With a virile vim Stanley never guessed ’e ’ad innim, Willis opens the legs, then, with equally astonishing zeal, Bertie attaches the Vickers. Set beside the steadiness of the conchies, the machine gunners clearly have a case of the jitters — but is it any surprise they’re nerve cases? While the others have been conversing and taking tea, they have had to withstand this drum fire: Boom-boom! Boom-boom! Always in fours, a bloodthirsty giant’s timpani, Fee-fi-fo-fum! The 5.9s come soaring over the house, Fosse 8, trailing their smoky cloaks. Jack Johnson! Stanley cries to stiffen his men’s resolve, An’ we all know where ees bin! He throws himself prone and grasps the Vickers’s grips, Willis feeds the belt into the block, and Stanley cranks the cocking lever. The black bastards keep on coming, their pulsating rush gaining inexorably in power and intensity, until, with a final vicious swipe, they impact on a potting shed, a five-bar gate, the lush meadow beyond it and the duck pond beyond that. Bertie bellows, Two francs says you can’t get the fuckers on the mortar! as he pulls the tatty notes from his breast pocket. Willis shouts, I’ll match ’im! Stanley calculates the range at around a hundred and thirty yards — he pulls on the trigger and the gun pushes back at him, a monotonous battering of recoil, ten rounds every second, so that his arms shake, and his fingers twitch and his teeth chatter. Slowly he takes the muzzle across a thirty-degree traverse, squinting through the sights as rounds nibble away at the corner of the house and clip the yew into shapelessness. Stanley is aware of a dangerous harmoniousness between the machine gun and him — he has an intimate knowledge of every nick and bump in its wooden grips, while above the roaring of the barrage he can still hear its rat-a-tat-tat rag. It’s no use, though — his rounds are driving short into a grove of oak that is steadily being reduced to kindling. We’ll have to reposition! he orders the section at the end of a long burst — and Adeline abandons the cover of the low wall to go forward and reconnoitre. Look at her! her skirts dragging through the muck, her proudly hatless head held high. There is no fear in her — she has the strange unfathomable conviction that For aught the Parthian arrows fly, Swallows teeming against a pale-rose sky she will come through the whole splendid show without so much as a scratch on her — only her abundance of dark curls looser and freer. As another Minnie comes barrelling over, she stands, and, pulling the pistol from her pretty hip, fires the Very light directly at it. A single rifle shot slices through the din — she spins, tumbles, goes over-rowley into the wire, which coils around her, cocooning her in its galvanised thorns, until all that can be seen of the sleeping beauty is her blood-dimpled moonface — her jellied eels lie on the garden wall. Stanley rises and floats back to the madness of the tea party. . Bertie sits there — erect yet disjointed — a folded pad of muslin soaked with his own piss tied across the hole where his nose used to be. Willis, ignoring the mustard tongues that lick at the cups and saucers, presides over an engorged teapot. Crowdie? he asks, and, without waiting for Stanley’s reply, tilts and pours out the thin brownish gruel so that it surges across the table carrying dollops of mutton fat . .Y’know, Bertie observes, your country needs not you at the Front, it — she — needs you here. Stanley looks sharply at him: the anti-gas pad has gone and Bertie holds a cigarette the way a southpaw holds a pen. I must report, Stanley says curtly, to GOC Aldershot by stand-to tomorrow morning. If I don’t report there, I’ll be arrested, tried for desertion and shot. Willis, with an affecting casualness, has removed his false teeth — both sets — and now balances them atop a splendid honeycomb. He takes a biscuit and dips it into his cup of crowdie. We need someone, Bertie persists, who would be prepared to flout the authorities, who would take up the mantle of the early Christians. At the Front, we appreciate, such gestures are quite, um, inutile — but here, with the NCF’s assistance, it seems to me that if the weight of public opinion were to be brought to bear effectively, this would militate against anything too beastly happening — these are still men, y’know, not monsters quite yet. Willis sucks and slobbers on his biscuit, Stanley bends to unbuckle the unfamiliar gaiters. — D’you mind, ol’ man? Stanley nods in the direction of the tin of Fellner’s whale oil and Willis passes the spermaceti across. Unlacing his boots, removing them and then stripping off his stockings, Stanley commences the salving of his rotten feet, which are the colour of brisket five days old. — Moving behind Adeline’s face in such a way that their eyes no longer align, for a splinter of a second Audrey sees the corner of her visual field, and this makes her aware of how, while her cheeks rest in Adeline’s, and her nose slots into Adeline’s, the fit can never be exact — there will always be these slippages. That Adeline loves Stanley, Audrey does not doubt — she knows this from the inside, knows it by the frequency with which she darts looks at him, her eyes seeking his. Knows it also because when Willis or Bertie says anything she perceives as a threat to her Mowgli, Adeline daggers at them. Adeline loves Audrey’s brother more than she understands, and in this regard Audrey has a relation with her closer even than this: her weary chest rising and falling inside the young woman’s magnificent bosom, her slack skin sucking away from Adeline’s taut. Audrey has always loved Stanley more than I knew — what was it Gilbert said, A loaf of bread, a flask of wine, And thou beside me in the wilderness . .It is Stanley who is always beside her in this wilderness, my bumps-a-daisy, my blue boy. How Audrey would love to unbuckle his gaiters, take off his boots and stockings and rub the whale oil — which is what, they say, helps — into his poor feet. He sits there at the table sunk in his awful funk and overwhelmed by the tea things’ inability to move of their own volition: the Dundee cake digging into its willow-pattern plate, the butter knives staking out the napery, the fine cups lined up — all have arrived here post-haste, rushing to outflank each other: teaspoon countering saucer, side plate checked by butter dish. From Nieuport to Ypres to Aubers to Arras, snaking through Picardy and across the River Somme, then looping past Soissons and on to Verdun. Whence came that epochal moment that everyone present — not only Audrey and her little brother — realised that this was how it would be henceforth and forever: this inexorable grinding together of the manslides of field grey, blue and brown? Whence arrived the apprehension that it is to this that they are fated: the taking of more tea, the exchange of Stottertante, the spreading of Heldenbutter, followed by the cramped movement into a reserve place at the table for a few days before the entire bloody business of the tea party without end begins again . .On the Partie Réservée à la Correspondence of the card he had sent from Amiens before his only leave — a photographic card that showed Le Jardin Anglais de la Place Montplaisir, with massy crests of poplar, petrified fountains of willow fronds — he had scrawled, Tickler’s jam, Tickler’s jam, How I love old Tickler’s jam, Plum and apple in a one-pound pot, Sent from Blighty in a ten-ton lot, Every night when I’m asleep, I’m dreaming that I am, Forcing my way through the Dardanelles with a tin of Tickler’s jam . .At present a plump and studious Jew of the ginger type has taken Feydeau’s place at the tea table, while as for Bertie, in lieu of his cracked-and-glued white face, there is a nigger’s — or, at any rate, the minstrel Audrey is aware of caring for her.