All cheeks are rouged but Audrey’s — who is used since infancy to Albert’s prodigious calculations. . Am I right, sir? His skin has an unhealthy colour and his body, Stan thinks, is twisted out of all decency. His is a curious character, being at once a gibbering wreck and a Tartar to boot. He has scratched himself a sort of dugout behind a cattle bier built with the glossy-red bricks used in these parts. — Am I right, sir, Stan repeats, you’re not able to go on? The officer cowers — he’s lost his cap so there’s no real way of establishing to whom he belongs, if anyone — he could even be a spy — there’s talk of such characters: immaculately shined boots, in officers’ uniforms but without regimental badges, members of an international army of the higher orders. The others of Stan’s section are boiling the dixie for tea and propping opened tins of maconochie in the embers of the fire. He’s a tall man, the officer, which makes his craven-baby posture each time one of the 4.7s that surround them fires a salvo all the more pathetic. But whenever the bombardment ceases, his voice resurges, building in timbre and volume until he speaks with parade-ground authority: You mustn’t imagine, he says, that I’ve always been as you see me — I’m a regular, I was with the BEF at the beginning of the whole show — you understand, Corporal? I was seconded to the French Fifth Army, but not for liaison — I’m NOT STAFF! — yelped above a salvo that rolls away to a serenely ignorant horizon. In its wake Lufty says, Steak, tripe and onion, and Feldman counters: Fried fish and fried taters. . We were near Châlons on the Marne, the officer continues, it was a fine summer evening like this — except, he snorts, not like this at all because it was beautifully silent, YOU KNOW SUCH EVENINGS, CORPORAL, when the light begins to fade to the west and this becomes in some fashion mixed up with all that silence, A LARK CRYING OR A DOG barking in a farmyard sounds as peaceful as the breath of a sleeping babe. . There is a longer lull in the firing and squatting down Stanley scrutinises the officer: the man is, he thinks, at least forty years of age and has the mobile wishy-washy face and buck teeth of a rabbit. His madness Stanley views compassionately only as this: a soiled and ill-fitting suit of clothes he wears on top of his uniform.
Kills all insane persons in fact? Yes, in mercy and in justice to themselves . .comes to him, an exchange between characters in a torn book recovered from a dugout after a direct hit, a novelette about a perfect New Amazonia of the far future, wherein stately Hermiones and Beryls do away with the feeble-minded. . by means of the black drop. The smell of the heated maconochie has become in some fashion mixed up with the elemental cordite, and so Stanley considers this: might it be possible to eat a field piece? — We were sitting there watching the sunset — the officer sits hunched in his crazy billet, his moustache scratching between his well-tailored knees — the Frenchie and me both smoking our pipes, and the fading light was precisely, mark me, precisely like the silk chiffon sleeves of the dress my sweet young wife had worn to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, what. .? Maybe only a month or so before the Boche invaded, when, without any warning at all, the WHOLE HORIZON BURST INTO FLAME. . All scenes of this nature are, Stanley believes, deathbed ones. All speeches of this type — halting, impassioned — are valedictions demanding mourning right away. He has heard more than my fair share at the Front, and come to believe that they summon the bullet, the mortar and the shell . .Fuck Widow Twankey ’ere, says Lufty, who’s come up to the ruined bier and stands with his steaming mess tin in his hand, looking down at them. Lufty’s nose has a bloody knob of cotton wool stuck to its end with plaster, his chestnut hair is all awry, his brown eyes blink uncontrollably . .Fuck Widow Twankey ’ere, he says again and kicks a toe-load of the parched earth on to the cowardly officer. Stanley relapses still more on to the resounding ground, NO, he shouts, BRING ME OVER MINE — I’ll ’ear ’im out. Go on, he says to the officer, who, now it’s been said, he recognises to be more panto’ dame than rabbit, GO ON! It was. . the officer resumes in the aching silence after the concussion. . an artillery bombardment on a wide front — the first either of us had seen. Up until then — and this was August of ’14 — no one had ever seen such a thing, you understand? Stanley nods and takes his own mess tin from Bobby, the Squad Number Five, who’s shaking almost as badly as the officer. It is a measure of how far gone the man is that he does not respond to the smell of the food — he is beyond any sustenance, out there in the shadowland he has captured and holds alone. Horror gripped me, he says, like a bloody bastard ague — y’know, Corporal, that Frenchie and me, we were regulars, we’d seen war but it was war with hard blows and straight dealings — now we both knew, as we looked upon that curtain of fire, that everything had changed, that this. . thing — whatever it might be — had us in its grip, it was holding us tight in its grip, it would keep us in this grip SHAKING WITH THE EFFORT of holding us so tightly, gripping — and it would never let go its gripping. D’you see? All the shells, all the mines and the mortar rounds — your machine-gun ones too, they’re only its shaking, d’you see? The shaking of that MONSTROUS HAND WHICH never moves, can never move.