The officer has extended his clenched fist: it shakes above Stanley’s mess tin, but he goes on wielding his spoon, dipping for the blackish lumps of potato and flipping them aside. Each time the nearby battery fires another salvo, the officer’s wrist jerks dramatically, And whosoever will let him take the water of life freely . . Stanley rattles his teeth with the corner of the mess tin and the watery broth bleeds from the sides of his mouth. He rises up from his haunches too fast and the fuchsia sky and white gun smoke swirls about him, then he staggers, rights himself and kicks the dust from furrow to furrow of the fallow field, the mess tin dangling from the end of his arm, turnip flecks. . balling in the dirt. A few paces from the smouldering fire Corbett and Feldman sit either side of the belt-filler. It pulls Feldman in by a length of pocketed canvas, and it rotates Corbett’s arms with a turn of its hand-crank. It resembles, Stanley thinks, a giant apple-corer, but instead of peel there’s this lumpy tongue of.50-calibre machine-gun rounds.
Pull, rotate, pull, rotate . .so the belt-filler makes use of its animal components: pull, rotate. . pull, rotate . .On the far side of the tumbled-down fence the jellyfish of camouflage netting rises and falls soundlessly. . in this ocean of noise — the gunners, stripped to the waist, scamper about the heaving creature, their devil’s tails of braces bouncing on their backsides. Up above an aircraft comes whining back from the lines — a Blériot Experimental — Stanley can see from five hundred feet below the black box of the camera clamped beside the cockpit, and the delicate damsel flies him back to the models he made before the war — how he had thrust himself suddenly silver skyward . .there to stare directly down upon a broad green field across which surged flying wedges of blue-coated hussars, their cuirasses and helmets coruscating, a battle elegant and silent excepting a piano accompaniment . . — When they came into the trenches at the Redoubt, the London Pals withdrew, leaving behind their hastily buried dead — rotting hands and feet punching and kicking from the parados — and their rubbish: a litter of tin cans that rattled in the night as the rats did their rounds under the singing wire, and their stupid fucking signs: Leicester Square, Piccadilly — Fulham Road too — painted with blanco on to bits of board that they’d stuck in the mud. They had thought, Stanley understood, that they were making of these corpse-heaps and grave-craters a landscape that neared home — with the fosses of Hampstead and Harrow and Crystal Palace lumping up in the distance, and the tidal flats of the Thames between them and the Fritzes. — He had seen it differently: London, the workshop of the world, with its cutlers, welders, carriage-makers, turners, pianola-assemblers, piecework cobblers chewing on brads ’til they spit blood — London, with all its frenzied bending and shaping and fabricating this-out-of-that had really been an anticipation of