Ha! He laughs aloud at his own idiotic maundering — for no officer, no matter how well supplied with cigars from Fox’s, cocaine pep pills from Harrods and the latest Rudyard Kipling or G. C. Cook from Hatchard’s, could lay his lily-white hands on a whole salmon! No, they’d partaken of mutton chops, right enough, with new potatoes, peas and string-fucking-beans. . — Some more, sir? As he manipulated a pair of spoons, in their eyes the least of individual minds. . a wop waiter at Simpson’s, Stanley had prayed devoutly for a Jack Johnson to KO them there and then, silence the scratching tune and their daft banter. He had been born to soar aloft, yet here he was dishing it up to these pink-faced shavers. — More beans, old bean? Ha-ha! — underground, in a tomb-in-waiting. One side of Stanley’s pack drags heavier. Down at the bottom of it, stuffed under the shit-stained long johns and the scrounged bully, is a pair of Luger pistols wrapped in a German officer’s greyback and shoved in a pickelhaube. Pausing to catch his breath, his hand laid tenderly on a deep and evilly jagged gash in thou, gentle hornbeam, Stanley identifies the helmet’s blunt spike digging into his kidneys thru’pence, frying in their own blood and piss . .His comrades hang on to such things as souvenirs — but these aren’t: they’re arms for a future rising. He sees himself still in uniform but wearing the pickelhaube — he stands on the front steps while the parlour maid, distressed by this apparition, trips away to find the master of the house, who comes to the door with a sheaf of official papers in one hand and a horsehair flyswatter in the other. Well, what d’you want my man? asks Albert De’Ath, feigning not to recognise his brother. Stan raises the Luger and holds its barrel against Bert’s raw oyster. Four million rifles, Stan says matter-of-factly, two hundred and fifty thousand machine guns, fifty-two thousand aeroplanes, twenty-five thousand artillery pieces and one hundred and seventy million shells, Am I right, sir? Albert for once takes no umbrage, only bows meekly to the inevitable. Stepping over his surprisingly corpulent dead body, Stan strolls along the hallway to what he supposes is a breakfast room. Here a potted palm cascades on a stand, and rack of freshly made toast steams on an oval mahogany table. Stan takes a piece, butters it with an ivory-handled knife, then pushes it whole into my dry mouth — the corners stabbin’ the insides of me cheeks . .It tastes of boot blacking — and cordite, beyond any shadow of doubt he is scared — terror is the ground vibrating beneath my feet, ground that heaves a hundred yards in front of where the section has taken cover, its piecrust buckles, earth-juice spurts flashing tastily into the cacophonous four-beat b’-b’-b’-boom! that should have preceded it. Stanley is scared — and his fear is a hungering: he could eat the hornbeam for a joint, the tangle of undergrowth at its roots for a salad. He could crunch up Vicky’s three spare barrels in their webbing bundle — and shovel down a box of ammo for puddin’. He could eat and eat and eat — no one, he wagers, has ever before experienced such a shameless voracity. He will consume the dead Mutton Lancers and the straggling back Scots Guards, he will help myself to the ruins of a small farmhouse and its shattered outbuildings despite their already having been feasted upon by the Hun’s artillery. He will feed his way across the broad and churned valley, then munch his way up the chalky rise, snaffling the bodies of the fallen, using their bayonets to pick his teeth, until he reaches the wire, rolls into it and kips the kip of the stuffed. Then. . later. . no enemies any more, only the sweet. . sweet enema of putrefaction: Bliss! Ah, well lads! Corbett shouts the second the barrage lifts. S’pose we better get forward and put up the ol’ um-ber-ella! And forward they go, inching their way snail-like around giant clods and raw gouges until they reach the cover of the remaining brick walls — a lovely situation for Vicky, what with a smooth bit of tiling to set her legs on, and the bottom half of a window to poke her muzzle through. Dark burgundy dapples on broken red pantiles, there’s a botheration of greenbottles around some two-days-since dead thing — and, for all that, miraculous damsons still whole on the one remaining branch of a scythed orchard, and Vicky rat-a-tat-tat-trilling with pleasure between his hands as Feldman, legs spread and top-to-tail, feeds her the belt. It would be pretty cushy were it not that even with his pack off Stanley cannot help but wrench his head up and around to the left, where some invisible object compels his attention. As they reach the end of each belt, back goes his shoulder, round and up swings his head. Now, now, Stan, says Corbett, keep steady at that range — and he crawls forward to check it. Stanley understands wherefrom comes his compulsion: for hours and days now, weeks slotting into the canvas pockets of months — so that the entire year and a half trails across the foreign field — he has lain on his belly listening to the incoming sing over the machine gun’s drumming, and his spasmodic assessments of whether — and if so which way — he should go for cover have left him with this permanent crick, this, and his magnificent powers of espial: the Tommies’ queer superstition is also Stanley’s addiction to counting by threes — three fags, three shells, three lots of food, three nights, three days, three brass, three rats, three cups of vino, three tots of rum, with three of any-bloody-thing it’s always the third that’s got your number, so watch out for it, keep counting, always keep counting. They fire continuously for hour upon hour, the bullets spitting in a jet low across the valley. Every fourth round is a tracer to help them keep the range — but the day is so bright these are barely visible. They change one barrel and then the second — they run out of water for Vicky’s redingote by about ten thirty and, with no source readily available, take it in turns to piss in her reservoir. The smell of hot urine intensifies the Devil’s fart of the cordite, the sweetly rotting flesh of fruit — and men. Terror gathers in the gun’s grips and shudders through him with the recoil — it might be safer, he thinks, if he were to flit back through the wood with Luftie on the ammo run — although the truth is that for Stanley there can be no danger of death, no dark patch spreading across the tiles. His asinine moniker has put paid to that — each new man who joins the Death squad has this impressed upon him: ’E’s a fucking ’uman rabbit’s foot, the Lance ’ere, or a Cornish pixie — go on, lay yer ’and on ’im, ’e won’t mind. . There can be no danger of death when it’s death who’s the danger, a transposition that sets Stanley off on another futile train of thought: Why is it that he has this overpowering need to match things up, to put a box of matches in one pocket if there’s a box in the other, to ensure there are the same number of rifle cartridges in each of his pouches, to wind on his puttees with an equal number of turns? And it isn’t only things — ideas, fleeting apprehensions, the ghosts of formerly finer feelings that flit across the waste land of his terror, all must be married up so that they precisely match: two-equals-two-equals-two, an iteration of equivalence that he fervently believes will cancel out the lethal threes. Vicky giggles about this: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, and she sings also: We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere, as she tickles the backs of Stanley’s hands with her trigger guards. And, despite the absence of the land ironclads and the presence to the west of a river lazing through its bends, there is a similar neat vee in the chalky bluffs against which the machine gun cries out, and so he is enabled to make the necessary pairing between Norr and. . here. Three years have passed since he stood by the window of the empee’s country house and Wallie, Wallie, Wall-flowers, Growing up so high — All these young ladies, Will all have to die . .The men in their creamy-linen uniforms spoke, as he recalls it, of Bulgaria and certain alliances and the Irish — it was always the poor fucking Irish, dying for a post office or a sessions — and here is Stanley Death raining down death on a Daimler he cannot see but which he is busily disassembling, his bullets methodically shearing off one mudguard, then the next, drilling out the spokes from the wheels, unbolting those wheels from their axles, hammering the chassis into scrap, and finally pulverising its engine into all its component parts.