They’ve been at it for nigh on four hours when on the stroke of twelve Jerry’s Maxims stop. Immediately after this Luftie comes back with the order to cease fire themselves — watch hand slim-stroking butterfly feeler, silence — hateful. How many rounds have they loosed? Two-hundred-and-fifty per box, eight boxes each run back from the forward depot, an ammo run every quarter-hour making for thirty-two thousand. . Am I right, sir? The silence is hatefuclass="underline" Vicky’s nose tilts to the ground — the men swoon as smoke pools, then flows from the battlefield, they are listening to the thud-thud-pumping of their young hearts, hearing all their component parts. They are licking. . kissing the tarnished casing of lockets, hissing out their own smoke as the blood rush-ush-ushes through their battered ears. The vanguard of defeat has already invaded them fucked-up francs-tireurs who straggle ahead limping, crawling, dragging themselves back into the battle of life . .One little Scots gamecock bob-flits-whirrs from shell hole to ditch to tree stump for a couple of hours, before arriving at their position with his kilt in tatters. He collapses against the remains of the scullery wall and lying there lifts his remaining hand to his black cracked lips over and over again miming . . what? Is it a request for the water they cannot spare — or the valiant urge to tootle his bugle? With superhuman toughness he’d managed to strap a tourniquet around the stump of his blown-to-bits hand or else he’d’ve gone long since . .Feldman, spooked by the Jock’s sightless eyes and his dirgeof amansamansamans. . wants to: Finish ’im off — in kindness — but Corbett says, In justice any man who’s come through that has earned the right to take his chances. So the disagreement nags between them as the greenbottles give up on the other thing to trickle across to the Scotsman’s nostrils, to pour over his mouth and eyes. . — A long time of this, until Feldman puts the bins to his eyes and, seeing two or three Union flags jerking about part-way up the ridge, says, We’ve taken their frontline, lads, p’raps the support ’as. . then trails off, the bins dropping on their lanyard. He lifts them again, shakes his head disbelieving — and they fall again. He lifts them —. For fuck’s sake! Corbett cries, Now you an’ ’im both! — because they’re in time, Feldman and the Jock, lifting and dropping their arms. Corbett snatches the bins and the lanyard rucks up the front of Feldman’s tunic —
He looks like a kid getting ragged. Wiv ’is blond curls and periwinkle eyes you’d never peg ’im for a Jew boy — took all he got with remarkable pluck . .Eldest son of a schneider fromup the Mile End Road — tho’ you’d never guess that either: made of himself a well-spoken coke and oil merchant in Shadwell selling direct to the public — but the dandiprat took it personal when the Contemptible points his old white-gloved hand, so up he goes for his shilling. . His daddy? Mortimerfied oy-yoy-yoy! Rocking back and forth on his bum, forgetting his thimble drill. And now where’s the hand that wore the glove? Feeding fishies wiv its bleedin’ manicure — and here’s Solly, such a face on ’im that Luftie’s stopped filling Vicky with the piss-pan to laugh at him. Corbett ain’t laughing, tho’, Oh my sainted fucking aunt diddlin’ ’erself with a cruci-fucking-fix, he says by way of comfort — that being the way of it with him . .Tenderly he untangles the lanyard from Feldman’s buttons and lifts the bins from around his neck. The section don’t speak as they pass the bins from hand to hand. Later, Stanley remembers amansamanferall. . amansamanferall . .and the whistling of the stretcher parties emerging from the wood. To begin with it is impossible to take it all in — probably just as well. The eyepieces are the viewfinder of a handheld stereoscope: it should therefore be possible to change the card, or remove them from his powder-stung eyes altogether to reveal the parlour at Waldemar Avenue, Gladstone’s plaster noggin, the Solar lamp on the table with its dangling prisms, the cottage piano and his sisters’ samplers — anything should be possible, not this: the figures elbow to elbow so closely are they packed, on their knees, praying maybe to the womanly breast of the hillside. The boys concertinaed in their khaki sacks at the end of this spiffing company sports day — will there be prizes? Fifty francs and a silver cup for the bull’s eye? The bins take Stanley’s bugged eyes probing into hollows, roving over spurs, and everywhere they go they discover more and more bodies — not hanging on the wire but reclining into it, so very dense are the coils those methodical Teutons have laid down. Amansamanferall. . Amansamanferall. . grates the dying Scotsman, Amansamanferall. . Luftie, when it’s his turn with the bins, begins to weep, and Stanley says: They put this one on to take the pressure offa Frenchie down the line, but Frenchie — he has the right idea: when they ordered ’im back into the line ’e shot ’is own fucking officers — and Corbett says, Now, now. . and there might have been some bother if the first of the stretcher parties hadn’t come along at that point, and a second lieutenant who was with them — and who seemed the very soul of decency — said that Fritz had very decently stopped firing so they could go and bring in the wounded — which is how Stanley comes to be tearing up a stretch of duckboard on to which he thinks they might be able to roll a tubby private of the Second Royal Welsh who’s taken a couple of rounds in the thigh — but no bones broken or arteries busted, so all things being well he’s a chance of making it if they get him back. A fighting chance if Feldman will only stop larking about — not that there is any joy to it, it’s more that the set-up of the Jerry trench has pushed him over the edge. Look at this, Lance! he cries. And this — and that! calling Stanley’s attention to the electrical wiring running from neat porcelain to neat porcelain along the trench wall. We know about it already, you daft bugger! Stanley cries. Don’t you remember the deep dugout? — The deep dugout, splendidly dry and with only the faintest odour of mouse droppings. Stanley had found a real china plate piled with slices of black bread and white onions, and set beside this a clear glass bottle — on the label a bunch of cherries