lusty in the pulsing light still being generated by an unseen and thrumming generator. Heedless as yet of Feldman’s crack-up, Stanley had seated himself at the table and crammed down the coarse food with little sips of the cherry brandy. . kleine Boche stands on me tongue wielding ’is Kleinflammenwerfer . .Solly wouldn’t keep still, kept diving into adjoining burrows to rummage in the bedding. — Feather quilts! he cried. Pillows! and returned with a single-page newssheet he said he could read on account of German not being that different from the Yiddisher lingo, Yes, yes, it revealed to him — sweethearts under linden trees, that spanking-hot summer. . freshly brewed lager-beer with cloves. . snatches of these simple boys’ souls, who, from Bavaria and Franconia, had got themselves planted here in the soil that clung to the roses of Picardy . .There were pistols and rifles still in the dugout — and plenty of their brand-new Stahlhelms, such had been the frenzy of their retreat. Stanley had not been interested in these, although he took a couple of their potato-mashers, the superiority of which. . everyone knows. In the dugout he had felt a bowel-loosening apprehension — the dense, cool air pressing in on him — and when, despite the ceasefire, there came the soft crump! of a falling shell, fear infiltrated his mind. . a dirty plume. He’d rolled a cigarette with a corner of the newssheet and some coal-black tobacco, then availed myself of the facilities that, outrageously, had been plumbed in, so that, rising from the shapely seat, he was able rejoice in the fly away, little brown bird as he carefully wiped his arse with more of the Gothic type, discovering it to be unexpectedly kind to his piles. — Up top Solly has come upon the Welshman — who screams as Stan kicks the board in under him. Come and give me a hand, you daft fucker! Stan cries, knowing there’s little point because Solly’s all the way over now, dog-faced, gnashing. . paws a blur as he scampers this way and that along the trench, from traverse to traverse, climbing up on to the neatly carpentered fire step to yap about their craftsmanship: You can always rely on a German, he howls, to d-d-d-doo-doo-doo the b-b-best he c-c-can with the t-t-tools available. Stanley’s hands tic to his wire cutters and the grenades in his belt — in that instant he resolves to ditch the Welshman and if necessary lay Solly out, if that’s what it’ll take to get him back. . Too late! because Solly has mounted the fire step and pulls himself from arms to knees, gibbering upright, low-angled afternoon sunlight striking him together with twenty or so 7.92-millimetre rounds from a Maschinengewehr 08 that must have loitered behind in a reserve trench, its craftsmen resolved to bide their time and do the best they could with the tools available. Leisurely — Solly Feldman’s death, so very slow. . While Stanley has never been one of those machine-gunners who enjoy comparingthe attractions of the Vickers.303 with those of her kissing cousin, the enfilade that buzzes over the trench, then burrs back to capture Solly and hold him in its kinetic embrace, leads him to consider — even as his comrade’s arms windmill crazily — that Jerry’s may be the better weapon. See, see! how it clasps him to its leaden bosom, reluctant to let him fall, although there’s hardly anything left but a tattered red rag. In the stretched moments as Solomon Feldman flaps into extinction, Stanley dwells upon this: that never before in his interminable nineteen months of service at the Front has he witnessed the impact of machine-gun fire. His fingers clenched on the trigger, Vicky trembling in my grasp, spitting and gasping inches in front of my face — yet theirs was never an exclusive relation, there were always these others with whom they were joined by the bullets. Solomon Feldman has his Heimatschuss an’’e’s gone west. Pointless to think of getting the Welshman back now — Stanley has seen enough to know. . his time approaches. Instead, he turns and legs it along the trench, hoping there’s just the one Maschinengewehr covering this section. Where the trench makes a sharp right-angle a sap runs back towards the British lines, and he takes this bend for home, potato-mashers bouncing on his hips — rifle butt one side, Colt the other, both goading my withers, I’m Rothschild’s pair, trotting down Brook Green Road and turning into the Broadway . .He sees the well-crafted step that leads up into the bramble patch, he sees old Hammersmith Town Hall soberly clad in red sandstone, gas-jets atop fluted iron pillars burning either side of its stolid portico. He hears the first salvo of the resumed barrage quite some time after registering the shell’s scream, and so he dithers: is the noise more piercing in his right or his left ear? He twists in the sap, compelled to turn first up, back and to the left, then up, back and to the right — it’s pointless anyway, because as it homes in on him the rising Eeeeeeeeeee! bores into the absolute core of his brain spores glow dried-out dandelion head and he knows he would have to go over the top to evade the shell that stops precisely where his gaze locks . . Umbrellas Re-covered and Repaired on the Premises, Umbrellas Re-covered in One Hour, 2/6, King Street opposite the Temperance Hotel . .If only he had availed himself of this service, because when all was said and done you should never go out without one. Nevertheless, heacquiesces to this: that the shell one of ours will fall between him and Jerry’s Maxim — such dull mattersare a mere flapdoodle — what’s significant is that Stanley can see inside the brass casing of the 50-pounder, make out not only the discrete layers of Trotyl, guncotton and tri-nitro-toluene but what put them there: the sprinkling, wadding and pounding of those yellow hands. He sees those hands also fritillaries fluttering above the dingy wooden bench, he hears the peevish whine of the lathe, the hissing contempt of the oxy-acetylene torch, the rheumatic complaint of the overhead hoist, and he hearkens to the lusty voices raised in song, Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day, Wearing the roses off their cheeks for precious little pay, Some style us canaries but we’re working the same as the lads across the sea, If it wasn’t for us, the munitions girls, where would the Empire be —? The arrested shell sings a hundred feet above the trench in a cloud of penny novelettes, and the turning of its fuse cap and detonator plug, the brazing of its smoothly seductive haunches — all the scores and hundreds of repetitive motions that led to its triumphantly short-lived embodiment are there, plain to his exophthalmic eye. And Stanley Death understands, even as the rest is over, and the angelic feet begin once more to pump the pedals, the perforations are engaged by the ebony pegs, and the pianola resumes its plummet Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooooooooooooo . .that upon impact all of its strings, hammers, levers, cogs and screws will blast across the shattered terrain in wave upon wave of tics, jerks, yawns, spasms, blinks, gasps, quivers, pursing, bobbing, pouts, chews, grindings, palsies, tremors and twitches, sending them dancing from mind to mind, so animating body after body to perform choreography that will stand in for civilisation unprompted, matinee upon matinee — evenings as well — a merry dance