The two bearers raise the wounded man and they follow the canal bank, coming after a while to a bridge formed by a water-logged barge hull lashed bow and stern to either bank, and so pass over. Here they halt again while once more the captain and the subaltern consult the map.
Gunfire comes across the pale spring noon like a prolonged clashing of hail on an endless metal roof. As they go on the chalky soil rises gradually underfoot. The ground is dryly rough, shaling, and the going is harder still for the two who carry the wounded man. But when they would stop the wounded man struggles and wrenches free and staggers on alone, his hands at his head, and stumbles, falling.
The bearers catch and raise him and hold him muttering between them and wrenching his arms. He is muttering “. . . bonnet . . .” and he frees his hands and tugs again at his bandage. The commotion passes forward. The captain looks back and stops; the party halts also, unbidden, and lowers rifles.
“A’s pickin at’s bandage, sir-r,” one of the bearers tells the captain. They let the man sit down between them; the captain kneels beside him.
“. . . bonnet . . . bonnet,” the man mutters. The captain loosens the bandage. The sergeant extends a water bottle and the captain wets the bandage and lays his hand on the man’s brow. The others stand about, looking on with a kind of sober, detached interest. The captain rises. The bearers raise the wounded man again. The sergeant speaks them into motion.
They gain the crest of the ridge. The ridge slopes westward into a plateau slightly rolling. Southward, beneath its dun pall, the barrage still rages; westward and northward about the shining empty plain smoke rises lazily here and there above clumps of trees. But this is the smoke of burning things, burning wood and not powder, and the two officers gaze from beneath their hands, the men halting again without order and lowering arms.
“Gad, sir,” the subaltern says suddenly in a high, thin voice; “it’s houses burning! They’re retreating! Beasts! Beasts!”
“’Tis possible,” the captain says, gazing beneath his hand. “We can get around that barrage now. Should be a road just yonder.” He strides on again.
“For-rard,” the sergeant says, in that tone not loud. The men slope arms once more with unquestioning docility.
The ridge is covered with a tough, gorselike grass. Insects buzz in it, zip from beneath their feet and fall to slatting again beneath the shimmering noon. The wounded man is babbling again. At intervals they pause and give him water and wet the bandage again, then two others exchange with the bearers and they hurry the man on and close up again.
The head of the line stops; the men jolt prodding into one another like a train of freight cars stopping. At the captain’s feet lies a broad shallow depression in which grows a sparse, dead-looking grass like clumps of bayonets thrust up out of the earth. It is too big to have been made by a small shell, and too shallow to have been made by a big one. It bears no traces of having been made by anything at all, and they look quietly down into it. “Queer,” the subaltern says. “What do you fancy could have made it?”
The captain does not answer. He turns. They circle the depression, looking down into it quietly as they pass it. But they have no more than passed it when they come upon another one, perhaps not quite so large. “I didn’t know they had anything that could make that,” the subaltern says. Again the captain does not answer. They circle this one also and keep on along the crest of the ridge. On the other hand the ridge sheers sharply downward stratum by stratum of pallid eroded chalk.
A shallow ravine gashes its crumbling yawn abruptly across their path. The captain changes direction again, paralleling the ravine, until shortly afterward the ravine turns at right angles and goes on in the direction of their march. The floor of the ravine is in shadow; the captain leads the way down the shelving wall, into the shade. They lower the wounded man carefully and go on.
After a time the ravine opens. They find that they have debouched into another of those shallow depressions. This one is not so clearly defined, though, and the opposite wall of it is nicked by what is apparently another depression, like two overlapping disks. They cross the first depression, while more of the dead-looking grass bayonets saber their legs dryly, and pass through the gap into the next depression.
This one is like a miniature valley between miniature cliffs. Overhead they can see only the drowsy and empty bowl of the sky, with a few faint smoke smudges to the northwest. The sound of the barrage is now remote and far away: a vibration in earth felt rather than heard. There are no recent shell craters or marks here at all.
It is as though they had strayed suddenly into a region, a world where the war had not reached, where nothing had reached, where no life is, and silence itself is dead. They give the wounded man water and go on.
The valley, the depression, strays vaguely before them. They can see that it is a series of overlapping, vaguely circular basins formed by no apparent or deducible agency. Pallid grass bayonets saber at their legs, and after a time they are again among old healed scars of trees to which there cling sparse leaves neither green nor dead, as if they too had been overtaken and caught by a hiatus in time, gossiping dryly among themselves though there is no wind. The floor of the valley is not level.
It in itself descends into vague depressions, rises again as vaguely between its shelving walls. In the center of these smaller depressions whitish knobs of chalk thrust up through the thin topsoil. The ground has a resilient quality, like walking on cork; feet make no sound. “Jolly walking,” the subaltern says.
Though his voice is not raised, it fills the small valley with the abruptness of a thunderclap, filling the silence, the words seeming to hang about them as though silence here had been so long undisturbed that it had forgot its purpose; as one they look quietly and soberly about, at the shelving walls, the stubborn ghosts of trees, the bland, hushed sky. “Topping hole-up for embusqué birds and such,” the subaltern says.
“Ay,” the captain says. His word in turn hangs sluggishly and fades. The men at the rear close up, the movement passing forward, the men looking quietly and soberly about.
“But no birds here,” the subaltern says. “No insects even.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The word fades, the silence comes down again, sunny, profoundly still. The subaltern pauses and stirs something with his foot. The men halt also, and the subaltern and the captain, without touching it, examine the half-buried and moldering rifle. The wounded man is babbling again.
“What is it, sir?” the subaltern says. “Looks like one of those things the Canadians had. A Ross. Right?”
“French,” the captain says; “1914.”
“Oh,” the subaltern says. He turns the rifle aside with his toe. The bayonet is still attached to the barrel, but the stock has long since rotted away. They go on, across the uneven ground, among the chalky knobs thrusting up through the soil. Light, the wan and drowsy sunlight, is laked in the valley, stagnant, bodiless, without heat. The saberlike grass thrusts sparsely and rigidly upward.
They look about again at the shaling walls, then the ones at the head of the party watch the subaltern pause and prod with his stick at one of the chalky knobs and turn presently upward its earth-stained eyesockets and its unbottomed grin.
“Forward,” the captain says sharply. The party moves; the men look quietly and curiously at the skull as they pass. They go on, among the other whitish knobs like marbles studded at random in the shallow soil.
“All in the same position, do you notice, sir?” the subaltern says, his voice chattily cheerful; “all upright. Queer way to bury chaps: sitting down. Shallow, too.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The wounded man babbles steadily. The two bearers stop with him, but the others crowd on after the officers, passing the two bearers and the wounded man. “Dinna stop to gi’s sup water,” one of the bearers says.
“A’ll drink walkin.” They take up the wounded man again and hurry him on while one of them tries to hold the neck of a water bottle to the wounded man’s mouth, clattering it against his teeth and spilling the water down the front of his tunic. The captain looks back.
“What’s this?” he says sharply. The men crowd up. Their eyes are wide, sober; he looks about at the quiet, intent faces. “What’s the matter back there, Sergeant?”
“Wind-up,” the subaltern says. He looks about at the eroded walls, the whitish knobs thrusting quietly out of the earth. “Feel it myself,” he says. He laughs, his laughter a little thin, ceasing. “Let’s get out of here, sir,” he says. “Let’s get into the sun again.”
“You are in the sun here,” the captain says. “Ease off there, men. Stop crowding. We’ll be out soon. We’ll find the road and get past the barrage and make contact again.” He turns and goes on. The party gets into motion again.
Then they all stop as one, in
