ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND

I.

The dream was still stronger than the reality. In the dream he was at home on a hot summer afternoon, working on the edge of the common, across the little stream at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and the bracken, and left the grey, dryish soil bare. He was troubled because he could not get the path straight. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine-trees, but for some unknown reason everything was wrong. He looked again, strained and anxious, through the strong, shadowy pine-trees as through a doorway, at the green garden-path rising from the log bridge between sunlit flowers, tall purple and white columbines, to the butt-end of the old, beautiful cottage. Always, tense with anxiety, he saw the rising flowery garden and the sloping old roof of the cottage, beyond the intervening shadow, as in a mirage.

There was the sound of children’s voices calling and talking: high, childish, girlish voices, plaintive, slightly didactic, and tinged with hard authoritativeness. “If you don’t come soon, Nurse, I shall run out there where there are snakes.”

Always this conflict of authority, echoed even in the children! His heart was hard with disillusion. He worked on in the gnawing irritation and resistance.

Set in resistance, he was all the time clinched upon himself. The sunlight blazed down upon the earth; there was a vividness of flamey vegetation and flowers, of tense seclusion amid the peace of the commons. The green garden-path went up between tall, graceful flowers of purple and white; the cottage with its great sloping roofs slept in the for-ever sunny hollow, hidden, eternal. And here he lived, in this ancient, changeless, eternal hollow of flowers and sunshine and the sloping-roofed house. It was balanced like a nest in a tree, this hollow home, always full of peace, always under heaven only. It had no context, no relation with the world; it held its cup under heaven alone, and was filled for ever with peace and sunshine and loveliness.

The shaggy, ancient heath that rose on either side, the downs that were pale against the sky in the distance, these were the extreme rims of the cup. It was held up only to heaven; the world entered in not at all.

And yet the world entered in and goaded the heart. His wife, whom he loved, who loved him—she goaded the heart of him. She was young and beautiful and strong with life like a flame in the sunshine; she moved with a slow grace of energy like a blossoming, red-flowered tree in motion. She, too, loved their hollow with all her heart. And yet she was like a weapon against him, fierce with talons of iron, to push him out of the nest-place he had made. Her soul was hard as iron against him, thrusting him away, always away. And his heart was hard as iron against her in resistance.

They never put down their weapons for a day now. For a few hours, perhaps, they ceased to be in opposition; they let the love come forth that was in them. Then the love blazed and filled the old, silent hollow where the cottage stood, with flowers and magnificence of the whole universe.

But the love passed in a few hours; only the cottage with its beauty remained like a mirage. He would abide by the mirage. The reality was the tension of the silent fight between him and his wife. He and she, as if fated, they were armed and exerting all their force to destroy each other.

There was no apparent reason for it. He was a tall, thin, fair, self-contained man of the middle class, who, never very definite or positive in his action, had now set in rigid silence of negation. He kept rigid within himself, never altering nor yielding, however much torture of repression he suffered.

Her ostensible grievance against him was that he made no money to keep his family; that, because he had an income of a hundred and fifty a year, he made no effort to do anything at all—he merely lived from day to day. Not that she accused him of being lazy; it was not that; he was always at work in the garden; he had made the place beautiful. But was this all it amounted to? They had three children; she had said to him, savagely, she would have no more. Already her father was paying for the children’s nurse, and helping the family at every turn. What would they do without her father? Could they manage on a hundred and fifty a year, with a family of three children, when they had both been brought up in plenty, and could not consider pennies? Living simply as they did, they spent two hundred and fifty a year; and now the children were tiny; what would it be when they had to go to school? Yet Evelyn would not stir to obtain any more.

Winifred, beautiful and obstinate, had all her passion driven into her conscience. Her father was of an impoverished Quaker family. He had come down from Newcastle to London when he was a young man, and there, after a hard struggle, had built up a moderate fortune again. He had ceased to be a Quaker, but the spirit persisted in him. A strong, sensual nature in himself, he had lived according to the ideas of duty inculcated upon him, though his active life had been inspired by a very worship of poetry and of poetic literature. He was a business man by tradition, but by nature he was sensual, and he was on his knees before a piece of poetry that really gratified him. Consequently, whilst he was establishing a prosperous business, a printing house and a small publishing house, at home he diffused the old Quaker righteousness with a new, æsthetic sensuousness, and his children were brought up in this sensuous heat, which was always, at the same time, kept in the iron grate of conventional ethics.

Winifred had loved her husband passionately. He came of an old south-of-England family, refined and tending towards dilettantism. He had a curious beauty of old breeding, slender and concentrated, coupled with a strange inertia, a calm, almost stoic indifference which her strong, crude, passionate, ethical nature could not understand. She could not bear it that their marriage, after all the tremendous physical passion that had convulsed them both, should resolve gradually into this nullity. Her passion gradually hardened into ethical desire. She wanted some result, some production, some new vigorous output into the world of man, not only the hot physical welter, and children.

Gradually she began to get dissatisfied with her husband. What did he stand for? She had started with a strange reverence for him. But gradually she fell away. A sense of meaninglessness came up strong in her. He was so strangely inconclusive. Her robust, undeveloped ethical nature was negated by him.

Then came the tragedy. They had three children, three fair-haired flitting creatures, all girls. The youngest was still a baby. The eldest, their love-child, was the favourite. They had wanted a boy in place of the others.

Then one day this eldest child fell on a sharp old iron in the garden and cut her knee. Because they were so remote in the country she did not have the very best attention. Blood-poisoning set in. She was driven in a motor-car to London, and she lay, in dreadful suffering, in the hospital, at the edge of death. They thought she must die. And yet in the end she pulled through.

In this dreadful time, when Winifred thought that if only they had had a better doctor at the first all this might have been averted, when she was suffering an agony every day, her husband only seemed to get more distant and more absent and exempt. He stood always in the background, like an exempt, untouched presence. It nearly drove her mad. She had to go to her father for all advice and for all comfort. Her father brought the specialist to the child; her father came to Winifred and held his arm round her, and called her his darling, his child, holding her safe, whilst all the time her husband stood aloof, silent, neutral. For this horrible neutrality, because of the horrible paralysis that seemed to come over him in these crises, when he could do nothing, she hated him. Her soul shrank from him in a revulsion. He seemed to introduce the element of horror, to make the whole thing cold and unnatural and frightful. She could not forgive him that he made the suffering so cold and rare. He seemed to her almost like a pale creature of negation, detached and cold and reserved, with his abstracted face and mouth that seemed shut in eternity.

The child recovered, but was lame. Her leg was stiff and atrophied. It was an agony to both the parents, they who lived wholly by the physical life. But to the mother it was an open, active grief; to him it was silent and incommutable, nihilistic. He would not speak of the child if he could help it, and then only in an off-hand, negligent fashion. So the distance was finally unsheathed between the parents, and it never really went away. They were separate, hostile. She hated his passivity as if it were something evil.

She taunted him that her father was having to pay the heavy bills for the child, whilst he, Evelyn, was idle, earning nothing. She asked him, did he not intend to keep his own children; did he intend her father to support them all their lives? She told him, her six brothers and sisters were not very pleased to see all the patrimony going on her children.

He asked her what could he do? She had talked all this out with her father, who could easily find a suitable post for Evelyn; Evelyn ought to work, everybody said. He was not idle; why, then, would he not do some regular work? Winifred spoke of another offer— would he accept that? He would not. But why? Because he did not think it was suitable, and he did not want it. Then Winifred was very angry. They were living in London, at double expense; the child was being massaged by an expensive doctor; her father was plainly dissatisfied; and still Evelyn would not accept the offers that were made him. He just negated everything, and went down to the cottage.

Something crystallised in Winifred’s soul. She alienated herself from him. She would go on alone with her family, doing everything, not counting her negative husband.

This was the state of affairs for almost a year. The family continued chiefly in London; the child was still being massaged, in the hope of getting some use back into the leg. But she was a cripple; it was horrible to see her swing and fling herself along, a young, swift, flame-like child working her shoulders like a deformed thing. Yet the mother could bear it. The child would have other compensation. She was alive and strong; she would have her own life. Her mind and soul should be fulfilled. That which was lost to the body should be replaced in the soul. And the mother watched over, endlessly and relentlessly brought up the child when she used the side of her foot, or when she hopped, things which the doctor had forbidden. But the father could not bear it; he was nullified in the midst of life. The beautiful physical life was all life to him. When he looked at his distorted child, the crippledness seemed malignant, a triumph of evil and of nothingness. Henceforward he was a cipher. Yet he lived. A curious corrosive smile came on his face.

II.

It was at this point in their history that the war broke out. A shiver went over his soul. He had been living for weeks fixed without the slightest sentience. For weeks he had held himself fixed, so that he was impervious. His wife was set fast against him. She treated him with ignoring contempt; she ignored his existence. She would not mend his clothes, so that he went about with his shirt-shoulders slit into rags. She would not order his meals. He went to the kitchen and got his own. There was a state of intense hard hatred between them. The children were tentative and uncertain, or else defiant and ugly. The house was hard and sterile with negation. Only the mother gave herself up in a passion of ethical submission to her duty, and to a religion of physical self-sacrifice: which even yet she hardly believed in.

Yet the husband and wife were in love with each other. Or, rather, each held all the other’s love dammed up.

The family was down at the cottage when war was declared. He took the news in his indifferent, neutral way. “What difference does it make to me?” seemed to be his attitude. Yet it soaked in to him. It absorbed the tension of his own life, this tension of a state of war. A flicker had come into his voice, a thin, corrosive flame, almost like a thin triumph. As he worked in the garden he felt the seethe of the war was with him. His consciousness had now a field of activity. The reaction in his soul could cease from being neutral; it had a positive form to take. There, in the absolute peace of his sloping garden, hidden deep in trees between the rolling of the heath, he was aware of the positive activity of destruction, the seethe of friction, the waves of destruction seething to meet, the armies moving forward to fight. And this carried his soul along with it.

The next time he went indoors he said to his wife, with the same thin flame in his voice:

“I’d better join, hadn’t I?”

“Yes, you had,” she replied; “that’s just the very thing. You’re just the man they want. You can ride and shoot, and you’re so healthy and strong, and nothing to keep you at home.”

She spoke loudly and confidently in her strong, pathetic, slightly deprecating voice, as if she knew she was doing what was right, however much it might mean to her.

The thin smile narrowed his eyes; he seemed to be smiling to himself, in a thin, corrosive manner. She had to assume all her impersonal righteousness to bear it.

“All right——” he said in his thin, jarring voice.

“We’ll see what father says,” she replied.

It should be left to the paternal authority to decide. The thin smile fixed on the young man’s face.

The father-in-law approved heartily; an admirable thing for Evelyn to do, he thought; it was just such men as the country wanted. So it was the father-in-law who finally overcame the young man’s inertia and despatched him to the war.

Evelyn Daughtry enlisted in a regiment which was stationed at Chichester, and almost at once he was drafted into the artillery. He hated very much the subordination, the being ordered about, and the having no choice over quite simple and unimportant things. He hated it strongly, the contemptible position he occupied as a private. And yet, because of a basic satisfaction he had in participating in the great destructive motion, he was a good soldier. His spirit acquiesced, however he despised the whole process of becoming a soldier.

Now his wife altered towards him and gave him a husband’s dignity; she was almost afraid of him; she almost humbled herself before him. When he came home, an uncouth figure in the rough khaki, he who was always so slender and clean-limbed and beautiful in motion, she felt he was a stranger. She was servant to his new arrogance and callousness as a soldier. He was now a quantity in life; he meant something. Also he had passed beyond her reach. She loved him; she wanted his recognition. Perhaps she had a thrill when he came to her as a soldier. Perhaps she too was fulfilled by him, now he had become an agent of destruction, now he stood on the side of the Slayer.

He received her love and homage as tribute due. And he despised himself even for this. Yet he received her love as tribute due, and he enjoyed it. He was her lover for twenty-four hours. There was even a moment of the beautiful tenderness of their first love. But it was gone again. When he was satisfied he turned away from her again. The hardness against her was there just the same. At the bottom of his soul he only hated her for loving him now he was a soldier. He despised himself as a soldier, ultimately. And she, when he had been at home longer than a day, began to find that the soldier was a man just the same, the same man, only become callous and outside her ethical reach, positive now in his destructive capacity.

Still they had their days of passion and of love together when he had leave from the army. Somewhere at the back was the death he was going to meet. In face of it they were oblivious of all but their own desire and passion for each other. But they must not see each other too often, or it was too great a strain to keep up, the closeness of love and the memory of death.

He was really a soldier. His soul had accepted the significance. He was a potential destructive force, ready to be destroyed. As a potential destructive force he now had his being. What had he to do with love and the creative side of life? He had a right to his own satisfaction. He was a destructive spirit entering into destruction. Everything, then, was his to take and enjoy, whilst it lasted; he had the right to enjoy before he destroyed or was destroyed. It was pure logic. If a thing is only to be thrown away, let anybody do with it what he will.

She tried to tell him he was one of the saviours of mankind. He listened to these things; they were very gratifying to his self-esteem. But he knew it was all cant. He was out to kill and destroy; he did not even want to be an angel of salvation. Some chaps might feel that way. He couldn’t; that was all. All he could feel was that at best it was a case of kill or be killed. As for the saviour of mankind: well, a German was as much mankind as an Englishman. What are the odds? We’re all out to kill, so don’t let us call it anything else.

So he took leave of his family and went to France. The leave-taking irritated him, with its call upon his loving constructive self, he who was now a purely destructive principle. He knew he might not see them again, his wife and children. But what was the good of crying about it even then. He hated his wife for her little fit of passion at the last. She had wanted it, this condition of affairs; she had brought it about; why, then, was she breaking up at the last? Let her keep a straight face and carry it on as she had begun!

There followed the great disorder of the first days in France, such a misery of chaos that one just put up with it. Then he was really engaged. He hated it, and yet he was fulfilling himself. He hated it violently, and yet it gave him the only real satisfaction he could have in life now. Deeply and satisfactorily it fulfilled him, this warring on men. This work of destruction alone satisfied his deepest desire.

He had been twice slightly wounded in the two months. Now he was again in a dangerous position. There had been another retreat to be made, and he remained with three machine-guns covering the rear. The guns were stationed on a little bushy hillock just outside a village. Only occasionally—one could scarcely tell from what direction— came the sharp crackle of rifle fire, though the far-off thud of cannon hardly disturbed the unity of the winter afternoon.

Evelyn was working at the guns. Above him, in the sky, the lieutenant stood on the little iron platform at the top of the ladders, taking the sights and giving the aim, calling in a high, tense voice to the gunners below. Out of the sky came the sharp cry of the directions, then the warning numbers, then “Fire!” The shot went, the piston of the gun sprang back, there was a sharp explosion, and a very faint film of smoke in the air. Then the other two guns were fired, and there was a lull. The officer on the stand was uncertain of the enemy’s position. Only in the far distance the sound of heavy firing continued, so far off as to give a sense of peace.

The gorse bushes on either hand were wintry and dark, but there was still the flicker of a few flowers. Kissing was never out of favour. Evelyn, waiting suspended before the guns, mused on the abstract truth. Things were all abstract and keen. He did not think about himself or about his wife, but the abstract fact of kissing being always in favour interested and elated him. He conceived of kissing as an abstraction. Isolated and suspended, he was with the guns and the other men. There was the physical relationship between them all, but no spiritual contact. His reality was in his own perfect isolation and abstraction. The comradeship, which seemed so close and real, never implicated his individual soul. He seemed to have one physical body with the other men; but when his mind or soul woke, it was supremely and perfectly isolated.

Before him was the road running between the high banks of grass and gorse. Looking down, he saw the whitish, muddy tracks, the deep ruts and scores and hoof-marks on the wintry road, where the English army had gone by. Now all was very still. The sounds that came, came from the outside. They could not touch the chill, serene, perfect isolation of the place where he stood.

Again the sharp cry from the officer overhead, the lightning, perfectly mechanical response from himself as he worked at the guns. It was exhilarating, this working in pure abstraction. It was a supreme exhilaration, the finest liberty. He was transported in the keen isolation of his own abstraction, the physical activity at the guns keen as a consummation.

All was so intensely, intolerably peaceful that he seemed to be immortalised. The utter suspension of the moment made it eternal. At the corner of the high-road, where a little country road joined on, there was a wayside crucifix knocked slanting. So it slanted in all eternity. Looking out across the wintry fields and dark woods, he felt that everything was thus for ever; this was finality. There appeared a tiny group of cavalry, three horsemen, far off, very small, on the crest of a field. They were our own men. So it is for ever. The little group disappeared. The air was always the same—a keen frost immovable for ever.

Of the Germans nothing was to be seen. The officer on the platform above waited and waited. Then suddenly came the sharp orders to train the guns, and the firing went on rapidly, the gunners grew hot at the guns.

Even so, even amid the activity, there was a new sound. A new, deep “Papp!” of a cannon seemed to fall on his palpitating tissue. Himself he was calm and unchanged and inviolable. But the deep “Papp!” of the cannon fell upon the vulnerable tissue of him. Still the unrelenting activity was kept up at his small guns.

Then, over the static inviolability of the nucleus, came a menace, the awful, faint whistling of a shell, which grew into the piercing, tearing shriek that would tear up the whole membrane of the soul. It tore all the living tissue in a blast of motion. And yet the cold, silent nerves were not affected. They were beyond, in the frozen isolation that was out of all range. The shell swung by behind, he heard the thud of its fall and the hoarseness of its explosion. He heard the cry of the soldier to the horses. And yet he did not turn round to see. He had not time. And he was cold of all interest, intact in his isolation. He saw a twig of holly with red berries fall like a gift on to the road below and remain lying there.

The Germans had got the aim with a big gun. Was it time to move? His superficial consciousness alone asked the question. The real he did not take any interest. He was abstract and absolute.

The faint whistling of another shell dawned, and his blood became still to receive it. It drew nearer, the full blast was upon him, his blood perished. Yet his nerves held cold and untouched, in inviolable abstraction. He saw the heavy shell swoop down to earth, crashing into the rocky bushes away to the right, and earth and stones poured up into the sky. Then these fell to the ground again; there was the same peace, the same inviolable, frozen eternality.

Would they move now? There was a space of silence, followed by the sudden explosive shouts of the officer on the platform, and the swift training of the guns, and the warning and the shout to “Fire!” In the eternal dream of this activity a shell passed unnoticed. And then, into the eternal silence and white immobility of this activity, suddenly crashed a noise and a darkness and a moment’s flaring agony and horror. There was an instantaneous conflagration of life and eternity, then a profound weight of darkness.

When faintly something began to struggle in the darkness, a consciousness of pain and sick life, he was at home in the cottage troubling about something, hopelessly and sickeningly troubling, but hopelessly. And he tried to make it out, what it was. It was something inert and heavy and hopeless. Yet there was the effort to know.

There was a resounding of pain, but that was not the reality. There was a resounding of pain. Gradually his attention turned to the noise. What was it? As he listened, the noise grew to a great clanging resonance which almost dazed him. What was it, then?

He realised that he was out at the front. He remembered the retreat, the hill. He knew he was wounded. Still he did not open his eyes; his sight, at least, was not free. A very large, resounding pain in his head rang out the rest of his consciousness. It was all he could do to lie and bear it. He lay quite still to bear it. And it resounded largely. Then again there returned the consciousness of the pain. It was a little less. The resonance had subsided a little. What, then, was the pain? He took courage to think of it. It was his head. He lay still to get used to the fact. It was his head. With new energy he thought again. Perhaps he could also feel a void, a bruise, over his brow. He wanted to locate this. Perhaps he could feel the soreness. He was hit, then, on the left brow. And, lying quite still and sightless, he concentrated on the thought. He was wounded on the left brow, and his face was wet with stiffening blood. Perhaps there was the feel of hot blood flowing; he was not sure. So he lay still and waited. The tremendous sickening, resounding ache clanged again, clanged and clanged like a madness, almost bursting the membrane of his brain.

And again, as he lay still, there came the knowledge of his wife and children, somewhere in a remote, heavy despair. This was the second, and deeper, reality. But it was very remote.

How deep was the hurt to his head? He listened again. The pain rang now with a deep boom, and he was aware of a profound feeling of nausea. He felt very sick. But how deep was the wound in his head? He felt very sick, and very peaceful at the same time. He felt extraordinarily still. Soon he would have no pain, he felt so finely diffused and rare.

He opened his eyes on the day, and his consciousness seemed to grow more faint and dilute. Lying twisted, he could make out only jumbled light. He waited, and his eyes closed again. Then he waked all of a sudden, in terror lest he were able to see nothing but the jumbled light. The terror lest he should be confronted with nothing but chaos roused him to an effort of will. He made a powerful effort to see.

And vision came to him. He saw grass and earth; then he made out a piece of high-road with its tufts of wintry grass; he was lying not far from it, just above. After a while, after he had been all the while unrelaxed in his will to see, he opened his eyes again and saw the same scene. In a supreme anguish of effort he gathered his bearings and once more strove for the stable world. He was lying on his side, and the high-road ran just beneath. The bank would be above. He had more or less made his bearings. He was in the world again. He lifted his head slightly. That was the high-road, and there was the body of the lieutenant, lying on its face, with a great pool of blood coming from the small of the back and running under the body. He saw it distinctly, as in a vision. He also saw the broken crucifix lying just near. It seemed very natural.

Amid all the pain his head had become clear and light. He seemed to have a second being, very clear and rare and thin. The earth was torn. He wanted to see it all.

In his frail, clear being he raised himself a little to look, and found himself looking at his own body. He was lying with a great mass of bloody earth thrown over his thighs. He looked at it vaguely, and thought it must be heavy over him. He was anxious, with a very heavy anxiety, like a load on his life. Why was the earth on his thighs so soaked with blood? As he sat faintly looking, he saw that his leg beyond the mound was all on one side. He went sick, and his life went away from him. He remained neutral and dead. Then, relentlessly, he had to come back, to face the fact of himself. With fine, delicate fingers he pushed the earth from the sound leg, then from the wounded one. But the soil was wet with blood. The leg lay diverted. He tried to move a little. The leg did not move. There seemed a great gap in his being. He knew that part of his thigh was blown away. He could not think of the great bloody mess. It seemed to be himself, a wet, smashed, red mass. Very faintly the thin being of his consciousness hovered near. A frail, fine being seemed to be distilled out of the gaping red horror. As he sat he was detached from his wounds and his body.

Beyond his knowledge of his mutilation he remained faint and isolated in a cold, unchanging state. His being had become abstract and immutable. He sat there isolated, pure, abstract, in a state of supreme logical clarity. This he was now, a cold, clear abstraction. And as such he was going to judge. The outcome should be a pure, eternal, logical judgment: whether he should live or die. He examined his thought of his wife, and waited to see whether he should move to her. He waited still. Then his faintly beating heart died. The decision was no. He had no relation there. He fell away towards death. But still the tribunal was not closed. There were the children. He thought of them and saw them. But the thought of them did not stir the impulse back to life. He thought of them, but the thought of them left him cold and clear and abstract; they remained remote, away in life. And still he waited. Was it, then, finally decided? And out of the cold silence came the knowledge. It was decided he remained beyond, clear and untouched, in death.

In this supreme and transcendent state he remained motionless, knowing neither pain nor trouble, but only the extreme suspension of passing away.

Till the horrible sickness of dissolution came back, the overwhelming cold agony of dissolution.

As he lay in this cold, sweating anguish of dissolution, something again startled his consciousness, and, in a clear, abstract movement, he sat up. He was now no longer a man, but a disembodied, clear abstraction.

He saw two Germans who had ridden up, dismount by the body of the lieutenant.

“Kaputt?”

“Jawohl!”

In a transcendent state of consciousness he lay and looked. They were turning over the body of the lieutenant. He saw the muscles of their shoulders as they moved their arms.

Clearly, in a calm, remote transcendence, he reached for his revolver. A man had ridden past him up the bank. He knew, but he was as if isolated from everything in this distinct, fine will of his own. He lay and took careful, supreme, almost absolute aim. One of the Germans started up, but the body of the other, who was bending over the dead lieutenant, pitched forward and collapsed, writhing. It was inevitable. A fine, transcendent spirituality was on the face of the Englishman, a white gleam. The other German, with a curious, almost ludicrous bustling movement had got out his revolver and was running forwards, when he saw the wounded, subtle Englishman luminous with an abstract smile on his face. At the same instant two bullets entered his body, one in the breast, and one in the belly. The body stumbled forward with a rattling, choking, coughing noise, the revolver went off in the air, the body fell on to its knees. The Englishman, still luminous and clear, fired at the dropped head. The bullet broke the neck.

Another German had ridden up, and was reining his horse in terror. The Englishman aimed at the red, sweating face. The body started with horror and began slipping out of the saddle, a bullet through its brain.

At the same moment the Englishman felt a sharp blow, and knew he was hit. But it was immaterial. The man above was firing at him. He turned round with difficulty as he lay. But he was struck again, and a sort of paralysis came over him. He saw the red face of a German with blue, staring eyes coming upon him, and he knew a knife was striking him. For one moment he felt the searing of steel, another final agony of suffocating darkness.

The German cut and mutilated the face of the dead man as if he must obliterate it. He slashed it across, as if it must not be a face any more; it must be removed. For he could not bear the clear, abstract look of the other’s face, its almost ghoulish, slight smile, faint but so terrible in its suggestion, that the German was mad, and ran up the road when he found himself alone.