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Show 108 ONE NIGHT THE DARK FOREST 199 They went oil in a line under the There were men in the body of the earth, not in trenches, hedge. The man obviously thought me a tiresome prig. He had no romantic. illusions about the business: he. had not been a I‘leldseher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a wound was a wound: when a man was dead he was dead. but in holes---my foot stepped on a head of hair and some However . . . "Truly it‘s not far?" he asked the soldier. shouts of triumph and bursts of laughter. Songs in chorus, somewhere miners hammering below the earth, somewhere storm at sea. with the crash of waves on rocks and the shriek poet), dismissed them. "Tal' 2‘0!c7u20," the man answered, his face quite without expression. We crossed the moonlit field and for a brief moment silence fell, as though an audience were holding its breath watching us. On the other side were cottages, the outskirts of a tiny village. IIcre beside these cottages we fell into a fantastic world. That small village must in other times have been a pretty place, nestling with its gardens by the river under the hill. It seemed now to rock and rattle under the noise of the cannon. All the open spaces were like white marble in the moonlight and in these open spaces there was utter silence and emptiness. The place seemed deserted-and yet, in every shadow, in long lines under the cottage wells, in little clumps and clusters round trees or ruins there were eyes staring, the gleam of muskets shone, little specks of light, dancing from wall to wall. Everywhere there were bodies, legs, boots, arms, heads, sudden low voice cursed me. I was, I suppose, by this time, a little delirious with my adventure. I know that I could now distinguish no separate sounds-~shells and bullets had van- ished and in their stead were whispers and screams and of wind through rigging, somewhere some one who dropped heavy loads of furniture so carelessly that I cursed him-- and always these little patches of moonlight, so tempting just because one was forbidden. . . "'0 were not popular here. Husky, breathless voices whispered to us "to be away from here, quick. \Ve would draw the fire. What did we want here now '3" "Have you any wounded?" we, whispered in return. "No, no," the answer 'ame. "Keep away from the moonlight." The voices came to us connected sometimes with a nose, an eye, or a leg, often enough out of the heaven itself. "There‘s a man wounded behind the next lines," some, \‘oiee murmured. \Ve stumbled on and suddenly came to a river with very steep banks and a number of narrow and slender bridges. if this 11m! in reality been a nightmare this river could not have obtruded itself more often than it did. \Ve diseov~ caps, sudden fingers, sudden hot and streaming breaths. ered to our dismay that our soldier-guide had disappeared And over everything this infernal noise and yet no human (exactly as in a sound. A nightmare of the true nightmare of dreams. The open silver spaces, the little gardens thick with flowerS; the high moon and the starry sky, not a living soul to be seen-and nevertheless watchers everywhere. "Step for- ward on to that little plot of grass in front of the eottai-T'0 windows and you're a dead man'Lithe moonlight said- nightmare he would have done). We. crossed the river (bathed of course in moonlight l, the plank bridge shaking and quivering beneath us. \Vo had then a ditlienlt task. Here a row of cottages be- neath the very edge of the bank and in the, cottage. shadow the soldiers were ranged in a long line. Their boots |