He glanced at the couple of typewritten sheets as if to hide his embarrassment.

‘Them’s part two orders you’re lookin’ at. Part one’s the first page.’

He glanced through them quickly. The sergeant-major could not teach him anything about orders. Then he put them back on the table.

‘Well, we shall have to move back. If a parcel should come for me, I suppose the post-corporal will bring it along. Good night, Sergeant-Major. Good night, sir.’

He and Martlow went out into the twilight.

‘Shall we get a drink here, or wait until we get back to Reclinghem?’ he asked Martlow.

‘Wait,’ said the other briefly.

They stepped out in silence for a little while, and then Martlow turned his face up sideways to him.

‘Bourne, are you goin’ to be an officer?’

The question itself seemed to divide them sharply from each other. There was something cool, remote, and even difficult in the tone in which it was asked. It was as though the boy had asked him if he were going over to surrender to the Hun.

‘Yes,’ he answered a little harshly, accepting bitterly all the implications in the question.

They were approaching the church, and came suddenly through the shadows on the old curé, in his soutane and broad-brimmed hat. Bourne drew himself up a little and saluted him. The old man took his hat right off, and bowed, standing uncovered, in something like an attitude of prayer, while they passed; and even though he had noticed before the kind of reverence which some French priests put into their courtesy towards a soldier, the trivial incident filled Bourne with a sense of trouble. He thought he had heard somewhere that it was unlucky to meet a priest in the dusk; and as the thought flitted through his mind, he had the sensation of goose flesh all up his spine. He was a reticent and undemonstrative man, but after a few more steps through the silent shadows he put his arm round Martlow’s neck, his hand resting on his shoulder.

‘I don’t want it. I have got to go,’ he said.

‘We’re all right as we are, the three on us, aren’t we?’ said Martlow, with a curious bitterness like anger. ‘That’s the worst o’ the bloody army: as soon as you get a bit pally with a chap summat ’appens.’

‘Well, it has got to be,’ said Bourne, ‘I am not going before the show comes off, anyway. The three of us shall be together, and then … well, it’s not much use looking ahead, is it?’

They did not say much more for the rest of the way, but picked up Shem, and then went into the estaminet in Reclinghem for a drink. Shem laughed scornfully when they told him that the company did not apparently expect them to report in the morning.

‘What did I tell you?’ he said; and Bourne, in a sulky way, told him he had better go and buy some provisions.