The light was failing rapidly as they fell in, and they moved off in silence, marching to attention. A Company would join up with them at the cross-roads, marching to meet them from Vincly. They noticed that their new Colonel had a good word of command, which carried well without breaking in the effort. Shortly after A Company had joined them they had the order to march at ease, and then to march easy. A few minutes later, Bourne again saw the old curé of Vincly. He was standing by the roadside, watching them pass, his head uncovered and bowed, in his characteristic attitude of humility, which seemed at once beautiful and ominous. Bourne felt a kind of melancholy, a kind of home-sickness, stilling the excitement which had filled him a little while ago. He watched the colour draining out of earth, leaving all its contours vague and gray, except where the shadowy woods and downs took a sharper outline against a sky as luminous and green as water flowing over limestone. Some stars, pallid as yet, hung in it. He had the feeling that he had relinquished everything. It was not that silly feeling of sacrifice, the sense of being a vicarious atonement for the failure of others: the wind with which some men puff out an idle vanity. Memory drifted up on to the verge of his thought a phrase: la résignation, c’est la défaite de l’âme; but it was not quite that, for there was no sense of defeat. He had ceased, in some curious way, to have any self-consciousness at all; it was as though his mind were brimmed up with peace, with a peace that still trembled a little on its surface, as though a breath would suffice to spill it; though he had the certainty in his heart that presently it would become still, and mirror only the emptiness of the night.

The rhythm of all those tramping feet, slurring the stresses slightly, held him in its curious hypnosis. He was aware of it all only as one might be aware of a dream. The men sang, sang to keep up cheerful hearts:

‘’ere we are, ’ere we are, ’ere we are, again,
Pat and Mac, and Tommy and Jack, and Joe!
Never mind the weather! Now then, all together!
Are wé down’eártéd! NO! (’ave a banana!)
’ere we are, ’ere we are …’

It might have gone on indefinitely, but the men suddenly switched on to Cock Robin, into which some voices would interject ‘another poor mother ’as lost ’er son,’ as though to affront the sinister fate against which they were determined to march with a swagger. As they marched through one little village, at about ten o’clock, doors suddenly opened and light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.

‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.

‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly pitying voices in reply; and even after the doors closed again, and they had left that village behind, the kindly voices seemed to drift across the darkness, like the voices of ghosts: ‘Somme! Ah, no bon!’