And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher than death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them, and the vague shadows of the trees on either hand. At last the singing died away; there was nothing but the trampling of myriad feet; or they would halt for ten minutes, and the darkness along the roadside became alive as with fireflies from the glow of cigarettes through a low mist.

It must have been midnight when they reached St Pol; and there again their singing sent out a noisy challenge to the darkness, but now they sang one of their regimental marching-songs, chronicling in parody their own deeds: it was the air of the Marseillaise:

‘At La Clytte, at La Clytte,
Where the Westshires got well beat,
And the bullets blew our buttons all away,
And we ran, yes, we ran,
From that fuckin’ Alleman;
And now we are happy all the day!’

Windows were thrown up, and recognizing only the patriotic air, some of the virtuous townspeople joined in the singing; but after all there must be some misunderstanding in any alliance between two separate peoples. The men laughed with great delight, and then the order to march to attention imposed silence on them. They turned into a big camp, which Bourne was told was a hospital, and after waiting some little time restlessly in the dark, some huts were assigned to them.

‘I like marching at night,’ said Martlow. ‘Don’t you, Bourne?’

‘Yes, I like it, kid; are you tired?’

‘A bit. Shem isn’t. Shem never tires.’

They laid themselves down, as they were to get a few hours’ sleep; and Bourne, dropping off between the two of them, wondered what was the spiritual thing in them which lived and seemed even to grow stronger, in the midst of beastliness.

XII

Yes, in this present quality of war

Indeed the instant action, a cause on foot

Lives so in hope, as in an early spring

We see the appearing buds, which to prove fruit

Hope gives not so much warrant, as despair

That frosts will bite them.

SHAKESPEARE

BOURNE roused himself, and, after a few minutes of dubious consciousness, sat up and looked round him, at his sleeping companions, and then at the rifles stacked round the tent-pole, and the ring of boots surrounding the rifle-butts. His right hand finding the opening in his shirt front, he scratched pleasurably at his chest. He was dirty, and he was lousy; but at least, and he thanked God for it, he was not scabby. Half a dozen men from Headquarter Company, including Shem as a matter of course, had been sent off yesterday to a casualty clearing station near Acheux, suffering or rejoicing, according to their diverse temperaments, with the itch. The day after their arrival at Mailly-Maillet, the medical officer had held what the men described irreverently as a prick-inspection. He was looking for definite symptoms of something he expected to find, and because his inquest had been narrowed down to a single question, it may have seemed a little cursory. The men stood in a line, their trousers and underpants having been dropped round their ankles, and as the doctor passed them, in the words of the regimental sergeant-major, they ‘lifted the curtain’, that is to say the flap of the shirt, so as to expose their bellies.