‘There’s a man dead outside, Sergeant,’ he said, dully.

‘What the bloody hell are you doin’ out in it? Are you sure ’e’s dead?’

‘Yes, Sergeant; most of the head’s gone. I’m at the relay-post, runners. I thought I had better tell you that we had left the stable, and gone into the cellar of the house.’

‘I’m goin’ out to see to that man.’

They doubled out to him, and finding that he was really dead, shifted him off the road; and went into the dug-out again.

‘I’m going back now, Sergeant.’

‘You ’ad better wait a bit,’ said the sergeant, in a kindlier voice. ‘You know it’s against regulations for you chaps to go alone. There ought to be a pair of you.’

‘I had better go back. I didn’t know whether we ought to move, as I have not been on the job before. I’ll go back to see how my chums are.’

‘All right,’ said the sergeant, in a curiously irritable way. ‘Write up on the door where you are.’

The shelling was still violent, but seemed to be worse at the corner in the direction of Courcelles, and to have extended on this side farther along the Mailly-Maillet road. As Bourne came out, he could see shells exploding by the dump, with some shrapnel bursting, woolly-bears they called them, overhead. He couldn’t say whether it was with a prayer or a curse that he made for the corner of Colincamps, doubling up the short rise with difficulty. Collapsing houses had spilt their bricks half across the street. One wall, about sixty yards away from him, suddenly crumpled and fell. He wouldn’t look at things. He found himself saying over and over again in soldiers’ language: ‘I’ve been out of the bloody shit too long’: not uttering the words but thinking them with a curious intensity. His vision seemed narrowed to a point immediately in front of him. When he got to the stable they had left, he went straight to Martlow’s notice, and drawing a rough arrow underneath the words ‘Relay Post’, wrote in rough blocks the words ‘In Cellar’. Then he went to it, noticing as he descended that the entrance was turned the wrong way. Shem and Martlow looked at him, but he could scarcely see their faces in the gloom.

‘What’s it like, now?’ asked Martlow, with a very slight catch in his voice.

‘Oh, it’s cushy enough,’ said Bourne, with desperate humour.

Suddenly he felt inexpressibly tired, He bowed his head and sat gazing into nothing, emptied of all effort. The shells bumped for some time longer, slackened, and then ceased. Bourne had the sensation that the earth was left steaming.

A drizzle of rain began, and increasing by degrees filled the quiet with little trickling sounds. The cellar was comfortably furnished as it had apparently been used as a funk-hole before, and by people of more importance than its present occupants. Its sole defect was that the entrance directly faced the Hun lines, and perhaps this inconvenience had prompted them to leave; but during their tenancy they had put in three beds, wooden frames standing about two feet off the floor, over which rabbit-netting had been stretched and nailed, as a substitute for spring-mattresses. Some rather thin Wilson canvas curtained the entrance. Bourne remembered that there was some thicker sacking in the stable which they had left, and he proposed to get it, and nail it over the outside of the doorway. They went back, together, to their old quarters. Little of the stable was left except its frame, some laths, and a few tiles, still hanging precariously on the slats overhead, through which, now, the rain fell steadily. They wrenched some nails from the timbers, and Shem and Martlow fastened the extra sacking on the doorway of the cellar. Bourne wandered off by himself for a moment. He found that the premises included their own private latrine. He had been silent and preoccupied, since coming back from the control, and had said nothing about the man killed on the hillside. He didn’t want to talk.