Martlow covered the light with a can, as Bourne moved out into the dark. It was very dark, and the rain was fine, searching and cold. He would keep to the road as far as the dump, it was no use trying a short cut, and the wet surface of the road was at least visible, lots of little pools gleaming in it. The control was not there. Some instinctive scruple moved Bourne to avoid the side of the road where he had found the dead man, and, looking to where they had carried the body, he saw that it had been removed.

The dump was empty. In another couple of hours it would be alive with men and transport. He had a kind of talent for moving about surefootedly in the dark. He did not mind the rain, and he loved the quiet. There were fewer star-shells tonight, and the rain made their expanding and contracting haloes even more mysterious than usual.

He handed in the message, and then spoke to Corporal Hamley, who was with Sergeant-Major Corbet, about the strafe.

‘Well, Captain Malet is out of it, now,’ said the sergeant-major.

‘What happened to Captain Malet, Sergeant-Major?’ he asked, anxiously.

‘Dug-out blown in; a beam fell on him, and broke both his legs. They were some time before they got him clear, they had to dig under the beam. They wanted to take a couple of rifles as splints for his legs, until they got him to the dressing-station; but he wouldn’t have it. “You may want ’em more than I do,” he said. “You get me a couple of miles away from here, and I’m laughing.” When they were getting him out he smoked a cigarette, and didn’t say a word, though they must have hurt him.’

‘Anyone else hurt?’ asked Bourne.

‘A boy called Bates was killed, and two others wounded or hurt. I haven’t heard all the details. B Company had a few casualties. We had a sentry over the dug-out wounded. Matheson. D’you know him? You came from A Company, didn’t you? Thought so. Someone told me Captain Malet was going to get the Colonel to recommend you for a commission, wasn’t he? What are you going to do about it, now?’

While the sergeant-major was speaking of Bates having been killed, Bourne tried to remember who Bates was; and, at the effort of memory to recover him, he seemed to hear a high, excited voice suddenly cry out, as though actually audible to the whole dug-out:

‘What’s ’e want to drag me into ’t for?’

And it was as though Bates were bodily present there; the sergeant-major’s voice seemed less real. In the light of the unsteady candles, each haloed in the fog of smoke, Bourne saw all the quiet men, some half asleep, some staring in front of them, thinking, and waiting. He felt as though he were under some extraordinary hallucination, but he answered the sergeant-major reasonably enough, said he would have a talk to him when they went out of trenches again, suggested speaking to Mr Rhys; and all the time he heard his own voice saying things, which somehow did not seem to concern him, meaningless things which had to be taken very seriously. He knew no more of Bill Bates than that one phrase, passionately innocent: