‘Bourne ’ere?’ he asked, and then seeing his man, added: ‘You’re to go before Major Shadwell at two o’clock, at ’is billet, by the orderly-room. You’ll take ’im up, Corporal.’

‘What’s the trouble about?’ asked the corporal, alarmed at the possibility that one of his section might have disgraced himself.

‘Oh, there’s no trouble,’ said Bourne, with a weary impatience. ‘It is probably about my commission.’

His interview with Major Shadwell did him a lot of good. It was a plain, matter-of-fact conversation. The second-in-command apparently knew all he needed to know about him, merely asking him a few questions and then explaining the procedure. At the same time, he managed to put into what was only a matter of routine, a touch of humanity. He was quiet, serious, and yet approachable. He made only one reference to the attack, and that was indirectly, when he told Bourne that the Colonel would see him after it was over. It seemed to reduce the attack to the right proportions, as being after all only a matter of routine too. As he walked back to billets with Corporal Hamley, after the interview was over, the corporal turned to him.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘Major Shadwell’s the right kind of officer.’

‘Yes,’ said Bourne, a little preoccupied. ‘He’s all right. He’s in the cart with the rest of us.’

They carried on with their routine training for the next hour; but the work seemed irrelevant, and they were preoccupied and dreamy. After Corporal Hamley told them they might pack up for the day, they wrote letters home, and during this laborious business the stable became extraordinarily quiet and pensive. Suddenly reality cut across the illusion. Weeper turned a lachrymose face from one to the other.

‘What would our folks think,’ he said, ‘if they could see us poor buggers sittin’ ’ere writin’ all manner o’ bloody lies-to ’em?’

‘I’m not writin’ any bloody lies,’ said Madeley. ‘I’m tellin’ ’em I’m in the pink, an’ so I am. An’ I’m tellin’ ’em everythin’ ’s all right, an’ so ’t is, up to the present.’

‘What the ’ell are you tellin’ ’em?’ said Glazier, more brutally, turning on Weeper. ‘Nothin’ but the bloody truth, eh? “Dear Mother, by the time you get this I’ll be dead.”’

‘If you do write the truth they rub it out in th’ orderly-room,’ said Martlow; ‘so you might just as well write cheerful. Me mother told me the first letters I sent ’ome was all rubbed out wi’ indelible pencil, so as she couldn’t read anythin’, ’cept that it were rainin’, an’ your lovin’ son Babe: that’s the silly name they give me when I were a kid.’

‘It’s ’igh time they sent you ’ome again, now, to the bloody Veterans Corps,’ said Glazier, kindly enough.

Bourne wrote three brief notes, and then lounged back on his folded great-coat and blankets. He could feel with his elbow the two bottles of wine and a tin of sausages in tomato sauce; the rest of the provisions had been distributed under Shem’s or Martlow’s kit. He was in much the same mood as the others were. One did not face the possibilities quite squarely until they were thrust on one, and yet one never lost completely the sense of them; whatever kind of hope or imagining held for a moment the restless mind, one heard behind it the inexorable voice: It must be, it must be; seeming to mark the dripping of time, drop by drop, out of the leaky vessel of being. One by one they finished their letters, and turned gradually to quiet conversation, the arrival of tea at last bringing with it, instantly, a general movement as much of relief as of appetite.