There was only one parade in the morning: roll-call; and Bourne had to give Captain Marsden details of Martlow’s end, and of Adams’s; and then to describe Minton’s wound. Pritchard told about Shem’s wound, and corroborated Bourne’s evidence on some points about the others. It was a long, disconsolate business. In the afternoon they moved up to take over the new front-line to the right of Blenau: they were all indifferent; it was a matter of routine.

A couple of days later, in the small hours of the morning, Bourne was on the firestep; and Corporal Jakes was asleep in the same bay. The weather had become much clearer. After a time Bourne seemed to forget his own existence; not that he was dreaming, or was unaware of the world about him, for every nerve was stretched to the limit of apprehension. Staring into the darkness, behind which menace lurked, equally vigilant and furtive, his consciousness had pushed out through it, to take possession, gradually, and foot by foot, of some forty or fifty yards of territory within which nothing moved or breathed without his knowledge of it. Beyond this was a more dubious obscurity, into which he could only grope without certainty. The effort of mere sense to exceed its normal function had ended, for the moment at least, not only in obliterating his own identity, and merging it with those objects of sense which he did actually perceive, but in dissolving even their objective reality into something incredible and fantastic. He had become accustomed to them that they had ceased to have any reality or significance for him. The night was quiet. Puddles and flat wet surfaces reflected what was no more than a reminiscence of light. Against the skyline he could see strands of wire, and the uprights leaning awry; and beyond them little waifs of diaphanous mist drifting into the darkness. The darkness itself changed continually, clearing at times to a curious transparency, and then clouding again. The moon was behind a bank of cloud in the west; but the stars sparkled with the brilliance they gain from frost. At intervals the silence became so intense that he almost expected it to crack like ice. Then the whine of a shell would traverse it, or several in succession pass overhead, a pack in full cry; and there were dull explosions, or the sudden stutter of a machine-gun in the distance. The mind, so delicately sensitive to the least vibration from the outer world, no longer recorded it in the memory, unless it had some special relevance. The sound for which he was waiting was that of a stumble in the dark, or of a shaken, creaking wire; and that for which his eyes sought, where darkness swallowed up the travelling wraiths of mist, was a crawling shadow advancing stealthily towards him. It was such an unearthly stillness, that he almost prayed for something to happen, so that he might kill, or be killed. Sooner or later it would come, out of the hostile night. He waited in motionless expectancy, his tin-hat tilted forward slightly over his eyes and gleaming very faintly, as his waterproof ground-sheet, worn cape-wise and tied at the neck with a bootlace through two of its eyelets, gleamed also, from the damp air which had condensed on it.