ted him with a voice that had in it not the slightest tremor.

There comes now a difficult matter. During the later months when I was
to reflect on the whole affair I saw quite clearly that that hour
between our leaving the wooden house and arriving in the trenches
bridged quite clearly for me the division in this business between
imagination and reality: that is, I was never after this to speak of
war as I would have spoken of it an hour before. I was never again to
regard the paraphernalia of it with the curiosity of a stranger--I had
become part of it. This hour then may be regarded as in some ways the
most important of all my experiences. It is certainly the occasion to
which if I were using my invention I should make the most. Here then
is my difficulty.

I have nothing to say about it. There's nothing at all to be made of
it....

I may say at once that there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment
I was standing with Marie Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was
standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to
my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far
away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from under the cloth
that covered him peacefully beneath a tree at my side. There had, of
course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road
whilst the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the
iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder. But
it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life--a
life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe
distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from that same
distance--into the other. I had been caught up, had hung for a moment
in midair, had been "planted" in this new experience. For us all there
must have been at this moment something of this passing from an old
life into a new one, and yet I dare swear that not for any one of us
was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather
lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the
trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business
of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a
thing custom had made it.

Yes, we made a desolate little group. Semyonov had gone to a house on
the farther side of the road up which we had come, a house that flew
the Red Cross flag. We had only the right to care for the wounde