epped
forward to meet us. We saluted and shook hands. He seemed a boy, but
stood in front of his men with an air as though he commanded the
whole of this world of ghosts.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

We explained.

"Well, if you'll excuse me, you'd better make haste. An attack very
shortly ... yes. I should advise you to be out of this. Petrogradsky
Otriad? Yes ... very glad to have the pleasure...."

We left him, his men a grey cloud behind him, and when we had taken a
few steps he seemed, with his young air of importance, his happy
serious courtesy, to have been called out of the ground, then, with
all his shadows behind him, to have been caught up into the air. These
were not figures that had anything to do with the little curling
wreaths of smoke, the bottles cracking in the sun, our furious giants
of the morning.

"Ah, _Boje moi, Boje moi_!" sighed the wounded.... It was impossible,
in such a world of dim shadow, that there should ever be any other
sound again.

My excitement had never left me; I had had no doubt, during this last
half-hour, that I was on the Enchanted Ground of the Enemy, so stray
and figurative had been my impressions all day. Now they were all
gathered into this half-hour and the whole affair received its climax.
"Ah," I thought to myself, "if I might only stay here now I should
draw closer and closer--I should make my discovery, hunt him down. But
just when I am on the verge I must leave it all. Ah, if I could but
stay!"

Nevertheless we hastened. The world, in spite of the ghosts, was real
enough for us to be conscious of that attack looming behind us. We
found our wagons, transferred our wounded, then hurried down the road.
We found the cross-roads and there, waiting for us, Semyonov and
Marie Ivanovna. Standing in the moonlight, commanding, as it seemed
to me, all of us, even Semyonov, she was a very different figure from
the frightened girl of the early morning. Now her life was in her
eyes, her body inflamed with the fire of the things that had come to
her. So young in experience was she, so ignorant of all earlier
adventure, that she could well be seized, utterly and completely, by
her new vision ... possessed by some vision she was.

And that vision was not Trenchard. Seeing her, he hurried towards her,
with a glad cry:

"Ah, you are safe!"

But she did not notice him.

"Quick, this way!... Yes, the stretchers here.... No, I have
everything.... At once. There i