s little time!"

The wounded were laid on the stretchers in the square of the
cross-roads. Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna bandaged them under the
moonlight and with the aid of electric-torches. On every side of me
there were little dialogues: "No ... not there. More this way. Yes,
that bandage will do. It's fresh. Hold up his leg. No, _durak_, under
the knee there.... Where's the lint?... Turn him a little--there--like
that. _Horosho, golubchik_. _Seitchass_! No, turn it back over the
thigh. Now, once more ... that's it. What's that--bullet or
shrapnel?... Take it back again, over the shoulder.... Yes, twice!"

Once I caught sight of Trenchard, hurrying to be useful with the
little bottle of iodine, stumbling over one of the stretchers, causing
the wounded man to cry out.

Then Semyonov's voice angrily:

"Tchort! Who's that?... Ah, Meester! of course!"

Then Marie Ivanovna's voice: "I've finished this, Alexei
Petrovitch.... That's all, isn't it?"

These voices were all whispers, floating from one side of the road to
the other. The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved
off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting
together.

We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we
began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind
me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as
though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life,
had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest.
Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one
of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind....

I looked back. Without an instant's warning that dead world, as a
match is set to a waiting bonfire, broke into flame. A thousand
rockets rose, soaring, in streams of light into the dark sky; the
fields that had been vapour ran now with light. A huge projector, the
eye, as it seemed to me, of that enemy for whom I had all day been
searching, slowly wheeled across the world, cutting a great path
across the plain, picking houses and trees and fields out of space,
then dropping them back again. The rockets were gold and green,
sometimes as it seemed ringed with fire, sometimes cold like dead
moons, sometimes sparkling and quivering like great stars. And with
this light the whole world crackled into sound as though the sky, a
vast china plate, had been smashed by some angry god and been flung,
in a m