g.

And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments
of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the
shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the
mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose
very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by
them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be
the same man again. "No, your Honour," one soldier said to me. "It
isn't my arm.... That is nothing, _Slava Bogu_ ... but life isn't so
real now. It is half gone." He would explain no more.

Since the battle of S----, I had been restless. I wanted to be back
there again and this work was to me like talking to travellers who
had come from some country that one knew and desired.

In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the
candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in
the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell
ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled
bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was
weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs
and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not
notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn
almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs
hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in
endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world
was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little
beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of
ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our
defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and
torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one ... in those early
morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear
his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.

There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else,
before or since, that attacked one on those early mornings. It was not
a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like
a cold hand pressing upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the
nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the
blood seemed to stop in its course, one's heart beat feebly, and
things were dim before one's