like beaters
in a long line: "Soon," Trenchard told me, "I was quite alone. I
could hear sometimes the breaking of a twig or a stumbling footfall
but I might have been alone at the end of the world. It was obvious
that the regimental sanitars had been there before us because there
were many new roughly made graves. There were letters too and post
cards lying about all heavy with wet and dirt. I picked up some of
these--letters from lovers and sisters and brothers. One letter I
remember in a large baby-hand from a boy to his father telling him
about his lessons and his drill, 'because he would soon be a soldier.'
One letter, too, from a girl to her lover saying that she had had a
dream and knew now that her 'dear Franz, whom she loved with all her
soul, would return to her!... I am quite confident now that we shall
be happy here again very soon....' In such a place, those words."

As he walked alone there he felt, as I had felt before the battle of
S----, that he had already been there. He knew those trees, that
smell, that heavy overhanging sky. Then he remembered, as I had
remembered, his dream. But whereas that dream had been to me only a
reflected story, with him it had lasted throughout his life. He knew
every step of that first advance into the forest, the look back to the
long dim white house with shadowy figures still about it, the avenue
with many trees, the horses and dogs down the first grey path, then
the sudden loneliness, the quiet broken only by the dripping of the
trees.

Always that had caught him by the throat with terror, and now to-day
he was caught once again. He was watched: he fancied that he could see
the eyes behind the thicket and hear the rustling movement of
somebody. To-day he could hear nothing. If at last his dream was to be
fashioned into reality let it be so. Did the creature wish to destroy
him, let it be so. He had no strength, no hope, no desire....

"It was there," he told me, "when I scarcely knew what was real and
what was not, that I saw that for which I was searching. I noticed
first the dark grey-blue of the trousers, then the white skull. There
was a horrible stench in the air. I called and the sanitars answered
me. Then I looked at it. I had never seen a dead man before. This man
had been dead for about a fortnight, I suppose. Its grey-blue trousers
and thick boots were in excellent condition and a tin spoon and some
papers were showing out of the top of one boot. Its face