Damned embusques;
it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."

Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and
five metres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was
the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous
stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had
been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that
zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the
crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and had
clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the
level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the
tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the
German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay
were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men
with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom
as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the
shell-holes.

"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a serious
case all day."

"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb....
You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."

"It was the Boche who did that.... We took that slope from them two
months ago.... How does it grow?"

"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.

He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the
sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept
asking himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoop
gently out of the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where he
could lie amid the amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously
down at the spinning ball of the earth? It might have beauty if he were
far enough away to clear his nostrils of the stench of pain.

"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much
nearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to
anyone else."

"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the
people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."

The little doctor nodded.

"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's
fighting about anything.... God, it's so hideously stupid!" cried
Martin, suddenly carried away, helpless