‘All present and correct, sir,’ said Sergeant Smith.
‘All right, let’s go then,’ said Lieutenant Mackinnon.
Down the trench they went, teeth and eyes grinning, clattering over the duckboards with their Mills bombs and their bayonets and their guns. ‘What am I doing here?’ thought Robert, and ‘Who the hell is making that noise?’ and ‘Is the damned wire cut or not?’ and ‘We are like a bunch of actors,’ and ‘I’m leading these men, I’m an officer.’
And he thought again, ‘I hope the guns have cut that barbed wire.’
Then he and they inched across No Man’s Land following the line of lime which had been laid to guide them. Up above were the stars and the air was cool on their faces. But there were only a few stars, the night was mostly dark, and clouds covered the moon. Momentarily he had an idea of a huge mind breeding thought after thought, star after star, a mind which hid in daylight in modesty or hauteur but which at night worked out staggering problems, pouring its undifferentiated power over the earth.
On hands and knees he squirmed forward, the others behind him. This was his first raid and he thought, ‘I am frightened.’ But it was different from being out in the open on a battlefield. It was an older fear, the fear of being buried in the earth, the fear of wandering through eternal passageways and meeting grey figures like weasels and fighting with them in the darkness. He tested the wire. Thank God it had been cut. And then he thought, ‘Will we need the ladders?’ The sides of the trenches were so deep sometimes that ladders were necessary to get out again. And as he crawled towards the German trenches he had a vision of Germans crawling beneath British trenches undermining them. A transparent imagined web hung below him in the darkness quivering with grey spiders.
He looked at his illuminated watch. The time was right. Then they were in the German trenches. The rest was a series of thrustings and flashes. Once he thought he saw or imagined he saw from outside a dugout a man sitting inside reading a book. It was like looking through a train window into a house before the house disappears. There were Mills bombs, hackings of bayonets, scurryings and breathings as of rats. A white face towered above him, his pistol exploded and the face disappeared. There was a terrible stink all around him, and the flowing of blood. Then there was a long silence. Back. They must get back. He passed the order along. And then they wriggled back again avoiding the craters which lay around them, created by shells, and which were full of slimy water. If they fell into one of these they would be drowned. As he looked, shells began to fall into them sending up huge spouts of water. Over the parapet. They were over the parapet. Crouched they had run and scrambled and were over. Two of them were carrying a third. They stumbled down the trench. There were more wounded than he had thought. Wright . . . one arm seemed to have been shot off. Sergeant Smith was bending over him. ‘You’ll get sent home all right,’ he was saying. Some of the men were tugging at their equipment and talking feverishly. Young Ellis was lying down, blood pouring from his mouth. Harris said, ‘Morrison’s in the crater.’
He and Sergeant Smith looked at each other. They were both thinking the same: there is no point, he’s had it. They could see each other’s eyes glaring whitely through the black, but could not tell the expression on the faces. The shells were still falling, drumming and shaking the earth. All these craters out there, these dead moons.
‘Do you know which one?’ said Robert.
‘I think so, sir, I . . . Are you going to get him?’
‘Sergeant Smith, we’ll need our rifles. He can hang on to that if he’s there. Harris, come with us.’ They were all looking at him with sombre black faces, Wright divided between joy and pain.
‘Sir.’
Then
