The Dark Forest

light as they broke; but really amongst that welter of wooded hill the sounds were uncanny. They’d be under one’s feet, over one’s head, in one’s ear, up against one’s stomach, straight in the small of one’s back. Since my night with Nikitin physical fear really seems to have left me⁠—the whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an entirely commonplace thing, but it was the Forest that I felt⁠—exactly as though it were playing with me. Wasn’t there an old medieval torture when they shot arrows at their victim, always just missing him, first on one side, then on another, until at last, tired of the game, they fixed him through the head? Well, that’s what the old beast was trying to do to me, anything to doubt what’s real and what is not, anything to make me question my senses.⁠ ⁠… We tumbled quite suddenly on to some men, a small Red Cross shelter and two or three hundred soldiers sitting under the trees by the road resting⁠—most of them sleeping. The doctor in the Red Cross place⁠—a small fussy man⁠—was ill-tempered and overworked. There were at least thirty dead men lying in a row outside the shelter, and the army sanitars were bringing in more wounded every minute. “Why weren’t there more wagons? What was the use of coming with so few? Where was the other doctor, someone or other who ought to have relieved him?” There he was, like a little monkey on wires, dancing up and down in the blazing road, his arms covered with blood, pincers in one hand and bandages in the other and the inside of his shelter with such a green, filthy smell coming out of it that you’d think the roof would burst! I filled seven of my wagons, sent them back and went forward with the remaining three. We were climbing now, up through the Forest road, the shell, very close, making a terrific noise, and in between the scream of the shell the birds singing like anything!

The road turned the corner and then we were in the middle of it! Now here’s the worst thing I’ve seen with my eyes since I came to the war⁠—worst thing I shall ever see perhaps. One looks back, you know, to one of those old average afternoons at Polchester, my father coming back from golf, I myself going into the old red-walled garden for tea, with some novel under my arm, the cathedral bell ringing for Evensong just over the wall across the Green, then slowly dropping to its close, then the faint murmur of the organ. Some bird twittering in a tree overhead, buttered toast in a neat pile placed carefully over hot water to keep it warm; honey, heavy homemade cake, perhaps the local weekly paper with the “Do you know that⁠ ⁠…” column demanding one’s critical attention. One’s annoyed because tomorrow some tiresome fellow’s coming to luncheon, because one wishes to buy some china that one can’t afford, because the wife of the Precentor said to the Dean’s sister that young Trenchard would be an old man in a year or two.⁠ ⁠… One sips one’s tea, the organ leads the chants, the sun sinks below the wall.⁠ ⁠… That! This!⁠ ⁠… there’s the Forest road hot like red-hot iron under the sun; it winds away into the Forest, but so far as the eye can see it is covered with things that have been left by flying men⁠—such articles! Swords, daggers, rifles, cartridge-cases, of course, but also books, letters, a hairbrush, underclothes, newspapers, these tilings in thick, tangled profusion, rifles in heaps, cartridge-cases by the hundred! Under the sun up and down the road there are dead and dying, Russians and Austrians together. The Forest is both above and below the road and from out of it there comes a continual screaming. There is every note in this babel of voices, mad notes, plaintive notes, angry notes, whimpering notes. One wounded man is very slowly trying to drag himself across the road, and his foot which is nearly severed from his leg waggles behind him. One path that leads from the road to the Forest is piled with bodies and is a stream of blood. Some of the dead are lying very quietly in the ditch, their heads pillowed on their arms⁠—every now and then something that you had thought dead stirs.⁠ ⁠… And the screaming from the Forest is incessant so that you simply don’t hear the shell (now very close indeed).⁠ ⁠…

There is, you know, that world somewhere with the Rev. Someone lecturing on Fools and “the class ‘Ruysdael’ costing in the neighbourhood of $100.” At least, it’s very important if I’m to continue to keep my head steady that I should know that it is there!

It seemed that we were the first Red Cross people to arrive. Oh! what rewards would I have offered for another ten wagons! How lamentably insufficient our three carts appeared standing there in the road with this screaming Forest on every side of one! As I waited there, overwhelmed by the blind indifference of the place, listening still to the incredible birds, seeing in the businesslike attentions of my sanitars only a further incredible indifference, a great stream of soldiers came up the road, passing into the first line of trenches, only a little deeper in the Forest. They were very hot, the perspiration dripping down their faces, but they went through to the position without a glance at the dead and wounded. No concern of theirs⁠—that. Life had changed; they had changed with it.⁠ ⁠… Meanwhile they did as they were told.⁠ ⁠…

We worked there, filling our wagons. The selection was a horrible difficulty. All the wounded were Austrians and how they begged not to be left! It would be many hours, perhaps, before the next Red Cross Division would appear. An awful business! One man dying in the wood tore at his stomach with an unceasing gesture and the air came through his mouth