“Listen,” said a voice in his ear. It was Wright, his face uplifted in the moonlight and disfigured by ugly twitchings. “Listen,” he said, “they’re coming back. …” William shrank from him irritably, but the man had not spoken particularly to him, and, having spoken, turned swiftly and went back into the house. He had been the first to catch the double-noted drone which as they stood and listened grew nearer.
“That’s him, sure enough,” another voice agreed. “Coming up in relays. He’ll be out to make a night of it—I thought we’d got rid of him too quickly.”
A searchlight wheeled and the antiaircraft spoke on the word; someone cried, “Got ’im,” and pointed, and for an instant William had sight of a wicked thing caught in the ray and rushing upwards. Battery and machine-gun gave tongue at the sight, but in a flash the climbing devil had vanished and the searchlight wheeled after it fruitlessly. As they stood and watched it wheeling, a voice called, “Come in, men,” and they went back perforce within their walls.
The first attack had lasted not much over half an hour; this time the ordeal by darkness and waiting was longer. William held himself tightly, ashamed of the weakness with which Wright had infected him and keeping it doggedly at bay; he talked when he could think of anything to talk about—odd irrelevant fragments of whatever came into his head, anything to keep himself from listening. At one time he made a conscious and determined effort to turn his talk and his mind with it to something unconnected with air-raids; but always his speech, like that of his companions, came back to the thought of the moment.
“Do you remember,” he asked a man beside him, “what a fuss there was about the first Channel flight? I forget the fellow’s name—a Frenchman?”
Someone supplied the name, “Bleriot,” out of the darkness.
“Yes, Bleriot—that’s it. … Queer when you think of it. Nobody had any idea then what it would mean—getting into cellars and hiding in the dark. If they had”—he forced an attempt at a laugh—“they wouldn’t have been so pleased.”
“No,” his neighbour agreed with him jocularly; “they wouldn’t have been so pleased. We thought we was all going to flap about like birds—and instead the most of us go scuttling into holes like beetles what the cook’s trying to stamp on. That’s flying—for them as don’t fly.”
“Yes,” said William, “that’s flying.” The beetle simile caught his fancy oddly, and he found himself contrasting it with his old idea of a soldier. After all, the beetle-warrior was a new development—it was impossible to think of Napoleonic heroes as beetles. Yet if they were alive they would have to scuttle too—even Murat the magnificent, and Ney, the Red Lion …
“When the next war comes,” his jocular neighbour was continuing, “every man that ain’t in the R.F.C. ’ull be crawling at the bottom of a coal-mine. And I don’t mind mentioning in confidence that if I saw a coal-mine ’andy I wouldn’t mind crawling down it now.”
“No,” said William, for the sake of speaking, “I don’t suppose you would.” He was trying to think of something further to say when he felt the man on his other side start perceptibly and stiffen in attention. Something caught at his throat and he could only whisper, “What is it?”
“He’s stopping his engine,” said the other quietly; and before William had time to ask what he meant the next bomb fell in the courtyard.
There was only one man wholly uninjured—the terror-haunted Wright, who ran out, splashed with other men’s blood, took screaming to his heels and collapsed a mile along the road. There he lay till long after the bell of St. Nicholas had rung an “All Clear” to the town—until long after the ambulances telephoned for from the hospitals outside had loaded up in the streets across which cordons had been drawn by military police and French firemen. Men and fragments of men were taken from the ruins, some speedily, some after much search; and among them Private Tully, past terror, but breathing, still alive but only alive.
He spoke but a few times after the explosion had broken him, and the men who lifted him on a stretcher to the ambulance and out of it could see that he suffered not at all; the shifting and handling that was torture to others left his maimed and mauled body unaffected. The injury to the spine that was killing him had bereft him of the power of pain as well as of the power of movement, and in the hospital, where a few minutes’ drive from the ruins landed him, he lay quietly alive for a day or two, for the most part dumb and unconscious, but with intervals of sense and lucid speech. Once, in such an interval, he whispered to the nurse that his wife, too, was buried in France; whereby she saw that he knew he was about to die.
Later he asked that someone would write to Edith Haynes, and tried to explain who she was. “No relation—just a lady I know. … I should like her to hear.”
The last person he spoke to was a chaplain, a young man making his round of the ward, who, seeing intelligence in the pale blue eyes, bent over the bed to ask if there was anything he wanted. The chaplain had been warned by a sister that here was a hopeless case, and he spoke very gently and bent very low for the answer.
It drifted out faintly in a slow and expressionless whisper.
“No, thank you,” said William. “I don’t seem to have been much good … but there comes a time … when nothing matters.”
“Not even,” asked the chaplain, feeling his way, “the sense that you have done your duty?”
“Most people do that,” said William. “The question is … if you’ve been much
