He heard an English voice shouting, “Paiper! Paiper!” No mere
spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of
English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the
morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long
since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted
dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at
evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite
a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could
be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was
strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm
as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six
especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else’s hut and
there was excitement about it.
Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one who
walked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, as
one who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while they
were taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but the
strain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone in
a single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, of
something to take its place, so the football loomed very large.
It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active at
dawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown too
familiar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldier
with a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling “Paiper,
paiper!”—bringing to that strange camp the voice of the English
towns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily,
on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itself
rejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud,
looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mud
the liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a shower
on other men’s helmets and coats.
He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling
amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants
use, some trivial song or cry of his native city.