Two officers at their breakfast table look at me, and then slowly stand
up in utter amazement with opening mouths and wide eyes. In a second of
time I see the broken egg-shell on the plate, the carelessly folded
napkins, a half-empty toast-rack.
"Bewsher! Paul! Why--why--where have you been?"
"Haven't you heard? Hasn't--didn't the Monitor tell you?" I asked dully.
"No. This is the first we have seen of you. Oh! I am glad you are all
right. Where's Roy?"
"Roy! Roy! Oh! He's dead, dead--dead--in the sea--drowned in the
wreck...." And throwing myself on a seat, I drop my face on to my arms
on the table and burst into sobs, which shake my weary frame to the
bones as the scalding tears well from my tired bruised eyes.
Follows in my memory picture after picture--of lying for a few hours in
my little bed in the familiar cabin at the aerodrome, and of Jimmy
bending over me with his face drawn with anxiety, telling me of the
tragedy of the night, of Bob and Jack missing, of machines crashing: of
the Friends Hospital at Dunkerque in a little wood where we awoke at
dawn to hear the thunder of the 15-inch shells bursting on the docks: of
the Red Cross city at Etaples: of yet another hospital in the green
silence of Eton Square: of convalescence in the dream-garden of a great
house in Buckinghamshire.
One night I rode into Paddington and found Jack Hudson awaiting me.
Three months was it since I had dined with him on the tragic night of
April 10. He told me how, an hour after my accident, he had landed with
a shell-shattered engine in Holland; he had struck a canal at 75 miles
an hour, and had been upside down under water with his feet fixed on the
wreckage, and his machine had caught fire on top of him, and how by
burrowing down into the mud he had managed to free himself and to
escape. Unchanged by our experiences which we related as interesting
stories, we wandered happily along the twilight streets.
Infinitely remote, like a scarce-remembered dream, is the war to me
to-day. I seem ever to have been a civilian, ever to have strolled at
ease down sunlit terraces of London through the drowsy hours of an
English spring--but every night with the slow approach of azure twilight
I feel a strange stirring in my heart. As the first primrose star blooms
in the east, I seem to hear the roar of starting engines, and when, in
cold and sublime beauty, a silver moon rides high in the vast immensity
of the night, I yearn with an almost unbearable pain to be once more
sitting far above a magic moonlit world, to be moving ever onwards
through the dim sky, where here and there the white waiting arms of the
searchlights swoop and linger amidst the stars; where, beautiful and
enchanted, there rises in the distance a long curving chain of green
twinkling balls.
_Dusk is our dawn, and midnight is our noon!
And for the sun we have the radiant moon.
We love the darkness, and we hate the light,
For we are wedded to the gloomy night._