fidgeted about the darkened room; but the room was fairly full, and he
could not move far--after a step or two this way and a step or two that,
he was brought up by a solid group that stretched from the wall to a
table. He came to a standstill on the edge of the group and tried to
listen to their talk; forced himself to listen to it--and all the time
straining his ears through the murmur for the droning of the Gotha
engines. He fought with himself and fought more manfully than he knew;
striving to thrust out of his mind Wright's phrase about the "beastly
bits of flesh," and to fasten his hearing, to the exclusion of all else,
on the voice of a man, his neighbour in the darkness, who had lately
seen a German aeroplane brought down, and, having apparently some
mechanical knowledge, was describing its points and its engines. They,
the engines, were first-rate, he said, waxing technical; but even if he
had not been told it, he should have guessed from the fittings of the
plane that Jerry was getting a bit scarce in his stock of rubber and
leather. What he was using---- Here the windows rattled loudly and
drowned him. "That's pretty close," some one commented, and William
moved a restless step away. Once it had seemed to him an easy thing to
follow Griselda and die; now all the moral strength he possessed went
into the effort not to shrink, to be master of his body, to behave
decently and endure. That was all that seemed to matter--to be steady
and behave decently--so that, for all his fear of instant death, he
never turned his thoughts to God.... He had not known how beautiful
silence could be till it came almost suddenly, like a flood of clear,
cool water; when some one, muttering that it seemed to be over, opened
the door and went out into the courtyard, he followed and stood there
feeling the silence as something clean, exquisite and grateful. His
hands were wet and hot, and he stretched them out to the air; if he had
not prayed when he was under the spell of fear, his heart, at his
release from it, was filled with something like praise.
"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 anti-aircraft spoke on the word; some one
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?"
Some one 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 some one 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 use when you've done it."
The chaplain, puzzled, said something of infinite mercy and the standard
of God not being as the standard of man.
"If you've done your best..." he suggested.
"Most people do that," said William again ... and slid back once more
into silence.
* * * * *
He was buried without mourners, save those detailed for the duty; who,
none the less, stiffened in salute of his coffin and called him farewell
on the bugle. His death, duly entered in the hospital books, was
reported to the Casualty Department; and the Graves Registration clerks
took note of his burial and filed it for possible inquiries.
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