II
Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn’s first astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow, the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to impart—they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac. We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as I went to sleep—the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in, and the waiting cavalry’s lances upright, black and multitudinous in roadside fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening’s reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?
Thought must have passed into dream when I was awakened by some bird that may have had a dream too and had fallen right off its perch in a bush near my head, with a disconcerted squeak and a scuffling sound among dry leaves. Opening my eyes, I found that a thickish veil was drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself over the meadow. Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and armour of darkness at dawn for our men. Soon night’s habitual sounds brought on sleep again. An owl in the wood by the little chalk stream would hoot, patiently wait for the answering call that should come, and then hoot again, and listen again. The low, dry, continuous buzz of an aeroplane engine, more evenly humming than any of ours, droned itself into hearing and softly ascended the scale of audibility; overhead, as the enemy passed, was slowly drawn across the sky from east to west a line of momentarily obscured stars, each coming back into sight as the next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like the audible breath of a sleeper. The war was taking its rest.
Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees, was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes tumbling down wooden stairs, “off,” as they do in a farce. Of course—that night-bomber unloading on St. Omer, Abbeville, Étaples, some one of the usual marks. But now there was something to wake for. Not a star to be seen. I jumped up and found the mist thick to my armpits, and rising. Oh, good, good! Our men would walk safe as the attacking Germans had walked in the mist of that lovely and fatal morning in March. I slept hard till two o’clock came—time to get up for work. The mist was doing its best; it seemed to fill the whole wide vessel of the universe.