A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [25]
He was asking desultorily of the Sergeant whether he often shocked the men by what he said and the Sergeant was answering with blushes: Well, you do say things, sir! Not believing in skylarks now! If there was one thing the men believed hit was in the hinstincks of them little creatures!
'So that,' Tietjens said, 'they look at me as a sort of an atheist.'
He forced himself to look over the parapet again, climbing heavily to his place of observation. It was sheer impatience and purely culpable technically. But he was in command of the regiment, of an establishment of a thousand and eighteen men, or that used to be the Establishment of a battalion; of a strength of three hundred and thirty-three. Say seventy-five per company. And two companies in command of second lieutenants, one just out...The last four days...There ought to be, say, eighty pairs of eyes surveying what he was going to survey. If there were fifteen it was as much as there were!...Figures were clean and comforting things. The chance against being struck by a shell-fragment that day, if the Germans came in any force, was fourteen to one against. There were battalions worse off than they. The sixth had only one one six left!
The tortured ground sloped down into mists. Say a quarter of a mile away. The German front lines were just shadows, like the corrugations of photographs of the moon: the paradoses of our own trenches two nights ago! The Germans did not seem to have troubled to chuck up much in the way of parapets. They didn't. They were coming on. Anyhow they held their front lines very sparsely...Was that the phrase? Was it even English?
Above the shadows the mist behaved tortuously: mounting up into umbrella shapes. Like snow-covered umbrella pines.
Disagreeable to force the eye to examine that mist. His stomach turned over...That was the sacks. A flat, slightly disordered pile of wet sacks, half-right at two hundred yards. No doubt a shell had hit a G.S. wagon coming up with sacks for trenching. Or the bearers had bolted, chucking the sacks down. His eyes had fallen on that scattered pile four times already that morning. Each time his stomach had turned over. The resemblance to prostrate men was appalling. The enemy creeping up...Christ! Within two hundred yards. So his stomach said. Each time, in spite of the preparation.
Otherwise the ground had been so smashed up that it was flat: went down into holes but did not rise up into mounds. That made it look gentle. It sloped down. To the untidiness. They appeared mostly to lie on their faces. Why? Presumably they were mostly Germans pushed back in the last counter-attack. Anyhow you saw mostly the seats of their trousers. When you did not, how profound was their repose! You must phrase it a little like that--rhetorically. There was no other way to get the effect of that profoundness. Call it profundity!
It was different from sleep. Flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs...Well, you can't go on with a sentence like that...But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall...Probably because they--the painters--drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form...But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi...Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God! As if He dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth...Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered...
Dawn on the battlefield...Damn it all, why sneer? It was dawn on the battlefield...The trouble was that this battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months and twenty-seven days of it still...No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony