A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [26]
At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They mopped and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; drooping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying layings out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence but in accord they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black quiet nights, in dugouts where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners' picks below you; tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening...But not FEAR.
It was in effect the desire for privacy. What he dreaded at those normal times when fear visited him at lunch; whilst seeing that the men got their baths or when writing, in a trench, in support, a letter to his bank-manager, was finding himself unhurt, surrounded by figures like the brothers of the Misericordia, going unconcerned about their tasks, noticing him hardly at all...Whole hillsides, whole stretches of territory, alive with myriads of whitish-grey, long cagoules, with slits for eyeholes. Occasionally one would look at him through the eye-slits in the hoods...The prisoner!
He would be the prisoner: liable to physical contacts--to being handled and being questioned. An invasion of his privacy!
As a matter of fact that wasn't so far out; not so dotty as it sounded. If the Huns got him--as they precious near had the night before last I--they would be--they had then been--in gas-masks of various patterns. They must be short of these things: but they looked, certainly, like goblin pigs with sore eyes, the hood with the askew, blind-looking eyeholes and the mouthpiece or the other nose attachment going down into a box, astonishingly like snouts!...Mopping and mowing--no doubt shouting through the masks!
They had appeared with startling suddenness and as if with a supernatural silence, beneath a din so overwhelming that you could not any longer bother to notice it. They were there, as it were, under a glass dome of silence that sheltered beneath that dark tumult, in the white illumination of Verey lights that went on. They were there, those of them that had already emerged from holes--astonishingly alert hooded figures with the long rifles that always looked rather amateurish--though, Hell, they weren't. The hoods and the white light gave them the aspects of Canadian trappers in snow; made them no doubt look still more husky fellows as against our poor rats of Derby men. The heads of goblin pigs were emerging from shell-holes, from rifts in the torn earth, from old trenches...This ground had been fought over again and again...Then the counter-attack had come through his, Tietjens', own crowd. One disorderly mob, as you might think, going through a disordered crowd that was damn glad to let them get through, realizing slowly, in the midst of a general not knowing what was going to happen, that the fellows were reliefs. They shot past you clumsily in a darkness spangled with shafts of light coming from God knows where and appeared going forward, whilst you at least had the satisfaction that, by order, you were going back. In an atmosphere of questioning. What was happening? What was going to happen?...What the bloody hell...What...
Tidy-sized shells began to drop among them saying: 'Wee...ee...ry...Whack!' Some fellow showed Tietjens the way through an immense apron of wire that was beginning to fly about. He, Tietjens, was carrying a hell of a lot of paper folders and books. They ought to have evacuated an hour ago; or the Huns ought not to have got out of their holes for an hour...But the Colonel had been too...too exalted. Call it too exalted. He was not going to evacuate for a pack of...Damn orders!...The fellow, McKechnie, had at last had to beg Tietjens to give the order...Not that the order mattered.