A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [33]
This surge then of whitey-grey objects, sacrificed for fun, was intended...was intended ulti ultim...then...A voice, just under his camp-bed, said:
'Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze...' As who should say: 'Bring a candle for the Captain...Just like that! A dream!
It hadn't been as considerable a shock as you might have thought to a man just dozing off. Not really as bad as the falling dream: but quite as awakening...His mind had resumed that sentence.
The handful of Germans who had reached the trench, had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called Strategy. Probably. Stupid!...It was, of course, just like German spooks to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibelungen-like. Dwarfs probably!...They had sent over that thin waft of men under a blessed lot of barrage and stuff...A lot! a whole lot! It had been quite an artillery strafe. Ten thousand shells as like as not. Then, somewhere up the line they had probably made a demonstration in force. Great bodies of men, an immense surge. And twenty to thirty thousand shells. Very likely some miles of esplanade, as it were, with the sea battering against it. And only a demonstration in force...
It could not be real fighting. They had not been ready for their spring advance.
It had been meant to impress somebody imbecile...Somebody imbecile in Wallachia, or Sofia, or Asia Minor. Or Whitehall, very likely. Or the White House!...Perhaps they had killed a lot of Yankees--to make themselves Transatlantic popular. There were no doubt, by then, whole American Army Corps in the line somewhere. By then! Poor devils, coming so late into such an accentuated hell. Damnably accentuated...The sound of even that little bit of fun had been portentously more awful than even quite a big show say in '15. It was better to have been in then and got used to it...If it hadn't broken you, just by duration...
Might be to impress anybody...But who was going to be impressed? Of course, our legislators with the stewed-pear brains running about the ignoble corridors with cokebrize floors and mahogany doors...might be impressed. You must not rhyme!...Or, of course, our own legislators might have been trying a nice little demonstration in force, equally idiotic somewhere else, to impress someone just as unlikely to be impressed...This, then, would be the answer! But no one ever would be impressed again. We all had each other's measures. So it was just wearisome...
It was remarkably quiet in that thick darkness. Down below, the picks continued their sinister confidences in each other's ears...It was really like that. Like children in the corner of a schoolroom whispering nasty comments about their masters, one to the other...Girls, for choice...Chop, chop, chop, a pick whispered. Chop? another asked in an undertone. The first said Chopchopchop. Then Chup...And a silence of irregular duration...Like what happens when you listen to typewriting and the young woman has to stop to put in another page...
Nice young women with typewriters in Whitehall had very likely taken from dictation, on hot-pressed, square sheets with embossed royal arms, the plan for that very strafe...Because, obviously, it might have been dictated from Whitehall almost as directly as from Unter den Linden. We might have been making a demonstration in force on the Dwolologda in order to get the Huns to make a counter-demonstration in Flanders. Hoping poor old Puffles would get it in the neck. For they were trying still to smash poor old General Puffles and stop the single command...They might very well be hoping that our losses through the counter-demonstration would be so heavy that the Country would cry out for the evacuation of the Western Front...If they could get half-a-million of us killed perhaps the Country might...They, no doubt, thought it worth trying. But it was wearisome: