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By Root 4523 0

which he would match: 'And neither of us would have got back in if it had not been for his pass from the Ministry of War in Pans. So you dont even know yet what they have done to you. They've sealed you up in here-the whole front from the Channel to Switzerland. Though from what I saw in Paris last night-not only military police, the French and American and ours, but the civilian police too-I wouldn't have thought they'd have enough left to seal anything with. But they have; the Colonel himself could not have got back in this morning unless the pass bore the signature of that old man in the castle at Chaulnesmont. It's like another front, manned by all the troops in the three forces who cant speak the language belonging to the coat they came up from undei the equator and half around the world to die in, in the cold and the wet-Senegalese and Moroccans and Kurds and Chinese and Malays and Indians-Polynesian Melanesian Mongol and Negro who couldn't understand the password nor read the pass either: only to recognise perhaps by memorised rote that one cryptic hieroglyph. But not you. You cant even get out now, to try to come back in. No-man's Land is no longer in front of us. It's behind us now. Before, the faces behind the machine guns and the rifles at least thought Caucasian thoughts even if they didn't speak English or French or American; now they dont even think Caucasian thoughts. They're alien. They dont even have to care. They have tried for four years to get out of the white man's cold and mud and rain just by killing Germans, and failed. Who knows? by killing off the Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans whom they have bottled up here, they might all be on the way home tomorrow. So there is nowhere for us to go now but east-'

Now the sentry moved. That is, he did not move yet, he dared not: he simply made a single infinitesimal transition into a more convulsive rigidity, speaking now, harsh and obscene, cursing the rapt immobilised faces: 'Are you going to let them get away with this? Dont you know we're all going to be for it? They have already killed Lieutenant Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe-'

'Nonsense,' the runner said. 'They aren't dead. Didn't I just tell you I have learned how to use the flat of a pistol? It's his money. That's all. Everyone in the battalion owes him. He wants us to sit here and do nothing until he has earned his month's profit. Then he wants them to start it up again so we will be willing to bet him twenty shillings a month that we will be dead in thirty days. Which is what they are going to do-start it up again. You all saw those four aeroplanes yesterday, and all that archie. The archie were blank shells. There was a German general in the hun aeroplane. Last night he was at Chaulnesmont. He would have to have been; else, why did he come at all? Why else wafted across on a cloud of blank archie shell, with three S. E. 's going through the motion of shooting him down with blank ammunition? Oh yes, I was there; I saw the lorries fetching up the shells night before last, and yesterday I stood behind one of the batteries firing them when one of the S. E.'s-that pilot would have been a child of course, too young for them to have dared inform him in advance, too young to be risked with the knowledge that fact and truth are not the same-dived and put a burst right into the battery and shot me in the skirt of my tunic with something-whatever it was-which actually stung a little for a moment. What else, except to allow a German general to visit the French and the British and the American ones in the Allied Commandery-in-Chief without Thursday alarming the rest of us bipeds who were not born generals but simply human beings? And since they-all four of them---would speak the same language, no matter what clumsy isolated national tongues they were compelled by circumstance to do it in, the mat-ter probably took them no time at all and very likely the German one is already on his way back home at this moment, not even needing the blank shells now because the guns will be already loaded with live ones, merely