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By Root 4430 0

with leaves, scattered for a hundred metres. When they overtook her, she was holding in her hand a shard of the pale new unpainted wood which had been the coffin; she spoke to the husband by name, quite gently: You'll have to go back and get the shovel,' But before he could turn, the girl had already passed him, running, frantic yet unerring, deer-light among the craters and what remained of the weeds and the quenchless poppies, getting smaller and smaller yet still running, back toward the house. That was Sunday. When the girl returned with the shovel, still running, they took turns with it, all that day until it was too dark to see. They found a few more shards and fragments of the coffin, but the body itself was gone.

TOMORROW

t o nee more there were twelve of them, though this time they were led by a sergeant. The carriage was a special one, though it was still third class; the seats had been removed from the forward compartment and on the floor of it rested a new empty military coffin. The thirteen of them had left Paris at midnight and by the time they reached St. Mihiel they were already fairly drunk. Because the job, mission, was going to be an unpleasant one, now that peace and victory had really come Tomorrow to Western Europe in November (six months after the false armistice in May, that curious week's holiday which the war had taken which had been so false that they remembered it only as phenomenon) and a man, even though still in uniform, might have thought himself free, at least until they started the next one, of yesterday's cadavers. So they had been issued an extra wine and brandy ration to compensate for this, in charge of the sergeant who was to have doled it out to them at need. But the sergeant, who had not wanted the assignment either, was a dour introvert who had secluded himself in an empty compartment forward with a porno-graphic magazine as soon as the train left Paris. But, alert for the opportunity, when the sergeant quitted his compartment at Chalons (they didn't know why nor bother: perhaps to find a urinal; possibly it was merely official) two of them (one had been a fairly successful picklock in civilian life before and planned to resume that vocation as soon as he was permitted to doff his uniform) entered the compartment and opened the sergeant's valise and extracted two bottles of brandy from it.

So when the Bar-le-Duc express dropped their carriage at St. Mihiel, where the local for Verdun would engage it, they (except the sergeant) were a shade better than fairly drunk; and when, shortly after daylight, the local set the carriage on a repaired siding in the rubble of Verdun, they were even another shade better than that; by that time also the sergeant had discovered the ravishing of his valise and counted the remaining bottles and, what with the consequent uproar of his outraged and angry denunciation, plus their own condition, they did not even notice the old woman at first; only then to remark that there had been something almost like a committee waiting for them, as though word of the time of their arrival and their purpose too had preceded them-a clump, a huddle, a small group, all men save one, of laborers from the town and peasants from the adjacent countryside, watching them quietly while the sergeant (carrying the valise) snarled and cursed at them, out of which that one, the old woman, had darted at once and was now tugging at the sergeant's sleeve-a peasant woman older in appearance than in years when seen close, with a worn lined face which looked as though she too had not slept much lately, but which was now tense and even alight with a sort of frantic eagerness and hope.

'Eh?' the sergeant said at last. 'What? What is it you want?'

'You are going out to the forts,' she said. 'We know why. Take me with you,'

'You?' the sergeant said; now they were all listening. 'What for?'

'It's Theodule,' she said. 'My son. They told me he was killed there in but they didn't send him back home and they wont let me go out there and find him.'

'Find him?' the sergeant said. 'After