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By Root 4600 0

it seemed impossible that the sergeant six feet away could have heard him: 'Nothing more's come up I suppose, sir?' For another half min-ute the officer peered through the aperture. Then he turned and stepped down to the duckboards, the sentry turning with him, the sergeant moving again into file behind him, the officer himself already beginning to move when he spoke: 'When you are relieved, go down your dugout and stay there,' Then they were gone. The sentry began to turn back toward the aperture. Then he stopped. The runner was now standing on the duckboards below him; while they looked at each other the star-shell sniffed and traced its sneering arc and plopped into parachute, the faint glare washing over the runner's lifted face and then, even after the light itself had died, seeming to linger still on it as if the glow had not been refraction at all but water or perhaps grease; he spoke in a tense furious murmur not much louder than a whisper: 'Do you see now? Not for us to ask what nor why but just go clown a hole in the ground and stay there until they decide what to do. No: just how to do it because they already know what. Of course they wont tell us. They wouldn't have told us anything at all if they hadn't had to, hadn't had to tell us something, tell the rest of you something before the ones of us who were drawn out yesterday for special couriers out of Corps would get back in tonight and tell you what we had heard. And even then, they told you just enough to keep you in the proper frame of mind so that, when they said go down the dugouts and stay there you would do it. And even I wouldn't have known any more in time if on the way back in tonight I hadn't blundered onto that lorry train.

'No: that's wrong too; just known in time that they are already up to something. Because all of us know by now that something is wrong. Dont you see? Something happened down there yesterday morning in the French front, a regiment failed-burked-mutinied, we dont know what and are not going to know what because they aren't going to tell us. Besides, it doesn't matter what happened. What matters is, what happened afterward. At dawn yesterday a French regiment did something-did or failed to do something which a regiment in a front line is not supposed to do or fail to do, and as a result of it, the entire war in Western Europe took a recess at three o'clock yesterday afternoon. Dont you see? When you are in battle and one of your units fails, the last thing you do, dare do, is quit. Instead, you snatch up everything else you've got and fling it in as quick and hard as you can, because you know that that's exactly what the enemy is going to do as soon as he discovers or even suspects you have trouble on your side. Of course you're going to be one unit short of him when you meet; your hope, your Tuesday Night only hope, is that if you can only start first and be going the fastest, momentum and surprise might make up a little of it.

'But they didn't. Instead, they took a recess, remanded: the French at noon, us and the Americans three hours later. And not only us, but Jerry too. Dont you see? How can you remand in war, unless your enemy agrees too? And why should Jerry have agreed, after squatting under the sort of barrage which four years had trained him to know meant that an attack was coming, then no attack came or failed or whatever it was it did, and four years had certainly trained him to the right assumption for that; when the message, signal, request-whatever it was-came over suggesting a remand, why should he have agreed to it, unless he had a reason as good as the one we had, maybe the same reason we had? The same reason; those thirteen French soldiers apparently had no difficulty whatever going anywhere they liked in our back-areas for three years, why weren't they across yonder in Jerry's too, since we all know that, unless you've got the right properly signed paper in your hand, it's a good deal more difficult to go to Paris from here than to Berlin; any time you want to go east from here, all you need is a British or