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By Root 10488 0

to see her. Because if one wanted to get into the house unheard, one wouldn't cross the gravel, but approach the house from the rear, or the far side. There was a sound from the bedroom and Conchis appeared in the lamplit doorway, carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. I waited till he had set it by the candle. "You know someone has just come in downstairs." He betrayed not the least surprise. He uncorked the bottle and carefully poured the brandy. "A man or a woman?" "A woman." "Ah." He handed me my brandy. "This is made at the monastery of Arkadion in Crete." He snuffed the candle and went back to his chair. I remained standing. "You did say you lived alone." "I said that I liked to give the islanders the impression that I lived alone." The dryness in his voice made me feel that I was being very na�. The woman was simply his mistress, whom for some reason he did not want me to meet; or perhaps who did not want to meet me. I went and sat down on the lounging chair. "I'm being tactless. Forgive me." "Not tactless. Perhaps a little lacking in imagination." "I thought perhaps I was meant to notice what obviously I'm not meant to notice." "Noticing is not a matter of choice, Nicholas. But explaining is." "Of course." "Patience." "I'm sorry." "Do you like the brandy?" "Very much." "It always reminds me of Armagnac. Now. Shall I continue?" As he began to speak again I smelt the night air, I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I touched a piece of chalk in my pocket. But a strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality.

19

"I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted. I had no aptitude with the rifle. I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly. But I was considered 'sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast. So I was selected as company runner. "My training company commander was a Regular Army officer of thirty or so. His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg sometime before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal. "Before our training was finished, he received an urgent posting to France. That same day he told me, as if he were giving me a magnificent present, that he thought he could pull strings and have me posted with him. Only a man as blank as he would have failed to see the hollowness of my enthusiasm. But unfortunately he had grown fond of me. "He had a brain capable of only one idea at a time. With him it was the _offensive a outrance_--the headlong attack. Foch's great contribution to the human race. 'The force of the shock is the mass,' he used to say--'the force of the mass is the impulsion and the force of the impulsion is the morale. High morale, high impulsion, high shock--victory!' Thump on the table--'Victory!' He made us all learn it by heart. At bayonet drill. Vic-tor-ree! Poor fool. "I spent a last two days with my parents and Lily. She and I swore undying love. The idea of heroic sacrifice had contaminated her, as it had contaminated my father. My mother said nothing, except an old Greek proverb: A dead man cannot be brave. I remembered that later. "We went straight to the front. One of the company commanders had died of pneumonia, and it was his place Montague had to take. This was early in 1915. It sleeted and rained incessantly. We spent long hours in stationary trains in railway sidings, in grey towns under greyer skies. One knew the troops who had been in action. The ones who sang their way to death, the new recruits, were the dupes of the romance of war. But the others were dupes of the reality of war, of the ultimate _Totentanz_. Like those sad old men and women who haunt every casino, they knew the wheel must always win in the end. But they could not force themselves to leave. "We spent a few days on manoeuvres. And then one day Montague addressed