One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 8

the boyau had caved in, and from
the level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the
tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the
German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay
were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men
with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and
boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the
trenches and the shell-holes.
"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a serious
case all day."
"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb....
You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."
"It was the Boche who did that.... We took that slope from them two
months ago.... How does it grow?"
"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.
He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the sky,
like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept asking
himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoop gently
out of the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where he could lie
amid the amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously down at the
spinning ball of the earth? It might have beauty if he were far enough
away to clear his nostrils of the stench of pain.
"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much nearer

we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to anyone
else."
"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the
people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."
The little doctor nodded.
"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's
fighting about anything.... God, it's so hideously stupid!" cried Martin,
suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his passionate revolt.
"Life is stupid," said the little doctor sententiously.
Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns.
"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'd
better get your car ready, my friend."
The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that led to
the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the
lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the
wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of
blood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the
middle of the man had been, where had been the curved belly and the
genitals, where the thighs had joined with a strong swerving of muscles
to the trunk, was a depression, a hollow pool of blood, that glinted a
little in the cold diffusion of grey light from the west.
The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed
down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green
smoke. At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and
Tom Randolph, Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their
dirty nails spread flat and his head resting on the table between them,
so that Martin could see the stiff black hair on top of his head and the
dark nape of his neck going into shadow under the collar of the flannel
shirt.

"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide
and no damned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.
"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were God
and could look at it like that... Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred
so?"
"A question of taste... as the lady said when she kissed the cow."
"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't be. It
even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, like Higgins, who
believes that the Bible was written in God's own handwriting and that
the newspapers tell the truth."
"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those
Hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."
"It is a stupid affair, la vie, as the doctor at P.I. said yesterday...."
"Hell, yes. . ."
They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in
sparkling finger-like streams.
"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back
his head and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about
what happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"
"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plumtree, a wonderfully nice place
near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane....