"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."
"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.