Something was burning his throat--he opened his eyes, gazed into a man's face close to his. Consciousness came back in a rush. He pushed away the brandy flask that was being pressed against his teeth and struggled to his feet. Strong arms supported him. Several men were round him, looking at him. He was close to a road, and along that road he thought he saw batteries of artillery galloping at full speed. He was not certain of their reality. They passed like phantoms in his vision, wavering up and down. He wanted to do something--to ask something--what was it? He all but fixed the elusive thought--and lost it. His hand felt for the duplicate report-book in his pocket--his desire was connected with that. The report-book had gone. Then a fragment of his intangible preoccupation floated, visible as it were, in his brain. He clutched at it.
"What--what guns are those?" he asked thickly.
"Divisional artillery--Sixth Division," came the reply. "All right. We got your message."
The scout put his hand to his brow and then, dropping it, stared at it stupidly. It was red.
"All right," said the voice. "You're hit--but not seriously. Lie down."
The scout collected all his faculties in an attempt to bring out one more thought from the obscurity which filled his brain.
"Just one o'clock." The voice appeared to recede to an enormous distance, although he felt the speaker's face close to his. "They're in time--don't worry. Lie down. The ambulances are coming in a minute or two."
"Bagged 'em both. You came down beautifully--like a kite." The voice sounded from worlds away.
"In time!" He breathed the words rather than spoke them. They came like the sigh of a man utterly spent.
The man who had been supporting him turned round with a jump and focussed his binoculars on the wooded hill. A crowd of white puffs was breaking out in the air above it.
The scout, left unattended, swayed with hands stretched out like a blind man. The field whirled round and round suddenly with a fearful rapidity and then rushed up and struck him.
The man with the binoculars ignored his prone body.
"Beat 'em on the post!" he shouted in joyous excitement. "By the Lord! Beat 'em on the post!"
The subaltern commanding this section of the trench sat in a hunched position in the narrow corridor of earth topped with sandbags. His knees drawn up to serve as a support for the writing-pad, he wrote quickly between long pauses when he bit the end of his pencil and stared reflectively at the brown clay wall some two feet in front of his nose. At his side a man stood, bent and motionless, peering into the lower end of a long box, very narrow in proportion to its length, which he held against the side of the trench so that the other end just rose above the wall of sandbags. Further view down the trench in that direction was barred by the traverse--the thick dividing-wall of earth that would localise the effect of a shell-burst or a bomb. All was quiet. The subaltern might have imagined that only he and the look-out at his side remained buried in this flat landscape where once two armies had flung fire and noise and steel at one another, hidden from the sight of those who should have come to tell him that the war was over and the armies stolen away. He did not so imagine. Ever present to his mind was the parallel line of sandbags, some fifty yards away, between him and which stretched a tangle of wire overgrown with rank grasses and tufts of corn. That parallel line was the great permanent fact in his existence. He knew it in its every aspect better than he had ever previously known anything on this earth. Not a spot on that apparently deserted wall might change without his being interested to the quick. Even as he wrote, the feeling and the knowledge of it were concrete in his brain, constraining him to this cramped attitude.