“Tomato ketchup with duck's eggs. Draw up a chair,” said Boylan. He appeared just now to see the steward's blouse.
“Samarc takes the field to-day. It's for him,” Peter explained.... “He's going out to kill himself. Only one reservation--that he kill no one else.”
“You're letting the ketchup burn,” Peter said mildly.
“I suppose that's what he really means to do,” Big Belt observed, after a moment. “And what are we to do about it?”
“I thought I would stand by a little--not so as to be a nuisance, you know--”
They ate in silence--a thousand things to say.
“I won't be very far from the staff,” said Peter, hurrying back to the hospital. “Poor old Samarc has two wounds, you know--”
It wasn't a day to explain things--not a day to talk. Men afield can never tell what they are doing; some devilish irony is in the air. They laugh; they listen; they hope--only a jest comes. The most thrilling and stupendous situations bring forth but a curse or a roar. Human throats are inarticulate, afield; the reality that voices heroic utterance and makes it memorable is not at work in man-fabric; splendid faces and brave actions--but the words are the revealers of emptiness. For the animal is awake and upstanding; the spirit that quickens reality is apart.
The battlefield opened to Mowbray's eyes that day with abnormal clearness, as if he had brought rest and reflection to a problem that long had harried him, He felt singularly light and full of ease--as one does sometimes in the first hours of the day after a sleepless night. The day was wild with west wind, a touch of south still clinging. The east arrayed itself again and again in all the delicate blends of pink and gray, watery yellow, rose, and azure; a different arrangement at each glance, as if separate groups of maidens followed each around a Roman bath.
Samarc was given a seat in an ammunition wagon, with orders to join his battery. Peter found his horse, already saddled by Boylan, and overtook the wagon train as it left the town. In a halt for the way to clear, Kohlvihr and his staff passed, Dabnitz and Boylan riding together. The General sat soft and lumpy in the saddle, his eyes small and feverish, his face hotly red. The staff passed on, all except Boylan believing that the correspondent had fallen in behind. Riding with the wagons, Peter frequently turned to the terrifying bandage above the steward's blouse. When the light was right, he caught a glint of the eyes beneath.