sun, a round glazed disk
sharply defined but without colour, was like a dirty plate in the sky.
Up again into the woods, then over rough cart tracks, they came
finally to a standstill amongst thick brushwood and dripping
undergrowth.

They could hear, very far away, the noise of cannon. The sanitars were
inclined to grumble. "Nice sort of business, looking for dead men
here, your Honour.... We must leave the carts here and go on foot.
What's it wet for? It hasn't been raining."

Why was it wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told
me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you
know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled,
and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant smell in the air.
But that afternoon I simply didn't care about anything, nothing
mattered." I don't think that the sanitars at that time respected
Trenchard very greatly. He wasn't, in any case, a man of authority and
his broken stammering Russian wouldn't help him. Then there is nothing
stranger than the fashion in which the Russian language will (if you
are a timid foreigner), of a sudden wilfully desert you. Be bold with
it and it may, somewhat haughtily, perhaps, consent to your use of
it ... be frightened of it and it will despise you for ever. Upon that
afternoon it deserted Trenchard; even his own language seemed to have
left him. His brain was cold and damp like the woods around him.

They passed through the thickets and came, to their great surprise,
upon a trench occupied by soldiers. This surprised them because they
had heard that the Austrians were many versts distant. The soldiers
also seemed to wonder. They explained their mission to a young officer
who seemed at first as though he would ask them something, then
checked himself, gave them permission to pass through and watched them
with grave gaze. After they had crossed the barbed wire the woods
suddenly closed about them as though a door had been softly shut
behind them. The ground now squelched beneath their feet, the sky
between the trees was like damp blotting-paper, and the smell that had
been only faintly in the air before was now heavy around them, blown
in thick gusts as the wind moved through the trees. Shrapnel now could
be distinctly heard at no great distance, with its hiss, its snap of
sound, and sometimes rifle-shots like the crack of a ball on a cricket
bat broke through the thickets. They separated, spreading