mething in space. I was saying: "At last, my
chance has come. Now you shall see whether I fly from you or
no. _Now_ you shall do your worst and fail. I'm the hunter
now, not the hunted."

I was conscious of nothing but this quite childish
preoccupation with myself. I was, nevertheless, pleased with
myself. "There, you see," some one near me seemed to say,
"he's not quite so unpractical after all. He's full of
common sense." I looked at the row of sanitars squatting on
the ground, and felt like a schoolmaster with his children.

"You'd better go home then," I said scornfully. The
Feldscher, who was a short stocky man, with a red face and
melancholy eyes (something like a prize-fighter turned
poet), dismissed them. They went off in a line under the
hedge.

The man obviously thought me a tiresome prig. He had no
romantic illusions about the business; he had not been a
Feldscher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a
wound was a wound; when a man was dead he was _dead_.

However.... "Truly it's not far?" he asked the soldier.

"_Tak totchno_," the man answered, his face quite without
expression.

We crossed the moonlit field and for a brief moment silence
fell, as though an audience were holding its breath watching
us. On the other side were cottages, the outskirts of a tiny
village. Here beside these cottages we fell into a fantastic
world. That small village must in other times have been a
pretty place, nestling with its gardens by the river under
the hill. It seemed now to rock and rattle under the noise
of the cannon. All the open spaces were like white marble in
the moonlight and in these open spaces there was utter
silence and emptiness. The place seemed deserted--and yet,
in every shadow, in long lines under the cottage wells, in
little clumps and clusters round trees or ruins there were
eyes staring, the gleam of muskets shone, little specks of
light, dancing from wall to wall. Everywhere there were
bodies, legs, boots, arms, heads, sudden caps, sudden
fingers, sudden hot and streaming breaths. And over
everything this infernal noise and yet no human sound. A
nightmare of the true nightmare of dreams. The open silver
spaces, the little gardens thick with flowers, the high moon
and the starry sky,