down in the blazing road, his
arms covered with blood, pincers in one hand and bandages in the other
and the inside of his shelter with such a green, filthy smell coming
out of it that you'd think the roof would burst! I filled seven of my
wagons, sent them back and went forward with the remaining three. We
were climbing now, up through the Forest road, the shell, very close,
making a terrific noise, and in between the scream of the shell the
birds singing like anything!

The road turned the corner and then we _were_ in the middle of it! Now
_here's_ the worst thing I've seen with my eyes since I came to the
war--worst thing I shall ever see perhaps. One looks back, you know,
to one of those old average afternoons at Polchester, my father coming
back from golf, I myself going into the old red-walled garden for tea,
with some novel under my arm, the cathedral bell ringing for Evensong
just over the wall across the Green, then slowly dropping to its
close, then the faint murmur of the organ. Some bird twittering in a
tree overhead, buttered toast in a neat pile placed carefully over hot
water to keep it warm; honey, heavy home-made cake, perhaps the local
weekly paper with the "Do you know that ..." column demanding one's
critical attention. One's annoyed because to-morrow some tiresome
fellow's coming to luncheon, because one wishes to buy some china that
one can't afford, because the wife of the Precentor said to the Dean's
sister that young Trenchard would be an old man in a year or two....
One sips one's tea, the organ leads the chants, the sun sinks below
the wall.... That! This! ... there's the Forest road hot like red-hot
iron under the sun; it winds away into the Forest, but so far as the
eye can see it is covered with things that have been left by flying
men--_such_ articles! Swords, daggers, rifles, cartridge-cases, of
course, but also books, letters, a hair-brush, underclothes,
newspapers, these tilings in thick, tangled profusion, rifles in
heaps, cartridge-cases by the hundred! Under the sun up and down the
road there are dead and dying, Russians and Austrians together. The
Forest is both above and below the road and from out of it there comes
a continual screaming. There is every note in this babel of voices,
mad notes, plaintive notes, angry notes, whimpering notes. One wounded
man is very slowly trying to drag himself across the road, and his
foot which is nearly severed from his leg waggles behind him. On