mud, struggling up
and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and
be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud;
lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the
straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud,
motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back
in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through
the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy
men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of
mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with
a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever
through the endless mud.

Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men
squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding
feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds.

A world without colour. No other colour to be seen beneath the sky but
mud. The very buttons on the men's coats painted to make them look like
mud.

Mud and dirt! Dirty faces, dirty hands, dirty clothes, dirty food, dirty
beds; dirty interiors, from which there was never time to wash the mud;
dirty linen hanging up to dry, beneath which dirty children played, while
dirty women scolded. Filth and desolation all around. Shattered
farmsteads half buried in the mud; shattered gardens trampled into mud. A
weary land of foulness, breeding foulness; tangled wire the only harvest
of the fields; mile after mile of gaping holes, filled with muddy water;
stinking carcases of dead horses; birds of prey clinging to broken
fences, flapping their great wings.

A land where man died, and vermin increased and multiplied. Vermin on
your body, vermin in your head, vermin in your food, vermin waiting for
you in your bed; vermin the only thing that throve, the only thing that
looked at you with bright eyes; vermin the only thing to which the joy of
life had still been left.

Joan had found a liking gradually growing up in her for the quick-moving,
curt-tongued doctor. She had dismissed him at first as a mere butcher:
his brutal haste, his indifference apparently to the suffering he was
causing, his great, strong, hairy hands, with their squat fingers, his
cold grey eyes. But she learnt as time went by, that his callousness was
a thing that he put on at the same time that he tied his whit