everything is fluid and dissolved, the earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie the yellow pools with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded, and survivors slowly sink down.
The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans wearily to the silence.
Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live.
Then the heat sinks heavily into our shell holes like a jelly-fish, moist and oppressive, and on one of these late summer days, while bringing food, Kat falls. We two are alone. I bind up his wound; his shin seems to be smashed. It has got the bone, and Kat groans desperately: “At last—just at the last———”
I comfort him. “Who knows how long the mess will go on yet! Now you are saved———”
The wound begins to bleed fast. Kat cannot be left by himself while I try to find a stretcher. Anyway, I don’t know of a stretcher-bearer’s post in the neighbourhood.
Kat is not very heavy; so I take him up on my back and start off to the dressing-station with him.
Twice we rest. He suffers acutely on the way. We
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