He was right.
There was stillness; no battery, however distant, no pitter-patter of rifle fire, no chattering report of the machine guns.
Men began to cross the yard, slowly, without caution.

The dusk caught us so that I could not see the Colonel's face; a stream that cut the field, hidden in the day, was now suddenly revealed by a grinning careless moon.
Then a soldier crossed the yard to us, told us that Dr.Semyonov wished us to start and had sent us a guide; the wagons were ready.
At that instant, whence I know not, for the first time that day, excitement leapt upon me.
Events had hitherto passed before me like the shadowed film of a cinematograph; it had been as though some one had given me glimpses of a life, an adventure, a country with which I should later have some concern but whose boundaries I was not yet to cross.

Now, suddenly, whether it was because of the dark and the silence I cannot say, I had become, myself, an actor in the affair.

It was not simply that we were given something definite to do--we had had wounded during the morning--it was rather that, as in the children's game we were "hot," we had drawn in a moment close to some one or something of whose presence we were quite distinctly aware.

As we walked across the yard into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the hunters of Trenchard's dream.
Never, surely, before, had I known the world so silent.