He flung himself on the ground, rubbing the wet soil on to his face, whispering desperately: "Oh God!--Oh God!--Oh God!" On the day following we did not know of what had happened.

Trenchard was not with us, as he was sent about midday with some sanitars to bury the dead in a wood five miles from M----.

That must have been, in many ways, the most terrible day of his life and during it, for the first time, he was to know that unreality that comes to every one, sooner or later, at the war.

It is an unreality that is the more terrible because it selects from reality details that cannot be denied, selects them without transformation, saying to his victim: "These things are as you have always seen them, therefore this world is as you have always seen it.

It is real, I tell you." Let that false reality be admitted and there is no more peace.
On this day there were the two sanitars, whose faces now he knew, walking solidly beside his cart, there were the little orchards with the soldiers' tents sheltering beneath them, the villages with the old men, the women, the children, watching, like ghosts, their passage, the fields in which the summer corn was ripening, the first trembling heat and beauty of a quiet day in early June.