[The Dark Forest by Hugh Walpole]@TWC D-Link book
The Dark Forest

CHAPTER VI
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He ran messages, found parcels and bags for the Sisters, collected sanitars, even discovered the mongrel terrier, tied a string to him and gave him to one of our soldiers to look after.

In what a confusion, as the evening fell, was the garden of our large white house! Huge wagons covered its lawn; horses, neighing, stamping, jumping, were dragged and pulled and threatened; officers, from stout colonels to very young lieutenants, came cursing and shouting, first this way and that.

A huge bag of biscuits broke away from a provision van and fell scattering on to the ground; the soldiers, told that they might help themselves, laughing and shouting like babies, fell upon the store.
But for the most part there was gloom, gloom, gloom under the evening sky.

Sometimes the reflections of distant rockets would shudder and fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils drawn across a gigantic slate--and always the dust rose and fell in webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the evening sun.
At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch, the student like a fish, in the old black carriage.

Molozov had "flung the world to the devil," Trenchard afterwards said, "and I sat there, you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk about." Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively English--and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and on Wednesday wonders whether any one in England knows the true value of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a passion for "ideas." To-night Trenchard was an Englishman.


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