All this time, as in one's dreams sometimes one holds off a nightmare, I was keeping my fear at bay.

I had now exactly the sensation that I had known so often in my dream, that I was standing somewhere in the dark, that the Enemy was watching me and waiting to spring.

But to-night I was only _nearly_ afraid.
One step on my part, one extra noise, one more flare of light, and I would abandon myself to panic, but, although the perspiration was wet on my forehead, my heart thumping, and my hands dry and hot, I was not yet _quite_ afraid.
I had a strange sensation of suffocation, as though I were at the bottom of a well, a well black and damp, with the stars of the sky miles away.

There came to me, with a kind of ironic sentimentality, the picture of the drawing-room at home in Polchester, the corner where the piano stood with a palm in an ugly brass pot just behind it, the table near the door with a brass Indian tray and a fat photograph-book with, gilt clasps, the picture of "Christ being Scourged" above the fireplace, and the green silk screen that stood under the picture in the summer.
A soldier stopped and spoke to me: "Your Honour, it's on the right--the next gate." I followed him without attention, having no doubt but that this was one of our own sanitars, and accompanied a group of soldiers that surrounded a bobbing kitchen on wheels.

I was puzzled by the kitchen because I knew that one had not been brought by our Otriad, but I thought that the doctors of the Division had perhaps begged our men to aid the army sanitars.
We hurried through a gate to the right, where in what appeared to be a yard of some kind, the kitchen was established and then, from out of the very earth as it seemed, soldiers appeared, clustering around it with their tin cans.