“John—­I want to get him in before he dies.”

“All right.  Get in under there.  Take his head.”

“Hadn’t I better take his feet?”

“You’d better take what you’re told to.”

She stiffened to the weight, heaved up her shoulder.  Two men came running down the steps to help her as John pulled.

“They’ll be glad,” he said, “to see him.”

* * * * *

She was in the yard of the hospital, swabbing out the car, when John came to her.

The back and side of the hospital, the long barracks of the annex and the wall at the bottom enclosed a waste place of ochreish clay.  A long wooden shed, straw-white and new, was built out under the red brick of the annex.  She thought it was a garage.  John came out of the door of the shed.  He beckoned to her as he came.

“Come here,” he said.  “I want to show you something.”

They went close together, John gripping her arm, in the old way, to steer her.  As they came to the long wall of the shed his eyes slewed round and looked at her out of their corners.  She had seen that sidelong, attentive look once before, when she was a little girl, in the eyes of a schoolboy who had taken her away and told her something horrid.  The door of the shed stood ajar.  John half led, half pushed her in.

“Look there—­” he said.

The dead men were laid out in a row, on their backs; greyish-white, sallow-white faces upturned; bodies straight and stiff on a thin litter of straw.  Pale grey light hovered, filtered through dust.

It came from some clearer place of glass beyond that might have been a carpenter’s shop, partitioned off.  She couldn’t see what was going on there.  She didn’t see anything but the dead bodies, the dead faces, and John’s living face.

He leaned against the wall; his head was thrown back, his eyes moved glistening under the calm lids; the corners of his mouth and the wings of his nostrils were lifted as he laughed:  a soft, thin laugh breathed out between the edges of his teeth.  He pointed.

“There’s your man.  Shows how much they wanted him, doesn’t it?”

He lay there, the last comer, in his uniform and bloody bandages, his stiff, peaked mouth open, his legs stretched apart as they had sprung in his last agony.

“Oh, John—­”

She cried out in her fright and put her hands over her eyes.  She had always been afraid of the dead bodies.  She didn’t want to know where they put them, and nobody told her.

John gripped her wrists so that he hurt her and dragged down her hands.  He looked into her eyes, still laughing.

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything,” he said.

“I’m not afraid when we’re out there.  I’m only afraid of seeing them.  You know I am.”

She turned, but he had put himself between her and the door.  She wrenched at the latch, sobbing.