The Road

The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep.  He was all worn out by the continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the dugouts and dazing his brains for weeks.  He was pretty well fed up.

The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform and of particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face.  The Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received an order, and took a stick at once and beat up the tired men.  For a message had come to the battery that some English (God punish them!) were making a road at X.

The gun was fired.  It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days when our luck is out.  The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British working party.  It did the Germans little good.  It did not stop the deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was driving misery down like a wedge into their spirits.  It did not improve the temper of the officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered as acutely as ever under the Sergeant-Major.  But it stopped the road for that day.

I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.

Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to work; and next day and the day after.  Shells came, but went short or over; the shell holes were neatly patched up; the road went on.  Here and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not many of them were left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones.  Sometimes the engineers would come:  that was when streams were crossed.  The engineers made their bridges, and the infantry working party went on with the digging and laying down stones.  It was monotonous work.  Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and thunder.  And so the road went on.

They came to a wide river.  They went through a great forest.  They passed the ruins of what must have been quite fine towns, big prosperous towns with universities in them.  I saw the infantry working party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way on from where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day.  And behind them curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry going up to the trenches, and going back along it into reserve.  They marched at first, but in a few days they were going up in motors, grey busses with shuttered windows.  And then the guns came along it, miles and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further off over the hills.  And then one day the cavalry came by.  Then stores in wagons, the thunder muttering further and further away.  I saw farm-carts going down the road at X. And then one day all manner of horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and women and boys all going by to X. There was going to be a fair.