“Dear old Roger (it ran),—
“We have been badly knocked about, and are here to refit. Seven of our officers killed and four wounded; 348 out of 726 men killed and wounded—some horribly maimed—my poor fellows. This is butchery, not war. The Colonel was wounded early in the day and I was in command. Kelsey is gone, and Marriott, and little Kennedy, of those you knew. Writing to mothers and wives is hard work. You might go and see Mrs. Kelsey. She would like it. I have not a scratch and am well, but the damnable horror of this war is past belief. I have told Vi as little as possible, and nothing of the following. Poor von Schäde was brought into our lines, strangely enough, last evening, terribly mutilated. They had to amputate both legs and right arm at the clearing station. I managed to get down after things were over to see him. But he was still unconscious. We are in a ruined château on the right of —— Forest. There is a lake in which we can bathe—a godsend.
“Just midnight; and while I write a nightingale is singing. It goes on though the roar of the guns is echoing through the forest like a great sigh, and even the crash of an occasional shell does not disturb it. I suppose born and bred to it. My God, what wouldn’t I give to wake up and hear the nightingales singing to the river at Thorpe and find this was only an evil dream!
“20th. Von Schäde is gone. I was with him at the end, but it was terrible. I could not leave him and yet perhaps it would have been better. He seemed mad with hatred. Poor fellow, one can hardly wonder. It was not only himself, so mutilated, but he seemed convinced, certain, that they were beaten. He cursed England and the English. Me and mine and Thorpe. Even Vi. It was indescribably horrible. The evil of this war incarnate as it were——”
The letter broke off, and ended with the scrawled initials
“Yrs., R. C.”
and an undecipherable postscript:
“Don’t tell Vi.”
Had he been called away hurriedly by the falling shell which had buried his men? The envelope was addressed in another writing. She felt it must have been so. Very swiftly he had followed the man who had died cursing him and his, out into the world where thought and emotion, unclogged by this physical matter, are so much the more powerful and uncontrolled. Had they met, these two strong spirits, moving on different lines of force, working for different ends? What had been let loose when Karl von Schäde had died in that British clearing station, cursing “England and the English, me and mine and Thorpe. Even Vi.” The great emotional forces, so much greater than the physical body which imprisons them, what power was there when freed; this hatred in a man of great and cultivated intellect, whose aim had been no mean or contemptible thing, whose aim had been power, what was that force on the other side of death? How much could it accomplish if, with added knowledge, it so willed?
Ruth shivered in the warm June night. A sense of danger to the farm stole over her. A warning of something sinister, impending, brooding, as the great thunder-cloud had loomed up before it burst. She stepped out over the low window-ledge on to the terrace, looked across the sleeping beauty before her. Still she held the papers in her hand. A glimmering moon was rising behind the trees, a little faint wind whispered among the leaves. They made black patterns on the silvered grass as it moved them very gently. The wind fell, and with it a great stillness. And out of the stillness came to Ruth Seer a Word.