Every power of the will, every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes. Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, impervious to human ingenuity.
In the quieter hours of the night, they crouched side by side formulating fresh schemes and going over one by one the weak points of their defenses.
They hadn’t enough guns, or any reinforcements; they had no dry clothes. The men were not accustomed to wet climates or invisible enemies.
They wanted more sand-bags and more bombs, and it would be better for human beings not to be in trenches for three weeks at a time in the rain.
They sat there pitting their brains against these obstacles, creating the miraculous ingenuity of war. Personal questions dropped. Lionel saw that Winn was ill beyond mending, but he saw it without definite thought — it was one more obstacle in a race of obstacles. It wouldn’t do for Winn to break down. He fitted himself without explanations, selflessly, with magnificent disinterestedness, into his friend’s needs. He was like a staff in the hand of a blind man.
Winn himself had begun to wonder, moving about in his sea of mud, how much worse you could be before you were actually done. His cough shook him incessantly, his brain burned, and his hands were curiously weak. He was conscious that he had to repeat to himself all day long the things he had to do; even then he might have forgotten if there had not been Lionel. He might have forgotten to give orders. In spite of everything a strange inner bliss possessed him which nourished him like food. He had Claire’s letters, they never failed him, they were as regular as the beats of a heart. Something in him lived that had never lived before, something that did not seem likely ever to die.
It was helping him as Lionel was helping him to get through things. What he had to get through was dying. It was going to be quicker than the way they had of dying in Davos, but it mightn’t be quick enough; it might drive him out of his last fight, back to an inconceivable stale world.
This must not happen. Lionel must live and he must die, where he was. You could bully fate, if you were prepared to pay the price for it.
Winn was not sure yet what the price would be, he was only sure that he was prepared to pay it.
They were to be relieved next day. The men were so worn out that they could hardly move. Winn and Lionel found their own bodies difficult to control; they had become heavy and inert from want of sleep, but their minds were alive and worked with feverish swiftness, like the minds of people in a long illness, when consciousness creeps above the level of pain.