“What is she doing?” I glanced lazily over the sunlit distance in her direction. “She’s mending something, isn’t she?”
Dan shook his head. Then, in order to give me another chance to guess, he added, “And it’s got to do with what Bully Beef’s doing.”
“He’s gathering wild-flowers.”
“Yes, He’s gathering wild-flowers,” Dan said. “But she ain’t mending anything; she’s putting something together.”
I unslung my glasses and focussed them to get a closer view. “Ah, I see what she’s up to now. She’s made a kind of pillow out of a piece of horse-blanket and she’s stuffing it with leaves.”
“It’s a pillow for his head,” Dan said solemnly, “and the flowers is to cover him, before we throw the earth on.”
Then I knew what Dan wanted and, rising to my feet, accompanied him without further words. In the wood, which surrounds our camp, we have just buried Standish, with Suzette’s pillow beneath his head and Bully Beef’s wild-flowers for a covering. On account of the way he died, there was no parade of the battery to do him honour: but many of the men attended. Trottrot was there, whom everyone regards as untrustworthy under shell-fire. He was one of those who lowered the body, bruised by its last night’s march on the gun-seat, into its narrow bed. While the short ceremony was in progress, the sound of the gramophone was stopped and the shouts of the base-ball pitchers died into silence. As we were seen to emerge from the wood, with scarcely a moment’s delay, the sounds started up—not in callousness, but in a frenzied effort to forget. It was fully an hour after I had again seated myself among the bales of hay that I saw Suzette and Trottrot come back. I could guess what they had been doing—making the place beautiful. But why should Trottrot do that? He had not been the dead man’s friend. Was it because he himself had come so near to cowardice that he could stoop to be tender?
I shall have no time to see what they have done to mark the grave, for a runner has just brought a movement order from Brigade that we are to be prepared to march by sun-down. It doesn’t give us much of a margin, for the smoke-gray haze of evening is already creeping through the tree-tops. The Major and Heming have not yet retuned.