Most of us went to bed, but a few continued to pace up and down in great agitation. One man picked up his blankets in a bundle and went off in order to sleep in the open fields, far away from the camp.
An hour had hardly passed before distant anti-aircraft fire broke out again. Anxiety began to renew its tortures. We heard the dull, sullen roar of bombs exploding at intervals. Then fourteen burst in rapid succession as though a gigantic ball of solid iron had bounced fourteen times with thundering reverberations on a resonant surface. But the sound of firing died down and soon all was quiet. And then sleep came upon us and our troubles were over for a time.
The next morning was windless and clear. All day we kept looking at the sky, but not a cloud was to be seen.
The evening approached, darkness fell, and the stars shone. "Lights Out" was sounded and we extinguished our candles. None of us said a word, but everybody knew what everybody else was thinking of. And soon we heard the familiar buzz. At first it only came from one propeller, but others arrived and the sound multiplied and increased in volume, and at the same time it rose and fell in irregular gusts and regular pulsations. Anti-aircraft firing burst out suddenly and for a few minutes there was a blending of whining, whistling, rushing sounds overhead punctuated by faint reports. The firing ceased, but the droning noises continued louder than ever. The German aeroplanes seemed to be above us like a swarm of angry wasps, and above us they seemed to remain, hovering and circling. We awaited the downward rush and the deafening thunder-clap that would destroy us all. One man was groaning loudly. Another shivered. I could hear the chattering of many teeth. My neighbour trembled violently and cowered beneath his blankets. But his fear grew so strong that he could not bear it any longer. He got up and said in a strained voice, trying to appear calm, "I'm goin' to 'ave a look at 'em." He ran out of the marquee and disappeared. I found my powers of resistance ebbing. I was unable to control my imagination. I saw my comrades and myself blown to pieces. I saw the clerk in the office of the C.C.S. write out the death-intimations on a buff slip and filling in a form. I saw a telegraph boy taking the telegram to my home. He stopped on the way in order to talk to a friend. Then he whistled and threw a stone at a dog. He sauntered through the garden gate and knocked at the front door. The door opened ... but I could not face the rest, and with a tremendous mental impulse I turned my mind away to other things. But my terrible thoughts lay in wait for me like tigers ready to rush upon me as soon as my will relaxed its efforts. I tried to compromise, and I imagined myself killed and invented all the details of a post-mortem examination and burial. I found some relief in these imaginings, but soon that implacable telegram claimed my attention once more and drew me on to what I dared not face. I sought distraction by muttering some verses of poetry to myself. They had no meaning to me, they were just empty sound and their rhythm had a hideous pulsation like that other pulsation overhead:
"He above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower...."
and so on, line after line. The dreariness of the verses grew so intense as to be almost intolerable. At the same time I was dimly conscious of the fact that at one time I thought this passage beautiful. But the beat of the blank verse carried me on. Sometimes it seemed to blend with the buzzing of those angry wasps above and sometimes the two rhythms would vie with each other for speed, so that they hurried along each alternately ahead of the other. I came to a line where my memory failed me. I faltered for a moment, but the droning sound seemed to grow into an enormous roar, and I leapt back to the beginning:
"He above the rest...."
and then on and on a second time until my head throbbed with the double pulsation.
Suddenly a man who had been lying on the far side of the marquee got up and said:
"I've had enough of this, I'm going to sleep in a ditch."