The two subalterns chatted awhile over their cigarettes, while the red gold of the western sky faded into rose. They talked of the little incidents of mess and trench, magnified by their isolation from the main stream of life, and then, harking back, of the things that once had been so important to them in London town, and were now so dwindled and remote. A year ago Lennard was a critic who was read, and Wilson, the tall subaltern, a painter whose first success was hanging on the line. Both were, or had been, highly polished products of what we called, proudly, civilisation. As they talked the old scenes came back to them, obliterating the present. At last Wilson rose, responsive to a subtle inner sense of time measured, independent of his consciousness.
"Well, so long, old thing," he said, standing up and straightening his tall form, fatigued with so much bending. The momentary forgetfulness was fatal. On the instant a rifle cracked and the lanky subaltern collapsed as though his knees had been knocked from under him.
"My God!" cried Lennard, limb-paralysed by this brutally tragic reassertion of his environment. Trembling, his heart seeming to stop and swell within him, he bent down to his friend. He touched mere clothed flesh, heavy and inert, on which the flies had already settled. They buzzed away, indignantly asserting their right of pasture. A madness of anger at this wanton annihilation of a life that was not just a dull living but an irradiation of the spirit, connoting civilisation, highly conscious, swept over him. He burst into a torrent of incoherent wrathful curses.
"That was 'Ermann, sir," said the observer at the periscope. "I spotted the flash, in among them bricks."
Lennard rose, fiercely vengeful.
"Let me look. Where did you see the flash?"
"Three o'clock from that bit of greenstuff in the middle, sir," replied the man, ceding his place at the periscope. "You'll see a dark spot—that's 'is loophole."
Lennard gazed down into the mirror of the instrument. There was just light enough for him to pick up the spot indicated.
"Very good." He strode, with bent back, down the trench, muttering to himself.