Sylvia said:
"It's not always mud, then?" and Tietjens, to her: "He'll stop if you don't like it." She said monotonously: "No . . . I want to hear."
Cowley drew himself for his considerable effect:
"Mud!" he said. "Not then. . . . Not by half. . . . I tell you, ma'am, we trod on the frozen faces of dead Germans as we doubled. . . . A terrible lot of Germans we'd killed a day or so before. . . . That was no doubt the reason they give up the trenches so easy: difficult to attack from, they was. . . . Anyhow, they left the dead for us to bury, knowing probably they were going, with a better 'eart! . . . But it fair put the wind up me anyhow to think of what their counter-attack was going to be. . . . The counter-attack is always ten times as bad as the preliminary resistance. They 'as you with the rear of their trenches—the parades, we call it—as your front to boot. So I was precious glad when the moppers-up and supports come and went through us. . . . Laughing, they was. . . . Wiltshires. . . . My missus comes from that county. . . . Mrs. Cowley, I mean. . . . So I'd seen the captain go down earlier on and I'd said: 'There's another of the best stopped one. . . .'" He dropped his voice a little: he was one of the noted yarners of the regiment: "Caught 'is foot, 'e 'ad, between two 'ands. . . . Sticking up out of the frozen ground. . . . As it might be in prayer. . . . Like this!" He elevated his two hands, the cigar between the fingers, the wrists close together and the fingers slightly curled inwards: "Sticking up in the moonlight. . . . Poor devil!"
Tietjens said:
"I thought perhaps it was O Nine Morgan I saw that night. . . . Naturally I looked dead. . . . I hadn't a breath in my body. . . . And I saw a Tommy put his rifle to his pal's upper arm and fire. . . . As I lay on the ground. . . ."
Cowley said:
"Ah, you saw that . . . I heard the men talking of it. . . . But they naturally did not say who and where!"
Tietjens said with a negligence that did not ring true:
"The wounded man's name was Stilicho. . . . A queer name. . . . I suppose it's Cornish. . . . It was B Company in front of us."