A few yards further on, Latimer stopped. He wanted to cry out. He longed to scream wildly and break this conspiracy of silence. Suddenly, it seemed to him as though the entire country-side were for a brief second illuminated by a magnificent burst of light: Le Grand Couronné was revealed from top to toe; in the slits crinkling the breasts and flanks of the mountain he saw dark, bearded Bulgars, bullet-headed and yellow-toothed. They were all gazing at him with cruel, malignant eyes.... The hallucination passed.
“I feel ill, Morgan,” he said.
Morgan, a man twice Latimer’s age—for Latimer was still in his teens—took from his pocket a bottle of tabloids.
“You ought to have gone sick this morning, sir,” said Morgan; “or, better still, let me take you to the telephone dug-out.... Have a drink from my water-bottle, sir.... Ask Captain Mitchell to send another officer out to relieve you.”
“Oh, no; I’ll stick it out. But let me have a drink.”
But the water had none of the virtue of water: it was tepid and sickly, and it tasted slightly of grease....
The sound of a single rifle-shot from the enemy’s lines ripped the silence. It meant nothing: it was nothing. Yet Latimer cursed beneath his breath.
“Let’s get on,” he said, and proceeded to feel his way towards the ravine.
In a few minutes they reached it. Here was another sentry-group. Assuring himself that all was in order, he began to retrace his steps. He was conscious of nothing except the procession of fantasies and memories within his brain: verses he had written last year beneath the young flowering laburnum in his father’s garden; a girl’s hand in which his heart seemed to be inevitably cupped; a flannelled figure, with a rapid, crushing serve, on the other side of the tennis-net; barbaric music from “Boris Godounov,” which he had heard in that wonderful summer of 1914; a great day on the river with his friend. At first these memories came singly; then they clustered together horribly and seemed to menace him.
“Fever: just fever,” he assured himself.