He had heard a man telling a horrible story of the opening bombardment of Ypres by the Germans. The core of the story was a bricked tunnel near the old fortifications of the town, whither a crowd of refugees had fled from the bombardment, and into which a number of injured people had been carried. A shell exploded near the exit and imprisoned all those people in a half-light without any provisions or help. There was not even drinking-water for the wounded. A ruptured drain poured a foul trickle across the slimy floor on which the wounded and exhausted lay. Now quite near and now at a distance the shells were still bursting, and through that thudding and uproar, above all the crouching and murmuring distresses of that pit of misery sounded the low, clear, querulous voice of a little girl who was talking as she died, talking endlessly of how she suffered, of how her sister could not come to help her, of her desire to be taken away; a little, scolding, indignant spirit she was, with a very clear explicit sense of the vast impropriety of everything about her.
“Why does not some one come?”
“Be tranquil,” an old woman’s voice remonstrated time after time. “Help will come.”
But for most of the people in the tunnel help never came. Through a slow, unhurrying night of indescribable pain and discomfort, in hunger, darkness, and an evil stench, their lives ebbed away one by one....
That dark, dreadful, stinking place, quivering to the incessant thunder of guns, sinking through twilight into night, lit by flashes and distant flames, and passing through an eternity of misery to a cold, starving dawn, threaded by the child’s shrill voice, took a pitiless grip upon Bunny’s imagination. He could neither mitigate it nor forget it.
How could one laugh at the Kaiser with this rankling in his mind? He could not fit it into any merry scheme of things, and he could not bear any scheme that was not merry; and not to be able to fit dreadful things into a scheme that does at last prevail over them was, for such a mind as Bunny’s, to begin to drift from sanity.
The second story that mutely reinforced the shrill indictment of that little Belgian girl was a description he had heard of some poor devil being shot for cowardice at dawn. A perplexed, stupid youth of two- or three-and-twenty, with little golden hairs that gleamed on a pallid cheek, was led out to a heap of empty ammunition boxes in a desolate and mutilated landscape of mud and splintered trees under a leaden sky, and set down on a box to die. It was as if Bunny had seen that living body with his own eyes, the body that jumped presently to the impact of the bullets and lurched forward, and how the officer in command—who had been himself but a little child in a garden a dozen years or more ago—came up to the pitiful prostrate form and put his revolver to the head behind the ear that would never hear again and behind the eye that stared and glazed, and pulled the trigger “to make sure.”
Bunny could feel that revolver behind his own ear. It felt as a dental instrument feels in the mouth.
“Oh, my God!” cried Bunny; “oh, my God!” starting up from his sack of straw on the floor in his billet in the middle of the night.
“Oh! shut it!” said the man who was trying to sleep beside him.