After that he grew without any care, in sunlight, moonlight and rain; grew abundantly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and increased in arrogance till he felt himself greater than man. And indeed in those leaden storms that sang often over his foliage all living things seemed equal.
There was little that the Germans left when they retreated from the Somme that was higher than this swede. He grew the tallest thing for miles and miles. He dominated the waste. Two cats slunk by him from a shattered farm: he towered above them contemptuously.
A partridge ran by him once, far, far below his lofty leaves. The night winds mourning in No Man’s Land seemed to sing for him alone.
It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man’s Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket and brought him back to our company to cook.
Weeds and Wire
Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been, there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South, a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the South.
“Where did you hear that tune?” he asked the platoon commander.
“Oh, the hell of a long way from here,” the platoon commander said.
He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods, and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for hundreds of yards through orchards. “The hell of a way from here,” he said.