"How is that?"
"An officer of the —— wouldn't let us go by without a written permission."
"Why?"
"He said it was a Brigade order," was Pryor's naïve reply. He wanted to go up that perilous road. The captain sat down on a sandbag, took out a slip of paper (or borrowed one from Pryor), placed his hat on his knee and the paper on his hat, and wrote us out the pass.
For twenty yards from the trench the road was sheltered by our parapet, past that lay the beaten zone, the ground under the enemy's rifle fire. He occupied a knoll on the left, the spot where the fighting was heavy on the night before, and from there he had a good view of the road. We hurried along, the jars striking against our legs at every step. The water was obtained from a pump at the back of a ruined villa in a desolate village. The shrapnel shivered house was named Dead Cow Cottage. The dead cow still lay in the open garden, its belly swollen and its left legs sticking up in the air like props in an upturned barrel. It smelt abominably, but nobody dared go out into the open to bury it.
The pump was known as Cock Robin Pump. A pencilled notice told that a robin was killed by a Jack Johnson near the spot on a certain date. Having filled our jars, Pryor and I made a tour of inspection of the place.
In a green field to the rear we discovered a graveyard, fenced in except at our end, where a newly open grave yawned up at us as if aweary of waiting for its prey.
"Room for extension here," said Pryor. "I suppose they'll not close in this until the graves reach the edge of the roadway. Let's read the epitaphs."
How peaceful the place was. On the right I could see through a space between the walls of the cottage the wide winding street of the village, the houses, cornstacks, and the waving bushes, and my soul felt strangely quieted. In its peace, in its cessation from labour, there was neither anxiety nor sadness, there remained rest, placid and sad. It seemed as if the houses, all intact at this particular spot, held something sacred and restful, that with them and in them all was good. They knew no evil or sorrow. There was peace, the desired consummation of all things—peace brought about by war, the peace of the desert, and death.
I looked at the first grave, its cross, and the rude lettering. This was the epitaph; this and nothing more:—
"An Unknown British Soldier."