He looked so broken down, and yet said so little of his troubles, that my heart went out to him, and I answered gladly enough I would do what I could. Next morning I was passing the hospital, and, remembering him, looked inside. The picture was not pleasant, and there seemed no boots about. I went on to the quartermaster, and, after a little haggling, got a new pair. Away I started and dangled them before Sands.
“You’ve got a new pair!” he exclaimed, getting up in a hurry. “You’re the most wonderful man, Lake. I never could have got them.”
“I couldn’t get any laces, sir,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter in the least. These are splendid. I would willingly give ten shillings for them.” And he looked at me in a sort of what-about-it way, and then dropped the subject. Thus it came about that Sands regained his respectability.
In a week or two, the whole face of the country was changed, and the army had settled down into a daily routine. The scrub was thinning under the demands of cooks for firewood, and definite roads pierced the main valleys and linked them together, while paths crawled over the hills wherever there were headquarters or gunpits, or whatever else you like. The feeling of great adventure was done with.
On first days I had been up some of those valleys, pushing a way through the scrub if I left the track by a yard. And all the way one would tumble on relics of the first advance. It sorrowed my heart to look about. Boxes of ammunition had been thrown down in the undergrowth, tens of thousands, aye, hundreds of thousands of rounds spilled about for the dews to damp and blacken. Cases of jam, big yellow cheeses, sacks of bully beef lay here, unclaimed except by such runaways as were on the lookout for a dinner. Once I found a dead donkey loaded up as he had started on the journey. At every dozen paces one passed rifles and web equipment and endless other things, some damaged in the great game, true; but much just spoiling there for the want of picking up.
And the scrub held other secrets. As you peered among the shadows you might happen on strange and grisly objects lying even stiller than the leaves in the hot noon: horrid black and swollen figures, causing you to turn and push for opener spaces. Or a short-lived, sickly wind might come drifting over, warning of yet other spots to be left alone.
I would not have you think we were careless with our dead, and left them as they died, but some fell in lonely places, and some lay under enemy fire where the search parties could not go. Few only were left thus unattended. In strangest, most difficult, most wayward places little graves had found a way: here one alone, now a community of them; each with simple marks which spring was hiding, and which winter would wash presently quite away.
Australia alone had not left marks for passage. At one time there were many Turkish prizes for him who sought. Choked rifles, a clip of pointed cartridges, a belt, a water-bottle: any of these were there to point out the path of battle. And of empty shell-cases and fuse-caps there was no end: one never troubled to turn them over.
Springtime had come along, the hour of lovemaking was at hand, and tiny birds played hide-and-seek through all this ruin. When we tired of our furies, and the guns awhile shut their mouths, you could hear the birds singing and singing, so swollen were they with love. I have crouched in odd corners of that playground waiting for an outbreak of shrapnel to pass, and I have seen the happy hurry-scurry in the twigs, and I have thought—but what does a soldier with thinking? A soldier draws pay to act.