“If I ever get out of here,” he said, “I'll write one story—one battle till I die—and I'll call it 'Vintage Fourteen'.”
For he was sick of the spilled wine of men. And other armies were fighting in the vineyards of France—as were these in the piney hills of the ancient shepherd kings; and what a fertilizing it was for the manhandled lands of Europe—potash and phosphor and nitrogen in the perfect solution of the human blood.
More and more Boylan saw that Peter was queer.
“I can't think,” the latter would say. “I feel like a man dying, under a mountain of dead. Mostly I don't want to live. I don't want to die. I believe that it's all one and that this is the end of the world.”
Peter could work, however. Day and night when they would let him, and mostly the Germans accepted his services gratefully now, he tugged at the dead and the dying in the field and in the field hospitals. And with the lanterns at night, often under fire, often so long that Boylan could not rest, but would wait at the hospital-division like a mother for a dissipated son.
“They call this the great German fighting machine,” Peter whispered to Boylan one night, “but we're inside. We can't call it that. It's the most pitiful and devitalized thing that ever ran up and down the earth. And it doesn't mean anything. It's all waste—like a great body killing itself piece by piece—all waste and death.”
He tried to make death easy for a soldier here and there, but there was so much. His clothing smelled of death; and one morning before the smoke fell, he watched the sun shining upon the pine-clad hills. That moment the thought held him that the pine trees were immortal, and men just the dung of the earth.
...One night Boylan asked as they lay down:
“Who are you?”
“Peter Mowbray.”