The Dark Tower

He had thought of her before as a man registers a fact that is always present to him, but in the interval since he had seen her his consciousness of her had been increasingly troubled.

Now the trouble was fading, as England faded, as his old life was fading.

He had a sense that he was finally freed. It was not like seeing Claire again, but it was like not having to see anything else.

“Until I’m dead I’m hers, and after I’m dead I’m hers, so that’s all right,” he said to himself. “I haven’t got to muddle things up any more.”

The sea lay around them at dawn like a sheet of pearl — it was very empty but for the gulls’ wings beating to and fro out of the mist.

Winn had lived through many campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pass, and he had gone through the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country like a garden, met by welcoming populations, with flowers and fruit.

It made him feel sick. The other places were the proper ones for war.

It was not his way to think of what lay before him. It would, like all great emergencies, like all great calamities, keep to its moment, and settle itself. Nevertheless he could not free his mind from the presence of the villages — the pleasant, smiling villages, the little church towers in the middle, the cobbled streets, the steep-pitched, gray roofs and the white sunny walls.

Carnations and geraniums filled the windows, and all the inhabitants, the solid, bright-faced people, had a greeting for their khaki guests.

“Voilà quelque choses des solides, ces Anglais!” the women called to each other.

Winn found himself shrinking from their welcoming eyes. He thought he hadn’t had enough sleep, because as a rule a Staines did not shrink; but when he slept in the corner of the hot jolting railway train, he dreamed of the villages.

They were to attack directly they arrived at their destination. By the time they reached there, Winn knew more. He had gathered up the hastily flung messages by telegram and telephone, by flying cars and from breathless despatch riders, and he knew what they meant.

They had no chance, from the first, not a ghost of a chance. They were to hold on as long as they could, and then retreat. Part of the line had gone already. The French had gone. No reinforcements were coming up. There were no reinforcements.

They were to retreat turn and turn about; meantime they must hold.

They could hear the guns now, the bright harvest fields trembled a little under the impact of these alien presences.

They came nearer and the sky filled with white puffs of smoke that looked like glittering sunset clouds, and were not clouds. Overhead the birds sang incessantly, undisturbed even by the occasional drilling of an aëroplane.

In the plains that lay beneath them, they could see the dim blue lines of the enemy debouching.

They made Winn think of locusts. He had seen a plague once in Egypt. They came on like the Germans, a gray mass that never broke — that could not break, because behind it there were more, and still more locusts, thick as clouds, impenetrable as clouds.

You killed and killed and killed, and yet there were more clouds.

Every now and then it ran through his mind like a flame, that they would spread this loathsome, defiling cloud over the smiling little villages of France.

Fortunately there was no time for pity; there were merely the different ways of meeting the question of holding on.

It was like an attempt to keep back a tide with a teaspoon.

Their guns did what they could, they did more than it seemed possible guns could do. The men in control of them worked like maniacs.

It was not a time to think of what people could do. The men were falling like leaves off a tree.

The skylarks and the swallows vanished before the villainous occupation of the air. The infantry in the loosely built trenches held on, breathless, broken, like a battered boat in a hurricane, stout against the oncoming waves.

The stars came out and night fell — night rent and tortured, darkness assaulted and broken by a myriad new lights of death, but still merciful, reassuring darkness. The moment for the retreat had come.

It was a never-ending business, a stumbling, bewildering business. The guns roared on, holding open indefatigably, without cessation, the way of their escape.

Much later they got away themselves, dashing blindly in the wake of their exhausted little army, ready to turn at command and hold again, and escape again, and once more hold the unending blue lines, with their unnumbered guns, unwinding like an endless serpent in their rear.

The morning showed them still retreating. Sometimes they were miles ahead and could see nothing but the strangely different barred and shivering villages, small settlements of terror, in an untroubled land.