The Penguin Book of First World War Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

had the wind up?’ We had. But who could say why? How is a horse to say what it is that be-devils one empty place more than another? He has to prick up his ears when he gets there. Then he starts sweating. That’s all he knows, and it was the same story with us in The Garden. All I can do is to tell you, just roughly, the make of the place, the way that the few honest solids and liquids were fixed that came into it. They were the least part of it, really.
    It was only an orchard, to look at; all ancient apple-trees, dead straight in the stem, with fat, wet grass underneath, a little unhealthy in colour for want of more sun. Six feet above ground the lowest apple boughs all struck out level, and kept so; somebeasts, gone in our time, must have eaten every leaf that tried to grow lower. So the under side of the boughs made a sort of flat awning or roof. We called the layer of air between it and the ground The Six-foot Seam, as we were mostly miners. The light in this seam always appeared to have had something done to it: sifted through branches, refracted, messed about somehow, it was not at all the stuff you wanted just at that time. You see the like of it in an eclipse, when the sun gives a queer wink at the earth round the edge of a black mask. Very nice, too, in its place; but the war itself was quite enough out of the common –falling skies all over the place, and half your dead certainties shaken.
    We and the Germans were both in The Garden, and knew it. But nobody showed. Everywhere else on the front somebody showed up at last; somebody fired. But here nothing was seen or heard, ever. You found you were whispering and walking on tip-toe, expecting you didn’t know what. Have you been in a great crypt at twilight under a church, nothing round you but endless thin pillars, holding up a low roof? Suppose there’s a wolf at the far end of the crypt and you alone at the other, staring and staring into the thick of the pillars, and wondering, wondering – round which of the pillars will that grey nose come rubbing?
    Why not smash up the silly old spell, you may say – let a good yell, loose a shot, do any sane thing to break out? That’s what I said till we got there. Our unit took over the place from the French. A French platoon sergeant, my opposite number, showed me the quarters and posts and the like, and I asked the usual question, ‘How’s the old Boche?’
    â€˜
Mais assez gentil
,’ 2 he pattered. That Gaul was not waiting to chat. While he showed me the bomb-store, he muttered something low, hurried, and blurred –‘
Le bon Dieu Boche
,’ 3 I think it was, had created the orchard. The Germans themselves were ‘
bons bourgeois
’ enough, for all he had seen or heard of them –‘Not a shot in three weeks.
Seulement
’– he grinned, half-shamefaced and half-confidential, as sergeant to sergeant –‘
ne faut pas les embêter
.’ 4
    I knew all about that. French sergeants were always like that:dervishes in a fight when it came, but dead set, at all other times, on living
paisiblement
, 5 smoking their pipes.
Paisiblement
– they love the very feel of the word in their mouths. Our men were no warrior race, but they all hugged the belief that they really were marksmen, not yet found out by the world. They would be shooting all night at clods, at tops of posts, at anything that might pass for a head. Oh, I knew. Or I thought so.
    But no. Not a shot all the night. Nor on any other night either. We were just sucked into the hush of The Garden the way your voice drops in a church – when you go in at the door you become part of the system. I tried to think why. Did nobody fire just because in that place it was so easy for anybody to kill? No trench could be dug; it would have filled in an hour with water filtering through from the full stream flanking The Garden. Sentries stood out among the fruit trees, behind little