For Winterbourne the battle was a timeless confusion, a chaos of noise, fatigue, anxiety, and horror. He did not know how many days and nights it lasted, lost completely the sequence of events, found great gaps in his conscious memory. He did know that he was profoundly affected by it, that it made a cut in his life and personality. You couldn’t say there was anything melodramatically startling, no hair going grey in a night, or never smiling again. He looked unaltered; he behaved in exactly the same way. But, in fact, he was a little mad. We talk of shell-shock, but who wasn’t shell-shocked more or less? The change in him was psychological, and showed itself in two ways. He was left with an anxiety complex, a sense of fear he had never experienced, the necessity to use great and greater efforts to force himself to face artillery, anything explosive. Curiously enough, he scarcely minded machine-gun fire, which was really more deadly, and completely disregarded rifle-fire. And he was also left with a profound and cynical discouragement, a shrinking horror of the human race.... * * * * * A timeless confusion. The Runners scattered outside their billet and made for the Officers’ cellar through the falling shells, dodging from one broken house or shell-hole to another. Winterbourne, not yet unnerved, calmly walked straight across and arrived first. Evans took him aside: “We’re going up as a Company, with orders to support and co-operate with the infantry. Try to nab me a rifle and bayonet before we go over.” “Very good, Sir.” Outside was an open box of S.A.A. and they each drew two extra bandoliers of cartridges, which they slung round their necks. They moved off in sections, filing along the village street which was filled with fresh débris and ruins re-ruined. It was snowing. They came on two freshly killed horses. Their close-cropped necks were bent under them, with great glassy eyeballs starting with agony. A little farther on was a smashed limber with the driver dead beside it. In the trench they passed a batch of about forty German prisoners, unarmed, in steel helmets. They looked green-pale, and were trembling. They shrank against the side of the trench as the English soldiers passed, but not a word was said to them. The snowstorm and the smoke drifting back from the barrage made the air as murky as a November fog in London. They saw little, did not know where they were going, what they were doing or why. They lined a trench and waited. Nothing happened. They saw nothing but wire and snowflakes and drifting smoke, heard only the roar of the guns and the now sharper rattle of machine-guns. Shells dropped around them. Evans was looking through his glasses, and cursing the lack of visibility. Winterbourne stood beside him, with his rifle still slung on his left shoulder.