When his servant woke him, with tea and orders and the nightly lists of traffic and stores, it was a wonderful golden and green sunset, tremulous with the evening “hate.” The purple shadows were just sufficiently long to admit of getting the wounded back, and the road was filled with ambulances, whirring and grinding as they stopped, backed, and restarted, while a steady punctual crash, once a minute, showed that the Bosche were shelling the road or one of the innumerable camps or dumps along it, in the neighbourhood. Amid all this clamour, Kavanagh was not silenced, but recited at the top of his voice, and Dormer had a suspicion that the real reason was that it helped to keep down the nervousness that grew on men, as the years of the War rolled on, and the probability of being hit increased. Especially as, far overhead, the planes that circled and swooped like a swarm of gleaming flies, were attracting considerable anti-aircraft fire, and all round, big jagged bits were coming to earth with a noise almost echoing that of the ambulances. Dormer’s tidy mind was soon called into action. Some wounded who had died on the way to the dressing station, had been laid out beside the road as the ambulances had enough to do without carrying corpses ten miles. He went to make sure the M.O. had arranged for a burial party, as he had the strongest belief that casualties lying about were bad for the morale of the troops. When he got back to the dug-out, Kavanagh was “going on,” as he bent over a map of the extensions of the divisional cable lines, like a crow on a gate. “See those chaps, Dormer?” “Quis procul hinc--the legends writ The--er--Picard grave is far away, Quis ante diem periit Sed miles, sed pro patria.” “Do you believe in pronouncing Latin like Julius Cæsar or like Jones Minor?” “I don’t believe in it at all. Pure waste of time!” “Dormer, you are a Utilitarian!” “Have it your own way so long as you get that cable line of yours sited. I’ve got parties coming up to-morrow to dig it in!” “I shall be ready for them. Think of all that language, and language is only codified thought, buried in the ground, Dormer!” “I have all the thinking I want over all the men buried in the ground. We’re losing far too many!” The “victory” of the Somme had been a saddening experience for Dormer. “That shows how wrong you are. We are mortal. We perish. But our words will live.” “Rot! Do you mean to say that ‘825 Brigade relieve you to-morrow Nth. Div. Ack, ack, ack’ will live! Why should it? It’ll be superseded in four days. Who wants to perpetuate it?” “I disagree with you, Dormer, I really do. Here we are at the great crisis of our lives, of the life of European Civilization perhaps. Some trumpery order you or I transmit may mean in reality ‘Civilization is defeated, Barbarism has won!’ or it may mean, I hope, ‘Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence----’” “I wish you wouldn’t joke about the Bible!”