Great Britain. Army -- Officers -- Fiction; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Winn led the attack with the last of his strength, and in the fierceness
of his rage with life.
A white fog hung over the fields like the shadow of a valley filled with
snow.
The men fought like demons--strange shapes in the fog, with here and
there as the flames shot up, the flash of their black faces, set to
kill.
Winn's voice rallied and held them above the racket of the spitting
rifles, and the incessant coughing of the guns. It was the Staines voice
let out on a last voyage. To have gone back against it would have been
more dangerous than to go on against the guns.
They seized the trench and held it, there were no prisoners taken in the
dark, and after the first light they ceased to hear Winn's voice.
The sun came out and showed them all they had won, and what they had
lost.
Winn lay peacefully between the old trench and the new, beyond
resentment, beyond confusion, in the direct simplicity of death.
THE END
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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