“I didn’t love him ... not truly. And he’s killed the little love I had.” “But all the fine things he’s guv you....” “Doan’t talk about them. They’re just part of the horribleness.” “Then you’re telling me as you maade a mistake?” “Reckon I did. Reckon my only chance now is that he won’t come back.” She began to sob again, not tempestuously, but slowly and painfully, gradually jerking to silence. A soft green twilight deepened in the room, and the low gurgling calls of starlings trilled under the eaves. The mother still sat on the bed-foot, staring at her daughter, who now lay still, a pool of blue in the dusk with her silk petticoat, her shoulders showing nacreous against the dead-white of the pillow. Mrs. Beatup was stunned, her mind slowly adjusting itself to the revelation that there was in war another tragedy besides the tragedy of those who do not come back—and that is the tragedy of some who do. 7 The dipping sun slanted over the fields from Stilliands Tower, and made Tom Beatup’s khaki like a knight’s golden armour as he trudged home. The sky was a spread pool of blue, full of light like water, and moss-green in the east where it dipped towards the woods of Senlac. Soft whorls of dust bowled down the lane before a fluttering, racing wind, that smelled of primroses and rainy grass. Tom heaved a deep sigh of well-being as he stopped to light his pipe. To-morrow he would have left these sun-swamped sorrowless fields and be back in the country where the earth was torn and gutted as if by an earthquake, all scabbed and leprous as if diseased with the putrefaction of its million dead—where the air rocked with crashes, roars, rumbles, whizzes, caterwaulings, and reeked with flowing stenches of dead bodies, blood, and hideous chemicals—where any thornbush might conceal a sight of horror to freeze heart and eyeballs ... and yet he could put the dread of it out of his mind, and smile contentedly, and blink his eyes in the sun.