Edward watched one soldier blindly seeking a human animal on which to place his pack. A child could have knocked that soldier down. He was thin and immature; he could pretend to be a man no longer; his shoulders drooped forward, his hanging head swayed between them; his eyes seemed shut; he dragged his rifle in the mud; he walked awry like a drunken man. Six big boatmen saw him coming towards them. He followed them as a senseless ghost or curse might follow, slowly and sightlessly. He followed them on to a moored junk and from that on to another. On the last junk in the line he came up to them. They would not fight; they could retreat no further. Still without seeming to see them he selected one. That one did not protest; he was driven away to be roped to the end of the growing line of cattle-prisoners on the steps. “They’ll never come back, those men,” said Tam. “The soldiers shoot ’em when they’re through with ’em. Poor devils.” He said “poor devils” in an intense tremulous voice, as though he were really sorry for the afflicted townsmen. Edward imagined him saying to himself, “I’m a tender-hearted chap, a man of wide sympathies. I must make that quite clear.” “People never undeceive self-deceivers,” thought Edward. “We all conspire to pretend we are deceived.” Tam took Edward’s arm with a roughly loving flourish and said in a brisk voice, as though brushing from his mind’s eye an unmanly tear—which he was nevertheless proud of—“A heart-breaking sight, old man, let’s sit on the other side of the deck.” They did so. The sharp needles that denoted rifle fire from the other side were being injected into the shining body of the river. But though even Edward could sometimes hear the mewing twang of shots in the air, it was obvious that the marksmen were giving the foreign ship a fairly wide berth.