We were too late when we cut him down; so we moved out that night upon our anonymous march with an extra passenger lashed to a gun-seat, on whose incapacity we had not counted. The nightingales were still singing in the thickets when we left, singing of things forsaken, of beauty and of passion. I could not shake off the impression that it was their sweet, intolerable melancholy which had urged him to do it. If we had taken to the road an hour earlier, he would have been saved from that act. Poor lad! He had played the game to the top of his bent, till he had passed the limit of his power to suffer. What was the limit of us who remained? How much further had we to go till we reached the breaking-point? “There’s those that does it because they’re frightened.” Trottrot knew of what he was talking. VII WE march, and sleep, and work as in a dream. Nothing that we do or see seems any longer real to us. This inverted way of living by night and drowsing by day, blunts one’s sense of actuality as with a drug. The only fact which remains constant is our ceaseless struggle against weariness. There’s no longer the faintest doubt as to where we are going; we’re marching into the great shove, to which all the previous four years of war have been a preface. We’re marching, if human endurance can carry us, straight into the heart of Germany. Among ourselves we make no more attempts to disguise what is intended; as though the doors of a furnace had been suddenly flung wide, we feel the heat of the trial which will consume us. To-day is the fourth of August; we hope to be in Berlin by Christmas—some, but not all of us. One looks curiously into the faces of his companions, half expecting to find their fates written on their foreheads. In so doing, he is not morbid: he simply braces himself to meet the facts of things which must surely happen. He knows that many of those who jest with him to-day, will lie endlessly asleep to-morrow. He wonders vaguely to which company he himself will belong—whether to the company of those who sleep or the company of those who go toiling forward. It seems as though those who are to fall in the battle must have been already selected; they must have been assigned some mark by which they may be detected. So one watches his comrades stealthily to discover the invisible tag which records their lot. I find myself speaking to my men more as a friend and less as an officer; the thought of that last night-march, which all men must make solitarily, is drawing us together in a closer bond. A voice is continually whispering, “It may be the last time you can be decent to that chap—the last time.”