But whether I mistook the way, or whether they had gone off leaving me for dead, I was unable to explain to Wolf. I only know that I walked and walked, and found no one. The world had been suddenly deserted. Except for an occasional horse or cow, that paused in its grazing to watch me pass, or the scurrying of some small wild thing through a hedge, I seemed the only creature astir. Dead villages, dead châteaux, dead farms, dead gardens, dead forests, dead lorries, dead tanks, dead horses, dead men, and a dead self, or a self that had only partially come back to life, were the features of that lonely tramp through the darkness. With no other aim than a vague hope of joining up again with my section I plodded on till dawn. Though my watch had run down, and there was no change as yet in the light, I knew when dawn was approaching by a sleepy twitter in a hedge. Another twitter awoke a few yards farther on, and then another and another. Presently the whole countryside was alive, not with song, but with that chirrupy hymn to Light which always precedes the sunrise, and ceases before the sun has risen. Wandering away from the front, by instinct, not on purpose, I was now in a region relatively untouched by calamity, with grapes hard and green in the vineyards and poppies in the ripening wheat-fields. Between eight and nine I reached a village, where I breakfasted at a wine-shop, explaining myself as an American charged with a mission that was taking me across country. Stray soldiers being common, I had no harder task than to profit by the sympathy accorded to my British-seeming uniform. So I tramped on again, and on, always with a stupefied half-idea of finding my section, but with no real motive in my mind. If I had a real motive it was in a dull, blind, animal instinct to get away from the brutality in which I had been living for the past six months, even though I knew I should be headed off and turned back again. But I wasn’t. In that land of agony I went my way unheeded. I also went my way unheeding. It was the beginning of the more or less pointless pilgrimages I made later in New York. To my anguished nervous system there was a soothing quality in being on the move. So on the move I kept, hardly knowing why, except that it was to get away from what was right behind me. And yet I had clearly the impression that I was merely enjoying a breathing spell. I didn’t mean to run away. I knew I was Billy Harrowby, and that for my very name’s sake I must return to my task at the first minute possible. It was only not possible, because as I continued my aimless drifting along the roads I got farther away from my starting-point.