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Marwood.

That was Scarsdale’s first glimpse of Marwood, a man in a brown cleft of the earth, intently and solemnly picking lice from his shirt. It was as though the clock of time had gone back to the days when there were no clocks, and man,—primitive and unadorned,—squatted in a hole, and scratched himself. Almost it was ape-like.

Scarsdale entered the trench. It was no more than a sap cut in the earth for shelter. The man with the shirt sat in a patch of sunlight; he had slipped on his tunic while dealing with his shirt, and it being unbuttoned, showed the whiteness of his chest. So absorbed was he in the business of the moment that he remained unaware of Scarsdale’s presence until the visitor was close upon him.

He glanced up. His face expressed neither surprise, not resentment, nor pleasure. It had a sallow darkness. The eyes were inarticulate, full of an infinite, dumb sadness; they were hopeless eyes, and as Scarsdale looked into them he remembered the cry of his inward voice. Broken souls.

He said, “You’re busy.”

The man with the shirt compressed something between thumb and finger.

“Obviously. Must do something.”

He looked up at Scarsdale, and for a moment his eyes lost their dead expression, for Scarsdale was unusual. He had no steel hat, no box-respirator, no flashes.

“Where have you blown from?”

“No. 37 C.C.S.”

“What! What the devil are you doing up here?”

“I’ve come up to see the real thing. I’ve only seen the other end of it.”

“Good lord!”

He let his shirt lie across his knees.

“You must be damned innocent. How did you get up here?”

“I had a lift on an ambulance, and then I walked.”

“Took the day off, in fact, for a nice country ramble.”

His slate-blue eyes were bitter. He had one of those large, sallow, flat faces that light up but rarely with a smile. He looked as though he had never smiled. His hands were dirty; he had shaved himself indifferently, and yet he had some quality that saved him from being squalid.

“Well, how do you like it?”

Scarsdale stared at the man’s boots.

“I’ve been afraid. I wanted to bolt. Everything’s so strange.”

“Strange!”

His echoing of the word mingled scorn and pathos.

“Well, anyway, I’m damned. Did you meet anybody?”

“One man—in a hurry. That’s what struck me as so extraordinary.”

“What, the hurry?”

“No, the solitude.”

The man’s dark head went down; he seemed to become enveloped in darkness.

“It’s nothing like the solitude inside you. Hell!”

And suddenly he snarled at Scarsdale.

“Sit down. You had better crawl under that ground-sheet there and hide in the hole if anybody comes along. You’d be for it.”

“For it. Why?”

“No tin hat, no respirator, no nothing. No business here—either. Got a fag on you?”

Scarsdale had. He sat down with his back to the earth wall, but not too close to the grey shirt. The man’s dirty fingers picked a cigarette from the packet. He tapped it on the back of his hand, and groped in the right-hand pocket of his tunic for a match. Sullenly he contemplated the flame, and then lighting the cigarette, drew the smoke in deep.

“Thanks. Nothing worth living for now but the rum and the cigs, though there’s a sort of filthy joy in a clean shirt and hot stew. What the devil made you come up here?”

“I felt I ought to.”

“Ought to! That sounds like the old brass band and music-hall stunt days. Like to stay here?”

“No.”

“That’s better. The sort of slush you get up here drowns all other sorts of slush. Pretty comfy where you are.”

“Sometimes I’m ashamed. You see—I was over forty when I volunteered, and not too fit. They made me—”

The sallow man cut in.

“Don’t apologize. Thank your blighted stars. No false modesty. Married, are you?”

“No.”

He of the shirt fell into a kind of muse. His eyes stared. He inhaled smoke and blew it through his nostrils, and his nostrils seemed to sneer. Then he unbuttoned the breast pocket of his tunic and drew out a wad of old letters and photographs. He spread them on his shirt, and selecting a photograph, passed it to Scarsdale.

“That’s the one.”

“Your wife?”

“No, daughter. Good kid. Should like to see her again, but I shan’t.”

“Why not?”

“My number’s up. I know.”

Scarsdale glanced at him as though to say—“O, rot,” but he did not say it, for the man’s eyes had a hopelessness. So Scarsdale looked at the photograph, and saw a girl with a plain, square face, and a cloud of jet-black hair. She resembled her father, and her eyes were like her father’s, save that they were young and bright, and without that lamentable hopelessness. She looked determined, and rather too square about the chin and forehead for a girl, but the face had a clarity. Across a corner of the photo was written, “Daddy, with Julia’s love.”

Scarsdale had the feeling that he ought to say something about the photograph, something that would please the man, but while he was still looking at it he heard the other’s voice suddenly blurting out words that sounded inconsequential and incongruous.

“Women! O, lord women! Seeing ’em makes you mad. Silk stockings or high boots,—and the little aprons the French girls wear. And my wife’s a—O, well that’s that!”

He looked sideways at Scarsdale and held out his hand for the photograph.

“Good kid. Only live thing I care a damn about. And I shan’t see her again. Funny, isn’t it?”

Scarsdale felt himself penetrated by this other man’s sadness. Here in the trenches you were in contact with elemental things, and men became fatalists. They were chained to an idea. Even while cursing the war, and dragging their feet through the mud, or sharing their food with the flies, they accepted the inevitableness of the bloody business. And from being dumb and desperate they laughed, just as the man with the shirt threw his head back suddenly and laughed.

“Funny, isn’t it! Millions of men squatting in trenches and shell-holes, just because—Makes one marvel. Why don’t we all walk home? And yet when Jerry goes for us or we go for Jerry—we are just like a lot of mad beasts. Fastened up in cages, and then let out to tear each other.”

He threw away the end of his cigarette.

“You’re a Londoner.”

Scarsdale nodded.

“Same here. Chelsea. Clerk in an estate agent’s office. Used to be. Quite a sober sort of fellah. And you?”

“Canonbury Square.”

“Upper Street—Islington. O, God! Something in the city, are you?”

“What they used to call a literary gent.”

“Going back to it?”

“I suppose so.”

There was silence between them, a staring, heavy silence. Across the strip of blue sky an aeroplane flying high passed like a faint, silvery moth. A piece of earth slithered down with a dry, rattling sound. The man began to finger his shirt.

“My name’s Marwood. Look here, if you take my advice, you’ll cut and run.”

“Why?”

“Why! Because it’s nice and quiet. Fritz’s dinner-hour you know. Later he’ll get busy. If I were you I’d shin it.”

“That sounds rather like—”

“Sense, old lad. I’d cut and run—now, if I wasn’t sure I should be caught and shot.”

Said Scarsdale, drawing in his long legs.

“No, you wouldn’t. Some of us stick things out.”

He got up. He felt a sort of shame in leaving this other man there chained to his fate.

“Perhaps we’ll meet in London.”

“In hell, more likely, or your old C.C.S. Well, good luck. If Fritz starts a hate go flat on your belly. No use doing the heroic stunt with H.E. flying about.”

His sallow face cracked in a grin, but his eyes retained their intolerable sadness, and Scarsdale, dropping his packet of cigarettes on the grey shirt, walked suddenly away and did not look back.