He was a Devonshire lad,
with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his
loneliness, with a roof over his head which would be no proof against
a fair-sized shell.
He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been
surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him.
He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his
green armchair.
The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a
little while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as
the first faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire
burst out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new
spasms of ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing
them, had an attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.
The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated
fireworks after a night of orgy.
In a distant field a cock crew.
The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the
ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed
again nakedly.
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