Next to me on the left a smart young officer, of a perfect neatness
and even dandiness, was eating his supper, which his servant,
crouching in front of him, ladled with a spoon out of a tin can.
Beyond him again the soldiers in a long line under the farm wall were
sewing their clothes, eating, talking in whispers, and one of them
reading a newspaper aloud to himself.
A barn opposite us in ruins showed between its bare posts the green
fields beyond. Now and then a soldier would move across the yard to
the door of the farm, and he seemed to slide with something between
walking and running, his shoulders bent, his head down. The sun, low
now, showed just above the end of the farm roof and the lines of light
were orange between the shadows of the barn. All the batteries seemed
now very far away; the only sound in the world was the occasional sigh
of the shrapnel. The farmyard was bathed in the peace of the summer
evening.
The Colonel, when he had finished his conversation with some humorous
sally that gave him great pleasure, greeted us.
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