The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved
off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting
together.
We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we
began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind
me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as
though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life,
had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest.
Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one
of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind....
I looked back. Without an instant's warning that dead world, as a
match is set to a waiting bonfire, broke into flame. A thousand
rockets rose, soaring, in streams of light into the dark sky; the
fields that had been vapour ran now with light. A huge projector, the
eye, as it seemed to me, of that enemy for whom I had all day been
searching, slowly wheeled across the world, cutting a great path
across the plain, picking houses and trees and fields out of space,
then dropping them back again.
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