I held her magic in my head, listening to the patter of long spokes of rain. 1 Clouds are melting in the sunset above the khaki and the camouflage and the sun like brass on the trees and across the far hills, slate and brimstone and lilac stretching vermilion at the edge of the earth. They lie in a pastoral evening, the dead soldiers. A bearable beauty falls on the foreign effects, last tangents of daylight glance off the crab-apple and walnut trees. Up and down the stream goes a smudge of gnats, nettle seeds, the skittering of brilliant insects, a guilty donkey with depressed ears, snapping at passing thistles, teased by staccato French or the French flies.
Clouds move and melt and the delicate cirrus has become a last kiss or a parting word.
Day gives to darkness the gaping cottages the fluted fields. 2 Stretched out under canvas they lie in the shadows not smoking nor talking but getting cool in the rough wool with their wounds unhealed for ever and the pain elsewhere. But babies and girls often look beautiful being dead, and over the old and sick sinks a common expression down the eyes and mouth, almost of gratitude. Here I drag on behind an army no hero nor a likely one for dying, yet my unequal self could spend some eventual breath in some such makeshift place with sounds of battle near. We build our own prison walls, but that day the doors fell open.