haunted, teeming with ghosts, lie stagnant in the morning sun. The cobwebs drift across the Hulluch road, and in the distance, by the first bend, a man pushing a wheeled stretcher comes slowly walking back to the dressing station. It's still going on: nothing much has changed; and yet—the cigar is good; the brandy superb: the brandy Jimmy preferred. He only spent one leave in England; as a sergeant he couldn't get more; but I dined with him one night, dress clothes and all complete, and we drank that brandy. One need hardly say, perhaps, that the writing on the register of his birth would have been hard put to it to spell O'Shea. There have been many like him this war, from "the legions of the lost ones and the cohorts of the damned"; and they've come to us out of the waste places, out of the lands that lie beyond the mountains. Unhonoured, unknown, they've finished the game; and having finished, they lie at peace. Britain called them; they came—those so-called wasters; look to it, you overmuch righteous ones, who have had to be dragged by the hairs of your heads—bleating of home ties and consciences. ...
I forget which of the stories I heard him telling the men that morning before they went over. He read one lot a thing he swore he'd got out of a German paper—Heaven knows if it was true. I remember it ended up: "Above all things show no mercy to the accursed English. They are the starters of this war; so spit on them, kick them, use them as the swine they are."
