iii
The Dead March
I woke very early that morning with the sound of music in my ears. It was a band, a distant band; evidently, I thought, some troops are changing camp, and I lay awake listening until the strains exercised a strange possession over me, for never, I declare, had I heard a melody so haunting. It was all things. From the wail of lament it rose to the blazonry of triumph, from joy passed to sorrow, spoke now of hope and now of despair, shrilled victory in defeat and relentlessly voiced the barrenness of conquest. It was of pagan grandeur, of Arcadian simplicity, of cities and of glades. A mother with her laughing child; Cæsar to his victorious army; a shepherd fluting at a spring; a dead warrior lying stark by night on a desolate waste. Sometimes I thought that it was approaching, sometimes receding, but this I discovered was nothing but the vagarity of the wind, and presently the music was no more and the night was empty of sound and cold with the loneliness of bereavement.
It was still very early when I rose and went out. Day was just breaking, like day at the beginning of time before things were. The villages of Preston and Sutton Poyntz lay beneath me in the valley, but they were as a picture that is limned and no smoke came from the chimneys of their hearths, nor was there any sound save that from the more distant water-meadows beyond; at intervals a sheep-bell gave a note. About me lay the grave-mounds
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