Sebastian Faulks

We’ve all gone now. The whole of our little group.

He depended on the resilience of certain men to nerve himself to his unnatural life.

Although he had little idea of time, the burned images of the preceding days lived in his memory with static clarity.

The empty expressions that filled so many letters home did not seem to describe the part that Stephen had played in his life.

Once more in ragged suicidal line. They trudged towards the pattering death of mounted guns.

And a recent one [food parcel] addressed to Wilkinson, some weeks dead had been a cause of particular celebration.

He wanted to answer them with steel and explosives, with metal tearing into soft tissue and spinning on the bone. When the war was over there would be a place for contemplation, even generosity, but in the meantime he treasured his hatred as a means of saving his own life and those of his men.

No child or future generation will know what this was like.

What had taken place beneath that placid irregular roof seemed to belong to a world as peculiar and abnormal as the one in which he now lived.

Still, the more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them, he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven.

He blamed the NCOs, who blamed the officers; they swore at the staff officers who blamed the Generals.

For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose, there was no planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realised, they were digging a mass grave.