From time to
time the eye, travelling carefully with a certain disagreeable suddenly
fear no longer distances of air, coldish and sweet, stopped upon the
incredible clearness of the desolate, without-motion, Autumn. Awkward and
solemn clearness, making louder the unnecessary cries, the hoarse
laughter of the invisible harlots in their muddy yard, pointing a cool
actual finger at the silly and ferocious group of man-shaped beings
huddled in the mud under four or five little trees, came strangely in my
own mind pleasantly to suggest the ludicrous and hideous and beautiful
antics of the insane. Frequently I would discover so perfect a command
over myself as to reduce _la promenade_ easily to a recently invented
mechanism; or to the demonstration of a collection of vivid and unlovely
toys around and around which, guarding them with impossible heroism,
funnily moved purely unreal _plantons_ always absurdly marching, the
maimed and stupid dolls of my imagination. Once I was sitting alone on
the long beam of silent iron and suddenly had the gradual complete unique
experience of death....
It became amazingly cold.
One evening B. and myself and, I think it was the Machine-Fixer, were
partaking of the warmth of a _bougie_ hard by and, in fact, between our
ambulance beds, when the door opened, a _planton_ entered, and a list of
names (none of which we recognized) was hurriedly read off with (as in
the case of the last _partis_, including The Wanderer and Surplice) the
admonition:
"Be ready to leave early to-morrow morning.
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