puzzling as to what they had done in the past to deserve such a
punishment.

Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on
the high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with
their limbs fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and
they were so utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious
energy around them that one grew rather afraid of them and of their
superiority to their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and the
insects in the grass waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed
in the warm moist earth upon which they lay; over their heads the
invisible carriers of death jarred the air with shrill crescendoes,
and near them a comrade sat hacking with his bayonet at a lump of
hard bread. He sprawled contentedly in the hot sun, with humped
shoulders and legs far apart, and with his cap tipped far over his
eyes. Every now and again he would pause, with a piece of cheese
balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and look at the twisted
figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge involuntarily as a
shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at the still
forms on either side of him that had not moved. Then he brushed the
crumbs from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot canteen, and
looking again at the sleeping figures pressing down the long grass
beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench and
picked up his waiting rifle.

The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it
noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their
dying had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared
than they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but
through mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest;