Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Tom
Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
1918
I Out of No Man's Land
II From a British Port
III In the Barred Zone
IV In Deep Waters
V On the Banks
VI Under Suspicion
VII In Stateroom 29
VIII Off Nantucket
IX Sub Sea
X At Base
XI Under the Rose
XII Resurrection
XIII Reincarnation
XIV Defamation
XV Recognition
XVI Au Printemps
XVII Finesse
XVIII Danse Macabre
XIX Force Majeure
XX Riposte
XXI Question
XXII Chicane
XXIII Amnesty
On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, asstill as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, wherethey had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contestswhich the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards ofthat debatable ground.
Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached withthe misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.
Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable anundetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darknessand resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lightsand star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glareand disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest throughloopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.
Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even asrifle-fire had grown more intermittent … as if many waters might quenchout hate in the heart of man!
For it was raining hard—a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavyatmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign andinexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter ofa weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering ofmachine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder ofcannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmeringcurtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenchesand over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus—forwant of any hint of slackening—it might rain for another twelve hours, oreighteen, or twenty-four….
The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled andwinked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtainedwhile, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the Britishbarbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,shapi