Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/184

 price at the moment of victory. Another five seconds and they would have been in that line; but it was left to some one else to stop that machine gun firing. And so, beside that motionless, distorted group a hole is dug, and soon no trace remains. One phase of clearing the battlefield; there are many such holes to be made. A few yards away—this time on the parapet of the trench—a Scotchman and a German are lying together. The Scotchman’s bayonet is through the German—his hands still hold the rifle—and as he stabbed him he himself had been shot from behind. A strange tableau: natural enough, yet weirdly grim to the imagination when seen by the dim light two or three days after it took place.

One could elaborate indefinitely. Each of those quiet, twisted figures means some one’s tragedy: each of them goes to form the price which must be paid. And at no time, I think, does the brutal realism of war strike home more vividly than when in cold blood one sees before one’s eyes the results of what took place in hot blood a few days before. Just a line in the paper—a name—no more. That is the public result of the