She must go there, she must not make him wait for her.
She kept thinking,
“Why don’t you go?” and then suddenly,
“Or let me go if you don’t want to.”
But Nicole went to one more place to buy corsages for them both and sent one to Mary North.
Only then she seemed to remember and with sudden abstraction she signalled for a taxi.
“Good-by,” said Nicole. “We had fun, didn’t we?”
“Loads of fun,” said Rosemary.
It was more difficult than she thought and her whole self protested as Nicole drove away.
XIII
Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard.
He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet.
In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval.
Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness.
He went on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse.
He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he had not.
“This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary.
She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth.
If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon.
Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.
She didn’t know what to do—she wanted to talk to her mother.
“There are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe consolingly.
Rosemary waited tensely for Dick to continue.
“See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes.
It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind.
And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe.
“And in Morocco—”
“That’s different.
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time.
The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t.
They could fight the first Marne again but not this.
This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes.
The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front.
You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember.
You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t—he just invented mass butchery.
This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia.
Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here.
This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D.
H.
Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently.
“Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”
“I don’t know,” she answered with a grave face.
“You know everything.”
They dropped behind the others.