siewtea0903

@@@@@ They're at the German trenches, someone shouts He looks up hastily, sees a few men jumping over the parapet, their bayonets forward like pole vaulters approaching the barThey seem to move so leisurely, so few men follow them that he is puzzledWhere are the rest he is about to say when there is a shout from the Regimental CommanderThey took it, they're good boys, they took itHe is holding the phone in his hand, shouting orders quickly The German artillery is beginning to fall on the newly taken trenches, and columns of men advance slowly through the dusk over the quiet field, circling around the dead men, and filing into the German trenchesIt is almost dark, and the sky has assumed a rosy wash in the east where a house is burningHe cannot see through his field glasses any longer, and he puts them down, stares across the field with a silent wonderIt looks primal, unfamiliar, the way he has imagined the surface of the moon might lookIn the craters the water glistens, slides away in long rippling shadows from the bodies of the men who have fallen What'd you think of it? The Colonel nudges himBut he cannot find the wordsIt has been too immense, too shatteringThe long dry battles of the textbooks come alive for him, mass themselves in his mindHe can only think of the man who has ordered the attack, and he pictures him with wonder(For want of a richer word he picks up the military expression There were all those men, and there had been someone above them, ordering them, changing perhaps forever the fiber of their livesIn the darkness he looks blankly at the field, tantalized by the largest vision that has ever entered his soul There were things one could do To command all thatHe is choked with the intensity of his emotion, the rage, the exaltation, the undefined and mighty hunger He returns a captain (temporary), is promoted and demoted in the same order, made first lieutenant (permanent)There is his marriage with Margaret against the subtle opposition of her parents, the brief honeymoon, and they settle down at an Army post, drift in the pleasantly vacant circle of parties and Saturday night dances at the officers' club Their lovemaking is fantastic for a time: He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her