and the heavy, ceaseless rain, and the threat of the fast-descending night.  According to the theory of the Divisional Staff a dump furnished by the Army Service Corps ought to have existed at a spot corresponding to the final letter in the words ‘Burgh Heath’ on the map, but the information quickly became general that no such dump did in practice exist.  To George the situation was merely incredible.  He knew that for himself there was only one reasonable course of conduct.  He ought to have a boiling bath, go to bed with his dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and take a full basin of hot bread-and-milk adulterated by the addition of brandy—­and sleep.  Horses and men surged perilously around him.  The anarchical disorder, however, must have been less acute than he imagined, for a soldier appeared and took away his horse; he let the reins slip from his dazed hand.  The track had been transformed into a morass of viscous mud.

VII

It was night.  The heavy rain drove out of the dark void from every direction at once, and baptized the chilled faces of men as though it had been discharged from the hundred-holed rose of a full watering-can.  The right and the left sections of the Battery were disposed on either side of the track.  Fires were burning.  Horse-lines had been laid down, and by the light of flickering flames the dim forms of tethered animals could be seen with their noses to the ground pessimistically pretending to munch what green turf had survived in the mud.  Lanterns moved mysteriously to and fro.  In the distance to the west more illuminations showed that another unit had camped along the track.  The quartermaster of No. 2, had produced meagre tinned meats and biscuits from his emergency stores, and had made a certain quantity of tea in dixies; he had even found a half-feed of oats for the horses; so that both horses and men were somewhat appeased.  But the officers had had nothing, and the Army Service Corps detachment was still undiscoverable.

George sat on an empty box at the edge of the track, submissive to the rain.  Resmith had sent him to overlook men cutting straight branches in a wood on Park Downs, and then he had overlooked them as, with the said branches and with waterproofs laced together in pairs, they had erected sleeping shelters for the officers under the imperfect shelter of the sole tree within the precincts of the camp.  From these purely ornamental occupations he had returned in a condition approximating to collapse, without desire and without hope.  The invincible cheerfulness of unseen men chanting music-hall songs in the drenched night made no impression on him, nor the terrible staccato curtness of a N.C.O. mounting guard.  Volition had gone out of him; his heart was as empty as his stomach.