The Middle Parts of Fortune:
  dreaming about the attack (chapter1)
 (1930)

Context

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Once during the night Bourne started up in an access of inexplicable horror, and after a moment of bewildered recollection, turned over and tried to sleep again.  He remembered nothing of the nightmare which had roused him, if it were a nightmare, but gradually his awakened sense felt a vague restlessness troubling equally the other men.  He noticed it first in Shem, whose body, almost touching his own, gave a quick, convulsive jump, and continued twitching for a moment, while he muttered unintelligibly, and worked his lips as though he were trying to moisten them.  The obscure disquiet passed fitfully from one to another, lips parted with the sound of a bubble bursting, teeth met grinding as the jaws worked, there were little whimperings which quickened into sobs, passed into long shuddering moans, or culminated in angry, half-articulate obscenities, and then relapsed, with fretful, uneasy movements and heavy breathing, into a more profound sleep.  Even though Bourne tried to persuade himself that these convulsive agonies were merely reflex actions, part of an unconscious physical process, through which the disordered nerves sought to readjust themselves, or to perform belatedly some instinctive movement which an over-riding will had thwarted at its original inception, his own conscious mind now filled itself with the passions, of which the mutterings and twitchings heard in the darkness were only the unconscious mimicry.  The senses certainly have, in some measure, an independent activity of their own, and remain vigilant even in the mind's eclipse.  The darkness seemed to him to be filled with the shudderings of tormented flesh, as though something diabolically evil probed curiously to find a quick sensitive nerve and wring from it a reluctant cry of pain.  At last, unable to ignore the sense of misery which filled him, he sat up and lit the inevitable cigarette.  The formless terrors haunting their sleep took shape for him.  His mind reached back into the past day, groping among obscure and broken memories, for it seemed to him now that for the greater part of the time he had been stunned and blinded, and that what he had seen, he had seen in sudden, vivid flashes, instantaneously: he felt again the tension of waiting, that became impatience, and then the immense effort to move, and the momentary relief which came with movement, the sense of unreality and dread which descended on one, and some restoration of balance as one saw other men moving forward in a way that seemed commonplace, mechanical, as though at some moment of ordinary routine; the restraint, and the haste that fought against it with every voice in one's being crying out to hurry.  Hurry?  One cannot hurry, alone, into nowhere, into nothing.  Every impulse created immediately its own violent contradiction.  The confusion and tumult in his own mind was inseparable from the senseless fury about him, each reinforcing the other.  He saw great chunks of the German line blown up, as the artillery blasted a way for them; clouds of dust and smoke screened their advance, but the Hun searched for them scrupulously; the air was ripped by screaming shells, hissing like tons of molten metal plunging suddenly into water, there was the blast and concussion of their explosion, men smashed, obliterated in sudden eruptions of earth, rent and strewn in bloody fragments, shells that were like hell-cats humped and spitting, little sounds, unpleasantly close, like the plucking of tense strings, and something tangling his feet, tearing at his trousers and puttees as he stumbled over it, and then a face suddenly, an inconceivably distorted face, which raved and sobbed at him as he fell with it into a shell-hole.  He saw with astonishment the bare arse of a Scotsman who had gone into action wearing only a kilt-apron; and then they righted themselves and looked at each other, bewildered and humiliated.  There followed a moment of perfect lucidity, while they took a breather; and he found himself, though unwounded, wondering with an insane prudence where the nearest dressing station was.  Other men came up; two more Gordons joined them, and Mr Halliday, who flung himself on top of them and, keeping his head well down, called them a lot of bloody skulkers.  He had a slight wound in the fore-arm.  They made a rush forward again, the dust and smoke clearing a little, and they heard the elastic twang of Mills bombs as they reached an empty trench, very narrow where shelling had not wrecked or levelled it.  Mr Halliday was hit again, in the knee, before they reached the trench, and Bourne felt something pluck the front of his tunic at the same time.  They pulled Mr Halliday into the trench, and left him with of the Gordons who had also been hit.  Men were converging there, and he went forward with some of his own company again. From the moment he had thrown himself into the shell-hole with the Scotsman something had changed in him; the conflict and tumult of his mind had gone, his mind itself seemed to have gone, to have contracted and hardened within him; fear remained, an implacable and restless fear, but that, too, seemed to have been beaten and forged into a point of exquisite sensibility and to have become indistinguishable from hate.  Only the instincts of the beast survived in him, every sense was alert and in that tension was some poignancy.  He neither knew where he was, nor whither he was going, he could have no plan because he could foresee nothing, everything happening was inevitable and unexpected, he was an act in a whole chain of acts; and, though his movements had to conform to those of others, spontaneously, as part of some infinitely flexible plan, which he could not comprehend very clearly even in regard to its immediate object, he could rely on no one but himself.  They worked round a point still held by machine-guns, through a rather intricate system of trenches linking up shell-craters.  The trenches were little more than bolt-holes, through which the machine-gunners, after they had held up the advancing infantry as long as possible, might hope to escape to some other appointed position further back, and resume their work, thus gaining time for the troops behind to recover from the effect of the bombardment, and emerge from their hiding-places.  They were singularly brave men, these Prussian machine-gunners, but the extreme of heroism, alike in foe or friend, is indistinguishable from despair.  Bourne found himself playing again a game of his childhood, though not now among rocks which reverberated heat quivered in wavy films, but in made fissures too chalky and unweathered for adequate concealment.  One has not, perhaps, at thirty years the same zest in the game as one had at thirteen, but the sense of danger brought into play a latent experience which had become a kind of instinct with him, and he moved in those tortuous ways with the furtive cunning of a stoat or a weasel.  Stooping low at an angle in the trench he saw the next comparatively straight length empty, and when the man behind was close to him, ran forward still stooping.  The advancing line, hung up at one point, inevitably tended to surround it, and it was suddenly abandoned by the few men holding it.  Bourne, running, checked as a running Hun rounded the further angle precipitately, saw him stop, shrink back into a defensive posture, and fired without lifting the butt of his rifle quite level with his right breast.  The man fell shot in the face, and someone screamed at Bourne to go on; the body choked the narrow angle, and when he put his foot on it squirmed or moved, making him check again, fortunately, as a bomb exploded a couple of yards round the corner.  He turned, dismayed, on the man behind him, but behind the bomber he saw the grim bulk of Captain Malet, and his strangely exultant face; and Bourne, incapable of articulate speech, could only wave a hand to indicate the way he divined the Huns to have gone.  Captain Malet swung himself above ground, and the men, following, overflowed the narrow channel of the trench; but the two waves, which had swept round the machine-gun post, were now on the point of meeting; men bunched together, and there were some casualties among them before they went to ground again.  Captain Malet gave him a word in passing, and Bourne, looking at him with dull uncomprehending eyes, lagged a little to let others intervene between them.  He had found himself immediately afterwards next to Company-Sergeant-Major Glasspool, who nodded to him swiftly and appreciatively; and then Bourne understood.  He was doing the right thing.  In that last rush he had gone on and got into the lead , somehow, for a brief moment; but he realized himself himself that he had only gone on because he had been unable to stand still.  The sense of being one in a crowd did not give him the same confidence as at the start, the present stage seemed to call for a little more personal freedom.  Presently, just because they were together, they would rush something in a hurry instead of stalking it.  Two men of another regiment, who had presumably got lost, broke back momentarily demoralized, and Sergeant-Major Glasspool confronted them.
  'Where the bloody hell do you reckon you're going?'
  He rapped out the question with the staccato of a machine-gun; facing their hysterical disorder, he was the living embodiment of a threat.
  'We were ordered back,' one said, shamefaced and fearful.
  'Yes.  You take your fuckin' orders from Fritz,' Glasspool, white-lipped and with heaving chest, shot sneeringly at them.  They came to heel quietly enough, but all the rage and hatred in their hearts found an object in him, now.  He forgot them as son as he found them in hand.
  'You're all right, chum,' whispered Bourne, to the one who had spoken.  'Get among your own mob again as soon as there's a chance.'
  The man only looked at him stonily.  In the next rush forward something struck Bourne's helmet, knocking it back over the nape of his neck so that the chin-strap tore his ears.  For the moment he thought he had been knocked out, he had bitten his tongue, too, and his mouth was salt with blood.  The blow had left a deep dent in the helmet, just fracturing the steel.  He was still dazed and shaken when they reached some building-ruins, which he seemed to remember.  They were near the railway-station.