Format: Single
She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her. |
This is from “The Gardener”, collected in Debits and Credits (1926) On the Western Front, Helen Turrell has lost her deeply-loved ‘nephew’, whom she has brought up as her son, and has come over to France to see his grave, among many many thousands of others. |
|