The Wars

Robert catches a train and boards a ship to France. Finding his way back to the Brigade Headquarters is difficult. He is separated from his kit bag due to a “foul-up on the part of one of the Sergeants” (149). He travels to Rouen and onward without it, arriving in Magdalene Wood, “still twelve miles from his destination” (150). He has to walk to Bailleul to get a room at a hotel and is assured his kit bag will be sent along to him. The countryside is peaceful, and he thinks that “there cannot be a war” (150). The landscape is empty and Robert wonders where the people have gone. Without his bag, he does not have his change of clothes or his pistol. He has travelled over 200 miles when his journey “should have been about a quarter of that” (151). He collapses into a deep sleep at the hotel.

The sounds of the hotel filter up to him, but he does not feel clean enough to venture down and join the women. He hears the guns in the distance and slips “his hand across his stomach and down between his legs” (152). He undresses and looks at himself in the mirror: “he seemed like a fugitive” (152).