XI
W
hat
followed then is now a confused dream to me, or to speak more accurately, a nightmare in which there were both dark and terrifying gaps and also garishly clear pictures, some of them too clear, whose every detail comes to me now as brutally as they did when I first experienced them.
I see the red-necked soldiers clustered about the hole, some of them men I knew, men who had brought their sweethearts under our flowering wall on summer nights. They must often have seen me peeping at them shyly from among the boughs, yet now they looked at me as though I were an utter stranger, almost an enemy. I wondered whether they were accusing me silently of killing the little baby; I did not know enough about soldiers then to realise that their sullen resentment might have been due to some
