Later the huddled shapes would grow quiet and still and there would be an odour that would sicken all who passed, and the graves would be shallow graves. The pain, the cry for water, and the prayer for death – the crying and the calling and the whimpering that would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or day, and it was broken by the whimper and Then it all had ended and there was a silence. For endless time, it seemed, there had been belching thunder rolling from horizon to horizon and the gouted earth that had spouted in the sky and the screams of horses and the hoarse bellowing of men the whistling of metal and the thud when the whistle ended the flash of searing fire and the brightness of the steel the bravery of the colours snapping in the battle wind. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted. The smoke drifted like thin, grey wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire.
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