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in the wrong place.
    The wind was rising as he hurried across the gritty
tarmac to his tent. Bent double, he braced himself to face the smell of armpits
and socks, heavy on the day's stored heat, for though they left the flaps open,
nothing could prevent the tents becoming ovens in hot weather. He took a deep
breath, as deep as he could manage, and crawled into the stinking dark.
    A voice said, 'Hello.'
    Of course. Hallet. The past week he'd
had the tent to himself, because Hallet had been away on a bombing course in
Ripon.
    'Can you see all right?'
    The beam of a torch illuminated yellow grass littered
with cigarette butts.
    'I can manage, thanks.'
    Blinking to reaccustom himself to the blackness, Prior wriggled into his sleeping-bag.
    'You're just back from London, aren't you?'
    He resigned himself to having to talk. 'Yes. Week ago.'
    A flicker of lightning found the whites of Hallet's
eyes. 'Have you been boarded yet?'
    'Out next draft. You?'
    'Next draft.'
    Voice casual, but the mouth dry .
    'First time?' Prior asked.
    'Yes, as a matter of fact it is.'
    Now that Prior was accustomed to the gloom he could
see Hallet clearly: olive-skinned, almost Mediterranean-looking, a nice crooked
mouth with prominent front teeth that he was evidently self-conscious about,
for he kept pulling his upper lip down to hide them. Quite
fetching. Not that in these circumstances Prior ever permitted himself to be fetched.
    'I'm really rather looking forward to it.'
    The words hung on the air, obviously requiring an
answer of some kind, but then what could one say? He was scared shitless, he
was right to be scared shitless, and any
'reassuring' remark risked drawing attention to one or other of these
unfortunate facts.
    'Some of the men in my platoon have been out three
times,' Hallet said. 'I think that's the only thing that bothers me, really.
How the hell do you lead men who know more than you do?'
    'You pray for a good sergeant. A really good sergeant
tells you what orders to give him, doesn't let anybody else see him doing it,
and doesn't let himself know he's doing it.'
    'How many times have you—?'
    'This'll be the fourth. Wound, shell-shock, trench
fever. Not in that order.'
    Hallet was lying on his back, hands clasped behind his
head, nothing much visible from Prior's angle except his chin. How appallingly
random it all was. If Hallet's father had got a gleam in his eye two years
later than he did, Hallet wouldn't be here. He might even have missed the war
altogether, perhaps spent the rest of his life goaded by the irrational shame
of having escaped. 'Cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends
who died.' That was it exactly, couldn't be better put. Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This
moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or
perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve
weeks. He was this boy's great-grandfather.
    He looked at Hallet again, at the warm column of his
neck, and tried to think of something to say, something light-hearted and easy,
but could think of nothing. He stared instead at the stained canvas, lit by
flickers of summer lightning, and noticed that the largest stain looked like a
map of Africa.

 
    CHAPTER
FOUR
     
    Two black lines circled Moffet's legs immediately
above the knee.
    'Close your eyes,' Rivers said. 'I want you to tell me
exactly what you feel.'
    'Pinprick.'
    'How many?'
    The pins touched again.
    Two.
    Again.
    'One.'
    Again.
    'Two.' Moffet sounded bored. 'Two. Two.' A pause. 'Not sure.'
    'All right. You can open your eyes now.'
    He hadn't lied once. He'd lain with closed eyes, a
fluttering visible beneath the thin lids, and Rivers
had read in every line and fold of his face the temptation to lie, and yet the
progression of yeses and noes had been totally accurate. True, he couldn't