They very much want it done. I argued with them; but they want it done.... And that’s that.”

Dutertre and I sat looking out of the window. Here too a branch was swaying in the breeze. I could hear the cackle of the hens. Our Intelligence Room had been set up in a schoolhouse; the major’s office was in a farmhouse.

It would be easy to write a couple of fraudulent pages out of the contrast between this shining spring day, the ripening fruit, the chicks filling plumply out in the barnyard, the rising wheat—and death at our elbow. I shall not write that couple of pages because I see no reason why the peace of a spring day should constitute a contradiction of the idea of death. Why should the sweetness of life be a matter for irony?

But a vague notion did go through my mind as I stared out of Alias’ window. “The spring has broken down,” I said to myself. “The season is out of order.” I had flown over abandoned threshing machines, abandoned binders. I had seen motorcars deserted in roadside ditches. I had come upon a village square standing under water while the village faucet—“the fountain” as our people call it—stood open and the stream flowed on.

And suddenly a completely ridiculous image came into my mind. I thought of clocks out of order. All the clocks of France—out of order. Clocks in their church steeples. Clocks on railway stations. Chimney clocks in empty houses. A charnelhouse of clocks. “The war,” I said to myself, “is that thing in which clocks are no longer wound up. In which beets are no longer gathered in. In which farm carts are no longer greased. And that water, collected and piped to quench men’s thirst and to whiten the Sunday laces of the village women—that water stands now in a pool flooding the square before the village church.”

As for Alias, he was talking like a bedside physician. “Hm,” says the doctor with a shake of the head, “rather awkward, this”; and you know that he is hinting that you ought to be making your will, thinking of those you are about to leave behind. There was no question in Dutertre’s mind or mine that Alias was talking about sacrificing another crew.

“And,” Alias went on, “things being as they are, it’s no good worrying about the chances you run.”

Quite so. No good at all. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s not our fault that we feel none too cheerful. Not the major’s fault that he is ill at ease with us. Not the Staff’s fault that it gives orders. The major is out of sorts because the orders are absurd.