He seemed a great many difficult miles away. That he should be in a
heated room with lights, and flowers, and a spread table--and she under
the shadow of the forest watching the moon rise, lengthened the miles
between them; yet though she would have given much to have him with her,
she would have given nothing to change places with him.
The road left the forest for a time and passed over bare grass hills
beneath a windy sky. Then back into the forest again, hidden from the
moon. And here her half-stayed hunger made her fanciful, and she started
at the noise of a moving bough, blew her horn at nothing, and seemed to
hear the overtaking hum of a car that never drew near her.
Suddenly, on the left, in a ditch, a dark form appeared, then another
and another. Down there in a patch of grass below the road she caught
sight of the upturned wheels of a lorry, and stopping, got down, walked
to the ditch and looked over. There, in wild disorder, lay thirty or
forty lorries and cars, burnt, twisted, wheelless, broken, ravaged,
while on the wooden sides the German eagle, black on white, was marked.
"What--what--can have happened here!"
She climbed back into the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights
came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and
die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up
by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to
firm land on the other side.
Pages:
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216