ABSTRACT
Sooner or later my parents would be bound to have the telegram announcing my death; the war had only to go on long enough. Already I had exhausted my quota of chances of survival. My mother and father, particularly my mother... There was no time and this was no place in which to pursue such thoughts. The soft, caressing mist, the great pall of blackness which had now begun to grey with the approaching dawn, was matched by the silence turning to the pulsating throb of the engines along the front. I watched the minute hand motionless, creeping, rushing headlong to zero hour.
