“My Peter was killed at Loos,” said the farmer when he brought the milk. “Were you at Loos?” Ellwood was forced to admit he had been. “What was it like?” He did not know how to answer. It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century. So he had simply stared at the farmer, speechless, until his mother took his arm and led him away, as if he was a drunken old fool. “He’s very tired,” she’d apologised to the farmer. Yes. He was very tired.
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