Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river.

In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.