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Updated: May 9, 2025
We can pretend it's seaside. 'Father said it was once, Anthea said; 'he says there are shells there thousands of years old. So they went. Of course they had been to the edge of the gravel-pit and looked over, but they had not gone down into it for fear father should say they mustn't play there, and the same with the chalk-quarry.
He gazed at his mother while she played, but he saw Fleur Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering, stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was Dad looking like that for? The expression on his face was so sad and puzzling.
And I have a better proof of this at least I should have in every gravel-pit at Eversley in a few pieces of a stone which is not chalk-flint at all; flattish and oblong, not more than two or three inches in diameter; of a grayish colour, and a porous worm-eaten surface, which no chalk-flint ever has.
Pheasants in the tall trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind.
Now, the mass of chalk which has been carried away began behind you, at the Hogsback, and the line of chalk-hills which runs to Boxhill, and stretched hundreds of feet above your head as you stand on Hind Head or Leith Hill, right over the old Weald of Sussex to the chalk of the South Downs. And out of the scourings of that vast mass of chalk was our gravel-pit made.
They called Anthea "Panther," which seems silly when you read it, but when you say it it sounds a little like her name. The gravel-pit is very large and wide, with grass growing round the edges at the top, and dry stringy wildflowers, purple and yellow. It is like a giant's washbowl.
A short conversation with him during this evening produced a strong impression on my mind. Whilst examining an old gravel-pit near Shrewsbury, a labourer told me that he had found in it a large worn tropical Volute shell, such as may be seen on the chimney-pieces of cottages; and as he would not sell the shell, I was convinced that he had really found it in the pit.
Bare posts hacked to the ground were all that remained of Fort Gibraltar's old wall. I had not gone many paces across the former courtyard, when voices sounded from the gravel-pit that had once done duty as a cellar. The next thing I noticed was the shaggy face of Louis Laplante bobbing above the ground.
But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, "Here we are!" "How white the house is," said Robert. "And look at the roses," said Anthea. "And the plums," said Jane. "It is rather decent," Cyril admitted.
All my previous experiences in this war the slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch are the purest child's play compared with this massacre, and that is much too mild a description. I hardly think they will bring us into the fight again, for we are in a very bad way."
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