Commonplace Book

'Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody's face all the time. I met it first at B echelon on the way up; then it increased. Everywhere - by netted vehicles, in men sitting under hedges watching us pass, by low tents, and guns in stalls of earth poised for that uncatchable instant of concussion and departure, from the top of boulder-like turrets of metal, in spite of earphones and procedure - IT. And in the eyes of horses, mules and peasants moving slowly among rubble like ants, IT looked out - even from inanimate objects - from a patch of ground - signed by IT - with M and V tins, winey shit, and foul webbing. And in the sky IT whispered lusciously, hummed, intoned, moaned, whistled, crackled, sobbed, breathed, rushed, howled, shrieked, banged, erupted, rent, or with a little limited cough, underfoot, sufficed. And at night IT sometimes had a look in an isolated lake of lapping yellow light under a falling star, hushed with eyes, wobbling to make the silhouettes frolic.

And then like this IT chose someone, dropped a pencil on the great telephone-book of stockbrokers and shopwalkers, adolescents and middle-aged regulars and miners - the Guys and Johns and Boys and Corporal Murrays - sent you away with your face covered with a rough blanket or with pulp for a joint, mauve, calling out mother Christ morphia or some stored obscenity for relief.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part One, Chapter 3)