A man forgot all these things when he came down the cellar steps and
crept to a corner to snatch what sleep he could, but remembered them
again only when he was wakened and sent out into their midst, and into
all the toils and terrors the others had passed, or were to go into or
even then were meeting.
The signalers at the instruments, the sergeants who gathered them in
and sent them forth, gave little or no thought to the orderlies. These
men were hardly more than shadows, things which brought them long
screeds to be translated to the tapping keys, hands which would stretch
into the candle-light and lift the messages that had just "buzzed" in
over their wires. The sergeant thought of them mostly as a list of
names to be ticked off one by one in a careful roster as each man did
his turn of duty, went out, or came back and reported in. And the man
who sent messages these men bore may never have given a thought to the
hands that would carry them, unless perhaps to wonder vaguely whether
the message could get through from so and so to such and such, from
this map square to that, and if the chance of the messages getting
through--the message you will note, not the messenger--seemed extra
doubtful, orders might be given to send it in duplicate or triplicate,
to double or treble the chances of its arriving.
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