Quote:
The spur of the officer caught in a tree-root, he went down backwards with a crash, the middle of his back thudding sickeningly against a sharp-edged tree-base, the pot flying away. And in a second the orderly, with serious, earnest young face, and underlip between his teeth, had got his knee in the officer’s chest and was pressing the chin backward over the farther edge of the tree-stump, pressing, with all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists exquisite with relief. And with the base of his palms he shoved at the chin, with all his might. And it was pleasant, too, to have that chin, that hard jaw already slightly rough with beard, in his hands. He did not relax one hair’s breadth, but, all the force of all his blood exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man, till there was a little “cluck” and a crunching sensation. Then he felt as if his head went to vapour. Heavy convulsions shook the body of the officer, frightening and horrifying the young soldier. Yet it pleased him, too, to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration to the weight of his strong, young knees, to feel the hard twitchings of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed down on it.
But it went still. He could look into the nostrils of the other man, the eyes he could scarcely see. How curiously the mouth was pushed out, exaggerating the full lips, and the moustache bristling up from them. Then, with a start, he noticed the nostrils gradually filled with blood. The red brimmed, hesitated, ran over, and went in a thin trickle down the face to the eyes.
Up until here he is acting in a way that will relieve him of his tension and pain and his situation of abuse. He uses specific words and phrases to express this relief such as:
Quote:
It shocked and distressed him. Slowly, he got up. The body twitched and sprawled there, inert. He stood and looked at it in silence. It was a pity IT was broken. It represented more than the thing which had kicked and bullied him. He was afraid to look at the eyes. They were hideous now, only the whites showing, and the blood running to them. The face of the orderly was drawn with horror at the sight. Well, it was so. In his heart he was satisfied. He had hated the face of the Captain. It was extinguished now. There was a heavy relief in the orderly’s soul. That was as it should be. But he could not bear to see the long, military body lying broken over the tree-base, the fine fingers crisped. He wanted to hide it away.
This is a very curious line in the above paragraph when referring to the officers dead body:
Quote:
Quickly, busily, he gathered it up and pushed it under the felled tree-trunks, which rested their beautiful, smooth length either end on logs. The face was horrible with blood. He covered it with the helmet. Then he pushed the limbs straight and decent, and brushed the dead leaves off the fine cloth of the uniform. So, it lay quite still in the shadow under there. A little strip of sunshine ran along the breast, from a chink between the logs. The orderly sat by it for a few moments. Here his own life also ended.
Now he hides the body, actually positions it as though it is still alive and sleeping. The curious thing is the next to the last line when he sat by it for a few minutes. The last line is the zinger and I think the climax - "Here his own life also ended". The way this line suddenly presents itself on the page is stark reality and so brilliant on Lawrence's part. The timing is perfect for this line. This line shows to me starkly that violence and actions like these that end in death/murder never have one victim, but claim two. Now the men are one in the crime, their fates sealed. Perhaps similiar to Tess' action in the Hardy novel when she kills Alec and knows from that moment on that her own life is doomed, that she will be hanged and die. In PO there is a oneness of death and quilt and violence, now that the young officer has crossed that moral line; the end also reflects and encompasses this oneness with the communing of the dead in the final scene. The 'two halves of the whole', perhaps? becoming one in death?
