Edward Thomas looks back on evening walks with a companion during the First World War. The days were slow and undemanding—full of easy talk, quiet pauses, and cheerful goodnights. War news flickered at the edges of their attention, but it was almost effortlessly pushed aside by small, vivid things: a wasp-eaten apple yellow and fragrant, a sentinel-like betony, pale crocuses the colour of the Underworld. Even when the moon rose and reminded them of distant soldiers watching the same light, the conflict felt as remote as the Crusades or Caesar’s battles.
What stays with the speaker is how fragile that peace proved to be. The walks, the fallen apples, the murmur and stillness between them—all have slipped into a past as irretrievable as footprints under the tide. Now, other people wander those fields beneath the same moon, talking easily. The memory shimmers with gratitude and loss, creating a mood that is warm yet deeply elegiac: a glimpse of friendship that the present can never quite recover.