Part 18

We met them at footer the other day, and I told that little bounder Jenkins that we had a fellow at the Front. He said, "Rot!" So I showed him the envelope of your letter with "Passed by the Censor" on it, and one of those cartridge-cases you sent me, and I said, "That's proof," and he dried up. He did look sick. I hope you'll get the V.C. or something--the Head'll be sure to give us a half-holiday. Young Smith, who pretends to read the Head's newspaper when he leaves it lying about--you know how he swanks about it--said the Precedent or General Joffre had given a French kid who was only fourteen and had enlisted and killed a lot of Huns, till they found him out and sent him back to school, a legion of honours or something. Smith said it was a medal; I said that was rot, and that it meant they'd given him a lot of other chaps to command, and I showed him what the Bible said about a legion of devils, and I got hold of a crib to Caesar and proved to him that legions were soldiers. That shut him up. So, Pan, old man, mind you get the French to let you bring us other fellows out, or if you can't bring it off, then come home with a medal or something.

"Peter," I called out. Peter had turned his back on me and was pretending to be absorbed in a distant speck in the sky.

"Major Peter," I said ingratiatingly, with a salute. Peter turned round. He was very red.

"I didn't mean you to read all that rot," he said. "I meant what he says at the end."

I read on--this time in silence:

I say, have you killed any Huns yet? Very decent of the Head to tell your governor you could have an extra week. We miss you at center forward. So hurry up, but mind you don't get torpeedod--we hope they'll just miss you. It would be rotten luck if you never saw one. We've given up German this term--beastly language; it's just like a Hun to keep the verb till the end, so that you never know what he's driving at.

Then followed a sentence heavily underlined:

By the way I'll let you have that knife you wanted me to swop last term if you'll bring me a bayonet. Only mind it's got some blood on it, German blood I mean.--Yours to a cinder,

ARTHUR JACKSON.

I handed this priceless missive back to Peter.

"Cheek, isn't it?" said Peter rather hurriedly. "His old knife for a bayonet!"

"But if you put 'the Front' at the top of your letters, Major Peter, you can't be surprised at his asking for one, you know."

Peter blushed.

"Well, I heard Dad say we were the back of the Front, and the fellows wouldn't think anything of me if I hadn't been near the Front," he said, apologetically. "Hullo, they're going up!"

An aeroplane was skimming along the ground as a moor-hen scuppers across the water, the mechanics having assisted her initial progress by pushing the lower stays and then ducking under the planes, as she gathered way, and just missing decapitation. It's a way they have. She took a run for it, her engine humming like a top, and then rose, and gradually climbed the sky. Peter gazed at her wistfully. "And he promised to take me up some day," he said sadly.

"Yes, some day, Peter," I said encouragingly. "But it's time we were getting back. You know you've got to catch the leave-boat at four o'clock this afternoon."

* * * * *

Peter's father and I stood on the quay, having taken farewell of Peter. There was an eminent Staff Officer going home on leave--a very great man at G.H.Q., a lieutenant-general, who inspired no less fear than respect among us all. He knew Peter's father in his distant way, and had not only returned his salute, but had even condescended to ask, in his laconic style, "Who is the boy?"--whereupon Peter's father had, with some nervousness, introduced him. All the other officers going home on leave, from a Brigadier down to the subalterns, stood at a respectful distance, glancing furtively at the hawk-like profile of the great man, and lowering their voices. It was a tribute not only to rank but to power. As the ship gathered way and moved slowly out of the harbour I pulled the sleeve of Peter's father. "Look!" I said. The Lieutenant-General and Peter were engaged in an animated conversation on the deck, and the great man, usually as silent as the sphinx and not less inscrutable, was evidently contesting with some warmth and great interest, as though hard put to keep his end up, some point of debate propounded to him by Peter.

"T----, old chap," I said, "Peter'll be a great man some day."

Peter's father said nothing, but his eyes grew misty. Perhaps he was thinking of that lonely grave in the distant plains of the Deccan where Peter's mother sleeps.

XVII

THREE TRAVELLERS

(October 1914)

My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon. It was due at Calais at eight o'clock the same evening. But it soon became apparent that something was amiss with our journey--we crawled along at a pace which barely exceeded six miles an hour. At every culvert, guarded by its solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath. As we approached Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor. It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his half-naked body. Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate ministries a hasty dressing. In the next carriage the black face of a wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight. Ahead of us an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had passed, conveying fresh troops. Then I knew. The Germans, hovering like a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce battle was in progress. The news of it had travelled by some mysterious telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil. They looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we passed, no hand waved an exuberant greeting. In the twilight we had already seen red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the grass, digging trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising a wire footbridge across the river. The contagion of suspense was in the air,--you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.

"Shall we get to Calais?" I asked.

"Bon Dieu! I know not," was the reply of the harassed guard.

We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M. Calais at last! I joyfully exclaimed. But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were headed off to Dunkirk. It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no food since noon of yesterday. But my thoughts were with our men, the men whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their fingers numbed with cold. We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M. No explanation why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any hope held out of a return. In those days I was travelling as a private person, and was not yet endowed with the prerogatives by which, in the name of a Secretary of State, I could requisition cars and impress men to do my bidding.

At a hopeless moment I had the good fortune to fall in with a King's Messenger, carrying despatches, who was in the next carriage. He produced his special passports, and the prestige of "Courrier du Roi," Knight of the Order of the Silver Greyhound, worked a miracle. Every one was at our service. We were escorted to the military headquarters of Dunkirk--through streets already echoing with the march of French infantry, each carrying a big baton of bread and munching as he kept step, to an office in which the courteous commandant was just completing his toilet. The Consul was summoned, the headquarters hotel of the English officers was rung up, and thither we went through an ambuscade of motor-cars in the courtyard.