Mr. Standfast
that you should know your fate. You are going into France, and I will
see that you are taken to the British front. There with my old division
you will learn something of the meaning of war. Understand that by no
conceivable chance can you escape. Men will be detailed to watch you
day and night and to see that you undergo the full rigour of the
battlefield. You will have the same experience as other people, no
more, no less. I believe in a righteous God and I know that sooner or
later you will find death—death at the hands of your own people—an
honourable death which is far beyond your deserts. But before it comes
you will have understood the hell to which you have condemned honest
men.”
In moments of great fatigue, as in moments of great crisis, the mind
takes charge and may run on a track independent of the will. It was not
myself that spoke, but an impersonal voice which I did not know, a
voice in whose tones rang a strange authority. Ivery recognised the icy
finality of it, and his body seemed to wilt, and droop. Only the hold
of the warders kept him from falling.
I, too, was about at the end of my endurance. I felt dimly that the
room had emptied except for Blenkiron and Amos, and that the former was
trying to make me drink brandy from the cup of a flask. I struggled to
my feet with the intention of going to Mary, but my legs would not
carry me.... I heard as in a dream Amos giving thanks to an Omnipotence
in whom he officially disbelieved. “What’s that the auld man in the
Bible said? Now let thou thy servant depart in peace. That’s the way
I’m feelin’ mysel’.” And then slumber came on me like an armed man, and
in the chair by the dying wood-ash I slept off the ache of my limbs,
the tension of my nerves, and the confusion of my brain.
CHAPTER XX
The Storm Breaks in the West
The following evening—it was the 20th day of March—I started for France
after the dark fell. I drove Ivery’s big closed car, and within sat its
owner, bound and gagged, as others had sat before him on the same
errand. Geordie Hamilton and Amos were his companions. From what
Blenkiron had himself discovered and from the papers seized in the Pink
Chalet I had full details of the road and its mysterious stages. It was
like the journey of a mad dream. In a back street of a little town I
would exchange passwords with a nameless figure and be given
instructions. At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a
thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had
been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber
up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was
the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself
dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to
blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron’s own
arrangements began, and soon I was drinking coffee with a young
lieutenant of Chasseurs, and had taken the gag from Ivery’s mouth. The
bluecoats looked curiously at the man in the green ulster whose face
was the colour of clay and who lit cigarette from cigarette with a
shaky hand.
The lieutenant rang up a General of Division who knew all about us. At
his headquarters I explained my purpose, and he telegraphed to an Army
Headquarters for a permission which was granted. It was not for nothing
that in January I had seen certain great personages in Paris, and that
Blenkiron had wired ahead of me to prepare the way. Here I handed over
Ivery and his guard, for I wanted them to proceed to Amiens under
French supervision, well knowing that the men of that great army are
not used to let slip what they once hold.
It was a morning of clear spring sunlight when we breakfasted in that
little red-roofed town among vineyards with a shining river looping at
our feet. The General of Division was an Algerian veteran with a brush
of grizzled hair, whose eye kept wandering to a map on the wall where
pins and stretched thread made a spider’s web.
“Any news from the north?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “But the attack comes soon. It will be against our
army in Champagne.” With a lean finger he pointed out the enemy
dispositions.
“Why not against the British?” I asked. With a knife and fork I made a
right angle and put a salt dish in the centre. “That is the German
concentration. They can so mass that we do not know which side of the
angle they will strike till the blow falls.”
“It is true,” he replied. “But consider. For the enemy to attack
towards the Somme would be to fight over many miles of an old
battle-ground where all is still desert and every yard of which you
British know. In Champagne at a bound he might enter unbroken country.
It is a long and difficult road to Amiens, but not so long to Chilons.
Such is the view of Pétain. Does it convince you?”
“The reasoning is good. Nevertheless he will strike at Amiens, and I
think he will begin today.”
He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “_Nous verrons_. You are
obstinate, my general, like all your excellent countrymen.”
But as I left his headquarters an aide-de-camp handed him a message on
a pink slip. He read it, and turned to me with a grave face.
“You have a _flair_, my friend. I am glad we did not wager. This
morning at dawn there is great fighting around St Quentin. Be
comforted, for they will not pass. Your _Maréchal_ will hold them.”
That was the first news I had of the battle.
At Dijon according to plan I met the others. I only just caught the
Paris train, and Blenkiron’s great wrists lugged me into the carriage
when it was well in motion. There sat Peter, a docile figure in a
carefully patched old R.F.C. uniform. Wake was reading a pile of French
papers, and in a corner Mary, with her feet up on the seat, was sound
asleep.
We did not talk much, for the life of the past days had been so hectic
that we had no wish to recall it. Blenkiron’s face wore an air of
satisfaction, and as he looked out at the sunny spring landscape he
hummed his only tune. Even Wake had lost his restlessness. He had on a
pair of big tortoiseshell reading glasses, and when he looked up from
his newspaper and caught my eye he smiled. Mary slept like a child,
delicately flushed, her breath scarcely stirring the collar of the
greatcoat which was folded across her throat. I remember looking with a
kind of awe at the curve of her young face and the long lashes that lay
so softly on her cheek, and wondering how I had borne the anxiety of
the last months. Wake raised his head from his reading, glanced at Mary
and then at me, and his eyes were kind, almost affectionate. He seemed
to have won peace of mind among the hills.
Only Peter was out of the picture. He was a strange, disconsolate
figure, as he shifted about to ease his leg, or gazed incuriously from
the window. He had shaved his beard again, but it did not make him
younger, for his face was too lined and his eyes too old to change.
When I spoke to him he looked towards Mary and held up a warning
finger.
“I go back to England,” he whispered. “Your little _mysie_ is going to
take care of me till I am settled. We spoke of it yesterday at my
cottage. I will find a lodging and be patient till the war is over. And
you, Dick?”
“Oh, I rejoin my division. Thank God, this job is over. I have an easy
_trund_ now and can turn my attention to straight-forward soldiering. I
don’t mind telling you that I’ll be glad to think that you and Mary and
Blenkiron are safe at home. What about you, Wake?”
“I go back to my Labour battalion,” he said cheerfully. “Like you, I
have an easier mind.”
I shook my head. “We’ll see about that. I don’t like such sinful waste.
We’ve had a bit of campaigning together and I know your quality.”
“The battalion’s quite good enough for me,” and he relapsed into a
day-old _Journal_.
Mary had suddenly woke, and was sitting upright with her fists in her
eyes like a small child. Her hand flew to her hair, and her eyes ran
over us as if to see that we were all there. As she counted the four of
us she seemed relieved.
“I reckon you feel refreshed, Miss Mary,” said Blenkiron. “It’s good to
think that now we can sleep in peace, all of us. Pretty soon you’ll be
in England and spring will be beginning, and please God it’ll be the
start of a better world. Our work’s over, anyhow.”
“I wonder,” said the girl gravely. “I don’t think there’s any discharge
in this war. Dick, have you news of the battle? This was the day.”
“It’s begun,” I said, and told them the little I had learned from the
French General. “I’ve made a reputation as a prophet, for he thought
the attack was coming in Champagne. It’s St Quentin right enough, but I
don’t know what has happened. We’ll hear in Paris.”
Mary had woke with a startled air as if she remembered her old instinct
that our work would not be finished without a sacrifice, and that
sacrifice the best of us. The notion kept recurring to me with an
uneasy insistence. But soon she appeared to forget her anxiety. That
afternoon as we journeyed through the pleasant land of France she was
in holiday mood, and she forced all our spirits up to her level. It was
calm, bright weather, the long curves of ploughland were beginning to
quicken into green, the catkins made a blue mist on the willows by the
watercourses, and in the orchards by the red-roofed hamlets the blossom
was breaking. In such a scene it was hard to keep the mind sober and
grey, and the pall of war slid from us. Mary cosseted and fussed over
Peter like an elder sister over a delicate little boy. She made him
stretch his bad leg full length on the seat, and when she made tea for
the party of us it was a protesting Peter who had the last sugar
biscuit. Indeed, we were almost a merry company, for Blenkiron told
stories of old hunting and engineering days in the West, and Peter and
I were driven to cap them, and Mary asked provocative questions, and
Wake listened with amused interest. It was well that we had the
carriage to ourselves, for no queerer rigs were ever assembled. Mary,
as always, was neat and workmanlike in her dress; Blenkiron was
magnificent in a suit of russet tweed with a pale-blue shirt and
collar, and well-polished brown shoes; but Peter and Wake were in
uniforms which had seen far better days, and I wore still the boots and
the shapeless and ragged clothes of Joseph Zimmer, the porter from
Arosa.
We appeared to forget the war, but we didn’t, for it was in the
background of all our minds. Somewhere in the north there was raging a
desperate fight, and its issue was the true test of our success or
failure. Mary showed it by bidding me ask for news at every
stopping-place. I asked gendarmes and _permissionnaires_, but I learned
nothing. Nobody had ever heard of the battle. The upshot was that for
the last hour we all fell silent, and when we reached Paris about seven
o’clock my first errand was to the bookstall.
I bought a batch of evening papers, which we tried to read in the taxis
that carried us to our hotel. Sure enough there was the announcement in
big headlines. The enemy had attacked in great strength from south of
Arras to the Oise; but everywhere he had been repulsed and held in our
battle-zone. The leading articles were confident, the notes by the
various military critics were almost braggart. At last the German had
been driven to an offensive, and the Allies would have the opportunity
they had longed for of proving their superior fighting strength. It
was, said one and all, the opening of the last phase of the war.
I confess that as I read my heart sank. If the civilians were so
over-confident, might not the generals have fallen into the same trap?
Blenkiron alone was unperturbed. Mary said nothing, but she sat with