And there he found them; twenty of them under the command of a subaltern. They had mounted their guns to cover the track at its narrowest point and were lying, waiting for what the evening would bring. It was a ragged and weary party.
“I’m sorry I didn’t send across to you,” said the subaltern. “We were all in. I didn’t know where you were exactly and I hadn’t a man to spare.”
“What happened?”
“It was all rather a nonsense,” said the subaltern, in the classic phraseology of his trade which comprehends all human tragedy. “They bombed us all day yesterday and we had to go to ground. We made a mile or two between raids but it was sticky going. Then at just before sunset they came clean through us in armoured cars. I managed to get this party away. There may be a few others wandering about, but I rather doubt it. Luckily the Jerries decided to call it a day and settled down for a night’s rest. We marched all night and all to-day. We only arrived an hour ago.”
“Can you stop them here?”
“What d’you think?”
“No.”
“No, we can’t stop them. We may hold them up half an hour. They may think we’re the forward part of a battalion and decide to wait till tomorrow before they attack. It all depends what time they arrive. Is there any chance of your being able to relieve us?”
“Yes. I’ll get back right away.”
“We could do with a break,” said the subaltern.
Cedric ran most of the way to the cave. The Colonel heard his story grimly. “Armoured cars or tanks?”
“Armoured cars.”
“Well there’s a chance. Tell D Company to get on the move,” he said to the Adjutant. Then he reported to brigade Headquarters on the wireless what he had heard and what he was doing. It was half an hour before D Company was on its way. From the cave they could see them marching along the track where Cedric had walked so exuberantly. As they watched they saw the column a mile away halt, break up and deploy.
“We’re too late,” said the Colonel. “Here come the armoured cars.”
They had overrun the party of Loamshires and were spreading fanwise across the low plain. Cedric counted twenty of them; behind them an endless stream of lorries full of troops. At the first shot the lorries stopped and under cover of the armoured cars the infantry fell in on the ground, broke into open order and began their advance with parade-ground deliberation. With the cars came a squadron of bombers, flying low along the line of the track. Soon the whole battalion area was full of bursting bombs.
The Colonel was giving orders for the immediate withdrawal of the forward companies.
Cedric stood in the cave. It was curious, he thought, that he should have devoted so much of his life to caves.
“Lyne,” said the Colonel. “Go up to A Company and explain what’s happening. If they come in now from the rear the cars may jink round and give the other companies a chance to get out.”
Cedric set out across the little battlefield. All seemed quite unreal to him still.
The bombers were not aiming at any particular target; they were plastering the ground in front of their cars, between battalion Headquarters and the mouth of the valley where A Company were dug in. The noise was incessant and shattering. Still it did not seem real to Cedric. It was part of a crazy world where he was an interloper. It was nothing to do with him. A bomb came whistling down, it seemed from directly over his head. He fell on his face and it burst fifty yards away, bruising him with a shower of small stones.
“Thought they’d got him,” said the Colonel. “He’s up again.”
“He’s doing all right,” said the Adjutant.
The armoured cars were shooting it out with D Company. The infantry spread out in a long line from hillside to hillside and were moving steadily up. They were not firing yet; just tramping along behind the armoured cars abreast, an arm’s length apart. Behind them another wave was forming up. Cedric had to go across this front. The enemy were still out of effective rifle range from him, but spent bullets were singing round him among the rocks.
“He’ll never make it,” said the Colonel.
I suppose, thought Cedric, I’m being rather brave. How very peculiar. I’m not the least brave, really; it’s simply that the whole thing is so damned silly.
A Company were on the move now. As soon as they heard the firing, without waiting for orders, they were doing what the Colonel intended, edging up the opposing hillside among the boulders, getting into position where they could outflank the outflanking party. It did not matter now whether Cedric reached them. He never did; a bullet got him, killing him instantly while he was a quarter of a mile away.
chapter 4 SUMMER
Summer came and with it the swift sequence of historic events which left all the world dismayed and hardly credulous; all, that is to say, except Sir Joseph Mainwaring, whose courtly and ponderous form concealed a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity, which left him bobbing serenely on the great waves of history which splintered more solid natures to matchwood. Under the new administration he found himself translated to a sphere of public life where he could do no serious harm to anyone, and he accepted the change as a well-earned promotion. In the dark hours of German victory he always had some light anecdote; he believed and repeated everything he heard; he told how ? he had it on the highest authority ? the German infantry was composed of youths in their teens, who were intoxicated before the battle with dangerous drugs; “those who are not mown down by machine guns die within a week,” he said. He told, as vividly as if he had been there and seen it himself, of Dutch skies black with descending nuns, of market women who picked off British officers, sniping over their stalls with sub-machine-guns, of waiters who were caught on hotel roofs marking the rooms of generals with crosses as though on a holiday postcard. He believed, long after hope had been abandoned in more responsible quarters, that the French line was intact. “There is a little bulge,” he explained. “All we have to do is to pinch it out,” and he
