Strolling under the aspens that shivered and twinkled by the river, I allowed myself a little daydream, based on the leisurely ticking of the old Ludlow clock. … Was it only three weeks ago that I had been standing there at the foot of the staircase, between the barometer and the clock, on just such a fine summer morning as this? Upstairs in the bathroom Aunt Evelyn was putting sweet peas and roses in water, humming to herself while she arranged them to her liking. Visualizing the bathroom with its copper bath and basin (which “took such a lot of cleaning”), its lead floor, and the blue and white Dutch tiles along the walls, and the elder tree outside the window, I found these familiar objects almost as dear to me as Aunt Evelyn herself, since they were one with her in my mind (though for years she’d been talking about doing away with the copper bath and basin).
Even now, perhaps, she was once again carrying a bowl of roses down to the drawing-room while the clock ticked slow, and the parrot whistled, and the cook chopped something on the kitchen table. There might also be the short-winded snorting of a traction-engine labouring up the hill outside the house. … Meeting a traction-engine had been quite an event in my childhood, when I was out for rides on my first pony. And the thought of the cook suggested the gardener clumping in with a trug of vegetables, and the gardener suggested birds in the strawberry nets, and altogether there was no definite end to that sort of daydream of an England where there was no war on and the village cricket ground was still being mown by a man who didn’t know that he would some day join “the Buffs,” migrate to Mesopotamia, and march to Bagdad.
Amiens was eleven miles away and the horses none too sound; but Dottrell had arranged for us to motor the last seven of the miles—the former Quartermaster of our battalion (who had been Quartermaster at Fourth Army Headquarters ever since the Fourth Army had existed)—having promised to lend us his car. So there was nothing wrong with the world as the five of us jogged along, and I allowed myself a momentary illusion that we were riding clean away from the War. Looking across a spacious and untroubled landscape chequered with ripening corn and bloodred clover, I wondered how that calm and beneficent light could be spreading as far as the battle zone. But a Staff car overtook us, and as it whirled importantly past in a cloud of dust I caught sight of a handcuffed German prisoner—soon to provide material for an optimistic paragraph in Corps Intelligence Summary, and to add his story to the omniscience of the powers who now issued operation orders with the assertion that we were “pursuing a beaten enemy.” Soon we were at Querrieux, a big village cosily overpopulated by the Fourth Army Staff. As we passed the General’s white château Dottrell speculated ironically on the average income of his personal staff, adding that they must suffer terribly from insomnia with so many guns firing fifteen miles away. Leaving our horses to make the most of a Fourth Army feed, we went indoors to pay our respects to the opulent Quartermaster, who had retired from Battalion duties after the First Battle of Ypres. He assured us that he could easily spare his car for a few hours since he had the use of two; whereupon Dottrell said he’d been wondering how he managed to get on with only one car.
In Amiens, at the well-known Godbert Restaurant, we lunched like dukes in a green-shuttered private room. “God only knows when we’ll see a clean tablecloth again,” remarked Barton, as he ordered langoustes, roast duck, and two bottles of their best “bubbly.” Heaven knows what else the meal contained; but I remember talking with a loosened tongue about sport, and old Joe telling us how he narrowly escaped being reduced to the ranks for “making a book” when the Battalion was stationed in Ireland before the war. “There were some fine riders in the regiment then; they talked and thought about nothing but hunting, racing, and polo,” he said; adding that it was lucky for some of us that horsemanship wasn’t needed for winning the war, since most mounted officers now looked as if they were either rowing a boat or riding a bicycle uphill. Finally, when with flushed faces we sauntered out into the sunshine, he remarked that he’d half a mind to go and look for a young lady to make his wife jealous. I said that there was always the cathedral to look at, and discovered that I’d unintentionally made a very good joke.
V
Two days later we vacated the camp at Heilly. The aspens by the river were shivering and showing the whites of their leaves, and it was goodbye to their cool showery sound when we marched away in our own dust at four o’clock on a glaring bright afternoon. The aspens waited, with their indifferent welcome, for some other dead beat and diminished battalion. Such was their habit, and so the war went on. It must be difficult, for those who did not experience
