"You poor little beast!" says the Colonel, bending down.
He has seen men die in thousands, this gaunt Englishman with his eye in a sling.
But his voice is infinitely compassionate as he looks with one eye at the little shivering creature, and murmurs again, "Youpoorlittle brute!"
"Yesterday," adds the man with the red gloves, "my trick wolf escaped. She was a beauty, and so clever. When the War began I used to dress her up as a French solider,—red trousers, red cap and all!I s'pose you haven't seen a wolf, M'sieur, running about these parts?"
Nobody answers for a bit.
We are all stunned.
But the old fellow brightens up when he hears that his wolf ate the rabbit.
"Ah, but she was a clever wolf!" he cries excitedly. "Very likely the reason why she ate your Chou-chou was because she has played the part of a French soldier.French soldiers always steal the rabbits!"
I am on my way back to London, grateful and glad to be once more on our side of the Channel.
"Five days!" exclaims a young soldier in the train.
He flings back his head, draws a deep breath, and remains staring like an imbecile at the roof of the railway carriage for quite two minutes.
Then he shakes himself, draws another deep breath, and says again, still staring at the roof:
"Five days!"
The train has started now out into the night. We have left Folkestone well behind. We have pulled down all the blinds because a proclamation commands us to do so, and we are softly, yet swiftly rushing through the cool, sweet-smelling English country back towards good old Victoria Station, where all continental trains must now make their arrivals and departures.
"Have you been wounded, Sir?" asks an old lady in a queer black astrakhan cap, and with a big nose.
"Wounded? Rather! Right on top of the head." He ducks his fair head to shew us. "I didn't know it when it happened. I didn't feel anything at all. I only knew there was something wet. Blood, I suppose. Then they sent me to the Hospital at S. Lazaire, and I had a ripping Cornish nurse. But lor, what a fool I was! I actually signed on that I wanted to go back. Why did I do that? I don't know. I didn't want to go back.Want to go back?Good lor! Think of it! But I went back! and the next thing was Mons! Even now I can't believe it, that march. The Germans were at us all the time. It didn't seem possible we could do it. 'Buck up, men! only another six kilometres!' an officer would say. Then it would be: 'Only another seven kilometres! keep going, men!' Sometimes we went to sleep marching and woke up and found ourselves still marching. Always we were shifting and relieving. It was a wonderful business. It seemed as if we were done for. It seemed as if we couldn't go on. But we did. Good lor!We did it!Somehow the English generally seem to do it. Some of us had no boots left. Some of us had no feet.But WE DID IT!'"
The old lady with the black astrakhan cap nods vigorously.
"And the Germans wouldn't acknowledge that victory of ours," she says! "I didn't see it in any of their papers."
It is rather lovely to hear the dear creature alluding to Mons as "our victory!"
But indeed she is right. Mons is, in truth, our glory and our pride!
But it is still more startling to find she knows secret things about the German newspapers, and we all look at her sharply.
"I've just come from Germany!" the old lady explains. "Just come from Dresden, where I've been living for fifteen years. Oh dear! I did have a time getting away. But I had to leave! They made me.Dresden is being turned into a fortified town and a basis for operations!"
We all now listen toher, the soldiers three as well.
"Whenever we heard a noise in Dresden, everyone said, 'It's the Russians coming!' So you see how frightened they are of the Russians. They are scared to death. They've almost forgotten their hatred for England. They talk of nothing now but the Russians. Their terror is really pathetic, considering all the boasting they've been doing up to now. They made a law that no one was to put his head out of the window underpain of death!"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one.
"There's only military music in Dresden now. All the theatres and concert rooms are shut. And of course from now there will be nothing but military doings in Dresden! Yes, I lived there for fifteen years. I tried to stay on. I had many English friends as well as Germans, and the English all agreed to taboo all English people who adopted a pro-German tone. Some did, but not many. My greatest friends, my dearest friends were Germans. But the situation grew impossible for us all. We were not alienated personally, but we all knew that there would come between us something too deep and strong to be defied or denied, even for great affection's sake. So I cut the cables and left when the order was given that Dresden was henceforth to be a fortified town. Besides, it was dangerous for me to remain. I was English, and they hissed at me sometimes when I went out. It was through the American Consul's assistance that I was enabled to get away. I saw such horrid pictures of the English in all the shops. It made my blood boil. I saw one picture of the Englishmen withthree legs to run away with!"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one. "Wait till I travel in Germany!"
"And, oh dear!" goes on the old lady, "I was so frightened that I should forget and put my head out without thinking! As I sat in the train coming away from Dresden, I said to myself all the time, 'You must not look out of the window, or you'll have your head shot off!' That was because they feared the Russian spies might try to drop explosives out of the trains on to their bridges!"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one again.
It is really remarkable what a variety of expressions this fair-haired young English gentleman manages to put in a word.
He belongs to a good family and at the beginning of the War he cleared out without a word to anyone and enlisted in the ranks. Now he is coming home on five days' leave, covered with glory and a big scar, to get his commission. He is a splendid type. All he thinks about is his Country, and killing Germans. He is a gorgeous and magnificent type, for here he is in perfect comradeship with his pal Tommy in the corner, and the Irishman next to him. Evidently to him they are more than gentlemen. They are men who've been with him through Mons, and the Battle of the Aisne, and the Battle of Ypres, and he loves them for what they are! And they love him for what he is, and they're a splendid trio, the soldiers three.
"When I git into Germany," says Tommy, "I mean to lay hands on all I can git! I'm goin' to loot off them Germans, like they looted off them pore Beljins!"
"Surely you wouldn't be like the Crown Prince," says the old lady, and we all wake up to the fact then that she's really a delightful old lady, for only a delightful old lady could put the case as neatly as that.
"Shure, all I care about," says the big, quiet Irishman in the corner, "is to sleep and sleep and sleep!"
"On a bed," says the wounded one. "Good lor! Think of it! To-night I'll sleep in a bed. I'll roll over and over to make sure I'm there. Think of it, sheets, blankets. We don't even get a blanket in the trenches. We might get too comfortable and go to sleep."
"What about the little oil stoves the newspapers say you're having?" asks the old lady.
"We've seen none of them!" assert the soldiers three.
"Divil a one of them," adds the Irishman.
"I've eat things I never eat before," says Tommy suddenly, in his simple way that is so curiously telling. "I've eat raw turnips out of the fields. They're all eatin' raw turnips over there. And I've eat sweets. I've eat pounds of chocolates if I could get them and I've never eat them before in my life sinst I was a kid."
"Oh, chocolates!" says the wounded one, ecstatically. "But chocolate in the sheet—thick, wide, heavy chocolate—there's nothing on earth like it! I wrote home, and put all over my letters, Chocolate,chocolate, CHOCOLATE. They sent me out tons of it. But I never got it. It went astray, somewhere or other."
"But they're very good to us," says Tommy earnestly. "We don't want for nothin'. You couldn't be better treated than what we are!"
"What do you like most to receive?" asks the old lady.
"Chocolate," they all answer simultaneously.
"The other night at Ypres," says Tommy with his usual unexpectedness, "a German came out of his trenches. He shouted: 'German waiter! want to come back to the English. Please take me prisoner.' We didn't want no German waiters. We can't be bothered takin' the beggars prisoners. We let go at him instead!"
"They eat like savages!" puts in the Irishman. "I've see them shovelling their food in with one hand and pushing it down with the other. 'Tis my opinion the Germans have got no throats!"
"The Germans have lots to eat," asserts Tommy. "Whenever we capture them we always find them well stocked. Brown bread. They always have brown bread, and bully beef, and raisins."
"Beasts!" says the wounded one again. "But good lor, their Jack Johnsons! When I think of them now I can't believe it at all. They're like fifty shells a minute sometimes. Sometimes in the middle of all the inferno I'd think I was dead; or in hell. I often thought that."
"Them guns cawst them a lot," says Tommy. "It cawst £250 each loading. We used to be laying there in the trenches and to pass the time while they was firing at us we'd count up how much it was cawsting them. That's 17s. 6d., that bit of shrapnel! we'd say. And there goes another £5! They waste their shells something terrible too. There's thirty five-pound notes gone for nothing we'd reckon up sometimes when thirty shells had exploded in nothin' but mud!"
Then the wounded one tells us a funny story.
"I was getting messages in one day when this came through: 'The Turks are wearing fez and neutral trousers!' We couldn't make head or tail of the neutral trousers! So we pressed for an explanation. It came. 'The Turks are wearing fez, breaches of neutrality!'"
And while we are laughing the train runs into Victoria Station and the soldiers three leap joyously out into the rain-wet London night.
Then dear familiar words break on our ears, in a woman's voice.
"Any luggage, Mum!" says a woman porter.
And we know that old England is carrying on as usual!
THE END
SKETCH MAP OF BELGIUMSketch map of Belgium