Sometimes whole regiments entrained under the care of fatherly French railway officials, curiously liable to hysteria on ordinary excursion days, but now as calm as Egyptian Pyramids in the face of national disaster. They pieced together with marvelous ingenuity the broken thread of speech presented to them by the occasional French scholars upon the British Staff; but more often still they shook polite and emphatic heads, and explained that there quite simply were no trains. The possible, yes; but the impossible, no. One could not create trains. So the men went on marching. They did not like retreating, but they moved as if they were on parade in front of Buckingham Palace, and when they held, they fought as winners fight.
It was not until they reached the Marne that Winn found time to write to Claire. “We are getting on very nicely,” he wrote. “I hope you are not worrying about us. We have plenty to eat, though we have to take our meals a little hurriedly.
“There is a good deal of work to do.
“This war is the best thing that ever happened to me – bar one. Before I came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won’t mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first, remember that they never do.
“Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start with, and had to fight against odds, which doesn’t matter really if you have the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me commandeer the boots I wanted – the kind they offered me at first wouldn’t have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not mind as much as I did.
“I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It’s a pity the Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in.
“One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck.
“I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your loving Winn.”
In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic châteaux; but they all began in the same reassuring way. “I am very well, and we are getting on quite nicely.”
The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they fenced and circled.
They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.
The battle of the Aisne passed by slow degrees out of their hands, and the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as thinly as a Japanese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very camp cooks were in the trenches.
Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and fell and returned again.
Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few, who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said, “We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it.”
Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.
They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.
They remade it at the cost of their lives in Flanders, in the face of incredulous enemies and criticizing neutrals, painstakingly, without science, doggedly out of their own wills. They held Ypres by a thread, and when it seemed that nothing could keep it, one cold and dreadful day along the Menin road came up their reinforcements.
First one group and then another of tall, dark people, silent footed as falling leaves, turbaned black faces, eyes of appalling and unearthly gravity, hearts half like a rock and half like a child, alien captive people of another blood, took their place silently, regiment by regiment blocking up the dreadful gaps with their guns, their rifles, and the free gift of their lives.
“Lionel has come,” Winn wrote, “and all my men. I never was so glad of anything, but you. Send me all the warm things you can. The winter will be quite jolly now when the men get used to the trenches. It’s a funny thing, but they’ve given me command of the regiment. I hadn’t expected it, but I’ve always liked handling Sikhs. Whatever happens, you’ll remember that I’ve been an awfully lucky chap, won’t you?”
CHAPTER XXXI
Lionel and Winn talked of the regiment and the war; these two things filled the exacting hours. In a world a very long way off and in the depths of their hearts were England and Claire.
They spent three weeks in the trenches, blackened and water clogged and weary.
It was the darkest time of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes passed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that worshiped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid people who ate sausages, and could be killed.
One or two small parties led in night attacks overcame the worst of their fears.
Later on when the mud dried they could kill more; in the end all would be killed, and they would return with much honor to their land of sunshine.
To the officers who moved among them, absorbed in the questions of their care, there was never any silence or peace, and yet there was a strange content in the huddled, altered life of their wet ditch.
Every power of the will, every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes. Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, impervious to human ingenuity.
In the quieter hours of the night, they crouched side by side formulating fresh schemes and going over one by one the weak points of their defenses.
They hadn’t enough guns, or any reinforcements; they had no dry clothes. The men were not accustomed to wet climates or invisible enemies.
They wanted more sand-bags and more bombs, and it would be better for human beings not to be in trenches for three weeks at a time in the rain.
They sat there pitting their brains against these obstacles, creating the miraculous ingenuity of war. Personal questions dropped. Lionel saw that Winn was ill beyond mending, but he saw it without definite thought – it was one more obstacle in a race of obstacles. It wouldn’t do for Winn to break down. He fitted himself without explanations, selflessly, with magnificent disinterestedness, into his friend’s needs. He was like a staff in the hand of a blind man.
Winn himself had begun to wonder, moving about in his sea of mud, how much worse you could be before you were actually done. His cough shook him incessantly, his brain burned, and his hands were curiously weak. He was conscious that he had to repeat to himself all day long the things he had to do; even then he might have forgotten if there had not been Lionel. He might have forgotten to give orders. In spite of everything a strange inner bliss possessed him which nourished him like food. He had Claire’s letters, they never failed him, they were as regular as the beats of a heart. Something in him lived that had never lived before, something that did not seem likely ever to die.