Part 30 (1/2)

At last an armoured car came along and pulled the automobile onto the road. But after a progress of only ten feet it lapsed again, and there remained.

The situation was now acute. It was impossible to go back, and to go ahead meant to advance on foot along roads crowded with silent soldiers--meant going forward, too, in a pouring rain and in high-heeled shoes. For that was another idiocy I had committed.

We started on, leaving the apologetic chauffeur by the car. A few feet and the road, curving to the right, began to near the German line.

Every now and then it was necessary to call sharply to the troops, or struggling along through the rain they would have crowded us off knee-deep into the mud.

”_Attention!”_ the officer would call sharply. And for a time we would have foot room. There were no more horses, no more guns--only men, men, men. Some of them had taken off their outer coats and put them shawl-fas.h.i.+on over their heads. But most of them walked stolidly on, already too wet and wretched to mind the rain.

The fog had lifted. It was possible to see that sinister red streak that follows the firing of a gun at night. The rain gave a peculiar hollowness to the concussion. The Belgian and French batteries were silent.

We seemed to have walked endless miles, and still there was no little town. We went over a bridge, and on its flat floor I stopped and rested my aching feet.

”Only a little farther now,” said the British officer cheerfully.

”How much farther?”

”Not more than a mile,”

By way of cheering me he told me about the town we were approaching--how the road we were on was its main street, and that the advanced line of trenches crossed at the railroad near the foot of the street.

”And how far from that are the German trenches?” I asked nervously.

”Not very far,” he said blithely. ”Near enough to be interesting.”

On and on. Here was a barn.

”Is this the town?” I asked feebly.

”Not yet. A little farther!”

I was limping, drenched, irritable. But now and then the absurdity of my situation overcame me and I laughed. Water ran down my head and off my nose, trickled down my neck under my coat. I felt like a great sponge. And suddenly I remembered my hat.

”I feel sure,” I said, stopping still in the road, ”that the chauffeur will go inside the car out of the rain and sit on my hat.”

The officer thought this very likely. I felt extremely bitter about it. The more I thought of it the more I was convinced that he was exactly the sort of chauffeur who would get into a car and sit on an only hat.

At last we came to the town--to what had been a town. It was a town no longer. Walls without roofs, roofs almost without walls. Here and there only a chimney standing of what had been a home; a street so torn up by sh.e.l.ls that walking was almost impossible--full of sh.e.l.l-holes that had become graves. There were now no lights, not even soldiers. In the silence our footsteps re-echoed against those desolate and broken walls.

A day or two ago I happened on a description of this town, written by a man who had seen it at the time I was there.

”The main street,” he writes, ”is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village of ---- had been spared.”

We stumbled down the street toward the trenches and at last stopped before a house. Through boards nailed across what had once been windows a few rays of light escaped. There was no roof; a side wall and an entire corner were gone. It was the residence of the ladies of the decoration.

Inside there was for a moment an illusion of entirety. The narrow corridor that ran through the centre of the house was weatherproof.

But through some unseen gap rushed the wind of the night. At the right, warm with lamplight, was the reception room, dining room and bedroom--one small chamber about twelve by fifteen!