Part 3 (1/2)

A fortnight later Colonel Parker and Aurelle stepped on to the platform at B----, where they were met by Major Baraquin, the officer commanding the garrison, and Captain Pereira, the Portuguese liaison officer.

Major Baraquin was a very old soldier. He had seen service--in the 1870 campaign. All strangers, Allies included, inspired him with a distrust which even his respect for his superiors failed to remove.

When the French War Office ordered him to place his barracks at the disposal of a British colonel, discipline required him to obey, but hostile memories inspired him with savage resistance.

”After all, sir,” said Aurelle to Parker, ”his grandfather was at Waterloo.”

”Are you quite sure,” asked the colonel, ”that he was not there himself?”

Above all things, Major Baraquin would never admit that the armies of other nations might have different habits from his own. That the British soldier should eat jam and drink tea filled him with generous indignation.

”The colonel,” Aurelle translated, ”requests me to ask you ...”

”No, no, _no_,” replied Major Baraquin in stentorian tones, without troubling to listen any further.

”But it will be necessary, sir, for the Portuguese who are going to land....”

”No, no, _no_, I tell you,” Major Baraquin repeated, resolved upon ignoring demands which he considered subversive and childish. This refrain was as far as he ever got in his conversations with Aurelle.

Next day several large British transports arrived, and disgorged upon the quay thousands of small, black-haired men who gazed mournfully upon the alien soil. It was snowing, and most of them were seeing snow for the first time in their lives. They wandered about in the mud, s.h.i.+vering in their spotted blue cotton uniforms and dreaming, no doubt, of sunny Alemtejo.

”They'll fight well,” said Captain Pereira, ”they'll fight well.

Wellington called them his fighting c.o.c.ks, and Napoleon said his Portuguese legion made the best troops in the world. But can you wonder they are sad?”

Each of them had brought with him a pink handkerchief containing his collection of souvenirs--little reminders of his village, his people, or his best girl--and when they were told that they could not take their pink parcels with them to the front, there was a heart-breaking outcry.

Major Baraquin, with unconscious and sinister humour, had quartered them in the shambles.

”It would be better----” began Colonel Parker.

”Il vaudrait peut-etre mieux----” Aurelle attempted to translate.

”Vossa Excellencia----” began Captain Pereira.

”No, no, _no_,” said the old warrior pa.s.sionately.

The Portuguese went to the shambles.

CHAPTER IV

A BUSINESS MAN IN THE ARMY

”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”--G. B. Shaw (in _A Revolutionist's Handbook_).

Colonel Musgrave of the R.A.S.C. had been instructed to superintend the supply and transport arrangements of the Portuguese Division, and Lieutenant Barefoot, in charge of a Labour Company, had been detailed to a.s.sist him.

”These men,” he explained to Colonel Musgrave, ”are all Southampton dockers. In peace time I am their employer, and Sergeant Scott over there is their foreman. They tell me your Labour Companies have often shown rather poor discipline. There's no fear of anything like that with my men; they have been chosen with care, and look up to me as if I were a king. Scott, my sergeant, can do anything; neither he nor my men ever drink a drop. As for me, I am a real business man, and I intend to introduce new methods into the army.”

Barefoot was fifty years old; he had a bald head shaped like an egg.