“But we don’t march there to-day, do we?”
“If you can,” he said cheerfully. “But it’s about twenty kilos, and by the time you’ve got to Vitry you probably won’t be sorry to have a rest.”
The prospect of a twenty-kilometre march along the unspeakable French roads was anything but encouraging. It was drizzling slightly, and there seemed no likelihood of getting any food. In a sad silence we waited, while the scattered groups of prisoners were collected into a party sufficiently large to be moved off together.
Proceedings were at this point considerably delayed by a company sergeant-major of the Blankshires who had spent his last moments of liberty near the rum jar; and under its influence he could not rid himself of the idea that he was still in charge of a parade. Nothing would induce him to fall in in the ranks. He persisted in standing on a bank, from which he directed operations in bucolic spasms, meanwhile treating the Germans with the benevolent patronage that he had been wont to display before the newly-joined subaltern. It was the one flash of humour that that grey afternoon provided.
At last enough stragglers had dribbled in, six officers and about a hundred and twenty men, and the march back began.
Nothing could exceed the depression of that evening. The rain began to fall heavily, and through its dim sheets peered the mournful eyes of ruined villages. We marched in silence; Vis-en-Artois, Dury, Torquennes, one by one they were passed, the landmarks we had once picked out from the Monchy heights. A stage of exhaustion had been reached when movement became mechanical. For twelve hours we had had no food, and no rest for at least sixteen, and to this physical weariness was added the depression that the bleak French landscape never fails to evoke—the grey stretches of rolling ground unrelieved by colour; the dead-straight roads lined by tree-stumps, the broken homesteads; and to all this was again added the cumulative helplessness that the events of the day had roused; the knowledge of the ignominy of one’s position, and the uncertainty of what was to come.
Gradually the succession of broken houses yielded to whole but deserted villages; and these woke even more the sense of loneliness, of nostalgia. Formerly, on the way back from the line, there was nothing so cheering as to see through the night the first signs of civilisation. Then they were to the imagination as kindly hands welcoming it back to the joys from which it had been exiled. But now the shadowy arms of a distant windmill only served to increase the feeling of banishment and separation. Behind us we could hear the dull roll of guns, we could see the flares of the Verey lights curving against the sky; and these seemed nearer happiness than the untouched barns.
At last towards ten o’clock we reached Vitry and were herded into an open cage. The whole surface of it was a liquid slime, round which men were moving, trying to keep warm. Sleep there was impossible. But at any rate there was something to eat, a cup of coffee, a quarter of a loaf of bread. The German officer received us as a hotel-keeper receives guests for whom he has no beds.
“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” he said; “but you’re only here for one night. But I think I might be able to find you a little room in the hut for the wounded.”
And so tired were we that there was pleasure in the mere prospect of a roof; and on a floor covered with lousy straw we passed the night in snatches of sleep, disturbed every moment by the tossing of cramped limbs, and by the presence of muddy boots driven against one’s face, and brawny Highlanders sprawling across one’s chest. But in that state of exhaustion these troubles were remote—for a while at any rate we could be still; and in the waking moments there lay no venom even in the recurring thought that on the next morning we should have to begin our march afresh.