I ran a pathetic eye over them. There were several I particularly wanted to save; there were two novels by Hardy, Robert Graves’s new book of Poems, Regiment of Women, a battered copy of La Terre, The Oxford Book of Verse, The Stucco House. After a moment’s hesitation, the last two were saved for further odysseys; there was just room in a spare pocket for Fairies and Fusiliers; the rest would have to stay to welcome the Teuton.
At last all the equipment of a machine-gun section had been carted away. I took one turn round the dugouts to see that no incriminating document remained. The dugout looked hospitably clean; all the delicacies of handing over had been observed, but as there would be up one to receive the relieving party, manners demanded some sort of “Salve”; and so, tearing from a notebook a sheet of paper, I scrawled across it in large letters, CHEERIOH, and pinned it over the entrance of my deserted home.
§ 2
March 28th, 1918.
Of course the limbers never turned up. For two months without the least inconvenience from German artillery they had come up to the ration dump every night, but on this particular night they felt sure it would arouse suspicions, and so a guide was sent instead. And in France there are only two sorts of guides. There is the guide who does not know the way and owns up to it, and there is the guide who does not know the way and pretends he does. There are no others. Luckily ours came under the former category.
“You see, Sir, I’ve only bin from Headquarters once and that was by day, and I’m not too sure of the way.... I’ve only been ’ere once and that....”
Which was a pretty clear sign that a compass bearing would be hardly less reliable. We dumped most of our spare kit in the river, and set off. It is wonderful how disorderly any movement of troops appears by night. Actually it was a most methodical withdrawal, but in its progress it looked pitifully like a rout. The road seemed littered with cast-off equipment, ammunition, packs and bombs; dumps were going up all round. Innumerable Highlanders had lost their companies; nobody seemed to know where he was going or to care particularly whether he ever arrived. A subsection of fifteen men straggled into an echelon formation covering as many yards. It appeared an absolute certainty that dawn and the Germans would find us still trailing helplessly along the road.
At last, however, came the loved jingle of harness, and the sound of restive mules. We heaved packs and baggages on a limber, and more cheerfully resumed our odyssey.
This cheerfulness considerably diminished when the section found that our new positions were two hundred yards from the road, and that a hundred boxes of S.A.A. had to be stacked in half an hour. But eventually peace was restored to Israel, and by the time that the morning broke, the section was fairly comfortably lodged in some disused German dugouts.
There followed four very lazy days. The two subsections had been amalgamated, and with my section officer Evans, I spent most of the day working out elaborate barrage charts in case of a break through. Evans had recently been on a course at Camières where they had given him an enormous blue sheet which was warranted proof against geography. Evans regarded it as a sort of charm.