Teddy grinned up at him rather impudently. “You wouldn’t have been much loss,” he said. “I knew it would take you about a month to start, if you started at all; and I wanted to take the short cut to the barracks. There was no time to be lost.”
“It’s as well you did,” said Mr. Noah. “The troops only came up just in the nick of time. Five minutes more, and the enemy would have been entrenched in the wood.”
As they rode across the downs, they passed heaps of soldiers lying on the ground, most of which were wooden soldiers of the attacking party; but some were men and horses of the Lifeguards and the Lancers. None of them were much damaged, but they hated lying there and doing nothing, and implored to be picked up.
But they were told that there wasn’t time for that. The ambulance corps would be sent out as soon as possible, and they must wait for that. The only soldier they did pick up was the Colonel of Lancers, who rode along with them, very glad for his horse to be on its feet again. He was proud of the charge that his regiment had made, but would not take any credit for his own share of it. He said that he had only done his duty as a soldier should.
When they arrived at the houses in front of the fort, the guns had already got to work. The cavalry had gone into the streets, and told all the inhabitants to come away, as in five minutes their houses were going to be knocked down. It was necessary to destroy them, in order to have a clear range at the walls of the fort, and as our little party came up the dolls’ houses of the town were toppling down in dozens as the guns fired at them. All the poor dolls who had been told to leave them were gathered in a body on a low hill to the right, watching the destruction of their homes, and it was sad to hear the wails and lamentations that arose from them; for they had not had time to bring anything away. Perhaps their possessions were not worth very much, but still, a home is a home to those who live in it. Be it ever so humble, there is no place like it, as the song says, and it was not nice for these poor people to see their homes knocked down by great peas as big as wardrobes. However, the houses would all be put up again as soon as the siege was over, and the poor dolls would not be any the worse off.
All the poor dolls were gathered in a body
The hill on which the refugees were crowded was out of the line of fire, and our party went there to watch what was going on.
It was not quite such an easy matter to reduce the fort as it first appeared. For one thing, the walls had been built to resist such attacks, and would be more difficult to demolish than the houses outside them. And for another thing, the artillery did not have it all its own way. There were, of course, guns in the fort itself, and they were already doing great damage to the attacking forces. The shooting was not quite so good as it might have been, and the artillery-men in the field were very clever in moving their guns about quickly, so that whenever they had fired they would move away to a new position, and the guns in the fort always had to be finding new ranges.
Still, one field-gun after another was put out of action, and now there were only about half of them left to do the work.