"Why! How old d'you think I am?"
"Well, my canny boy, you'll never see thirty again, I suppose."
"No, I shan't. Nor you either."
Captain Resmith said:
"I'm twenty-four."
George was thunder-struck. The fellow was a boy, and George had been treating him as an equal! But then the fellow was also George's superior officer, and immeasurably his superior in physique. Do what he would, harden himself as he might, George at thirty-three could never hope to rival the sinews of the boy of twenty-four, who incidentally could instruct him on every conceivable military subject. George, standing by his sodden horse, felt humiliated and annoyed as Resmith cantered off to speak to the officer commanding the Ammunition Column. But on the trek there was no outlet for such a sentiment as annoyance. He was Resmith's junior and Resmith's inferior, and must behave, and expect to be behaved to, as such.
"Never mind!" he said to himself. His determination to learn the art and craft of war was almost savage in ferocity.
When the Battery at length departed from Ewell the rain had completed its victory but at the same time had lost much of its prestige. The riders, abandoning illusion, admitting frankly that they were wet to the skin, knowing that all their clothing was soaked, and satisfied that they could not be wetter than they were if the bottom fell out of the sky, simply derided the rain and plodded forward. Groups of them even disdained the weather in lusty song. But not George. George was exhausted. He was ready to fall off his horse. The sensation of fatigue about the knees and in the small of his back was absolute torture. Resmith told him to ride without stirrups and dangle his legs. The relief was real, but only temporary. And the Battery moved on at the horribly monotonous, tiring walk. Epsom was incredibly distant. George gave up hope of Epsom; and he was right to do so,
for Epsom never came. The Battery had taken a secondary road to the left which climbed slowly to the Downs. At the top of this road, under the railway bridge, just before fields ceased to be enclosed, stood the two girls. Their bicycles leaned against the brick wall. They had taken off their mackintoshes, and it was plain from their clinging coloured garments that they too were utterly drenched. They laughed no more. Over the open Downs the wind was sweeping the rain in front of it; and the wind was the night wind, for the sky had begun to darken into dusk. The Battery debouched into a main road which seemed full of promise, but left it again within a couple of hundred yards, and was once more on the menacing, high, naked Downs, with a wide and desolate view of unfeatured plains to the north. The bugles sounded sharply in the wet air, and the Battery, now apparently alone in the world, came to a halt. George dropped off his horse. A multiplicity of orders followed. Amorphous confusion was produced out of a straight line. This was the bivouacking ground. And there was nothing—nothing but the track by which they had arrived, and the Downs, and a distant blur to the west in the shape of the Epsom Grand Stand, and the heavy, ceaseless rain, and the threat of the fast-descending night. According to the theory of the Divisional Staff a dump furnished by the Army Service Corps ought to have existed at a spot corresponding to the final letter in the words 'Burgh Heath' on the map, but the information quickly became general that no such dump did in practice exist. To George the situation was merely incredible. He knew that for himself there was only one reasonable course of conduct. He ought to have a boiling bath, go to bed with his dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and take a full basin of hot bread-and-milk adulterated by the addition of brandy—and sleep. Horses and men surged perilously around him. The anarchical disorder, however, must have been less acute than he imagined, for a soldier appeared and took away his horse; he let the reins slip from his dazed hand. The track had been transformed into a morass of viscous mud.