Only the A.S.C. lorry drivers understood the story, but the villagers were quick to realise that something serious was happening. Old Pierre remembered 1870, and he knew what war meant; but to the rest it was a new, hideous thing, dimly realised, but now, at last, with this mute witness before them, very real.
Then things began to happen. No one ever knows how a crowd will spring up in a city street, apparently by magic, and here suddenly the village began to fill with men.
Four soldiers—two Scots, a Dorset and a Bedford man—black with grime, three days' growth of beard, hollow-eyed and limping painfully, appeared in front of Pierre and asked where they were to go. A captain of the Guards, riding a tired farm-horse, with a colonel walking by his side, one hand on the horse's flank, came behind, and, tackling the A.S.C. captain, asked for something to eat.
"We've been on the trudge for twelve hours," said the colonel, "and could get nothing. No one knows where anyone is. The regiment? Badly cut up last night and all scattered, heaven knows where."
"Is the mayor about anywhere?" And a young Staff officer, with a French interpreter, pushes his way through the crowd.
"A cavalry brigade (or what's left of it"—he adds in an undertone) "will be here to-night. What barns and houses have you available? How much hay can you get?"
Old Pierre is beginning to lose his wits in the amazing turn of events.
"If monsieur will come into the house I will try to arrange."
The officer follows, with a shrug of the shoulders which might have meant many things.
The long summer's day is closing, but there is no hint of the evening's cool in the heavy air. All over the little village green, where the church tower has thrown a grateful shadow, lie groups of men worn with exhaustion and sleeping with gulping breaths. In one corner Henriette is busy with water and clean linen, bathing and bandaging horrible, staring wounds. And the men lie patiently, with now and then a moan of pain, gazing up at her with the great round eyes of a hurt collie dog.