Ah, the pride of them! The glory of race and blood! This is not the Mons country, with its blood-soaked memories; 'tis the Horse Guards Parade, and we're Trooping the Colour!
The click of rifles coming to the slope runs down the ranks. The fours line by magic as the men straighten themselves; it is a new regiment, marching into action, which the French villagers see pass before them.
"Defeat? Why, this is part of the joke! Just to draw the Germans on into the trap." And at a word they would have turned to charge an army corps.
And so the regiments pass. And as the last of the Division goes through, lights twinkle from the tiny windows of the cottages and the great yellow moon climbs slowly over the poplar trees. An A.S.C. sergeant mounts a lorry with a copy of the Paris Daily Mail in his hand, and entertains an ever-growing audience with the news that the Russians have invaded Germany and are marching on Berlin.
"It will be all over by Christmas—but I'd 'ave liked just one slap at them Germans, so as I could tell the missis," says a late bus-driver.
But on the outskirts of the crowd the Staff officer is talking to the A.S.C. captain:
"I've no orders for you, but you've evidently been forgotten. You ought to have had your park fifteen miles farther south by now. Things are bad, and there will be the hell of a scrap round here to-morrow morning. I should clear out if I were you."
Away up to the north there is a blinding electric glare coming fast down the road. Nearer, and it is the headlight on the first of a long train of R.F.C. light motor-lorries, slipping silently down on rubber tires. The dust rises in clouds above and about them. Half-way through the village a motor-cyclist rides, meeting them. The dust takes his shadow, and as he approaches the headlight the silhouette rises higher and higher until it mounts to the sky and disappears. Just as when children play a shadow pantomime and vanish by jumping over the lamp.
The lorries pass, and the dust slowly settles once more. The little lights twinkle clearly again, and the moon now floods the countryside in a sheen of silver.
But the A.S.C. captain talks earnestly with his sergeant-major and M. le maire.