They were to attack directly they arrived at their destination. By the time they reached there, Winn knew more. He had gathered up the hastily flung messages by telegram and telephone, by flying cars and from breathless despatch riders, and he knew what they meant.
They had no chance, from the first, not a ghost of a chance. They were to hold on as long as they could, and then retreat. Part of the line had gone already. The French had gone. No reinforcements were coming up. There were no reinforcements.
They were to retreat turn and turn about; meantime they must hold.
They could hear the guns now, the bright harvest fields trembled a little under the impact of these alien presences.
They came nearer and the sky filled with white puffs of smoke that looked like glittering sunset clouds, and were not clouds. Overhead the birds sang incessantly, undisturbed even by the occasional drilling of an aëroplane.
In the plains that lay beneath them, they could see the dim blue lines of the enemy debouching.
They made Winn think of locusts. He had seen a plague once in Egypt. They came on like the Germans, a gray mass that never broke — that could not break, because behind it there were more, and still more locusts, thick as clouds, impenetrable as clouds.
You killed and killed and killed, and yet there were more clouds.
Every now and then it ran through his mind like a flame, that they would spread this loathsome, defiling cloud over the smiling little villages of France.
Fortunately there was no time for pity; there were merely the different ways of meeting the question of holding on.