III
KEEP to the Right,” and, after an interval, “Ha-alt!” Passed back down the unseen column ahead of us come the hoarse cries, followed by a sudden cessation of wheels and then, sharp and emphatic, “Dismount the drivers.”
Our Major shouts back the orders to the Sergeant-Major; from him they are picked up by the Section-Commanders and Numbers One. We listen to them as they travel down the battery through the darkness, altered in tone and made more faint as each new voice takes up the cry. The B. C. party back their ridden and led animals into the grass on the side of the road, loosen the reins and allow their beasts to graze. This is the first halt that we have made, so it should be long enough to give us time to check over the fitting of the harness and to make sure that everything is correct. I climb into the saddle to ride down the line; as I turn away, the Major calls to me, “Oh, Chris, one minute!” I bend down to catch his words: “Find out what’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette.”
What’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette? That question has been in my mind, in the mind of the Major, and probably in every gunner’s and driver’s mind ever since we marched out from the wagon-lines. It’s dead against all army orders that a woman and child should accompany a fighting unit into action. Since the war started, camp-followers of whatever sort have been forbidden. From time to time, even the dogs in the army areas have been shot because many of them were spies, carrying messages to the Germans across No Man’s Land at night. It’s dead against every dictate of decency and humanity that fighting-men should take non-combatants with them into the kind of furious carnage towards which we——. But, somehow, Bully Beef and Suzette do not seem to be non-combatants; we regard them as soldiers. They march with us as representatives of the impassioned soul of France. Yes, and more than that—for they stand to us for everything tender and kindly that would have been ours, had we not been selected to die. Suzette is to us what Joan of Arc must have been to her soldiers—the dream of the woman we would have married had Fate been more lavish with life. And Bully Beef—he’s the might-have-been child of every boy and man in the battery.
Gun-carriages and wagons have been pulled well over to the right, clear of the pavi road, so as not to cause a block in the passing traffic. It’s difficult to see them in detail on account of the blackness caused by the wall of trees on either side. One can just make out the heads of horses and the huddled figures of men on the limbers, too tired to know that we have halted. Usually when I enquire, I find that the sleepers were on guard or picket the night previous. We let them sleep on. They are wise; none of us know how far we have to go or how many nights of wakefulness lie before us.
Behind the darkness I can hear the drivers lifting up the feet of their horses and feeling for stones. Good boys, these drivers! They love their beasts and speak to them as pals. There’s so much discipline that one doesn’t get much time for loving in the army. I remember a march on this same road when the drivers were so frozen that they had to be lifted out of their saddles; no one had the strength to unfasten a bit till he had thawed his fingers between the horse’s back and the saddle-blanket. Yet there wasn’t one man who quit when we limped into our muddy standings. Every gunner and driver went to work on the horses, grooming them with a will and trying to make them comfortable before he thought of himself—and this, not because it was ordered, but because he realised through his own misery the forlornness of his four-footed comrades. Good boys, all of them! I think the Lord of Compassion, when the final reckoning comes, will remember kindnesses even to horses. When he judges those drivers, he’ll not forget the bitter cold of that winter’s march and what it meant to stand grooming in the snow and sleet when you were bitten to the bone and almost crying with misery. So he’ll pass over their swearing and the times when they got drunk, and he’ll say, pointing to the horses who will also be in Heaven, “inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me.” If that should happen, the drivers will be most awfully surprised, because according to their standards they only did their duty.
Some of the chaps in my section, which is the leading and senior section of the battery, try to ask me questions as I pass.
“Are we going far, sir?”