The Sergeant shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like Standish. He came of good people and was a trustworthy, well-conducted chap. He’s never been up for office and was proud of it.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll have to report to the Major, and then you and I will go and search for him. I’ll wager we’ll find him in his billets.”
The Major told me “Righto,” and not to be long. We weren’t running a kindergarten. If the chap got left behind, it was his own look-out.
As we hurried through the battery, they were carrying out the men who were incapable and lashing them with drag-ropes to the gun-seats like sacks. The billets were not more than a hundred and fifty yards from the horse-lines; they consisted of a mouldy stable, standing on one side of a farm-yard, the whole of which was made foul by an accumulation of manure, a? is the custom in French farmyards.
We tiptoed our way across the reeking mess, choosing our path so as not to sink too deeply into it. At the doorway of the low barn-like stricture, we called the man’s name, “Standish.” When he did not answer, I loosened my flashlight from my belt and swept the ray along the broken floor and into the farthest corners. It seemed not unlikely that he might have fallen asleep there. All I saw was the refuse of worn-out equipment and empty bean-tins neatly gathered up into sacks. Already I could hear the first of the teams pulling out and the rattling of the guns on the road as they left the padded surface of the turf. If we did not hurry, we should be left behind ourselves.
“I told you he wasn’t here, sir,” the Sergeant said.
Just as we were leaving, I flashed my light round the building for one last look. In so doing I tilted the lamp, so that the ray groped among the rafters of the roof. The Sergeant started back with a curse, knocking the lamp from my hand. Just above his head he had seen it hanging, its face staring down at him crookedly.
We were too late when we cut him down; so we moved out that night upon our anonymous march with an extra passenger lashed to a gun-seat, on whose incapacity we had not counted.
The nightingales were still singing in the thickets when we left, singing of things forsaken, of beauty and of passion. I could not shake off the impression that it was their sweet, intolerable melancholy which had urged him to do it. If we had taken to the road an hour earlier, he would have been saved from that act. Poor lad! He had played the game to the top of his bent, till he had passed the limit of his power to suffer. What was the limit of us who remained? How much further had we to go till we reached the breaking-point?
“There’s those that does it because they’re frightened.” Trottrot knew of what he was talking.