We were to see them not so many hours later, when their glory had been accomplished.
IV
WE watered our horses out of the buckets at the few wells which had not been poisoned. It was a lengthy process, but we were all finished and ready to move off by the time Tubby returned. He brought word that it had been found impossible to pull off the attack at the hour set. The country in front of us was studded with woods and cut up by gorges, which the enemy was holding with machine-guns. Moreover, by retiring the Hun had shortened the distance for his supports to come up and was now numerically much stronger than had at first been imagined. The bulk of our artillery were too far back to be brought up, so the tasks which ought to have been undertaken by the guns were to be carried out by bombing-planes. As soon as these were ready the assault would commence. Meanwhile our instructions were to push on to the head of the ravine and remain there concealed till we were ordered forward.
“It’s going to be a pretty sporting show, if I know anything about it,” Tubby said, when we were once again on the march. “The infantry are fed up to the back-teeth with the way in which the guns have failed to keep in touch with them. And I don’t wonder—you wait till you see the kind of country they’ve got to tackle. It’s no joke being a lone man on two legs, with hundreds of field-guns pointing at you and quite as many machine-guns singing your swan-song in the woods, and all their stuff coming over and none of yours going back It’s a bit stiff to tell chaps to advance against that, as though you expected ‘em to strangle whole batteries with their naked hands. It’s up to us to show them that the eighteen-pounders aren’t quitters. We’ll take as long a chance as any of them. If some of us aren’t pushing daisies by sunset, it won’t be our fault.”
Out of the corner of my eye I watched him. He wasn’t the same man who had made that shabby little confession to me earlier in the morning. He had been weak and conscience-haunted then; now he was eager and heroic. One no longer noticed that he was fat and good-natured and ordinary; a new boldness and dignity transformed him. The test of scarlet was discovering chivalrous values in Tubby of which he himself was only partly aware.
As though he recognised my thoughts, he nodded. “I’m happy. I wouldn’t have missed to-day for worlds.”
To the south of us, like hail-stones pounding on a roof of metal, a heavy bombardment had been steadily growing in violence. It was the French putting on an attack. Probably the seventy-fives we had seen trotting into action that morning were in it. Good luck to them. As suddenly, as it had opened, it died down, and was succeeded by the crackling of rifle-fire. We pictured the true-clad tiger-men of France going over, dropping on one knee to take aim, then up and on again to slake the thirst of their bayonets.
With a kind of glee, Tubby whispered, “Our turn next.”