"I really believe I can smell greens cooking for dinner," she said. "And I certainly can see a lot of those boys in blue suits, moving about on the lawn like ants. That's all I must think about. But do you know what I'm stopping myself from thinking about? Don't laugh when I tell you. David's thirteen, you know, and in four years from now——"
For quite a long time Jack didn't laugh....
Dodo got what she described as a life-size map of France, and an immense quantity of pins to which were attached cardboard flags of the warring nations. The map was put up at one end of the men's dining-room practically covering the wall, and morning by morning, standing on a step-ladder, she gleefully recorded the advance of the Allies, and the retreat of the Huns, in accordance with the information conveyed by the daily communiqué.
"Amiens!" she said. "We must take out all those German flags and put English ones in instead. We shall be able to get coffee again there on the way to Paris, unless the Huns have poisoned all the supplies in the refreshment room, which is more than probable, and put booby-traps in the buns, so that they explode in your mouth. Look! A German flag has fallen out of Bapaume all of its own accord; that's a good omen, it's hardly worth while putting it back. Isn't it a blessing we've got more French flags? Now we can make Soissons a pin-cushion of them. But it's a long way to Berlin yet. I believe you'll have to join up, David, before we get there. Why not make a betting-book about the date we get to Berlin? Oh, there's a place called Burchem; what an extraordinary coincidence. Give me some more American pins."
Through August the advance continued, sweeping on during September back through Peronne, and through the Drocourt-Quéant line, until late in the month the Hindenburg line was broken, and Dodo pulled out the most stubborn of all the rows of German pins.
"'All according to plan,' as the German communiqué tells us," she said. "What a good thing their plans coincide so exactly with ours! They didn't want to hold the Hindenburg line any longer. They had got tired of being so long in one place and thought they would like a change, and by the greatest good luck we agreed that a change would be nice for them. That's all that's happened: they had been abroad for four years, and it was high time to think of getting home. What liars! My dear, what liars. Presently they will get tired of being in Cambrai, and so, according to plan, they will leave that. I should love to be the German Emperor for precisely five minutes to see what he feels like. Then I would be myself again, and gloat. Wanted on the telephone, am I? Nobody must touch those pins. I must put every one of them in myself. To-morrow I will be unselfish and let somebody else do it, but not to-day. Just according to plan!"
October came and flung a flaming torch among the beeches, and the thick dews brought out the smell of autumn and dead leaves in the woods and meadows. Once for two days a gale from the south-west roared through the grey rainy sky, strewing the lawn with the wreck of the woodland, but when that was past the weather became crystal clear again, with days of warm windless sun, and evenings that grew chilly and mornings when the hoar-frost lay white on the grass. Cambrai was regained and the British armies marched back into Le Cateau of evil memory, and the French flag flew once more over Laon. The tide of victory swept too along the Channel, and before the end of the month the waters of freedom washed the whole Belgian coast clean of the dust of its defilement. And not along the French front alone was heard the crash of the ruinous fortress of the Huns, nor there alone leaped the flames that rose ever higher round the crumbling walls of their monstrous Valhalla, shining brighter as the dusk deepened to night in the halls of their War God. For to the east Damascus had fallen; nearer at hand Bulgaria lay like a cracked and rotten nut, black and shattered; the Italian armies recrossed the Piave and on the last day of the month the Allied Fleet steamed through the Dardanelles past silent guns and deserted bastions to receive the surrender of the Turks. For four years of war the grim tower of Central Europe had stood firm: now as its outlying forts surrendered it shook to its foundations, the fissures widened in its tottering walls, and the dusk gathered.
It tottered, and with a crash a wall fell in, for in the first days of November, Austria surrendered, and at Kiel the German sailors mutinied. Two days later full powers were given by the Versailles Conference to Marshal Foch (of whom Dodo had now heard) to treat with the German envoys who came to sue for an armistice. And next day Sedan fell to the Americans.
"Sedan was rather a favourite town with the Huns till just now," said Dodo, as she dropped the German pin on the floor and made an American porcupine of the place. "Now they won't like it quite so much, and I'm sure I don't wonder. What did the cocks say in Sedan when they woke up the hens in Sedan this morning! Nobody can guess, so I'll tell you. They said, 'Yankee-doodle-doo. Amen.' Give me some more American pins! Yankee——"