“Quite safe,” Jeremy answered, shivering a little and stamping his feet for warmth.
“I knew I could trust you to bring them,” the Speaker murmured. “Come over here and they shall give you a warm drink.”
Jeremy went with him to the little knot of officers, who were standing just in the growing sunlight, and took from a servant a great mug which he found to be full of inferior, sickly-flavored whisky and hot water, highly sweetened. He lifted his head from it, coughing and gasping a little, but immediately found that he was warmer and stronger.
“All the army is assembled,” the Speaker told him. “We continue the march in half-an-hour. The enemy pushed past St. Albans last night and they are camped between here and there. The battle will be two or three miles north of this.”
Jeremy was now sufficiently revived to look about him with interest. Here, as almost everywhere in the farthest limits of London, the restorations of time had been complete. The little town had returned to what it was before the nineteenth century. The long rows of small houses had gone, like a healed rash, as though they had never been; and on all sides of the few buildings that clustered round the church and to the north of it, grazing land stretched out unbroken, save here and there by rude and overgrown walls of piled bricks. On this narrow platform, which fell away rapidly on the right hand and on the left, the troops were bivouacking, huddled in little clusters around miserable fires or dancing about to keep themselves warm.
Jeremy’s eye ran from one end of the prospect to the other and back again, until he became conscious that somebody was standing at his elbow waiting for him to turn. He turned accordingly and found the Canadian, whose customary barbaric fineness of dress seemed to have been enhanced for the occasion by a huge dull red tie and a dull red handkerchief pinned carelessly in a bunch on the brim of his hat.
“What do you think of them?” asked Thomas Wells in his hard, incisive tones, indicating the shivering soldiers by a jerk of his head.
“I’ve not seen enough of them to think anything,” Jeremy answered defensively. “I daresay they’re not at their best now.”
“Poor stuff!” snapped the Canadian, between teeth almost closed. “Poor stuff at the best. I could eat them all with half of one of our regiments. Yes ...” he continued, drawling as though the words had an almost physical savor for him, “if I got among them with two or three hundred of my own chaps, I bet we wouldn’t leave a live man anywhere within sight in half-an-hour. We’d cut all their throats. It’d be like killing sheep.”
Jeremy shuddered involuntarily and moved a step away. “Where’s all the rest of the army?” he asked.