“After all,” he said, “it’s war; what the French call La Guerre.” He professed to have discovered, not from the R.T.O. but from a sleepy French railway official, that the train, our train in which we were to travel, was somewhere in the neighbourhood, waiting for its engine. It did not come to us from anywhere else; but made its start, so to speak took its rise, at that junction. Thompson and our new friend, the boy, proposed to get into the train when they found it.
Thompson can speak French of a sort, but he does not understand the language as spoken by the French people. I did not believe that he had really found out about that train. I declined to join in the search. He and the boy went off together. They came back in about half an hour. They said they had found a train standing by itself in a field and that it must be ours because there was no other. The reasoning did not seen conclusive to me, but I agreed to go and sleep in whatever train they had found. I suggested that we should leave our luggage on the platform and pick it up when the train got there at 6 a.m.
“That,” said Thompson, “is just the way luggage gets lost. Suppose—I don’t say it’s likely or even possible—but suppose the train we get into goes somewhere else. Nice fools we’d look, turning up in Paris or Marseilles without a brush or comb among us. No. Where I go I take my luggage with me.”
Thompson was evidently not so sure about that train as he pretended to be. But I had reached a pitch of hopeless misery which left me indifferent about the future. It did not seem to me to matter much just then whether I ever got to X. or not. We had to make three trips, stumbling over railway lines and sleepers, in the dark, falling into wet ditches and slipping on muddy banks; but in the end we got all our luggage, including the boy’s top-coats, into a train which lay lifeless and deserted in a siding.
This time Thompson and the boy slept. I sat up stiff with cold. At half-past five a French railway porter opened our door and invited us to descend, alleging that he wanted to clean the carriage. I was quite pleased to wake Thompson who was snoring.
“Get up,” I said, “there’s a man here who wants to clean the carriage and we’ve got to get out.”
“I’m damned if I get out,” said Thompson.
The Frenchman repeated his request most politely. If the gentlemen would be good enough to descend he would at once clean the carriage.
Thompson fumbled in his pocket and got out an electric torch. At first I thought he meant to make sure that the carriage required cleaning. Thinking things over I came to the conclusion that he felt he could talk French better if he could see a little. He turned his ray of light on the Frenchman and said slowly and distinctly:
“Nous sommes officiers anglais, et les officiers anglais ne descendent pas—jamais.”