Fighting with French: A Tale of the New Army

by Herbert Strang

The captain at once hurried to the Bonnards' cottage. "Amory's a likely man," he thought.

The upshot was that when the official despatch rider was returning to headquarters by the long way round, Kenneth and Harry were speeding along the road north-eastward. Harry was the first to start; Kenneth followed at a minute's interval, just keeping his friend in sight. Their orders were to let nothing interfere with or delay the delivery of the despatch. If any accident happened, if either of them was hit by a sniper's bullet, there must be no question of helping the other.

Before starting they had attentively studied a large-scale map of the district. The colonel's information had shown the impossibility of attempting to reach headquarters without leaving the direct road. This lay, for about half the distance, between the new fronts of the opposing forces, but it then crossed the new position which the Germans were believed to be entrenching, and ran for several miles behind it. There was, however, a by-road forking to the left just before the halfway point was reached, and this opened into a bridle track leading in the right direction. By making this slight detour they would lose a mile or two, but they might hope to incur no more danger than they were bound to risk in the early part of the journey.

"Barring accidents, we shall save a good deal more time than the colonel thinks," said Kenneth, as he folded the map. "The way the other fellow has gone is sure to be congested with traffic: this will be clear."

"I hope so," replied Harry, "but don't forget there's been an action. The road is probably half pits. Well, I go first then; if I come a cropper, take warning and scoot."

At the outset the road was not so bad as he had expected, and he was able to run the machine at a pace of nearly forty miles an hour without much risk. There were few marks of gun fire, no doubt because the road followed the bottom of an indentation over which the shells had passed. But after a time it rose, and the ground fell away on each side, and Harry was warned of the necessity of reducing speed by a sudden jolt that made him bite his tongue. From that moment he had to watch every yard of the road. Sometimes on the left, sometimes in the centre, sometimes on the right, yawned a shell pit deep enough to bury a wagon. Presently he had to pick his way through a litter of broken rifles, helmets, haversacks, all sorts of articles of equipment, evidently dropped or thrown aside by the Germans in their disordered flight the day before. Time was so important that, even now, he rode at a speed that would have seemed lunacy to a motorist with a proper respect for springs and bearings, avoiding only dangerous holes, and riding over most of the obstacles. His progress was a succession of jolts and jerks that threatened to dislocate the machine, and he afterwards wondered that it had not broken down under the strain.

He came into the by-road. This, being at a lower level than the road he had left, had not suffered so much from shells; on the other hand, it was scored with ruts and soft with mud, into which the wheels now and then sank several inches. He was beset now by a constant fear of skidding, and annoyed by splashes of mud on his face.

"It might be worse," he thought. "Lucky they are not bullets."

So far, it was clear, he had not been seen by the snipers whom Captain Adams had mentioned as the greatest risk of the journey. The ground on either side rolled away in gentle undulations. There was neither house nor living creature in sight. Guns were booming in the far distance, but though he knew that there were thousands of invisible soldiers on each side of him, nothing on the face of the country indicated a state of war.

Topping a rise, he came to a ruined hamlet in which not a single cottage was whole. Beyond this branched the bridle track that led to his destination. It was a lane no more than four feet wide, between hedges, and thick with slimy mud. It wound and twisted in an erratic and seemingly purposeless manner, and but for the evidence of the map he had conned Harry would have had no confidence in its general direction.