The day's journey was not over by any manner of means, but so far as I personally was concerned its culminating moment passed when I walked out on the bridge timbers with that matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What followed thereafter was in the nature of a series of anticlimaxes, and yet we saw a bookful before we rode back to Soissons for a second night under bombardment in that sorely beset and beleaguered old city. Before heading back we cruised for ten kilometres beyond Noyon, going west by south toward Compiègne.
On this side jaunt we mostly skirted the river, which on our bank was comparatively calm but which upon the farther bank was being contended for at the bayonet's point by British and French against Germans. The sound of the cannonading never ceased for a moment, and as dusk came on the northern horizon was lit up with flickering waves of a sullen dull red radiance. The nearer we came to Compiègne the more numerous were the British, not in squads and detachments and bits of companies but in regiments and brigades which preserved their formations even though some of them had been reduced to skeletons of their former proportions. In the fields alongside the way the artillerymen were throwing up earthen banks for the guns; the infantrymen were making low sod walls behind which they would sleep that night and fight on the morrow. From every hand came the smell of brewing tea, for, battle or no battle, the Tommy would have his national beverage. The troop horses were being properly bestowed in the shaggly thickets, and camp fires threw off pungent smells of wood burning. For the first time in a long time the campaign was outdoors, under the skies.
I saw one fagged trooper squatting at the roadside, with a minute scrap of looking-glass balanced before him in the twigs of a bare bush, while he painfully but painstakingly was shaving himself in cold ditch water. He had fought or marched all day, I imagine; his chances of being sent to eternity in piecemeal before another sunset were exceedingly good; but he would go, tidied and with scraped jowls, to whatever fate might await him. And that, except for one other small thing, was the most typically English thing I witnessed in the shank of this memorable evening.
The other incident occurred after we had faced about for our return. In a maze of byroads we got off our course. A lone soldier of the Bedfordshires—a man near forty, I should say at an offhand guess—was tramping along. Our driver halted our car and hailed him. He straightened his weary back and came smartly to a salute.
“We've lost our way,” explained one of us.
He smiled at us whimsically.
“I'm afraid I can't help you, sirs,” he said in the tones of an educated man. “I've lost my own way no less than six times to-day. I may add that I'm rather a stranger in these parts myself.”
When we got to Blérincourt with an hour of daylight and another hour of twilight yet ahead of us we turned north toward Chauny, which the Germans now held and which the Allies were bombarding furiously. We had come to a crossroads just back of a small village, when with a low spiteful hiss of escaping air one of our rear tires went flat. We stopped to replace the damaged tube with a better one. Behind us, a quarter of a mile or so away, a British baggage train was making bivouac for the night. Just in front of us a British battery was firing over the housetops of the empty village toward Chauny.
We had the car jacked up and the old tire off the rim and the new one half on when—bang! the heavens and the world seemed to come together all about us. What happened was that a big shell of high explosives, fired from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped within seventy, sixty yards of us in a field; what seemed to happen was that a great plug was pulled out of the air with a smiting and a crashing and a rending. The earth quivered as though it had taken a death wound. Our wind shield cracked across under the force of the concussion. Gravel and bits of clay descended about us in a pattering shower.
Speaking for myself, I may say that one of the most noticeable physical effects of having a nine shell exploding in one's immediate vicinity is a curious sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach, complicated with a dryness of the mouth and sudden chill in the feet.