Chausseur à pied.
FELLOWS IN MISFORTUNE.
I
The First Day
As we limped and stumbled into Caudry in the dusk we presented a very disturbing spectacle.
Two young French women stood at a cottage door, and, when our doleful procession passed, one of them flung herself into her sister’s arms in a paroxysm of grief.
The good folk of the town would have slipped bread into our hands, but our German guards pressed them back with their rifles. Bayonets and rifle butts could not prevent them, however, from flinging us words of cheer and encouragement. “Courage! Bonne chance! Bonne nuit!”
How illogical is war! This very morning, as we entered the first village in which German troops were billeted, we found them waiting to serve us, with outset tables on which were clean glasses and pitchers of clear water! Earlier, while the enemy attack was still developing, I observed a German—himself at the charge, and with at his elbow Death, the equal foeman of all who fight—wave a reassuring hand to a British soldier prisoner who was showing signs of distress.
So in the dark we came to a grim factory, into which we were shepherded for the night. We had had nothing to eat all day; we were to have nothing to eat now. There was, however, an issuing of bowls of what, for lack of a better name—or of a worse—was designated coffee.
There was now also to be a search, and a giving up of all papers, knives, razors, or other steel instruments—bare bodkins by which we might be disposed to seek redress, relief, or release. Search had already been made at a German headquarters within a few miles of the line. Prior to which, as we marched down heavily flanked by our guards, I had, with surreptitious hand thrust into my tunic pocket, succeeded in tearing up and scattering over the land, sundry military papers, and the proof sheets of a book of mine in which were some very complimentary references to the Kaiser. Here it was also that a wounded fellow-officer, giving up his letters, and asking me to explain that two from his wife he had not yet read, the gnarled old German officer handed them back with a salute.