He was able to walk a little when the order came to move. The guards became suddenly busy; officers whom the prisoners had not seen before came in and out, and one evening the helpless were put roughly into farm carts and taken to the station, while those able to move by themselves were marched after them—marched quickly, with bayonet points ready behind them to prod stragglers. It was nearly dark when they were thrust roughly into closed trucks, looking back for the last time on the little cure, who had marched beside them, with an arm for two sick men, and now stood on the platform, looking wistfully at them. He put up his hand solemnly.
“God keep you, my sons!”
A German soldier elbowed him roughly aside. The doors of the trucks were clashed together, leaving them in darkness; and presently, with straining and rattling and clanging, the train moved out of the station.
“Next stop, Germany!” said Denny Callaghan from the corner where he had been put down. “And not a ticket between the lot of us!”
CHAPTER XVI
THROUGH THE DARKNESS
“I think that’s the last load,” Jim Linton said.
He had wriggled backwards out of a black hole in the side of a black cupboard; and now sat back on his heels, gasping. His only article of attire was a pair of short trousers. From his hair to his heels he was caked with dirt.
“Well, praise the pigs for that,” said a voice from the blackness of the cupboard.
Some one switched on a tiny electric light. Then it could be seen, dimly, that the cupboard was just large enough to hold four men, crouching so closely that they almost touched each other. All were dressed—or undressed—as Jim was; all were equally dirty. Their blackened faces were set and grim. And whether they spoke, or moved, or merely sat still, they were listening—listening.
All four were British officers. Marsh and Fullerton were subalterns belonging to a cavalry regiment. Desmond was a captain—a Dublin Fusilier; and Jim Linton completed the quartette; and they sat in a hole in the ground under the floor of an officers’ barrack in a Westphalian prison-camp. The yawning opening in front of them represented five months’ ceaseless work, night after night. It was the mouth of a tunnel.