I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across the frontier, outside a village.
“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful oaths.
“What game?”
“Murder,” he answered sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows. Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns. Jolly work, what?”
He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made him miserable I never knew. I walked into the village and found it peaceful. No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had yet entered it.
The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol across the Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same degree. He leaned sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to me with laughter which did not conceal his apprehensions.
“Hope there’s no trouble.... Haven’t the ghost of| an idea what to do if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language either! If I’m the boy who takes the wrong turning, don’t be too hard on me!”
It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.