“A line! A handful of tired men.”
“It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map.”
“They won't.”
“We keep on saying, 'They won't.' We said, 'They won't get the Somme crossings!' but they did. Let's face it squarely, without any damned false optimism. That has been our curse all through.”
“Better than your damned pessimism.”
“It's quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to keep them back? There's nothing up the road.”
“It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would laugh!”
“We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things.”
“How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication. Anything may happen in the night.”
Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways. Then some one laughed.