Next morning he crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne.
XXXVIII
Folkestone-Boulogne!
It was not three hundred years ago, but only three, that those words, and that cross-Channel passage, meant the way to roads which began very pleasantly past green fields and French villages—with roofs on their cottages, and towers to their churches—through long avenues of poplars growing tall and straight, past cornfields or ploughed fields, stretching away, hedgeless, to the horizon line, until presently those roads became filled with deep holes, and the fields were no longer green, but bare of vegetation as though blasted by some curse of God, and the trees were lopped and gashed, and the cottages had become unroofed, and the churches had lost their towers, and then, at the end of the roads, no house stood, no wall of any size above a rubble of bricks and no man walked hand-high above the ground, but all life was hidden in holes and ditches, and death alone was visible, where unburied bodies lay beyond a line of sand-bags and twisted wire.
To Bertram, all that seemed, for a few moments, as he stood on the quayside at Boulogne, three hundred years ago, and then not three years ago, not three minutes, but still going on.
He was back from seven days’ leave. The purple-faced Major with the megaphone could assuredly shout out “All officers back from leave to report to the A.M.L.O.”
Eight hundred soldiers, or more, who had been as sick as dogs, would stagger down the gangway, with tin hats, rifles, gas-masks, packs, silent, grim, sullen, because they were going back to the “bloody old trenches.”
A line of cars would be drawn up for staff officers from G.H.Q. With luck one might get a lift in one of them part of the way and do some lorry-jumping for the rest of the way, instead of waiting for the night train, so cold, and slow, and crowded and dark.
A convoy of ambulances would soon arrive, with the usual crowd of badly-wounded—the fellows with Blighty wounds—and one would see their muddy boots, soles outward, when the flaps were drawn back. Surely the war was going on, for ever, and ever, and ever, as it had seemed to those who enlisted in 1914 or afterwards. . . .
No, all that was finished! It was merely a dream and a memory. Bertram saw the last representative of the British Army which had poured out here in tides—a dapper young sergeant, in khaki, doing some job with the customs officers or the French police. All else had vanished, even the A.M.L.O. with his megaphone!