“My dear Dendrecourt, in England a Mayor is somebody. Not an old peasant dressed up in a top hat and an apron, all stars and stripes.”
“Well, here is lunch!” (He called it lernch.) “I will not join with you, Dormer, in the game of slanging each other’s nationality.”
Dormer dismounted and handed over his horse, and went in to lunch, walking wide in the legs and feeling a fool. The only pleasure he had had was the male-game-bird appearance of Colonel Lepage.
Of course he said nothing about his morning’s work, and of course Colonel Birchin had forgotten it. At the end of the week the Division moved into the line and he had to go forward with that fellow Kavanagh to check the workings of communications. They were “in” four weeks, and came out in the great cold of January, 1917, and were moved up near to Doullens. They had not been out a week before the Colonel sent for him. He knew what it would be about, but the whole of his mind being occupied with keeping warm, he did not care. They were in huts, on a high plateau. White snow obliterated every colour, softened every outline as far as the eye could reach, except where the road to Arras lay black with its solid ice, the snow that the traffic had trodden into water, refrozen into a long black band, scattered with cinders, gravel, chalk, anything that made it negotiable.
Dormer looked at the collection of huts, with the obvious pathways between, the obvious, inevitable collection of traffic, lorries and limbers, motor-cycles and horses, that accumulated round any Head-quarters. He wondered how long it would take the Bosche to discover it in some air-photo and bomb it all to blazes. Inside Q. office, in spite of two big stoves in the tiny box of a place, it was so cold that every one breathed clouds of steam, and the three officers, and the clerks, sat in their coats.
“Look here, Dormer!”—the Colonel sounded as though he had a personal grievance—“just look what I’ve got from the army.”
It was an official memorandum, emanating from Army Head-quarters and duly passed through the Corps to whom they had belonged, and by Corps to the Division, inquiring what results had been arrived at in the Vanderlynden affair, and whether it could not be reported to the Minister of War that the matter had reached a satisfactory conclusion.
“I thought you settled all that, while we were at Louches?”
“Well, sir, I went to see them at Army Head-quarters and explained, or tried to.”
“You don’t seem to have done any good at all. In fact it looks as though you and Dendrecourt had a nice morning ride for nothing.”