O.C. 469 T.M.B. stood at Dormer’s elbow:
“We’ve just got time to catch your train.”
“Come on.” Dormer had no intention of being marooned in this place another day. Outside a cycle and side-car stood panting. Dormer did wonder as they whizzed down the rutted road how long such a vehicle had been upon the strength of a Trench Mortar School, but after all, could you blame fellows? They were existing under War conditions, what more could one ask?
He woke to the slow jolting of the train as it slowed up in smoky twilight at Boulogne. He bought some food, and sitting with it in his hands and his thermos between his knees, he watched the grey Picard day strengthen over those endless camps and hospitals, dumps and training grounds.
He was retracing his steps of the day before, but he was a step farther on. As he looked at the hundreds of thousands of khaki-clad figures, he realized something of what he had to do. With no name or number he had to find one of them, who could be proved to have been at a certain place a year ago. He didn’t want to, but if he didn’t, would he ever get rid of the business?
The “rag” of the previous evening stuck in his head. How true it was. The man who did the thing was “Nobby” with the number 6494 that was beginning to be folk-lore. Of course he was. He was any or every soldier. Madeleine Vanderlynden was the heroine. O.C. 469 T.M.B. was the hero. The Mayor of Hondebecq was the comic relief, and he, Dormer, was the villain. He was indeed Jack Ketch, the spoiler of the fun, the impotent figure-head of detested “Justice,” or “Law and Order.” And finally, as in all properly conducted Punch and Judy shows, the Devil came and took the lot. What had Dendrecourt said: “The Devil had taken the whole generation.” Well, it was all in the play. And when he realized this, as he slid on from Étaples down to Abbeville, he began to feel it was not he who was pursuing some unknown soldier in all that nation-in-arms that had grown from the British Expeditionary Force, but the Army—no, the War—that was pursuing him.
When he got out at Doullens, and scrounged a lift from a passing car, he found himself looking at the driver, at the endless transport on either side of the road, at the sentry on guard over the parked heavies in the yard of the jam factory, at the military policeman at the cross-roads. One or other of all these hundreds of thousands knew all about the beastly business that was engaging more and more of his mind. One or other of them could point to the man who was wanted.
He found himself furtively examining their faces, prepared for covert ridicule and suspicion, open ignorance or stupidity. He had, by now, travelled a long way from the first feelings he had about the affair, when he had thought of the perpetrator of the damage at Vanderlynden’s as a poor devil to be screened if possible. He wouldn’t screen him now. This was the effect of the new possibility that had arisen. He, Dormer, did not intend to be ridiculous.
On reaching the Head-quarters of the Division, he found the War in full progress. That is to say, every one was standing about, waiting to do something. Dormer had long discovered that this was war. Enlisting as he had done at the outbreak of hostilities, with no actual experience of what such a set of conditions could possibly be like, he had then assumed that he was in for a brief and bitter period of physical discomfort and danger, culminating quite possibly in death, but quite certainly in a decisive victory for the Allies within a few months. He had graduated in long pedestrian progress of Home Training, always expecting it to cease one fine morning. It did. He and others were ordered to France. With incredible slowness and difficulty they found the battalion to which they were posted. Now for it, he had thought, and soon found himself involved in a routine, dirtier and more dangerous, but as unmistakably a routine as that in which he had been involved at home.