With his hand pressed to his side, where a piece of flying metal had caught him, he examined the damage done to the gun. The sergeant was at work with Archie's revolver among the wounded horses.
The driver reported that, bar a bit of skin gone, the off-leader would do.
'Good,' said Archie. 'Then mount and follow the battery hell for blast. If they have gone to their new positions, find them. Tell the major what has happened. Say the gun is worth saving, if he can get a team up in the night. There are no Austrians in sight; if they are not here before dark, they will probably wait till dawn. Tell him none of us can walk except Sergeant Yates and myself. Understand?'
Evans saluted, and swung round on his heel. Archie and the sergeant busied themselves with first-aid dressings and fetching water for the wounded. Whenever the stoicism of his kind let a sufferer ask what was happening:—
'Driver Evans is finding the Major,' said Archie. 'When it's dark, he'll send up to pull the gun and us out.'
It was not, he knew, as simple as that. The battery had a long start, and would by now be concealed in a new position. In a strange country and with a foreign tongue, the driver would be very lucky if he found it. But there seemed no better plan.
To look for civilian transport in the scarred desert that the retreating army left in its wake was to waste time. Time that was all too short, even if the Austrian advance guard, accustomed to the almost defenceless condition of the Russian rear at that date, and misled by the English expenditure of ammunition, advanced with unjustified caution.
The hours passed. Archie watched the shadow of the western hills, as it spread across the valley, and still no attack came.
I tactlessly asked him what he felt like as he waited.
He stared at me.