The last I saw of them was in the early cold morning, all in marching order, jinking and jingling down a road through woods.
‘Where are you going?’
‘God knows!’
THE INN OF GOOD-BYES
It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea and away to the front for the battle of ‘Our Raj.’ The quiet hotel where people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to such departures. The officers of a whole Division—the raw cuts of their tent-circles lie still unhealed on the links—dined there by scores; mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for a last look at their boys, and found beds goodness knows where: very quiet little weddings, too, set out from its doors to the church opposite. The Division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that the mule-battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills signed and witnessed in the smoking-room are full-blown executors now; some of the brides are widows.
And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie down and have her cry out—not at all nice to remember that it never occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night’s lodging, even to an unintroduced stranger.
GREATHEART AND CHRISTIANA
There were hospitals up the road preparing and being prepared for the Indian wounded. In one of these lay a man of, say, a Biluch regiment, sorely hit. Word had come from his colonel in France to the colonel’s wife in England that she should seek till she found that very man and got news from his very mouth—news to send to his family and village. She found him at last, and he was very bewildered to see her there, because he had left her and her child on the verandah of the bungalow, long and long ago, when he and his colonel and the regiment went down to take ship for the war. How had she come? Who had guarded her during her train-journey of so many days? And, above all, how had the baba endured that sea which caused strong men to collapse? Not till all these matters had been cleared up in fullest detail did Greatheart on his cot permit his colonel’s wife to waste one word on his own insignificant concerns. And that she should have wept filled him with real trouble. Truly, this is the war of ‘Our Raj!’
VI
TERRITORIAL BATTALIONS
To excuse oneself to oneself is human: but to excuse oneself to one’s children is Hell.—Arabic Proverb.