‘Huddersfield, of course?’ I said, to make them out with it.
‘Bolton,’ said one at last. Being in uniform the pitman could not destroy the impertinent civilian.
‘Ah, Bolton!’ I returned. ‘All cotton, aren’t you?’
‘Some coal,’ he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry ‘twixt coal and cotton in Bolton, but I wanted to see him practise the self-control that the Army is always teaching.
As I have said, he and his companion were most polite, but the total of their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come from Bolton way; might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they liked Gloucestershire in the south. A spy could not have learned much less.
The battalion halted, and moved off by companies for further evolutions. One could see they were more than used to drill and arms; a hardened, thick-necked, thin-flanked, deep-chested lot, dealt with quite faithfully by their sergeants, and altogether abreast of their work. Why, then, this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly-room?
There were many orderly-rooms in the little old town, most of them in bye-lanes less than one car wide. I found what I wanted, and—this was north-country all over—a private who volunteered to steer me to headquarters through the tricky southern streets. He was communicative, and told me a good deal about typhoid-inoculation and musketry practice, which accounted for only six companies being on parade. But surely they could not have been ashamed of that.
GUARDING A RAILWAY
I unearthed their skeleton at last in a peaceful, gracious five-hundred-year-old house that looked on to lawns and cut hedges bounded by age-old red brick walls—such a perfumed and dreaming place as one would choose for the setting of some even-pulsed English love-tale of the days before the war.
Officers were billeted in the low-ceiled, shiny-floored rooms full of books and flowers.