A large band of prisoners had been captured by our troops that day. Small detachments had from time to time been captured ever since the turn at Chaumes, but this was different. There were long lines of them, standing bolt upright, and weaponless. The Subaltern looked at them curiously. They struck him as on the whole taller than the English, and their faces were not brown, but grey. He admired their coats, there was a martial air in the long sweep of them. And he confessed that one looked far more of a soldier in a helmet. There is a ferocity about the things, a grimness well suited to a soldier.... Not that clothes make the man.
He sternly refused himself the pleasure of going to get a closer sight of them. He wanted very badly to see them, perhaps to talk French with them, but a feeling that it was perhaps infra dignitatem debarred him. The men, however, had no such scruples. They crowded round their captives, and slowly and silently surveyed them. They looked at them with the same sort of interest that one displays towards an animal in the Zoo, and the Germans paid just as much attention to their regard as Zoo animals do. Considering that only a short hour ago they had been trying to take each other's lives, there seemed to be an appalling lack of emotion in either party. Fully half an hour the Tommies inspected them thus. Then, with infinite deliberation, one man produced a packet of "Caporal" cigarettes and offered one, with an impassive countenance, to a German. As far as the Subaltern could see, not a single word was exchanged nor a gesture made. They did not move away until it was time to fall in.
The advance was continued until it was dark, and intermittent firing was heard throughout the afternoon on either flank. The German retreat, which had in its first stages been conducted with such masterly skill, was rapidly developing into a hurried and ill-conducted movement, that bade fair to lead to disaster. Reports of large quantities of prisoners were coming in more frequently than ever.
It was at this time that the Subaltern first heard the now notorious story of the German who had been at the Savoy, and who gave himself up to the Officer whom he recognised as an old habitué. One of the Officers in the Regiment said that this had happened to him, and was believed—for the moment. Later on, Officers out of every corps solemnly related similar experiences, with occasional variations in the name of the hotel. Usually it was the Savoy or the Ritz; less often the Carlton, or even the Cecil, but the "Pic" or the "Troc" were absolutely barred. The story multiplied so exceedingly that one began to suspect that the entire German corps in front was exclusively composed of ex-waiters of smart London hotels.
Another sign that the Germans were beginning to be thrust back more quickly than they liked was the frequent abandonment of transport. Whole trains of motor lorries that had been hastily burned and left by the roadside, and all sorts of vehicles with broken wheels, were constantly being passed. The Subaltern remembers seeing a governess cart, and wondering what use the Germans had found for it. Perhaps a German colonel had been driven gravely in it, at the head of his men. He wondered whether the solemn Huns would have been capable of seeing the humour of such a situation.
Horses, too, seemed to have been slaughtered by the score. They looked like toy horses, nursery things of wood. Their faces were so unreal, their expressions so glassy. They lay in such odd postures, with their hoofs sticking so stiffly in the air. It seemed as if they were toys, and were lying just as children had upset them. Even their dimensions seemed absurd. Their bodies had swollen to tremendous sizes, destroying the symmetry of life, confirming the illusion of unreality.
The sight of these carcases burning in the sun, with buzzing myriads of flies scintillating duskily over their unshod hides, excited a pity that was almost as deep as his pity for slain human beings. After all, men came to the war with few illusions, and a very complete knowledge of the price to be paid. They knew why they were there, what they were doing, and what they might expect. They could be buoyed up by victory, downcast by defeat. Above all, they had a Cause, something to fight for, and if Fate should so decree, something to die for. But these horses were different; they could neither know nor understand these things. Poor, dumb animals, a few weeks ago they had been drawing their carts, eating their oats, and grazing contentedly in their fields. And then suddenly they were seized by masters they did not know, raced away to places foreign to them, made to draw loads too great for them, tended irregularly, or not at all, and when their strength failed, and they could no longer do their work, a bullet through the brain ended their misery. Their lot was almost worse than the soldiers'!
To the Subaltern it seemed an added indictment of war that these wretched animals should be flung into that vortex of slaughter. He pitied them intensely, the sight of them hurt him; and the smell of them nauseated him. Every memory of the whole advance is saturated with that odour. It was pungent, vigorous, demoralising. It filled the air, and one's lungs shrank before it. Once, when a man drove his pick through the crisp, inflated side, a gas spurted out that was positively asphyxiating and intolerable.
However much transport the Germans abandoned, however severe the losses they sustained, they always found time to break open every estaminet they passed, and drain it dry. Wretched inns and broken bottles proved to be just as reliable a clue to their passing as the smell of them.