Even as he spoke there came the complaining whine of a four-inch shell high overhead.
III—THE BABE ON THE BATTLEFIELD WITH HIS DOG
Possibly it was the new sound that woke Hippolyte, or perhaps Casper, the mongrel wolf-hound, took it for the challenge of some ancestral enemy. At least, some half-hour later No. 21687 Private John Smith, of C Company, had a vision. He was not naturally an imaginative man, but he hastened to report it to the C.S.M.
"Lummy, sir," he said, "if there ain't a bloomin' angel comin' across the bloomin' marsh!"
And, sure enough, across the very centre of the shivering quag came a small figure, clothed in a long white robe very like those attributed to mediæval angels, and with a golden aureole about its head, cast by the last rays of the dying sun. Actually it was no angel, but little Hippolyte, looking for his mother. She had left him, very early in the morning, to go to Mass, trusting him, as often before, to the care of Casper. Usually she was not gone for more than half an hour or so. On that day, however, she had not returned in one hour or in three. She never would return, for before the third hour she was lying dead in the little square before the church-door—one of a group of six, men and women, who had been caught leaving the building when the Germans, in their first assault, enfiladed the main street with machine-gun fire. They lay side by side, very peacefully, just as they fell, for the hard-pressed defenders of the village had found no leisure to remove them.
Hippolyte waited very patiently—as was his wont. He cried a little from loneliness at first, but his mother, before she left him, had set out the little portion of milk and bread that was to be his breakfast. Growing hungry, he sought for it in its accustomed place, ate it, and fell asleep again. It was the dog at last that disturbed him, later in the afternoon, by whimpering and scratching at the door, and gave him the great idea of starting out to find the mother who was so long in returning.
Child and dog set out together along the imperceptible track of safety that crept and twisted across the marsh. Alone Hippolyte would almost certainly have strayed from it, but the dog's surer instinct guarded him until, just at the moment when hope was at an end, he came as a vision of hope to the spent company of Englishmen.
That is practically the end of the story, for you can imagine the rest, except, perhaps, that the child, when he had almost reached the hard ground, grew afraid of the sound of firing, the noise overhead, and the gaunt, stark men staring at him in wondering silence. So he turned homeward again, Casper stalking beside him, sacrificing his lust for battle to his duty as foster-father. But they went slowly, the child often turning back to stare with wondering eyes at the increasing chaos behind him and, as the more impressionable among the soldiers would have it, beckoning them to follow him towards safety.
Follow they did, but as unbeaten soldiers should, in good order and with due precautions—and so escaped. The Germans lost time before they entered the deserted village, for they feared an ambush. When they did enter, it was long past sunset and the night was too dark to do anything before dawn. Even then they had no guide to show them the track across the marsh, and they were forced to skirt it, losing so much time that the British battalion—if you can call less than three hundred men a battalion—got clear away, and in due course picked up the main body, taking with them Hippolyte and Casper.