This struck him as curious; it was no weather or hour for decent folk to be abroad. The Babe then remembered that the mess-cart was in the shed, and it occurred to him that somebody might be monkeying with the harness. He thereupon marched straight for the shed (treading quite noiselessly in his gum-boots) and, pulling out his electric torch, flashed it, not on some cringing Picard peasant, as he had expected, but on three unshorn, unwashed, villainous, whopping big Bosch infantrymen! It would be difficult to say who was the most staggered for the moment, the Huns blinking in the sudden glare of the torch or the Babe well aware that he was up against a trio of escaped and probably quite desperate prisoners of war. "Victory," says M. HILAIRE BELLOC (or was it NAPOLEON? I am always getting them mixed) "is to him who can bring the greatest force to bear on a given position." That is as may be, but, after personal participation in one or two of the major disputes in the late lamented war, I put it this way. Two opposing factions bump, utter chaos reigns supreme and the side which recovers first wins. In this case the Babe was the first to recover. A year before the War he found himself in a seminary in the suburbs of Berlin, learning to cough his vowels, roll his r's and utter German phonetically. Potsdam was near at hand, and many a pleasant hour did the Babe spend on a bench outside the old Stadt Palast, watching young recruits of the Prussian Guard having their souls painfully extracted from them by Feldwebels of great muzzle velocity and booting force. The sight of those three Hun uniforms standing before him must have pricked a memory, which in turn set some sub-conscious mechanism to work, for suddenly the Babe heard a voice bawling orders in German. It was fully five seconds, he swears, before he recognised it as his own. "Attention!" snarled the voice in proper Potsdammer style. "Quick march! Right wheel!" The three great hooligans trembled all over, clicked their heels and stepped off the mark as punctiliously as though on the Tempelhofer Feld at the Spring Parade.
In two minutes the Babe, snarling like a Zoo tiger at dinner-time, had manoeuvred them across a hundred yards of bog and filed them, goose-stepping, into a Nissen Hut full of sleeping Atkinses. The Atkinses rolled, gaping, off their beds at the Babe's first shout, and the game was up.
Ten minutes later the Bosch gentlemen were en route for the main guard under strong, if déshabillé, escort.
It turned out that one of them spoke English quite badly and on reaching the Guard Room he opened out.
They had escaped from a prison camp at Abbeville, he said, and were heading for Holland, travelling by night.
Passing the farm at about midnight they espied our hooded mess-cart and, feeling tired and footsore, had conceived the bright idea of stealing a horse to fit the cart and driving to Holland in style and comfort. Just as they were getting things shipshape along came the Babe and clapped the lid on—"verfluchte kleine Teufel!"
When the Main Guard lads inquired how it was that after all their trouble they had allowed one lone unarmed infant to corral the three of them, instead of quietly biffing him on the head, as they quite easily might have done, the Huns were very confused. At one moment they were in the shed, they said, fascinated like moths in the glare of the torch, and the next thing they knew they were in the midst of a horde of underclothed Tommies—trapped. As to what had happened in the interval, or how they had been spirited from one place to the other, they were not in the least clear—couldn't explain it at all.
The Drill Habit again.
PATLANDER.