Many fell out—fell out in the literal as well as the drill sense of the word; swerved to the side of the road and missed foot in the ditch and fell there, or stumbled in the ranks, tripped, lacking the brain or body quickness to recover themselves, collapsed, and rolled and lay helpless. Others, again, gasped a word or two to a comrade or an N.C.O., stumbled out of the ranks to the roadside, sank down with hanging head and rounded shoulders to a sitting position. Few or none of these men deliberately lay down. They sat till the regiment had plodded his trailing length past, tried to stagger to knees and feet, succeeded, and stood swaying a moment, and then lurched off after the rear ranks; or failed, stared stupidly after them, collapsed again slowly and completely. All these were left to lie where they fell. It was useless to urge them to move, because every officer and N.C.O. knew that no man gave up while he had an ounce of strength or energy left to carry on, that orders or entreaties had less power to keep a man moving than his own dogged pluck and will, that when these failed to keep a man going nothing else could succeed.
All were not, of course, so hopelessly done as this. There were still a number of the tougher muscled, the firmer willed, who kept their limbs moving with conscious volition, who still retained some thinking power, who even at times exchanged a few words or a mouthful of curses. These, and the officers, kept the whole together, kept them moving by force of example, set the pace for them and gave them the direction. Most of them were in the leading ranks of their own companies, merely because their greater energy had carried them there past and through the ranks of those whose minds were nearly or quite a blank, whose bodies were more completely exhausted, whose will-power was reduced to a blind and sheep-like instinct to follow a leader, move when and where the dimly seen khaki form or tramping boots in front of them moved, stop when and where they stopped.
The roads by which the army was retreating were cumbered and in places choked and blocked with fugitive peasantry fleeing from the advancing Germans, spurred into and upon their flight by the tales that reached them of ravished Belgium, by first-hand accounts of the murder of old men and women and children, of rape and violation and pillage and burning. Their slow, crawling procession checked and hindered the army transport, added to the trials of the weary troops by making necessary frequent halts and deviations off the road and back to it to clear some block in the traffic where a cart had broken down, or where worn-out women with hollow cheeks and staring eyes, and children with dusty, tear-streaked faces crowded and filled the road.
The rear-guard passed numbers of these lying utterly exhausted by the roadside, and the road for miles was strewn with the wreckage of the retreat, with men who had fallen out unable longer to march on blistered or bleeding feet or collapsed in the heedless sleep of complete exhaustion; with broken-down carts dragged clear into the roadside and spilled with their jumbled contents into the ditch; with crippled horses and footsore cattle; with quivering-lipped, grey-haired old men, and dry-eyed, cowering women, and frightened, clinging children. Some of these peasantry roused themselves as the last of the rear-guard regiments came up with them, struggled again to follow on the road, or dragged themselves clear of it and sought refuge and hiding in abandoned cottages or barns or the deep dry ditches.
At one point where the road crept up the long slope of a hill the rear-guard came under the longe-range fire of the German guns. The shells came roaring down, to burst in clouds of belching black smoke in the fields to either side of the road, or to explode with a sharp tearing cr-r-rash in the air, their splinters and bullets raining down out of the thick white woolly smoke cloud that coiled and writhed and unfolded in slow heavy oily eddies.
One battalion of the rear-guard was halted at the foot of the hill and spread out off the road and across the line of it. Again they were told not to lie down, and for the most part the men obeyed, leaning heavily with their arms folded on the muzzles of their rifles or watching the regiments crawling slowly up the road with the coal-black shell-bursts in the fields about them or the white air-bursts of the shrapnel above them.
‘Pretty bloomin’ sight—I don’t think,’ growled a gaunt and weary-eyed private. The man next him laughed shortly. ‘Pretty one for the Germs, anyway,’ he said; ‘and one they’re seein’ a sight too often for my fancy. They’ll be forgettin’ wot our faces look like if we keep on at this everlastin’ runnin’ away.’
‘Blast ’em,’ said the first speaker savagely, ‘but our turn will come presently. D’you think this yarn is right, Jacko, that we’re retirin’ this way just to draw ’em away from their base?’
‘Gawd knows,’ said Jacko; ‘but they didn’t bring us over ’ere to do nothin’ but run away, an’ you can bet on that, Peter.’
An order passed down the line, and the men began to move slowly into the road again and to shake into some sort of formation on it, and then to plod off up the hill in the wake of the rest. The shells were still plastering the hillside and crashing over the road, and several men were hit as the battalion tramped wearily up the hill. Even the shells failed to rouse most of the men from their apathy and weariness, but those it did stir it roused mainly to angry resentment or sullen oath-mumblings and curses.