“I shall be back soon,” he called to Manon.
And so he set out to drive this half-blind Polyphemus out of Beaucourt, walking among the ruins like Bibi’s shadow, ready to shoot if the man in front of him hesitated or hung back. Neither of them spoke, save when Brent uttered a word of warning. “Right . . . Left . . . Keep in the middle of the road.” He found that Bibi’s pace was lengthening when they had passed the factory, and were on the road to Bonnière, and he went along at a steady slouch. The stars were out overhead, and there was no wind rustling the dead grass and weeds in the wild fields beside the road. They heard the sound of their own feet on the broken pavé, nothing more.
Brent wondered what was passing in the mind of the man in front of him, and the picture of Bibi lurching along in the darkness brought back the night of a memory in the Arras battle of 1917. Paul had marched a German prisoner back from the line, a big, tusk-faced sergeant-major who had been badly wounded in the right shoulder, and Brent remembered how all the swagger had gone out of the German. He had thought of one thing and one thing only, how long it would be before they reached a dressing-station. He had kept on worrying Brent: “I bleed, Tommy, I bleed.”
They had covered two miles when Louis Blanc spoke. He was sullen, but something stronger than his hatred of Brent marched at his heels.
“What’s the time?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps about half past seven.”
Bibi walked on in silence for several minutes. Brent noticed that their pace had increased.
“Have we passed Des Ormes?”
“Don’t know the place,” said Brent. “Why?”
“There’s a road that turns off there, the road to Boves.”