“Oh, you holy young liar!” said the man next him.
But Doggie did not trouble to reply, his neighbour being only a private like himself.
Then the draft joined its unit. In his youth Doggie had often wondered at the meaning of the familiar inscription on every goods van in France: “40 Hommes. 8 Chevaux.” Now he ceased to wonder. He was one of the forty men…. At the rail-head he began to march, and at last joined the remnant of his battalion. They had been through hard fighting, and were now in billets. Until he joined them he had not realized the drain there had been on the reserves at home. Very many familiar faces of officers were missing. New men had taken their place. And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty, some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the eyes of children who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
McPhail and Mo Shendish had passed through unscathed. In the reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them found themselves in the same platoon of A Company. Doggie almost embraced them when they met.
“Laddie,” said McPhail to him, as he was drinking a mahogany-coloured liquid that was known by the name of tea, out of a tin mug, and eating a hunk of bread and jam, “I don’t know whether or not I’m pleased to see you. You were safer in England. Once I misspent many months of my life in shielding you from the dangers of France. But France is a much more dangerous place nowadays, and I can’t help you. You’ve come right into the thick of it. Just listen to the hell’s delight that’s going on over yonder.”
The easterly wind brought them the roar streaked with stridence of the artillery duel in progress on the nearest sector of the Front.
They were sitting in the cellar entrance to a house in a little town which had already been somewhat mauled. Just opposite was a shuttered house on the ground floor of which had been a hatter and hosier’s shop, and there still swung bravely on an iron rod the red brim of what once had been a monstrous red hat. Next door, the façade of the upper stories had been shelled away and the naked interiors gave the impression of a pathetic doll’s house. Women’s garments still hung on pegs. A cottage piano lurched forward drunkenly on three legs, with the keyboard ripped open, the treble notes on the ground, the bass incongruously in the air. In the attic, ironically secure, hung a cheap German print of blowsy children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like the wind and the rain.
But to Doggie it was new—just as the sight of the wrecked house opposite, with its sturdy crownless hat-brim of a sign, was new. He listened, as McPhail had bidden him, to the artillery duel with an odd little spasm of his heart.
“What do you think of that, now?” asked McPhail grandly, as if it was The Greatest Show on Earth run by him, the Proprietor.
“It’s rather noisy,” said Doggie, with a little ironical twist of his lips that was growing habitual. “Do they keep it up at night?”