Very early in the morning I met Alan Breck, with a half-healed
bullet-scrape across the bridge of his nose, and an Alpine cap
over one ear. His people a few hundred years ago had been
Scotch. He bore a Scotch name, and still recognized the head
of his clan, but his French occasionally ran into German
words, for he was an Alsatian on one side.
"This," he explained, "is the very best country in the world
to fight in. It's picturesque and full of cover. I'm a
gunner. I've been here for months. It's lovely."
It might have been the hills under Mussoorie, and what our
cars expected to do in it I could not understand. But the
demon-driver who had been a road-racer took the 70 h.p.
Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys, as well as
occasional half-Swiss villages full of Alpine troops, at a
restrained thirty miles an hour. He shot up a new-made road,
more like Mussoorie than ever, and did not fall down the
hillside even once. An ammunition-mule of a mountain-battery
met him at a tight corner, and began to climb a tree.
"See! There isn't another place in France where that could
happen," said Alan. "I tell you, this is a magnificent
country."
The mule was hauled down by his tail before he had reached the
lower branches, and went on through the woods, his
ammunition-boxes jinking on his back, for all the world as
though he were rejoining his battery at Jutogh. One expected to
meet the little Hill people bent under their loads under the
forest gloom. The light, the colour, the smell of wood smoke,
pine-needles, wet earth, and warm mule were all Himalayan. Only
the Mercedes was violently and loudly a stranger.
"Halt!" said Alan at last, when she had done everything except
imitate the mule.
"The road continues," said the demon-driver seductively.
"Yes, but they will hear you if you go on. Stop and wait.
We've a mountain battery to look at."
They were not at work for the moment, and the Commandant, a
grim and forceful man, showed me some details of their
construction. When we left them in their bower--it looked
like a Hill priest's wayside shrine--we heard them singing
through the steep-descending pines. They, too, like the 75's,
seem to have no pet name in the service.
It was a poisonously blind country. The woods blocked all
sense of direction above and around. The ground was at any
angle you please, and all sounds were split up and muddled by
the tree-trunks, which acted as silencers. High above us the
respectable, all-concealing forest had turned into sparse,
ghastly blue sticks of timber--an assembly of leper-trees
round a bald mountain top. "That's where we're going," said
Alan. "Isn't it an adorable country?"