THE FIELDS OF WINDSOR
1
Jeremy sat with the Speaker in the parlor of a rude farmhouse at the
edge of the little village of Slough. It was now a week since the army
had taken the field, and during that time they had not once come to
grips with the enemy. The President of Wales had lingered unaccountably
at Oxford, and Jeremy had pitched his camp in the neighborhood of
Windsor, not daring to move further from London. He could not tell
whether the Welshmen would follow the windings of the north bank of the
river or cross at Reading and approach the capital from the south, or
march by Thame around the top of the Chilterns. The Speaker, judging
the enemy by his own strategical notions, had affirmed that they would
advance towards Windsor if they supposed that battle could be joined
there; and he wished to go straight on, as far as Oxford if necessary.
But Jeremy, determined to be in truth what the old man had forced him
to be, refused to move. They spent a weary week of doubt and anxiety,
receiving every day a dozen contradictory reports, and occasionally
moving out the troops to the west or the north on a wild-goose chase.
This state of affairs told heavily on them both. Jeremy ceased to be
able to sleep, and he felt inexpressibly tired. The Speaker grew
irritable and the ardor of his spirit, confined by delay, daily
corroded his temper. The Canadian, who attended them faithfully, never
refused to give Jeremy his advice; but he never suggested less than
two possible courses of action, and he never failed to make it clear
that either might bring success, and that either might involve complete
disaster. On this day at last Jeremy’s patience had worn very thin. He
had just explained to the Speaker for the twentieth time his objection
to moving up the river direct on Oxford, and a dissatisfied silence
had fallen between them. Jeremy sighed, and let his hands fall on the
table, across the crude, inaccurate maps which were all that he had
been able to obtain.
The dispute between them had grown so bitter that he felt unwilling
to encounter the Speaker’s gaze, fearing lest his own weariness and
disgust and resentment should show too obviously. But as he glanced
cautiously at the old man he saw that he was leaning back in his chair,
his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap. In this attitude of
rest he betrayed himself more than was common with him. The air of fire
and mastery had gone out of his face, the lines of power were softened,
the thick lips, instead of expressing pride and greed, drooped a little
pathetically, and showed a weary resignation. Not only his features,
but also the thick-veined old hands, seemed to have grown thinner and
frailer than they were. He looked to Jeremy like a lamp inside which
the flame is slowly and quietly dying. Jeremy’s heart suddenly softened
towards him and he felt more unbearable than ever the fate in which
they were all thus entangled.
But his tired brain refused to grapple with it any more, and he fell
to making pictures. When they had marched out he alone in the whole
army had felt despondent. The people of London wished them good luck
with as much enthusiasm as, a few days before, they had welcomed them
home. The troops marched off down Oxford Street and along the winding
valley-road, covered again with flowers, which they stuck in their
hats or in the muzzles of their rifles, singing odd uncouth snatches
of boasting defiance in curious cadences which had suddenly sprung
up among them and passed rapidly from mouth to mouth. Most of these
praised Jeremy and his guns: some of them exalted him as a necromancer
and credited him with supernatural powers. Even the Speaker chanted one
of them in a rumbling, uncertain bass, somewhat to Jeremy’s discomfort.
The discomfort was greater when Thomas Wells hummed another below his
breath, with a satirical grin directed at the horizon before them.
The Lady Eva at their parting shared Jeremy’s distress but not his
doubts. They had a few moments alone together on the morning of
setting out, before the public ceremony at which she and the Lady
Burney were to wish the army God-speed. She clung to him speechlessly,
begging him with her eyes and her kisses to confess that he looked
cheerfully to the result. Jeremy, shamefacedly conscious of having felt
some resentment towards her since he had yielded to her entreaties,
comforted her as well as he was able, and yet could not bring himself
to say what she wanted to hear. Their short time ran to an end: the
minutes ticked inexorably away; below in the courtyard he could hear
the servants bringing around the horses. A dozen times his mind framed
a pleasant lie for her which his tongue would not speak. Then they
parted with this between them, and Jeremy went down into the courtyard
with a heavy spirit. A few minutes later he and the Speaker and Thomas
Wells were riding up Whitehall towards Piccadilly, the Lady Burney and
the Lady Eva going before them in a carriage. There, on the spot where
once the poised Cupid had stood, the Lady Eva kissed him again before
the cheering people, and the army set out. Jeremy rode dully with it,
wishing that his obstinate fixity in his own opinion could have given
way for a moment and let him part without reserve from his beloved. He
wondered much whether he would ever see her again, and the thought was
exceedingly bitter.
Then followed this week of confusion and wretchedness, a depressing
contrast with the lightning brilliance of the campaign against the
Yorkshiremen. Jeremy’s resolution, braced for a swift and single test
of it, withstood the strain hardly. It seemed to him that the moments
in which good luck might carry him through were fast running away;
he felt them like material things melting out of his hands. Still at
Oxford, the President maintained his enigmatical immobility. Slowly
the spirit of the troops faded and withered, like the trail of flowers
they had left behind them on the march. Jeremy preserved the stolidity
of his expression, grew slower of speech every day, and hid the
bewildering turmoil of his thoughts. Only the Canadian went about the
camp with an unaltered cheerfulness of demeanor. He behaved like an
onlooker who is always willing to do what he can when the players of
the game invoke his help. He talked with the officers, rode out often
in front of the lines, seemed always busy, always in a detached manner
interested in what was going on. Jeremy grew to hate him as much as he
feared him....
“Jeremy! Jeremy!”
He started up from his meditation and found that the old man was
speaking to him.
“Listen! Wasn’t that firing ... a long way off?”
He listened intently, then shook his head. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Jeremy, how much longer is it going to be?”
He was seized with surprise at the pitifulness of the Speaker’s tone.
“God knows, sir,” he answered slowly, and added in an exhausted voice.
“We haven’t enough men to go on adventures and force the business.”
“No ... no, I suppose not.” And then, losing some of this unusual
docility, the Speaker burst out: “I am sick of this hole!”
“Campaigning quarters!” Jeremy replied as humorously and soothingly
as he could. He was sick of it himself. The Speaker had desired that
they should establish themselves in Windsor Castle; but much of
the old building had been burnt down in the Troubles, and what was
left had been used as a quarry. It was not possible to go anywhere
in the neighborhood without seeing the great calcined stones built
into the walls of house or barn. Hardly anything of the Castle was
left standing; and the poor remains, in fact, were used as a common
cart-shed by the inhabitants of the village of Windsor. In all this
countryside, which was held and cultivated by small men, there was
no great house; and they had been obliged to content themselves with
a poor hovel of a farm, which had only one living-room and was dirty
and uncomfortable. Jeremy grew to hate it and the wide dusty flats in
which it stood. It seemed to him a detestable landscape, and daily the
scene he loathed grew intertwined in his thoughts with his dread of the
future. His feverish brain began to deal, against his will, in foolish
omens and premonitions. He caught himself wondering, “Will this be the
last I shall see of England?” He remembered, shuddering, that when he
had first joined the Army in 1914 and had complained of early morning
parades, a companion had said, “I suppose we shall have to get up at
this time every morning _for the rest of our lives_!”
While he was trying to drive some such thoughts as these out of his
mind, he was conscious of a stir outside the farmhouse, and presently
an orderly entered and announced, “A scout with news, sir.”
“Bring him in,” said Jeremy wearily. He hardly glanced up at the
trooper who entered, until the man began to speak. Then the tones
of the voice caught his attention and he saw with surprise that it
was Roger Vaile who stood there, his head roughly bandaged; his face
smeared with blood and dust, his uniform torn and stained.
“Roger!” he cried, starting up.
Roger hesitated. The Speaker, who was leaning forward, his elbows on
his knees and his face between his hands, muttered sharply, “Go on,
man, go on!”
Roger straightened himself a little, disregarded Jeremy’s outstretched
hand, and began again. “I went out alone, sir, three days ago,” he
said, looking at neither of his listeners, “and went on upstream as far
as a place called Dorchester. I saw a patrol of the enemy there coming
out of the village, and to get away from them I had to leave my horse
and swim across the river. There’s a hill on the other side that you
can see the road from----”
“I know it!” Jeremy jerked out. “It’s called Sinodun!” The mere name as
he pronounced it almost took his breath away. How well, in old journeys
up the river, he had once known Sinodun!
“Is it?” Roger asked indifferently. “I didn’t know. Well, I stayed
on top of the hill under a bush that night. The next morning about
eleven I saw a lot of cavalry coming into the village from the Oxford
road and soon after that infantry. It looked to me like the whole of
the President’s army. There must have been ten or twelve thousand
men altogether. So I started off to come back as fast as I could.
I had some difficulty because when I got across the river again at
Wallingford I was right among their patrols, and I couldn’t get away
from them till they camped at Marlow last night.”
“At Marlow!” Jeremy cried, starting up. “Are you quite sure the whole
army came as far as Marlow?”
“Absolutely sure,” Roger replied. “I was hiding just outside the
village while they pitched their camp.”
“Then God be praised,” Jeremy breathed, “they’ve come past Reading and
they’re marching straight at us. They can’t cross the river between
here and there. Ten or twelve thousand, you say? Then we’re about equal
in numbers and I believe we shall be equal to them in spirit--let alone
the guns. And, Roger,” he finished, “are you hurt?”
“Nothing much--only a cut,” Roger assured him with his gentle smile.
“Luckily I ran into one of their scouts and got his horse away from
him--or I might not have been here so soon.”
“Come, Jeremy,” growled the Speaker, rising. “The battle is on us. We
must get ready.” Jeremy would have stayed to speak to Roger and to see
that he was provided with food; but the old man was insistent, and he
found himself outside the house before he could protest.
It was about eleven o’clock of a fine, dry day, and the variable wind
was blowing clouds of dust this way and that over the flat fields.
All around them stretched the tents of the encampment in slovenly,
irregular lines; and the soldiers, on whom, untrained as they were, the
period of idleness had had an unlucky effect, were lounging here and
there in careless groups. Jeremy’s attempt to make use of this week in
drilling them had been for the most part unsuccessful. Officers and
men alike were too much flushed with victory for his orders or appeals
to have any effect. They were not so much impatient of discipline as
negligent of it.
Jeremy sighed a little as he looked at the camp; but his spirits
immediately revived. The Speaker was taking short steps up and down,
rubbing his hands together and lifting up his nostrils to snuff the
sweet, dry air. A kind of exhilaration seemed to fill him and to
restore him to his former self. Jeremy caught it from him, and his
voice was lively when he shouted to a servant to fetch thither the
principal officers.
The council of war had hardly gathered when a new report came that the
enemy were marching on Hitcham, following the main road that had once
crossed the river at Maidenhead and now came around by the north bank.
Jeremy’s plans were prepared, and he rapidly disposed his army, with
the right wing resting on the slightly-rising ground of Stoke Park, the
center running through Chalk Hill and Chalvey, and the left, guarding
the bridge, in the empty fields where Eton once had been.
As he gave his orders, with some show of confidence and readiness, he
tasted for a moment the glories of a commander-in-chief; but when he
detailed to Thomas Wells his duties as the leader of the right wing of
the army, his heart unreasonably sank and he faltered over his words.
“I understand,” the Canadian replied gravely, with an inscrutable
expression. “I am to stand on the line between Stoke and Salt Hill
until you give the word. Then you will send up the reserves and I am to
advance, wheel around, and force them against the river.”
“That’s it,” said Jeremy with a heartiness he did not feel.
“So be it ... sir,” Thomas Wells assented lingeringly; then, with an
air of hesitation, he murmured: “I suppose you’re quite certain ...
that they’ll mass against our left ... that they won’t attack me and
try to drive _us_ into the river?”
“I’ll take the chance, anyway,” Jeremy answered stoutly; and, nodding,
he rode off to look at the guns, which were under the command of Jabez,
immediately behind the center of the line.
“We’ll do them in, master,” said Jabez reassuringly. “Never you fear.
You leave that to us.” As he spoke a sharp crackling of rifle fire
arose by the river-bank near Queen’s Eyot.
“Well, we’ve started, Jabez,” Jeremy smiled at him. “I must go back.”
As he rode again towards his chosen point for directing the battle his
breath came regularly and his heart was singularly at rest.
2
When the firing spread and became general all along the line, showing
that battle had actually been joined, Jeremy began to feel a little
light-headed with excitement. He stood, with the Speaker and two or
three officers, on the western edge of the slight rise on which the
village lay; and from this point of vantage he could see that the
outposts were being rapidly driven in from Dorney and Cippenham upon
the main line of defense. In the center the enemy seemed to be pressing
towards the Beaconsfield road. On the right, where Thomas Wells was in
charge, the firing was furious, and great clouds of smoke were drifting
away among the trees of Stoke Park; but the attack had not the air of
being seriously driven home. Jeremy regarded it for a few moments,
biting his lip and screwing up his eyes, and then turned from it to
scan with particular anxiety the flats on the right between Boveney and
Eton Wick. Here it was, he hoped, that the enemy would concentrate his
troops. Here, with luck, his masses might be caught in the open and
broken up by the guns, while the Speaker’s men remained safe in cover
behind the ruins of the viaduct.
In spite of his doubts and the frequent monitions of his judgment
Jeremy retained somewhere in his mind an obscure belief that the fear
of the guns would, after all, hold the Welshmen in check and enfeeble
their advance. All the time, as he stood beside the Speaker, something
was drawing him towards the shallow gun-pit which he had established,
close to the line, between Chalvey and the old disused railway-cutting.
But the hugeness of the moment, the release of his tension, and
the incessant rattling outbursts of noise combined in an odd way to
exhilarate him. He grew so restless that at last, with a muttered
excuse to the Speaker, he mounted his horse and trotted off to look at
the guns.
He found Jabez and his ancients standing in a strained attitude of
readiness. Their faces were absurdly grave, and Jabez greeted him with
what he thought a ludicrous solemnity. He rallied the withered old
creature, with exaggerated heartiness, on his anxious air.
“Let ’em come, master!” Jabez replied with a menacing expression, “and
we’ll see to ’em. Let ’em just put their heads out----”
Jeremy laughed loudly at this, clapped Jabez on the back, and directed
his tattered opera-glasses towards the little church of Boveney. But no
considerable body of troops answered the invitation. Still restless,
Jeremy rode back to his headquarters.
He found that the Speaker had given orders for his armchair to be
brought out for him from the farmhouse, and he was sitting in it, his
elbow on the arm and his chin in his hand, regarding the unshifting
line of smoke with an immobile but somber countenance. Like Xerxes,
Jeremy suddenly thought, with a shiver for the omen, over the bay of
Salamis!
“You are trembling,” the old man said, without looking around, as
Jeremy reached him.
“I’m excited,” Jeremy explained. “It’s all right. I’m quite cool.”
He was indeed so cool that he could sit down on the dry, short grass
beside the Speaker, light a cigar, and consider quite calmly what
course of action he ought to take. The only thing he found lacking
was an indication of any one course as better than another. The enemy
might be, and very likely was, concealing troops among the houses of
Boveney, Dorney, and Cippenham--it was impossible to tell which. The
battle seemed to be hung in a state of miraculous suspension. The
enemy’s advance had been brought to a standstill, and neither of the
lines moved or wavered. From the bank of the river to Stoke Place
there stretched a thick woolly bar of smoke as though a giant hand
had smudged ink with its thumb across the landscape. Jeremy searched
vainly through the whole of the country before him for some mark, on
which the guns might expend their few shells, and especially for the
Welsh transport; but he could find nothing. It was only as the minutes
drifted by and the fighting continued that Jeremy began to realize
his own vagueness and impotence, to understand that, in spite of his
protestations, he had been relying hopelessly on some such stroke of
luck as had served him at Barnet.
The first half-conscious realization was like a cold draught, an
imperceptible movement of chilly air, blowing upon his resolution and
high spirits. In a moment full comprehension followed and gripped
him, and he awoke as though out of a dream, alive to the danger and
yet incapable of action. Nothing had changed: the line of smoke was
as before, the sounds of the fighting had grown not louder or more
terrible. But what had been to Jeremy a picture had become a real
thing, a vast and menacing event, in the path of which he was an
insignificant insect. Not a muscle of his face stirred under the shock.
The Speaker, above him, mumbled deeply:
“What are you going to do, Jeremy?”
“We must wait a little, sir,” Jeremy answered confidently, but with a
trace of impatience in his voice. He wanted desperately to gain time.
Under his mask he felt like a man who is about to be detected in an
imposture, whom the turning of the next page will bring to utter ruin.
He gazed here and there over the field, wondering how long he could
control his expression. Perhaps the next minute his muscles would
betray him and he would burst into tears. But suddenly the seizure was
relaxed and he rose with a jerk to his feet.
“Time to bring the guns in,” he exclaimed with an air of authority
which surprised himself. As he cantered down the slope one voice was
whispering in his ear: “Throw your hand down! Confess that you’re
stuck,” and another was answering, “You can’t do that. One doesn’t _do_
that sort of thing!”
In the gun-pit he was greeted this time with enthusiasm, and Jabez
accepted delightedly the order to drop a couple of shells on Dorney
and see what would happen. The first shell did not explode. The second
burst clean in the middle of the village, and, though they could not
see that it had discovered a concentration, it seemed to have acted as
a cue for the climax of the battle. The rifle fire on the river-bank
doubled in volume, and a line of black dots appeared out of Boveney,
rushed forward, and was succeeded by another wave. But by the time the
guns were trained in that direction the movement had ceased, and two
or three shells thrown into the houses whence it had come produced no
visible effect. Jeremy ordered the guns to cease firing.
On the right the noise of the combat had suddenly grown irregular and
spasmodic. Jeremy was puzzled and worried, and racked his sluggish
brain to guess what this might portend. Was it the moment to order
Thomas Wells to advance the right wing and begin the encircling
movement? He had had no messenger nor any news from the Canadian
since the battle had begun. His plan now seemed to him at once wooden
and fantastic, drawn up by an amateur on the map, dependent on an
accommodating enemy. Should he wait a little longer until the Welsh
army had shown its hand more plainly? In his agony of indecision he
gripped the gun-wheel at his side, as though he had been in need
of physical support. If he had been left to himself he would have
collapsed on the trodden earth of the pit and let the battle and the
fortunes of the world roll over him as they would. He felt himself a
poor waif beaten down by circumstance, a child called on to carry an
unsupportable load. Only some kind of irrational obstinacy, a sort of
momentum of the spirit, kept him upright. But things, both mental and
physical, began to be blurred and to lose their outlines, and anxiety
shed on him a sort of intoxication.
When he moved away towards his horse he was swaying in his walk and
preserving his balance with the solemn care of drunkenness.
“Fire--fire on any advance you see!” he said unsteadily to Jabez, and
he thought the old gunner looked at him queerly as he touched his hat
in acknowledgment of the order.
“I’ve lost control of myself,” Jeremy muttered under his breath, very
seriously and carefully, as he rode back to rejoin the Speaker. “I’ve
lost control of myself ... I must be calm ... I’ve lost control of
myself ... I must....” Nothing more seemed to matter but this: the
battle came second to the struggle between his will and his nerves. He
thought hazily that by one prodigious effort he might clear his brain
again and see an answer to questions which now looked insoluble. He
mechanically urged his horse up the rise; but the beast, fat, lazy, and
sulky, did not respond, and Jeremy forgot it. When he dismounted he
saw the old man still motionless in his chair gazing across the field,
while behind him were the attendants, motionless, too, as though what
was going on did not at all concern them. Jeremy half glanced at these
men, and thought that they whispered to one another as he passed. He
went on and stood silently beside the Speaker’s chair. His lips were
still moving as he muttered to himself, and some moments passed before
he became aware that the old man had turned and was looking up at him
dubiously.
“I’m all right,” he began; and then suddenly a bullet whistled past
their heads. It was as though the shrill sound had cleared away a
thickening fog.
“Come out of this, sir,” Jeremy cried violently. “They’re too close.
Some of them must have got into Chalk Hill. It’s not safe for you up
here.” As he cried out, clutching at the Speaker with a convulsive
hand, his self-possession and his resolution returned, and in that
fraction of an instant he began to survey the field again with a new
eye. The reserves were behind him in the village of Slough. He would
bring them up, on the right, and make his push forward while the
guns fired over the heads of the attacking wing. All these thoughts
passed, sharp and distinct, through his mind, while he was frantically
endeavoring to drag the Speaker into safety. But the old man resisted,
foolishly obstinate it seemed to Jeremy, without giving any reason for
doing so. He was staring open-mouthed towards the right flank of the
army towards Stoke Park, and his face was contorted, crumbling, ravaged
by the effects of astonishment and horror. It was a grotesque face, not
that of an old man but of a man incredibly ancient: it might have been
a thousand years old.
Jeremy ceased the effort to pull him away and followed with his eyes
the direction of the extended, helplessly shaking finger. There, on
the right, all firing had stopped, and the last clouds of smoke were
drifting heavily to the north, leaving the fields quite clear. It took
Jeremy a moment to realize what it was that he saw. Then he understood
that, between the railway and the woods, the opposing forces had left
their shelter in ditches and behind hedges and were mixing together,
running, it seemed, in groups across the intervening meadows to unite.
And among the moving crowds little rags of white danced and fluttered
up and down.
“What!” he cried stupidly. “They can’t have surrendered?”
“No!” the Speaker wailed in a thin and inhuman voice. “No! Those white
flags are ours: I saw them raised. Thomas Wells has betrayed us. He
has sold us to the Welsh.” He let his arms fall by his sides and stood
there limp, lax, shrunken, hopeless.
“It can’t be----” But as Jeremy began to speak he saw the masses
swarming in the meadows turn and move tumultuously towards them,
cheering and waving their rifles in the air. He leapt to the emergency.
“Come on down!” he shouted hoarsely. “We’ll turn the guns on them! Come
on to the guns!”
As they ran to their horses, Jeremy dragging the spent and stumbling
Speaker after him, the firing on the river-bank rose sharply to a
crescendo, and Jeremy guessed that a final attack was being made
there. But he disregarded it, shoved the unresisting body of the old
man into the saddle of one horse, leapt on to another himself, and
galloped heavily down the slope to the battery. He found Jabez and his
men working like demons, their faces black from the powder, bleared
and puddled with sweat. They were firing in the direction of Boveney,
and staring at the spot where their shells were bursting, he saw a
regiment advancing to the attack of the village. They must have crept
up in small parties and taken shelter in the houses. Now the rifle fire
against them was weak and hesitating, and the guns, soon worn out, were
shooting inaccurately and could not score a hit.
Jeremy abandoned that disaster. “Turn--turn them to the right!” he
stuttered fiercely; but Jabez, with a blank look of incomprehension,
pointed to his ears to signify that the noise had deafened him. Jeremy
made him understand by gestures what he wanted, but knew not how to
tell him the reason. The guns were only just shifted when the mixed mob
of soldiers, Welshmen and Speaker’s men together, came pouring over the
edge of the low hill.
“Fire on them!” he bawled at the top of his voice. Jabez trained one
gun, quietly and coolly, on the advancing mass, while Jeremy trained
the other. When they fired, the shells went over the leading ranks and
burst beyond the hill. Shouts of anger were mixed with yells of pain,
and after wavering for a moment the mob came on again. With no more
concern than if they had been at the lathes in the workshop, with the
same awkward antic gestures, the devoted old gunners loaded once more;
but they had hardly closed the breeches when the first wave was upon
them. Jeremy desperately snatched at the lanyard of his gun, and, as he
did so, saw fleetingly the Speaker beside him, arms folded, shoulders
sagging, head apathetically bowed. He pulled, and, with the crash, the
nearest assailants vanished in a yellow, reeking cloud. The next thing
Jeremy knew was that a breaker of human bodies had surged over the
edge of the shallow pit and had fallen on him. He saw Jabez sinking
grotesquely forward upon the pike that killed him, saw the still
unstirring Speaker thrown down by a reeling man. Then he was on the
ground, the lowest of a mass of struggling creatures, and some one, by
kicking him painfully in the ear, had destroyed his transient sense of
a pathetic end to a noble tragedy. He struck out wildly, but his arms
and legs were held, and the struggle grew fiercer above him, choking
him, weighing on his chest. Slowly, intolerably slowly and painfully,
darkness descended about him. His last thought was a surprised,
childish exclamation of the mind, “Why, this must be death....”