HAD we waited that night for Opportunity to knock at our door I am
inclined to think we might be waiting yet. We went out and we set a trap
for Opportunity, and we caught her. No matter how or whence, the chance
we coveted for a lift to the battle came to us before the night was many
hours old. But before the design assumed shape we were to meet as blithe
a young Britisher as ever I have seen, in the person of one Captain
Pepper, a red-cheeked Yorkshireman in his early twenties, a fit and
proper type of the men England has sent out to officer her forces
overseas.
One of our Red Cross ambulances, while scouting out toward Noyon that
afternoon, picked him up as he trudged up the road alone, with a fresh
machine-gun wound through the palm of his right hand and his cap on
the back of his head. His wound had been tied up at a casualty-dressing
station and he had set out then to walk a distance of twenty-odd
kilometres to Soissons, where he was told he might find a hospital to
shelter him.
He dined with us, along with the ambulance driver who brought him in;
and afterward he insisted on sitting a while with us, though he had been
fighting, day and night almost continuously since the beginning of the
battle and plainly was far spent from fatigue and lack of sleep. So far
as I might judge, though, he did not have a nerve in his body. Gesturing
with his swathed hand he told us not what he himself had done--somehow
he managed in his self-effacing way to steer away from the personal note
in his recital--but mainly about the stupendous tragedy in which he had
played his part. Considering him as he sat there on a broken sofa with
his long legs outstretched before a wood fire, one could not doubt that
it had been a creditable part.
We gathered that in the second day of the fighting, as the English fell
back before overwhelming odds but fighting for every inch, he became
separated from his company. Next morning he found himself without a
command in the heels of the orderly retreat and had offered himself for
service to the first superior officer he met. Thereupon he was put in
charge of a mixed detachment of two hundred men--gathered up anyhow and
anywhere--and with his motley outfit had been told off to hold a strip
of woods somewhere south of Chauny. Under him, he said, were stragglers
cut off from half a dozen battered line regiments, and along with
these, cooks, wagon drivers, engineers, officers' servants and stretcher
bearers. In front of the squad, beyond the woods, was a strip of marsh,
and this natural barrier gave them an advantage which, plus pluck,
enabled them to beat off not one but several oncoming waves of Germans.
“We had machine guns, luckily enough,” he said; “and, my word, but we
gave the beggars a proper drubbing! We piled them up in heaps along the
edges of that bally old bog. Everywhere along the Front--where we were
and everywhere else, too, from what I can hear--they have outnumbered us
four or five to one, but I'm quite sure we've killed or wounded ten
of them for every man of ours that has been laid out since this show
started four days ago.
“Well, that's all, except that this morning about ten o'clock I was hit
and had to quit and come away, because you see I wouldn't be much use
with one hand out of commission and bleeding all over the shop--would I
now? I'm sorry to have to leave the chaps--they were a sporting lot; but
since I had to stop a bullet I'm glad I've got a nice clean cushy wound.
I shall be glad to get a taste of Blighty too; I'm a bit fagged, as you
might say.”
His head nodded forward on his chest when he got this far, and his limbs
relaxed.
He protested, though, against being bundled off to bed, saying he was
quite comfortable and that his hand scarcely pained him at all, but the
man who had brought him took him away. As for Carroll and Green and me,
we slept that night, what sleeping we did, with our clothes on us, ready
to rise and hunt the wine cellar if anything of a violently unpleasant
nature occurred over our heads. During the hours before daylight there
was a spirited spell of banging and crashing somewhere in the town, and
not so far away either, if one might judge by the volume of the tumult,
which rattled the empty casement frame alongside my bed and made the
ancient house to rock and creak; but when dawn came the gables above
us were still intact and we were enjoying our beauty sleep in the calm
which succeeded the gust of shelling or of bombing or whatever it was.