I unearthed their skeleton at last in a peaceful, gracious
five-hundred-year-old house that looked on to lawns and cut hedges
bounded by age-old red brick walls—such a perfumed and dreaming place as
one would choose for the setting of some even-pulsed English love-tale
of the days before the war.
Officers were billeted in the low-ceiled, shiny-floored rooms full of
books and flowers.
‘And now,’ I asked, when I had told the tale of the uncommunicative
cyclist, ‘what _is_ the matter with your battalion?’
They laughed cruelly at me. ‘Matter!’ said they. ‘We’re just off three
months of guarding railways. After _that_ a man wouldn’t trust his own
mother. You don’t mean to say our cyclists let you know where we’ve come
from last?’
‘No, they didn’t,’ I replied. ‘That was what worried me. I assumed you’d
all committed murders, and had been sent here to live it down.’
Then they told me what guarding a line really means. How men wake and
walk, with only express troop-trains to keep them company, all the night
long on windy embankments or under still more windy bridges; how they
sleep behind three sleepers up-ended or a bit of tin, or, if they are
lucky, in a platelayer’s hut; how their food comes to them slopping
across the square-headed ties that lie in wait to twist a man’s ankle
after dark; how they stand in blown coal-dust of goods-yards trying to
watch five lines of trucks at once; how fools of all classes pester the
lonely pickets, whose orders are to hold up motors for inquiry, and then
write silly letters to the War Office about it. How nothing ever happens
through the long weeks but infallibly would if the patrols were taken
off. And they had one refreshing story of a workman who at six in the
morning, which is no auspicious hour to jest with Lancashire, took a
short cut to his work by ducking under some goods-wagons, and when
challenged by the sentry replied, posturing on all fours, ‘Boo, I’m a
German!’ Whereat the upright sentry fired, unfortunately missed him, and
then gave him the butt across his ass’s head, so that his humour, and
very nearly his life, terminated.
After which the sentry was seldom seen to smile, but frequently heard to
murmur, ‘Ah should hev slipped t’ baggonet into him.’