Dodo Wonders Part 23

"I know. Perhaps it's best not to. Besides, you don't want to hear about the war."

Dodo waved her hands wildly.

"But get on," she said. "You speak as if there's something good to be heard. What do you mean? As if I wouldn't give my--my sh.e.l.l-like ears to hear something good. My dear, the number of times I've chucked the paper away because the headlines only said, 'New German offensive.

Slight loss of ground near Parlez-vous.' Go on, Jack, or I shall burst."

"Well, do you know anything about the position on the west front?" asked he.

"Nothing whatever. I only know it's a beastly front."

Jack took his stick and drew a long line with two bulges in it on the short turf.

"That lower bulge is the Marne," he said, "and the upper one is round about Amiens."

"Where one has coffee on the way to Paris," said Dodo breathlessly.

"Yes. They battered away at the Marne bulge, and have now had to go back. Then they battered alternately at the Amiens bulge, and it isn't bulging any worse. There was no earthly reason why the Huns shouldn't have walked straight through to Abbeville, which is there, last week.

They meant to give us a knock-out in one place or the other. But--how shall I explain it?"

"Anyhow," said Dodo.

Jack clenched his fist and drew back his arm.

"Well, I'm the Hun," he said, "and it's a boxing match. Your chin there, darling, is quite defenceless, and I can knock you out, if I have enough weight behind me to give you a good punch. But I haven't; it looks as if I was exhausted. I can just advance my arm like that, but I can't hit.

You're rather done, too, but you can just grin at me, and wait till you get stronger. But I shan't get stronger; I'm fought out."

Dodo put up her hands to her forehead.

"But ever since March we've been thrust back and back," she said.

"Yes. And now we're going to begin."

Dodo made a wild gesticulation in the air.

"I won't think about it," she said. "You must remember the idea of the Russian steam-roller, and the Queen Elizabeth steaming up the Dardanelles. Oh, Jack! It's a trick! They're going to break through in Kamkatka or somewhere and I won't think about that either. We've got to go pounding along, and not attend to what is happening. I want a map, though. Do be an angel, and get me an enormous map with plenty of flags and pins and I'll hang it up in the dining-room. One may as well be ready, and you have to order things long before you want them. Jack, if you were obliged to bet when the war would be over, obliged I mean, because I should cut your throat if you refused, when would you say?

Name the day, darling!"

"Can't," said he.

"Don't be so ridiculous. Name the year then. Or the century."

"Nineteen hundred and eighteen," said he.

"Pish!"

"Very well, pish," said Jack.

Suddenly Dodo's mouth began to tremble.

"Jack, you're not playing the fool, are you?" she said. "Do you mean that?"

"I do. There's a man called Foch. And there are a million Americans now in France. An Australian boy the other day told me that they are rather rough fighters."

"Bless them!" said Dodo.

"By all means. Now don't build too much on it. It's only what some people think."

"I won't think about it. But I want a map. Gracious, it means a lot to want a map again. I got an atlas August four years ago and coloured Togoland red."

Dodo sniffed the air.

"I really believe I can smell greens cooking for dinner," she said. "And I certainly can see a lot of those boys in blue suits, moving about on the lawn like ants. That's all I must think about. But do you know what I'm stopping myself from thinking about? Don't laugh when I tell you.

David's thirteen, you know, and in four years from now----"

For quite a long time Jack didn't laugh....

Dodo got what she described as a life-size map of France, and an immense quant.i.ty of pins to which were attached cardboard flags of the warring nations. The map was put up at one end of the men's dining-room practically covering the wall, and morning by morning, standing on a step-ladder, she gleefully recorded the advance of the Allies, and the retreat of the Huns, in accordance with the information conveyed by the daily _communique_.

"Amiens!" she said. "We must take out all those German flags and put English ones in instead. We shall be able to get coffee again there on the way to Paris, unless the Huns have poisoned all the supplies in the refreshment room, which is more than probable, and put b.o.o.by-traps in the buns, so that they explode in your mouth. Look! A German flag has fallen out of Bapaume all of its own accord; that's a good omen, it's hardly worth while putting it back. Isn't it a blessing we've got more French flags? Now we can make Soissons a pin-cushion of them. But it's a long way to Berlin yet. I believe you'll have to join up, David, before we get there. Why not make a betting-book about the date we get to Berlin? Oh, there's a place called Burchem; what an extraordinary coincidence. Give me some more American pins."

Through August the advance continued, sweeping on during September back through Peronne, and through the Drocourt-Queant line, until late in the month the Hindenburg line was broken, and Dodo pulled out the most stubborn of all the rows of German pins.

"'All according to plan,' as the German _communique_ tells us," she said. "What a good thing their plans coincide so exactly with ours! They didn't want to hold the Hindenburg line any longer. They had got tired of being so long in one place and thought they would like a change, and by the greatest good luck we agreed that a change would be nice for them. That's all that's happened: they had been abroad for four years, and it was high time to think of getting home. What liars! My dear, what liars. Presently they will get tired of being in Cambrai, and so, according to plan, they will leave that. I should love to be the German Emperor for precisely five minutes to see what he feels like. Then I would be myself again, and gloat. Wanted on the telephone, am I? n.o.body must touch those pins. I must put every one of them in myself. To-morrow I will be unselfish and let somebody else do it, but not to-day. Just according to plan!"

October came and flung a flaming torch among the beeches, and the thick dews brought out the smell of autumn and dead leaves in the woods and meadows. Once for two days a gale from the south-west roared through the grey rainy sky, strewing the lawn with the wreck of the woodland, but when that was past the weather became crystal clear again, with days of warm windless sun, and evenings that grew chilly and mornings when the h.o.a.r-frost lay white on the gra.s.s. Cambrai was regained and the British armies marched back into Le Cateau of evil memory, and the French flag flew once more over Laon. The tide of victory swept too along the Channel, and before the end of the month the waters of freedom washed the whole Belgian coast clean of the dust of its defilement. And not along the French front alone was heard the crash of the ruinous fortress of the Huns, nor there alone leaped the flames that rose ever higher round the crumbling walls of their monstrous Valhalla, shining brighter as the dusk deepened to night in the halls of their War G.o.d. For to the east Damascus had fallen; nearer at hand Bulgaria lay like a cracked and rotten nut, black and shattered; the Italian armies recrossed the Piave and on the last day of the month the Allied Fleet steamed through the Dardanelles past silent guns and deserted bastions to receive the surrender of the Turks. For four years of war the grim tower of Central Europe had stood firm: now as its outlying forts surrendered it shook to its foundations, the fissures widened in its tottering walls, and the dusk gathered.

It tottered, and with a crash a wall fell in, for in the first days of November, Austria surrendered, and at Kiel the German sailors mutinied.

Two days later full powers were given by the Versailles Conference to Marshal Foch (of whom Dodo had now heard) to treat with the German envoys who came to sue for an armistice. And next day Sedan fell to the Americans.

"Sedan was rather a favourite town with the Huns till just now," said Dodo, as she dropped the German pin on the floor and made an American porcupine of the place. "Now they won't like it quite so much, and I'm sure I don't wonder. What did the c.o.c.ks say in Sedan when they woke up the hens in Sedan this morning! n.o.body can guess, so I'll tell you. They said, 'Yankee-doodle-doo. Amen.' Give me some more American pins!

Yankee----"

She gave a loud squeal.

"I've put an American pin into my finger instead of into Sedan," she said. "I want a disinfectant and a sterilised bandage, and some more pins. Look, I've shed my blood on the French front. Give me a wound stripe and a Sedan chair, and let me try to be sensible. It won't be any good, but we may as well try."

Dodo had arranged a week ago to run up to London on November the ninth, because David was coming up from Eton on leave that day to see a dentist, and because Monday had been notified to her as a day of inspection for the hospital at Chesterford House: it must therefore be distinctly understood that the fall of Sedan and the powers granted to Marshal Foch had nothing to do with the date of this expedition. The visit to the London hospital had to be made, and if David was coming up on the ninth, it was indicated, with the force of a providential leading, that she should amalgamate these two events into one visit.

Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when the dentist was numbered with past pains, should be given to David; Sunday would be Sunday, and she would get back to Winston on Monday night. David would see his dentist in the morning, and Dodo accordingly left the house early, before the paper had come in, so that she would be ready for him by lunch time in London. That day the German envoys were to be received by Marshal Foch, who would hand them--so it was understood--the terms on which Germany would be granted an armistice. It was believed also that if the terms were accepted, the armistice would come into force on the morning of the eleventh. The terms, whatever they were, had been agreed upon by the Versailles Conference earlier in the week....

David appeared soon after Dodo had reached Chesterford House.

"Oh, it was too exciting," he said. "I had gas, mummie, wasn't it grand!

They put a cage over my mouth, and I began to get buzzy in my head, and then before I got really buzzy I was all b.l.o.o.d.y instead and the beastly thing was gone. It was like a conjuring trick, and the Emperor has given up, and I am so hungry. Look where it came out."

"Darling, what's happened to the Emperor?" she asked.