Men, Women and Guns Part 8

And then the adjutant recalled in a still small voice how he first realised the orderly-room sergeant's baby was going to be sick in his arms at the regiment's Christmas-tree festivities, and, instead of throwing it on the floor, he had clung to it for that fatal second of indecision. As he admitted, it was certainly not one of the things he had thought out beforehand.

He's gone, too, has old Bellairs the adjutant. I wonder how many fellows I'll know when I get back to them next week? But I'm wandering.

"Winkle, wake up!" It was Pat speaking. "Jerry is being horribly serious, and I'm not at all certain it will be safe to marry him; he'll be experimenting on me."

"What's he been saying?" I murmured sleepily.

"He's been thinking what he'd do," laughed Jack, "if the stout female personage in yonder small canoe overbalanced and fell in. There'll be no fatal second then, Jerry, my boy. It'll be a minute even if I have to hold you. You'd never be able to look your friends in the face again if you didn't let her drown."

"a.s.s!" grunted Jerry. "No, Winkle, I was just thinking, amongst other things, of what might very easily happen to any of us three here, and what did happen to old Grantley in South Africa." Grantley was one of our majors. "He told me all about it one day in one of his expansive moods. It was during a bit of a sc.r.a.p just before Paardeburg, and he had some crowd of irregular Johnnies. He was told off to take a position, and apparently it was a fairly warm proposition. However, it was perfectly feasible if only the men stuck it. Well, they didn't, but they would have except for his momentary indecision. He told me that there came a moment in the advance when one man wavered. He knew it and felt it all through him. He saw the man--he almost saw the deadly contagion spreading from that one man to the others--and he hesitated and was lost. When he sprang forward and tried to hold 'em, he failed. The fear was on them, and they broke. He told me he regarded himself as every bit as much to blame as the man who first gave out."

"But what could he have done, Jerry?" asked Pat.

"Shot him, dear--shot him on the spot without a second's thought--killed the origin of the fear before it had time to spread. I venture to say that there are not many fellows in the Service who would do it--without thinking: and you can't think--you dare not, even if there was time. It goes against the grain, especially if you know the man well, and it's only by continually rehearsing the scene in your mind that you'd be able to do it."

We were all listening to him now, for this was a new development I'd never heard before.

"Just imagine the far-reaching results one coward--no, not coward, possibly--but one man who has reached the breaking-point, may have.

Think of it, Winkle. A long line stretched out, attacking. One man in the centre wavers, stops. Spreading outwards, the thing rushes like lightning, because, after all, fear is only an emotion, like joy and sorrow, and one knows how quickly they will communicate themselves to other people. Also, in such a moment as an attack, men are particularly susceptible to emotions. All that is primitive is uppermost, and their reasoning powers are more or less in abeyance."

"But the awful thing, Jerry," said Pat quietly, "is that you would never know whether it had been necessary or not. It might not have spread; he might have answered to your voice--oh! a thousand things might have happened."

"It's not worth the risk, dear. One man's life is not worth the risk.

It's a risk you just dare not take. It may mean everything--it may mean failure--it may mean disgrace." He paused and looked steadily across the shifting scene of gaiety and colour, while a long bamboo pole with a little bag on the end, wielded by some pa.s.sing vocalist, was thrust towards him unheeded. Then with a short laugh he pulled himself together, and lit a cigarette. "But enough of dull care. Let us away, and gaze upon beautiful women and brave men. What's that little tune they're playing?"

"That's that waltz--what the deuce is the name, Pat?" asked Jack, untying the punt.

"'Destiny,'" answered Pat briefly, and we pa.s.sed out into the stream.

A month afterwards we three were again at Henley, not in flannels in a punt on the river, but in khaki, with a motor waiting at the door of the Delawnays' house to take us back to Aldershot. I do not propose to dwell over the scene, but in the setting down of the story it cannot be left out. Europe was at war; the long-expected by those scoffed-at alarmists had actually come. England and Germany were at each other's throats.

Inside the house Jack was with his mother. Personally, I was standing in the garden with the grey-haired father; and Jerry was--well, where else could he have been?

As is the way with men, we discussed the roses, and the rascality of the Germans, and everything except what was in our hearts. And in one of the pauses in our spasmodic conversation we heard her voice, just over the hedge:

"G.o.d guard and keep you, my man, and bring you back to me safe!" And the voice was steady, though one could feel those dear eyes dim with tears.

And then Jerry's, dear old Jerry's voice--a little bit gruff it was, and a little bit shaky: "My love! My darling!"

But the old man was going towards the house, blowing his nose; and I--don't hold with love and that sort of thing at all. True, I blundered into a flower-bed, which I didn't see clearly, as I went towards the car, for there are things which one may not hear and remain unmoved.

Perhaps, if things had been different, and Jerry--dear old Jerry--hadn't---- But there, I'm wandering again.

At last we were in the car and ready to start.

"Take care of him, Jerry; he and Pat are all we've got." It was Mrs.

Delawnay speaking, standing there with the setting sun on her sweet face and her husband's arm about her.

"I'll be all right, mater," answered Jack gruffly. "Buck up! Back for Christmas!"

"I'll look after him, Mrs. Delawnay," answered Jerry, but his eyes were fixed on Pat, and for him the world held only her.

As the car swung out of the gate, we looked back the last time and saluted, and it was only I who saw through a break in the hedge two women locked in each other's arms, while a grey-haired gentleman sat very still on a garden-seat, with his eyes fixed on the river rolling smoothly by.

It was on the Aisne I took it. Through that ghastly fourteen days we had slogged dully south away from Mons, ever getting nearer Paris. Through the choking dust, with the men staggering as they walked--some asleep, some babbling, some cursing--but always marching, marching, marching; digging at night, only to leave the trenches in two hours and march on again; with ever and anon a battery of horse tearing past at a gallop, with the drivers lolling drunkenly in their saddles, and the guns jolting and swaying behind the straining, sweating horses, to come into action on some ridge still further south, and try to check von Kluck's hordes, if only for a little s.p.a.ce. Every bridge in the hands of anxious-faced sapper officers, prepared for demolition one and all, but not to be blown up till all our troops were across. Ticklish work, for should there be a fault, there is not much time to repair it.

But at last it was over, and we turned North. A few days later, in the afternoon, my company crossed a pontoon bridge on the Aisne, and two hours afterwards we dug ourselves in a mile and a half beyond it. The next morning, as I was sitting in one of the trenches, there was a sudden, blinding roar--and oblivion.

I will pa.s.s rapidly over the next six weeks--over my journey from the clearing hospital to the base at Havre, of my voyage back to England in a hospital ship, and my ultimate arrival at Drayton Hall, the Delawnays'

place in Somerset, where I had gone to convalesce.

During the time various fragments of iron were being picked from me and the first shock of the concussion was wearing off, we had handed over our trenches on the Aisne to the French, and moved north to Flanders.

Occasional scrawls came through from Jack and Jerry, but the people in England who had any knowledge at all of the fighting and of what was going on, grew to dread with an awful dread the sight of the telegraph-boy, and it required an effort of will to look at those prosaic casualty lists in the morning papers.

Then suddenly without warning, as such news always does, it came. The War Office, in the shape of a whistling telegraph-boy, regretted to inform Mr. Delawnay that his son, Lieutenant Jack Delawnay of the Royal Downshire Regiment, had been killed in action.

Had it been possible during the terrible days after the news came, I would have gone away, but I was still too weak to move; and I like to think that, perhaps, my presence there was some comfort to them, as a sort of connection through the regiment with their dead boy. After the first numbing shock, the old man bore it grandly.

"He was all I had," he said to me one day as I lay in bed, "but I give him gladly for his country's sake." He stood looking at the broad fields. "All his," he muttered; "all would have been the dear lad's--and now six inches of soil and a wooden cross, perhaps not that."

And Pat, poor little Pat, used to come up every day and sit with me, sometimes in silence, with her great eyes fixed on the fire, sometimes reading the paper, because my eyes weren't quite right yet.

For about a fortnight after the news we did not think it strange; but then, as day by day went by, the same fear formulated in both our minds.

I would have died sooner than whisper it; but one afternoon I found her eyes fixed on mine. We had been silent for some time, and suddenly in the firelight I saw the awful fear in her mind as clearly as if she had spoken it.

"You're thinking it too, Winkle," she whispered, leaning forward. "Why hasn't he written? Why hasn't Jerry written one line? Oh, my G.o.d! don't say that _he_ has been----"

"Hush, dear!" I said quietly. "His people would have let you know if they had had a wire."

"But, Winkle, the Colonel has written that Jack died while gallantly leading a counter attack to recover lost trenches. Surely, Jerry would have found time for a line, unless something had happened to him; Jack was actually in his company."

All of which I knew, but could not answer.

"Besides," she went on after a moment, "you know how dad is longing for details. He wants to know everything about Jack, and so do we all. But oh, Winkle! I want to know if my man is all right. Brother and lover--not both, oh, G.o.d--not both!" The choking little sobs wrung my heart.

The next day we got a wire from him. He was wounded slightly in the arm, and was at home. He was coming to us. Just that--no more. But, oh! the difference to the girl. Everything explained, everything clear, and the next day Jerry would be with her. Only as I lay awake that night thinking, and the events of the last three weeks pa.s.sed through my mind, the same thought returned with maddening persistency. Slightly wounded in the arm, evidently recently as there was no mention in the casualty list, and for three weeks no line, no word. And then I cursed myself as an a.s.s and a querulous invalid.

At three o'clock he arrived, and they all came up to my room. The first thing that struck me like a blow was that it was his left arm which was. .h.i.t--and the next was his face. Whether Pat had noticed that his writing arm was unhurt, I know not; but she had seen the look in his eyes, and was afraid.

Then he told the story, and his voice was as the voice of the dead. Told the anxious, eager father and mother the story of their boy's heroism.

How, having lost some trenches, the regiment made a counter attack to regain them. How first of them all was Jack, the men following him, as they always did, until a shot took him clean through the heart, and he dropped, leaving the regiment to surge over him for the last forty yards, and carry out gloriously what they had been going to do.