The Dark Tower Part 33

Then work closed over his head. He became a railway time-table, a lost-luggage office, a registrar, and a store commissioner.

He had the duties of a special Providence thrust upon him, with all the disadvantages of being readily held accountable, so skilfully evaded by the higher powers.

Junior officers flew to him for orders as belated ladies fly to their pin cushions for pins.

He ate when it was distinctly necessary, and slept two hours out of the twenty-four.

He left nothing undone which he could do himself; his mind was unfavorable to chance. The heads of departments listened when he made suggestions, and found it convenient to answer with accuracy his sudden questions.

Subordinates hurried to obey his infrequent but final orders; and when Winn said, "I think you'd find it better," people found it better.

The division slipped off like cream, without impediment or hitch.

There were no delays, the men acquired their kit, and found their railway carriages.

The trains swept in velvet softness out of the darkened London station through the sweet, quiet, summer night into a sleepless Folkestone. The division went straight onto the right transports; there wasn't a man, a horse, or a gun out of place.

Winn heaved a sigh of relief as he stepped on board; his troubles as a staff officer had only just begun, but they had begun as troubles should always begin, by being adequately met. There were no arrears.

He did not think of Claire until he stood on deck and saw the lights receding and the shadow that was England pa.s.sing out of his sight.

He remembered her then with a little pang of joy--for suddenly he knew that he was free to think of her.

He had thought of her before as a man registers a fact that is always present to him, but in the interval since he had seen her his consciousness of her had been increasingly troubled.

Now the trouble was fading, as England faded, as his old life was fading.

He had a sense that he was finally freed. It was not like seeing Claire again, but it was like not having to see anything else.

"Until I'm dead I'm hers, and after I'm dead I'm hers, so that's all right," he said to himself. "I haven't got to muddle things up any more."

The sea lay around them at dawn like a sheet of pearl--it was very empty but for the gulls' wings beating to and fro out of the mist.

Winn had lived through many campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pa.s.s, and he had gone through the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country like a garden, met by welcoming populations, with flowers and fruit.

It made him feel sick. The other places were the proper ones for war.

It was not his way to think of what lay before him. It would, like all great emergencies, like all great calamities, keep to its moment, and settle itself. Nevertheless he could not free his mind from the presence of the villages--the pleasant, smiling villages, the little church towers in the middle, the cobbled streets, the steep-pitched, gray roofs and the white sunny walls.

Carnations and geraniums filled the windows, and all the inhabitants, the solid, bright-faced people, had a greeting for their khaki guests.

"Voila quelque choses des solides, ces Anglais!" the women called to each other.

Winn found himself shrinking from their welcoming eyes. He thought he hadn't had enough sleep, because as a rule a Staines did not shrink; but when he slept in the corner of the hot jolting railway train, he dreamed of the villages.

They were to attack directly they arrived at their destination. By the time they reached there, Winn knew more. He had gathered up the hastily flung messages by telegram and telephone, by flying cars and from breathless despatch riders, and he knew what they meant.

They had no chance, from the first, not a ghost of a chance. They were to hold on as long as they could, and then retreat. Part of the line had gone already. The French had gone. No reinforcements were coming up.

There were no reinforcements.

They were to retreat turn and turn about; meantime they must hold.

They could hear the guns now, the bright harvest fields trembled a little under the impact of these alien presences.

They came nearer and the sky filled with white puffs of smoke that looked like glittering sunset clouds, and were not clouds. Overhead the birds sang incessantly, undisturbed even by the occasional drilling of an aeroplane.

In the plains that lay beneath them, they could see the dim blue lines of the enemy debouching.

They made Winn think of locusts. He had seen a plague once in Egypt.

They came on like the Germans, a gray ma.s.s that never broke--that could not break, because behind it there were more, and still more locusts, thick as clouds, impenetrable as clouds.

You killed and killed and killed, and yet there were more clouds.

Every now and then it ran through his mind like a flame, that they would spread this loathsome, defiling cloud over the smiling little villages of France.

Fortunately there was no time for pity; there were merely the different ways of meeting the question of holding on.

It was like an attempt to keep back a tide with a teaspoon.

Their guns did what they could, they did more than it seemed possible guns could do. The men in control of them worked like maniacs.

It was not a time to think of what people could do. The men were falling like leaves off a tree.

The skylarks and the swallows vanished before the villainous occupation of the air. The infantry in the loosely built trenches held on, breathless, broken, like a battered boat in a hurricane, stout against the oncoming waves.

The stars came out and night fell--night rent and tortured, darkness a.s.saulted and broken by a myriad new lights of death, but still merciful, rea.s.suring darkness. The moment for the retreat had come.

It was a never-ending business, a stumbling, bewildering business. The guns roared on, holding open indefatigably, without cessation, the way of their escape.

Much later they got away themselves, dashing blindly in the wake of their exhausted little army, ready to turn at command and hold again, and escape again, and once more hold the unending blue lines, with their unnumbered guns, unwinding like an endless serpent in their rear.

The morning showed them still retreating. Sometimes they were miles ahead and could see nothing but the strangely different barred and shivering villages, small settlements of terror, in an untroubled land.

There were no flowers flung upon them now, only hurried gasping questions, "Are they coming?" "How far are they behind you?"

Sometimes they were halted for half an hour at a time, and sat in hedges and ate, or meant to eat, and slept between the bites.

Occasionally they surprised small bands of wandering Uhlans, and if there was time took them prisoners, and if there was no time, shot them in rows against white walls.

Once they met a troop out of one of their own divisions, led by a solitary subaltern of nineteen, with queer fixed eyes, who didn't know who he was. All he could say, "I brought them out."

Despatch riders hurled themselves upon the Staff with orders; very often they had conflicting orders; and they always had dust, trouble with horses, trouble with motor ambulances, trouble with transport. Enraged heroic surgeons achieving hourly physical miracles, implored with tears to be given impossible things like time. Of course they couldn't have time.

Then in the midst of chaos, orders would come to hold. The guns unlimbered, the transports tore madly ahead. Everything that could be cleared off down the road was cleared off, more rough trenches were dug, more hot and sullen hours of waiting followed, and then once more the noise, the helpless slaughter, the steady dogged line gripping the shallow earth, and the unnumbered horde of locusts came on again, eating up the fields of France.

Sometimes whole regiments entrained under the care of fatherly French railway officials, curiously liable to hysteria on ordinary excursion days, but now as calm as Egyptian Pyramids in the face of national disaster. They pieced together with marvelous ingenuity the broken thread of speech presented to them by the occasional French scholars upon the British Staff; but more often still they shook polite and emphatic heads, and explained that there quite simply were no trains.

The possible, yes; but the impossible, no. One could not create trains.

So the men went on marching. They did not like retreating, but they moved as if they were on parade in front of Buckingham Palace, and when they held, they fought as winners fight.