Behind the Lines (4 page)

The ground fell away to a narrow sunken lane between twelve-foot banks, with the main road at the bottom. He slowed to a walk, but the mare was still fresh and pulled his arms almost out of the sockets.

“Steady, old girl,” he cried. “Steady, damn you! We can't barge on to a main road like that. Blast you!” This last as the mare curveted sideways up the bank.

Progressing sideways he reached the end of the steep track where the high enclosing banks fell away abruptly to the main road, and at the same moment an ambulance flashed past with a loud warning screech and sudden swerve to avoid the emerging horseman. This was too much for the mare; Rawley's hands were jerked forward as her head went up, and away she went down the road after the car. He sat back and pulled her in, first to a canter and then to a straining trot.

The mare was still tossing her head and capering as he drew level with the green-hooded car, that had pulled up on the roadside. He saw that the driver was a girl. With one
gauntleted hand resting on the steering-wheel she looked up at him. “I'm sorry I startled your horse,” she said. “But you did come out rather suddenly.”

“My fault—or rather Lucy's!” he admitted readily, and raised his hand in salute. And then he dropped it hurriedly as the mare capered round and presented her hind quarters to the car. He pulled her round again. “She has no manners this morning,” he declared. “I apologize for her.”

The girl smiled. She was not exactly pretty, Rawley decided, but she had candid eyes and an engaging smile; her voice was pleasant and cultivated, and above all she was attractively healthy and English.

“See! She is apologizing herself,” she said, rubbing the silky muzzle the mare pushed against her shoulder.

Rawley rubbed the glossy neck with his crop. “She is fresh this morning. It's the first gallop we have had together for goodness knows how long. And she has taken me the wrong way. That is the way to Doullens, isn't it?” he asked, pointing with his crop.

She nodded. “Yes. It is about five kilometres.”

“We are going in to see the sights,” he explained. He found the novelty of an English girl's society attractive, and was in no hurry to go.

“The sights of Doullens!” she echoed with a laugh.

“Don't tell me there aren't any!” he exclaimed in pained tones. “After you've brought us out so far, and made us trot so quick!” he quoted with a grin.

“Sorry! It is not a bad little place. One wouldn't rave about it in peace time—and in England; but . . . well if you
have just come from the Line you will find it attractive, I expect.”

“I breathe again,” he answered, laughing.

She dropped her hand to the gears. “Well, I must get on with the war. Goodbye.”

The clutch went in, and the car slid away. Rawley turned his mare and trotted on into Doullens.

It was a commonplace little provincial town, but, as the lady of the ambulance had prophesied, it was very attractive to him, fresh from the desolation of the forward area. There were shops with homely unwarlike goods in the windows; things one had forgotten anyone had a use for—white stiff collars, and civilian suits, children's toys and photograph frames, fancy notepaper and ladies' hats. Where the street widened to form a small square was a market. Fat market women sat complacently beneath their large umbrellas before trays piled with stockings, hats, pots and pans, vegetables, fruit, crockery or ironmongery.

Rawley rode slowly through the main street and enjoyed it all. Two army nursing sisters in red and grey uniforms stood before a window hung with silk and linen lingeries, and Rawley smiled to think how remote such fragile garments were from the rough masculine world of gun-pits and dug-outs from which he had come.

For luncheon he turned into the Quatre Fils. It was market day, and there were but few vacant chairs at either of the long tables that ran the length of the dining-room. The atmosphere was redolent of cooked food, and hazy with the steam of hot dishes; and there was a
swelling buzz of sound, for the
vin ordinaire
, a bottle of which stood before each plate and was included in the
table d'hôte,
seemed to have loosened the tongues of the taciturn Picardy farmers and to have increased the natural volubility of their wives. A sprinkling of British officers served to remind one of the war.

Rawley was looking for a vacant chair when he heard his name called and, turning, discovered Charles Tankard seated at a small table by the wall. Tankard was an old school friend and together they had enlisted in a Territorial battalion in 1914. They had both been commissioned about the same time and separated, Rawley to the Artillery, and Tankard to a Yeomanry regiment.

Tankard gripped Rawley's hand and grinned. “Hullo, Peter, old cock! Take a pew. I thought we'd run across each other before long.” He signalled to a waitress. “Let's have some drinkable juice to celebrate in. Can't swallow the local red ink.” He pushed the bottle of
vin ordinaire
aside. “And where are your old pop-guns now?”

“Ervillers—back resting for a bit. We pulled in from La Basse last night.”

“That's bad luck,” exclaimed Tankard. “Here have we been hanging round here for the last month, and now we go north tomorrow, and I have to get back to the squadron
toute suite
after this, so I shall not see you again. Rotten luck!”

“Rotten luck,” agreed Rawley.

“Well, what have you been doing up at La Basse, old son? Pitching shorts on the poor ruddy infanteers as usual?”

Rawley grinned. “You old horse-wallah, you! No—winning the war, that's what we've been doing—you know, the usual harassing fire relieved by occasional S.O.S. calls.”

“No fruity barrages yet?”

“Not yet; that's to come.”

Tankard nodded. “Sure. You will get all you want before you are through. Well, how does this little war agree with you, Peter?”

Rawley put down his glass and answered thoughtfully. “Well, to tell the truth, I really rather like it. It's deuced interesting.”

“Interesting! My God!” exclaimed Tankard. “Look here, young fellow, if you go on like that you will be a general before you know where you are, so be warned in time.”

“You old cynic,” retorted Rawley. “But after all, that's what we joined up for, isn't it.”

“I suppose so,” admitted Tankard. “But we were very young in those days.”

“Three years younger to be precise,” put in Rawley dryly.

Tankard shrugged his shoulders. “One can learn a lot in three years. Oh, ay, I don't want to die,” he sang softly.

“Neither do I,” retorted Rawley. “But what is wrong with you, Charles, is that you're fed up with hanging about. I suppose you have been spending your evenings loaded up with sandbags and junk, wandering round in the dark among crumps, looking for a map reference and a sapper lance-corporal who isn't there.”

“That's about the size of it,” agreed Tankard.

“But you know damn well that, if the infanteers made a break and pushed you through, you would be as keen as mustard the moment you got your old quadrupeds on the other side barging among the Bosche.”

“Well, that would be a reasonable kind of war,” protested Tankard. “Not this damned ditch-digging game.”

“They will push you through the gap one of these days,” Rawley asserted confidently.

“My God! Have they been telling you, too, about that gap!” exclaimed Tankard in disgust. “When I first came out it was to be a break through—vanguard to Berlin. Now it's this cursed gap. For weeks we have been practising finding that gap. Why, my troop horses wake up in the night and imagine they've found it, poor brutes. The only gap I've ever found—or am ever likely to find—is in the brains of the Brass Hats.”

Rawley smiled. “It's not a bad old war,” he said.

“It might be worse, I suppose,” admitted Tankard. “But not much. Yours a decent push?”

“Quite a good crowd. We are only four in the mess at the moment; we lost a subaltern up at La Basse. The Major is all right—young and keen; a bit regimental, but he doesn't muck the battery about or try experiments. Old Whedbee, the second-in-command, is a rum old bird—dry old stick. Was a schoolmaster in civil life—got the pedagogic manner. Reminds me of old Piecrust at Ventchester. But he's a jolly good sort when you know him. And then there's young Piddock; he's quite a good kid. We are a cheery crush.”

“That's half the battle,” said Tankard. “What are you doing in Doullens?”

“Having a look round.”

“Not much to see, I'm afraid.”

“It's new to me and a change from the battery position.”

Tankard nodded. “Civilization again. The devastated area is ghastly.”

“Yes. And yet it has its own peculiar charm.”

Tankard raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Same old Peter,” he commented.

“Well, it has,” asserted Rawley. “In a way it reminds me of the Broads—Hickling and Horsey.”

“Oh, I say!” protested Tankard.

“It has the same loneliness—and timelessness,” went on Rawley. “There one might be living in the twelfth century or the ninth; there is nothing to show that it is the twentieth.”

“Except crumps,” put in Tankard.

“Those great stretches of devastated, uncultivated, deserted downland are rather fine—especially at night, when there is only a faint flickering of Verey lights to the east and the grumble of a distant strafe. The universe seems grander and nearer then—and anything might happen.”

Tankard shook his head. “You will be a poet one of these days, Peter, my lad. But I know what you mean.”

“And those stark trees, all points and shivered branches without leaves, and the great mine craters in the chalk all white in the moonlight. Did you ever see anything more like a dead world—like another planet, like a Lunar landscape must be?”

Tankard smiled reminiscently. “You haven't changed much since the old days at Piecrust's,” he said. “Do you remember that day after the Ely match when you nearly missed the train and we found you up the cathedral tower in the dark trying to light a beacon!”

Rawley grinned. “I had been reading
Hereward the Wake
,” he said.

Tankard looked at his wrist-watch. “I must walk march.” He beckoned a waitress.

Rawley's hand went to his breast pocket, but Tankard held his arm. “No; this is with me—positively.” At the door he gripped Rawley's hand. “Don't go fooling round looking for trouble, Peter,” he said. “Cheerio!”

II

Rawley made his purchases with leisurely enjoyment, wandering to and fro in the streets and lingering before every shop window. Some time between three and four o'clock he entered a shop which sold English periodicals and newspapers. It was an old-fashioned shop. A bell jangled when one pushed back the door, and two steps led down to the dark, low-ceilinged interior of the shop. On the shelves and stands round the wall other articles besides papers were displayed for sale. There were fancy notepaper and bottles of ink, gaudily-framed reproductions of the basilica of Albert, gilt teaspoons with the arms of Doullens embossed on the handle, aluminium rings and medallions stamped with a miniature seventy-five millimetre gun,
and made from old shell fuses, picture postcards—some indecent to English eyes—and greeting cards of ribbon and lace and celluloid, bearing sententious mottoes.

There were a number of people in the shop when Rawley entered, and at first he was unable to get near the counter on which the periodicals lay. He stood pressed back against the shelf behind him to allow those on their way out to reach the door, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that in addition to the civilians there were three or four English Tommies in the shop, and at the far end a girl in uniform whom, though he could see only half her face, he recognized as the driver of the ambulance that had bolted his mare that morning.

He studied her with interest, and was pleased with what he saw. He disliked uniforms for women. One of a woman's greatest attractions, he thought, was her individuality, and this quality she always exemplified in her dress. And this was just the quality that a uniform was intended to destroy. There was something nauseating and degrading in a row of women all alike.

But this girl had triumphed over the disability. She did not belong to her clothes; her clothes belonged to her. Her skirt hung cleanly and neatly from her hips, and suggested lithe, clean limbs beneath. The ugly uniform jacket hung gracefully from her shoulders. It did not bulge and sag in creases about her figure as did so many women's uniforms he had seen; nor did it hang too loosely, like a shapeless sack. It stressed her girlish figure neither too much nor
too little. On her the jacket succeeded in being entirely a woman's garment, and not a ludicrous travesty of a man's. And with the unpromising cap, too, she had achieved distinction, though in what it differed from others of its pattern he could not discover.

Suddenly she turned and made towards the door, passing close to him without noticing him; and just as she reached the door it was opened from the outside. She stepped back to avoid it, and a small parcel she was carrying fell from her hand. Rawley bent swiftly to pick it up, but the girl had already stooped and their heads bumped.

Rawley straightened with the package in his hands. “Sorry!” he said, with real distress. “I'm most awfully sorry.”

She straightened her cap and smiled as she recognized him. It was a friendly and expressive smile. It said all sorts of things: that bumping heads was a comedy and not a tragedy, that she was sorry for his evident distress and hoped he would not think any more about it, that she knew it was an accident and was not in the least annoyed.

“We are quits now, aren't we?” she said.

They had reached the pavement outside and he was holding the package in his hands. He did not want her to go. He badly wanted to talk to her in a friendly, sisterly way. War made one like that, made one friendly towards one's kind. After all, it was one show, they were all in it, men and women, for good or ill.