Chapter IV: Part 4

"There is one thing," he said, "that goats cannot get on without, and that is heat. You must make very low wooden sheds for them; without any openings; let them stew in their own juice, and they will be happy!"

He remarked to the interpreter when the colonel had gone, "Didn’t I tell them a good tale about their goats, _hé_? In the South they live out in the open and are as well as you or I. But let’s talk seriously. Couldn’t you get your English to manage an extension of leave for me, to look after their beasts, _hé_?"

They had begun to build the huts described by the man from the South, when the Indian Corps wrote to Colonel Musgrave that they had discovered a British expert whom they were sending him.

The new seer was an artillery officer, but goats filled his life. Aurelle, who looked after him a good deal, found out that he regarded everything in nature from the point of view of a goat. A Gothic cathedral, according to him, was a poor shelter for goats: not enough air, but that could be remedied by breaking the windows.

His first advice was to mix molasses with the fodder which was given to the animals. It was supposed to fatten them and cure them of that distinguished melancholy which the Indian troops complained of. Large bowls of molasses were therefore distributed to the Hindoo shepherds. The goats remained thin and sad, but the shepherds grew fat. These results surprised the expert.

Then he was shown the plans of the huts.

He was astounded.

"If there is one thing in the world that goats cannot do without," he said, "it is air. They must have very lofty stables with large windows."

Colonel Musgrave asked him no more. He thanked him with extreme politeness, then sent for Aurelle.

"Now listen to me," he said: "you know Lieutenant Honeysuckle, the goat expert? Well, I never wish to see him again. I order you to go and find a new farm with him. I forbid you to find it. If you can manage to drown him, to run over him with my car, or to get him eaten by the goats, I will recommend you for the Military Cross. If he reappears here before my huts are finished, I will have you shot. Be off!"

A week later Lieutenant Honeysuckle broke his leg by falling off his horse in a farmyard. The Territorial from Marseilles was sent back to his corps. As for the goats, one fine day they stopped dying, and no one ever found out why.

*CHAPTER XXI*

One morning, Aurelle, seeing an English Staff officer come into his office in a gold-peaked hat with a red band, was surprised and delighted to recognize Major Parker.

"Hullo, sir! I _am_ glad to see you again! But you never told me about that"—and he pointed to the signs of authority.

"Well," said the major, "I wrote and told you that Colonel Bramble had been made a general. He now commands our old brigade and I am his brigade major. I have just been down to the Base to inspect our reinforcements, and the general ordered me to pick you up on the way back and bring you in to lunch. He will send you back this evening. Your colonel is quite agreeable. We are camped for the moment next to the village where the padre was killed; the general thought you would like to see his grave."

Two hours later they drew near the front and Aurelle recognized the familiar landmarks: the little English military village with a policeman holding up his hand at every corner; the large market town, scarcely bombarded, but having here and there a roof with its beams exposed; the road, where one occasionally met a man in a flat steel helmet loaded like a mule; the village, the notice boards, "This road is under observation," and suddenly, a carefully camouflaged battery barking out of a thicket.

But Major Parker, who had seen these things every day for three years, discoursed on one of his favourite themes:

"The soldier, Aurelle, is always done in by the tradesman and the politician. England will pay ten thousand a year to a lawyer or a banker, but when she has splendid fellows like me who conquer empires and keep them for her, she only gives them just enough to keep their polo ponies. And again——"

"It is just the same in France——" began Aurelle; but the car stopped suddenly opposite the church of a nightmare village, and he recognized H——. "Poor old village, how it has changed!" he said.

The church, ashamed, now showed its profaned nave; the few houses still standing were merely two triangles of stone sadly facing one another; and the high building of the weaving factory, hit by a shell in the third story, was bent over like a poplar in a storm.

"Will you follow me?" said the major. "We have had to put the H.Q. of the brigade outside the village, which was becoming unhealthy. Walk twenty paces behind me; the sausage balloon is up and it’s no good showing them the road."

Aurelle followed for a quarter of an hour through the bushes, and suddenly found himself face to face with General Bramble who, standing at the entrance to a dug-out, was watching a suspicious aeroplane.

"Ah, messiou!" he said. "That’s good!" And the whole of his rugged red face lit up with a kindly smile.

"It will be like a lunch in the old days," he continued, after Aurelle had congratulated him. "I sent the Staff captain out with the interpreter—for we have another interpreter now, messiou—I thought you would not like to see him in your place. But he has not really replaced you, messiou; and I telephoned to the Lennox to send the doctor to lunch with us."

He showed them into the Mess and gave Major Parker a few details of what had been happening.

"Nothing important; they have spoilt the first line a bit at E 17 A. We had a little strafe last night. The division wanted a prisoner, so as to identify the Boche reliefs—yes, yes, that was all right—the Lennox went to fetch him. I have seen the man, but I haven’t had their written report yet."

"What, not since last night?" said Parker. "What else have they got to do?"

"You see, messiou," said the general, "the good old times are over. Parker no longer abuses red hats. No doubt they are abusing him in that little wood you see down there."

"It is true," said Parker, "that one must be on the Staff to realize the importance of work done there. The Staff is really a brain without which no movement of the regiments is possible."

"You hear, messiou?" said the general. "It is no longer the same; it will never be the same again. The padre will not be there to talk to us about Scotland and to abuse bishops. And I have no longer got my gramophone, messiou. I left it to the regiment with all my records. The life of the soldier is one of great hardship, messiou, but we had a jolly little Mess with the Lennox, hadn’t we?"

The doctor appeared at the entrance to the tent.

"Come in, O’Grady, come in. Late as usual; there is no creature so wicked and so dense as you."

The lunch was very like those of the good old times—for there were already good old times in this War, which was no longer in the flower of its youth—the orderlies handed boiled potatoes and mutton with mint sauce, and Aurelle had a friendly little discussion with the doctor.

"When do you think war will be finished, Aurelle?" said the doctor.

"When we win," cut in the general.

But the doctor meant the League of Nations: he did not believe in a final war.

"It is a fairly consistent law of humanity," he said, "that men spend about half their lives at war. A Frenchman, called Lapouge, calculated that from the year 1100 to the year 1500, England had been 207 years at war, and 212 years from 1500 to 1900. In France the corresponding figures would be 192 and 181 years."

"That is very interesting," said the general.

"According to that same man Lapouge, nineteen million men are killed in war every century. Their blood would fill three million barrels of 180 litres each, and would feed a fountain of blood running 700 litres an hour from the beginning of history."

"Ugh!" said the general.

"All that does not prove, doctor," said Aurelle, "that your fountain will go on running. For many centuries murder has been an institution, and nevertheless courts of justice have been established."

"Murder," said the doctor, "never appears to have been an honoured institution among primitive peoples. Cain had no reason to care for the justice of his country, if I mistake not. Besides, law courts have not suppressed murderers. They punish them, which is not the same thing. A certain number of international conflicts might be settled by civil tribunals, but there will always be wars of passion."

"Have you read ’The Great Illusion’?" said Aurelle.

"Yes," said the major, "it’s a misleading book. It pretends to show that war is useless, because it is not profitable. We know that very well, but who fights for profit? England did not take part in this war to conquer, but to defend her honour. As for believing that Democracies would be pacific, that’s nonsense. A nation worthy of the name is even more susceptible than a monarch. The Royal Era was the age of gold, preceding the Iron Age of the people."

"There’s an argument just like the old days," said the general. "Both are right, both are wrong. That’s capital! Now, doctor, tell me the story about your going on leave and I shall be perfectly happy."

After lunch, they all four went to see the padre’s grave. It was in a little cemetery surrounded by weeds; the ground broken up here and there by recent shell-holes. The padre lay between two lieutenants of twenty. Cornflowers and other wild plants had spread a living mantle over all three graves.

"After the war," said General Bramble, "if I am still alive, I shall have a stone carved with ’Here lies a soldier and a sportsman.’ That will please him."

The other three remained silent, restraining their emotion with difficulty. Aurelle seemed to hear, in the murmuring summer air, the undying strains of "Destiny Waltz" and saw the padre setting out once more on horseback, his pockets bulging with hymn-books and cigarettes for the men. The doctor meditated: "’Where two or three are gathered together, there I will be in the midst of them.’ What a profound and true saying! And how the religion of the dead still lives."

"Come," said the general, "we must go, the Boche sausage is up in the air, and we are four; it is too many. They tolerate two, but we must not abuse their courtesy. I am going on up to the trenches. You, Parker, will take Aurelle back, and if you want to go with them, doctor, I will tell your colonel that I have given you leave for the afternoon."

The three friends passed slowly across the silent plains, which only a few months before had been the formidable battlefield of the Somme. As far as the eye could see, there were low, undulating hillocks covered with thick, coarse grass, groups of mutilated tree-trunks marking the place of the famous wood, and millions of poppies made these dead fields glow with a warm and coppery light. A few tenacious rose-trees, with lovely fading roses, had remained alive in this wilderness, beneath which slept the dead. Here and there posts, bearing painted notices, like those on a station platform, recalled villages unknown yesterday, but now ranking with those of Marathon or Rivol: Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Thiepval.

"I hope," said Aurelle, looking at the innumerable little crosses, here grouped together as in cemeteries, there isolated, "that this ground will be consecrated to the dead who won it, and that this country will be kept as an immense rustic cemetery, where children may come to learn the story of heroes."

"What an idea!" said the doctor. "No doubt the graves will be respected; but they will have good crops all round them in two years’ time. The land is too rich to remain widowed; look at that superb lot of cornflowers on those half-healed scars."

And truly, a little further on, some of the villages seemed, like convalescents, to be tasting the joy of life once more. Shop windows crowded with English goods in many-coloured packets brightened up the ruined houses. As they passed through a straggling village of Spanish aspect the doctor resumed:

"Yes, this is a marvellous land. Every nation in Europe has conquered it in turn; it has defeated its conqueror every time."

"If we go a little out of the way," said Parker, "we could visit the battlefield of Crécy; it would interest me. I hope you are not annoyed with us, Aurelle, for having beaten Philippe de Valois? Your military history is too glorious for you to have any resentment for events which took place so long ago."

"My oldest resentments do not last six hundred years," said Aurelle. "Crécy was an honourably-contested match; we can shake hands over it."

The chauffeur was told to turn to the west, and they arrived on the site of Crécy by the same lower road taken by Philippe’s army.

"The English," said Parker, "were drawn up on the hill facing us, their right towards Crécy, their left at Vadicourt, that little village you see down there. They were about thirty thousand; there were a hundred thousand French. The latter appeared about three o’clock in the afternoon, and immediately there was a violent thunderstorm."

"I observe," said the doctor, "that the heavens thought it funny to water an offensive even in those days."

Parker explained the disposition of the two armies, and the varying fortunes of the battle. Aurelle, who was not listening, admired the woods, the quiet villages, the yellowing grass of the fields, and saw in imagination swarms of men and horses riding up to the assault of this peaceful hill.

"Finally," concluded the major, "when the King of France and his army had left the field of battle, Edward invited the principal corps commanders to dinner, and they all ate and drank with great rejoicings because of the good luck which had befallen them."

"How very English, that invitation to dine with the King," said Aurelle.

"Then," continued Parker, "he ordered one Renaud de Ghehoben to take all the knights and clerks who knew heraldry——"

"The units," said the doctor, "ought to send up this evening to His Majesty’s H.Q. a statement of all barons with armorial bearings."

"And commanded them to count the dead, and to write down the names of all the knights whom they could recognize."

"The adjutant-general will start a numbered list of lords who have been killed, including their rank," said the doctor.

"Renaud found eleven princes, thirteen hundred knights and sixteen thousand foot soldiers."

Heavy black clouds were showing up against the brilliant sunshine: a storm was coming over the hill. By the valley of Renaud’s clerks, they climbed up on to the summit and Parker looked for the tower from which Edward had watched the battle.

"I thought," he said, "that it had been made into a mill, but I don’t see one on the horizon."

Aurelle, noticing a few old peasants, helped by children, cutting corn in the next field, went up to them and asked them where the tower was.

"The tower? There is no tower in these parts," one of them said, "nor mill either."

"Perhaps we are wrong," said the major. "Ask him if this is really where the battle was."

"The battle?" replied the old man. "What battle?"

And the people of Crécy turned back to their work, binding into neat sheaves the corn of this invincible land.

THE END