Mr. Standfast - John Buchan (autobiographies to read TXT) 📗

proud and bullying manager suddenly forced to labour in a squad of navvies, and worse, for there was the gnawing physical fear of what was coming.

He made an appeal to me.

“Do the English torture their prisoners?” he asked. “You have beaten me. I own it, and I plead for mercy. I will go on my knees if you like. I am not afraid of death⁠—in my own way.”

“Few people are afraid of death⁠—in their own way.”

“Why do you degrade me? I am a gentleman.”

“Not as we define the thing,” I said.

His jaw dropped. “What are you going to do with me?” he quavered.

“You have been a soldier,” I said. “You are going to see a little fighting⁠—from the ranks. There will be no brutality, you will be armed if you want to defend yourself, you will have the same chance of survival as the men around you. You may have heard that your countrymen are doing well. It is even possible that they may win the battle. What was your forecast to me? Amiens in two days, Abbeville in three. Well, you are a little behind scheduled time, but still you are prospering. You told me that you were the chief architect of all this, and you are going to be given the chance of seeing it, perhaps of sharing in it⁠—from the other side. Does it not appeal to your sense of justice?”

He groaned and turned away. I had no more pity for him than I would have had for a black mamba that had killed my friend and was now caught to a cleft tree. Nor, oddly enough, had Wake. If we had shot Ivery outright at St. Anton, I am certain that Wake would have called us murderers. Now he was in complete agreement. His passionate hatred of war made him rejoice that a chief contriver of war should be made to share in its terrors.

“He tried to talk me over this morning,” he told me. “Claimed he was on my side and said the kind of thing I used to say last year. It made me rather ashamed of some of my past performances to hear that scoundrel imitating them⁠ ⁠… By the way, Hannay, what are you going to do with me?”

“You’re coming on my staff. You’re a stout fellow and I can’t do without you.”

“Remember I won’t fight.”

“You won’t be asked to. We’re trying to stem the tide which wants to roll to the sea. You know how the Boche behaves in occupied country, and Mary’s in Amiens.”

At that news he shut his lips.

“Still⁠—” he began.

“Still,” I said. “I don’t ask you to forfeit one of your blessed principles. You needn’t fire a shot. But I want a man to carry orders for me, for we haven’t a line any more, only a lot of blobs like quicksilver. I want a clever man for the job and a brave one, and I know that you’re not afraid.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I am⁠—much. Well. I’m content!”

I started Blenkiron off in a car for Corps Headquarters, and in the afternoon took the road myself. I knew every inch of the country⁠—the lift of the hill east of Amiens, the Roman highway that ran straight as an arrow to St. Quentin, the marshy lagoons of the Somme, and that broad strip of land wasted by battle between Dompierre and Peronne. I had come to Amiens through it in January, for I had been up to the line before I left for Paris, and then it had been a peaceful place, with peasants tilling their fields, and new buildings going up on the old battlefield, and carpenters busy at cottage roofs, and scarcely a transport wagon on the road to remind one of war. Now the main route was choked like the Albert road when the Somme battle first began⁠—troops going up and troops coming down, the latter in the last stage of weariness; a ceaseless traffic of ambulances one way and ammunition wagons the other; busy staff cars trying to worm a way through the mass; strings of gun horses, oddments of cavalry, and here and there blue French uniforms. All that I had seen before; but one thing was new to me. Little country carts with sad-faced women and mystified children in them and piles of household plenishing were creeping westward, or stood waiting at village doors. Beside these tramped old men and boys, mostly in their Sunday best as if they were going to church. I had never seen the sight before, for I had never seen the British Army falling back. The dam which held up the waters had broken and the dwellers in the valley were trying to save their pitiful little treasures. And over everything, horse and man, cart and wheelbarrow, road and tillage, lay the white March dust, the sky was blue as June, small birds were busy in the copses, and in the corners of abandoned gardens I had a glimpse of the first violets.

Presently as we topped a rise we came within full noise of the guns. That, too, was new to me, for it was no ordinary bombardment. There was a special quality in the sound, something ragged, straggling, intermittent, which I had never heard before. It was the sign of open warfare and a moving battle.

At Peronne, from which the newly returned inhabitants had a second time fled, the battle seemed to be at the doors. There I had news of my division. It was farther south towards St. Christ. We groped our way among bad roads to where its headquarters were believed to be, while the voice of the guns grew louder. They turned out to be those of another division, which was busy getting ready to cross the river. Then the dark fell, and while airplanes flew west into the sunset there was a redder sunset in the east, where the unceasing flashes of gunfire were pale against the angry glow of burning dumps. The sight of