THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE REARGUARD.

BY BOYD CABLE.

All day long Papa Laval had been wandering about the streets of the little town, listening restlessly to the distant thunder of the guns, questioning eagerly the first of the fugitive peasantry who came streaming through in their flight towards safety. Papa Laval with his one arm and his cripple leg and his tales of ’70-’71 was naturally an authority on matters of war, and his fellow-townsmen listened deferentially to all he had to say about affairs. Papa was scornful of the first tales the fugitives told of a German victory and an Allies’ retreat; but the first rumble of heavy transport wagons through the cobbled streets in the middle of the night brought him quickly from his bed and down the narrow stairs to find out what it meant. He could learn nothing much because the transport drivers were English, could only take some comfort from the calm with which they steered through the crowded street, laughed and called jokes which none understood down to the staring townsfolk. But Papa had seen too much of war not to understand the meaning of the swelling tide of transport, to mark as the light grew the jaded horses and the sleep-worn looks of the drivers. His dismay grew when the khaki regiments began to flood through after the toiling transport, while out behind them the growling thunder of the guns rolled louder and louder.

And by noon he was in utter despair. The street through the town was by then choked from end to end with a seething mass of men and cattle and vehicles, military transport and ammunition wagons, soldiers, old peasant men and boys, women with children clutching their skirts or wailing in their arms, country carts piled with bedding and furniture, squealing pigs and squawking leg-tethered poultry, with huddled clinging old crones and round-eyed infants. And when Papa was told that the road was blocked in the same way for miles back, that the Germans were coming fast, that the whole army was retiring as fast as it could, he groaned in despair. He watched the slow torrent struggling and scrambling along the choked street, the impatience of the officers and dull apathy of the men in the marching regiments as they progressed a few yards and halted for the head of the column to clear a way; and he pictured to himself visions of a squadron of Uhlans swooping down on the crowded road back there and the havoc they would make in the packed masses under their lances.

About noon he found a new interest and fresh food for thought. A regiment arrived and, instead of pushing on through the town as the others had done, sought billets there and halted. Six men were billeted on Papa Laval, and between the smattering of broken French that one of them spoke and Papa’s equally broken English it was possible to hold some conversation and glean some understanding of the recent battle. But the men were too worn out, too dead beat, too utterly fatigued to talk much. They ate and drank and then flung themselves down to sleep, and all that Papa learned was that in truth a big battle had been fought, that the Germans had been held, but that for some reason the English were retreating. Fugitives from Maubeuge direction had told a similar tale of the retreat of the French, and Papa groaned again and wandered out into the street to curse impotently as he watched the struggling tide of fugitives that still poured with desperate slowness through the town. ‘Perhaps it would be better,’ he told his daughter at last and very reluctantly, ‘for you to go away while there is yet time. Not for yourself, but for the sake of the little ones. There will be fighting here, as I see it. This regiment remaining while all the others pass through means a rearguard action, an attempt to cover the retreat of the others. But that is a plan without hope. There is only a handful of men left to hold the town, and they are worn to the edge of exhaustion with marching and fighting. The Germans will attack in force, they will sweep through the town and take the bridge. That no doubt is the plan, and holding the town and the bridge they will sever the English army and the retreat will be a rout. Yes, my child, you had better go now.’

But the woman refused to go, to leave their little house, to drag her children out into the crowded roads on the way to nowhere; and after a little Papa gave up trying to persuade her.

It was a bare four hours after the weary men had found their billets when the alarm came that the enemy were coming. Papa shook his head as he watched the six men in his house rouse slowly and reluctantly, yawn and stretch and rub their eyes. ‘Four hours,’ he thought. ‘Of what use is a little four hours to men exhausted by battle and marching? If it had been eight hours’ sleep now, who knows—they say these English are good fighters, and they might have held the town a few hours. But four hours....’

The men themselves took it differently. ‘That shut-eye done me good,’ said one. ‘If I’d a decent wash now I’d be as good as ever.’

‘Glad we’re goin’ to ’old ’em up here,’ said another. ‘This retreatin’ game don’t suit me none. I’d sooner stop an’ fight it out.’

‘Dunno wot the blank we retreated for at all,’ grumbled a third. ‘They couldn’t ’ave pushed us out o’ that last position in a month.’

‘They do say the Frenchies on the right broke,’ said a corporal, the man with the smattering of French, ‘an’ we had to fall back ’cause they’d left our flank open. Fancy it must ha’ been something o’ that sort too.’

They were hastily buckling on their kits when Papa came in to them. ‘Cheer up, Daddy,’ they told him. ‘We’re not letting ’em come any further. But there’s goin’ to be a scrap here an’ you’d better keep your tuppenny tucked well in or you may get hurt by a stray lump o’ lead.’

‘Noos restey ici—compronney?’ said the corporal, and Papa nodded his understanding. ‘Mais not posseebl’ for to make victoire,’ he demurred. ‘Anglais ver’ few; Allemands plenty, ver’ plenty.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Daddy,’ said the corporal heartily. ‘Beaucoo Anglaise to stop—haltey les Allemong. You’ll see,’ and he got his men together and hurried off.

Papa had to admire the smart and business-like fashion in which the town was set in a state of defence, the houses commanding the roads loopholed, the street entrances blocked with barricades of transport wagons, the men distributed to the various vantage-points. But he had little or no hope of the result, because he saw how few the men were, how they had to be split up into small companies to cover all the many points which might be attacked. It was true that the defenders held the advantage of cover in the houses, but that would avail little against artillery; and the enemy had the advantage of being able to choose their point of attack and mass on it against the weakness of the distributed defence. Papa gave the defence half an hour at most to hold out after the real attack developed. As it happened, he was perfectly right in his surmise that a mere section of the defence would have to bear the full brunt of the attack, although he was quite wrong as to how long they could withstand it.

The attack came soon after the early darkness had fallen.

At first there was a quick rumour running round that a mistake had been made, that it was a French column that was approaching. It may have been this that deceived the defenders into allowing the enemy to come almost to hand-grips before the fighting began, and anyhow it is certain that the first sounds of conflict that Papa heard were not, as he had expected, a long-drawn rapid rifle fire, but one single and then a few scattered shots, shoutings, and the clash of steel on steel. For the moment it looked as if the first rush was to swamp the defence and break through it, since a seething mass of men fighting fiercely with butt and bayonet eddied slowly back and actually into the street of the town. Rifles began to blaze and bang from some of the upper windows, and then with a wild cheer a rush of khaki swept out from a side street and plunged into the fight. The fresh weight told, and although the defence was still outnumbered by two to one it was the stronger at close-quarter work, and the attack was driven slowly back and back until at last it broke and ran, leaving the street and the road about the outside of the town heaped with dead and wounded.

Papa Laval ran out into the street and began to give what help he could to carry in the wounded British, when he heard a whistling screech and the crash of a shell on one of the outer houses of the town. He ran crouching in to the shadow of one of the houses, and presently his straining eyes caught the quick leaping flash of the German piece and another shell hurtled over and burst in a hail of shrapnel about the entrance to the town. Papa ran back, and in a side street found a young officer and a dozen men breaking in the door of a deserted house. Papa guessed their intention, and since the officer fortunately was able to speak French, Papa could tell him a better house to choose, one taller and with a better and more commanding outlook on the point of attack. He led the way to the house and to the upper rooms, and pointed out the best windows, and watched them pile bedding at the windows and break out loopholes in the wall. All the time shell after shell was smashing and crashing down somewhere outside, and now the Germans began to fire star-shells that floated down in a blaze of dazzling light, blinding the defenders and exposing them as visible targets to the hail of bullets that came drumming and rattling in from their unseen foes.

Then came another fierce rush against the barricaded streets and the rifle fire rose to a full deep-noted roar, punctuated by the crashing reports of the shells and the boom of a gun that began to fire back from somewhere in the town. Down in the street the attack pushed home again to the barricades, and men pulled and dragged at the overturned carts and leaped and scrambled to cross them, and fired in each other’s faces; and, where the barricade was gapped for a moment, thrust and stabbed with the bayonet and smashed with the butt and tore and beat at one another, until slowly the attack gave again and the barricade was made good. In the rooms upstairs where Papa Laval was, the men pumped bullets from the loopholes and the windows down on to the struggling mass that pushed in to the barricade, until a machine-gun was turned on the house and hailed a storm of bullets back and forward, across and across its front. The storm caught several of the men at the windows, and they fell back killed or badly wounded for the most part. A group of the enemy turned from the barricade, ran across and began beating at the door and the barred and shuttered windows. Half a dozen of the garrison, on a command from the officer, jumped from their loopholes and poured clattering down the stairs, just as a rifle thrust into the lock and fired blew it away and the door swung open. As the Germans rushed in they were met by the men plunging headlong down the stair, and in the passage and about the stair-foot commenced a wild and desperate hand-to-hand scrimmage. Somewhere outside a building had caught fire, and in the dim light reflected into the house-passage from the leaping flames the fighters scuffled and raged, scarcely seeing each other, stabbing and striking and singling friend from foe by blind instinct. The passage was a pandemonium of shouts and cries and oaths, of trampling scuffling feet, of clashing steel and thudding blows, with every now and then the thunderous report of the officer’s revolver reverberating in the confined space. The advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward, when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows had been forced.

‘Get back! Get back and hold the stair,’ the officer was yelling; and his men, with one last fierce rush, drove the Germans further along the passage, turned and made good their retreat to the stair-foot. Then when the position looked to be too desperate for hope, there came from outside a burst of rifle fire, a fresh clamour of fighting noises, a hoarse yell of English cheers. A mixed mob of the fighters swirled past the open doorway, and a rush of khaki swung past and licked in after it, followed closely by a line of British swarming across the width of the street and running forward with bayonets at the level. Inside the house the panting remnant of the defence slammed the door shut, piled a tangle of furniture—tables, chairs, chests of drawers—into the passage, busied themselves re-securing the broken window, wedging a big table and the heaviest articles of furniture they could find against it, and making all ready for a renewal of the attack.

But the attack was not again successful in reaching a point level with the house. Another attempt, made twenty minutes later, succeeded in coming almost level with the house, but it was too fiercely swept by the fire from the barricade, by a tempest of bullets from a couple of machine-guns placed in position in some of the houses commanding the approach, and had to fall back without any result beyond an increase in the piled bodies littered about the street, the wounded crawling and writhing away as best they could out of the line of fire.

The fighting continued throughout most of the night, but never reached again the savage ferocity of the first hour, never came within such measurable distance of success for the attack. And at dawn the enemy withdrew and left the defence time to collect its wounded and tally its dead, and make all ready for continuing the fight.

And when Papa Laval came back an hour after to his daughter’s house he found her busy making coffee for the corporal and one other man—the only ones left, as it turned out, from the six who had billeted there. The corporal’s head was tied up, his sleeve and shirt-sleeve were slit their full length and stained a dull brown from a wound, the red-wet bandage of which showed round his upper arm when the slit sleeve fell back from it.

But he was quite cheerful and turned triumphantly to Papa Laval when he came in. ‘Wot did I tell you, Daddy? Ici noos restey, eh?’

‘You ’ave spik true,’ said Papa warmly. ‘Ze Anglais—ah, zey are ze brav mans—mos’ brav—magnifique. I no tink it posseebl’—it was not posseebl’, but zey do heem, zis imposseebl’, and make ze victoire.’

‘It was a good scrap,’ assented the corporal modestly. The Frenchman assented warmly after he had had the meaning of ‘scrap’ explained to him.

‘Good, good, ver’ good,’ he said. ‘I, Papa Laval, who have seen much fighting in ’70 and ’71, say it was ver’ good. So much Allemands an’ so leetle—so not-much Anglais an’ so fatigue, so tire they. Ver’ much kill, ver’ much blessés, what you say wounds, but zey fight on an’ zey make victoire. I see ze Anglais to-morrow—no, yesterday—an’ I say ze grande armée anglaise is feenish, is defeat. Mais, now I onnerstand heem no defeat, heem yet make ze good fight.’

‘Oh, we’ll make a fight all right when the time comes,’ said the corporal.

By now the coffee was ready, and the two men drank it hurriedly and ate hastily of the meal the woman set before them. Papa Laval was concerned about this haste. He would have had them sit down and wait till a good breakfast was cooked and then eat it at leisure and in comfort. The corporal shuffled a little uneasily. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we got to be movin’ on. Orders, voo savvy—les instruckshions à marchey; noos continuey le moshion à la sud.’

Papa stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Mais—zat ees ze retreat,’ he stammered. ‘Pourquoi ze retreat après la victoire?’

‘Wot’s ’e say?’ asked the other soldier through a huge mouthful of bread and butter.

‘Says why should we bolt again after lickin’ the Germans,’ explained the corporal.

‘An’ that’s exackly wot I wants to know,’ said the private disgustedly. ‘We ’as the bloomin’ company near wiped out, an’ B Company the same, and stands off the attack all right; an’ when we’ve chased ’em off good an’ handsome we has to up stick an’ run away again. Bloomin’ rot, I calls it.’

‘Steady on,’ cautioned the corporal. ‘You don’t want these bloomin’ French people to get no wrong notion about our runnin’ away. Look ’ere, Papa, it’s like this: Up there,’ he waved his hand towards the north, ‘we have le grand fight, battle. We win, voo savvy, la victoire c’est à noos. I dunno why we retreat after it—je ne comprong pas pourquoi le retreat, but—I mean, mais les instructions they says retreat. (Dashed if I know the French for “they says.”) Voo savvy, noos make le retiremong because⸺(An’ I’ve forgot the word for “because” now! Oh, dash this French language!)’

‘I onnerstand, m’sieu,’ broke in Papa. ‘The ordaire it is retreat and, parbleu! ze good soldat he obey ze ordaire. Quand ze ordaire ees fight, ze good soldat he fight; eh, is it not?’

‘Egg-zackly,’ said the corporal. ‘Certimong, Papa.’

‘Bien,’ said Papa. ‘I know you spik true. I have seen ze Anglais fight. Zey are keel, peut-être, mais nevaire—how you say it?—run away. I have seen, and I know. I go now to spik it to ze peoples in la ville who is disconsole, peut-être, when ze retreat continue.’

‘That’s it, Papa,’ said the corporal. ‘An’ you tell ’em this army is never goin’ to run away. When the order is retreat, we retreat, even though we don’t like it. But one day the order will be to advance, an’ then we’ll show ’em. You tell ’em not to be afraid. The French is bound to win this war. We’ve come over to see it through with them, an’ we’re not goin’ ’ome till we’ve chased every dash German back to Germany. You savvy, when the time comes, en avong is the order, an’ avong we goes.’

It is very doubtful if Papa caught all the meaning of this harangue, but he got the sense of it and the last words at least.

‘En avant!’ he cried, leaping to his feet. ‘Vivent les Alliés! Vivent les Anglais!’

‘If you two ’as finished ’andin’ out bookays to each other,’ said the private, ‘p’raps you’ll ask Madam ’ere if she’s got a spare loaf we can put in our ’aversacks. There’s the fall-in sounding.’