FLIGHT
The first part of the meal over, the hostess picked
up a nut and threw it deftly at a door leading into
the lean-to-kitchen.
“Our table bell,” she explained to me.
And, true enough, a moment later the orderly appeared
and carried out the plates.
Then we had dessert, which was fruit and candy, and
coffee.
And all the time the guns were firing, and every opening
of the door into the corridor brought a gale of wind
into the room.
Suddenly it struck me that hardly a foot of the plaster
interior of that room was whole. The ceiling
was riddled. So were the walls.
“Shrapnel,” said the major, following
my gaze. “It gets worse every day.”
“I think the ceiling is going to fall,”
said one of the hostesses.
True enough, there was a great bulge in the centre.
But it held for that night. It may be holding
now.
Everybody took a hand at clearing the table.
The lamp was burning low, and they filled it without
putting it out. One of the things that I have
always been taught is never to fill a lighted lamp.
I explained this to them carefully. But they
were quite calm. It seems at the front one does
a great many extraordinary things. It is part
and parcel of that utter indifference to danger that
comes with war.
Now appeared the chauffeur, who brought the information
that the car had been dragged out of the mud and towed
as far as the house.
“Towed?” I said blankly.
“Towed, madame. There is no more petrol.”
The major suggested that we kill him at once.
But he was a perfectly good chauffeur and young.
Also it developed that he had not sat on my hat.
So we let him live.
“Never mind,” said Miss C——;
“we can give you the chauffeur’s bed and
he can go somewhere else.”
But after a time I decided that I would rather walk
back than stay overnight in that house. For the
major explained that at eleven o’clock the batteries
behind the town would bombard the German trenches
and the road behind them, along which they had information
that an ammunition train would pass.
“Another night in the cellar!” said some
one. “That means no one will need any beds,
for there will be a return fire, of course.”
“Is there no petrol to be had?” I inquired
anxiously.
“None whatever.”
None, of course. There had been shops in the
town, and presumably petrol and other things.
But now there was nothing but ruined walls and piles
of brick and mortar. However, there was a cellar.
My feet were swollen and painful, for the walk had
been one long agony. I was chilled, too, from
my wetting, in spite of the fire. I sat by the
tiny stove and tried to forget the prospect of a night
in the cellar, tried to ignore the pieces of shell
and shrapnel cases lined up on the mantelpiece, shells
and shrapnel that had entered the house and destroyed
it.
