“Lord bless you, sir, ’e’s all right,” said a man in answer to the Subaltern’s inquiry.  “We wouldn’t let no harm come to ’im.”  The man who spoke was an old soldier whom he knew well, tall, wiry, commanding—­the sort of man that a young officer leans upon, and who, reciprocally, relies on his officer.  In the old Peace days, if any special job that required intelligence or reliance were going, he always saw that this man got it.  He had made a sort of pet of him; and now he was openly, frankly displaying a state of mind akin to worship towards another officer.  It was defection, rank desertion.  A ridiculous feeling of jealousy surged up in the Subaltern’s mind, as he turned back towards the Company.

As he regained the road, many stretchers passed.  They were no longer things of tragedy, to be passed by with a shudder and averted eyes—­he was getting used to horror.

CHAPTER XX

DEFENCE

It was now midday, and the Officers of the two companies that had been deployed gathered round the mess-cart.  The remaining companies, who had been kept in local reserve during the fight, were sent out to bury the dead.  The rain began to fall in torrents, and somehow the memory of crouching under the mess-cart to get shelter has left a far more definite and indelible impression upon the Subaltern’s mind than the actual moments of danger and excitement.

A large band of prisoners had been captured by our troops that day.  Small detachments had from time to time been captured ever since the turn at Chaumes, but this was different.  There were long lines of them, standing bolt upright, and weaponless.  The Subaltern looked at them curiously.  They struck him as on the whole taller than the English, and their faces were not brown, but grey.  He admired their coats, there was a martial air in the long sweep of them.  And he confessed that one looked far more of a soldier in a helmet.  There is a ferocity about the things, a grimness well suited to a soldier....  Not that clothes make the man.

He sternly refused himself the pleasure of going to get a closer sight of them.  He wanted very badly to see them, perhaps to talk French with them, but a feeling that it was perhaps infra dignitatem debarred him.  The men, however, had no such scruples.  They crowded round their captives, and slowly and silently surveyed them.  They looked at them with the same sort of interest that one displays towards an animal in the Zoo, and the Germans paid just as much attention to their regard as Zoo animals do.  Considering that only a short hour ago they had been trying to take each other’s lives, there seemed to be an appalling lack of emotion in either party.  Fully half an hour the Tommies inspected them thus.  Then, with infinite deliberation, one man produced a packet of “Caporal” cigarettes and offered one, with an impassive countenance, to a German.  As far as the Subaltern could see, not a single word was exchanged nor a gesture made.  They did not move away until it was time to fall in.