22 
Land & Water 
August 8, 191 8 
fXJor game that be! I reckon you'd be glad to see the 
last on it." Bemerton laughed; and even while he laughed 
he suddenly found hipself submerged in one of those dark 
eddies. .\ gleam, too swift and elusive to be recaptured, 
had shown him a bewildering glimpse of the whole 
business. It was dark. An icy sleet from the north-east 
was sweeping over the valley from beyond the German lines. 
In the city, no doubt, the same blurred lights would be 
shining; and yet he had become suddenly conscious of the 
place under a broiling summer sun. The sun beat down 
the streets. It was all ridiculous; for the cold wind and 
the driven sleet stung his face. He shivjsred. All that 
night his soul was vaguely disquieted. He supposed that 
sometime in the summer, some blazing day, he was going 
to "stop one" in the streets of St. Quentin. Well, if his 
number were up there was nothing lo be gained by thinking 
about it. 
So the winter passed, and with the spring the men of 
the Mid-Wessex herded in their trenches on either side 
of the Roman road, were troubled with a strange nostalgia. 
Nearly all of them were countrymen. They knew what 
spring would mean in their own homes, where it comes as 
a sudden miracle filling the river valleys and the ridge- 
woods with birdsong, spreading the upland cornfields with 
green blades that mingle with scattered flints to make a 
kind of pale bloom. On the open down plovers would be 
nesting, and larks singing high above the morning mist. 
Even in France the. larks were singing. To Bemerton the 
season was peculiarly poignant : for at the farm in the Adder 
valley, where his people had lived and worked for many 
hundreds of years, this was a season of great busyness. 
He heard often from his father about the progress of the 
lambing, and dreamed of old Burbage, the shepherd, and 
his wheeled hut standing up against the cold skyline of 
the downs, of his thatched fold, and the bleating of lambs 
in the lengthening evenings. Snow fell, making clean and 
"beautiful even that old battlefield. It changed the face of 
war ; but even the snow could not stifle the sense of spring. 
Bemerton wondered, hoping that this would be the last spring 
of the war. He and Chamberlayne groused to one another 
at night, asking why in God's name they were freezing in 
a trench in France staring at St. Quentin. 
The Mid-Wessex moved into billets at Ugny,.a few miles 
behind the lines. There, in a night of March, the German 
guns found them. They tumbled out in the dawn. This, 
It seemed, was a liell of a push. On a front of fifty miles 
Fritz was attacking. Well, there it was. ... A hard 
day's marching, and all the day an inhuman uproar of guns. 
God knows where all the guns came from. For a little time 
they sheltered in the cutting near Marteville. It was like 
old times. "Back to bloody old St. Quentin," said 
t,hamberlayne. Bemerton smiled. Still, it wasn't 
summer. . . . 
An order came through. They left the cutting and moved 
along the Holnon Road through an increasing barrage This 
is_ our counter-attack, he thought. There wasn't much fun 
about 1^ now. Bemerton saw Chamberlayne on' his left 
suddenly sit down. "Poor old Bill," he thought That 
^tlJ''^^n^, ° u^''. '"^H ^^'^ thought, he got a sudden vision 
of the Chamberlayne s sheep dog, Jim, with his mouth open 
and a long red tongue hanging out. Damned funny. 
Yes this was the counter-attack. On he went. Something 
hit his left foot. He must have kicked something violently 
Sorncfhing had torn away part of his boot. ShrapneP Bv 
God he couldn't walk with that. In front of him he saw 
A I ?r'' u ^*' ^"^"*'" cathedral, the damaged pinnacle. 
And then he spun over altogether. Well. 
It didn't last lonj:. There was just one minute of black- 
ness as if some one had switched off the sun. Then the 
IiRht came . . . blazing sunlight. Summer after all. That 
must be wrong . a dream. And yet it couldn't very well 
be a dream There was St. Quentin cathedral in front. 
In .one of those queer flashes of sub-conscious memory he 
How'lonfTf T'I'"1^ ""l '^'^ •^^'"^ 1^''"'^ «"^e before. 
Ho^^ long before?- An hour? ... A hundred years? Yes 
W. \ ^"r^^"^- • • • ^'o- It wouldn't act. He pushed 
the troublesome dream aside; or rather, the solid and 
assuring present reasserted itself. The dream vanished, and 
m Its p ace swarmed in definite physical facts things which 
h could see and hear and feel and smell : the intolerable heat 
uhich tried them even in the shade of the wood; the veiS 
and discomfort of his suit of armour; the homely smelK 
t rS The s" r' ''' 'r^'"''^ P'^"^-'' l^o-- -hich 
he rode. The beast was restless, lashing his Tone tail lo 
quirsurfo?Tim ^^S"''" "T^^ ^'^ "^^'^' ^- ^^ --•' 
quae sup of him. His own horse had been killed with 
many others of the Earl's contingent in the rough border 
SoI'.Tf K^' ^"' Countries, and this beast liad been 
bough for him (or stolen) in the city of Cambrai where 
now, they sa.d, King Philip himself' was lyTng ^ith h s 
grandees and their ladies waiting to hear that his armies 
had done for the French and sacked this stubborn city of 
St. Quentin. Then, they said, the war would be over. 
That, at any rate, was worth thinking of. He was sick 
of these foreign wars, sick of fighting in Flanders for a 
foreign prince and a foreign priesthood, sick of these 
swaggering Spaniards who thought they owned the world, 
and, above all of those black German mercenaries, the 
Schwartzreiters, who were no more than bloody savages. 
.4 breath of wind moved through the oak wood. Even the 
horses sniffed it. And no wonder. In this country, he 
reflected, there was no air. He thought of the high corn- 
land on the downs above the Adder valley, now whitening 
for harvest, and of the great ridge woods on the summits 
that caught the moisture coming in from sea. He thought 
of the cool slides of the river, the green weeds trailing, 
and pike basking in muddy shallows. When he was a boy, 
and not so long ago, he and Will Chamberlayne from the 
Mill would strip and swim in the water above the weir. 
It wpuld be good, he thought, to strip oiT his heavy armour 
now and lie naked on the bank of the Somme River watching 
the white clouds sail overhead. 
From St. Quentin now there capie the dull sound of 
cannon. The English troopers pulled themselves wearily 
to their feet and stood lo their horses. A strangely ragged 
company ; for their clothes were torn and mired with 
campaigning, their beards long and tangled, and beneath 
the weathered skin their faces were grey ; so much the fever 
of the Flemish fens iind lack of food had done for them. 
One great fellow with a long red beard quaked with ague 
as he stood. Some one passed him a leather bottle of 
Burgundian wine. He poured the stuff down his throat with 
unsteady hands. Two others helped him to his saddle. 
"Us can't leave 'ee here, Eddard," they said. "For if 
the French were beaten these German, dftgs of ours are 
like to slit your throat if once we were parted." rfe sat 
up in his saddle with his sword shaking in his hand. 
Again the French cannon boomed ; and now, from the 
left, came the faint patter of the Spanish musketry and a 
distant tumult of shouting. A word was passed along, and 
the English horsemen moved off. "Keep yourselves to the 
woods, "they said, "and closer to the river. The Earl has 
planned to fall upon their flank." 
Through the woods they rode with clinking harness. It 
seemed that they might easily fail in secrecy; and, indeed, 
if the Spaniards and the Germans failed upon the front, 
their adventure must come to nothing". They rode in single 
file, and at their head the Earl himself. For a little while 
they followed, and at last the trees grew thin, and they 
came to the edge of the wood. "Now," thought Bemerton, 
"the time has come." He gripped his sword. The man 
with the red beard rode next to him. His feve< had passed ; 
his face was flushed with wine, and he smiled. The man 
in front held up his hand. They halted. In front of him, 
very near, Bemerton could see the walls of St. Quentin, 
a city of red roofs and grey towers. Before the walls he saw 
the rolling battle. In the centre the musketeers had swept 
a way. The French had broken, and as they ran the Spanish 
pikemen followed after, so that the battlefield was full of 
scattered fighting. Only in one place was the French line 
unmoved, where, on a little rise, a banner still was flying, 
and about it a knot of heavily armoured men, on which the 
following waves of Spanish pikemen split. A fine and war- 
like scene, rich with the black smoke of the Spanish muskets, 
the standard of white and gold, the glint of swords, and 
the sheen of polished armour. 
"This is better than a fit of the ague," laughed the man 
with the red beard ; and Bemerton laughed back at him. 
The shouting, the smoke, and the sound of musketry dis- 
turbed the horses. They chafed on the edge of the wood 
as though they could wait no longer. The Earl waved his 
hand. "Follow," he called, and drove his spurs into his 
horse. They followed. Bemerton was caught up in a 
thunder of hoofs. The' Flemish horse knew the game. 
Before them the groups of fighters scattered or went down. 
The air was full of their cries. "A Herbert, a Herbert," 
they shouted. Straight for the rise and the French standard 
they rode ; and they, too, in all their thunder, were broken 
on that knot of steel. They swept past and reformed. 
Bemerton 's horse trembled and snorted. A spent Spanish 
bullet from the rear flattened itself on his breastplate. 
Again they charged. This time the knot was thinned. 
In the centre of it, beneath the standard, the charge fell 
short of a tall man, in magnificent armour, who waved his 
sword and .shouted : 
"Gare, gare . . . reculez vous,'' he cried; and Bemerton 
knew from the stories which he had heard, that this must 
be no other than Anne de Montmorency, High Constable 
ot France A sword slashed the neck of the Flemish horse. 
It struggled and reared, spouting frothv blood. Bemerton 
