“What’s that?”

He took a long pull at his tea before he replied quietly,—­“Another division across the Marne.”

Then he went on as if there had been no interruption:—­

“This Yorkshire regiment has had hard luck.  Only one other regiment in the Expedition has had worse.  They have marched from the Belgian frontier, and they have been in four big actions in the retreat—­Mons, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, and La Fere.  Saint-Quentin was pretty rough luck.  We went into the trenches a full regiment.  We came out to retreat again with four hundred men—­and I left my younger brother there.”

I gasped; I could not find a word to say.  He did not seem to feel it necessary that I should.  He simply winked his eyelids, stiffened his stern mouth, and went right on; and I forgot all about the Uhlans:—­

“At La Fere we lost our commissary on the field.  It was burned, and these lads have not had a decent feed since—­that was three days ago.  We have passed through few towns since, and those were evacuated,—­drummed out and fruit from the orchards on the roadsides is about all they have had—­hardly good feed for a marching army in such hot weather.  Besides, we were moving pretty fast—­but in order—­to get across the Marne, toward which we have been drawing the Germans, and in every one of these battles we have been fighting with one man to their ten.”

I asked him where the Germans were.

“Can’t say,” he replied.

“And the French?”

“No idea.  We’ve not seen them—­yet.  We understood that we were to be reinforced at Saint-Quentin by a French detachment at four o’clock.  They got there at eleven—­the battle was over—­and lost.  But these boys gave a wonderful account of themselves, and in spite of the disaster retreated in perfect order.”

Then he told me that at the last moment he ordered his company to lie close in the trench and let the Germans come right up to them, and not to budge until he ordered them to give them what they hate—­the bayonet.  The Germans were within a few yards when a German automobile carrying a machine gun bore down on them and discovered their position, but the English sharpshooters picked off the five men the car carried before they could fire a shot, and after that it was every man for himself—­what the French call “sauve qui peut.”

The Uhlans came back to my mind, and it seemed to me a good time to ask him what he was doing here.  Oddly enough, in spite of the several shocks I had had, and perhaps because of his manner, I was able to do it as if it was the sort of tea-table conversation to which I had always been accustomed.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Waiting for orders,” he answered.

“And for Uhlans?”

“Oh,” replied he, “if incidentally while we are sitting down here to rest, we could rout out a detachment of German cavalry, which our aeroplane tells us crossed the Marne ahead of us, we would like to.  Whether this is one of those flying squads they are so fond of sending ahead, just to do a little terrorizing, or whether they escaped from the battle of La Fere, we don’t know.  I fancy the latter, as they do not seem to have done any harm or to have been too anxious to be seen.”