“T——­, old chap,” I said, “Peter’ll be a great man some day.”

Peter’s father said nothing, but his eyes grew misty.  Perhaps he was thinking of that lonely grave in the distant plains of the Deccan where Peter’s mother sleeps.

XVII

THREE TRAVELLERS

(October 1914)

My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon.  It was due at Calais at eight o’clock the same evening.  But it soon became apparent that something was amiss with our journey—­we crawled along at a pace which barely exceeded six miles an hour.  At every culvert, guarded by its solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath.  As we approached Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight.  One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor.  It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost.  We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a Japanese print.  Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his half-naked body.  Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate ministries a hasty dressing.  In the next carriage the black face of a wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight.  Ahead of us an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had passed, conveying fresh troops.  Then I knew.  The Germans, hovering like a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce battle was in progress.  The news of it had travelled by some mysterious telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil.  They looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we passed, no hand waved an exuberant greeting.  In the twilight we had already seen red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the grass, digging trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising a wire footbridge across the river.  The contagion of suspense was in the air,—­you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.

“Shall we get to Calais?” I asked.

“Bon Dieu!  I know not,” was the reply of the harassed guard.

We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M.  Calais at last!  I joyfully exclaimed.  But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were headed off to Dunkirk.  It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no food since noon of yesterday.  But my thoughts