XVI

The Battalion had twenty-four hours’ rest at Rupprecht trench, and then pushed on for four days and nights, stealing trenches, capturing patrols, with only a few hours’ sleep,—­snatched by the roadside while their food was being prepared.  They pushed hard after a retiring foe, and almost outran themselves.  They did outrun their provisions; on the fourth night, when they fell upon a farm that had been a German Headquarters, the supplies that were to meet them there had not come up, and they went to bed supperless.

This farmhouse, for some reason called by the prisoners Frau Hulda farm, was a nest of telephone wires; hundreds of them ran out through the walls, in all directions.  The Colonel cut those he could find, and then put a guard over the old peasant who had been left in charge of the house, suspecting that he was in the pay of the enemy.

At last Colonel Scott got into the Headquarters bed, large and lumpy,—­the first one he had seen since he left Arras.  He had not been asleep more than two hours, when a runner arrived with orders from the Regimental Colonel.  Claude was in a bed in the loft, between Gerhardt and Bruger.  He felt somebody shaking him, but resolved that he wouldn’t be disturbed and went on placidly sleeping.  Then somebody pulled his hair,—­so hard that he sat up.  Captain Maxey was standing over the bed.

“Come along, boys.  Orders from Regimental Headquarters.  The Battalion is to split here.  Our Company is to go on four kilometers tonight, and take the town of Beaufort.”

Claude rose.  “The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey, and they had no supper.”

“That can’t be helped.  Tell them we are to be in Beaufort for breakfast.”

Claude and Gerhardt went out to the barn and roused Hicks and his pal, Dell Able.  The men were asleep in dry straw, for the first time in ten days.  They were completely worn out, lost to time and place.  Many of them were already four thousand miles away, scattered among little towns and farms on the prairie.  They were a miserable looking lot as they got together, stumbling about in the dark.

After the Colonel had gone over the map with Captain Maxey, he came out and saw the Company assembled.  He wasn’t going with them, he told them, but he expected them to give a good account of themselves.  Once in Beaufort, they would have a week’s rest; sleep under cover, and live among people for awhile.

The men took the road, some with their eyes shut, trying to make believe they were still asleep, trying to have their agreeable dreams over again, as they marched.  They did not really waken up until the advance challenged a Hun patrol, and sent it back to the Colonel under a one-man guard.  When they had advanced two kilometers, they found the bridge blown up.  Claude and Hicks went in one direction to look for a ford, Bruger and Dell Able in the other, and the men lay down by the roadside and slept heavily.  Just at dawn they reached the outskirts of the village, silent and still.