CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Summons Comes for Mr Standfast

I slept for one and three-quarter hours that night, and when I awoke I seemed to emerge from deeps of slumber which had lasted for days.  That happens sometimes after heavy fatigue and great mental strain.  Even a short sleep sets up a barrier between past and present which has to be elaborately broken down before you can link on with what has happened before.  As my wits groped at the job some drops of rain splashed on my face through the broken roof.  That hurried me out-of-doors.  It was just after dawn and the sky was piled with thick clouds, while a wet wind blew up from the southwest.  The long-prayed-for break in the weather seemed to have come at last.  A deluge of rain was what I wanted, something to soak the earth and turn the roads into water-courses and clog the enemy transport, something above all to blind the enemy’s eyes . . .  For I remembered what a preposterous bluff it all had been, and what a piteous broken handful stood between the Germans and their goal.  If they knew, if they only knew, they would brush us aside like flies.

As I shaved I looked back on the events of yesterday as on something that had happened long ago.  I seemed to judge them impersonally, and I concluded that it had been a pretty good fight.  A scratch force, half of it dog-tired and half of it untrained, had held up at least a couple of fresh divisions . . .  But we couldn’t do it again, and there were still some hours before us of desperate peril.  When had the Corps said that the French would arrive? . . .  I was on the point of shouting for Hamilton to get Wake to ring up Corps Headquarters, when I remembered that Wake was dead.  I had liked him and greatly admired him, but the recollection gave me scarcely a pang.  We were all dying, and he had only gone on a stage ahead.

There was no morning strafe, such as had been our usual fortune in the past week.  I went out-of-doors and found a noiseless world under the lowering sky.  The rain had stopped falling, the wind of dawn had lessened, and I feared that the storm would be delayed.  I wanted it at once to help us through the next hours of tension.  Was it in six hours that the French were coming?  No, it must be four.  It couldn’t be more than four, unless somebody had made an infernal muddle.  I wondered why everything was so quiet.  It would be breakfast time on both sides, but there seemed no stir of man’s presence in that ugly strip half a mile off.  Only far back in the German hinterland I seemed to hear the rumour of traffic.

An unslept and unshaven figure stood beside me which revealed itself as Archie Roylance.