A Fox Under My Cloak Read Free

previously, many of them barefoot, ragged, bearded, and near-delirious.
    Sergeant Douglas said that they were passing through Westoutre , and Phillip told his new friends of the draft that they were for Ypres—the regulars’ “Ee-priss”—all right.
    The battalion turned off at a lesser lane about two kilometres beyond the village, and they saw the wooded slopes of Mont Kemmel rising dark against the hesitant paleness of the eastern sky. The muddy lane led under the hill through Kemmel village to cross-roads, and a wider tram-lined road leading to a distant line of flares rising along the crest of the Wytschaete-Messines ridge, of Hallo’e’en memory.
    A little way on the pavé route they halted; and with relief Phillip learned that No. 1 Company was to be billeted for the night in some sheds and lofts around a farm. Here speculation ceased, when Sergeant Douglas told them that they were taking over part of the line the next day. The Germans, he said, had attacked down south, and the battalion was to remain in support while diversionary attacks were made to relieve the pressure.
    This was cheerful news to Phillip, heard as he rested with others staring at smoky coal flames behind the wall of a farm outbuilding, where black-faced, sweating cooks stirred dixies of skilly. While they stood there, enjoying drowsy warmth, a great white flash followed by a double crack smote them. Some of the draft flinched. Phillip was also startled, but he knew it for a sixty-pounder gun firing down the road.
    “Don’t get the wind up,” he said to Glass, one of his four friends of the draft. “It’s one of our naval guns, a Long Tom, by the double report. They fire lyddite shells, which burst with a sort of nitro-di-oxide smell, a brown-yellow smoke—usually in our own trenches.” He was quite the old soldier.
    *
    In the morning the villages of Wytschaete and Messines were visible at the end of the tree-lined road, about a couple of miles away, at the end of a long and gradual slope. Phillip stared at the scene of the first acceptance, in battle, that life was becomenightmare. The remote skyline villages seemed to have an everlasting remoteness. Somewhere up there lay his friends of the old August days in Charterhouse Square and Bleak Hill, of the time on lines of communication outside Paris in September, and Orleans in October. Baldwin, Elliott, Costello, the Iron Colonel, the three Wallace brothers—all lay up there. He thought back to the day and the night of Hallo’e’en, reliving moments which in memory were without fear, only of deep sadness that they were gone.
    But it was a sunny day; when he looked around him again, he felt hopeful. And with hope was curiosity; he wanted to see everything he could about the war. So down he walked to look at the long slender gun on straked iron wheels, half concealed in a cart-shed beside a cottage, that had fired while they were waiting for the skilly. The gunners told him that they fired only twice every twenty-four hours, usually in the evening, to catch the Alleyman horse transport coming along the road from Warneton. They were still limited to two rounds a day, a bombardier said.
    From the gun he walked on down the lane to look at the lines of mules belonging to Indian soldiers in an orchard. The bark of the trees was gnawn away, with hundreds of tooth-marks nearly an inch wide. The bearded soldiers wore pale blue turbans. They looked, he thought, cold and disheartened, like the mules on the picket line. It seemed a bit of a shame to have brought the Indians to France, when they belonged to a hot country; and the mules too, that had Spanish blood. He decided to be affable to one of the pale Indians.
    “You one-feller, you come from Orleans? Base wallahs, eh? Me help makee your camp, carry wood all day, knock knock wash-house up, savvy?”
    “Yes, sir,” said the Indian soldier, gravely. “We were at Orleans, but for a few days only.”
    “Oh, I see,” said Phillip, and giving