Behind the Lines Read Free

France.
    The road was white and dusty and slashed by the blue shadows of the bordering trees, but where it slid downthe opposite slope towards him and disappeared into the hollow to prepare for its sudden swoop out of the dip, something long, narrow and dark like a worm was crawling. No movement was perceptible, though little pin-points of light scintillated from it from time to time; but moving it was, for its worm-like length lessened till it was swallowed up in the hollow and the road was white and bare again.
    Somewhere beneath the remote pale vault an invisible aeroplane droned lazily. Distantly, where the gauzy towers and chimneys of a small town sprouted in the eastern haze, rumbling explosions broke the summer stillness. But they were remote beneath the withdrawn vault. The warm, wide-spreading landscape soothed them and took them to itself.
    A faint but increasing rumble became audible, and presently the jingling music of metal striking upon metal and the klipity-klop of horses’ hoofs emerged from the rolling undercurrent of sounds. A man in khaki rose above the white horizon of the road with an unfamiliar bobbing motion that was absurd till one saw that he was riding a glossy chestnut charger. Behind him came other horses in pairs, a rider to each pair, their necks stretched out and their shoulders lunging rhythmically to the strain. Six of them in pairs, and behind rumbled a field gun painted service green. More horses and more guns followed. The distant worm had disclosed itself. It was a battery of field guns, B Battery, on the march.
    The moving column was stippled with sunlight that striped the road between the trees, and as man and beastand gun passed through these yellow bars, button, bit, and polished breech-block glittered like a heliograph. The turn-out would have passed the eye of an inspecting general. Even head and drag ropes were as white as snow. But this was no foppish, Bond Street battery. The men wore cloth service caps, but grey painted steel helmets hung behind the saddles, and a jagged twisted gun shield and twinkling points on gun and limber, where the naked steel showed through the bruised paint, were scars that spit and polish could not hide.
    But the battery looked well, especially to the eye of a gunner—to the eye of Rawley. And the two leading guns were those of his own section, the spear point of his particular little force.
    He glanced back at the cobwebby towers and chimneys in the distant haze, and then again at the battery. It was good to feel the moving flanks of a horse between one’s knees on this summer afternoon, good to be in France amid the “real thing,” good to be a subaltern of B Battery.
    The Major rode up from the rear of the column, his black mare cantering gracefully over the turf bordering the road. He dropped into a walk beside Rawley.
    â€œAbout another five kilometres,” he said with a nod towards an iron sign-post, white embossed letters on a blue ground.
    Major Cane was a young man, he could not have been more than a year older than Rawley. He was a regular, and B Battery was his first command. He wore the tricolourMons ribbon and the white and purple of the Military Cross that he had won on the Somme.
    â€œIt is only a few kilometres from Doullens, isn’t it?” asked Rawley.
    â€œAbout ten,” answered Cane.
    â€œMuch of a place?” inquired Rawley.
    â€œWhich? Doullens? Not bad. Smallish—nothing like Amiens, ye’know; but one can get a passable meal there.” He leaned forward and patted the black glossy neck of his mare. “Want to go joy ridin’, Rawley?”
    â€œWell I haven’t seen much of France yet,” answered Rawley; “and there are one or two things I want from Ordnance.”
    â€œYou can go in tomorrow,” said Cane. “I’m going to give the men a day off. You might bring me a couple of collars, and I expect the mess will want one or two things.”
    He