The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep. He was all worn out
by the continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the
dugouts and dazing his brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.
The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform
and of particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face. The
Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received an order, and took a
stick at once and beat up the tired men. For a message had come to the
battery that some English (God punish them!) were making a road at X.
The gun was fired. It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days
when or luck is out. The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British
working party. It did the Germans little good. It did not stop the
deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was driving
misery down like a wedge into their spirits. It did not improve the
temper of the officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered
as acutely as ever under the Sergeant-Major. But it stopped the road
for that day.
I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.
Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to
work; and next day and the day after. Shells came, but went short or
over; the shell holes were neatly patched up; the road went on. Here
and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not many of them were
left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones.
Sometimes the engineers would come: that was when streams were
crossed. The engineers made their bridges, and the infantry working
party went on with the digging and laying down stones. It was
monotonous work. Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath
it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and
thunder. And so the road went on.
They came to a wide river. They went through a great forest. They
passed the ruins of what must have been quite fine towns, big
prosperous towns with universities in them. I saw the infantry working
party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way on from
where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day. And behind
them curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry
going up to the trenches, and going back along it into reserve. They
marched at first, but in a few days they were going up in motors, grey
busses with shuttered windows. And then the guns came along it, miles
and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further off
over the hills. And then one day the cavalry came by. Then stores in
wagons, the thunder muttering further and further away. I saw
farm-carts going down the road at X. And then one day all manner of
horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and women and boys all
going by to X. There was going to be a fair.
And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always,
desolation and thunder. And one day far away from X the road grew very
fine indeed. It was going proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in
like a river; you would not think that it ever remembered duck-boards.
There were great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles blazoned in
stone, and all along each side of the road was a row of statues of
kings. And going down the road towards the palace, past the statues of
the kings, a tired procession was riding, full of the flags of the
Allies. And I looked at the flags in my dream, out of national pride
to see whether we led, or whether France or America. America went
before us, but I could not see the Union Jack in the van nor the
Tricolour either, nor the Stars and Stripes: Belgium led and then
Serbia, they that had suffered most.
And before the flags, and before the generals, I saw marching along on
foot the ghosts of the working party that were killed at X, gazing
about them in admiration as they went, at the great city and at the
palaces. And one man, wondering at the Si�ges All�e, turned round to
the Lance Corporal in charge of the party: ``That is a fine road that
we made, Frank,'' he said.
Read next: Tale 3 - An Imperial Monument
Read previous: Tale 1 - The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood
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