Here the Captain had a short break from his inside job, leaving another officer to look after that and accompanying the General on horseback to a conference with various Brigadiers, Colonels, and Commanding Officers. The ride was too wet to be pleasant, and at no time could a better pace than a jog trot be made because on the road there was too much horse, foot, and wheeled traffic, and off the road in the swimming fields it took the horses all their time to keep their feet.
The conference was held under the remaining quarter-roof of a shell-smashed farm, and the Captain listened and made notes in a damp book, afterwards accompanying the General on a ride round to where something could be seen of the position, and back to H.Q. Here, under the General’s direction in consultation with the Brigade Major, he elaborated and extended his notes, drafted detailed directions for a number of minor moves next day, and translated them into terms of map-reference language, and a multitude of details of roads to be followed by different units, billeting areas, rationing, and refilling points, and so on.
He made a hasty, tinned lunch, and at the General’s request set out to find one of the Battalion Headquarters and there meet some C.O.s and make clear to them certain points of the dispositions arranged. He went in a motor, sped on his way by the cheerful information of the aide that the town through which he must pass had been under “a deuce of a hot fire” all day, had its streets full of Jack Johnson holes, and was in a continual state of blowing up, falling down, or being burnt out. “I was through there this morning,” said the aide, “and I tell you it was warmish. Sentry outside on the road wanted to stop me at first; said he’d orders to warn everybody it wasn’t safe. Wasn’t safe,” repeated the youth, chuckling, “Lord, after I’d been through there I’d have given that sentry any sort of a certificate of truthfulness. It was _not_ safe.”
The Captain went off with his motor skating from ditch to ditch down the greasy road. The guns were rumbling and banging up in front, and as the car bumped and slithered nearer to the town the Captain could hear the long yelling whistle and the deep rolling crashes of heavy shells falling somewhere in it. He too was stopped at the outskirts by a sentry who held up his hand to the driver, and then came and parleyed with the Captain through the window. The Captain impatiently cut his warning short. There was no other road that would take him near the point he desired to reach; he must go through the town; he must ride since he could not spare time to walk. He climbed out and mounted beside the driver, with some instinctive and vaguely formed ideas in his mind that if the driver were hit he might have to take the wheel, that the car might be upset and pin him underneath, that he might be able to assist in picking a course through rubbish and shell-holes, to jump out and clear any slight obstruction from in front of the wheels. The car ran on slowly into the town. Decidedly the aide had been right, except that “warmish” was a mild word for the state of affairs. The Germans were flinging shells into the town as if they meant to destroy it utterly. The main street through was littered with bricks and tiles and broken furniture; dead horses were sprawled in it, some limp and new killed with the blood still running from their wounds, others with their four legs sticking out post-stiff in the air; in several places there were broken-down carts, in one place a regular mass of them piled up and locked in a confused tangle of broken wheels, splintered shafts, cut harness, and smashed woodwork, their contents spilled out anyhow and mixed up inextricably with the wreckage.