The soldier stared, then he laughed and said, ‘Ah, that’s the padding in our tunics. You should see us in the grey dawn taking our morning bath in a bucket.’ It was a dreadful picture for the imagination. A skeleton, with its bones all loose most likely, bathing anyhow in a pail. There was a silence while we thought it over.
Now, ever since the cleaning-cauldron soldier had said that about taking Maidstone, Alice had kept on pulling at Oswald’s jacket behind, and he had kept on not taking any notice. But now he could not stand it any longer, so he said--
Alice drew him aside, or rather, she pulled at his jacket so that he nearly fell over backwards, and then she whispered, ‘Come along, don’t stay parlaying with the foe. He’s only talking to you to gain time.’
‘Why, so that we shouldn’t warn the other army, you silly,’ Alice said, and Oswald was so upset by what she said, that he forgot to be properly angry with her for the wrong word she used.
‘But we ought to warn them at home,’ she said--’ suppose the Moat House was burned down, and all the supplies commandeered for the foe?’
Alice turned boldly to the soldier. ‘DO you burn down farms?’ she asked.
‘Well, not as a rule,’ he said, and he had the cheek to wink at Oswald, but Oswald would not look at him. ‘We’ve not burned a farm since--oh, not for years.’
‘A farm in Greek history it was, I expect,’ Denny murmured. ‘Civilized warriors do not burn farms nowadays,’ Alice said sternly, ‘whatever they did in Greek times. You ought to know that.’
The soldier said things had changed a good deal since Greek times.
So we said good morning as quickly as we could: it is proper to be polite even to your enemy, except just at the moments when it has really come to rifles and bayonets or other weapons.
The soldier said ‘So long!’ in quite a modern voice, and we retraced our footsteps in silence to the ambush--I mean the wood. Oswald did think of lying in the ambush then, but it was rather wet, because of the rain the night before, that H. O. said had brought the army-seed up. And Alice walked very fast, saying nothing but ‘Hurry up, can’t you!’ and dragging H. O. by one hand and Noel by the other. So we got into the road.
Then Alice faced round and said, ‘This is all our fault. If we hadn’t sowed those dragon’s teeth there wouldn’t have been any invading army.’