The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (174 page)

‘Shut up,’ said Noël again. ‘Look here, Oswald. We did sow those dragon’s teeth in Randall’s ten-acre meadow, and what do you think has come up?’

‘Toadstools I should think,’ was Oswald’s contemptible rejoinder.

‘They have come up a camp of soldiers,’ said Noël—
armed men
. So you see it
was
history. We have sowed army-seed, just like Cadmus, and it has come up. It was a very wet night. I daresay that helped it along.’

Oswald could not decide which to disbelieve—his brother or his ears. So, disguising his doubtful emotions without a word, he led the way to the bacon and the banqueting hall.

He said nothing about the army-seed then, neither did Noël and H. O. But after the bacon we went into the garden, and then the good elder brother said—

‘Why don’t you tell the others your cock-and-bull story?’

So they did, and their story was received with warm expressions of doubt. It was Dicky who observed—

‘Let’s go and have a squint at Randall’s ten-acre, anyhow. I saw a hare there the other day.’

We went. It is some little way, and as we went, disbelief reigned superb in every breast except Noël’s and H. O.’s, so you will see that even the ready pen of the present author cannot be expected to describe to you his variable sensations when he got to the top of the hill and suddenly saw that his little brothers had spoken the truth. I do not mean that they generally tell lies, but people make mistakes sometimes, and the effect is the same as lies if you believe them.

There
was
a camp there with real tents and soldiers in grey and red tunics. I daresay the girls would have said coats. We stood in ambush, too astonished even to think of lying in it, though of course we know that this is customary. The ambush was the wood on top of the little hill, between Randall’s ten-acre meadow and Sugden’s Waste Wake pasture.

‘There would be cover here for a couple of regiments,’ whispered Oswald, who was, I think, gifted by Fate with the far-seeingness of a born general.

Alice merely said ‘Hist,’ and we went down to mingle with the troops as though by accident, and seek for information.

The first man we came to at the edge of the camp was cleaning a sort of cauldron thing like witches brew bats in.

We went up to him and said, ‘Who are you? Are you English, or are you the enemy?’

‘We’re the enemy,’ he said, and he did not seem ashamed of being what he was. And he spoke English with quite a good accent for a foreigner.

‘The enemy!’ Oswald echoed in shocked tones. It is a terrible thing to a loyal and patriotic youth to see an enemy cleaning a pot in an English field, with English sand, and looking as much at home as if he was in his foreign fastnesses.

The enemy seemed to read Oswald’s thoughts with deadly unerringness. He said—

‘The English are somewhere over on the other side of the hill. They are trying to keep us out of Maidstone.’

After this our plan of mingling with the troops did not seem worth going on with. This soldier, in spite of his unerringness in reading Oswald’s innermost heart, seemed not so very sharp in other things, or he would never have given away his secret plans like this, for he must have known from our accents that we were Britons to the backbone. Or perhaps (Oswald thought this, and it made his blood at once boil and freeze, which our uncle had told us was possible, but only in India), perhaps he thought that Maidstone was already as good as taken and it didn’t matter what he said. While Oswald was debating within his intellect what to say next, and how to say it so as to discover as many as possible of the enemy’s dark secrets, Noël said—

‘How did you get here? You weren’t here yesterday at tea-time.’

The soldier gave the pot another sandy rub, and said—

‘I daresay it does seem quick work—the camp seems as if it had sprung up in the night, doesn’t it?—like a mushroom.’

Alice and Oswald looked at each other, and then at the rest of us. The words ‘sprung up in the night’ seemed to touch a string in every heart.

‘You see,’ whispered Noël, ‘he won’t tell us how he came here.
Now
, is it humbug or history?’

Oswald, after whisperedly requesting his young brother to dry up and not bother, remarked, ‘Then you’re an invading army?’

‘Well,’ said the soldier, ‘we’re a skeleton battalion, as a matter of fact, but we’re invading all right enough.’

And now indeed the blood of the stupidest of us froze, just as the quick-witted Oswald’s had done earlier in the interview. Even H. O. opened his mouth and went the colour of mottled soap; he is so fat that this is the nearest he can go to turning pale. Denny said, ‘But you don’t look like skeletons.’

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—

‘Well, what is it?’

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.’

‘What for?’ said Oswald.

‘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 Noël 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.’

I am sorry to say Daisy said, ‘Never mind, Alice, dear.
We
didn’t sow the nasty things, did we, Dora?’

But Denny told her it was just the same. It was
we
had done it, so long as it was any of us, especially if it got any of us into trouble. Oswald was very pleased to see that the Dentist was beginning to understand the meaning of true manliness, and about the honour of the house of Bastable, though of course he is only a Foulkes. Yet it is something to know he does his best to learn.

If you are very grown-up, or very clever, I daresay you will now have thought of a great many things. If you have you need not say anything, especially if you’re reading this aloud to anybody. It’s no good putting in what you think in this part, because none of us thought anything of the kind at the time.

We simply stood in the road without any of your clever thoughts, filled with shame and distress to think of what might happen owing to the dragon’s teeth being sown. It was a lesson to us never to sow seed without being quite sure what sort it is. This is particularly true of the penny packets, which sometimes do not come up at all, quite unlike dragon’s teeth.

Of course H. O. and Noël were more unhappy than the rest of us. This was only fair.

‘How can we possibly prevent their getting to Maidstone?’ Dickie said. ‘Did you notice the red cuffs on their uniforms? Taken from the bodies of dead English soldiers, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘If they’re the old Greek kind of dragon’s-teeth soldiers, they ought to fight each other to death,’ Noël said; ‘at least, if we had a helmet to throw among them.’

But none of us had, and it was decided that it would be of no use for H. O. to go back and throw his straw hat at them, though he wanted to. Denny said suddenly—

‘Couldn’t we alter the sign-posts, so that they wouldn’t know the way to Maidstone?’

Oswald saw that this was the time for true generalship to be shown.

He said—

‘Fetch all the tools out of your chest—Dicky go too, there’s a good chap, and don’t let him cut his legs with the saw.’ He did once, tumbling over it. ‘Meet us at the cross-roads, you know, where we had the Benevolent Bar. Courage and dispatch, and look sharp about it.’

When they had gone we hastened to the crossroads, and there a great idea occurred to Oswald. He used the forces at his command so ably that in a very short time the board in the field which says ‘No thoroughfare. Trespassers will be prosecuted’ was set up in the middle of the road to Maidstone. We put stones, from a heap by the road, behind it to make it stand up.

Then Dicky and Denny came back, and Dicky shinned up the sign-post and sawed off the two arms, and we nailed them up wrong, so that it said ‘To Maidstone’ on the Dover Road, and ‘To Dover’ on the road to Maidstone. We decided to leave the Trespassers board on the real Maidstone road, as an extra guard.

Then we settled to start at once to warn Maidstone.

Some of us did not want the girls to go, but it would have been unkind to say so. However, there was at least one breast that felt a pang of joy when Dora and Daisy gave out that they would rather stay where they were and tell anybody who came by which was the real road.

‘Because it would be so dreadful if someone was going to buy pigs or fetch a doctor or anything in a hurry and then found they had got to Dover instead of where they wanted to go to,’ Dora said. But when it came to dinner-time they went home, so that they were entirely out of it. This often happens to them by some strange fatalism.

We left Martha to take care of the two girls, and Lady and Pincher went with us. It was getting late in the day, but I am bound to remember no one said anything about their dinners, whatever they may have thought. We cannot always help our thoughts. We happened to know it was roast rabbits and currant jelly that day.

We walked two and two, and sang the ‘British Grenadiers’ and ‘Soldiers of the queen’ so as to be as much part of the British Army as possible. The Cauldron-Man had said the English were the other side of the hill. But we could not see any scarlet anywhere, though we looked for it as carefully as if we had been fierce bulls.

But suddenly we went round a turn in the road and came plump into a lot of soldiers. Only they were not red-coats. They were dressed in grey and silver. And it was a sort of furzy-common place, and three roads branching out. The men were lying about, with some of their belts undone, smoking pipes and cigarettes.

‘It’s not British soldiers,’ Alice said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I’m afraid it’s more enemy. You didn’t sow the army-seed anywhere else, did you, H. O. dear?’

H. O. was positive he hadn’t. ‘But perhaps lots more came up where we did sow them,’ he said; ‘they’re all over England by now very likely.
I
don’t know how many men can grow out of one dragon’s tooth.’

Then Noël said, ‘It was my doing anyhow, and I’m not afraid,’ and he walked straight up to the nearest soldier, who was cleaning his pipe with a piece of grass, and said—

‘Please, are you the enemy?’ The man said—

‘No, young Commander-in-Chief, we’re the English.’

Then Oswald took command. ‘Where is the General?’ he said.

‘We’re out of generals just now, Field-Marshal,’ the man said, and his voice was a gentleman’s voice. ‘Not a single one in stock. We might suit you in majors now—and captains are quite cheap. Competent corporals going for a song. And we have a very nice colonel, too quiet to ride or drive.’

Oswald does not mind chaff at proper times. But this was not one.

‘You seem to be taking it very easy,’ he said with disdainful expression.

‘This
is
an easy,’ said the grey soldier, sucking at his pipe to see if it would draw.

‘I suppose
you
don’t care if the enemy gets into Maidstone or not!’ exclaimed Oswald bitterly. ‘If I were a soldier I’d rather die than be beaten.’

The soldier saluted. ‘Good old patriotic sentiment’ he said, smiling at the heart-felt boy.

But Oswald could bear no more. ‘Which is the Colonel?’ he asked.

‘Over there—near the grey horse.’

‘The one lighting a cigarette?’ H. O. asked.

‘Yes—but I say, kiddie, he won’t stand any jaw. There’s not an ounce of vice about him, but he’s peppery. He might kick out. You’d better bunk.’

‘Better what?’ asked H. O.

‘Bunk, bottle, scoot, skip, vanish, exit,’ said the soldier.

‘That’s what you’d do when the fighting begins,’ said H. O. He is often rude like that—but it was what we all thought, all the same.

The soldier only laughed.

A spirited but hasty altercation among ourselves in whispers ended in our allowing Alice to be the one to speak to the Colonel. It was she who wanted to. ‘However peppery he is he won’t kick a girl,’ she said, and perhaps this was true.

But of course we all went with her. So there were six of us to stand in front of the Colonel. And as we went along we agreed that we would salute him on the word three. So when we got near, Dick said, ‘One, two, three,’ and we all saluted very well—except H. O., who chose that minute to trip over a rifle a soldier had left lying about, and was only saved from falling by a man in a cocked hat who caught him deftly by the back of his jacket and stood him on his legs.

‘Let go, can’t you,’ said H. O. ‘Are you the General?’

Before the Cocked Hat had time to frame a reply, Alice spoke to the Colonel. I knew what she meant to say, because she had told me as we threaded our way among the resting soldiery. What she really said was—

‘Oh, how
can
you!’

‘How can I
what
?’ said the Colonel, rather crossly.

‘Why,
smoke
?’ said Alice.

‘My good children, if you’re an infant Band of Hope, let me recommend you to play in some other backyard,’ said the Cock-Hatted Man.

H. O. said, ‘Band of Hope yourself’—but no one noticed it.

‘We’re
not
a Band of Hope,’ said Noël. ‘We’re British, and the man over there told us you are. And Maidstone’s in danger, and the enemy not a mile off, and you stand
smoking
.’ Noël was standing crying, himself, or something very like it.

‘It’s quite true,’ Alice said.

The Colonel said, ‘Fiddle-de-dee.’