The Wouldbegoods (24 page)

‘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.'

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 Noel were more unhappy than the rest of us. This was only fair.

‘How can we possibly prevent their getting to Maidstone?' Dicky 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,' Noel 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 signposts, 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 crossroads, 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 dinnertime 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 Noel 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 heartfelt 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 Cocked-Hatted Man.

H.O. said, ‘Band of Hope yourself,' – but no one noticed it.

‘We're
not
a Band of Hope,' said Noel. ‘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
.' Noel was standing crying, himself, or something very like it.

‘It's quite true,' Alice said.

The Colonel said, ‘Fiddle-de-dee.'

But the Cocked-Hatted Man said, ‘What was the enemy like?' We told him exactly. And even the Colonel then owned there might be something in it.

‘Can you show me the place where they are on the map?' he asked.

‘Not on the map, we can't,' said Dicky – ‘at least, I don't think so, but on the ground we could. We could take you there in a quarter of an hour.'

The Cocked-Hatted One looked at the Colonel, who returned his scrutiny, then he shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, we've got to do something,' he said, as if to himself. ‘Lead on, Macduff.'

The Colonel roused his soldiery from their stupor of pipes by words of command which the present author is sorry he can't remember.

Then he bade us boys lead the way. I tell you it felt fine, marching at the head of a regiment. Alice got a lift on the Cocked-Hatted One's horse. It was a red-roan steed of might, exactly as if it had been in a ballad. They call a grey-roan a ‘blue' in South Africa, the Cocked-Hatted One said.

We led the British Army by unfrequented lanes till we got to the gate of Sugden's Waste Wake pasture. Then the Colonel called a whispered halt, and choosing two of us to guide him, the dauntless and discerning commander went on, on foot, with an orderly. He chose Dicky and Oswald as guides. So we led him to the ambush, and
we went through it as quietly as we could. But twigs do crackle and snap so when you are reconnoitring, or anxious to escape detection for whatever reason.

Our Colonel's orderly crackled most. If you're not near enough to tell a colonel by the crown and stars on his shoulder-strap, you can tell him by the orderly behind him, like ‘follow my leader'.

‘Look out!' said Oswald in a low but commanding whisper, ‘the camp's down in that field. You can see if you take a squint through this gap.'

The speaker took a squint himself as he spoke, and drew back, baffled beyond the power of speech. While he was struggling with his baffledness the British Colonel had his squint. He also drew back, and said a word that he must have known was not right – at least when he was a boy.

‘I don't care,' said Oswald, ‘they were there this morning. White tents like mushrooms, and an enemy cleaning a cauldron.'

‘With sand,' said Dicky.

‘That's most convincing,' said the Colonel, and I did not like the way he said it.

‘I say,' Oswald said, ‘let's get to the top corner of the ambush – the wood, I mean. You can see the crossroads from there.'

We did, and quickly, for the crackling of branches no longer dismayed our almost despairing spirits.

We came to the edge of the wood, and Oswald's patriotic heart really did give a jump, and he cried, ‘There they are, on the Dover Road.'

Our miscellaneous signboard had done its work.

‘By Jove, young un, you're right! And in quarter column, too! We've got em on toast – on toast – egad!' I never heard anyone not in a book say ‘egad' before, so I saw something really out of the way was indeed up.

The Colonel was a man of prompt and decisive action. He sent the orderly to tell the Major to advance two companies on the left flank and take cover. Then we led him back through the wood the nearest way, because he said he must rejoin the main body at once. We found the main body very friendly with Noel and H.O. and the others, and Alice was talking to the Cocked-Hatted One as if she had known him all her life.

‘I think he's a general in disguise,' Noel said. ‘He's been giving us chocolate out of a pocket in his saddle.'

Oswald thought about the roast rabbit then – and he is not ashamed to own it – yet he did not say a word. But Alice is really not a bad sort. She had saved two bars of chocolate for him and Dicky. Even in war girls can sometimes be useful in their humble way.

The Colonel fussed about and said, ‘Take cover there!' and everybody hid in the ditch, and the horses and the Cocked Hat, with Alice, retreated down the road out of sight. We were in the ditch too. It was muddy – but nobody thought of their boots in that perilous moment. It seemed a long time we were crouching there. Oswald began to feel the water squelching in his boots, so we held our breath and listened. Oswald laid his ear to the road like a Red Indian. You would not do this in time of peace, but when your country is in danger you care but little about keeping your ears clean. His backwoods'
strategy was successful. He rose and dusted himself and said – ‘They're coming!'