by E. Nesbit
‘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.’
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 Noël 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,’ Noël 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!’
It was true. The footsteps of the approaching fo
e were now to be heard quite audibly, even by ears in their natural position. The wicked enemy approached. They were marching with a careless swaggeringness that showed how little they suspected the horrible doom which was about to teach them England’s might and supremeness.
Just as the enemy turned the corner so that we could see them, the Colonel shouted—‘Right section, fire!’ and there was a deafening banging.
The enemy’s officer said something, and then the enemy got confused and tried to get into the fields through the hedges. But all was vain. There was firing now from our men, on the left as well as the right. And then our Colonel strode nobly up to the enemy’s Colonel and demanded surrender. He told me so afterwards. His exact words are only known to himself and the other Colonel. But the enemy’s Colonel said, ‘I would rather die than surrender,’ or words to that effect.
Our Colonel returned to his men and gave the order to fix bayonets, and even Oswald felt his manly cheek turn pale at the thought of the amount of blood to be shed. What would have happened can never now be revealed. For at this moment a man on a piebald horse came clattering over a hedge—as carelessly as if the air was not full of lead and steel at all. Another man rode behind him with a lance and a red pennon on it. I think he must have been the enemy’s General coming to tell his men not to throw away their lives on a forlorn hope, for directly he said they were captured the enemy gave in and owned that they were. The enemy’s Colonel saluted and ordered his men to form quarter column again. I should have thought he would have had about enough of that myself.
He had now given up all thought of sullen resistance to the bitter end. He rolled a cigarette for himself, and had the foreign cheek to say to our Colonel—
‘By Jove, old man, you got me clean that time! Your scouts seem to have marked us down uncommonly neatly.’
It was a proud moment when our Colonel laid his military hand on Oswald’s shoulder and said—
‘This is my chief scout’ which were high words, but not undeserved, and Oswald owns he felt red with gratifying pride when he heard them.
‘So you are the traitor, young man,’ said the wicked Colonel, going on with his cheek.
Oswald bore it because our Colonel had, and you should be generous to a fallen foe, but it is hard to be called a traitor when you haven’t.
He did not treat the wicked Colonel with silent scorn as he might have done, but he said—
‘We aren’t traitors. We are the Bastables and one of us is a Foulkes. We only mingled unsuspected with the enemy’s soldiery and learned the secrets of their acts, which is what Baden-Powell always does when the natives rebel in South Africa; and Denis Foulkes thought of altering the sign-posts to lead the foe astray. And if we did cause all this fighting, and get Maidstone threatened with capture and all that, it was only because we didn’t believe Greek things could happen in Great Britain and Ireland, even if you sow dragon’s teeth, and besides, some of us were not asked about sowing them.’
Then the Cocked-Hatted One led his horse and walked with us and made us tell him all about it, and so did the Colonel. The wicked Colonel listened too, which was only another proof of his cheek.
And Oswald told the tale in the modest yet manly way that some people think he has, and gave the others all the credit they deserved. His narration was interrupted no less than four times by shouts of ‘Bravo!’ in which the enemy’s Colonel once more showed his cheek by joining. By the time the story was told we were in sight of another camp. It was the British one this time. The Colonel asked us to have tea in his tent, and it only shows the magnanimosity of English chivalry in the field of battle that he asked the enemy’s Colonel too. With his usual cheek he accepted. We were jolly hungry.
When everyone had had as much tea as they possibly could, the Colonel shook hands with us all, and to Oswald he said—
‘Well, good-bye, my brave scout. I must mention your name in my dispatches to the War Office.’
H. O. interrupted him to say, ‘His name’s Oswald Cecil Bastable, and mine is Horace Octavius.’ I wish H. O. would learn to hold his tongue. No one ever knows Oswald was christened Cecil as well, if he can possibly help it. You didn’t know it till now.
‘Mr Oswald Bastable,’ the Colonel went on—he had the decency not to take any notice of the ‘Cecil’—‘you would be a credit to any regiment. No doubt the War Office will reward you properly for what you have done for your country. But meantime, perhaps, you’ll accept five shillings from a grateful comrade-in-arms.’ Oswald felt heart-felt sorry to wound the good Colonel’s feelings, but he had to remark that he had only done his duty, and he was sure no British scout would take five bob for doing that. ‘And besides,’ he said, with that feeling of justice which is part of his young character, ‘it was the others just as much as me.’
‘Your sentiments, Sir,’ said the Colonel who was one of the politest and most discerning colonels I ever saw, ‘your sentiments do you honour. But, Bastables all, and—and non-Bastables’ (he couldn’t remember Foulkes; it’s not such an interesting name as Bastable, of course)—‘at least you’ll accept a soldier’s pay?’
‘Lucky to touch it, a shilling a day!’ Alice and Denny said together. And the Cocked-Hatted Man said something about knowing your own mind and knowing your own Kipling.
‘A soldier,’ said the Colonel, ‘would certainly be lucky to touch it. You see there are deductions for rations. Five shillings is exactly right, deducting twopence each for six teas.’
This seemed cheap for the three cups of tea and the three eggs and all the strawberry jam and bread-and-butter Oswald had had, as well as what the others ate, and Lady’s and Pincher’s teas, but I suppose soldiers get things cheaper than civilians, which is only right.
Oswald took the five shillings then, there being no longer any scruples why he should not.
Just as we had parted from the brave Colonel and the rest we saw a bicycle coming. It was Albert’s uncle. He got off and said—
‘What on earth have you been up to? What were you doing with those volunteers?’
We told him the wild adventures of the day, and he listened, and then he said he would withdraw the word volunteers if we liked.
But the seeds of doubt were sown in the breast of Oswald. He was now almost sure that we had made jolly fools of ourselves without a moment’s pause throughout the whole of this eventful day. He said nothing at the time, but after supper he had it out with Albert’s uncle about the word which had been withdrawn.
Albert’s uncle said, of course, no one could be sure that the dragon’s teeth hadn’t come up in the good old-fashioned way, but that, on the other hand, it was barely possible that both the British and the enemy were only volunteers having a field-day or sham fight, and he rather thought the Cocked-Hatted Man was not a general, but a doctor. And the man with a red pennon carried behind him might have been the umpire.
Oswald never told the others a word of this. Their young breasts were all panting with joy because they had saved their country; and it would have been but heartless unkindness to show them how silly they had been. Besides, Oswald felt he was much too old to have been so taken in—if he had been. Besides, Albert’s uncle did say that no one could be sure about the dragon’s teeth.
The thing that makes Oswald feel most that, perhaps, the whole thing was a beastly sell, was that we didn’t see any wounded. But he tries not to think of this. And if he goes into the army when he grows up, he will not go quite green. He has had experience of the arts of war and the tented field. And a real colonel has called him ‘Comrade-in-Arms,’ which is exactly what Lord Roberts called his own soldiers when he wrote home about them.
CHAPTER 14
ALBERT’S UNCLE’s GRANDMOTHER; OR, THE LONG-LOST
The shadow of the termination now descended in sable thunder-clouds upon our devoted nobs. As Albert’s uncle said, ‘School now
gaped for its prey.’ In a very short space of time we should be wending our way back to Blackheath, and all the variegated delightfulness of the country would soon be only preserved in memory’s faded flowers. (I don’t care for that way of writing very much. It would be an awful swot to keep it up—looking out the words and all that.)
To speak in the language of everyday life, our holiday was jolly nearly up. We had had a ripping time, but it was all but over. We really did feel sorry—though, of course, it was rather decent to think of getting back to Father and being able to tell the other chaps about our raft, and the dam, and the Tower of Mystery, and things like that.
When but a brief time was left to us, Oswald and Dicky met by chance in an apple-tree. (That sounds like ‘consequences,’ but it is mere truthfulness.) Dicky said—
‘Only four more days.’
Oswald said, ‘Yes.’
‘There’s one thing,’ Dickie said, ‘that beastly society. We don’t want that swarming all over everything when we get home. We ought to dissolve it before we leave here.’
The following dialogue now took place:
Oswald—‘Right you are. I always said it was piffling rot.’
Dicky—‘So did I.’
Oswald—‘Let’s call a council. But don’t forget we’ve jolly well got to put our foot down.’
Dicky assented, and the dialogue concluded with apples.
The council, when called, was in but low spirits. This made Oswald’s and Dicky’s task easier. When people are sunk in gloomy despair about one thing, they will agree to almost anything about something else. (Remarks like this are called philosophic generalizations, Albert’s uncle says.) Oswald began by saying—
‘We’ve tried the society for being good in, and perhaps it’s done us good. But now the time has come for each of us to be good or bad on his own, without hanging on to the others.’
‘The race is run by one and one,
