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 Noel 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 Noel'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, Noel 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 Noel, '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.
