‘You’re the bloody fool who is going to get us all in the mush,’ he said, in a rage quite equal to their own. ‘I’m not going to tell you twice. You take up your kit, and get down that bloody ladder quick.’

‘What’d she want… ?’

Madame advanced again with that purring hiss.

‘Are you going?’ said Bourne, the last strand of his control wearing thin. ‘There’s your bloody pack.’

He threw the pack down the ladder, and grumbling and arguing, Humphreys descended after it. They all had their hackles up by now, and Bourne told Shem and Martlow to get down with an air of curt authority. The women were flushed with triumph, but they were inclined to look on Bourne with a favourable eye, so he approached Madame again, and asked her if she had no other place where they might hide themselves, for that day, and the next, perhaps even for the third. At last she led him across the yard, and showed him a small room with a cement floor. It may have been a dairy, or a store-room of some kind, and it had two doors, one going out at the side of the house on to a narrow strip of grass bounded by an unkempt hedge with fields beyond; and the other into a passage, on the other side of which the military policeman had his lodging.

Bourne was satisfied. He made sure that Madame intended no further move against Humphreys, and excused him as well as he could. She would not have Humphreys in the house, but said he might remain where he was. Then Bourne went back to the stables, and telling Humphreys that he would probably be all right where he was, that he could please himself whether he stayed there or not, but that if he went back to the loft Madame would almost certainly inform the policeman who was billeted there, he took Shem and Martlow to the house with him. Then he asked Madame to let them have some coffee, and paid her for it. With the coffee they drank a little of the fast-dwindling, but carefully hoarded whisky. They heard the military policeman return at twelve o’clock. They could keep track of his movements more easily now, and aired themselves outside the house when he went out in the afternoon. They were glad when the battalion returned at four o’clock, and they could slip out and mingle with the men.

The second day was pleasanter, as they took more chances, getting out into the fields; and Bourne, after stalking the policeman until he saw him well on the road to Vincly, turned back and bought a bottle of wine at one of the estaminets to eke out their whiskey, of which they only had a tot each left. On that errand he ran into Evans, now servant to the new Colonel.

‘Lookin’ for trouble?’ Evans inquired, grinning. Bourne gave him a drink, and learned that the battalion would carry out the same practice the next day, unless it rained, but as there were no facilities for drying the men’s clothes, they wouldn’t risk a wetting.