ut the knees and in the small of his back was absolute torture.
Resmith told him to ride without stirrups and dangle his legs. The
relief was real, but only temporary. And the Battery moved on at the
horribly monotonous, tiring walk. Epsom was incredibly distant. George
gave up hope of Epsom; and he was right to do so, for Epsom never came.
The Battery had taken a secondary road to the left which climbed slowly
to the Downs. At the top of this road, under the railway bridge, just
before fields ceased to be enclosed, stood the two girls. Their bicycles
leaned against the brick wall. They had taken off their mackintoshes,
and it was plain from their clinging coloured garments that they too
were utterly drenched. They laughed no more. Over the open Downs the
wind was sweeping the rain in front of it; and the wind was the night
wind, for the sky had begun to darken into dusk. The Battery debouched
into a main road which seemed full of promise, but left it again within
a couple of hundred yards, and was once more on the menacing, high,
naked Downs, with a wide and desolate view of unfeatured plains to the
north. The bugles sounded sharply in the wet air, and the Battery, now
apparently alone in the world, came to a halt. George dropped off his
horse. A multiplicity of orders followed. Amorphous confusion was
produced out of a straight line. This was the bivouacking ground. And
there was nothing--nothing but the track by which they had arrived, and
the Downs, and a distant blur to the west in the shape of the Epsom
Grand Stand, and the heavy, ceaseless rain, and the threat of the
fast-descending night. According to the theory of the Divisional Staff a
dump furnished by the Army Service Corps ought to have existed at a spot
corresponding to the final letter in the words 'Burgh Heath' on the map,
but the information quickly became general that no such dump did in
practice exist. To George the situation was merely incredible. He knew
that for himself there was only one reasonable course of conduct. He
ought to have a boiling bath, go to bed with his dressing-gown over his
pyjamas, and take a full basin of hot bread-and-milk adulterated by the
addition of brandy--and sleep. Horses and men surged perilously around
him. The anarchical disorder, however, must have been less acute than he
imagined, for a soldier appeared and took away his horse; he let the
reins slip from his dazed hand. The track had been transformed into a
morass of