Blind Alley
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK TWO AMONG THE YAHOOS I A Certain discontent had invaded Sir Hugh in these two months. Things were going well enough, but not as well as he had come to hope. Steadily, every five or six days, there was a push at some point on the Somme; little places like Fricourt, like Trones Wood, were suddenly crowned with importance by the newspapers, and a wobbly, black line showed progress on the large-scale maps. Unfortunately, Sir Hugh was one of those people who like the truth, better than exultation; so he also looked at the small scale maps, and he could not deny that on those the wobbly line hardly went forward at all. Yes, he knew; Belloc, Colonel Maude, and their tribe were continually educating him in the difficulties of breaking through, persuading him that every yard now was worth ten yards once upon a
...time, and resolutely cheering him up when we did not advance by telling him it was all right if only we killed Germans. It annoyed him rather that the newspapers should also assume that in so doing we were killing no Englishmen; it also annoyed him to be told that when the Germans attacked and succeeded, they were wiped out, while when we attacked and succeeded, somehow or other hardly anybody was killed. This seemed to clash with the Roll of Honour. It was not that he lacked faith in the ultimate issue,for in that month of July, 1916, his attention was drawn to strange corners of Europe, to other wobbly lines on the Isonzo, in Poland, where the Russians were breaking through at Lutsk, pounding Austria, capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners, while the Italians were magically scaling giant hills, and even entering Gorizia, a town. Only it all seemed so slow and so far. Russia, no doubt, was the steam-roller, but a steam-roller was not a swift method of locomotion...
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