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The orders returned were that we were to stay in our present position till next morning, so that night we crept into any hole we could find, cowsheds, cart-houses, and all kinds of farmstead buildings, for shelter, and I never remember a worse night in all the Peninsular war, for the rain descended in torrents, mixed with fearful thunder and lightning, and seeming to foretell the fate of the following morning, the 18th, which again happened to be Sunday.
A large part of the American forces were billeted in the weathered, age-old little villages of the Gondrecourt area. They slept in barns, haylofts, cowsheds and even in pig sties. The roads were mere ditches running knee deep in sticky, clogging mud.
The farm yard, with the cowsheds, barn, and hay stack were close in front, with only a narrow strip of garden between, for there was not much heed paid to flowers, and few kitchen vegetables were grown in those days, only a few potherbs round the door, and a sweet-brier bush by the window.
For though Dickie adhered valiantly to his good resolutions going out with the second lot of horses between ten and eleven o'clock, riding on to Banister's farm to inspect the new barn and cowsheds in course of erection, then hurrying down to Sandyfield Street and listening to long and heated arguments regarding a right-of-way reported to exist across the meadows skirting the river just above the bridge, a right strongly denied by the present occupier.
That she was challenged by a sentry ant about as big to her as a bulldog to us that the sentry gave the alarm, that the guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.
Half a mile beyond were two other temples both crowded with refugees and their goods. Hundreds of families were seeking shelter in every little house beside the road and were overflowing into the cowsheds and pigpens. At six o'clock we stood on the summit of the hill overlooking the city and half an hour later were clambering up the ladder over the high wall of the compound, just behind Dr.
There it lay below, ramshackle and desolate, a rough wall around; flanked by outbuildings barn and cowsheds. The section rode down. The stoep led to a shuttered front. There was no sign of life. The moonlight blazed full on it. They dismounted, tethered their horses behind the wall, and entered the yard. The place was deserted, derelict not even a cat.
There is a pleasant irony in being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward.
While the others were going through the splendid stables and cowsheds, kept like a queen's parlour, he and the pretty girl were playing at bob-cherry in the saloon, to the scandal of Yerkes, who, with the honour of the car and the C.P.R. and Canada itself on his shoulders, could not bear that any of his charges should shuffle out of the main item in the official programme.
And yet it was the time of day when one usually sees housewives coming out of the cowsheds, with their sleeves tucked up and their feet in clogs, carrying pails full of fresh milk the time when the heavy carts and reaping machines lumber slowly along the brown roads on their way to the day's work.
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