R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days Page B

Hamel offensive. Farther south, in the Chemin des Dames area, the French were still taking a hammering and there were some spectacular German advances but these, David assured them, would soon peter out, as all offensives did in the nonstop slogging match. More and more Americans were landing in France, and the general pattern of the summer fighting was becoming clearer every day. 'I think Ludendorff may have shot his bolt by the time you get back here in September,' he said, cautiously, but then Cooper reminded him that most of the Sixth would not be returning for the autumn term, and all he could do was offer up a prayer that somehow these babies would be kept in training bases until the promised all-fronts counter-attack was launched.
    The climax came, for David Powlett-Jones, on the eleventh day of August, just before he set off on his belated visit to his mother at Pontnewydd. Screaming headlines announced the breaching of the Hindenburg Line and unheard-of advances by the British in most of their sectors, places where, only a year ago, the gain of a few hundred yards of quagmire was won at the cost of a hundred thousand casualties.
    He took Northcliffe's journal up to Herries's thinking post and read it very carefully, his heart-beats quickening when he came upon the familiar name of some devastated village where no building was more than a foot high, and the soil was rich with the bones of the dead of earlier battles. There could be no doubt about it now, surely? Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were reprieved. They would take their place in some office or factory, or perhaps spend a pleasant spell at one of the universities, after which, no doubt, theywould marry some fluffy girl and have children of their own, earmarked for Bamfylde if they were boys.
    He toyed with the fancy for a spell, visualising a subdued thirteen-year-old young Cooper, or a young Fosdyke, who would be coming here halfway through the nineteen-thirties, and the prospect must have caused him to smile, for suddenly he heard Herries's chirpy voice say, 'Good news, P.J.? My stars, it would have to be to fool me! I've been inflated and deflated so many times by that rag that I've stopped reading it, apart from casualty lists.'
    David said, 'It's real enough this time. We've broken the Hindenburg Line. I'd stopped believing that was possible. It'll be open warfare from here on and that's something positive.'
    'Was that worth grinning at?'
    'In a way, sir.' He could always talk uninhibitedly to Herries. 'As a matter of fact, I was smiling at the prospect of Cooper's boy sitting under Mrs Parminter in the Second in a dozen years or so,' and he smiled again when Herries's tufted eyebrows shot up. 'Pure speculation on my part, I'm afraid. What I mean is, the chances are that Cooper will live long enough to marry and have children. If he does he'd want to send his boys here, wouldn't he?'
    'They all do,' Herries said. 'Without them we should wither, I'm afraid.' He sat down on the shaft of the horse-roller, parked up here in obedience to his decree every time the roller-gangs finished a stint on the cricket pitch. 'Haven't seen so much of you lately. Settling in?'
    'I think so, sir. What do you think?'
    'You'll do. You've frightened one or two of the old stagers, I'm told. Oh, don't let that bother you. It never did me. If you can't smuggle your own convictions into the curriculum you might as well go away somewhere, dig a hole and live in it.' He lit his short pipe and puffed contentedly for a while. Then, cocking one eyebrow, 'How do we look to you?'
    'I've been very happy here, sir.'
    'I didn't mean that. How do we seem to be trundling along to someone from outside?'
    David hesitated. It seemed a propitious time to make a point he was very eager to make.
    'I can only answer that from an academic standpoint, Headmaster.'
    'Go ahead.'
    'It's the text-books I've inherited. Most of them were printed about the timeof Victoria's first Jubilee. How much say