So we picked out the two best that remained, pitched Rene and
his basket of provisions into the front one with Mabel and Jeremy, piled
Narayan Singh in after them to take my place as the second civilian, and
started them off straight forward, Grim and I following in a second car
after I had paid our former Arab driver handsomely and sent him off
grinning to give a lift to as many runaways as the car would hold.
We learned afterward that the rascal made a fortune, charging as much as
fifty pounds sterling for the trip halfway back to Damascus, at which
point the car collapsed. They say he carried eleven officers that far,
bought two wives with the proceeds and escaped all the way to a village
near Mecca, where his home was.
You know how bewildering and tricky those early mists are when they
start to roll up before the wind. We had hardly got going when the
whole mass seemed to shift in one great cloud, covering the fleeing
troops and incidentally Feisul, but leaving us in our two autos high and
dry, as it were, in full view of the French. And they were advancing by
that time.
I couldn't see more than a division of them that we would have to reckon
with--nearly all Algerians--and they looked dead-weary.
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