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Title: Sixty-four, ninety-four!
Author: R. H. Mottram
Release date: November 8, 2026 [eBook #79947]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Dial Press, 1925
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79947
Credits: Tim Lindell, Laura Natal, St. Louis Mercantile Library and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIXTY-FOUR, NINETY-FOUR! ***
[Illustration]
Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!
[Illustration]
SIXTY-FOUR, NINETY-FOUR!
_By_
RALPH HALE MOTTRAM
_author of_
THE SPANISH FARM
“Sixty-four, ninety-four--
He’ll never go sick no more,
The poor beggar’s dead.”
[Illustration]
LINCOLN MACVEAGH
THE DIAL PRESS
NEW YORK · MCMXXV
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
By THE DIAL PRESS, INCORPORATED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
PREFACE
BOOKS about the war of 1914-1918 are supposed to require an apology.
This one has only a reason. That war is only tolerable, as a memory,
when one can feel that some one learned something from it. Otherwise it
becomes a mere nightmare of Waste. How learn, except from books?--and
books there are! Histories, necessarily official, memoirs, necessarily
personal, novels, necessarily fiction ... something of all, and yet
something more than these is wanted.
And it seems as well for all of us whose experience of the War was
not confined to one unit or place, to set down what can be remembered,
before it becomes too dim--to set it down with the least official,
personal or imaginative bias, so that perchance the record each makes
may contain some of the Truth. In this way, before the generation
of the War has passed, there may arise a real Cenotaph, a true War
Memorial--a record, at which gazing, our children may be able to
imagine a way of settling disputes more intelligent than maintaining,
during years, a population as large as that of London, on an area as
large as that of Wales, for the sole purpose of wholesale slaughter by
machinery.
If we cannot provide the information which will make it possible to
avoid this, and if those children of ours cannot use it, then indeed
the Nightmare of Waste will visit us--more than a Nightmare, a reality
in which our children, and with them the white civilization of Western
Europe, may well disappear. And deservedly, for we shall have betrayed
all those dead comrades of ours, rendered their willing sacrifice a
ridiculous futility, and, by comparison with us, Judas will be shining
white.
For this reason, this book had to be written.
One word as to the persons and scenes of this book and its
predecessor, “The Spanish Farm.” There were hundreds of Skenes and
Earnshaws and Madeleines, dozens of farms called “L’Espagnole,” fifty
divisions known as Nth, fourteen “Umpteenth” Corps. If there lives
to-day a man whose regimental number was 6494 I apologize to him. He is
not intended. The sick call was variously blown and all sorts of words
went to it. I hope he will let me use his number on this understanding.
There was no appointment called “Clearance Officer,” but the many men
who did the job may substitute what name they like. In short, there
is no futile, impertinent pen-photograph of anybody. There is, in
the words of the writer of the preface to “The Spanish Farm,” many a
“composite portrait,” good or bad, but always composite.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
CHAPTER
I. SIXTY-FOUR, NINETY-FOUR! 3
II. UP TO THE LINE 23
III. RELIEF 31
IV. THE NATIVES 46
V. THE CHANCE 60
VI. A BRIGADE AFFAIR 73
VII. ONE GAME AND ANOTHER 85
VIII. THE DAY OF REST 93
IX. STANDS ENGLAND WHERE SHE DID? 101
X. THE WAGING OF WAR 115
XI. THE DIVISIONAL SHOW 135
XII. THE SOMME 145
XIII. INTERLUDE 170
XIV. THE FUNCTIONING OF G., A., AND Q. 187
XV. SHEER DEVOTION 200
XVI. PARIS LEAVE 209
XVII. THE FIELD OF ARRAS 228
XVIII. ANOTHER PARIS 241
XIX. A MATTER OF BUSINESS 256
XX. FLY-BY-NIGHT 272
XXI. THE COUSIN OF MY UNCLE 284
XXII. THE THIRD BIRTHDAY 296
XXIII. COLONEL WERNER’S REVELATIONS 318
XXIV. VICTORY 328
XXV. GLORY 342
XXVI. THE END OF A PERFECT DAY 356
Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!
CHAPTER I
_Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!_
IN the fine autumn weather that succeeded the Battle of Loos, the
tenth battalion--a “Kitchener” or “New Army” battalion as it was then
called--of a well-known English line regiment found itself in and
around one of those big, four-sided farmhouses that the Spaniards used
to build to protect their Netherland territory from the French. It
stood just where the chalk downs of the Pas de Calais slope towards the
Flemish plain. Its inhabitants spoke French or Flemish indiscriminately
and were beginning to pick up a good bit of English.
The battalion, reduced to below two-thirds of its normal strength,
was still large enough to fill the premises, the officers in the
ground-floor living-rooms that looked out on the manure heap, two
companies in the great barns and stables that spread at right-angles to
the house; beyond the remains of the moat, an oblong duckpond filling
the fourth side of the square, stretched a further yard, with cartsheds
and hop-presses. Another company and a half were close by. Spanning the
moat was a red-brick bridge commanded by an old loop-holed short tower,
now granary and pigeon-loft in its successive storeys. Against it stood
the dome-shaped kennel of the old yard dog. The ridge of the thatched
roof of the dwelling-house was tasselled with wallflowers in a brown
fringe. The mellowed brickwork of the front, between the low eaves
and the widespreading, bluish-green shutters, was bolted by old iron
bolts, whose heads were worked into the date 1610. Before the house was
a ten-acre pasture, surrounded by a double row of Holland elms, with
an avenue that led to the road. Behind was a smaller pasture. Westward
against the skyline were the downs beyond St. Omer, and northward the
gravelly hillocks that connect them with rolling country between Ypres
and Courtrai. The enemy were twenty kilometres east by south, away
down the Lys valley toward Lille and the Bethune coalfields. Over all
hung the heavy, moist, fertile beauty of a Flemish autumn; root-crops
knee-deep, hopfields turning russet. When the sentry on the gate was
changed at six, the close mist still clung between the trees of the
avenue, about the buildings, and above the moat. “Revelly” seemed to
dissipate the thickness of the atmosphere, but what it really did was
to make the emptiness of the meadows alive with khaki figures--little
strings of men going, section by section, through roll-call and kit
inspection, while the Adjutant, a small wiry infantry officer, once
the familiar figure in all photos of a celebrated polo team, passed
between the groups with the Regimental Sergeant-major, trying to gauge
how far the loss and disorganization of Loos had gone. A keen man, this
Captain Hunter, the Adjutant. He had retired a year or two before 1914
from a profession by which he set more store than was supposed by many
people, who mistook him for a mere idle polo-player. He had rejoined
at once and become the only ex-regular officer of one of the New Army
battalions. It was clothed in blue serge and unarmed, and commanded by
a motherly old ex-Territorial Colonel, who had recruited it; but it was
composed, as his instinct soon told him, of material such as regular
English officers only know in dreams, if ever they have any. Working
on this material with the military knowledge gained in South Africa,
and a good deal of practical skill and tact, he had brought them to
a very fair state, by the time they had been ordered to France and
involved in Loos. Emerging from that somewhat catastrophic experience,
Captain Hunter, never theoretic or abstract, had grasped at once the
immediate necessity--reorganize--refit--retrain even, and--have another
go. Moving among the busy groups on the extemporized parade-ground of
the home pasture, throwing questions at the Sergeant-major, he did not
forget to look at the weather, the country, the farmhouse; or listen to
the distant rumble of gunfire along the front, the hum of a threshing
machine, and the “Hue!” of old Vanderlynden, the farmer, beyond the
hedge, ploughing with a white jennet and a great Boulonnais horse,
harnessed to what looked like a garden hoe fastened to the chassis of
a perambulator. “Extraordinary people,” thought Captain Hunter, “can’t
leave the stubble alone five minutes. No wonder they’ve no sport!”
Having seen enough to make him ponder, he dismissed the Sergeant-major
with the necessary orders, and went back towards the house. The brisk
Doctor was standing there “at gaze,” with his orderly, a heavily-built
chemist’s assistant, “pointing” beside his officer like a well-bred dog.
“Mornin’, Doctor!”
“Mornin’. Can I have a fatigue of ten men?”
The Adjutant winced. “You’ll have to have it if you must. Doctor,
though the Colonel....”
“Must is the word! Do you know what a sick parade I’ve got? Eighty!
Yes, I have. It’s trench fever--insides all inside-out and temperature
like--well, some’ll have to go down to base. Meanwhile I want to
isolate the others and try and pull ’em through. I want that shed and I
want it empty.”
The Doctor pointed to a long low extension of the farm buildings that
ran out from the back of the dwelling-house to the grassy dip of the
dry moat. The door was barred and padlocked.
“‘_Privée--entrée interdite._’ Does that mean we mustn’t go in?”
“That’s it!” (the Adjutant was guessing).
“It’s full of marsh hay, isn’t it?” He peeped through a chink.
“Flax, man, flax! I’ll use it for bedding when it’s spread, then we
shan’t need to ask for straw and be told we can’t have it.”
Having sent the necessary instructions by the orderly, the two
entered the house from the back, past pig-swill carried in pails and a
separator humming like an aeroplane. Coming round the corner of a high
oak partition, they entered the mess extemporized in the front parlour,
and were greeted by that national password, “Mornin’.” It came from
Colonel Gilford, their commanding officer, who was seated before that
plate of eggs and bacon which it would have taken more than a German
Army to prevent his servant from providing, done to a turn, and served
fresh and hot. Born in and bred up for the Army, inheriting just enough
gentility of blood and security of income to be unconscious of either,
of Art, Religion, Science, Business and Politics, Colonel Gilford knew
nothing and cared less. During twenty-two years’ service he had seen
six weeks of actual fighting, all of it against black men or Asiatics;
there was not a sport at which he did not excel; and his physical
courage--at once an instinct and a creed, and his belief in himself--as
complete as most men’s in God--were masked by an expressionless
good-fellowship towards the few people he considered his fellows. He
had been ordered to command and take to France a battalion of the New
Armies, in which Captain Hunter and one or two N.C.O.’s were the only
regular soldiers. Face to face with an enemy of whose language he did
not understand a word, and whose theory of International Relationships,
military training and general conduct would have been quite beyond his
comprehension, his bearing did him and his kind every credit. He went
into the Battle of Loos, ostensibly an experienced veteran, really as
strange to the new conditions as the mechanics, clerks and labourers of
which his battalion was composed. The Kotal campaign of 1900 gave him
no hint of what to do in the face of machine-gun and heavy-artillery
fire, such as he had never conceived possible. In spite of all this,
through three days and nights, sleepless and practically foodless, he
had carried out such orders as had reached him, held on in the absence
of orders, and when finally relieved by the arrival of another unit,
had gathered together what remained of his men, whole platoons of whom
were missing, withdrawn them, entrained them, and established them in
an entirely new sector. And now he was billeted in a farmhouse whose
inhabitants spoke a tongue which the Adjutant thought was Cape Dutch.
He had slept soundly, awakened fresh; had bathed, shaved and appeared
at breakfast among the remaining officers of his battalion. In those
early days Colonel Gilford still maintained the peace-time taboo of
“No shop in the Mess.” The conversation was therefore restricted to
the weather. It was impossible to discuss the English papers, which
contained accounts of the “victory” of Loos, from which the battalion
had with such difficulty emerged. In the silence, only broken by the
sound of hearty eating, the noise of a dispute, carried on outside the
window, forced itself on every one’s attention. Colonel Gilford, who
expected his marmalade to be allowed to subside in peace, before he
drifted on in decency and comfort to the necessary business of the day,
raised his eyebrows. Whereon the Adjutant rose from his seat and passed
outside.
The argument was between old Jerome Vanderlynden, the farmer, and
Adams, the Quartermaster, the one slightly bowed in deprecation and
clasping his cap to his stomach, the other stiff and square in worn
khaki with the long-service ribbon at the breast.
The one was speaking Flemish and the other Lancashire.
“They have burnt my hop-holes for kindling, they have grazed their
horses in my pasture, and now they turn my agricultural implements
out of my shed, to leave them in the open air all night, so that they
rust....”
“Get out, you dirty native! I’ve twenty years’ service to my name; I
can’t understand a word you say: it’s no business of mine; go and talk
to the Adjutant, Transport Officer, Chaplain, Brigade Interpreter. I
gave you sugar and butter in exchange for the coffee....”
The Adjutant broke in. “What is it, Adams? Grousing again? _Qu’est
que c’est_, Mossoo? Devil take their jargon!” He went back into the
Mess: “Does anyone speak French? Oh, good. You do! Well, when you’ve
finished your breakfast, you might see what he wants.”
The officer addressed rose from the lower end of the table and went out
to where Vanderlynden, the farmer, relinquished by old Adams, was still
turning over and over in his hands that high-crowned cap with glazed
peak, so much more Dutch than French.
This young officer, by name Geoffrey Skene, had not been with
the battalion twelve hours, and regarded himself as one of the most
fortunate men on earth. A few hours ago he had been prey to a dreadful
fear--lest the victory of Loos should end the War, without his ever
having fired a shot.... And suddenly his orders had come, and with a
beating heart he had left the reinforcement camp at Etaples, to join a
battalion he had never seen. By chance in the only other occupant of
his railway carriage he had found a man called Earnshaw he had known
slightly in England. They were both bound for the same unit--perhaps
the first of the depleted regiments to be hauled out of the line and
given a chance to fill up; and there sprang up between them one of
those quick intimacies of the early days, before everyone became bored
and bewildered. Skene and this Earnshaw had seemed to have much in
common: both of them had gone in the first rush of Kitchener recruits
to those public meetings at which men shoved and fought for attestation
papers, which often could not be supplied for days. To Skene this had
happened in the country-market-cathedral-garrison town where he had
lived nearly all his life. To Earnshaw it had happened in the dark busy
heart of Manchester, where he was staying in the Imperial, just home,
“fed up” with Canada. Their experiences had been almost identical. With
incredible difficulty they had succeeded in becoming members of that
herd of men, tens of thousands, inhabiting the wooden town of Shoreham,
the vast camp of Black Down, or scores of similar places. There,
dressed in blue, unarmed but very healthy, all through the winter of
1914 they had drilled and drilled, with dummy rifles, without rifles,
heard lectures, laughed at the Army routine, been happy because they
were “_learning to fight_.” They wished to fight--Skene because
he saw in some confused way the Belfry of Bruges, the iron clock of
Malines, the streets of Louvain, battered or burning, with a generous
feeling in his heart of: “Look here, you know, this must be stopped”;
Earnshaw because all over the world he had found “dam” Germans. Exactly
why or how they were “dam” he could not have explained, but he was
just clear that the chance of a lifetime had come to “larn” them. The
will to fight, and the business of learning how, had filled the winter
nicely. At times Earnshaw was rebellious. He had half a dozen shot guns
and sporting rifles at home, and laughed at the old long Lee-Enfield;
he was appeased by being put into the transport section, where he
groomed riding horses and was promised mules later. He had “used”
mules (no one ever spoke of “riding” or “driving” mules, but always of
“using” them) in two continents, and the thought cheered him. It was
something he could _do_. Skene, an architect, fancied that he knew
something about plans, that trenches were not unlike the foundations
of houses, that he had experience of cements and ways of riveting that
might be useful. He was appeased by being put to dig mile after mile
of trenches that were only holes in the earth. Both earned their third
stripe by Christmas.
Spring had come--Neuve Chapelle--Festubert--the Dardanelles--the
fear of not getting out--of not being “in it”--became a panic. Skene
and Earnshaw, amid thousands of their kind and age, were up against
the old “dug-out” Colonels, who would not grant commissions to their
“men” for fear of spoiling a smart company, from a belief that the
private soldiers of the New Armies and the “Tommies” of Indian and
South African wars must be alike, or from who knows what prejudice or
paralysis of brain. But circumstances fought for Skene and Earnshaw.
Losses in France were too heavy, especially among Infantry officers;
commissions had to be granted. Earnshaw had applied for Artillery or
Horse Transport. Skene had applied for Engineers or Intelligence;
thousands of others had applied for special branches, stating
qualifications that ranged through every useful branch of knowledge.
All--all, except the few who commanded influence in high places, were
sent into the Infantry.
Skene and Earnshaw had gone to the Second Reserve Battalion of a
country regiment on the East Coast. The earlier “K” formations were
already filled from Universities, and county families and public school
O.T.C.s; and the Second Reserve were accumulating messes of 100 to 150
officers and battalions of 1,500 to 1,700 men.
Skene, Earnshaw, and many others, men whose thirtieth birthday was
passed, were “fallen in” and addressed as “young officers” by Adjutants
who had never been out of England, or put through their “setting up”
drill by Marine Sergeants whose greatest experience of war was the
Boxer Rising of 1900. How they existed through that summer many never
knew. Some got away by influence or chicane to other jobs, some were
mildly mutinous, or thoroughly dissipated. The majority had “stuck it,”
taking “courses” of machine-gunning, going route-marches with that
bloated battalion that looked like a brigade, taking leave, granted or
ungranted, listening greedily to anything wounded officers from France
would tell them, or to the tales of the many Colonials themselves.
At last, with the shadow of Loos looming near, some bright intellect
at Whitehall--some younger man who had perhaps been as far as St.
Omer--asked: “Look here, why not have some reserves handy? We’re bound
to have casualties.” The logic was irrefutable. The dispersal of those
reserve battalions began: some went to the Dardanelles, but most to
France. Many were middle-aged, some grey or bald, three-quarters were
townsmen, as perforce any collection of Englishmen must be; some were
Colonial, British South American, or Indian born. Skene was bidden to
report to Embarkation, Folkestone. Excited, half-dressed, he rushed
into the hut, where a tea-planter, a ship’s steward, and the biggest
cash-draper in Durlam were also dressing. “I’ve got my orders! Come and
have a drink before mess.” There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Why
should we drink with you? Why should you have your orders? You’re not
senior. It’s influence, that’s what it is!”
He spent a miserable week hanging about the base camp at Etaples,
then a mere suggestion of what it afterwards became. Officers lived in
little wooden messes, on their rations. There were no clubs; the one or
two restaurants that provided meals were crowded out by 6 p. m. Skene,
who knew the town through having stayed there one holiday to attend an
art school, wandered across into the stucco flimsiness and shuttered
desolation of Paris Plage. He knew a battle was going on--how was he
going to get to it? Then his orders came.
He and Earnshaw found the battalion, not too easily, that night--and
were astonished at the warmness of their welcome, until they dimly
realized that the ten officers round the newspaper-covered table in
that Flemish parlour, waiting so anxiously for some warm food, were the
survivors of a full battalion mess of thirty.
In the morning Skene and Earnshaw were up early--too early--they
wandered about for an hour before they could get any breakfast. They
looked at the transport lines, and the early parade--astonished at the
weak and lop-sided look of many platoons, the queer appearance of men
without arms or equipment, who slunk into their places, looking dazed.
They heard the bugles go “Sick parade.” One of the cooks by the field
kitchen sang the words:
“Sixty-four, Ninety-four,
He’ll never go sick no more,
The poor beggar’s dead!”
Skene was struck with horror ... there, in face of the enemy, men sick,
useless, clogging the wheels of the fighting machine! Somehow he never
got over that feeling.
It was the first rude blow at the idea so prevalent among the
enthusiastic volunteers of the New Armies, of going out to “fight,”
of pushing some such business as Loos on and on right into Berlin. It
was the shock to find that the fighting depended on a large stationary
military population, as vulnerable to illness or accident as the
population of London. He went to breakfast hurriedly readjusting his
mind. At the words, “Does anyone speak French?” he had almost leapt to
his feet. Here was something he could _do_.
As he passed out to where old Vanderlynden stood, the Colonel asked:
“Who’s that officer?” and the Adjutant replied: “New reinforcement
officer; came after you turned in last night, sir.”
From the extemporized mess to the farmer’s part of the house, was like
stepping from modern war into a Yorkshire farmhouse of the eighteenth
century. On the long, smooth-worn bench under the window in the kitchen
Skene sat with a cup of impeccable black coffee, and a wineglass of
unpurchaseable brandy. Across the table, old Vanderlynden, who had
resumed his cap, was propped in the one chair that could be described
as easy, with his feet toward the closed Flemish stove, on the clean
tiled floor. “Leinsche!” he called ... “Madeleinesche!” (“little
Madeleine”). From one of the inner rooms there came out one of those
women who do not exist in England ... whose dress was that of a woman
of thirty, but whose clear, unlined skin and easy movements belonged
to a girl in her teens; whose figure and manners might have earned her
good wages in a big shop, but whose hands were developed by continuous
use of the spade in youth ... who served Skene without looking at
him, but who, at the bidding of her old father, sat down opposite the
Englishman, and looking him straight in the eyes, began, in a pleasant
contralto voice, to expose in convent-taught French what was in the old
man’s mind.
The young woman was terse. Skene took down the items; hop-poles stolen,
horses grazing, a shed used for some purpose he could not quite
understand. He made the whole into a report in his Field Message book,
like a well-trained young officer of the New Armies, and went outside
to see the damage. It was quite evident. The great hop-poles were in
the transport lines, with mules and “riders” tied up to them, stamping
and feeding. Other horses, “a bit poor” with the journey, had been
cast loose and were grazing; but it was the shed at the back of the
dwelling-house that was the real trouble.
Here, in stretchers or in blankets on the grass, lay some eighty
of the battalion, all with the new disease, called everything from
“para-typhoid” to “cold-feet”; known not by its symptoms but by its
causes--standing up to the waist in filthy water without food or sleep,
or “resting” in cattle trucks or barns, still wet. Nothing to be
done--part of the enormous waste of war! It was the first real lesson
on war’s nature that Skene was taught.
He put it all down in his Field Message book. He further put down
exactly what it was that Mademoiselle Vanderlynden said her father
complained of: “You must not suppose that we are against the English.
We know that we should have been beaten without our Allies.” (No trace
of cajolery there!) “It is a pleasure as well as a duty to have the
troops billeted in the farm. We know quite well that the men must live,
that their rations are never sufficient. We have men of the family
mobilized, who would tell us all this if we did not know. But the
Government force us to grow corn and keep cows, and we cannot do this
if you take our pasture and spoil our reaping machine without paying
for the damage, not to mention the hop-poles you have destroyed or
burnt ... or at least give us a requisition paper.” Satisfied that she
had made Skene understand, she appeared to take no further interest in
him, until he had finished writing his report. Then she said: “You are
going to see to it at once?”
“At once, Mademoiselle.”
“A thousand thanks!”
“What a woman of business!” thought Skene and went to the orderly room.
He had to wait some minutes before the Adjutant, busy with a pad of
wires, a map and some typewritten orders, noticed him.
“Well, Skene, what is it? Oh yes, what did old Kruger want? Oh! I see!
Well, go back and offer him forty francs, as you suggest, and tell him
he can have his barns and out-houses and any dam’ thing he pleases. I
can’t say about the hop-poles--tell him to make a complaint. We move
in the morning up to the Line. You’d better cut along and see--oh,
yes--see Thomas, D Company. That’s all.”
“Yessir. Do you want this, sir?” Skene was still holding his report.
“No. Tear it up. Done with.”
And Skene went off to settle old Vanderlynden and then to find Thomas,
having learned another lesson in the art of that war worth more than
musketry or marching, drill or discipline; to keep abreast, not of the
actual situation, but of the next but one; so rapidly did changes come
and the necessities of the moment outrun the provisions of the past.
Who would be Sixty-four, ninety-four next?
CHAPTER II
_Up to the Line_
NEXT morning the battalion moved off. Skene had been posted to No. 13
Platoon, which gave him the best possible view of the hindquarters of
the charger ridden by the commander of D Company. This did not seem
amiss. Nothing did on these fine October mornings when the New Army,
undaunted and high of hope, started on those first marches in which
the physical comfort of motion was still combined with the illusion of
really going somewhere. The tedious unreality of training was over.
Loos was a brief bad dream. They were going to fight. That was what he
had enlisted for.
An hour passed and the first halt was called. On moving off again, the
Company Commander, a tall fair lad of eighteen, got down and walked
with Skene, giving him his first true insight into that “great British
victory,” as the papers called it, the Battle of Loos. “Never saw such
a show; weeks and weeks of marching, full of beans; then up a road to
a place called Vermelles; everything chock-a-block; mules and men and
guns all mixed up. Then they took us out over the open; bare ground all
cut up with shell-holes, old trenches; then it began to rain. When we
took up our line, everything was soaked, no one knew anything; no grub,
no water, no ammunition; and when at last some one found us, after the
Bosche had blown hell out of us for two or three days, some fool on our
left had given way and the only order we got was to go back. My word!
you should have seen us!... The men have picked up wonderfully these
few days, but there’s heaps of sickness besides the casualties.”
The speaker, by rank and name Captain Thomas, more than ten years
Skene’s junior, had obtained a Special Reserve commission straight from
that University in which, at the outbreak of war, he had been learning
what bad form it was to know anything. The narrative of his experiences
at Loos was given in the disjointed sentences of one who knew that
description was not his business. It conveyed little to Skene, not
because it was bald and disjointed, but because Skene, like all the
New Army reinforcements, was thinking: “Ah yes, my boy, that’s what
happened to you, but wait until I get there!” The warnings that should
have surmounted even the scrupulous understatement of Thomas were
lost on Skene, who was admiring the roofs and spires of the railhead
town they were approaching. Not Bruges, by a long way, still less
the Italian cities of Skene’s education, but it had tall towers with
belfries, long regular whitewashed buildings, barracks or convents,
with steep roofs, weather vanes, and many trees.
They halted; a rumour came down to D Company that the town was under
long-range bombardment.
Ahead, the Adjutant was consulting a military policeman as to an
alternative route. Having seen his men fall out correctly, Skene
joined a group of officers to watch. Then, for the first time in his
life, he heard an unforgettable sound, as though the heavens, made of
cheap calico, were being torn to lengths by some demoniac draper. The
bump of the shell followed and a crashing explosion, with the roar of
falling bricks, and a shriek of scattering humanity--then a pink cloud
of brickdust rose and bellied out over the cobbled streets of the
Flemish town. The men cheered, groaned, made bets on the next shot; the
officers grinned in sympathy.
It was dusk before the battalion passed beyond cultivation to the
desolation that bordered the trenches, and found, at a battered and
deserted level crossing, four mud-plastered guides.
This was before the day of regular trains, and the battalion passed
the zone of the heavy guns and forward dumps on foot, breaking up first
into companies, then into platoons, and marching in silence. The night
was fine and dry, the deepening silence was punctuated by a noise,
that was to become as much a part of life as the ticking of a clock in
the midnight silence of home--a noise as of some insane woodpecker;
the rat-tat-tat of the indefatigable Bosche machine-guns. On a crest
that rose slightly above the dead level of the plain, a greenish
glare soared up, hung a moment, and wasted out. Then another soared
further to the right, amid the gaunt skeletons, crowned fan-shaped with
splinters, of a row of trees. By this light Skene saw that the soft
mush in which he was treading was the self-sown, unharvested corn of a
once tilled field.
Among the ruins of a cottage, a murdered handful of battered brick and
mortar--they entered the communication trench.
Such trenches, afterwards developed to perfection and complexity, were
then nothing more than waist or breast-deep excavations, with slipping
walls and floored with deep and noisome ooze. They were, moreover, so
few and well-known to the enemy and so regularly shelled or enfiladed
by machine-guns, that the older hands preferred risking the open.
The first few bullets whistled overhead, too high. But soon came the
tearing shriek, the crash and scatter of shrapnel, the ducking and
bunching of startled men, and that first hearing of the cry, never
quite to be forgotten: “Stretcher-bearer!”
Details of the next three hours are merely tedious and
incomprehensible to those who have not been “there,” tedious and only
too comprehensible to those who have. Skene found the rear of his
platoon held up by the stretcher party, and then his passage blocked
by other units. His guide tried a short cut which led into mud and
wire and on into the lines of a brigade that was not his. Back, in
mud and wire, over drains and trenches, bodies and ruins, in and out
of latrines and shell-holes, lying flat for minutes together while
machine-gun fire swept over them, Skene entered at last, from the
spoil-pit at the back, the trench he was to hold, two hours overdue. He
found a weary subaltern with sarcasm on his lips and a crumpled list of
trench stores in his hand. “Sign! I don’t want to be caught in here in
daylight.”
Skene signed. The subaltern and his men moved off, and the last he
heard was:
“What’s yon relief?”
“Noo armies!”
“That means comin’ back to-morrer night t’ take these trenches back
again, sure enough!”
Skene, bitterly insulted, bit his lips and kept silence.
The dawn broke in a fierce crackle of musketry. Skene rested his head
against the parapet, the only dry firm place he could find. He had
thoroughly surveyed his ground. His men were all “standing-to.”
They were in a section of fire-trench fifty yards long, blocked at each
end and fed from a communication trench half cemetery and half latrine.
They had two and a half boxes of ammunition, two boxes of bombs, and
some Verey lights. There were some noisome holes for dug-outs into
which none of his men had been as yet fatigued enough to crawl.
What would happen if the enemy attacked, or if he himself were ordered
to attack, he did not even consider. He was thinking, with a sense
of almost tragic finality, that this was the end of the journey. The
recruiting room, the training camp, the O.T.C., the base camp, the
railhead town, all led to--this. There, a few yards away, were the
Germans. And he, who a few months ago had never thought of being a
soldier, much less an officer, least of all a combatant in the front
line of a European War, was, on his own and only responsibility,
standing to hold No. 13 Section of the “Z” lines of the British
Expeditionary Force, against the enemy. The hierarchy on which he
had been trained to depend had suddenly disappeared. Brigade, even
battalion head-quarters, were miles away. Thomas, with the remainder
of the company, was four hundred yards back, only accessible by a
field telephone that had already been twice cut by shell fire, and
could not be repaired in daylight. Training had hardly covered these
possibilities.
In the twilight chequered by the greenish German flares, listening
to the ceaseless tapping of the Bosche machine-guns, and the continual
swish, crash and clatter of shells, over nearly a hundred miles of
French or Flemish soil, Englishmen like him were doing as he was--in
the Line.
CHAPTER III
_Relief_
“SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE,
_“November, 1915_.
“DEAR Uncle,--
“I duly received your letter, together with the books, cigarettes,
woolly cap and socks. Thank you all very much, the parcel was most
acceptable. The post here is wonderfully regular, and we get a delivery
once a day, bar accidents.
“You ask me what it is like, but I fear I can’t give you much idea.
You see the address from which I write--well, that secrecy runs through
the whole business. We are as anonymous and invisible as possible. We
are told that if information as to the names or positions of units is
put on paper, it is likely to leak out, and we shall be spotted and
shelled. That is dangerous, of course, and above all uncomfortable.
Here am I, with all my clothes and equipment on me, lying in a wooden
box like a coffin with the end knocked out, buried in a beetfield. The
space where my notebook lies is the only dry bit on the floor of my
dug-out, but I am protected from the rain by the roof. Now, if we are
shelled with any accuracy, these small comforts will all disappear,
and we shall all have to wallow in the mud in the rain until we can
burrow out some more holes. So you see there is some point in all this
secrecy.”
Here Skene’s elbow, on which he was leaning, hurt him so much, that he
had to give up and rest.
He was writing to his uncle, who had asked for some idea of what the
life was like and how he was getting on, as relatives did in those
days, when to have a nephew, son or cousin “fighting in the trenches”
was still new. The Bosche then had what used to be called “command of
the air,” and to be seen by their ’planes meant a length of trench
shelled to bits, somebody killed, and the rest left shelterless in
the Flemish winter; so the “fighting” that went on “in the trenches”
consisted in keeping out of sight. Skene had, therefore, ample time and
tried to set down things about him as he saw them. He went on:
“During daylight we have to be very careful to keep under cover. I
can put my head out, or even stand up, if I am careful, but I can see
nothing except what appears to be miles and miles of sewage farm,
upturned earth, broken posts and wire, decay, stench and desolation,
with here and there a mound of splintered brick or a length of
granite-paved road, to show that it was once a stretch of goodish
agricultural land, not unlike some of the Peterborough flats below
Wansford. There is some high ground, gravelly and wooded, to the south
and west, but north, is the sea-level marsh, and the Bosche sit all
round us on a ridge that rings us into it. However we’ve managed to
hang on here beats imagining.”
At this point, perceiving that he had written what would not pass the
Censor, he tore it up.
He next began: “One gets rid of many preconceived notions. For
instance, Baptism of Fire, as it used to be called, is not panicky in
the least, but rather exhilarating. The first shelling near us made
the men cheer and I wanted to join them. The first bullets made them
mock and I even smiled, the first dead man was not pretty, but after a
curious feeling of ‘where are the police? something ought to be done
about this,’ one gets used to it. Of course one’s first impulse when a
man stumbles and drops is to tell him to get up. But there are many one
does not see. The Bosche knocked down a house on to eight of my men the
other day. We dug the ruins over but only found two bodies. The shell
fell directly on the others, I suppose. They are reported ‘missing.’ It
looked simply like a bad accident in a brickworks.”
When he got to this point, Skene read what he had written. “Oh, Lord,”
he thought, “I shall give them the horrors!” and he tore it up.
He began again:
“At dusk, directly the light is too dim to see movement from one trench
to another, there’s a most extraordinary scene. Do you remember the
old Doré pictures of the Resurrection? Well, just like that. Men that
have lain hidden in or just beyond the lines suddenly appear out of
their holes. From further back come parties to dig, bring rations or
ammunition, by hand, or by limbers drawn by mules.
“What has been all day a solitude, baleful, and ominous, suddenly
becomes as busy as a market-place, and the Bosche never leave off
their incessant machine-gunning. Darkness makes no difference to
them, because their theory is, not to aim at a man and hit him with a
bullet, but to cover any interesting point on the map--cross-roads,
copse or bridge--with a sheet of lead that anything moving must walk
into. We say the Bosche is nervous, is afraid of us, and nearly beaten.
Certainly he makes more fuss. The everlasting flare-lights, the
continual shooting, the immense care in screening his men, are symptoms
of it. We think that once the winter is over and we get a move on, we
shall crumple him up.
“Personally I shall be glad. I think it will be a relief. This living
in the Line in the face of machine-gunning that is always superior
to ours, and artillery and aircraft that generally are, takes it out
of a man. But what a splendid lot! My best men are a poacher and a
Salvationist preacher. Then come the young football-playing clerks, to
whom sniping and bombing are still exciting; the older men, mechanics,
artisans, shopkeepers, are wonderfully sensible and handy. At first
they were nonplussed, as everybody is, by the casualties and the
primeval conditions. But they soon set to work to make the best of
it. Most of them are quite handy at getting a good fire to cook food
and dry oneself by--which I now see to be the first cardinal point,
and very nearly the whole art of soldiering. The actual shooting
and bombing don’t take up much time. There is no bayonet work. The
agricultural labourers we keep for digging and sanitary fatigue. They
have so little spirit, I don’t feel sure how they would behave if
rushed, and their health is so poor. The great thing about them is that
they don’t care what they do, making graves or emptying latrines!”
Skene read it through, then tore it up. He rested his head on his
hands. He did not know what to write. Eventually he put down:
“DEAR UNCLE,--
“Thanks for the woolly cap and the cigarettes and chocolate. They
were most welcome and it is jolly good of you. The weather is not too
bad for the time of year. Give my kind regards to every one at the
office and tell them we are winning fast, and I shall soon be home.
“Ever yours,
“GEOFFREY.”
At the end of a wet week, after many false rumours, a message came
that the battalion was to be relieved. It was brought to him from
Company Head-quarters by an orderly who reached him just before
daybreak. He spent the daylight hours, during which no one could move,
in making a report on the state of the section of the line held by his
platoon. At last, the early dusk came down, opaque and humid, and the
first star-shells began to rise from the German lines; he set out with
his orderly along the parapet of a water-logged trench for Company
Head-quarters, the only possible path, to take his orders for the
move. Good Lord! Those rehearsals of that movement during training in
England! The scenery had been lacking a bit! But Skene was engrossed
in his carefully written report on the state of the trenches, with
illustrations.
Even that persistent race, the German machine-gunners, were less
active in the autumn damp and darkness. Few bullets hissed about his
ears, or thumped the greasy embankments beneath his feet; above the
moderated clamour he could hear a sound of wading in the glutinous
sludge between the trenches, and the lively whistling of a music-hall
tune. The whistler was little Mansfield, the machine-gun officer, a
brown-eyed, under-sized imp of eighteen, just let loose from a public
school, who, after the shortened course at Sandhurst, had come out to
France that summer without passing through the ranks. A more perfect
temperament for trench warfare than that of little Mansfield could
not have been invented. Still a child, completely irresponsible, with
nothing in his past to ponder over, and no inclination or capacity for
thought about the future, with fox-hunting ancestors, and a public
school training, he was the very plum of perfect health and physical
condition: the desolation in which he lived didn’t even touch his
insensitive little spirit, and his English humour, often called to-day
“the modern love for ragging,” as if there were something new about
it, found plenty of time for expression. He was given to “ragging”
Skene and Earnshaw. They seemed to him, no doubt, to deviate from that
exact good form to which he had been brought up. Skene had a knowledge
of drainage and draughtsmanship, had been heard discussing Home Rule
without violence--very middle-class. One didn’t ostracize a brother
officer, of course, one merely “ragged” him for his good. Besides Skene
was bigger than himself, so that sarcasm was all Mansfield’s sense of
fair play permitted him to use.
With Earnshaw, Mansfield was more cautious. The Lancashire man had
travelled, and was less tolerant than Skene. He said openly that he
had “no use for school kids”; and refused to loan a limber to the
machine-gunner, saying he would only “mess my mules about. He’s not old
enough to be trusted!”
But Mansfield was irrepressible, no snub ever affected him for long.
“Hallo!” he chirupped at Skene. “How are you enjoying the War? I know
I shall have a cold. Mother said I wasn’t to play in these nasty
trenches. Hurry up, Skene, you’ll be late for the office!”
They splashed and slid together in the dark foul waters of the
second-line trench, to the one-time cellar of an estaminet that had
stood by a paved road. In those Company Head-quarters, Long Thomas,
the Captain, Earnshaw, Skene and Mansfield (the company was always two
officers short) were just able to wedge themselves between the grimy
sweating walls and a Second Empire lacquer and brass-bound drawing-room
table, brought from a neighbouring château, which occupied the whole
floor space. With heads against the raftered ceiling, and feet propped
on sandbags out of the six inches of water on the floor, there was
just room to use map, message book and pencil. Stuck in a bottle was a
candle which smoked the studies of the nude from “La Vie Parisienne,”
nailed on the boarding by hands now folded probably beneath the sodden
clay of spoil-pit graves.
Long Thomas detailed the instructions for handing over their trench
to the incoming battalion, and gave them a rendezvous for marching
back to rest camp. Skene diffidently brought forward his report, with
its suggestion that bits of the line should be held by patrols of
machine-gunners, and the rest of the men saved for emergency. He was
heard in gloomy silence. Thomas put the serious obstacle: “You see,
we’re weaker than the Bosche in artillery and machine-guns, and if once
we let go of a bit of line, goodness knows how we should ever get it
back, and the effect on the men would be very bad.”
“The effect on the men is bad as it is,” persisted Skene; “they’ve
neither shelter from the weather nor cover from fire; I’ve lost eight
by wounds and seven by sickness, doing absolutely nothing!”
Mansfield’s voice rose in broken squeaky imitation of the battalion’s
venerable Major left behind at Brigade Head-quarters: “That’s what
you’re here for, sir! What d’you think I brought you all the way from
England for, sir, except to be cannon-fodder?”
Just then the Quarter-master-sergeant’s Corporal appeared with his
report: “Rations up, and all correct, sir, and letters!” There was one
for Skene, and one for Mansfield.
Skene’s was from Madeleine Vanderlynden. The feel of the thin grey
note-paper, covered with spidery sloping French script, gave him
astonishing pleasure: “I must be enjoying this life even less than I
knew,” he thought.
The letter ran: “Excuse the liberty I take in addressing you, but I do
not know to whom to apply. You arranged so well that the soldiers of
your regiment should respect the buildings and machinery necessary for
our agriculture, and since your departure another regiment has come and
taken all the barn, and has broken the fences of the pasture so that we
have to pay a boy to keep the cows from straying. I regret troubling
you, but I do not know to whom to apply.
“My father sends his respects and wishes he were with you.
“We have no news of my second brother Marcel.
“The regiment is the Cannock Chase Rangers.”
These everlasting civilians, couldn’t they understand it was war-time?
Perhaps it was just as well they couldn’t!
The squeal of Mansfield, who had long read his letter, a tailor’s bill,
and who had been turning over Skene’s neatly written and sketched
pages, broke the silence: “Report on the state of the front line,
section Z 13. Look here, Thomas, this fellow Skene’s written a book
about the War. What’s an outfall? Is that where you fall out!” Thomas
scanned again the closely written sheets and plans.
“I think I’d better not forward this report of yours, Skene; it won’t
do you any good with the General!”
Skene agreed (no one disagreed with Thomas), called his orderly, and
set out for his platoon.
The “relief” of the battalion by that which took its place was dragged
out for hours. Skene’s platoon was not relieved until nearly eight
o’clock. Skene let his men squeeze out and get on their way with his
Sergeant, keeping only his servant with him.
He found himself faced by a dejected young officer whose first remark
was, “You 13 Platoon, what a mess you’ve let the place get into!”
Skene explained that in the absence of any comprehensive drainage
system all they could do was to shift the omnipresent flood from one
small section into the next and back: he handed over the meagre trench
stores, and recorded his opinion that the front line was only fit to be
held in parts by moving patrols, and not fit for habitation. At which
the other shrugged his shoulders and replied: “I suppose we shall get
on somehow. Where are those d----d rations?” It was the attitude, at
that period, of the whole B.E.F.
Scrambling back through shell-hole and over broken posts and wire,
Skene and his servant got as far as the second line, where in the
communication trench they met the ration party of the incoming
battalion huddled under a crumbling parapet. “We’ve just had one over,
sir, and Fritz always sends two!”
Sure enough, in a few seconds came the second shrapnel shell, falling
short with a great splashing of muddy water and whizzing of jagged
bits. Skene pushed on, overtook his own platoon, and heard his
Sergeant’s report of the slow progress. “First we was stopped in the
trench and had to get out into the open, sir; then we found a lot of
wire and had to go round it; then, afore we could get back into the
trench, young Lewis was hit by a stray--bad he was--and we had to send
him off.”
They struck out on to what remained of the Courtrai road, let the
returning transport by, with its shrapnel-inviting clatter, and plunged
wearily down, through shell-holes and past remains of mules, farm
carts, hedges and trees, till, under the welcome shelter of the canal
bank, Skene gave the word: “You may smoke!”
When, leaving the canal bank, they made for the ploughed-up and
deserted railway crossing, it was now nearly eleven by Skene’s
wrist-watch: the men’s fatigue and the bad condition of their feet
had reduced the pace to a crawl. They passed D Company stragglers;
the weary, cheerful voice of Thomas hailed them. They had rejoined
the company, sagging and plodding toward the camp in the wood. Skene
remembered counting his men in like sheep, including one on his hands
and knees to save his raw feet, and two left at a wayside dressing
station. How he got to his hut and fell asleep he did not remember. It
was not necessary. The battalion was relieved.
CHAPTER IV
_The Natives_
WHO will ever forget the first hours of “Divisional Reserve” after
the trenches? The camp in the woods was only three miles from the
line, long-distance shots at railhead went clean over it; it was at
best a swampy clearing, cluttered up with tree stumps; furnished with
two or three huts for “messing,” a score of shelters for sleeping,
horse-lines, and the remains of the yellow-flagged urinals of an Indian
division. But you could walk about, bolt upright, without ducking your
head, you could whistle and sing, sit at a trestle table to feed, meet
the other companies of your battalion; and, best of all, you were
“fallen in” and marched, with halts if there were much shelling, to
the old brewery at railhead, where the men had the great vats and the
officers the mash-tubs, for a bath. There were still shops open here,
a market-place, civilians afoot, and you could wander about a bit. At
a restaurant in the side street you could engage a table in the hopes
that you might come in to dinner one night and even go to the cinema.
Never was there enjoyment like it. Old London days and nights seemed
tame.
And the men! It took little more than twenty-four hours for these
sodden and disconsolate scarecrows to become, by aid of sleep, baths,
parades and the last autumn flicker of the sun, the same light-hearted
crowd of overgrown boys that had marched out from the Spanish Farm, ten
days before.
On the second morning after being relieved, Skene woke in the pinewoods
with a light heart, and a body at ease. Long Thomas had promised him
the loan of his “charger” to ride over to the Spanish Farm; Earnshaw,
on a mount borrowed from the transport Sergeant, would ride with him as
far as railhead, to get money from a field cashier.
It happened that, coming back from bathing parade, Skene had been sent
for by the Adjutant, who handed him a file of papers: “Can you remember
about this?”
Skene turned it over. “Passed to you, please,” from battalion to
brigade, from brigade to division, from division to some authority at
Boulogne of whom Skene had never heard. At the very bottom was a blue
French printed form, headed “Claim for damage to Civilian Property,
in view of law article--” covered with R.F.s and the stamp of the
Mairie of the Commune. Here, duly set out and supported by _procès
verbal_ made by Valliant, Marius (gendarme, on duty), Skene read how
Mr. Vanderlynden, Jerome, a cultivator, made the following complaint of
hop-poles taken, grazing, and deterioration of agricultural machines.
“What does it amount to?” said the Adjutant.
Skene began to tell him.
“Oh, yes, and all the rest of it. I suppose we did it?”
“Part of it, there’s no doubt, sir! The rest has been done since!”
“Can you settle it for another twenty francs?”
“I’ll try, sir!”
“Here you are then. That’s all the brigade have sent!”
It was a fresh late October morning; the last clusters were brilliant
in the hop fields, and over the broad leaves of the sugar beet was
spread a steel blue sheen. Long Tom’s charger, black with a white
blaze, took the lead of Earnshaw’s Argentine-bred beast, which had
the belly and ears of a mouse, the neck of a giraffe, the mouth of a
wooden horse on the roundabouts, and paced with that disillusioned air
peculiar to the animals of Infantry transport.
“What a country!” thought Skene, to whom the little squares of haricot,
roots, and stubble already ploughed were like an immense tapestry
unrolled. “These people must work dashed hard for precious little
money,” said Earnshaw. “What are you going back to the old billet for?”
“Row on about troops interfering with their agriculture. Going to see
if I can interpret.”
“‘Myes, there’s a girl there, isn’t there?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Oh well, so long,” said Earnshaw, as Skene turned off west, “I’m going
to lunch in the town; meet you here at four.”
Under the high-pitched roof and the old brick tower of the farm, Skene
could see no sign of life. He had led his horse all round the outer
yard and across the bridge, before he saw old Vanderlynden, bent and
black, coming towards him between the currant bushes and the spirals of
myriad flies gleaming in the sunlight. The old man took Skene’s horse,
silenced the clamorous dog, and ushered his visitor with much deference
into the kitchen.
Yes, he had made his daughter write, because really there was no making
oneself understood, but now the troops had moved on and they were left
in peace. He regretted having deranged the officer.
For the second time Skene absorbed that great lesson of the War: “Never
obey an order you have received. It is already too late. Obey the order
for the time after next!”
Pulling out the old Fleming’s “Claim for damage to Civilian Property,”
he said.
“Then this is useless. You renounce it?” The old man shook his head.
“No. I claim what is due to me by law!”
“Yes--yes--but how can I tell how much was done by my regiment, and how
much by the next?”
“If the officer will only give himself the trouble to step into my
pasture and look!”
They passed through the low dark old doors--through the varying layers
of smell and mess to the old shed where the sick men had lain. There
the flax was stacked at one end, the reaper-and-binder and cultivator
parked at the other. In the rafters lay the heavy poles to which
Earnshaw had tied his horses. They returned to the kitchen.
“Listen, Monsieur Vanderlynden,” said Skene: “your hop-poles want a
coat of tar; your machines a squirt of oil. Your pasture is all the
better for the manure. Ten francs will cover the damage since I last
settled with you!”
The old man heaved a sigh:
“I do not share your opinion!”
Skene took from his pocket two of the five-franc notes the Adjutant had
given him.
“Will you take ten francs, or not?”
The old man grinned.
“There is no getting round you, my Lieutenant. Ten francs let it be.
And now let us have something to take!”
Skene sat down in pleasant lassitude. How comforting to the eye were
the greenery and sunlight, the clean tiles, black oak and shining
pewter after the ugly miseries of the past fortnight! The old dog
sprawling underneath the coffin-shaped stove blinked at him. In the
dairy a separator was humming; there was a smell of coffee, hops, burnt
wood and drying clothes. And the door was opened--by Mademoiselle
Vanderlynden.
She seemed to have grown since Skene’s last visit. Her carriage, dress,
doing of her hair, well-buttoned boots, and clear colour were the same,
but she seemed years older. She greeted Skene with formal politeness,
and went, at the old man’s request, to fetch a bottle of that special
Burgundy which, apparently, he had bought from time to time to mark the
progress of his tranquil and laborious existence, his marriage with
Madeleine’s mother, their succession to the farm, the birth of their
children, the prizes gained by his stock. “And this,” he said, “is the
dozen of my son Marcel, of which we will drink a bottle because we have
again news of him.” He nodded to an enlarged photograph on the wall,
of a young man whose chasseur’s bonnet and tight collar, with bugle
and numeral on the lapel, faintly disguised the bullet head and round
shoulders of a Vanderlynden and a farmer. Smacking his lips, he added:
“Good! Good stuff! What do you say?”
It was. Never had Skene felt so well, never was old kitchen so
picturesque, garrulous old man so interesting, or girl so well worth
looking at, though she never spoke a word. Skene accepted their
invitation to the midday meal. And when the old man went off to see to
his men, he stayed watching Madeleine interrupt her cooking to fill
his glass. No, she was not exactly a pretty girl, and she was dressed
for work rather than for show. But she was a person--not a chattel
or a clothes-prop. She was like one of those women the old Flemings
used to paint--quaint rather than beautiful--trim enough in figure and
complexion--but real people, who ruled houses and probably husbands,
and who made up in vitality and character for what they lost by not
being fair and frail. When the silence irked him, he broke it with a
commonplace, and she answered:
“Ah, Monsieur, this War, when will it end?”
“Quite soon, I should say, Mam’selle; we are going to----”
“I know--I have heard it all before----”
“Indeed--when?”
“Oh--how long ago--twelve months--the first time we saw the English----”
“And what did you think of us?”
“One was not in a state to think--the Germans had come as far as the
cross-roads--one heard the machine-guns--I was alone here with my
father, for my brothers, of course, were gone--Then, all at once, I saw
men in flat caps in the yard!”
“What did they say?”
“Ah! funny things--an officer--a quite young boy, spoke to papa--with
some trouble we found he was talking French.”
“Did you get on with them?”
“Oh, yes. They were nice to deal with--better than our poor old
territorials--and so frank. The officer told papa--‘We are going
straight between Douai and Lille!’”
Skene could not help smiling. He could see so clearly the well-dressed,
brave, ignorant youth who was going “between Douai and Lille.”
Mademoiselle Vanderlynden went on:
“That was a year ago--they have not yet gone between Douai and Lille,
and I sometimes think----”
“Courage, Mademoiselle, we are not beaten yet--on the whole we are
winning.”
“Oh yes, we are winning--but--do you know what I think, Mister Officer?”
“What do you think?”
“I think the War will end up here, in these fields!”
Skene laughed: “What, no march to Berlin?”
“Never--Brussels hardly--Lille perhaps and Strasburg if there are any
left to march!”
“What, out of all the English, French and Russians?”
Watching her gaze at the flat Flemish landscape, woolly with slanting
sunshine and moisture, Skene did not know what to say. There was an
uncanny note of prophecy in her voice. Then she came and sat opposite
to him, paler than usual, with eyes shining and red lips pressed out
into a straight line:
“Listen! You have French troops near your trenches?”
“Yes!” said Skene guardedly, “somewhere near!”
“You would not do me a little service?”
“Why, of course, anything in reason!”
“It is this. The regiment of my fiancé is there. You would not go and
see if there is news of him?”
“Why not? It might take a little time. One doesn’t go into the lines of
another army too easily.”
“Of course, of course! If you would just go and ask?”
“Go and ask! Why, I’ll go and find him, and take him out to dinner if I
can get the evening off.”
“No, no, I only want news of him.”
The rosy clouds of Burgundy were suddenly pierced by the grey light of
reality. “You mean you’re afraid that something may have happened to
him?”
She stood up to attend to a casserole which was just coming to the
boil. “I suppose so.”
Skene could think of nothing to say. She pushed the boiling pot aside
and knelt--a pleasure to watch--by the lower cupboard door of an
old press, gaily painted, polished with use, crowded with wedding
crowns, pewter jugs, gaudy Flemish china, and cap-badges of British
regiments that had been billeted at the farm. Madeleine unlocked a
small drawer in the lower portion: “I’ll write you the name, but it is
not to be shown to your friends, please. I trust you because you are
_gentil_.”
She wrote out and handed him the name: D’Archeville--53rd régiment de
Cavalerie!
So that was her young man? “But, my good girl, he’s never going to
marry you,” he thought, and as though she could read that thought, she
said:
“He is my _ami_--one calls it fiancé to English people--you will
try to hear of him, won’t you?” And Skene promised.
A cloth was laid at the head of the table for the family and their
visitor, while the men and women sat at the other end. The long
heavy Flemish dinner, with its roast and boiled, gooseberry jam and
gingerbread, wine and beer, spirits and coffee, dragged on into the
autumn afternoon. Madeleine was entirely absorbed in serving her father
and guest, and in passing their portions to the labourers. Skene was
nothing loth to mount his horse, the farmer’s good cheer, heavy and
solid, like the men, the houses, the beasts, the earth, even the thick,
woolly sky of that country, had made him drowsy to the point of sleep.
Long Thomas’s charger, properly watered and fed, was lively enough
to rouse him before he got to the cross-roads where he was to meet
Earnshaw. He got down, lit his pipe and looked back through the
elm-shadowed pastures and chequered arable at the Spanish Farm. There
it stood, under the gravelly hillocks which continue the blue chalk
downs of the Pas de Calais, across the Flemish plain into Belgium.
Past the trees he could just see the weather vane on the short tower
and the wallflowered peak of the thatched gable from which he had
come. From the hillocks to the north, and far down to the slag-heaps
of the Lens coalfields on the south horizon, was a land of unexampled
fertility, of that satisfying beauty which exists only where form and
colour are the clothing for home and plenty. And, clean across it lay
the chain of those old Spanish farms, from the Artois to West Flanders,
memorials of the time, not four centuries ago, when men had fought for
that rich land. Generation after generation, fighting and grabbing and
snatching--Romans and Franks, Spanish and French and Huns, and nature
covered it up, and went on producing more than ever was destroyed.
“Yes,” thought Skene, “but we die of the process--we others.”
And just then Earnshaw arrived, and remarked that it was a fine
evening and a wonderful year for hops; he had had a deuce of a job to
find the cashier and a long time to wait to get his money; and a dam’
good lunch, rather expensive, and they’d have to trot home most of the
way to get through that beastly wood in daylight. Having told all his
news, he asked: “How did you get on with the natives?”
CHAPTER V
_The Chance_
SUCH Englishmen as Skene and Earnshaw, who towards the end of 1915
were swamping the professional element in the British Expeditionary
Force, had been picked, by a very rough sort of natural selection, from
the million enlistments of the “Kitchener” armies; and they had under
their orders the mass who had not the education, initiative, or will to
rise out of the ranks. Above them, the small groups of regulars had,
almost to a man, been of necessity pushed into staff appointments.
Around them were a hundred thousand like themselves, company or battery
officers of fighting units or services. They were drawn from the two
main streams of English middle-class life--for the public school men
of military age were either in, or as near as they could get to, the
regular army, and the manual worker, however skilled, seldom rose to
be an officer. One stream came, like Skene, from the professional and
cultured circles--the other, like Earnshaw, from the business and
speculating crowd.
The New Army of England contrasted sharply with the other armies of
the world. Those who composed it were indubitably less soldierly,
less trained, less officer-like than men of other nationalities, bred
up in the close caste of conscriptive tradition. They were not so
much officers of a national army, as prominent members of a gigantic
football team--transmitting orders and taking initiative from a
good-humoured agreement that--well--some one had to.
On the other hand, they possessed an immense advantage in their
endless adaptability. From the early days, when recruiting posters
portrayed them, with the query: “He’s happy, are you?” to the petering
out of that grim jest about “enjoying the War,” there hung over them
a preposterous air of riding a hobby. They learned to kill with
a detachment as of learning fretwork. Even the serious Skene was
interested in the upkeep of a trench, not because it was an order,
but because he liked experimenting with earth and sandbags and water,
bombs, and telephone wire. The proudest day of Earnshaw’s life was that
on which he was appointed Transport Officer. They mostly carried the
“pack” like their men, and French officers were just beginning to envy
them.
In the rough draughty “mess” hut of the camp in the wood, during their
four days’ respite, there was little brooding over the morrow, or the
fate before most of them. When the Colonel had withdrawn to his bunk,
the Adjutant to his “office,” and old Adams to his store, the rest
played bridge or poker, yarned, smoked and skylarked. Any one glumly
complaining of a black eye from falling into a shell-hole, or of the
rats in his dug-out, was recommended to “take more water with it.”
That year-long grapple with death was perforce to be looked on as an
entertaining experience that no one ought to miss, in spite of the
obvious gaps at the table, and the narrow forty-eight hours of safety
that remained. Will there ever be again such “messes” as those of 1915?
The mail-bag was enormous, far larger than any regular soldiers would
have had. For all these “young officers” (so recruiting authorities
spoke of that unique gang of men whose average age was over thirty) had
folk belonging to them far more fussy and articulate than the relatives
of the “regulars.” But if, into one of those messes, some one came
with a rumour, “I hear there’s to be a stunt at ... next week,” or “We
are taking part in the 579th Brigade attack on the 20th,” then all the
indelible pencils and writing blocks would be neglected. To attack,
beat the enemy, and get finished with the War was the primary desire of
an army that wanted to get back to its proper job. Shell fire, gas, and
bullet wounds--horrible, of course, ghastly--but it didn’t do to say
so, not even to feel so. Carry on!
As Skene and Earnshaw led their horses back through the wood to the
camp, Skene said:
“You needn’t make a song in the mess about my going to the Spanish Farm
billet. I went to oblige the Adjutant.”
“You may have. But most fellows will think you went to see that girl!”
“Girl’s nothing to me. She’s got a young man of sorts in the French
Army!”
“You know all the family history.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you’re a silly ass!”
Just then the sentry on camp guard challenged, and they passed over
to the transport lines in silence. Wading in the mud Earnshaw grunted:
“I’ll have this sort of thing altered. Ruining all the horses!” This
was an _amende honorable_, for not at the point of the bayonet
would he have said a word that might make a “mess” joke of Skene’s
visit to the Spanish Farm. He was as English as Skene, even more so.
Skene had hardly finished washing down the coarse, ample food, with
whisky and water, when he was told an orderly was asking for him.
“What is it?”
“Wanted at Brigade Head-quarters!”
“Aha!” chirrupped little Mansfield. “I thought as much. Wanted for
espionage. I shouldn’t wonder, receiving letters from French civilians,
as you do.”
“Hope they’re not going to give you a job, Skene,” said Thomas. “We’re
short enough as it is.”
“Bad company, bad company,” Mansfield’s voice pursued them. “Give my
love to Uncle Charlie!”
At that period of the War, the ordinary company officer like Skene
regarded Brigade Head-quarters as akin to the throne of the Almighty.
Divisional Head-quarters was an unknown seventh heaven that never came
much nearer to the line than the railhead. As for Corps and Armies,
they were outside this universe. With excitement and awe, then, Skene
knocked at the newly painted door of a very new hut which an ambitious
Royal Engineer had taken pains to surround with a white-painted
railing. Bidden to come in, Skene came to attention in the small
office, almost entirely papered with maps of the sector and nearly
filled by a new pinewood table.
“Lieutenant Skene, sir, 10th Easthamptonshire Regiment.”
“Quite so, wait a minute!”
Skene stood and stared.
Standing by the table was the best type of the pre-War army. Captain
Castle, having fought through the bitter months of ’14 and ’15 as a
company officer, had been made Brigade Major while under thirty, and
only remained so out of loyalty to a selfish Brigadier. Well-born, well
made, faultlessly brave, as indeed were all those old regulars, he was
also thoughtful and well-read, loved by his equals and adored by his
men. Before the War he had mastered his job in double quick time, and
been thought none the worse of for excursions into Asiatic gendarmerie
and colonial militia. After twelve months of War, he was thinking
far into the second and third years to come. He had never laughed at
Territorials nor snubbed the New Armies. He was a skilled pianist,
had abundant good humour, and was already on the brink of those large
opportunities he subsequently used so fully. Standing between Colonel
Gilford and a French interpreter, and so tall that he had to stoop, he
had his finger and his keen eyes on a trench map, and his right ear
cocked, as it were, toward the blanket-curtained door to the little
mess-room where the General, a red-faced, white-haired cavalryman,
Devlin, by name, and known as “The Devil Himself,” was leading the
discussion with his habitual snarl.
“They tell us that you speak French?” said Captain Castle.
“Yes, sir!”
“Are you sure?” came the bitter query from beyond the curtain.
“I think there’s no doubt, sir; I hear that he has already been useful
in that way.”
The snarl continued:
“What is he in civil life?”
“What are you?” asked Captain Castle.
“Architect and surveyor, sir!”
From behind the curtain came a muttered “Good God!” The Brigade Major
covered it with, “Map no difficulty to you?”
“None at all, sir.”
“Very well, Colonel Gilford and the interpreter will take you by car
to the Head-quarters of the French division next us. Yours is the
flank platoon on our left. It is most important you should be in close
liaison with the French. Have you got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you anything else for Skene, sir?”
“No.”
“Very well, good night, Skene!”
Out went the Colonel and Skene and the interpreter along the white
paling to the car. The night was fine, the moonlight of amazing
brilliancy. Up the pavé and over the bridge, they passed through a
village under a belfry whose chimes swelled to meet them and died away
behind; then, still on the pavé road, along the bank of a canal lined
with French poplars, over another bridge into another village whose
belfry chimes were marking the next quarter. They seemed to be going
round and round in some moonlit dream and the numbing cold of the
October midnight. Skene tried to break the spell by listening to his
companions’ monosyllables, but the dream went on, of shining sky, black
poplars, gleaming canal.
They passed the sentry box of a British military policeman doubled by a
blue-cloaked, helmeted gendarme; turned down a drive between two Noah’s
Ark trees to a doll’s house of a bargeman’s cottage, where, flapping
in the moonlight, the tricolour swung above the porch. The car stopped
with a crunch, they unbent their stiffened limbs and got down. A plane
buzzed over them high up in the greenish silver sky, on some bombing
raid.
Inside the cottage, in a well-shuttered room, some lean, autocratic
gentlemen, with high, closed collars, white cuffs, and no belts or
impedimenta, were engaged round files and maps and telephones on
white deal tables. Skene reflected that never would any of his own
polo-playing, pheasant-shooting superiors be so dry, so old, so
competent as these sportless Continental theorists! Presented by the
interpreter, welcomed with conventional effusion, complimented on
his French, Skene was left to wait in a mess-room, and chat with a
charming, sleek-haired, scented boy in pale blue, crimson and silver,
over a glass of sweet “Malaga” and a harsh cigarette. This was his
chance to ask for Madeleine’s friend.
“D’Archeville” repeated the rainbow youth, “no officer that I know of
that name is with the division, but we change so fast. You do not know
the regiment? The 53rd Cuirassiers. But we are an infantry division.
Well, well, he may be with the machine-gunners, as a private soldier.
Many sons of good families prefer to remain in the ranks among their
own sort. One is more at home. Does not that also occur with you?” And
he lifted his pretty eyes, dark-circled with fatigue.
Skene thought not.
“Indeed!” replied the boy. “Do you know D’Archeville?”
Skene was forced to admit that he didn’t.
“Well then, my friend, I don’t know what interest you have in him,
but if you really want to see him there is nothing for it but to go up
to the front line, which is particularly bad on our front, and in this
there would be some difficulty, on account of your uniform. But I could
send a message for you if it is urgent?”
“No, not at all.”
“In that case, my friend, if it is merely for the pleasure of seeing
the face of some one you do not know, I should wait, I think, until
circumstances are more favourable.” And having thus delicately conveyed
that he thought Skene mad or a liar, he filled up his glass and
laughed. A gunner officer appeared with a bundle of papers, and led
out into the moonlight. He spoke in fair English to Colonel Gilford.
“When you begin, we will let loose the forty thousand devils.” Skene
stared. The gunner was replying to Colonel Gilford, and led beyond
the canal bank, into the mouth of a communication trench: “Think you
can find this again, if necessary!” Skene thought so. “Now, look here
...” and comparing his map with Skene’s he explained certain details.
Skene noted them with nervous care and took his leave. An attack! The
icy shock of the thought! Back in the car, scudding along the moonlit
pavé, Skene revolved the problem--what, where, how on earth would they
attack? The interpreter was speaking. Only by pressing his cheek close
against the humid grey moustache could he make out the words, “What is
it you want with D’Archeville?” Skene had forgotten all that in his
new excitement. Madeleine and the Spanish Farm seemed worlds away. “A
friend of a friend of mine ... I should have liked to have shaken hands
with him.”
“You will find it difficult, he is a very particular young gentleman.
I, for one, could not help you. He is a member of what they call the
New France--all that there is of conservative and behind the times.”
To Skene, who knew something of French politics, and that the
interpreter was an agnostic paper manufacturer from Lyons, this cast
little light on Madeleine’s mysterious _ami_.
Dawn broke, it was near sunrise when they reached the level crossing,
and Skene was dismissed to rejoin his company.
Back across fields and through deserted farms to the battalion, which
had moved up during the night to a line of dug-outs in the embankment
of a canal, Skene went to see Long Thomas and found that they would not
move till dusk. Rolling himself in a blanket he lay down, tired out, on
the wet earth. Through the opening of his dug-out, he could just see
the dark canal, the row of poplars, with leaves glowing straw-yellow
in the autumn sun, and beyond them again a little whitewashed
lock-keeper’s house, whose gaping windows and torn thatch let in the
pale Flemish sky. And that small point of domesticity amid all that was
so warlike brought his mind back to Madeleine and her lover. Hang the
fellow! What was he to do? Write to him? See him? On what imaginable
grounds, with what imaginable result? The wet came soaking through his
blanket. “This time to-morrow,” he thought, “I mayn’t be here. There
may be no me, no him--nothing!” And, rolling over on to what seemed a
drier patch, he fell asleep. He had had his chance.
CHAPTER VI
_A Brigade Affair_
HIS orderly was not to wake him till teatime, but the sun had just set
when Long Thomas stirred him up with one of those broomsticks then in
vogue among officers for sounding the impossibilities of the trenches
they were supposed to use, and invited him to come and have a look at
the scene of the night’s operations. Crossing the canal by a pontoon
bridge to the rear, they climbed the left wall of the lock-keeper’s
ruined cottage, and, lying flat on charred rafters, peered out through
the shell-torn thatch. At their feet was the canal; beyond its further
bank an ever-increasing desolation, where communication trenches ran
out among the weeds and self-sewn crops of fifteen months’ desertion,
the mud lagoons of undrained ponds, the gaunt scarecrows of splintered
trees and ruined fragments of walls and gateways gleaming like
bleaching bones in the dying light. Right on the sloe-coloured horizon,
always on the highest visible ground, the first star-shells of the
evening vaguely marked the enemy entrenchments. To Skene it seemed
flatly impossible that human beings should make their way in darkness
across so many sloughs and pitfalls, but the cheery voice of Long
Thomas giving him his orders, precisely in the tone in which he would
have told him to go in first wicket and hit the bowling, was incredibly
reassuring. “Two trees, and some brickwork, just there,” and Thomas
pointed; “you’re second wave! If you’re stuck, you stay there!” Skene
said: “Yes, I see!”
Climbing down, they went to the dug-out which served for mess-room
and Company Head-quarters, where Thomas was to meet the other officers
of his and the adjacent companies, for a last word. Years after, Skene
used to shudder when he remembered that moment. The amateurishness
of it all, that tiny concentration in plain sight of the Bosche, the
utter lack of preparation or reserves--the afterwards, patent fact that
General Devlin, scornful of others’ failures, was just experimenting,
with a view to the command of a division. On the sweating walls of
the candle-lighted den hung belts and rainproofs, between posted-up
cartoons from “Le Rire,” showing the Kaiser with a withered arm; its
improvised table was covered with maps and signal forms, little pools
of wine, little smears of grease and cigarette ends. Outside, the
N.C.O.’s were “falling-in,” the men under shelter of the embankment,
in the gathering dusk. Within one heard: “I see ... here and then here
... good enough.... I suppose we shall--what’s your watch!” and then an
awkward silence, as if they were wondering.
From without came a North-country voice growling: “If Aaa catches ’em
a’ll slog ’em, bah gom!” and a Cockney: “Mind the barrow, please! The
Sergeant said I was to have my little spade, but ’e won’t let me take
me little pail, no’ow, Gawd ’elp ’em!”
And Skene prayed from the bottom of his heart: “Pray God, don’t smash
me up this time. I didn’t start this silly show. It’s not fair I should
be killed!”
A tall high-shouldered form came splashing along the slippery pathway
and stopped beside him. It was Captain Castle.
“Hallo, Skene! Thomas in? Let’s see him!” Bending nearly double under
the low-opening he passed into the dug-out, with a word for everyone,
a fixed time here, a definite place there, making sure that everybody
knew where to look for him, and which way the walking wounded were to
come. Skene ceased to pray. To trust in Castle seemed more effectual.
That fine day had ended in a clear sunset, but with darkness a light
rain began to fall. Skene, with his Sergeant, passed slowly up the line
of his platoon, feeling for himself that the extra shovels, bombs,
and bundles of sandbags were in place; then, glancing at the luminous
dial of his watch, he led his party along the steep embankment to the
bridge. At the top, two tall figures stood, motionless, and as Skene
passed, the Colonel’s voice said: “All right, Skene?”
“All right, sir.”
“Good luck to you.”
Then began the slow and tiring journey to where they would “jump-off.”
The rain fell steadily; the mud rose above their ankles; there was
constant hesitation in the pitchy quagmire to make sure of the right
trench, constant halts to let those in front draw ahead, or close
up the tailing-out which no amount of discipline or forethought
ever entirely prevented among men marching in file. Of the enemy no
sign save an occasional greenish star-shell that soared up into the
downpour, hung glaring for a moment and went out; a few rifle-shots and
a couple of long-distance shrapnel bursting far back over the transport
routes. Then, before they had reached their shelter trench, the western
horizon suddenly flared brick red, and, with a nerve-racking hiss, the
first English shells passed over their heads and burst with dry crashes
amid the darkness of the enemy trenches. From their left came a sudden,
rapid, continuous, almost purring roll of gunfire. It was Skene’s
French friend letting loose “the forty thousand devils.” By the time
they had reached the jumping-off place, where the water rose halfway
to their thighs, the bombardment was continuous. Skene leant against
the low parapet in front of him. His head was singing and drowsy with
the uproar--he squeezed down the line of his men to make sure they had
each found proper foothold. Before he reached the end of his line, he
was stopped in the narrow trench by some one coming from the opposite
direction. It was Long Thomas.
“All right, Skene?”
“All right, Thomas.”
“They aren’t half getting hell, are they?”
“It sounds like it.”
“It’s nothing to what we’ll give them presently.”
“Rath-er!”
“Cheerio! I’ll come and see you as soon as you’re settled in.” He
passed, and Skene thought: “Will you? I wonder.” At last his watch
marked the minute, and he gave the signal. Everyone scrambled or hauled
himself on to the parapet. In an instant the lucky and sure-footed
were yards ahead of those whose foothold had slipped in the dissolving
mud, or, too eagerly, had slid forward on their faces. Skene, in an
incredibly puny voice, as it seemed to him, kept shouting: “Keep
together--keep together!” Then he was walking on nothing, immersed in
evil-smelling mud. And a crash that seemed inside his head deafened and
bewildered him. Struggling to his feet he ran his knees into a kneeling
figure.
“There’s a man hit, sir!”
“Never mind, go on!” And on they slid and stumbled together.
The uproar was now continuous, behind, above, before them; and beneath
them the marsh quaked. Mud and iron flew through the air in what seemed
solid masses; it had become as light as day. Skene could only think
of one thing, to keep on cawing hoarsely, “Go on, go on!” The Cockney
catchword he had heard in the dusk had caught on, and all about him,
shopmen and clerks, labourers, mill hands, miners were bellowing at the
top of their voices, “Mind the barrow, please!” as they skidded and
waded, fell and died.
With a sort of dismay he was brought up sharp by the inky line of
a trench. The voice of the Sergeant-major shouted to him from the
darkness: “Half left, sir, half left. There’s a plank across, and keep
half left, sir. You’re too far to the right!” He realized then that he
was crossing their own front line trench.
When he was over it he seemed to have before him a field of oats,
“All a-blowing, all a-growing,” but it was a thick bank of wire and
they must grope their way to the opening. With demon hands scratching
his face, rending his clothes, tearing his water bottle from his hip,
his cap from his head, he plunged through that devil’s garden, and
blundered at last into a group of men, digging, grubbing, tugging
asunder the tortured soil. They were the next platoon. Thrusting before
him to the left such of his own men as he could find, he reached the
mound of splintered brick and the two elm stumps, with their ragged
fans of bough, allotted as his position. The German trench was beyond,
but shells were still falling into it, making it a quaking line of
light, a continuous eruption. Of the first wave, no sign. By chance,
the right thought was uppermost in his mind, “Dig. Get cover.” He
passed from man to man, speaking a word here, giving a hand there,
and praying in vain that the third wave would bring the reels of wire
that alone could make them safe. The filthy mud splashed back in clods
into the miserable gully that was beginning to appear, the air was
alive with hurtling metal; the score or so of men were dropping one
by one; a sort of dull frenzy settled down on Skene. He could hear a
small voice calling, “Is that you, sir! Is that you?” “The fool!” he
thought, crawling backwards and forwards amongst his men, “Who does
he think it is!” Some one was pulling at his arms, a Cockney voice
said: “I’ve brought Mr. Mansfield, sir.” Suddenly around him appeared
his own Sergeant, Mansfield’s Sergeant nursing a Maxim gun, another
of Mansfield’s men with a tripod over his shoulder, and then a shrill
mocking voice, as of some parrot from the underworld, said: “I say,
Skene, do tell the band to stop! I want to reverse,” and out skipped
Mansfield’s little figure in a smeary raincoat, mud-clotted from head
to foot. The enemy’s fire had slackened, and his voice chirrupped
above it: “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you all over the
infernal room. And here you are, sitting out by yourself--you know the
next is ours!”
In the Operation Orders had occurred the sentence, “Immediate
provision will be made for adequate machine-gun protection against
counter-attack.” Skene began to laugh. He held his head in his hands
and a sort of dizziness overcame him. He sat down in a puddle. His
Sergeant, kneeling beside him, was telling him how the rear section had
got separated by a patch of impassable wire; they had been picked up by
Mansfield and brought on to the old German trench which had been the
first wave’s objective. “But there’s nothing to be done with that, sir,
it’s all to bits. There’s no one in front, and nothing has come up from
support. And what shall we do with these wounded, sir?”
What, indeed!
After setting up his gun, Mansfield passed with a jest, making his
way further along. By the first glimmer of a feeble dawn Skene could
see that they had scratched out some dozen yards of trench waist-deep
behind the two tree stumps. Then the hurricane burst out afresh. Some
one shouted: “Here they come!” Mansfield’s machine-gun set up an
unceasing gibber. Skene saw that his Sergeant was passing up and down
behind his men, tearing open boxes of small arms ammunition. There was
no need to order rapid fire. With one long yell, “a-a-a-a,” the men
were beginning to work the bolts of their rifles as if frantic. Nothing
else to be done! It was instinctive, the one poor outlet for what
all had been feeling. The men were behaving well, after what they’d
been through! Pulling himself up behind a jutting ledge of brickwork,
Skene stared into the greenish-white vapour, where the British barrage
was bursting, and into which his men were emptying their rifles. For
several minutes, it seemed, he watched. Nothing emerged from that belt
of vapour. The firing slackened. The counter-attack was not maturing.
Instead, as the sullen November day came up, Skene found himself
chained by a network of machine-gun fire. Two of his men were hit
at once, he told the others to lie close. He himself peered out
from time to time. Nothing to be seen but vapour--freshly torn
earth--broken pickets--shredded wire--bodies and water--and all visible
surface whipped with vicious bullets. No message could reach him, no
ammunition, no medical aid.
About midday he let his men eat what they had on them. There was no
hope of cooking anything. By two o’clock the enemy were enfilading
the little trench. Skene crawled along, literally over his men, some
sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, some grim and pale, shivering as they
clutched their rifles. The wounded were quiet, very white, either dead
or collapsed. At the end of the line, Skene found his Sergeant lying on
his back, his cap over his face. Skene pulled him by the arm, but the
arm came away in his hands. The Sergeant was cut limb from limb by a
shell that had landed beneath him.
Next, a long-distance bombardment was opened on them. Their
machine-gun, the brickwork and the tree stumps were first smashed
piecemeal and finally blown away. But the Flemish winter day is short,
and with dusk came a runner, worming his way in on his stomach, with a
written order from Thomas, “Bring in your men.”
Under cover of darkness, twenty-three men, dragging and carrying two
wounded, who still appeared alive, all of them soaked and starved,
scratched, torn and plastered with mud, made their way back in darkness
to the old front line.
Skene went to see Thomas. The companies were all mixed up. The first
wave had been held up by uncut wire and blotted out, leaving Skene’s
party uncovered. It was not even possible to know how far the artillery
had helped or hindered.
So ended that Brigade affair. Skene had lost half his men, had not
seen a German, and had come back to his starting-point.
CHAPTER VII
_One Game and Another_
THE battalion had been at rest for some days in a convent of a railway
town. They were no longer recognizable for the same men that Skene had
helped to march back from the line.
Reclothed, roughly but well-fed, shaved and no longer starved of sleep,
they were laughing and singing about the field kitchen in the courtyard
under the giant chestnut trees. It was a fine November day, and the
blue smoke curled up quietly through the rust-coloured leaves into the
pale Flemish sky. They had got over the exhaustion of the attack, the
despair of failure, the jealousy of the kilted battalion of regulars,
who, helped by a bombardment of three days instead of three hours, had
eventually straightened the line.
They had got over the bitter nights and mornings of torrential rain,
and those first frosts, when every semblance of a trench fell in, and
the battalion after being relieved, instead of coming out from the
line, had been kept on the canal bank and sent up every night to dig.
Here in the town they could walk about on the firm paved road, where
the mud was seldom above their ankles, where there were still a few
shops, restaurants, and actually a cinema. The third week of November
had turned mild and fine, and with the sun and rest, the old jaunty
spirit had come back. Skene shouted for his breakfast and hurried the
N.C.O.’s through the necessary parade and company business. Thomas had
gone to Brigade Head-quarters, Skene commanded the company, and they
were to play the semi-final of the Brigade Football Tournament that
afternoon on the archery meadow behind the church.
Free of his duties, Skene set out for the field behind the church. It
was market day, and crossing the square, he wondered if he would see
Madeleine or her father. Here, amid rows of black-hooded gigs, and the
low stalls stacked with butter, eggs, chickens and cheese, people were
haggling and bartering--old men in black broadcloth with black glazed
peaks to their Dutch caps, old ladies of astonishing circumference
and garrulity, bareheaded young girls with their hair carefully
dressed, and wonderfully neat stockings and boots, rough skirts, cotton
blouses, and strong hardworking bodies. One or two of them offered
their wares to Skene but the majority were content to examine him with
leisurely curiosity. He could see neither Madeleine nor her father,
and, having made sure that the football ground was in order, went
back to the billet. In the afternoon he lounged peacefully smoking
around the pasture where the match was played, trying to explain
to the Brigade interpreter why it was fitting that officers should
turn out in shorts and referee, and treat respectfully the captain
of the side, although he was the Sergeant-major’s servant. Under a
mild sky, in that damp rich meadow rose the old familiar shouts, the
drub-drub of the ball, the rustle of feet, the piercing whistle of the
referee. It was England, simply a piece of English life cut neatly
out and pasted on the map of Flanders. Behind the spectators--men and
officers, astonished natives and a few derisive French soldiers home on
leave--Brigadier-General Devlin strolled with Colonel Gilford, smoking
and watching the play. Skene caught these words:
“Have you got accustomed to these middle-aged subalterns?”
“Yes, pretty well. That bald-headed officer over there gives his age as
thirty-five, and none the worse for that. On the contrary, all work and
no raggin’!”
And just then Skene saw old Vanderlynden in a high cart behind an old
white horse plodding slowly along the pavé bordering the pasture,
without much guidance from the reins. He slipped through the hedge and
put his hand on the shaft. Old Vanderlynden raised his cap. “Good day,
my good sir! We have had bad news. My young lady’s young man is in
hospital!”
Skene expressed his sympathy: the old man, elbows on knees, looked at
the flies on the horse’s back.
“We have been to the hospital, but he is not to be seen!”
“How is that?”
Here the old man became strangely garrulous:
“My good sir, it was like this. We got the news that he lay in
hospital at five o’clock of the evening. Too late then. We went to
bed; she slept little, I think. In the morning, we got out the cart
and started. At the station we found a notice. In case of necessity,
relatives of wounded can have half-fare ticket. We ask, but it is not
granted without the written request stamped with the stamp of the
Mairie. So we went back, to write our request and get it stamped.
Blanquart, the Secretary, is not at home, but at the end we find him
and it is done. We catch the train and arrive at the hospital and show
our papers. He is not there!”
“Do you mean they have evacuated him?”
“They do not say: they only say, in French, he is not there!”
Skene looked at the round eyes, the roughly shaven chin, the horny
outstretched hand. He saw so plainly that utter incapacity to spend
three francs too much even to cheat Death, the dumb acquiescence in
some orderly-corporal’s “Pas ici!”
“Well, what are you going to do now?”
“It is just that, my Lieutenant, for which I have come to speak to
you. My daughter thinks you might help her....” (“Oh, yes, I daresay,”
thought Skene.) “It seems, since it was an English hospital to which
he was taken, he will go to an English base. We, as civilians, may not
use the telephone, and I do not know if they would answer us, at the
hospital--but they would answer you!”
“You want me to telephone, do you?”
“My little girl waits always at the station to see if you will not, my
Lieutenant! You have only to get up here beside me, and come and speak
to her!” He spoke to the old horse in Flemish.
Colonel Gilford, on his way from the football field to a conference at
Divisional Head-quarters, heard--above the cheering and the raucous:
“Come on, you Clyde-strikers!” “Right, we will so!”--the clop-clop of
the heavy-footed old white horse, and saw one of his officers being
driven down the street by a “native,” in a black gig. It confirmed his
saddest suspicions of the New Armies.
The station was a stucco building with a portico and arcade, cluttered
up with military offices, and almost lost among sandbags, waiting
lorries, and fidgeting mules in limbers.
In the dark waiting-room sat Madeleine Vanderlynden, between a
swine-fever notice and an appeal of the new War Loan. She had left off
for the occasion the clothes of her daily life, and was dressed in a
dove-grey tailor-made costume, and what Skene would have described as
a “decent” hat. She was sitting perfectly still, holding her gloves
and her little bag. Skene thought that except for her boots, too high
and pointed in the toe, she might have passed as “nice” in Easthampton
suburbs. She rose, held out her hand, and said: “Monsieur, you would do
me a great service if you would telephone!”
Skene pushed into the R.T.O.’s office, told off the Corporal in
charge, and called up the Clearing Station. He got through to the
orderly officer and put his question. The officer didn’t know. He was
a busy man, and relatives were a plague. Casualties were notified
through the proper channels in due course. As for French casualties
in an English hospital, they were a nuisance, like their relatives.
Their nominal roll was kept separately and could not be found. Anyhow
they had gone. Skene went back to Madeleine, who was sitting just as
he had left her. The old man stood by her, gazing at the floor, with
his hands hanging at his sides. In that case, she asked, would he
not get her a lift in a car to the base? Skene couldn’t do that. He
fidgeted, and looked at his feet. Madeleine stifled a sob, while the
old man spat carefully in a corner. “Perhaps he’s been transferred to
another sector,” said Skene. She answered bitterly: “I want to see
him!” It dawned on Skene that she didn’t understand, and didn’t want
to understand, even the most necessary and elementary Army Routine. He
felt helpless, and cast about for some phrase to express his feeling
that what was done was done, the dead were dead, and here was he alive,
to-day, and possibly dead to-morrow, and the least bit tired of being
a disinterested third party. But he only enquired what troops were now
billeted on the farm. Madeleine sprang to her feet, then, with a dab at
her eyes, and a brusque, “Yes, it’s time we were getting home.” And as
the old black gig trailed across the cobbles of the square behind the
old white horse, she turned her head to say: “You must come and see us
again soon.” That was the only thanks Skene got.
CHAPTER VIII
_The Day of Rest_
THE company was in Brigade Reserve--not even so far back as the camp
in the wood. They were to be quartered in Dead Dog Farm, just out of
bullet range, but within that of the field guns, and were advised not
to walk about in the daylight. There was no fear of that--they would
go up at four-thirty every afternoon to dig; besides, the artillery
dug-outs in the cellar had several feet of brick rubble over them which
meant that they hadn’t been abandoned without good reason.
On the first night, at ten o’clock, the company tumbled in from the
relief which had been taking place since five. By the help of two
candle stumps the officers saw the men under shelter. Their swelling
chorus of songs, oaths, thumps and clatter of rifles and equipment,
while they got their hot tea from the cooker in the yard, died away
into snores. There was no digging that night.
The morning dawned grey and thick with fog. Skene and Thomas went round
the place to see what could be done with it as a billet.
It reminded Skene of Spanish Farm. It was, in fact, another of that
chain of farm-fortresses left by Alva, three hundred years ago. On
three sides of an enormous midden, the red-brick buildings towered up,
solid as when built--badly holed by the Bosche, but hanging together
still. On the fourth side stood a short tower thirty feet high, and so
solid that a 4 in. howitzer shell had not destroyed the whole of it.
They were just returning, when a mounted officer clattered under the
arch of the gateway and dismounted beside them.
Was it credible that there could exist anything so clean and bright
as that officer? Cap, well-shaven face, raincoat, field boots, shining
spurs, black metal cross--ah! the Padre from Brigade. Thomas, the
public-schoolboy, covered his astonishment, called a man to take the
horse, and asked the Padre to breakfast as if he had been expecting him
for months. “Why, of course,” thought Skene, “it’s Sunday!”
For so long, Sunday had meant nothing more than any other day. An hour
later the four platoons filed along the cobbles to the big barn.
The fog was dense, the front quiet. There was nothing to fear from
observation. Thomas and Skene considered the danger of having so many
men together in a confined space, but agreed to risk it. The only
light came through the upper half of the great doors--the light of a
wet Flemish winter--and fell on shaven heads and newly brushed khaki,
freshly shined leather and brass. The Sergeants distributed little
paper hymn-books. The Padre produced a surplice from his haversack and
put it on in a corner, and Skene was perversely reminded of a girl he
had known, years before, who, after hours of shining nudity, would
suddenly get up, turn her back, and slip on a nothing of linen and lace
with just such an action.
The hymns the Padre had chosen were good and old. Skene amused himself
by picking out from amongst the men the well-trained little village
choir boys. The singing ceased. The young Padre was speaking; what he
said appeared simple, sincere, sensible. The men, heartened by having
opened their chests in singing, were listening, absolutely still.
Skene’s mind wandered. That young Corporal by the door, with the light
on his clean features and cropped head, the healthy sheen of his
flesh against the deep brown of the barn, might be out of a Flemish
picture--a Van Dyck. Somewhere a man snored--and with the sound the
picture changed to a Hals or a Jordaens.
Did those old painters, who lived in the midst of wars as brutal as
this one, draw inspiration from the tremendous emotions of their time?
And should we see, in our generation, art rise to equal heights? Or was
fine art sent wandering from heaven, like the wind, to descend only on
the unconscious!
But everybody was bending head and shoulders. The young Padre was
praying now. Direct and simple, asking that they might keep before them
the high purpose which had brought them together to do their duty in
a strange land, whatever might be the consequences. But Skene thought
of young Murdon and Bolton, the boy-Corporal, and suddenly felt he
wanted to cry. The young Padre started another hymn, and gave them
benediction. The men filed out.
Divested of his surplice the Padre was cheerful, obviously hungry. He
would stay to lunch. Thomas went over to Brigade. Skene entertained the
guest. The mess orderly had got pork chops from goodness knew where,
a tin of beans from the canteen, a bottle of French beer, there was
ration cheese and shamrock “butter.” And the Padre produced a flask of
canteen port.
After lunch, Skene, and the young Padre who volunteered his help, sat
smoking in that ancient basement, smelling of pigeons and rats and old
age, and turning over on the greasy “table” the letters home of nearly
two hundred men, which had to be censored and sent down that night.
Such letters home--letters to parents mostly! Some to children--the
longest of course to sweethearts--some well written--nearly all
affectionate--some obscene like the simple classic, “Dear Mother, This
war is a b.... Tell Auntie!” About them all was the curious anonymity
of letters whose writers are forbidden to say where they are, what
doing. Skene looked for the crude pothooks of his own servant, fearing
that the fellow’s loquacity, fortified by the extra leisure and liquor
of officers’ servants, might have prompted some effusion that would get
him into trouble. What he found, however, was this, with the spelling
corrected:
“DEAR WIFE,--
“Hope you are well and keeping your heart up. Give my love to the
kiddies. And do keep your heart up. That’s a rum ’un, old Mrs. ...
being dead. Mind you ask her girl Alice for some of the potatoes if
they are not going to keep them. And keep your heart up. Now I must
close. Your loving husband,
“JERRY.
“Somewhere in France.
“Love to my kiddies.”
Slowly the pile of cheap envelopes diminished. Presently they were
gone. Skene and the young Padre faced each other in the candle-lit
dusk. The latter was flushed. “The men are splendid!” he said. But on
Skene had already descended the irritable mood which used to come to
the most hardened, when about to leave such meagre comfort and safety
as they had in billets, for the misery and danger of the trenches.
“We get used to it,” he said.
“One is glad the spiritual fires are burning so brightly, a good augury
for after the War!”
On the tip of Skene’s tongue was the retort he had made the week before
to an Engineer officer about the siting of some dug-outs. “You may know
a lot about trenches, but we have to live in them!” But he looked at
the young Padre’s clean pink face. “After all,” he thought, “he might
easily have stayed at home!” and said instead: “There won’t be many
left for after the War--at our present rate of going on--it’s rather an
expensive education, isn’t it?”
“I fear so, I fear so! At any rate those who fall have the satisfaction
of knowing that they have done their duty!”
An eternity of satisfaction! Skene replied: “Let’s hope so!”
“Well, now I must be going. I shall have tea at Brigade. Is there
anything I can send you?”
“The men are always grateful for novels and cigarettes.”
“Comforts them--what?”
“Prevents them thinking. Good night.”
The Padre clattered out into the dusk. “Tea, sir!” said Jerry the
servant at his elbow. He drank it, reading “Tristram Shandy.” He was
roused by his Sergeant-major: “Company ready to move off, sir!”
Pulling on his gear he sallied from the farm at the head of that
procession.
That night he lost four men from shrapnel and two from machine-gun
fire. Sunday!
CHAPTER IX
_Stands England where she did?_
WHO that ever had such a thing can forget his first English leave?
That leave, which came after months of waiting, and was often despaired
of--for it was not then the usual thing it afterwards became--those
eight days which seemed to promise an eternity of leisured comfort.
Towards such bliss, Skene, like everyone else, travelled slowly and
with difficulty. Relieved from his command in the support line, he
had a mile or so to walk across the open, past the dump, and along
the shell-swept road, until, near the bank of the canal, he was lucky
enough to find some regimental transport, returning to the horse-lines.
He took the Sergeant’s horse and, pushing ahead, found old Adams in
his “Armstrong” hut, and shared the old man’s nightcap whisky, under
the Bosche midnight salvo flying over their heads. Then, buttoning
close his British-warm, and commending his valise to the old soldier’s
care, he stumbled through the darkness down the remaining mile and a
half of camp-surrounded pavé to the station. This was before the days
of rest-houses and officers’ clubs, and he slept sitting on his pack,
against the sandbags of the R.T.O.’s office, until a freak train, made
up with Belgian, French and English carriages, rolled dissolutely in.
Flinging himself into the nearest first-class compartment, he slept
until the bitter morning rain, blowing through a broken window, awoke
him between Calais and Boulogne. Around him on the seats and floor
lay half a dozen other officers, whom he had never seen before. His
grumble at the length and slowness of the journey was answered: “Ever
been by Havre? No? By Golly, you should go by Havre!” Luckily Skene
had biscuits and chocolate and some one had some coffee and rum in a
Thermos, for it was eleven o’clock of a grey, drizzling morning when
they stretched their stiffened limbs on the platform at Bologne, and
were promptly captured by a Military Landing Officer who took their
warrants and gave them “duty” tickets for the boat. Too green, then,
to “dodge” obligations of this kind, too keen, perhaps, to wish to,
and much in awe of the limping captain with the D.S.O. who gave the
orders--“base-port people” had not yet become an alien and hatred
race--Skene spent the two hours crossing in charge of the port side of
the main deck, and did not really feel free until he emerged through
the portals of Victoria Station. He had travelled up with two homeless
Englishmen who had hurried from the West Indies to enlist. They were
going to dine at a restaurant and see if they couldn’t “pick something
up” at a music-hall. Skene sent a telegram and took a taxi to a
northern terminus and caught the night train to his home. He slept the
whole four hours. Clouds were racing over the bright moon till the
very Cathedral spire seemed in motion, when he let himself into the
Cathedral close and put his key into the latch of his uncle’s house.
They had remained faithful to him then--all these familiar things!
He switched on the light in the low, wide, polished old hall--and
instantly felt for his revolver--coming to meet him was a red-eyed,
shorn fellow in a greasy collar and British-warm, nondescript cap
and sodden puttees. It was his own reflection in the mirror--what a
brute he looked--red, coarsened, broadened! The old mirror, that had
reflected him a thousand times, told him the truth as no human being
would have done; and stuck in it was a note: “Dear Geoffrey, I have
gone to bed. There is some hot milk in the Thermos. Uncle.” ... Milk!
Morning! O taste of the first cup of English-made tea. O first bath
in a real white enamelled bath with unlimited hot and cold water.
Having shaved at leisure, and breakfasted bloatedly under the admiring
eyes of housemaid and housekeeper, Skene sauntered out. He first met
one Sharpley, in the local bank, who had not enlisted, and kept him
talking, till the reluctant wretch, who was perfectly fit, and of
military age, but who wanted to “get on,” stammered: “Of course, I
can’t go, we’re so shorthanded!” He next met the stumping Captain
Bittern, who had left a leg at Mons, and was greeted as a brother
officer, before all the world. Then came a glass of sherry with Griggs
the wine merchant, who had known him “as a leetle, totty boy--and now
look at ye,” then a tearful blessing from an unknown old lady, who
_would_ shake his hand because she had lost “her boy” in the
trenches. It was nearly midday before he turned the corner of the
Chapter House and stood before his uncle’s office, with its brass
plate, “Diocesan Architect and Surveyor.” There was the bald head and
the toothless mouth of old Hanson, his uncle’s clerk, quavering out:
“Well, if it isn’t Master Geoffrey come back from the War--what will
the Gov’nor say?” as if he had stepped out of the pages of Anthony
Trollope or Bulwer Lytton.
And here was his uncle--that genial, decorous person, who had been
father and mother and tutor to him, with the beautiful white hair
and rosy cheeks, in the leisured tidiness of that office, where
the architectural drawings gleamed out from the neutral-tinted
lincrusta--was it all a sort of play?
War had not touched the people at home. Lighting regulations,
recruiting, daily casualty lists--it hadn’t really touched them. And
if it hadn’t, what would? “Well, Geoffrey, my boy!” And then a tale of
who had been born, married or died during his absence within the little
friendly circle of The Close. “So-and-so has done so-and-so--ah! but
you wouldn’t know him, he’s in the town.... Mrs. Someone’s son Lionel
has got a commission, and went to France on the 14th; I don’t know if
you met him!”
“I can’t say I have, Uncle; you see, there are over a million and a
half of us there!”
“Just so, just so! And now, my dear boy, do tell me what it is like,
your letters don’t give us much ... data!”
“No, you see we have strict censorship!”
“Quite! Quite! I suppose it is very terrible.”
“It’s like--like----” How could he find words, in that quiet room,
for the barren maze of putrid water and ragged wire--for the formless
misery and roystering leisure of billets! “It’s like the end of the
world!”
“My dear Geoffrey! Well, I suppose so!”
His uncle demanded no further explanation. He had more engrossing
things on his mind. They walked home to lunch. There were cutlets and
stewed rhubarb. No cream: “Wartime, Geoffrey. We all feel it.”
The days passed. They passed in visits to his tailor, his old school,
his uncle’s friends. His own friends were either gone, or, as he now
felt, worse than gone. He did not want to see those who had stayed
behind. He felt uncertain as to whether he made them feel awkward,
but certain that they made him feel so; the seventh day came. He had
to go up to town in the afternoon, to be in time for the boat train,
judiciously arranged so as to start at an hour at which all men are
sober. His uncle sitting opposite him at lunch (roast beef and apple
tart) ventured: “Well, my dear boy, the sooner it’s over the better. I
shall want you when we get really busy with the memorials--there’ll be
a lot!”
Skene agreed. They parted at the station with a handshake. What his
uncle thought none can tell.
In town, he had a hot bath and a good dinner, not knowing when he
would have either again, and strolled into a music-hall, having no
one in London to see and nowhere else to go. In that unreal maze of
mirrors, plush seats and gilding he felt curiously detached. The
allurements of the place, the promiscuous pleasures, that lay ready
enough to the hands of young officers on leave, did not allure him
somehow. He was far from realizing as yet the bleak certainty of
illness, breakdown, wounds, eventual death that lay before an Infantry
officer. The crowd cheered him up. He felt that the country was putting
up a good show for war-time. He felt a cheerful compassion for all
these women, chased out of Belgian watering-places under circumstances
he could well imagine. Two-thirds of the men were in uniform, and
mostly junior to him--he sympathized with them no less. By the bar a
young officer, trying to converse in broken French with an over-dressed
elderly women, cannoned against him and apologized. It was Wheather,
the Signal Officer, just drunk enough. He hailed Skene with effusion.
“I tell her I will go up the golden stairs,” he pointed to the ornate
stairway leading up from the bar, “but she won’t let me.”
The lady pounced on Skene as an ally; she was hardly less drunk, but
more used to it. What claim she made on Wheather--an introduction she
had given him, or a room he had hired from her--Skene couldn’t make
out. Her French, he judged, was inferior to his own, and she would
not accept his polite intimation that his friend was tired, and he
was going to see him home. Instead she stuck to Wheather’s arm, and
impounded Skene’s, who dare not withdraw it for fear that she should
fall. And together the three gyrated, to the amusement of the world,
but not to Skene’s. A commissionaire said with a grin: “Now, sir,
we must clear, if you please!” In the crush that followed, Skene,
separated from Wheather, was anchored on the stone curb, by this
elderly lady in loud clothes, dragging on his arm and stuttering in
rapid, mutilated French, “malade--malade à en crever--sick enough to
bust myself.”
“Taxi, sir?” said the grinning commissionaire. Skene nodded.
The vehicle slid up, the old lady collapsed. “All right, sir, shove
her in; I know her!” said the driver. Skene shoved her in and got
in behind, holding up the poor old bones and lolling head as best
he could. The machine stopped with a whirr at the doorway of an
establishment against which nothing could be said so far as appearances
went. A porter in uniform called a maid from an upper flat; Skene
delivered the old lady to them without remark and received no thanks.
Returning to the taxi he drove to his hotel. On getting out he asked
his driver:
“Who was that person?” “Well, sir, we calls her ‘skinny Lizzie.’ She
often goes home like that. Don’t get enough to eat, they say, since the
War!”
Skene went up to brush off the scent and powder.
Morning was breaking grey, in that grey place, Victoria Station, when
he picked his way among men sleeping on the asphalt pavement, and women
weeping against anything that gave them semblance of shelter. Dodging
and pushing, he got his boat ticket, found the Pullman breakfast car,
and cast his pack upon a seat.
Half-past six of a winter’s morning strikes chilly on an empty stomach,
however healthy. Skene stamped his feet, in the cold and sodden
twilight that the shaded lamplight eked out into the dawn under the
sooty girders. Around him, officers whose relatives had come to see
them off were trying to look anywhere but at those women’s faces, so
brave, so white, so strained. Skene thanked his God that he had no one.
Across on the platform where the rank and file were boarding their
separate train, emotion was allowed fuller vent, the atmosphere was
easier. There, stout buxom mothers, and pale neat mothers, trim or
draggled sisters, sweethearts, wives, and some few who were none of
these, were clinging and crying to their hearts’ content--and the men,
a few painfully sober and earnest, but most jolly, or just recovered
from jollity, elbowed their way into the carriages and began to sing.
An eddying movement round the carriages of his own train, a closing
of doors, caused Skene to seek his place. The train moved, gently,
noiselessly. Strained faces turned away; a rustling of newspapers, in a
dead silence--the men’s train, and its “Are we downhearted?” dropping
behind in the grey suburbs. And, oddly, as the speed increased, and the
last suburb yielded to the parklands of Kent, and the first gruff small
talk of Englishmen ashamed of their emotions began, Skene felt his
spirits rising.
Opposite to him an R.E. officer yawned and sat up, with ends of hair
straggling over his bleared eyes. It was Wheather.
Each of them said “Hallo!” and sat silent.
Presently Wheather leant across the breakfast table and said: “Lend me
some money!”
Skene did so. “Thanks,” said Wheather. “Where the devil did I see you,
Skene?” Skene reminded him. “Hoh! It was a muddle. You see, before the
War I used to know a little party in a shop, you know, in the West End.
I wrote and told her to meet me on leave. She used to wear a decent
black dress, an’ a little hat, and looked just all right--looked like
what she was. I used to take her to the Palace, and they never said a
word. When she met me, on leave, my word, you should have seen her.
The first evening cost me a little short of ten quid--why, we used to
go to the pictures and have supper, and the whole go was about thirty
bob! I was so tight I don’t know how I got out of her flat. I had to
go home, of course, and see my people that day, but I arranged to meet
her again last night. She was a bigger swell than ever. She’d had
trouble with her landlord, and wanted to come to my hotel. But I said,
‘My dear girl, I’ve booked my room and that sort of thing isn’t done.’
‘Oh, I’ll get a chaperone and take a room with her,’ she says, ‘and
be your fiancée and sling the lead like anything with the office.’ So
she produced the old girl as a chaperone, and by that time I was tight
again, and she turned up rotten and went off. An’ then I saw you, an’
comin’ out I got collared by another girl in a taxi, who swore I’d kept
her waiting.”
The waiter passed. “Here, get me some more coffee--hot--an’ never mind
the sugar.
“I got so fearfully mixed up I didn’t know where I was. Another girl,
another flat. Everything else the same. She got me up at half-past
five, gave me some sort of breakfast, and pushed me out like a good
’un. I got here somehow. But one of them had been through my pockets.
My case was gone and the return half of my leave warrant stuck in
here--breast pocket--loose!”
Skene laughed and thought: “What a beastly mess!” And everything seemed
false and artificial--his guardian’s offices--these ladies and their
flats! Well, he was going back to something--real!
Folkestone! The train slid down to the quay. The sharp air stung his
nostrils. Thank God the flood was at full--no waiting. Outside the pier
the wave-caps were white and the destroyer convoy circled sharply black
against the grey. Tramp and bustle as the leave boats swung at their
moorings, flapping of ropes and gulls’ wings, roar of steam cranes and
shouting.
Skene pushed his way well forward. He suddenly realized that he was
glad, actually glad to be going back. He felt as if he were going
home, leaving behind a certain comfort of body and leisure of mind,
but leaving, too, something that he felt to be false--the complacency
of that Cathedral town--the silly waste of the night in London. He was
going back to discomfort, hardship, danger, death perhaps, but he was
going--he felt--to where anyone with a spark of manhood ought to be,
fighting this war to an end, cutting a clean line with the past, and
making a fresh start possible, to a better future.
CHAPTER X
_The Waging of War_
THE year 1915 closed, dark and wet, and 1916 opened, dark and wetter
still. For six weeks the battalion was never completely out of the
line, the digging and carrying was incessant. An attack of trench
fever took Skene to the casualty clearing station for a fortnight.
He returned to his battalion in mid-March just as snow was beginning
to fall. The officers were billeted just then in a half-demolished
windmill, while the men were in the outbuildings. Skene sat there one
bleak afternoon, writing in his Field Message book letter after letter.
They were all the same. There were so many that he used his carbon
sheet to duplicate them.
“In the field. March, 1916.
“DEAR
“I very much regret to inform you that your
(son) (killed)
(husband) was (missing) in action on the......
(brother)
He was very popular with his comrades, who will feel his loss
severely. He was a good soldier and liked by his officers. As soon as
possible a cross will be erected, bearing his name, etc., on the spot
where he laid down his life for his country.
“Yours faithfully,
“G. SKENE, Lt.”
After filling in the names, he addressed the envelopes, some to
sooty streets of the northern mining and industrial towns--some to
the big estates and farms of the southern side of the county, some to
the salt-smelling alleys or villa rows of the east-coast ports and
watering-places. It was considered a duty in the battalion to write
to next-of-kin, so that the bald official announcement was not the
only last message they received. But it was becoming difficult to keep
up with the ever-increasing list. Sometimes the platoon officer and
N.C.O. both figured in it, and the rest of the company did what they
could. Often, no trace could be found of men who perished in direct
hits by big shell. Skene regarded it as the only tribute he could pay
to men who shared the life with him, but had not his luck. He was only
responsible for his own platoon, at most for his company. But the
casualties did not end there. The Colonel had been killed by so many
machine-gun bullets that his head was demolished. A bad business! Skene
remembered how in his trench he had heard the Colonel’s firm step,
splashing along on coming his round, his heavy breathing as he climbed
over a smashed-in traverse--the deep voice:
“Mornin’, Skene!”
“Good morning, sir!”
“All right?”
“Two men hit, on rations, sir!”
“Ah! Be glad when we can get some of our own back?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Anything special?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m going along to see Andrews. Straight ahead?”
“Yes, sir, but turn to the right down the ‘S’ lines: the way to the
left is all broken up and it’s enfiladed. Shall I send a guide?”
“Not necessary. Good day!”
“Good day, sir!”
He had passed on, tall, long-striding, followed by his orderly. And the
grey morning had broken with the usual crescendo of enemy machine-gun
fire. Skene sent a Corporal to see that all his men were standing-to
and getting the fires in the braziers past the smoky stage before the
Bosche could see the smoke. He was in good spirits, because the end of
his watch was near, and Jerry, his servant, was preparing his steaming
tin of porridge (Mansfield insisted on porridge, in the trenches: “It
makes a sort of buffer on the tummy, and when one falls flat, to avoid
fire, one falls soft”)--he would swallow it, soused in condensed milk
and rum, then crawl into a filthy hole and sleep, while the bullets
thumped the parapet. And suddenly the Colonel’s orderly had appeared
before him, shaking and saying: “Oh, sir! Oh, sir!”
Skene went with him to look, keeping well down at the broken parapet
where the “S” lines branched off. There lay Colonel Gilford, full
length, his feet sticking up stiffly, his head unrecognizable. All
the orderly could say was, “I told ’im, sir, I told ’im!” Skene quite
understood. The Colonel was known to be obtusely brave. He could not
easily read a map and was stubborn before suggestions. It took hours
to work a stretcher to where he lay, and another twenty-four hours
before his long form could be carried out and buried, near Brigade
Head-quarters, more than a mile back. So perished Colonel Gilford--and
his iron imperturbability.
The next officer to go had been young Murdon. That was another sort
of story. Young Murdon--Skene could never help being rather nice to
him because it was so obvious that the Major and Thomas and the others
regarded him with suspicion. For instance, in arranging the tours
of duty in the company (always under-officered) Thomas would always
give the easy ones to Murdon--taking the harder and more dangerous
for himself, Skene or Earnshaw. The latter spoke out to Skene when
they were alone. The kid was no good, just an ordinary funk! Not long
after that they were in brigade reserve--a mile or two back from the
trenches, going up every night to dig or carry, as now. Murdon simply
couldn’t be missed out of that. Thomas went the first night, Earnshaw
the next, and Skene the next. The fourth night Skene, crossing the yard
of the warehouse where they were billeted, in a shell-out village, saw
the party paraded under the N.C.O., the men standing as they do when
they know their time is being wasted, and the N.C.O.’s talking together
in a group. He went into the mess-room and met Thomas’s eye.
“Very late getting off, aren’t they?”
“Pretty late!” said Skene. The murmur of talk and the fidgety stamping
of the men increased.
Thomas looked at his watch. “Where’s Murdon?” he said.
“I’ll go and see!” Skene went to the hoppress where the officers’
valises lay side by side. He had to strike a light. There was Murdon
sure enough, his head in his hands, queer sounds in his breathing.
“Aren’t you well?--your party’s waiting.”
“Oh, Skene, don’t let them send me--I shall be killed, I know I shall,
I dream about it!”
Skene pulled on his boots and goatskin, mackintosh and equipment with
the speed taught by many a cramped awakening in the dark. “You lie
still!” he called over his shoulder, and ran across the yard, shoving
his torch and revolver into place.
“All present, Sergeant Evans? Right-in-file; lead out on to the road!”
He put his head into the mess: “Murdon isn’t feeling well; I’ll take
his lot to-night!”
Thomas grunted. This sort of thing couldn’t go on long. It didn’t. The
battalion had four days’ divisional rest at railhead. Murdon seemed
happy, took Skene out to dinner and to the Follies, where the red-nosed
comedian used to interrupt the serious songs with, “Did you want to
buy a dug-out?” and eight hundred officers and men sang the chorus,
“There’s something in the sea-side air!”
Now, it was that period of the war when white-moustached old
gentlemen used to say, “The men are getting soft, sir!” or “The Bosche
want gingering up, they’re laughing at us!” To remedy these evils,
some one who didn’t live in the trenches invented trench mortars and
trench raids. Those who lived in the Line, still keen, as many were,
on an offensive, still dreaming of the rush that was only to stop at
Berlin--knew that the only possible policy for the side weaker in
artillery and machine-guns was to keep quiet until a real offensive
might have some effect. But the London papers, the political situation,
and the professional soldiers who had never fought, had it their own
way. Curious little brass instruments (it was before Stokes invented
his simple and sufficient mortar) were carried up to the Line and
allowed to have their shoot and depart. The Bosche simply blew the
place where they had been to pieces, and the Infantry who lived there
lost their sleep and food and many of their lives. The raids were more
successful. The pugnacity of the individual Briton and his exasperation
found their vent. Twice Skene took out three or four men, exchanged
rifle-shot and bomb with the Bosche, tried to take a prisoner or
machine-gun. Each time wire, or swamp, or the instinct of his men,
selected from the poachers, rat-catchers and horse-slaughterers of his
company, to kill at sight or touch, had prematurely spoiled the game,
and he had come back into his own lines, soaking wet and somewhat
flustered, but more and more confident that the individual German was
afraid of him. This time, when the battalion went back to the Line,
Skene was told to take young Murdon and selected men and find out what
the Bosche were building at C. 29. (It subsequently turned out to be
the first pill-box of concrete, but the idea was shelved during the
Verdun offensive.)
Skene himself always felt shaky, until he had fairly started--and the
look in young Murdon’s eyes affected him so that he offered Thomas to
go alone. “No,” said Thomas, the Major (now commanding) had noticed
young Murdon, and said he must get used to it. They went out in the
old “diamond” formation then in vogue, cut some wire, lay still while
flares went up, and machine-guns rattled over their heads--then, Skene
and a Lance-corporal, busy scraping and probing of the hump of earth
they had to explore, in the light of a flare, saw men with tin hats
(the English had no steel helmets then) all round them. Instinctively
he squeezed his heavy “Colt” once--twice--thrice--ducked and slid off
the parapet, while a rifle went off in his ear and another in his
face. Shouts and running; silence and darkness. Surely some one still
running behind him! His Corporal, on whom he had fallen, was making a
gurgling noise--was he hit? No, spitting out liquid mud. The Bosche
had given the alarm. The whole field of No-man’s Land was laced and
perforated with traversing machine-gun fire, and salvos of whizzbangs
crashed and scattered over the trenches. Nothing to be done for minutes
that seemed hours, but lie quite flat and still. Then, face to rank
grass and stinking ooze, Skene and the Corporal found some of the
party and turned them crawling homeward, to that slantwise gap in the
wire where Thomas was waiting to take from his hand, as he slid into
comparative safety, any weapon, accoutrement or other spoil, to be sent
to “Brigade” for inspection. Perhaps no exhilaration on earth will ever
be again like that of crouching in a dug-out over hot black tea, gritty
with sugar and stinging with rum. Between mouthfuls of an enormous
bully sandwich, Skene, his eyelids nearly closing over shining eyes,
told Thomas how the “show” had fared. Thomas nodded.
“Well, you couldn’t do any more. I’ll put a report in. You sent young
Murdon to Head-quarters?”
“No!”
“Where is he then?”
“He was rearmost; must have come in first!”
“Did you see him?”
“No, I was t’other end. Sent Sergeant Evans to tell him!”
“All right. You get a sleep. I’ll go and see!”
“I say, Thomas, you don’t think he’s ...?”
“I’ll just go and make sure. So long!”
Skene rolled over and slept. He awoke with a start.
“Stand to!” Thomas was sitting beside him smoking, caked in mud from
head to foot.
Skene squelched as he turned, shivering as men shiver nowhere as in
Flanders: “Hullo! You’ve been out!”
“Only as far as young Murdon!”
Amid all that cheerfully accepted horror, a fresh special horror grew
on Skene’s face, as Thomas told him. So far as could be made out,
young Murdon had rushed back at the first shot, not obliquely, up the
alley in the English wire, to safety, but straight on to the wire, and
been caught in it, opposite the communication trench where the Bosche
machine-guns sprayed all night and day.
“You know the big crump-hole, right in our ditch. Well, he was hit
more than once, but one had paralysed him and he slipped in there. We
were after him until dawn, he was moaning all the time and shrieking
when we touched him. We tried all ways to get him out and fed him with
stuff; he got quieter bit by bit!”
“Do you think he’s snuffed it?”
“Can’t say, couldn’t stop to look. Had to come in when it got light. It
was a miracle we lost no one, as it was. We’ll try again to-night!”
“The Bosche will do him in before then.”
“Don’t think they can see, if he keeps still and quiet!”
Skene passed a miserable day, and was over the parapet and down
the wire the moment it was safe. Young Murdon was lying back, with
outstretched arms, as if crucified. His open eyes, however, had not
the orthodox expression. Skene was hardly sorry when, after hours of
building a “float” with pickets and boards, and gradually raising him
in four men’s arms, he died on the stretcher before he reached the
dressing station. The men kept away from the place, during all that
tour of duty. They never said why, but however carefully Thomas or
Skene spaced them out, the two bays by the grump-hole at the mouth of
the communication trench were always empty. No one would stay there.
And, as the Colonel and young Murdon had gone, so the men went, one by
one. The irrepressible boy who played the mouth-organ was killed by a
falling house--tons of masonry on his limber, fair-skinned body. They
never got to him, Skene had to rely on what his comrades remembered for
his next-of-kin. The hoarse-voiced Sergeant, Strood, a fish-hawker, was
killed outright by shrapnel, on a ration party. The Salvationist, who
would sing hymns while wiring, got a “stray” through the chest, and lay
on the stretcher loudly exclaiming, “Glory be to God, I’m dying, I know
I am, Glory be to God!” New men came and disappeared--those on whom
shells fell directly, so that no trace of them was ever found, were
posted “missing.” So was one who went mad and was found cooking for a
railway section, miles back, harmless, and insisting he had been sent
there. They passed so fast that Skene needed a list from which to write
his letter to their next-of-kin, in the half-demolished mill, by the
snow-glare on the ceiling. March it was now; he had not been “out” six
months, and half the battalion had changed....
He glanced up at a whirring sound, fearing a long-distance shot. He
was wrong. The low aperture through which he was looking out was filled
by the bonnet and front wheels of a Staff car that had slid half round
to its brakes on the greasy surface. Enter Captain Castle, huger than
usual in furs, brisker and more tonic than ever, a personality that
laughed at circumstance. At once the low brick vaulting rang with his
cheery energy. Thousands of yards of white material were wanted to make
shifts for the men out on patrol, in case the snow “lay.” Skene was to
go with the Ordnance Officer and interpreter to the nearest towns of
any size beyond railhead and purchase every inch he could lay hands
on. Three minutes later, Skene and the interpreter were being rushed
through the keen air towards railhead. There they picked up the Deputy
Assistant Director of Ordnance Stores, known to friends as D.A.D.O.S.,
of the Nth Division.
Their quest took them far afield. At dusk of the following day, they
saw the first consignment of the white material unloaded at the
Division Laundry, where in a dismantled brewery sempstresses would make
it up into the smocks. It seemed a pity the job was over, it was a
relief from the futureless monotony of company routine. Dados said:
“Well, you chaps have helped me no end, and I suppose I’m safe for the
M.C. over this, so we’ll have champagne.”
They had it, such as it was, with the gusto and in the quantity proper
to men, whose next drink may be poured out by Lazarus.
Out presently in the snow-lit dusk, watching the chauffeur laboriously
start up the car, the champagne gave Skene an idea: why not go back by
Spanish Farm? Dados was indifferent. Mercadet, the interpreter, smiled
indulgently. They left the Calais-Bethune road and turned east, eight
kilometres along the Courtrai road. With much barking of dogs and
opening of heavy gates, they got the car into the yard. A light was
shining from the kitchen. Madeleine, standing by the stove, smiled.
Skene went straight across to her. He wished to be sympathetic, if her
young man was dead, hopeful if he was alive, “_Ça ne va pas trop
mal?_” he began.
“I am always waiting; in a month or two I shall know, I suppose.”
And that was all Skene could get out of her. She and her married
sister, a bigger darker woman, who was a refugee, with her little
daughter, made omelettes of the usual level excellence, one of the
old bottles was brought out and a hare paté, garlicy and gamey, in an
earthenware jar. Dados became excited, played with the child, calling
himself “cochon” when he meant “cocher”; Mercadet’s eyes ran with cold
and wine; Skene drank and gazed at Madeleine. One might die to-morrow,
meanwhile one would live.
The studded wheels ground over the frozen snow, the old house was left
dimly outlined in the luminous night, and in the bright open doorway
the family waved them adieu.
“And very nice, too,” said Dados. “He does know where to find them,
doesn’t he, Mercadet!” From the depths of his wraps the Frenchman
answered: “Ah, Skene, you know, is one of those ones!”
The more Skene protested the more they laughed at him, till Dados,
overcome by high living and low temperature, went to sleep with his
head rolling in the high collar of his British-warm. Mercadet, nudging
Skene, said: “You have done him well, and amused him, my friend; now we
shall never be short of stores in the brigade.”
Skene growled.
“I wish I hadn’t amused him so much! Nice yarn he’ll make of this!”
“Quite so, mon cher, and very much to your credit. They will say you
are no end of a boy for the girls.”
“Look here, Mercadet, leave the beastly girl out of it!”
“Oh, no! Not at all beastly.”
“Good Lord, man! She’s got a chap of her own.”
“Yes, yes, the one you enquired after so tenderly, when we went to the
French Head-quarters.”
“I only tried to find out what had happened to him; haven’t you any
sympathy, you old sinner?”
“Yes, plenty of sympathy, but I have two sons older than you, and both
dead. And I can tell you all you want to know about him.”
“Mercadet, are you a liar, or merely a prophet?”
But Skene never found out. The car skidded under pressure of the
brakes. Skene and Mercadet peered out. A square, stumpy figure, all
British-warm and field boots, was holding up a hand. “Are you going
near C. 21?”
“Hullo, Earnshaw, what are you up to?” Earnshaw climbed in and squashed
down between them: “Let me introduce you. Lieutenant Earnshaw--Dados.
His real name is Mills. He’s the man who grows grenades!”
“I’ve been buying bricks!” said the serious Earnshaw.
“What, to build a bridge over the Bosche?”
“For horse-standings! Do you fellows realize the quantity of animals
we’re losing?”
Skene was a townsman and had little to do with animals, but he was
English, and had scruples about beasts.
“Bravo, Earnshaw, well done!”
Dados was not so sentimental. His professional dignity was hurt.
“What bricks? How did you pay?”
Earnshaw nodded. “In that brick yard behind the pub. Gave the old chap
a requisition, as soon as I’d seen them on to the lorries--empty ration
lorries!”
“My word!” gasped Dados, “you’ll get yourself into trouble over this!”
“I don’t think so. It’s common sense. Horses and mules must have
something firm, and reasonably hard and dry, under their feet.
Divisional H.Q. ought to be grateful. I’ve told ’em twice, and now I’ve
saved them the trouble!”
“You’d better send back your bricks, and recover and tear up your
requisition, as you call it. You’re not entitled to give it!”
“Well, the Field Pocket Book says I am--anyhow, the bricks are down in
my horse-lines, and my section are cementing ’em in with plaster from
the house at the railway!”
“You’d better get transferred in a hurry----” Dados began.
“Oh, go to hell!”
“I wash my hands of it. Well, here we are! Good night, gentlemen!” The
car had stopped by Brigade Head-quarters.
Half-melted snow still hung about the road and the yard of the mill, as
Skene and Earnshaw stepped out into it, very cheerful. Skene had had a
holiday--forty-eight hours, and was full of drink; Earnshaw had had an
argument.
“These Divisional Head-quarters Wallahs don’t know there’s a war on.”
“No,” said Skene; “I tried to tell ’em about the trenches!”
“This is plain common sense. I should like to see ’em object!”
They stumbled over Thomas’s legs in the loft where their valises were
spread. He said sleepily,
“Hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves!”
Skene loosened his collar, kicked off wet boots, and wound his
watch--his toilet for the night. “Ungrateful brute,” he said; “I’ve
been working hard to save you from being shot as a dark moving object
on white snow!”
“Oh, well, we shall be dark, moving objects at six Ack Emma; the
Brigadier’s coming to address us on the harassing tactics.”
“He ought to know, the blighter!” grunted Earnshaw, folding his
overcoat to make a pillow.
Skene sat up suddenly among his blankets; something had crunched
in his pocket as he burrowed. He felt and found the letters to the
next-of-kin, that ought to have been posted two days before.
“Oh well!” he thought, rolled over, and slept.
CHAPTER XI
_The Divisional Show_
AT last the division went out of the Line to rest. Rest--what that
word used to mean! It was a fine dry April, and even Flanders, whose
colour and shapes are generally woolly and gawky and wet, had for a
few days the clear joyfulness of Italy. The division trailed back--in
those days divisions moved as a whole--not merely to railhead and its
adjacent camps, but far into an unknown hinterland. It passed among
budding trees and flowering bushes beautiful with that queer stiffness,
as of heraldic symbols, peculiar to spring. Each morning, with steadily
rising spirits, the battalion set out, clean, fresh and properly fed,
from billets showing less and less the wear and tear of war; each
evening it settled down in lengthening twilight among peaceful farms
and villages, where the glass was still in the windows, and the towers
on the churches. After about a week they halted at Hondebecq, just
where the Pas de Calais slopes down to the Flanders flats. A typical
village through which the paved Rue Nationale from Paris to Dunkirk
ran from south to north, the equally important road from Bethune and
St. Omer to Lille crossed from west to east. The cross-roads made the
Place, whose whole north-east corner was filled by the high-shouldered
hump-backed church, chiming a hymn tune every quarter of an hour, and
whose south-west corner was filled by the stone-fronted, round-gabled
inn “Lion of Flanders.” In peace-time it was the weekly meeting-place
of Belgian horse-jobbers, and hop and flax merchants; now, with the War
only twenty kilometres to the east, it had become the nearest available
restaurant for officers of the resting battalions.
Before this estaminet, that fine Easter Sunday morning, Skene, with
a gunner officer called Wellin, gave their horses to a small boy.
They had ridden in to enter their respective units’ teams for the
Divisional Horse Show. From the opened west doors of the church, to the
music of the organ, came a procession of little girls in white, and
of little boys in blue suits with peaked caps, carrying sprays of the
first flowering bushes and followed by priest and beadle, mayor and
schoolmaster, and members of the societies for good works that abound
in the devout and wealthy parishes of the north.
Skene was trying to drive some comprehension of all this into the
bullet head of Wellin, when a voice said in his ear:
“Good morning, Mis-ter Skene.” It was Madeleine Vanderlynden.
During all these months of dangerous duty the thought of Madeleine had
always been remotely comforting to Skene, reminiscent of ease and rest,
a change of scene and diet, a spot of pleasant colour and an echo of
civilized conversation. Now he felt almost proprietary--confronted by
this carefully dressed, well-looking Madeleine, explaining in more or
less fluent English that she had taken over the restaurant of the “Lion
of Flanders.” He hated Wellin’s prominent eyes surveying her from top
to toe.
“What about having a little grub here, Skene, after the horse show
to-morrow?” Wellin was saying.
“I shall be getting back.”
“Well, I’m going to, anyhow!”
“All right, then, I’ll come.”
They arranged to take a table for four and make up a party. Wellin
proposed Wheather, the signaller, and Skene old Mercadet. Au revoired,
in Madeleine’s best English, they went across to Head-quarters. Riding
back to their respective billets, between brown tilth where, as yet, no
green was showing, Wellin said:
“I go off here. See you to-morrow! She ought to be easy fruit, that
girl at the pub!”
With a guarded “Looks like it,” Skene spurred his horse and cantered
away down the green border of the by-road, to the discomfiture of an
old woman feeding a rabbit and a goat.
Next day, the big pasture where the Lys skirts Hondebecq looked
something like an English country race-course. Round the white-palinged
track ambled English Yeomanry officers, Masters of Hounds, some of
them; grooms from regular Infantry battalions accustomed to playing
polo in India; gunner N.C.O.’s on mounts groomed to the nines, with
their Artillery air of “We’re as good as the Cavalry any day!”; here
and there a perplexed guest--some big local farmer or wine merchant,
trying to understand why English Infantry officers ride so indecently
well, or where on earth all the transport came from, and how the A.S.C.
Captain, driving that swell car, could be only a Captain, and not
either a chauffeur or a Major-General.
Then there were ambulances with Nursing Sisters--English in grey and
scarlet, Canadians in scarlet and blue, French and Belgians in white.
There was a naval officer doing liaison with the Corps Artillery;
and, last not least, a grey-whiskered baronet, Lord Lieutenant of his
county, who, having insisted (some said to keep up his reputation for
eccentricity) on coming out to France as a private in the R.A.M.C., had
been appointed Salvage Officer to stop his plying convalescents with
illicit drink.
He appeared on the course heralded by cheers and laughter, driving
a smart chestnut cob between the shafts of Vanderlynden’s old cart,
with all the whip-flourish and elbow-arching of Sam Weller, senior,
and beside him, not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle in her gloves,
in her lightest colours and with her brightest smile, sat Madeleine
herself. The police smiled and made way, the A.P.M. frowned, and
grinned, the French officers stared and murmured. The old man made a
circuit of the course, drew up by the enclosure, got down, gave his
hand to the lady and conducted her to a seat near the English Nursing
Sisters.
Skene muttered:
“Curse his cheek! what does he want to make a show of the girl
for?” Cooler reflection followed. Far better old Fryern--a licensed
“character”--whom every one knew and liked, sixty years old and not
likely to do any damage, or even to remember the week after next--far
better than some Staff pup, rich and young and lazy, who would spoil
her if no worse. Then followed reflection cooler still: what on earth
had it all to do with him--Skene?
A Yeomanry Major led the parade, in which old Mercadet, brilliant in
the blue and strawberry of the French Mission, was putting his horse
through the antics of the Haute Ecole.
After the riders came the wagon teams, Engineers and Medical Corps,
Artillery, A.S.C. and Infantry, all to the sort of music that appeals
to horses. Then came the jumping, and boxing, and various competitions,
until at last in the spring twilight Skene led old Mercadet to the
“Lion of Flanders,” where their table was set ready in a corner. The
place was packed with officers, humming with talk and the clink of
glasses, thick with cigarette smoke.
Madeleine, in black, was threading in and out among the tables. To
Skene she seemed years older again these few months. She had eyes
and ears for everything, answered questions and gave orders all at
once, turned aside the sharp puns in French and clumsier slang in
English, and, with the same frigid indulgence, disengaged the fingers
which, even at that early hour of the evening, were inclined to pinch
her wrists or elbows, and made the appropriate remark to each fresh
arrival, as though he were the one looked for guest. For Skene, even,
she had the right thing to say: “You have not seen my new piano, the
one which used to be in the château. It is there in the little salon.”
And she nodded back over her shoulder, “Will you not play?”
Skene would not, devoting himself to his excellent dinner, and trying
to think of nothing else. Wheather was recounting an adventure in his
deliberately boobyish manner; to Skene it sounded like the buzzing of
horseflies over a muck-heap:
“And so,” I said to her.... “And so ... she said to me ... and then
she went....”
And so on, through two courses, with oafish laughter and pigeon French.
It took Skene his third glass of champagne to wash the taste from his
mouth. Old Mercadet, old enough to be the father of the other two,
was giving them addresses in Paris. The crowd was thinning now, but
the heat had frosted the windows. Skene, sitting back to the wall,
had a clear view of Madeleine passing in and out among the tables and
disappearing to the kitchen or the cellar, or under the curtain to the
little salon where, as she informed Wellin to check his guffaws, she
had the Brigadier to dinner.
Wheather, to live up to his reputation as a funny man, had taken to
calling for her, and asking her some stupid question in pigeon French,
to which she invariably answered with a curt smile. Skene said sharply:
“Let the girl alone! She has quite enough to do to run her show without
your foolery.”
He spoke almost with the rasp in which he gave orders, and caught
Mercadet’s quizzical eye instantly on him, as if to say, “Ah, my
young friend! That fetches you.” The effect on Wheather was even more
disastrous. He sprang to his feet in imitation of a Tommy coming to
attention, while his chair fell backward with a clatter.
“Sit down, you fool, you’re drunk!” But Wheather stood his ground.
“On parade’s on parade, and off parade’s off parade.” This old tag of
the Regimental Sergeant-major brought laughter and applause, while
Madeleine stepped forward and picked up the fallen chair. Imitating the
well-known gesture of Charlie Chaplin and the statue, Wheather kissed
the chair-back where her fingers had grasped it.
Luckily for Skene, at that moment, from behind the curtain came the
opening bars of a Chopin Nocturne. Every one started, so strange in
that place was the feeling of the music. Skene knew it by heart, fairy
cobwebs on moonlit lawns over the footmarks of lovers on the grass; not
wonderful for him to sit and listen. Far more strange was the effect
on others, who could not even have named the composer. Wheather sat
heavily in his chair, Wellin’s jaw dropped, Mercadet began crossing his
fingers, and his eyes shone. Laughter everywhere was stilled, glasses
ceased to clink and feet to shuffle. Madeleine softly closed the door
to the kitchen and stood with one hand on it, and lips just parted.
In Skene something seemed to sink, some cool draught of unearthly
succour, down and down through the fumes of champagne and chartreuse,
lengthening and clarifying his vision. He saw all these fellows not
as the brutes he had thought them a moment ago, but as pitiful child
comrades bent on an escapade of which no one of them could see the
fateful issue, overhung by the shadow of death.
The music ceased. Wheather got up and butted his way out. Wellin
followed: “He’s very white ... expect he’s going to throw up his drink.
I’ll go and see he doesn’t fall on the pavé!”
As they passed along in the twilight the side door of the little salon
opened. Captain Castle could be seen drawing on his gloves, and waiting
for the Brigadier.
CHAPTER XII
_The Somme_
THE division moved to a manœuvre area; the training for open warfare
was begun. The weather was fine and hope ran high, rumours of the
colossal struggle at Verdun were as yet vague and little appreciated
in their reality by the New Armies that did not remember 1914, though
they made old Mercadet very grave. There was quite another rumour, too,
newer and more personal, having all the advantage of untarnished hope
over grimed reality. Gough was supposed to be gathering a great English
army for one decisive blow, and the division to which the Easthamptons
belonged was to form part of it. In the lengthening evenings men and
officers grew more and more cheerful. The horrors of the Flanders
winter receded. They were encouraged, too, by the issue of steel
helmets, and box respirators, and by the obvious turn of the tide in
the matter of heavy artillery and the air.
Then one day all was bustle and excitement. The orders had come. The
division was to move south, for the Great Offensive. Queer to-day
to recall the keen anticipation caused by that news. Some merely
realized, perhaps, that they were sick of trench warfare, and that, as
Ludendorff was to admit years after, attack was easier than defence--a
few perhaps, that the hectic excitement in which they lived must burn
itself out, and that whatever they had to do in the strength of its
flame must be done at once. None realized what an artillery-prepared
offensive on the then new scale could be. In the main, the feeling was
probably simply a craving for something fresh, a refuge from trenches
or drill. Besides, the reinforcements that reached them now did
really bring the companies up to strength, and were not cancelled by
casualties the same day.
Skene was walking up and down the little yard of a small
pork-butchering establishment, at kit inspection, dismissing his
platoon by sections. He hated keeping men standing about uselessly and
believed it did nothing but harm.
“Cap’n Thomas wants you, sir!”
In the front room of a little shop, where the backs of the words
“_Quincaillerie--machines à coudre_” stared from the windows,
Thomas was standing with Captain Castle.
“Division want you for a billeting stunt. Can you go?”
“If Thomas says so, sir!”
“Do you want to go?”
“I don’t want to leave Thomas, or the men, sir!”
“I don’t want to lose him, sir,” said Thomas.
“You shall have him back! Get into the car!”
“I thought as much!” grunted Thomas.
An aged closed Daimler grunted and whirred up across the Place.
“You are going with Major Fryern to get our billets ready in our new
area. Remember to treat people properly: there’s a lot of bad blood
between us and the French. You can make them understand, and old Fryern
will do the tactful with any swells you meet. I’m too busy to come and
I want Mercadet here. For God’s sake get us a Brigade Head-quarters
billet where the General can sleep!”
“I’ll try, sir!”
“If you do, you may go far!”
Reporting at the château where Divisional Head-quarters were
installed, Skene was sent to a disused lodge looking out on the Calais
road; his knock on the door not being heeded, he stood admiring three
horses--a taper-legged, full-shouldered, dark roan, so bright and quick
that it could never have seen a remount camp; a big-boned, useful grey,
one of those that always do better than they look; and the chestnut
that had been driven at the horse show.
One of the grooms said to him, “I should go in, sir; he’ll never hear
you!”
Skene went in. In the small paved and plastered interior, intended for
a gamekeeper, stood that aged baronet who had broken every regulation
from age-limit to kit-restrictions. No one could possibly call “old
Fryern” to book--no one that was anybody, because he knew every one
of that sort--whiskered halfway down his face, cigar in mouth, Sam
Browne undone, directing a chauffeur and two servants, who were packing
shot-guns, fishing rods and cameras. He stared at Skene, and told him
to fetch his kit and servant and be at the cross-roads in an hour.
Outside the gate he found an old red Panhard driven by a Belgian; got
into it, and was taken back to his billet.
The Baronet was punctually at the rendezvous, with his almost regal
state reduced to one chauffeur and one servant. The old car went well,
and it was yet early when they passed through the medieval gates of
Cassel under the old brazen weather vane with the motto:
“Quand ce coq chantera
Le Roi dans Cassel entrera!”
Far to the north were the twin towers of Dunkirk, and the
tree-bordered Napoleonic route nationale running on towards them.
East, beyond the drybones of Ypres, ghastly white in the sunshine, the
noise and vapour of the Canadians engaged in the third battle, that
desperate fatal skirmish of Maple Copse that no one ever knew about, so
overshadowed it was by Verdun and the Somme. Westward were the towers
of St. Omer at the foot of the chalk downs, where the home road wound
to Boulogne. But the old Panhard slid south towards the slag-heaps by
the coalfields and the Amiens road. Through merry Hazebrouck, that
had seen Belgian and Bosche and finally English Head-quarters in
its square; through St. Venant and Aire--Flanders was left behind.
They were passing now through little rows of stumpy, sooty, miners’
cottages. At that period of the War, when troops lived in the line and
never went far back, it was usual for a “young” officer to know nothing
outside his sector; Skene missed the Spanish towers, the elm-bordered
pastures, the teeming fields of rich moist Flanders. Then they came
to a more open road, and began to climb the first of the great chalk
downs. They dipped into valleys where the streams actually gurgled, and
the villages were clusters of one-storied, wattle-and-daub thatched
buildings, beneath great stone châteaux surrounded by trees.
They came to villages where the flat cap, the innumerable transport,
and indomitable good humour of the English were replaced by
coffee-coloured men, with red fez-caps, or blue-coated, blue-helmeted
machine-gunners--the French zone. It was now nearly two o’clock. Near a
tiny village by a stone bridge, the Baronet said: “Lunch, Jevons,” and
got down, unfolding his long bones section by section like a human foot
rule. “Let’s come down and look at the big trout.”
Skene was completely mystified. He followed the languid old gentleman
down to the bridge, where they lay flat and peered at the dark shadow
under the arch, deeply uncertain. “Not at home to-day,” and they
retraced their steps.
A cloth--a real cloth--had been spread on the grass under a dog-rose
in flower--the car removed to a convenient distance--sandwiches,
cheese biscuits, and moselle stood among the daisies and dandelions.
The Baronet murmured amiably along, not unlike the sound of the stream
below the bridge--larks rose from the high bare downside into the
pale high sky--the stunted oak, may-bushes and grass were all aswing
in the westerly breeze that had come no great distance from the
sea.--It might have been Sussex. The Baronet’s conversation glided
from trout (he was so sorry Skene had not been able to see the big
fellow below the bridge) to woodcock (he would try and get Skene
invited for the shootin’) with the easy assurance of one who never has
to bother whether what he has to say will be listened to or not. He
knew everybody and talked gently about everything, smoking his special
cigars; Skene puffed at a pipe and listened.
They rejoined the car and continued threading the width of two and
a half armies as far again as in the morning. If the trenches were
the slums of that great city of two million English-speaking men,
stretching across eighty miles of France, the road from Frevent through
Doullens was the residential suburb. Sentries and military police gazed
uncertainly at the French car in which English officers were driven by
a Belgian chauffeur. They came to the hill-top village inhabited by
their new corps at the sacred hour of tea.
In the middle of the old stone square, surrounded by houses of French
rentiers who had gone to Brittany or Nice while their sons went to
Verdun or Champagne, the car stopped before the inscription “B Mess”
on a red and white Corps placard. A pleasant, high-pitched voice came
through the open window, “What are you doing here!”
“Looking for you!” The Baronet unfolded himself. “May I bring my little
boy?” And Skene was presently drinking tea among gentlemen wearing red
tabs in a Picard parlour, and the atmosphere of a London Club--tea,
cigarettes, conversation all belonged to people used to the very best,
who were not going to alter their habits for a mere war.
He was taken to his billet by an A.D.C. whose perfection made him feel
ashamed of his puttees, his trench-worn tunic, with leather cuffs,
and the bullet hole in his cap. He did not dine with the Baronet, but
with this lovely creature and half a dozen other young sparks who
played poker after dinner. Skene could not afford it, so he smoked
his pipe and presently went out for a walk. It was still early in the
War. Specialists had not yet invaded Corps Staffs.... No one would
let him look at the job he had come to do between tea and to-morrow’s
breakfast. He slept well in the good Somme air.
After breakfast at nine-thirty, he and the Baronet started out in the
car with a map, and references. Skene wanted to work hard, to shrive
his soul of that atmosphere of Corps Head-quarters, where those tall,
well-bred gentlemen seemed to live so well and never outraged good form
by mentioning the War. He wanted to see every billet on his list, but
the Baronet did not. They could see the Brigade Head-quarters (Infantry
and Artillery), and have a glance at the A.S.C., Engineers and
Medicals. When Skene criticized billets that were either open fields
or already crowded, the Baronet said it was up to the troops to get in
where they were told. When Skene began measuring spaces for infantry
transport, the Baronet left him, and had tea with a friend who told him
the name of our new ambassador and what they were doing in London about
butter.
Finally he motored Skene to within a few miles of the detraining place
of his brigade, where they met the dark roan and the grey being ridden,
and the chestnut being driven in the spring cart piled with what Skene
knew to be guns and fishing rods. Here the Baronet bade him a genuinely
kind farewell, hoping to see his “little boy” or “young feller” again.
“Take care of yourself, and I’ll get you some shootin’ in the autumn!”
At that time the Somme country was still beautiful. The French, who
originally held this part of the Line, had never fought any great
engagement there. The English troops that filtered into it up to June,
1916, found wild flowers--poppy, cornflower, campion, and a climate as
different from that of Flanders as the climate of Sussex is from that
of London.
They were in high hope, too. To have got away from the Salient, or
La Bassée, was much! The tragic bungle of Loos was quite forgotten.
Besides, the news was not so bad. The failures of Kut and the
Dardanelles were over and done with. The French, left alone to stem the
tide at Verdun, might say that an offensive between the Somme ridges
was folly, but who believed them?
The Russians were astir. The Navy had fought another inconclusive
“victory.” The weather was glorious. A mournful splendour shines over
the memory of the preparations for that adventure of the Somme, that
ended in the mud of Beaumont Hamel and the swamps of the Ancre; a
splendour that never gilded the sodden atrocities of 1917. It was still
a voluntary--probably the greatest voluntary army of history that went
cheerfully to victory! Skene, rejoining his division when it detrained
behind Albert, felt like a happy schoolboy, after the Easter holidays
going back, not so much to school, as to cricket.
It was in the light dusk of a June evening that beneath chalky downs
arching purple to where the last sunset colour gave place to the first
stars, he followed a white road beside such water and slim poplars as
Skene at least associated with the frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes.
Far behind him was the winter in the Flemish flats; here on a dry
and powdery soil that looked as if it never could become mud, he saw
himself heroical, as in those high visions of 1914, which had claimed
him and many others for the ranks of that goodly company, setting
out on a splendid and, incidentally, successful crusade. The smoke
rose blue and straight from the field kitchens, the mules squawked
and fidgeted in their odorous lines, small children ran out from
whitewashed thatched cottages with flowers and postcards and chocolate,
and all along the road, through gunners and sappers until he came to
the Infantry, it was one long greeting--here Wellin and his guns, there
Wheather talking to young Calthorp, and finally where the young moon
silvered the tents and bivouacs, Long Thomas and Earnshaw welcoming him
back, and little Mansfield twittering round like an overgrown canary.
“Hallo, our own sleepless man--been awake eight days and nights. No
good your coming here like this, with the milk in the morning!--better
have stopped away.”
“Don’t you believe him, jolly glad to see you back--we move in an
hour,” Thomas interposed.
“Skene, you’re trying to get on in the army--hanging round Castle and
doing his jobs--disgusting, I call it!...”
“Earnshaw’s got the map--now look here!”
In Thomas’s tent, eating gingerbread, smoking, poring over the route
map, they squatted, and all around them the moonlit chill of the
chalky bottom seemed to freeze everything but the ground-base of the
thundering bombardment.
A week or two later the division went into one of the mid-July attacks.
They threaded their way through such a labyrinth of transport, dumps,
light railway tracks and guns as had never been dreamed of. The attack
had been carefully prepared, discipline was strict, they went into
action without a sound.
They reached the sunken road which was their jumping-off place, a
little after midnight of a close summer day, vibrating with gunfire.
They stood waiting, still and silent, and yet with the sense of a great
busy crowd about them; for they were only one of a dozen divisions
waiting down miles of line for zero moment. It came. Skene gave the
word to his platoon. Strung-up to intense excitement, it seemed hardly
strange to him that, after leaping out of the sunken road with the
others, he had not really moved but was lying on his back, his hands
full of small round lumps of chalk. He had a vague idea that he ought
to be going on with the company, but it seemed difficult to move, and,
instead, he went, surely, to sleep. He woke up in darkness and a great
noise, not the noise of the battlefield, but of a railway station. He
was lying in the corner of what was, so far as he could see, a dingy
and minute _salle d’attente_; his head ached with such pain as
he had never felt before, and he had a strong desire to vomit. The
noise that had awakened him was the jangle of a line of small cattle
trucks running one upon the other; a miniature engine slid past the
door within a yard or so of his face and stopped. Shouts, noise of
steam, of iron rattling, the tramp of army boots, the passing of shaded
lanterns--then dark forms bent over him, picked up the stretcher on
which he was lying, moved him under a strip of sky, and then into
the blackness of a cattle truck. He vomited with incredible pain and
discomfort, then lay still on his back, not daring to move for pain and
helplessness, watching the paling stars through a shrapnel hole in the
roof.
For hours, it seemed, he lay, while the bass of a now distant
bombardment was punctuated from the stretcher placed beside him by the
refrain:
“Orderly! Isn’t he ever coming? Aren’t there any blank orderlies on
these dashed trains?”
The little train was rattling at walking pace along the side of a
bare down whose outline, seen through the doorway, became distinct
against the grey, the silver, and at last the lemon-coloured light,
and there swept suddenly into that little prisoning box on wheels,
unmistakable, unforgettable, the smell of summer dawn, as though the
flowers in resurrection, and the ghosts of scent and colour, summoned
by Catastrophe, went walking.
It gave Skene the utmost delight. He realized without shame that, more
than anything in the world, he wanted to cry. Beside him the voice rose
above the rattle of the train: “Orderly! I want an orderly.”
“What’s up?” asked Skene in a voice he did not know. He could hear the
other grunting with the effort of turning his head.
“It’s my infernal shoulder. They’ve put me in so that it jars. Can
you help me to turn a bit?” Skene did not think he could, but trying
gingerly he found his left arm would move, and stretched it out.
“Here,” he said.
He could hear the other breathing hard, fighting the few inches
between their grip. Then his hand was clasped and his wrist tugged with
a groan that was a cry. Then there was silence, but for hard breathing,
and then:
“That’s damned good of you! I say, who are you?” Skene gave his name,
rank and regiment.
“What have you got?”
“Don’t know, except that I can’t move and my belly’s empty, and I wish
I was dead.”
“Well, you are, very nearly. I should think you’re the only one left of
your lot.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Well, I’m Staff Captain, 506 Brigade. We were supposed to be on your
left, but you weren’t there, and when I came through the dressing
station it was bung-full of your chaps.”
“Which day was that?”
“Day before yesterday or day before that. Hell! I don’t know. I was hit
at eleven o’clock in the morning, and when I got to an ambulance, I saw
one of your lot--Hunter, used to know him in India----”
“Yes, he was Adjutant.”
“Oh well, he isn’t now. He was hit in the neck, and when we got to the
station, he’d slipped out of his stretcher, I suppose, at that infernal
hairpin bend at what d’you call ’em. Anyhow he’d bled to death. My God!
I am thirsty. Isn’t there an orderly on this train?”
And Skene thought: “Soon I shall be dead, and I shall lie on the floor
of hell, shouting for an orderly that never comes.”
He must either have swooned or gone to sleep, for his next sensation
was of falling down, down, down through nothing. The train had stopped,
he noticed that it was a bright summer noon. The usual station noises
were speeded up suddenly by a bugle call, whistles, shouts and
scampering. They were whipped out of the truck, he heard his companion
cry out with pain, had an instant’s glimpse of a busy station yard, and
found himself in a white-painted ambulance, whose whirr and pulsation
were echoed, as it were, by another whirr, as of aeroplanes, and the
single drum-tap of machine-gun fire.
“Air raid,” thought Skene. “This’ll finish us probably.”
The noises swooped up in a crescendo to a crash, shrieks and the
tinkle of broken glass, but the ambulance still went on and Skene had
just energy enough to think: “Missed it again, by George!”
At sunset of that evening he lay, washed and cared for, in a ward with
only two other cases, waiting for the Doctor’s evening round. By great
good luck he had been taken to a hospital installed in the château of
a French lady with English connections, who had lent it as it stood.
Skene could pass his gaze from white panels and shining floors to the
laughing Cupids and gay garlands of Louis XVI.
Gingerly turning himself about and about with pain and difficulty,
he could not discover the smallest abrasion of his skin. But for a
grinding headache and the fact that nothing would stay on his stomach,
he would not have been too ill at ease so long as he kept still.
When the Doctor asked him: “What’s the matter with you?” he answered
faithfully: “I don’t know.” Two sets of stubby fingers passed all over
him. “You don’t remember what happened?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Not sitting on a dump and throwing away matches carelessly?”
“No, Doctor.”
The Doctor gave him a little shaving mirror. He saw his head and face
with one side bald, and the skin either feathery white or angry red.
“Well, you’ve had a very lucky escape.” And with that he was left.
Through the great windows, wide open and covered with gauze against
the flies, Skene could see the sunset over the beech-groves and
bird-haunted lawns of the park, like a pattern worked in luminous silks.
With dusk he fell into that half-waking state which an unspoiled
constitution opposes to overstrain and shock; into a repose just
spoiled by phantoms. His heart drummed in his ears. He could hear the
far-away bombardment, and fresh convoys arriving below. In the faint
light that came in from the corridor crowded images kept chasing. He
was trying to find billets for interminable streams of men and mules in
a sunken road where the enemy’s fire beat them down as the hailstorm
beats down corn. He went to Castle for leave to get them out of it, and
Castle changed to Hunter, and Hunter bled to death, and when he fetched
a cattle truck to take him away, there was old Mercadet laughing at
him. And the laughter changed to tears, the face to Madeleine’s. All,
that she would say was:
“He’ll never go sick no more,
The poor beggar’s dead.”
He woke. The summer dawn had come, and far-away, ethereal as feathers
from an angel’s wing, the faint notes of the bugle that woke him, woke
many for the last time.
They kept Skene on milk for ten days, and he began to be able to hold
his food and to move without too much difficulty. His head and ribs
were bandaged, his eyes protected by yellow-tinted glasses. Presently
he could creep with increasing ease about those high white passages,
those festooned corridors with mirroring floors, and the straight
alleys of the garden. But he was not right yet. At sunset especially,
he was fearfully sorry for himself. This was a symptom indeed that
became chronic with Infantry officers as the War reached what proved to
be the half of its course. It was so obvious that one had only to go up
to the Line often enough and death was certain. And this thought, not
yet deep enough in Skene or his kind to overcome what had been the main
impulse that called the New Armies into being, and is best expressed by
the tag, “beating the Bosche,” was yet strong enough to set recurring
in the minds of the more imaginative the longing to “live” before they
died.
On the day Skene was pronounced fit to return to his regiment, he sat
down in an arbour covered by dusty and untrimmed roses, and wrote to
Madeleine. But he only enquired after her health and her father’s,
and asked whether she had news of her fiancé. He disliked posting the
letter, feeling as though he were making a fool of himself, and finally
destroyed it, when, two days later, he and his valise were deposited
by the light railway amid a sea of tents on the western side of a
bare hill, where with incredible difficulty he got himself at length
directed to his battalion. He first fell in with the Quartermaster, old
Adams, on his unhurried bandy-legged way towards the transport lines.
“Hallo, Skene, you’ve come back, ’ave you? That’s more than most of
them’ll do. Oh yes, the Major’s there, what’s left of him. Barring me
and him, there’s hardly a soul you know. Come over to my tent and let’s
have a snappy one! Plenty of time for reporting after lunch!”
Nothing loth, Skene followed the squat figure; and, sitting on the end
of a stolen stretcher which the veteran conveyed with him, all over
France, he listened.
“Never seen such a job in my life--fourteen officers gone, including
the Adjutant. In D Company, Thomas is wounded; Earnshaw is wounded.
They sent back for young Vickers, who was doing transport, and he went
into the next show, commanding a company. But neither him nor the
company has been heard of since. Reinforcements? Well, I’ve been doing
transport and giving an eye to the orderly room, besides my own job,
and I ought to know. Seven hundred men while you’ve been away, and even
now we’re not up to strength!”
What he saw when they went over to lunch dispelled Skene’s remaining
doubts. The Major, perceptibly greyer and slower, was almost cordial
in his welcome. Round the trestle table were a score of fresh faces,
subalterns straight from the big reserve battalions in England with
the gloss of home training shining all over them, and older men,
obviously recalled from jobs of all sorts and reduced from home-given
captaincy--one and all staring at Skene with that half-resentful
respect which those who had still to go “through it” used to show to
those who had already been “through it.”
Skene found himself in command of a company and spent the afternoon in
making the acquaintance of the officers and N.C.O.’s.
“All they want,” the Major had said, “is a little experience!” Skene,
who had observed that in this War, contrary to all others, experience
rendered one less, and not more, fit to carry out one’s duties, was
cheered all the same by their unsuspecting good spirits, willingness,
and that delightful gust of the old “Beat the Bosche” tradition
straight from England.
Shortly after that, he was marching his company up through the
interminable layers of transport and dump, artillery and trench
tramway. Helmets and respirators, bombs and artillery, everything was
improved, and the spirit of the hour was that of victory. The French
had hung on at Verdun, the Russians were attacking; our offensive, if
not a complete success, had strained the enemy to the point of putting
dismounted cavalry into the Line. Then there was our new method of
attack, and Skene plunged along in the rear of a tank. Shuffling and
stumbling, and trying to keep his men together in the fearful medley
of noise and vaporous dusty murk, he kept saying to himself: “This
is it--this is really it. At last! A real attack! A real victory!”
and shouting: “Keep up, keep up!” The tank disappeared in mounds of
broken bricks, iron posts, and wire. “Now for the Bosche!” he thought,
loosening his revolver. The next moment, the barrage descended on
him. Stunned breathless, crouching in a hole, he waited. Suddenly the
clamour dwindled and passed.
He sat among the powdered ruins of a village from which the early
morning sun was drawing the stench of decay and chemicals. The next
wave carried the roar of the battle further on. He wrote home a cheery
postcard in the intervals of collecting his men and awaiting relief,
but no relief came, and no rations. He sent back runners, but by the
time a reply came, his head had begun to go round and something had
drawn up his stomach as a bootlace draws up a leather purse. By the
time his servant had made some sort of tea and he knew where his
rendezvous was, his knees had folded up under him and his eyes were
closing. He reached the camp--four tents in a patch of star-fissured
mud--leaning on his servant, deadly sick--ill, in the midst of all
that. When he came to, a Doctor was bending over him, and talking to
another.
They said “operation.” They might have said “operations”--sleepless
nights and foodless days and the everlasting punch, punch, punch of
earth-shaking explosions on ears and brain, on backbone and stomach,
had reduced his resistance, and the most commonplace civilian ailment
easily had him down.
At the last halt, whence they had fetched him in, he had, in the course
of “cleaning up,” unearthed three unwounded Bosches in a cellar--seeing
only Skene’s bayonet man, walking alone, the first Bosche put his hands
up, the second fired a Mauser automatic, and the bayonet man dropped.
Skene squeezed his heavy Colt instinctively, and the Bosche rolled into
a shell-hole: the left side of his face was gone, but his glazed right
eye stared fixedly at Skene, who had then sat for who knows how long,
staring back and saying aloud, “Well, you shouldn’t have done it!” as
his senses and self-control steadily left him.
He wanted so badly to explain to the Doctors that he was suffering
from “evil eye.” They sent him home to England.
CHAPTER XIII
_Interlude_
SKENE’S second bout of hospital life was passed in a big hotel at
a semi-deserted south-coast watering place. A German destroyer had
fired one shell into it, and a Zeppelin had bombed its outskirts. The
lighting, the trams, and the usual places of amusement, were therefore
absent, and two depots of county regiments were present; the result
was an atmosphere in which it was simply impossible not to get well.
There was nothing to do but eat, walk, sleep, play games, and read.
Away from irregular meals and rest, from bullets and shrapnel, from the
everlasting concussion--the punch, punch, punch of continual explosions
on the nerve centres, the healthy, unbrooding youth of England
recovered fast.
Getting out and about in the summer sunshine, Skene had the sensations
that a fly has perhaps on a window-pane--a curious little dizziness,
from being upright, and at right angles to the ground; he had, too, a
lively appetite, weak knees, and a great faculty for sleep. The neat
little place that had been cut in his side, to take out something that
was turning black, healed gradually.
From that moribound atmosphere he got no very clear notion of how
England was progressing, in the third year of the War. But being
pronounced cured, he was given a week’s leave before rejoining, and
went home.
A changed home! While still on his back, a black-edged letter had
brought him news of his uncle’s death. “You remember how he used to
complain of his breathing.” (Skene had forgotten.) “It seems that his
heart was weak. He took a chill at the bazaar for the relatives of
the wounded. Pneumonia supervened, and he died in two days. The only
explanation the doctor can suggest is that the War excited him, in some
way he did not show!” No, truly! thought Skene, but he was genuinely
grieved, and even more surprised--not so much at his uncle’s death, as
at the nature of his own feeling about it. Grieved, yes--but somehow
this death, of his nearest relative, did not affect him greatly. It
was like the death of some one in a very good story or play--moving,
but not vital quite. Was it that he had seen too much death? No,
deeper than that! He was changed. The old quiet life of the office in
the Close was like another existence--an existence in fiction--good
fiction, life-like, but not real.
Skene went to an aunt’s--to a new, hygienic, scrupulously neat house,
in a new healthy suburb on the hill, a mile from the Close and the old
town. He was greeted warmly and taken good care of. The life was simple
to frugality. He gardened and grew fit; when the day came to rejoin,
he was annoyed with himself that he was not sorry to go. It seemed
ungracious. His aunt had taxed her little establishment to its limit,
let him smoke in her living-room, and come down late to breakfast! But
he could not help it. His place was in France, in the B.E.F. He didn’t
want exactly, to go back, but he didn’t want to stay.
He returned during September to be one of the seething crowd in the
great Base Camp at Etaples, with, not merely the War, but the same
battle still going on.
It was almost a year since he had passed that way. The first year
of the War had changed him from a quietly happy, rather commonplace
provincial architect, who might easily have slid into middle life
without more excitement than influenza, moving house, or receiving
a legacy, into a young officer of the New Armies, punctilious from
over-training, callow from want of fighting experience, but very
earnest in his one idea--to contribute his share to the overthrow of
the enemy. Now another twelve months had almost passed and he was again
at Etaples. But not the same Skene--not the same Etaples, not the same
war.
He had now seen more actual continuous warfare than any pre-War
officer had seen for a hundred years. He was stretched all over, in
mind and body. His clothes failed to cover his wrists and meet round
him. His skin was hardened and reddened, his voice coarsened from
shouting in the open, and he coughed from time to time as only men
do who have breathed gas. His mind was full of expedients, ways of
obtaining food and drink, of avoiding toil and danger--it contained a
new scale of values, as to who must be saluted and obeyed and who could
be bluffed and ordered off.
The camp, which he remembered as an open sand-hill, dotted with tents
and a few wooden mess huts and baths, had become an enormous enclosure
containing probably a hundred thousand officers and men, streets of
buildings, partly brick or concrete, railways, roads and drainage far
ahead of most French provincial towns. No longer was it controlled by
a few weary regulars, wounded at Mons or on the Marne, and filled with
eager young or young middle-aged men like himself. A new type--the real
base officer, who did not go, and had never meant to go, within miles
of the fighting--was functioning now in proper offices, with all the
dignity and perversity of Aldershot or Chatham. And round them eddied
the ceaseless tides of reinforcement officers and men.
Skene met Earnshaw in a queue of eighty-odd, that were filing through
a medical-inspection hut, before three doctors, who, beginning by
examining men carefully, were being driven to mark them A or B and
keeping the crowd moving. Skene exclaimed: “Hullo! Thought you were
dead!” and heard Earnshaw speaking the same words. They laughed and
compared symptoms. Earnshaw had been hit in the thick of the leg; not
hurt much, he said, but he had started “going bad.” He added, “It’s
left off discharging now and I reckon I’m all right!” But there was no
volunteering spirit in his voice. They had both reached the point now
of supposing they would have to “go on with it.” They were both passed
“A,” and posted to battalions they had never heard of. “Conscription
coming,” said Earnshaw.
The attitude of the great voluntary army which fought the battle of
the Somme towards Conscription was definite. A man might have the best
reasons for staying at home. He might be honest and right in deciding
to do so. But he had cut himself off from the Voluntary New Army of the
War. If he was forced in now he would never be one of them. Skene felt
it. Earnshaw, the least imaginative man in the world, felt it. As to
the Australians in the fighting line, even at the end of the resources
of voluntary enlistment, they voted against forced service.
That Base Camp, in which Skene and Earnshaw spent the next few days,
held tens of thousands of men--a wooden and canvas and concrete town
on a bare sand-dune. On those light evenings, when the parades of the
day were over, it was like a gigantic ant-heap. The men swarmed round
the canteens, cinemas and concert halls, and the thousands still left
sprawled on the warm sand, a few writing and reading, more smoking
and talking, but the most playing or looking on at great childish
gambling games, “Crown and Anchor,” “Poker,” “Slippery Sam,” the usual
transparent race-course swindles, but most of all “House.” And on the
Picard beach, between the ragged firwoods and the never still railway,
the place hummed in the long twilight to the tune of: “Housey--housey!
thirty-four--forty-five--legs-eleven--click-ety-click--top of the
house! Come on, me lucky lads--who’s for a card?”
Officers were rather better off. They had free access to what was
becoming a very tolerable club, they could even get as far as Le
Touquet or Paris Plage, bathe or play tennis, visit their friends in
that little kingdom of hospitals, or have tea. No longer were they
compelled to wait, as twelve months ago, in a queue by a small hut,
where a voluntary canteen run by ladies provided a bathroom at which a
tame donkey watched ablutions through the window, and a Scotch orderly
stoked the tiny copper. Skene and Earnshaw were so unlike that they
respected each other. Besides, they had gone into the War together at
the start. As old, experienced soldiers they escaped much tedious duty,
and could usually spend the afternoon at Paris Plage or dine at the
club. Those were the golden days of returning health and almost perfect
idleness, and they passed too quickly.
Their orders to report arrived on the same day, and they went to Amiens
together, arranging to meet at a well-known restaurant for lunch.
They sat opposite each other there, and saw each other in innumerable
mirrors. Skene drank Chambertin, and reflected that officers, whether
in mirrors or not, were deucedly alike. Earnshaw drank whisky and
probably thought of nothing. They had a dispute over a liqueur called
Cordial Médoc which each imagined he had discovered.
As they were going out, Earnshaw grinned: “There’s a friend of yours!”
And Skene, turning his head, saw in a corner Madeleine Vanderlynden
sitting at a table on which stood a little bag and a café crème. He
felt as if he had dropped clean through the earth. He heard Earnshaw
chuckle, “So long, old thing!” and a click of the closing door. Without
any attempt to follow him, Skene started, with what he felt to be a
jerk, to cover the ten yards that separated him from Madeleine. There
was no reason in him at that moment.
It was not so much that he wanted her, as that he wanted to be cared
for. The moment had been preparing during the whole of his year’s
service in France. The dangers he had faced, the rough out-of-door
life, the fasting and feasting, his guardian’s death, and his own
growing perception of the inevitable fate before him; the nervous
overstrain and shock, the convalescence and rest--all culminated in
that instant with the fatal appropriateness called Providence.
Whether or not he showed her anything of this, she remained perfectly
composed. She said she had lunched, but she accepted a liqueur, and
then began to ask politely about Skene.
“So you have left the farm?”
“Yes. I have placed myself in a Government office!”
“Well, I’ve been to hospital twice since I last saw you!”
“Ah, but you are well now!”
“Yes! I’m going back to It to-morrow!”
“Ah!” She put into it the only feeling that was possible. Not
commiseration, not ignorance, just simple understanding.
“And you, what are you doing here?”
“I am staying with my aunt!”
“For how long?”
“How should I know?”
Skene pushed on breathlessly:
“How is your father?”
“All right, I suppose. Why not?”
“And your fiancé?”
Madeleine turned her face, a pale oval, between her white hat and her
white hands.
“He is dead.”
Skene dropped his hand on her forearm:
“When?”
“How should I know?” She looked away, but did not move her arm.
“Then are you sure?”
She turned to him again, her whole vital self shining in her eyes:
“He is dead, for me!”
Skene could only find to say:
“Believe me, I am sorry.”
Turning her face with its brimming eyes away, she shrugged her
shoulders, but still did not move her arm.
A sense of futility enveloped Skene--futile the words he had said,
futile to offer any kind of sympathy with the trouble before him.
It was the last moment he ever spent in his peculiar attitude of
sympathetic friend.
“You know this is an officers’ restaurant?”
“I know now.”
“I shouldn’t advise you to come here, unless of course you wish to.”
“It’s all the same to me.”
Skene thought: “Oh, is it?” and put his glass down. So did she.
After all they were empty. It was the vacant hour when lunch is being
cleared away and the tables re-set in readiness for the English tea,
just beginning to invade the English bases. The waiter was obviously
wishing them gone; the very silence and emptiness robbed them of
privacy.
“What shall we do now?” Skene asked her.
“But I have nothing to do.”
“It’s too early for tea. What about the cinema?”
“I don’t see any obstacle.”
Skene paid, and they went out into the street, full of the uniforms of
half a dozen nations. Before the door of the cinema was a long queue
controlled by military police. At the doorway they were met by a flat
refusal--not a seat to be had. They turned away: Skene’s heart was
thumping. He managed to get out:
“There’s nothing to be done but to take you back to your aunt’s.”
“Nothing but that.”
In a quiet cobbled street near the cathedral a well-kept, unpretentious
café was displaying the English legend:
EGGS, FISH, CHIPS, TEA
pasted on the glass of the windows.
The private house door was to the right. Madeleine turned to Skene with
a simple “Here we are!” In Skene, with every step from the cinema,
the blood had run faster--the blood hammering out in his temples the
fateful doggerel:
“He’ll never go sick no more,
The poor beggar’s dead.”
His voice changed in his throat to a voice he did not know,
stammering, beseeching:
“Look here--I’ve got to go back to It again to-morrow.... Let me
stay.... Don’t send me away.”
And Madeleine, drawing back into the darkness of the entry, answered,
“Well then, my poor friend----!”
Two hours later, they sat opposite each other at a little wooden table
set for them in the private room of the café. The wooden panelling,
painted stone-blue, was decorated with large and awe-inspiring
photographs of the proprietor and his wife, and with certificates of
the secular and religious instruction of their children. On the middle
of the mantelpiece, under a glass bell, stood Madame’s “couronne de
noces,” flanked by picture postcards, English and French, bearing
the stamps of all the different theatres of war. Over the glass
door that separated them from the steam and uproar of the bar was a
spectacular representation of the last pilgrimage to Notre Dame de
Lourdes. Over the black and odorous entry to the kitchen was the highly
coloured advertisement of a firm of champagne-growers, representing an
incredibly waisted damsel pouring foam from a bottle into a flat glass
held by the now forgotten pre-War _piou_ in his red breeches and
_képi_. From one doorway or the other, Madame kept coming in,
bringing with her own hands this dish or that bottle.
While Skene feasted, his eyes devoured Madeleine; there were puckers at
the corners of her light silky eyebrows.
“Listen now,” she said. “Since we are together like this, I do not wish
to deceive you. Madame here is no aunt of mine.”
“What does it matter?”
“Only this,--she may not want us here on account of the police,--better
give her something!”
When the Patronne swung her enormous circumference near them with the
bill, Skene explained that it was now too late for him to rejoin his
camp.
“Madame,” he said, “has sons who are soldiers--she well understands
that when one is young, one cannot always go back to camp.”
A lucky hit! For ten minutes they had to listen to the tale of
Madame’s sons--the one in the Infantry who was a priest in civil life;
the one at Salonika; the one who had been killed at Verdun. Then Skene
kissed the old lady good night, to her intense gratification, and as he
and Madeleine mounted the narrow stair abreast, she called after them
“_Bon amusement!_”
Midnight had hardly ceased chiming on old bells before Skene began to
think.
Lying on his back, his right arm crushed under a burden that had in
a few hours become so suddenly and vitally precious, he turned his
head from the sleepy smiling face at his shoulder, to the spotless
cleanliness of the little room (“I put it a little in order myself,”
she had said) lit by a candle flickering under a pink paper shade
(“Because I like us to see one another”); he turned back again and
framed the first question he had put for many hours: “To-morrow?”
Bare arms closed round his head so that he could neither speak, hear
nor see.
“To-morrow will be like that over again!”
“No, but listen. You know perfectly well what it is to be a soldier....
A few hours late, a day or two absent, and then endless trouble....”
“There is always trouble, one way or another!”
“Better be sensible and arrange where we can meet when I can get leave?”
“I know that as well as you!” She was smiling no longer, wide awake and
business-like as ever he had seen her in her father’s kitchen or her
restaurant.
With puckered brows, she stared at the ceiling. Outside a patrol passed
in the echoing street, with a clank and a grumble of voices.
Skene went on: “For you it’s easy enough. You have my address, and
wherever they send me my letter will follow--unless the censor’s
jealous----But for me--shall I write to the farm, or where?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.”
“Have you sold the ‘Lion of Flanders’?”
“Yes. Sold it well, at a profit!”
“Why? Were you tired of it?”
“No!”
“Then why!”
“Because there is only one way from Verdun to the Somme, and he must
come by it! It is the railway, here!”
“But you say he is dead!”
“One says those things!”
“But, Madeleine, what am I doing--here?”
“That’s what your General will ask you--if he finds out!”
Skene was nonplussed.
She went on: “I write and write to him. I know for certain he gets my
letters ... but at last, you know, there comes a point at which one
says ‘I won’t be served like this!’ And the same day I see you, and now
I wish to be for you.”
“You don’t wish to go home?”
“No, not that in any case.”
“Where then?”
“How should I know?”
“My poor Madeleine. What will you do?”
“Work, to be sure! I have already placed myself in an office!”
On that unromantic basis Skene had to leave it.
CHAPTER XIV
_The Functioning of G., A., and Q._
THE convent that occupied all one side of the little village street
of La Croix sur Flanche, in the Department of the Somme, was of
stone, with a steep slate roof, between dormers on which an aged
bright-coloured lichen had worked fairy patterns. Inside, the rooms,
whitewashed, and furnished with unpainted wood, had long been
evacuated, and were now inhabited by the staff of the Nth Division,
pulled out of the line in a battered and decimated state, to fill and
fatten up for another “show.”
At that period, Divisional Staff was very much what pre-war
organization had made it, though its personnel was already entirely
changed. It was still a Council of Ten Red Hats, General, two Aides,
three “General” Staff Officers (who directed operations when there
were any to direct), three officers representing the Adjutant-General
and Quartermaster-General and the A.P.M. But with the perversity of
that war, things were already getting upside-down. The General and
Aides were obliged, by the complexity of the training, the maze of
Intelligence Reports, to do what the G. side told them. A. & Q. were
rapidly overshadowing G., as it became increasingly obvious that in
years of maintaining a division in the field, there could only be some
weeks of operations. Above A. & Q. were already towering the three
technical specialists without whom nothing could be done--the Heads
of the Medical, Transport and Ordnance Services, by whom alone it was
possible to live, with the necessary food, ammunition and weapons.
Still undreamed of, there loomed in the future, all those others,
specialists in bombs, tramways, gas, forestry, roads, agriculture,
claims, courts-martial, rats, incinerators.
In spite of their new and relatively comfortable surroundings,
Divisional Head-quarters was not happy. The first series of attacks on
the Somme, in spite of the “Victory” headlines in the English papers,
and considerable drain on the resources of the enemy, had devastated
the domestic arrangements of the B.E.F. So-and-So had been “sacked,”
sent back to England with loss of rank and future prospects. “Yes,
really. So-and-So, by Gad!”
There had been consternation at conferences at G.H.Q. and various
Army Head-quarters, from which saddened commanders of formations
had returned and spoken seriously to their immediate subordinates.
“Either,” they said (they had it straight from G.H.Q.), “there must be
better staff work, or examples would be made!” Examples! Old So-and-So!
Thus consternation had filtered down to the actual working staff of the
Nth Division, transmitted by their Commander, at a long conference,
held at eight in the morning (summer time) to a properly shaved (but
as yet unbreakfasted) roomful of officers, on whom it made a profound
impression.
No one knew what was going to happen next. High up in the hierarchy of
the B.E.F. well-known faces had disappeared, men no one had heard of
were doing old jobs, more curious still, new men were doing new jobs
that no one had heard of either. Roads, water, tramways, machine-guns,
timber, were all being taken away from the jurisdiction of units of
brigades, divisions, even corps, and made into separate “services.” It
was rumoured that even so exalted an authority as “Corps” could not run
a train or close a road without referring to the Deputy Administrator
of Something or other.
As for a division--well!
Every one spoke of all this as a personal grievance. No one saw it as
an inevitable step. No one had read General Ludendorff’s Memoirs--they
were not yet written--so that no one knew that the same thing had
already been done by the Bosche.
G. branch, the strategic and tactical--or as they preferred to style
it, “fighting” side of the staff--came out of its monk-like retirement
and consulted the Adjutant-General and Quartermaster-General’s
side--(commonly known as A. & Q. or more briefly, Q.)--as to what was
to be done. United wisdom arrived at the conclusion that they must have
more “help.” You could not increase the establishment of the Divisional
Head-quarters, but you could “take some feller out of some crowd or
other, and make him do something!” This was the idea of G. branch. G.
took a high line all along. They were the real staff, precedent in the
hierarchy--it was all the fault of Q.
“How,” asked G. of Q., “can you expect us to function, when we order an
operation and you don’t give it the necessary supplies?”
Q. went white all over with excitement. Just like G. to talk like
that! It was G.’s way to say, “This division will now move to ...” (so
often misspelt) and leave it to overdriven Q. to find out how twenty
thousand officers and men, and nearly ten thousand animals and vehicles
and God knew (Q. didn’t) what other clutter, were to get there. But
Q. didn’t say so. It had to keep its job. All its pre-war staff had
long been gone here or there, and Q. was now filled up with mere
junior regulars who had wounds, or uncles in England, and was getting
along in this God-forsaken country by the light of such common sense
as it possessed. What Q. did say, and quite respectfully was: “Had G.
heard of the new extra burdens imposed on Q. by trench warfare--trench
boards, trench mortars, trench helmets, trench stores, all going up or
down the same one way road?” G. shrugged its shoulders. That was Q.’s
business. Q. pointed out politely that it was not. On the contrary, it
was not even A.’s business. No! to be precise, in a division, it was
the A.P.M.’s.
This brought matters to a head. The Drama has its unities. It only
remained to call in the A.P.M. and ask him more in sorrow than in
anger, why the traffic on the strategic roads was not better controlled
during operations.
The A.P.M. was (of course) a middle-aged cavalry officer, good at the
game of polo, for which the division hoped to put in a good team, when
next at “rest.” He met the G.S.O.2. (second dignitary of G. branch) at
lunch and wanted to know how the hell he was to superintend traffic
when he couldn’t get into his office for suspected spies and claims for
damage to civilian property.
About this time it chanced--on such slim threads did man’s destiny hang
during the War--that Captain, now Colonel Castle, translated after a
glorious apotheosis in the first Somme attacks, to the far-away heavens
of “Corps,” heard of the difficulty, and said he would see what could
be done.
“What we want,” said the division (and he had heard the same at eight
other divisions in the Umpteenth Corps), “is a feller who has some
combatant experience--otherwise he won’t know what’s what--he must
know something about roads, an’ be able to read a map--he mustn’t be
a captain or we shall be told we are reducing the available number of
company commanders--he mustn’t be a boy--and--oh, very important--he
must be able to speak French and--er--Belgian (for to the end, the
Staff found it difficult to know exactly what to call Flemish--it
sounded so like Yorkshire) and--er--Bosche if possible--then he’ll be
able to deal with--natives, and prisoners!”
Colonel Castle, gifted with that capacity for abstract ideas so
rare in the army of his native land, had also a thorough knowledge of
the actualities. No divisional staff could tell him anything about
the horrors of rain-sodden darkness on shell-hole-pitted roads, when
ammunition going up jammed ambulances coming back, and civilians
evacuating farms got stuck in infantry relieving. He went to his hut
and drafted his well-known report on “the congested state of the
traffic-arteries in forward areas, with a suggested remedy.” Peace
settled down again on the Convent of La Croix sur Flanche. Castle had
an idea. That was hopeful. And the idea of Colonel Castle grew and
grew. Admired by his juniors, loved by his contemporaries, respected
by his seniors, he had also, through relatives highly placed, and
through school and regiment, that influence without which nothing could
be done in the B.E.F. Above all, there was his personality, undimmed
by two years of war, of which eighteen months had been spent never
farther back than Brigade Head-quarters--the personality of Colonel
Castle who wanted to fight on and win, but thought that victory lay
in economizing our men, while the enemy squandered his. And so in the
fulness of time, there was issued a General Routine Order, instituting
the appointment, by divisions, of an officer, to be known as “Clearance
Officer,” possessing the following qualifications: (_a_) not
less than one year’s active service, (_b_) knowledge of foreign
languages and (_c_) proficiency in map reading, who, stationed at
the most convenient spot in the divisional area, would, in liaison with
Q., French Mission, and A.P.M., examine, classify, direct, and control
all traffic whatsoever, military (personnel or stores), civil or
prisoners of war, upon the forward traffic-arteries, and should receive
additional duty pay at the rate of umpence a day.
The Routine Order was duly read by the Staff of the Nth Division. They
read many, every day, without enlightenment. And one day when Castle
was present, inspecting, arranging, advising on a thousand and one
things, some weary wanderer in the tangle said to him:
“This memorandum of yours. It sounds all right, but who on earth shall
we get to do it--old Dakers?”
“Who’s that--the old chap from the Canadians--has he any qualification?”
“No--but we usually give him any odd job, and he gets through it!”
“I see!” Castle’s eyes twinkled: “Yes, look here--give old
Dakers the job and the pay, and attach young Skene to him, 10th
Easthamptons--between them they’ll help you a lot!”
“Stop a bit--let’s write it down--who did you say--how do you spell it?
Right-O. Thanks awfully!”
Thus, through the complexity of that great machine, with its millions
of men, its mountains of material, its interweaving and reaction of
thought and deed, a little thread spun itself out to Skene, and drew
him into new paths.
It reached him, dejected and wet, on a soaking day amid the ruins of a
Picard village. He had found his new battalion--but he could not feel
the same towards it--and no wonder. It was composed of people who for
one reason or another had not come out sooner, and others who would
never have come out at all but for the looming shadow of Conscription.
They were determined and well-trained; but for Skene it was like having
to start all over again--he felt as a boy feels who has been put back,
unjustly, to a form from which he has emerged a year before. The lot
of them, good or bad, had now to learn all that he had learned in the
twelve months passed.
Although he never had any doubt that England could not be beaten,
he began to wonder, now, if the victory would be so complete as he
had always assumed. He had always taken it for granted that he would
eventually land in Brussels if not in Berlin, and then march home with
the battalion.
He began to wonder now, listening to that familiar sound, the tap,
tap of the German machine-guns, the same sound, the same guns and men,
perhaps, as of the year before.
It was partly his experience of the expenditure of time and treasure
and human life necessary to conquer a line of smashed-in burrows and
rusty wire that meant nothing on the map. Partly a funny feeling
in his inside. Partly new realization of the infinite comfort of a
woman--partly a dawning doubt as to whether the staff work was all it
might have been.
When Skene got orders to report at Divisional Head-quarters, he obeyed
without elation but with a sort of curiosity.
By that war-method of traveling, known as “lorry-jumping,” that is,
by waiting in an obscure Flemish or Picard lane, turned by fate into
a traffic-artery, and boarding a lorry or ambulance, splashed to the
neck, with all one’s household goods on one’s back--Skene arrived at La
Croix sur Flanche, and saw the red and green lamps and the sentry at
the Convent gate. In the Nuns’ garden, he wrung out his cap, and wiped
his boots. The doorway, in addition to its little crucifix and holy
water-stoop with sprig of box, now bore the letters “A & Q” roughly
drawn on a bit of board and hung on a nail by a piece of string.
In the whitewashed schoolroom he found a weary young man with that pale
complexion that comes from the shock and the loss of blood, following a
bad body wound, however well healed. He stated his business.
“O my God!” said the young man, and rummaged hurriedly among piles of
papers. “Here take this!”--an armful was thrust on Skene--“You’ll find
your C.O. in the cubby-hutch by the gate!”
Relapsing into his papers, the young man called after Skene, “Are you
sure you can speak French, because he can’t! Have you brought your
servant? What do you say your name is?”
Skene traversed the soaking garden, where the odour of good green
vegetables mingled with the stench of bad drains, and dived into the
porter’s lodge.
That little lodge was a dark stone-and-plaster cubicle against the
high-tiled wall of the convent schools. Here old Jules Lemoineau,
gatekeeper and gardener, had lived with his aged wife until the
first shells fell. The old wooden bedstead behind the partition, the
crucifix, family photographs, picture postcards, were still in their
places on the whitewashed walls. Vine leaves round the little barred
window reduced light to a greenish twilight.
On the door was a little wooden placard, “Divisional Clearance Officer.”
Inside, a venerable old gentleman, grey and bald, with Maple-leaf
badges in his lapels, was reading through spectacles. Skene just
refrained from saluting, catching sight of the three stars on his cuff.
The old man looked up: “Come in ‘n’ have a drink!”
No one ever resisted such an invitation on a wet day on the Somme. They
sat over two ponies of whisky and water, produced from under his chair,
while the shrewd old Colonial sized up and summarized the situation.
“They’ve too much to do!” he nodded his head in the direction of the
Head-quarter Officers, “and most of ’em never earned ten dollars--so
we’ll have to help ’em. I can’t run, and I can’t parlee, but you can”
(he said “Kearnt,” and “Kean”). “We mess in ‘D’ Mess, but I expect
we’ll get one of our own. You sleep here. Tell your servant!”
In this way Skene’s life was saved.
CHAPTER XV
_Sheer Devotion_
AS a matter-of-fact, Skene was without a servant at the moment, and
lost no time in seeing the Officer Commanding what was then known as
an “Employment Company,” with a view to rectifying the omission. There
followed the first of the busy nights, preparing for the division to
take up a fresh sector. Skene had to go right up forward to take over,
and returning about five in the morning, had slept through, as agreed
with Captain Dakers, until lunch was on the table.
“Your new batman has come!” said the old Canadian; “he’s some cook!”
Skene looked at his plate, and thought hard. Pork chops and beans. Not
half bad. Where had he tasted that savoury dish last? Rum omelette, by
George--Red wine, instead of that everlasting whisky--Coffee.
“Like to see your new man? Don’t mind me. I’d like to see him myself!”
“Yes, please!”
“Burnside, send Mr. Skene’s servant here!”
A squat figure with the ghost of pre-war regular soldier’s “smartness”
about it filled the little doorway. Skene only took one glance, and
threw his harshest rasp into his voice:
“What the devil do you mean by this?”
“Orders was to report to you, sir!”
“Go back to the kitchen. If you move, I’ll have you put under arrest!”
“You seem hard on the man, Skene, what’s up?”
“Tell you when I’ve spoken to that Employment Company!”
After a short conversation, Skene put down the field telephone
receiver: “I’ll have him back, if I may. You’ll hear what he says, and,
if you still wish it, I’ll keep him, but you must hear first. Jermyn!”
The square figure in well-brushed khaki reappeared.
“You’ve spoken the truth, I find! Why did you volunteer for the job
directly you knew it was with me?”
“Wished to come back to you, sir!”
“If you do, you’ll be on the strength of Captain Dakers’ unit. If ever
I have to ‘run’ you for anything, he’ll deal with you severely. Do you
understand that?”
“Yessir!”
“You’ve got a perfectly clean conduct sheet?”
“Yessir!”
“Of course you have. You’re an old soldier.”
“Yessir!”
“After the retreat you were found wandering about, and were arrested.
Your regiment moved and you were at Base and got the job of storekeeper
to the Quartermaster of the Easthamptons!”
“Yessir!”
“He had to get rid of you----”
“There was a little misunderstandin’, sir!”
“A little missing, you mean. Then you took on as my batman because you
thought it was a soft job. Was it?”
“No, sir!” A grin here.
“Where did I take you?”
“Front line--’orrible dangerous places!”
“You’ll go there again if you try any tricks!” “I’ll be no trouble,
sir. I can cook!”
“You always could. Why did you leave me?”
“I--I don’t like to say, sir!”
“No. You stole my trousers, and sold them to another officer’s servant,
and got drunk on the proceeds, in Boeschepe. You went to clink. Your
second go, in the army. You’d been in clink in civil life. What was
your job?”
“Light porter, sir!”
“Rot, you picked up odd jobs on race-courses!”
“I’ve ’ad misfortunes, sir!”
“That’s nothing to what you’ll have, if you touch anything that isn’t
yours, or get the worse for liquor here! Got it?”
“Yessir.”
“Right. Here’s five francs to start with!”
“I’ave money on me, sir. I’d rather bring you a list at the end of the
week!”
“Good start. You’re improving. That’s all!”
Left alone, Captain Dakers smiled at Skene.
“You’re mighty particular. Do you mean to say you worry what a man’s
been?”
“We don’t like dishonesty or drink. Anyone who has to do with racing is
generally afflicted with both. Anyone who’s been to prison usually goes
again. I shouldn’t employ that man in civil life. But he can cook and
I’ve a hold on him!”
“He seems to like you!”
“That sort likes anyone who’ll give them a sharp short order, and make
them obey!”
“We take men as we find ’em, in Canada!”
“We don’t!”
Captain Dakers’ man was a Belfast schoolmaster called Burnside, whose
eyes had been badly damaged by gas, and who had learned all that the
army could teach him about cooking just as he would have learned
and passed examinations in any other subject under the sun, but he
lacked just that touch of imagination born of necessity which Jermyn
(always known as Jerry) supplied out of the bitter experiences of a
horrible past. This was not wonderful, for whereas cooking for and
valeting an officer meant all that Jerry expected of life, an easy job
diversified by three hearty meals--for Burnside it represented a slight
alleviation of a state of things which was otherwise unbearable. It
was not so much that he hated discipline, and rations, and wounds, and
censorship--though he did hate them--as that he was constitutionally
incapable of using so little of his brains as the life demanded of
him. Hoping, as he did, to get away from teaching to a professorship
of comparative philology, he put up with being Captain Dakers’ servant
because it allowed him more time for reading than any other job in the
army. The rests that his eyes forced him to take, he devoted to Captain
Dakers.
Burnside and Jerry made the queerest combination, for they did
combine, which was perhaps queerest of all. Skene’s theory was that
they were so utterly unlike, so removed from all possible competition,
that they respected each other. Anyhow, they did not quarrel, as most
servants did. Burnside immediately appreciated Jerry’s lick-my-thumb
cookery, and left it to him. When the division lay at Acheux, and
Jerry heard Burnside bargaining in fluent French with peasants and
shopkeepers, he remarked: “You can’t ’arf parlee the bat!” and never
again resorted to his pigeon English. Burnside was extremely anxious to
learn from Jerry the race-course “tic-tac” code, which he believed to
be associated with that obscure and ancient slang language, which the
modern tramp inherits from the gipsy, who had it from--where? That is
what Burnside wanted to know. In return for the knowledge, he allowed
Jerry to win money from him at “Slippery Sam,” and even to play the
concertina. Thus Skene, puzzling his head over the problem of two-way
roads east of Albert, would be roused by the strains of:
“The roses round the door
Make me love mother more,” etc., etc.
Hammering on the partition of the hut they now inhabited, he would
shout:
“Stop that d----d noise!”
And the noise would stop, until he went out to his rounds, to see the
dumps cleared, the roads policed, straggling units redirected, when
behind him would arise in the night:
“Don’t chase the pore sparrows away,
You may be a sparrow some day,
But spare them some crumbs
From your ha’penny buns,” etc., etc.
through verse after verse of Christmas-card sentiment, as the
concertina bleated and brayed.
“I can’t think why your fellow puts up with it!” he complained to his
Commanding Officer.
“Perhaps he likes it!” returned that veteran, “I do!”
But Skene questioned Burnside and discovered the truth, and
endeavoured to be more lenient in the interests of philology. He was
equally mystified by Jerry’s unaccustomed sobriety, amid the tangle of
low back-area estaminets, until one night when he and the Captain had
strolled out late to try and make up their minds as to the visibility
of the dumps, to aircraft. Returning to their billet, noiseless in gum
boots, they saw before them two figures, the square, squat one, walking
very wide, and depending on the tall gawky one’s wooden stride. They
heard Burnside’s scholarly articulation:
“Now get in and lie still, you swill-pot, and sleep it off!”
“A’ri’, lovee dearie, clean my bloke’s belt for me!” which Burnside,
whose keen head no drink could fluster, and whose puritan self-control
enabled him to refuse drinks he didn’t want, with a “Dam’ you” if
necessary, forthwith did.
So that extraordinary partnership went on.
One day, when they both had to ride up to Corps Head-quarters for
detail, Captain Dakers, surveying their usually unlovely remounts,
hoofs blackened, faultlessly groomed, saddlery glossy, remarked to
Skene:
“This isn’t Burnside. This is your chap, teaching him what!”
“They know when they’re well off, both of them!” rejoined Skene, not
without satisfaction, “it’s sheer devotion!”
CHAPTER XVI
_Paris Leave_
WHAT heartfelt prayers Skene offered up during the ensuing six weeks!
The division went into the last attacks of the Somme offensive. Skene’s
work was dangerous enough--out every night, now running a wooden
tramway that carried trench-mortar ammunition--now shepherding down
batches of draggled, dazed prisoners. But he slept during the day, got
some food, and did not get drowned like many an infantry man. Then
suddenly without warning, he found Head-quarters packing up, the usual
signs, a junior officer of Q. branch disappearing with the A.D.C. in a
car--the Quartermaster-Sergeant burning returns, orders, schedules, and
time-tables of the Corps they were leaving. The division was going out
to rest.
The moment the attacks stopped, the rain stopped; some said it was the
God of the Bosches, others that the gun fire brought the rain. Anyhow,
the weather became crisp and fine, and down those poplar-lined roads
the division filed out.
Skene’s work changed. His Commanding Officer, known throughout the
division as “Uncle” on account of years and miscellaneous wisdom,
had been given charge of some seventy men, unfits or technical
specialists--not on any account to be called the “H.Q.” Company,
because there was no such unit in the list of Establishment issued from
Whitehall--and the Americans had not yet shown the necessity for such
a body. No, they were just “attached” or “employed,” and rationed and
paid as such. Uncle had been given the real job of Clearance Officer,
on the lines embodied in Colonel Castle’s memorandum, and was nominally
responsible for half a hundred odd jobs that Head-quarters had no time,
no inclination, and, so Uncle said, no ability to do.
Skene did these while Uncle made himself invaluable to the Deputy
Assistant Director of Veterinary Services, for he could circumvent the
climate and the mules, he could build horse standings and ovens with
nothing, and steal nothing to do it with, without being discovered.
He was invaluable to the A.P.M. because he could handle Colonials who
sometimes strayed into divisional lines, and who could not understand
and would not submit to English Police. Also he understood Massey
Harris reaping machines, and helped local farmers, who in return might
be induced to lend their fields for polo. So while the old man gave
sage opinions, Skene, as a change from prisoners, and ammunition, and
routes and gas alarms, did traffic and salvage, ushered units out of
the Line and saw that they cleared up properly.
Day by day the War was changing. Instead of the old divisions still
more or less like big families--men of one or two neighbouring counties
often with their own traditions well-known and observed--Skene now saw
no cavalry, no cyclists--they had gone to Corps--no artillery, they
had been left in the Line for the benefit of some one else’s infantry,
and the four regular battalions, the three territorials, and the five
New Army ones, fitted out with Welsh engineers, the A.S.C. of a Scotch
division, and Colonial field ambulances.
They squatted down in the valleys east of Doullens, and Uncle and
Skene billeted near Head-quarters at Louches, in a château in a wood,
on the top of the chalk cliff that overlooks the untouched medieval
village bordering the stream. They had an office in the stone gatehouse
that bridged the village street, and from thence Skene went, riding or
cycling, every day--his job now was civilian claims for damage.
In those wattle and daub-built farms, the successive units had wrought
a havoc greater probably than shell fire over the same period. The
old English regular army idea of “Barrack damage” had broken down.
Who was to say which of fifty successive units caused the wall of a
300-year-old barn to collapse? This brought up the question of renting
permanent sites, since every one now agreed the English armies would
not be in Berlin this Christmas. And, to Skene, whose colloquial French
was fair, all this was interesting--not merely because it occupied the
mind and did not expose the body, as the work of an infantry company
officer did, but because he could feel himself of some use, somehow.
The peasants liked him because he understood them and took trouble.
Head-quarters liked him because he took a load of half-understood
bothersome detail off their hands. Uncle was a good master. The
officers of the French Mission, the Maires of the villages were easy to
get on with.
But there was a deeper reason than any of these for the glow in his
heart.
As the War was changing day by day, it was changing everybody that came
within its scope. Men over thirty grew so that they could not wear
pre-war clothes; more frequent, more curious and more catastrophic were
the cases of men whose minds would never again fit their pre-war habits.
The education of the war was profound--it attacked the middle-aged who
changed as they had never dreamed of changing. A few weeks counted as
years and left individuals unrecognizable. And it was permanent--there
was no undoing it.
All this disturbance, psychological more than physical, demanded
compensation. Habits, points of view--restraints had been destroyed.
Simple enough for those who, unable ever again to become the citizens
they had been, found in the swift death of the battlefield a halo
that endeared them to a generation. But for others who lived on,
through months--years--of shell fire and bombing, of Army orders
and Censorship, not so simple! They had to alter if not to rebuild
themselves. To a few men, soldiers by instinct like Colonel Castle,
work, and more work, a little ambition, a spice of danger, but always
more occupation, bridged the chasm. To many, that easy slip for
Northern peoples--a little more strong drink--sufficed. Uncle, who had
always taken his whack, took a little more. Whisky deteriorated less
perhaps than anything during those years of stress. Life was lived
outdoors, food was not scarce--Uncle was never drunk, but just cheerful
every night. What one would do with such a habit on returning to civil
life, did not bother men. The chance seemed increasingly remote. Whisky
best, other drink second, kept many going. There were other means of
recuperation--such sport as could be got--polo, football, cards in the
mess--expensive trips to the nearest town to see a lady. A few read,
sketched, photographed if they dared, kept pets or diaries.
Skene’s trouble was different. He was worn in body, but it was his
feelings, the complex inherited and acquired habits of a comfortable
provincial professional man that were so injured. Ought he ever to have
volunteered? Should he not have waited and got one of the innumerable
jobs where his draughtsmanship would have kept him busy and safe at
Calais, St. Omer, Abbeville, Amiens or Bethune, in one of the great
departments now springing up? But here he was. Soldiering did not
appeal to him, drink made him sick before it made him silly. Sports
and hobbies did not go deep enough. The ordinary after dinner jokes
he let pass with a grin and a shrug. Promiscuous women did not tempt
him. Madeleine did. To be cared for--to be wanted--to have some one
looking for his letters--arranging to meet him--that staid, demure,
yet physical responsiveness--that was the thing. He did not boast of
his precious feeling, but hugged to himself the thought that although
he was but a small screw in a great machine, he had his private and
special Heaven, where no one else could go. He felt perfectly secure.
He knew enough of France to be sure that Madeleine was not making a
business or a hobby of men. It was of course impossible for him to ask
himself, critically and coolly, what she was making of him.
Few men possess that best of Guardian Angels, a candid friend. And
to Skene, anyway, he would have been of doubtful benefit with his
probable: “You are an Englishman. There is only one way with a woman
for you. Marry her or let her alone. In England you were born and
educated, and are totally incapable of a liaison. You have no idea of
what she means by marriage. You will only hurt yourself or her, or
both. Let her alone!”
Skene had too good a reply: “I am saturated with the daily stimulus
of this war as if I were fed on alcohol. I have just escaped from
the trenches, I am living and shall probably live for years more or
less under shell fire. By the law of averages, it is unlikely I shall
survive. I must have this woman or go mad.”
Who could have gainsaid that?
But he had no frank mentor at his elbow; not even the grim cynical
Earnshaw to laugh at him. The matter was never present in concrete
form to his reason--it just made a little rosy cloud in the corner of
his eye, sometimes spreading over his whole vision. Passing up and
down those valleys between the chalk ridges, incredibly beautiful in
the clear weather, where the small-wooded, dense French plantations
made a bluish sheen on the downside, and the rushes in the beds of the
clear, blue-and-white reflecting streams had scarlet stems, where the
poplar leaves were spinning like so many gold sequins--all the time he
had that glow in his heart. The War lost its hold on his attention. As
he laboriously waded through the assessment and verification of great
piles of claims for occupation of pasture or arable, for damage to
plastering of barns, or pavement of courts, he was arranging in his
mind the strategy for obtaining leave.
He wrote to the address at Amiens, a letter beginning “Chère Amie”
and signed “Geo.”--for it was of course nationally impossible for her
to spell or pronounce “Geoffrey.” He posted it by help of a French
permissionaire in a civil post office. He waited a week, surprised
at himself, slightly annoyed each time it was post time to find no
reply--surprised at his perfect confidence that it would come. At last
it was there, postmarked Paris, and opened by the censor.
The letter was calm and cool. She had got work in Paris. She was
pleased that the War went so well. _Beaucoup de bons amitiés._
Skene was not disappointed. It was the very letter to pass the censor.
He could get Paris leave. It was a new institution invented to ease the
traffic in the Channel boats. He saw Uncle and Head-quarters and got
eight days’ leave to Paris. He wrote to Madeleine to meet him. He got
in reply a postcard with Union Jack and Tricolour entwined, inscribed
“_A bientôt!_” Then, only three days before the appointed date,
came a letter, beginning simply “_Chéri_”; it went on in her
vigorous language:
“All men are bad devils except you. I wish to be yours altogether!” and
promising to meet him on the Gare du Nord at the six-o’clock train.
So with a beating heart and a blushing face caused by a firm idea that
his Quartermaster-Sergeant had read all the postcards and guessed the
contents of most of the letters, Skene got into the Ford tender that
should take him to railhead, and prepared himself for a freezing eight
hours in the train--through Abbeville and Amiens--down to comparatively
civilian Creil. It was dark at Paris.
Madeleine was there on the platform; once again he thought her
slightly and advantageously aged; thinner and paler, also to her
advantage; better dressed than ever, and surely glad to see him.
In a moment the barriers of absence and strangeness were gone, and as
they passed out through the dark street to catch the last taxi, he felt
the warmth of the perceptible pressure of her arm, the bird-like lift
of her dark and shining eyes in a face pallid between the fur of her
collar and the brim of her hat. He had left the choice of restaurant to
her, and soon they were in a garishly painted dining hall, which had,
presumably, from its panels of naked goddesses and red plush and gold
seats, begun by upholding the old “how delightfully wicked” Montmartre
traditions, but had relapsed, under the influence of that gradual
commercialization of Paris, into catering for the steadier custom
of the clerks and better-class business employees of the district
surrounding the factories and goods stations of the northern arc of the
city.
Delightful to see the figure she cut among these diners! She had drunk
in Paris as if born there. A briskly pleasant, dictatorial manner with
the waiter, which one felt ready at the least shortcoming to break into
icy acerbity, the perfection of her gestures, her complexion and her
voice, where the least touch of superior tone rested on a solid basis
of assured sufficiency--all were perfect imitations of the girl earning
a good living, and conducting a successful liaison with a praiseworthy
young man towards a comfortable marriage or other permanent settlement.
And as Skene got further and further away from the primeval masculinity
of army life, from the freezing cold and bitter loneliness of his
journey, and was more and more intimately warmed by her glance, and
the dinner which, instead of being delivered to him as a ration, was
bestowed on him as a benediction, he thought with increasing amusement
how much more of a true Bohemian he was, than she.
It was the first time during the War (save for his rare spells of
leave) that he had been in a big town entirely outside the zone of
operations, where civilian atmosphere was the rule not the exception.
And in this new Paris, compared with the Paris he remembered fifteen
years before, it was he, who, dressed in the fancy dress of his
uniform, after running risks of life and death, was snatching a few
brief hours of happiness, careless of the morrow; and it was she who
sat there, imperturbable and unimpeachable, with clothes on the sombre
side of good taste, and a bearing on the stiff side of good breeding.
Because his dinner warmed him--because his mouth was full, because
he had nothing to say that could be freely said in such a place,
he was silent and made use of one of the innumerable mirrors with
which they were surrounded to steep his eyes in her image, from the
covering of her head (“a three-cornered affair of dark velvet--very
quiet and nice”) to the point of a glacé boot, set upon the iron of
the table support. What was it about her that made her so compelling?
No jewellery--just one ring, one brooch, solid, old-fashioned,
unpretentious--no glaring colour--no trick of gesture, no pose of
features or figure. Ashen-brown hair, dark grey eyes, shining a little,
under lowered lids, even, rather pallid complexion, mantling the least
bit as with suppressed excitement--expression imperturbable. Nothing to
catch attention, and nothing to get tired of.
That was it perhaps--character--strength of will and sureness of own
judgment--inherited from pure peasant stock and preserved and hardened
in the undisturbed rusticity of Flanders. She had come out, expanded,
in the atmosphere of the great city where she was making her way. A
hardy plant from a stiffer soil. She showed to advantage beside the
light more obviously “attractive” women around her, with their Parisian
tradition of doing their utmost to be attractive, and their inevitable
Paris clothes and fallals.
The contrast between her effortless self-possession and the almost
professional gaiety of the neighbouring tables moved him to convey to
her what he was feeling, with one of Mercadet’s jokes: “They ought to
call this the Place Cliché!” She smiled so vaguely that he wondered
if she understood, or again if she disapproved; she paused a moment
to survey the other diners--slightly curious, slightly antagonistic,
wholly critical, and went on with her dinner.
The dinner came to an end, as even good things must. She sent back the
bill to be corrected, and when he had paid it, preceded him, drawing on
her gloves and glancing at the waiters and the other tables as though
they did not exist.
Outside, in the clear-aired bustle of the Place Clichy, which even the
War could not rob of an air of wearing its cap over one eye, she chose
a cinema, and they took the best seats in one of the “_spectacles de
famille_” sort. She was decorously amused until the drama achieved
its usual pseudo-tragic separation between the male and female, when
she rose and said: “Listen, this representation is ‘_rasant_.’ I
ask nothing better than to go.” Skene followed her into the street. He
had taken a room in an old haunt of Mercadet’s--a little private hotel
in the Rue Biault. He asked anxiously: “Would that do?” She replied:
“You deserve it!”
With the warming sense of possession that fades with frequency Skene
handed her through the glass door with its English patent spring. The
proprietor, a little grinning bearlike Alsatian, recognized him at
once; In reply to enquiry after his health, he made the answer so often
heard: “_My_ good sir, I lost my son!” and wished Skene and his
“_petite dame_” a very good night.
Madeleine, who had been standing a little apart drawing off her gloves,
her feet at just the right angle to each other, her head at the right
poise, turned and gave him the smirk a middle-aged bourgeoise would
accord a necessary institution. Even on the stairs she did not abandon
the attitude, saying over her shoulder:
“Well, my friend, you have a pretty taste in hotels--it is at least
quiet and altogether clean!”
And upon this the door closed behind them.
In that clean little room with its rosy curtains and quilt, Skene sat
on the edge of the bed to unlace his boots, marvelling at the grace
of her raised arms as she unpinned her hat. Passing round the bed in
his stocking feet, he took her from behind to kiss her lips before the
fresh chill of the streets was off her face.
It would not have astonished him if she had pulled away, but instead
she shook all over, and the face he kissed was deluged with tears.
It says much for Skene’s middle-class upbringing, the most “gentle”
upbringing in the world, that he instinctively slipped from the hungry
lover to the kind-hearted friend, and more slowly back again from
drying her eyes and doing her little services to possession of her
lips, and, so far as man can know, of her thoughts and senses.
It was hours before that sudden collapse of the spirit was entirely
bridged, and they lay, side by side, at peace in the cosy stillness of
that little room, talking in voices such as married couples use for the
last few moments before they rise.
“My poor friend, I do plague you, don’t I?”
And while Skene denied it softly, by word and deed, she showed more
rancour than he had yet seen.
“But you well understand that it is not you, but him?”
“You have no bad news?”
“No, except that I always think he has gone with some one else. Ah, if
he would only let me see him, it would be all right!”
Pathetic, an abandoned woman’s undying belief in her power of
attraction! “Meantime, I love you much the more. You are more frank,
and much more a man.”
To Skene, fresh from mud and cold, from the tremble and roar of great
explosions and the mean loneliness of a Nissen hut, even this qualified
vow, backed with the pressure of soft shoulders against his arm, was
the very gate of heaven.
He woke with that feeling of comfort which can only be realized by
those who have slept in “gum boots” for months at a time; he rose
with the cheerful certainty of having all day to do just what he
liked. Madeleine, too, was in excellent spirits, no trace left of her
sombre collapse a few hours before, and finishing her deft toilet
before he was half through with his, made fun of his hot bath, his
difficulty in getting his belt and boots done to his liking, and his
egg for breakfast. They passed out into a frosty Paris, sandbagged and
darkened, but serene and busy, as yet not over-bombarded and still
possessed of taxis.
In infinite ease of mind and body Skene passed these few brief days
of complete holiday--the completer because his companion left a whole
province of his mind untouched.
Reaching him only through his less-educated senses, she led him,
daylight long, from shop to shop in quest of stockings, a stole, or
linen, which she consented to accept from him, and in the choice of
which, he could only respect her acumen and good taste. They would pass
the Musée de Cluny, the Sainte Chapelle, the Place de la Concorde,
places that had for Skene associations to warrant hours of dawdling
reminiscence. Madeleine was simply unaware of them, she cared more for
the use and appearance of a building than for its size, more for the
style and management of a shop than for its name or its pretensions;
she was interested in herself, but generous of herself, knowing how
to make herself valued, liking to see and be seen, light-hearted,
stoic--ideal for him and for the occasion.
He insisted on making the pilgrimage to the Lecture Hall of the
Sorbonne, to see what was, to him, The Fresco.
She looked at it in silence. At last she said:
“It is not, then, a church?” The atmosphere of the place had penetrated
her consciousness. He explained the uses of the Sorbonne, its place in
her nation’s life. “No doubt it is necessary!” she admitted.
The week went like a flash.
To the last moment, she was perfect. Standing on the platform of the
Gare du Nord, as the six-ten for Amiens began to move, Skene admired
her, and saw how other people did the same. Restrained, attractive,
mistress of herself and of the situation, her farewell was an
unconscious masterpiece, a glimpse of perfection. Skene would have been
miserable that journey, had he not slept like a log.
CHAPTER XVII
_The Field of Arras_
A WEEK later, Skene was standing as close to an army stove of the
“Queen” type as he could get without burning his whole stock of
clothes, which indeed, he was wearing all at once. He was in a wooden
hut which his Commanding Officer had “wangled” from a Canadian Railway
Company who had moved farther off.
The great cold of January, 1917, had set in, and the ground was frozen,
certainly inches, some said a yard deep. Shaving was difficult and
keeping still was dangerous. Over the high plateaux of the Somme
district, the wind cut like a knife. The trenches were enviable,
comparatively dry and sheltered from the wind.
For Skene, the problem was whether to shiver near the fire or to walk
the length of the little cabin and feel how desperately cold it was at
the other end, three strides away. His C.O. wrapped in blankets, with
nothing showing but a red nose and a ragged moustache, was snoring the
thankful snore of one who has enough to drink only once a week.
From outside came the stamp and bellow of the mules, and from the men’s
cookhouse a cheerful roar of:
“Mademoiselle No Bon
Après la guerre finie
Umptity--Umptity--umptity--um
Tous les Anglais partis.”
His week in Paris seemed years ago. So much had happened since. Far
behind was the “rest” in the old untouched villages behind the Somme.
He had returned to a B.E.F. that was rapidly passing out of recognition
and that was never unchanged, no, not even for two days.
By the time that Christmas was over the developments that had drawn
him out of the Line, to be a “Clearance Officer” had gone much further.
The root idea now was, to work everything by Corps. Uncle, Skene, their
men and office were to be Corps troops. This marked the disappearance
from the War of the last shred of individuality.
At the beginning there had been the personal appeal to enlist,
the attraction of units, whose names or deeds called in one way or
another upon local patriotism, or historical glory, or whose terms of
enlistment, or the personality of whose commanders, were well-known
and appreciated. All this was lost to men’s minds during the Somme.
In the gigantic dimensions of that battle no one could remember what
ground had been won by the Prince of Wales’ Own Light Infantry (the
Cardiff Buffs) or in what gallant circumstances the Duke of Glasgow’s
Carabiniers (dismounted) had been wiped out. Men learned to count
not by battalions but by divisions, that did to some extent remain
recognizable. Divisions, even though shorn of cavalry and cyclists,
artillery and A.S.C., had been still, as to their infantry, London
or Lancashire, Scotch or Colonial. But now even this was lost.
Reinforcements came from anywhere or everywhere. The old badges,
the old divisional signs, might still be found, but the spirit was
gone. Often not even the badges and signs remained. News came of
trouble, almost mutiny because Birkenhead Irish were sent to reinforce
Cumberland Light Infantry, that owned nor pipes, nor shamrock. The
old proverb of the estaminet girls in the back areas, “A Colonial
private is worth a Highland lance-corporal, who is worth an English
Second Loot” became deceptive. The Colonial, the Highlander, and the
Englishman all came from Liverpool.
Where Skene now lay, the width of the Doullens-Arras road separated
him from a Canadian Corps. They were indistinguishable from other
British Troops, except for the Maple Leaf and their accent. They were
unrecognizable for the old Canadian Divisions of the salient who wore
slouch hats, carried their flags into action, and would salute none but
their own officers.
And in and around the British Troops were now dotted the immense
and growing camps of the Labour Corps--African Negroes officered by
Missionaries--West Indians and Egyptians that grinned and chattered in
the damp, numbing cold. There were rumours of Chinese.
No longer did Uncle and Skene depend upon the small, harassed
dignitaries of the division, local and, as it were, tribal gods, “Corps”
brought a larger if chillier atmosphere; it lived miles away and only
communicated by wire or despatch rider. The people that really had to
be feared and propitiated were the new theology--or demonology--of
Roads and Railways, of Labour or Transport or farther back, Forestry or
Agriculture.
Those to whom life is bearable--and they are perforce a majority--are
astonished when they examine the nature of the compensations that
induce them to accept the inevitable. So with Skene. Just when it
became impossible for him to feel any longer that it was _his_
war, to be won by his own individual sacrifice, it became possible
to feel that he need not sacrifice himself either immediately or
continuously. Having so narrowly escaped death, he might now live a
bit and not bother. To live was not so easy. Apart from getting bombed
and shelled he had to find food, drink, housing and leave. Uncle
was the finest possible tutor for a young man anxious to live. He
taught the three arts of war, so much more necessary than musketry,
field engineering or tactics. Or were they, perhaps, part of tactics?
Wangling, Scrounging, and Winning.
Wangling was the art of obtaining one’s just due by unfair means. For
instance, every officer and man of the B.E.F. had his allotted daily
rations, his camp or billet, his turn for leave. In practice, to get
these necessities, it was well to know the man who provided them and
do him some small service--a bottle of whisky, the loan of transport
(if you had any) or of a fatigue party. Wangling extended to the lowest
ranks. Men wangled from the N.C.O.’s the better sorts of jam and extra
turns off duty. The main stream of wangling flowed from the enormous
and growing number of small units, like Uncle’s, the apportionment of
whose daily subsistence was at once a nuisance and an opportunity to
the Supply Officers and the Railhead Panjandrums--for the bigger units,
battalions, batteries, Head-quarters had to be and could be more easily
provided for. But Wangling was by no means confined to troops in the
field. As the War grew and grew--the contracts for supplying steel
helmets to Americans, the Command of smaller Allied Armies, the very
sovereignty of nations all became subject to the Wangle, so remote had
become the chances of justly obtaining bare justice.
To return to the unit in the field, when its Wangle was completed,
behold it housed, fed and allowed some leave. But life was still
very hard--almost insupportable--to bear it, men, those fathers of
invention, evolved the art of Scrounging.
Scrounging could be defined as obtaining that to which one had not
a shadow of a claim by unfair means. It was more insidious than the
Wangle, but just as necessary--men scrounged the best dug-outs off
one another, or off neighbouring sections. N.C.O.’s scrounged rum by
keeping a thumb in the dipper while doling it out. Officers scrounged
the best horse-lines from other units. Colonials scrounged telephone
wire to snare rabbits. Nations scrounged territory or trade. It was
simply done. You walked about whistling, with your hands in your
pockets and a cigarette in your mouth until you saw what you wanted,
and then took it. The main stream of Scrounging was for wood. The
armies were provided with coal and coke and presumably intended to
ignite it by holding a match to it. In result millions of men during
the five winters of the War, burnt a colossal cubage of wood. It was
easy to obtain. Vast quantities were being cut by an entire Forestry
Corps that had rights over several Picard and Norman forests and did
nothing else but provide the timber required for dug-outs, railways,
roads and gunpits. No great percentage ever reached its proper
destination. A little was built into huts, horse-lines or billets. The
bulk was burnt. From the timber dumps in the great cold of January,
1917, whole stacks disappeared. If any high authority went into the
matter, a dumb, putty-faced sentry was produced who had heard nothing,
seen nothing, knew nothing. But even the enormous quantity taken from
dumps was not enough. Farms, houses, public buildings were ransacked.
Shelving, forms, ladders, carts, partitions disappeared. In the Belgian
hop fields the British Army alone is said to have destroyed 1,000,000
hop-poles. Who shall blame them? Shall a soldier die of cold as well as
of other things?
Wangling is known in peace time. It is a necessity of civilization,
where violence is difficult and costly. Scrounging was a necessity of
war, for men must live. There was another Art that was more truly an
Art than either of these. For it did not rest upon necessity, but was
an ornament, a superfluity, a creative effort of the mind. This was
the Art of Winning. It may be defined as Stealing. More fully, it was
the Art of obtaining that which one has no right to, for the sake of
obtaining it, for the joy of possession.
Some say that it arose from taking millions of decent civilian people
and planking them down upon battlefields from which the last sign of
decency had disappeared, in a war so bloody and so endlessly long
that the issue of it was beyond imagining. Some say it was simply the
primeval joy of loot, ever present in man, and bursting out from time
to time in Tudor or Elizabethan Filibuster, in Georgian Colonists, or
Victorian Journalists.
As the War went on the contagion spread. Decent Flemish and Picard
girls, with no particular tenderness for any one man, possessed
glazed cases containing the badges of every unit in the B.E.F. Decent
English boys conveyed or sent home every sort of appliance, equipment,
projectile, arm--not one of which they had obtained by personal combat,
but which they had found lying about and appropriated.
As Skene stamped his feet and listened to the snoring of his C.O.,
he looked round on their joint handiwork. The Hut, the men’s hut, the
coal, the oil for the lamp, had been wangled from Q.M. stores, dump
guards, area commandants, Town Majors. The wood for the fire, the
sacking on the floor, the roofing of the horse-lines, the gum boots for
officers and men had been scrounged, who knows where--or where not.
The picture of the Virgin Mary, the fire extinguisher, the arm-chairs
had been won. All up and down the great open-air town from Dunkirk to
Basrah it was the same. And Skene, the law-abiding, decent professional
man from a country town was not ashamed.
These acts were not discussed in any abstract way by the officers and
men who instinctively performed them. To any charge of moral obliquity,
their defence might have run: “England needed us; we came. England
wasted us; we died or survived. England leaves us here for no one knows
how many years to get along as best we can. Well! we are getting along!”
Skene turned all these things over in his mind, and was not
discontented. He was “in it.” From “stand to” in the morning, when
he staggered out in gum boots and a muffler to see the men were
about and stirring, guards relieved, animals fed and groomed, to the
present moment, while waiting to hear that the last of the evening
ration traffic had passed, his life was full with guarding four dumps
of different sorts of material and ammunition, regulating streams of
traffic, collecting and classifying salvage. And behind and beneath the
mechanical preoccupation of his daily existence, his real preoccupation
was now--Madeleine, a warm spot against his heart. Two things went on,
not interfering with each other--Madeleine and the War.
He listened a moment to a faint drumming noise. It sounded like
’planes. It faded. He thought: “Damn this cold. I’m fed up. I must try
next time Uncle’s up at the Corps and see if I can wangle another Paris
leave. If I can’t I must win another stove from the R.E.’s and scrounge
coal at the railway!” Then he became conscious of another of the daily
“new” elements of the War.
The head of his Quartermaster-Sergeant appeared in the doorway: “Bosche
signalled over, sir!”
“Very good, have the gun teams standing to!”
Skene pulled down a knitted cap over the tips of his ears, wound his
muffler twice round his neck and head, and shoving his hands into his
pockets, went out into the piercing starlight.
Around him was a bustle of men covering the lights from fire or lamp,
and “standing to” around the two Lewis Guns that stood slung on posts a
few yards apart.
In front where the double line of trees that bordered the great road
melted off into darkness, the bursting shrapnel of the new 13-pounder
anti-aircraft guns was visible against the blue velvet of the night.
Then that familiar sound--the rhythmic groan of the Bosche bomber’s
engine crept up, penetrating, immense, unforgettable--a nightmare in
men’s memories, as in the first reading of fairy stories the Giant’s
“Fe Faw, Fum” is to a nervous child.
For Skene this bombing was nothing new--billeted in railhead towns,
halted in stations, sick in hospital, he had heard it going on around
him. But to-night, the invisible bird kept circling above his head,
and he could not fix the direction in which to fire. As usual, no
instruction had been issued, save that the railway dump was to be
guarded, and it only occurred to him after several minutes that the
Bosche was probably flying on a photograph some days old, showing
it full of stores, and swarming with personnel. Then came a curious
shrieking whirr, the dead silence of a stopped engine; a boring as of
some gigantic corkscrew into the solid earth; an explosion that seemed
to tear the ground from under his feet, a rain of débris that lasted
several seconds. His Sergeant beside him, voiced his very thought: “Big
stuff, that!” He ordered fire-traversing above the dump. Flame leapt
from the mouths of the two guns and their continuous rattle drowned
the scuffling of the frightened mules in the transport lines. A second
explosion followed farther off, then nothing more. One gun had jammed;
Skene ordered the other to cease fire.
Having seen all clear, he dismissed, and went back into the hut.
His C.O. had not moved a hair for the noise. Smiling, warm through,
with his heart beating and his feet tapping, Skene almost wished he
were back in the trenches, so infectious is Activity, so much more
attractive than its pensive sister Reflection.
CHAPTER XVIII
_Another Paris_
IN the clear bright morning that followed the first raid on the Corps
dumps a single Bosche flew over, and then retired. Apparently the enemy
had gathered that he was wasting his time. The following night, though
bright and clear, was quiet. Skene wrote a long letter to Madeleine,
his Field Message Book on his knees, his feet on the stove until his
boots scorched, while Uncle snored just out of the circle of lamplight,
and outside the road was never quiet and the sentry stamped on the iron
ground. Skene wrote fully and enthusiastically--not because he had
much to say--she was probably not very interested in such details of
his daily life as would pass the censor--but because it comforted him
to write. He told her how much he loved her, how lonely he was, how
he enjoyed staying with her. He explained that he could not get leave
often even to Paris, though that was easier than English leave, but
that he would try to get a couple of days off in February. He folded
and franked the letter and put it in his pocket, to post it when he
could do so unobserved.
In the morning “Corps people” in blue caps and red caps, seated in
motor-cars, were reported to him, as he wolfed his breakfast, his
porridge, his bacon and eggs, his bread and marmalade. His servant who
brought him the news, left him his well-brushed British-warm and his
going-on-leave cap on the bench. Uncle was still snoring and Skene
hurried out “clean and properly dressed” to see what these inhabitants
of a higher firmament might require.
They were nice people; well shaven, well breakfasted too, one or two
regular officers and several of the new “Goods manager” type of highly
placed civilian organizer, who were now flocking into uniform and
getting into good positions by influence before conscription caught and
made infantry privates of them. They wanted new dumps, more dumps and
another railway. Skene ventured to suggest that the place was already
“spotted” and that the Bosche, suspicious of it, could watch and bomb
it again if he saw any activity. And there was that nasty straight,
tree-lined road that ran past it, shown on every map, visible in every
photograph, visible even at night, so airmen said. Skene noticed that
his remarks were not attended to and held his tongue, fearing he had
been guilty of “cheek.” It only occurred to him later that the nice
gentlemen he was talking to simply did not understand him--did not
realize what bombing meant, never having seen any. Two days later
he found his half-finished letter to Madeleine. It seemed stale,
inadequate. He tore it up.
So the dumps came and the railway was begun. Skene’s work was doubled
and trebled. The weather broke and covered him with mud. At the end of
January as things were settling down, he wrote a letter to Madeleine.
He read it through and ordered his horse, telling Uncle he was “fed up”
with dump guarding and was going up to Corps to wangle two days’ leave.
“I hear what y’say!” was the only answer. The letter in Skene’s pocket
said the writer wished to be with her, and had a blank space for the
exact date of his leave to be filled in.
It was just before eleven when he got to the château where Corps lived
and got his horse held. “Old Bill,” as the men had christened that
interesting experiment in Zoology, did not require much holding, having
arrived at that time of life when to stand still in anything soft, nose
down, occasionally taking a bite of any vegetation within his reach
was all he desired. But, Skene, knowing this, was afraid for the Corps
Commander’s wattle mats.
Skene worked his way into the office of the Staff Captain whom he
and Uncle saved most trouble, and was just beginning to talk about
something quite unconnected with the object of his visit, after the
approved manner in which wangling was camouflaged--when Colonel Castle,
who was passing the door, looked in.
“Hullo, Skene, you’d better be getting back if you ever want to see
Uncle and your fellow-criminals again!” (That was how the detachment
was spoken of by those who used it.) “The Bosche don’t like your camp
and they’re knocking it over!”
Skene saluted, ran to “Old Bill” behind the shrubbery, jerked him
loose, jumped on and rode. From the wooden-jointed distance-devouring
trot of the old and weary beast-of-all-trades he appeared to know
that something was the matter. Or was it the common equine instinct
for knowing when the nose is towards home? It brought Skene in less
than an hour to the cross-roads where one of his men was diverting
traffic. A little farther on his servant, seated on his valise, was
smoking and surveying the scenery from an untilled field. Skene pushed
up beside him among the dead vegetation, and caught sight of the camp
and dumps. They were all lifeless and empty and dotted with big black
holes and lumps of chalky earth. In the middle of the desolation Uncle
was walking steadily up and down beside the collapsed card house of
the mess and office. What casualties? Two of his own men killed, it
appeared, for certain; two or three more not yet discovered, but might
have run off. Among the dumps, numbers not known, but “I got your
things out, sir!”
At that moment, “Old Bill” stiffened under Skene. There was a tearing
grinding noise. A great column of black smoke, earth and débris flew
up and hung towering over their heads, followed by that unforgettable
roar and patter of falling bits. Uncle turned to look mechanically and
resumed his walk. Skene gave “Old Bill” to his man and scrambled down
shouting, “Come out of it or I’ll come to you!” Uncle shouted back:
“The whisky came this morning! D’y’ think I’d leave eleven and a half
bottles to these hoboes?”
The business came to an end. Instead of dying heroically amid the
débris of their camp, Uncle and Skene and their detachments spent the
night gathering up fragments and moving themselves and their dumps.
It was days before life was even decent again. At last he had time to
write another letter, to say how anxious he was to see her, but that
he had difficulty in getting leave. He added that the War was long,
but that he would soon write and say when he was coming. His own words
struck him with a chill compunction. He had been so busy, he had hardly
thought of her. There were rumours of an early British offensive in
connection with the French, which, added to the rearrangement of the
dumps and camp had kept him at it night and day. He felt he must not
post the letter until he could say he was asking for leave. Uncle was
late for breakfast, Skene went across to the office they had rigged
in the corner of a stable, roofed-in, water tight, with scrounged
tarpaulin, for the N.C.O.’s and stores.
As he called his man to get out one of the army bicycles, for he was
going up to Corps--the field telephone jangled out. He put the receiver
to his ear. It was the Staff Captain, Q. “The Bosche has walked!”
“What!”
“The Bosche has gone, we haven’t touched him for days. There’s no one
in his trenches. Pack up and be at (Map Square) by noon.”
Not that day either did Skene apply for Paris leave. His letter became
soiled in his pocket. He tore it up. Then came the Bosche retreat
of February, 1917. The next letter he wrote was from near Arras, in
full preparation for the impending battle. He wrote in unmeasured
terms, explaining how he was prevented from joining her immediately.
On re-reading it, it now appeared to him to have been written in an
absent-minded moment. He read it and re-read it. The phrases were all
he could ask, but something seemed to have dropped out of them, and
there was no mention indeed of leave, much love and reflection on this
terrible war--and no fourth page. He searched in vain for something to
put on that fourth page, which he felt all such letters should have,
but failed to find it. He never posted that letter either.
His Corps going out to rest, he hastily applied for two days’ leave
to Paris, but before it could be granted, the fine spell of mid-March
had come, the bombing was incessant, the movement of troops by day and
by night continuous, and to crown all, the Corps moved. Whether his
application was lost or destroyed he never knew. Then, one morning, he
received a letter from her.
He opened it after a sleepless night and busy morning, during a spell
of bright weather after snow, when it was too clear for troops to move,
and he had some respite. He read it three or four times, then folded it
up and pocketed it, and stared over his extinct pipe at the desolation
about him, for within was a desolation greater still.
In spite of some slight attempt at concealment, in spite of cordial
phrasing and hopes for a speedy meeting, this letter was simply a
request for money.
Among Skene’s faults there was never any meannesss in such a matter;
pulling out of his wallet the hundred-franc note he kept by him for
emergencies; he thrust it into an envelope with a few lines on a sheet
from his Field Message Book, stuck it down, addressed it, franked it
and chucked it into a slotted biscuit tin, the pillar box to his unit.
The pale April sun sank behind the southwestern downs, and with it
something bright and clear faded out of Skene’s heart. The sum was
nothing, he would have spent many times that on her in a single day’s
leave, enjoyed together. What hurt him was something deliberate and
calculated that scraped his fastidiousness, robbed their liaison of
all there was personal, intimate; degraded it, and covered it with the
sticky dirt of “relations mondaines” advertised on the last page of a
comic paper. Thankful was Skene when his servant pushed a cropped head
out of the hut door to snap “Tea’s on, sir!” Happier still when dusk
awoke the bugles of “Stand to!” and he could think no more.
Arras, that fierce bitter battle in the snow, in part, at least, a
surprise to the enemy, dwindled out in hopeless attacks in mud and
filth. More deadly and more hopeless than the Somme, it had not been
heralded by such preparations and boasting, and more important, it had
not lasted so long. There was magic in that. If only the War had lasted
for two years; if only the War winters had been six weeks each--if
only--if only!
The effect on the mind of the quantities of prisoners and guns--the
considerable extent of ground gained, all coming after the Bosche
retreat, altered the whole tide of men’s feelings. The exhaustion, the
hopelessness, the failure of the winters after Loos and the Somme, the
coming of conscription, the cold of January, 1917, all had been driving
the men’s optimism down and down.
Now the tide rose again. In the Bosche retreat of February men saw
tangible result from the Somme--a whole great corner of the Bosche line
gone--even untouched villages with civilians in them--all that had not
happened since the Aisne, two years and a half ago. And on the top of
this came Vimy--Vimy, the Canadians’ prize “show,” and men gasped--for
years Vimy had been a legend in the armies. The French had said, “Our
black troops have it.” The English used to send over battalions, even
brigades, against it. But, eventually it always rested with the Bosche.
Now the Canadians were far beyond it. And while that fighting dwindled
out, came the news of America joining in the War.
Northward again--the drift of the War. All the troops that had
streamed out of Flanders to Loos, and after Loos down to the Somme,
were now streaming back, some tarrying at Arras to be put into the
last convulsions of that struggle, but all in the end coming up,
through Abbeville and the villages of the Picard downs, or up the
St. Pol-Frevent-Lillers road. The next “victory” was to be further
northward still, and incidentally Skene’s Corps went out of the Line
for a rest. He was not slow in seeing the Staff Captain who worked the
leaves. He got eight days.
Somehow, Madeleine’s face was dim. Something had come between them--the
War, of course. He wrote twice hastily. He received no reply. He sent a
last note with an appointment at the little hotel in the Rue Biault and
set off for Paris.
Once set free from the daily round of responsibility, and
preoccupation, it fared ill with Skene. All these busy months since
Christmas he had hardly had time to think; he now began to ask himself
questions.
Passing in the hot, fine weather through to Boulogne, Etaples,
Abbeville, down to Amiens, he tried to recapture the thought that
had possessed him, such few months before, making that same journey,
thinking of the same woman--the woman who had written him those last
two letters, the incomprehensible letter that said nothing in a few
words, and the fatal letter that he could not bear to unfold, but kept
close in the back of his wallet, the letter in which came the sentence:
“I know that you are generous, and life is so hard. I am so plagued for
money, could you not help me?”
The old exploiting of the wealthy, silly young English officer by the
fair but necessitous girl! He had heard of it, seen it happening so
often, had told himself that he was above it, not to be entangled in
such a mess and now....
When he had reached a certain depth of despair, the other Skene in
him, the Skene who had lived over thirty years in the world, and
thirteen of them in ordinary business to earn a living, rebelled. “Why
not I--as much as any of the others. I’ve had my fun, and now I want
it for nothing,” and on this conclusion, there would intervene the tag
from “Alice in Wonderland,” “nothing for nothing and precious little
for sixpence.”
With balance restored and sense of humour readjusted, he thought:
“All imagination. She’s hard up--of course! Who isn’t? I ought to feel
flattered that she trusts me ... in any case I’m going as fast as I can
to see what’s the matter!” And on this, like a wall of fog would come
her silence--the silence of the last weeks; and the miserable treadmill
of rumination would begin again.
It was a changed Paris--bombardment or disillusionment at failure of
the Champagne offensive had affected it. There were no taxis to be had;
Skene cursed, trudging with his pack up the steep stifling streets to
the little hotel.
The place had no glamour to-day! Perhaps it was the May daylight that
robbed it, but deep within him, Skene had a sinister premonition.
No longer was it a sheltered nest, quiet resting-place of the
war-worn--but simply a clean but ordinary hotel, in a rather
undesirable street, where officers and others took their young women.
The little proprietor in his glass cage was better dressed, more
independent. He fussed over having just one room left--it was lucky
Skene had written. No, no one had called--was Skene expecting anyone? A
lady--very good. She should be shown up.
The baize-aproned, bemedalled boots took Skene up to Room No. 6 and
left him to sit on the bed on the very coverlet of rose-coloured silk
in the same room where he had watched her bare arms above her head.
With a fatal sinking of the heart he washed and changed and waited.
It was long past eight when appetite rose out of the sea of his
mournfulness, and forced him out to the brasserie in the Place Clichy
to eat and above all to drink.
He was just beginning to tell himself that he did not care, when a
thought pricked him to the heart--she had been detained at her office,
and was now at the hotel waiting for him. Paying his bill, he left his
change and ran.
The proprietor came out of his den.
No, no one had called. And Skene knew that in turning on his heel, he
turned his back on an apish grin.
For hours he walked the streets, his world turned upside down. He kept
flinging himself at the blackness that seemed before him, only to know
that it was within him, behind his eyelids, not before his eyes.
Why could he not do without this woman, as she without him? As he
without so many others? Where was the lightness of heart with which he
had left her a few months before, probably as important to him then, as
now--parted with her after a few days at the call of duty--where was
the ease with which for thirteen years he had done without women--too
busy, too happy in his job to notice them.
He thought, with detachment, of morality, as he had so often heard it
expounded, of all the moral people in the world whose virtue was never
to have wanted anything with their whole hearts, as he now wanted
Madeleine, but the detachment did not last him long.
He wheeled briskly and started back for the hotel. Hope reconquered him
on the doorstep. Passing the cage of the proprietor without a word, he
leaped up the little stairs three at a time and wrenched the door wide.
A rustle set his heart beating in his head. It was the blind disturbed
by the draught from the door. The beating of his heart almost ceased
and he felt sick. He flung himself on the bed and remained still for
hours.
CHAPTER XIX
_A Matter of Business_
SKENE arrived back a day earlier than he need have done, and walked
from railhead until he caught a lorry going towards his billet. He was
expecting ridicule over his early return, but the little Uncle was busy
and glad to see him. One of those big reshufflings that always preceded
an offensive was in progress--the whole corps was going into the Line
again, and every one must move.
After some days, Uncle and Skene found their appointed place in a small
industrial town lying just inside the British trenches, one of those
cotton-spinning and mining centres that make the country round Lille
like a leisurely imitation of Lancashire.
Dangerous to hold on account of the number of casualties possible in
the narrow streets, costly and difficult to attack, it was left alone
by both sides as much as possible. The British allowed some hundreds of
civilians to remain in the less-bombarded streets and work the one or
two factories that were still being run.
At the western end of that town, touching the river bank, was the wreck
of a miniature garden suburb. A quadrangular walled-in space giving
northward on the river contained a house or two in the architectural
style associated with housing reform, a model infant school,
shrub-planted walks, and, most important, an asphalt tennis-court, dry
and firm in all weather, and roofed in, making a splendid dump. Here in
the cellar of a model house half-destroyed by shell fire--social reform
murdered--they made their Head-quarters; and here towards the end of
May they heard the bombardment that preceded Messines.
For Skene the War had become a regular business. At dusk every evening
he went out to visit his men on the four bridges and the six dumps
for which he was responsible, to see that the ration traffic cleared
itself, to settle disputes and evacuate casualties. He returned at
midnight, and had a night-cap with Uncle. He was out at “stand-to”
in gum boots and a British-warm over pyjamas, to see that things did
not get slack. There was salvage to be sorted, correspondence to deal
with, orders to issue in the morning; if he had not a journey to settle
some claim for damage to civilian property or to see Corps or other
Head-quarters, he got the remainder of his sleep. In the afternoon
there was nothing to be done but keep everybody under cover. Old
soldiers like Skene and Uncle knew that to be seen meant long-range
shelling and destruction of the happy home. As soon as the morning
mist had cleared, nothing was to be seen of the little camp--no white
posts, no brick pathways. The men on the bridge-guard were screened,
and the horse-lines camouflaged. Yes, this phase of the War became
mere business--even to the early morning cup of tea, and the Sunday
afternoon off. Skene, alas, had leisure to think over and over what
had happened to him. He became silent, brooding, dully mechanical. He
received no letter. He no longer expected one. He had two hopes--the
end of the War or the end of his life. He began to think.
He had plenty of time to think, going about on duty with his orderly
or N.C.O., through the grass-grown streets of the three-parts deserted
town, picking his way among shell-holes or fallen tiles by the light
of the Bosche flares, or of the bombardments where the fighting
at Messines was flickering out, and that at Passchendaele being
prepared--or in broad daylight, when he followed those same streets,
keeping under the lee of the houses, so that any odd shrapnel or tiles
flying about should miss him.
Or when he set off riding, or in the box car, with or without Uncle,
to Corps or Division, to argue with staff people about orders or
returns; with farmers about horse-lines or barns destroyed; or even
into the town at times to dine with passing units to whom he had been
able, and was always willing, to do a kind turn. All the time he
thought--stopping to speak to sentries by dumps or bridges, or to staff
officers--stopping to watch files of men and limbers passing dangerous
spots--stopping to watch games of bridge in cellars, to measure with
his eye how many posts, how much brickwork, what width of corrugated
iron must be made or destroyed to allow English-speaking Tommies and
mules from Lord knows where to live in French factories or barns or
pastures or copses, until they were sent away to be killed.
He thought and thought and began to see so clearly how the whole thing
had come about. He saw why Perfide Albion or Gott Strafe England had
always been on the lips of other peoples, a curse at the extraordinary
luck of the sea-grit country from which he came--where climate and
temper, lack of foreign invasion, new paths of knowledge, and a
world-wide Empire, obtained from discoverers by purchase or settlement,
had all combined to give England, in a sort of triumph of lucky
expediency, the lead of the industrial era--so many harbours, so much
coal and iron, such a hardy, pushful people that the whole world spoke
her language, borrowed her money, used her ships.
So extraordinary had been her luck that, when the World War came, her
children, like Skene, entered it with an ingrained romanticism possible
only to those who live in comfortable leisure, with enough to eat and
drink, no frontiers, and plenty of novels; presently to find as the
struggle lengthened and lengthened, that they were fighting a war that
their own luck had rendered inevitable perhaps--a war of life or death
for their business and prestige, on other people’s ground. Could any
luck be more colossal than that?
Further than this he seldom went, and used to say--“Well, I don’t
care, here I am, and must stick it!”
The thought of Madeleine was at first simply an everlasting ache.
Skene, whose pleasures lay in the imagination, supported on a slight
basis of reality, could find no comfort in the ordinary promiscuity of
the base or railhead towns. If he could not have Madeleine, he must go
without. He began to recognize that he was not dying of it; then to see
that here too he was the Lucky Englishman. To have had her at all had
been a lucky accident, a pleasant coincidence--nothing more! How could
there be a permanent relationship between an Architect in an English
county town and the daughter of a Flemish farm?
And the summer wore on, and hope in men’s hearts began ebbing again.
After all, it was only the hope of an early ending that was left.
The Bosche retreat, the capture of Vimy, the French Champagne
offensive, had been but qualified successes when they were not ghastly
failures.
And it was now patent that the great Ypres offensive was a failure.
Begun too late, with the old obvious methods of gigantic concentrations
of troops impossible to hide, and colossal bombardments that even
the mules in the lines and the birds on the trees could not possibly
mistake, it had almost alarmed the Bosches, who of course had made
corresponding efforts to meet it.
By the end of August men were talking of another winter. The Russians
were giving way. The Americans were not arriving. Skene, moving among
the farms in the back era, would hear from “reformed” soldiers, or
men on leave from the French front: “It’s all very well--one more
offensive--and we shall have no more men!” Some French troops were
fighting between Ypres and the sea, beside the English, liking it as
little as anyone else and making prodigious sacrifices to gain a few
yards of unrecognizable “ground.”
From the British front Skene heard no better news. In the offices at
Corps Château, he would hear officers saying: “I suppose we shall
really go on fighting, if we don’t get through this time!”--“this time”
being one of the weekly attacks made under the direction of an Army
Commander, whose renown was enshrined in the doggerel:
“All Hell’s Bells!
Butt in anyhow,
Kill all your Infantry,
Get some more from some one else!”
The services, the bases, the camps in France or England were raked for
men and still more men. Orders to re-examine ever more drastic came to
Corps, and just missed Skene because he was too useful, Uncle because
he was too old.
There was another change too in the nature of the War. The line of
destruction could barely lengthen--it stretched from sea to sea--but
it broadened and deepened to three or four times its old size. Not
only where the quasi-successful offensives left miles of weed-growing,
evil-smelling desolation, but in sectors like that held by Skene’s
Corps, on the back edge of the bigger battle, where the old trench
warfare was still more or less in practice, the danger zone had greatly
extended. In Skene’s time, troops never came back farther than the
outskirts of Ypres, or the mining villages east of Bethune; “rest” in
railhead towns like Poperinghe or even Albert, was rest indeed. Now
towns twenty miles from the Line, and of course Paris and London, to
say nothing of Amiens and St. Omer and Calais, were bombarded with
guns or aircraft of ever-increasing calibre. It seemed that there
could never be any end to the War. Collapse of one side or the other,
for want of men, money, material, or courage, wasn’t working out. The
nations were always willing to go one better under any demand made on
them, and business boomed. The War seemed illimitable. From Karlsruhe
and Cologne to Paris and London; from Vladivostock, over all Asia and
Europe to New York and San Francisco; from Scapa to Cape Town and the
Pacific Islands. And it had become a different army, a conscript army
that carried on the War in France.
Superficially there was not much difference. The old volunteer army
had been of all ages, and all degrees of fitness; those who succeeded
them were much the same. The last classes to come out showed rather
less spring and good humour, perhaps, but on the other hand they
never regarded the War in any sense as a picnic. Their one thought
was to get it done. Apart from this they were the same hard-elbowed,
music-hall-song-singing lot. One night, watching a battalion coming
out from the Line, just north of the river, where it became moderately
safe, Skene seemed to see a ghost, with a ghost’s voice and laugh,
standing beside the muddy way.
“Good evening sir!” he said, going up to it.
By the light of the Bosche flares, a drawn face was turned. But Skene
was right. It was Thomas, now a major.
Skene took him to the garden suburb--a changed Thomas.
He seemed to have grown, but he had really only become extremely thin.
He still had all the engaging qualities acquired at Public Schools.
He was charming to the garrulous and fuddled Uncle (whom he must have
thought an unqualified old reprobate), charming to Skene, and gave him
news of the old battalion, of which he was laughingly proud to be, with
the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant, the only survivor. He ticked
them off on his fingers, from the Colonel to Mansfield. “Earnshaw’s
still alive,” he said, “and you! You’re the lucky ones! And jolly glad
you are, and here’s your very good health, and yours, sir!”
The duty orderly put his head under the waterproof sheet.
“Horse transport with materials, sir, and can they put it on B dump?”
Thomas rose with Skene and they went out together. “Back to our jobs!
How queer we should feel without ’em!” was the last thing Skene heard
him say.
He was killed, of course, at Cambrai, but the War went on.
A few days later Skene had another ghostly visitor.
It was a blustering morning, too much wind and flying cloud for
aeroplane observation, and he had “gingered” Uncle up to having
a thorough sanitary inspection. Together they had tramped those
grass-grown streets, visited every police post, spoken to every
gendarme, chaffed the little Communal Secretary in his sand-bagged
office. Uncle stopped to lunch with a mess of officers billeted in the
town. Skene came home to the garden suburb to see that everything was
smooth. He called for food, dived into the dug-out, and saw an officer
sitting there.
It was Earnshaw--a little stouter, a little balder, but flushed and
with blazing eyes, in the devil of a temper. He only said “Hallo!”
Skene answered with: “Have a drink. There’ll be some grub directly.”
Over two chipped enamel mugs of whisky and water, Skene went on: “Well,
old man, how are you and where are you, and all that sort of rot?”
Earnshaw replied: “I want you to do me a favour!”
“Why of course. What is it?”
“Put me under arrest!”
“Burnside,” shouted Skene, “look sharp with lunch for two!”
Earnshaw stuck out his jaw.
“I mean what I say. Will you?”
“Anything you like, old man, but what for?”
“Do you remember, when we were with the battalion, that you were sent
off to buy....”
“Don’t I just--nightshirts--The whole brigade called us the Pyjama
Fusiliers!”
“Do you remember picking me up in a car?”
“Very well. You’d been stealing bricks!”
Earnshaw thumped the table, and the two mugs jumped.
“Dammit, you’re as bad as the rest. I’d been _buying_ bricks to
save my mules!”
“Of course, jolly good standings you made.”
“Well, they’ve raked that up.”
“What after--let’s see, eighteen months?”
“Raked it up. The dam’ Requisition Service, or whatever parcel of fools
it may be, wouldn’t pay on the chit I had given.”
“Red tape--awful--I know,” murmured Skene, who knew better than “I told
you so.”
“So I paid--paid out of my own pocket. I’m not complaining of that. I
saved the mules!”
“You’re a good sort, old Millgate!”
“Had to go through a Court of Inquiry, of course. Ever held one?”
“One or two.” Skene omitted to say that they were generally upon cases
of theft, for fear of upsetting his friend.
“Well, then it seemed that I had conveyed merchandise out of France
into Belgium. Owing to the time these Requisition people had taken to
NOT pay for saving the lives of mules, old Vander what’s-his-name the
Brick-maker----” Earnshaw stopped to masticate pork chop and haricot.
“Brickadier!” suggested Skene, but Earnshaw was past noticing.
“--had gone to his Deputy in the Chamber, and he’d told the Customs
people----”
“Of course there was a Douane post----”
“I’m not saying there wasn’t. I’m only saying it’s war time. I’m only
saying that it’s not worth while killing mules yourself with greasy
feet and swelled hocks, when the Bosche will kill ’em for you with
shrapnel. Well, they wanted another Court of Inquiry to satisfy the
French Chamber and the King of the Belgians and God knows who, and I
kept tearing the correspondence up. I’m on a Railway Laying Company,
now, we’ve been doing a mile a day, all spiked, for this precious
offensive up north. I was sent for, to Corps. I thought I was going to
get the M.C. for Railway Laying under fire, and instead, it was all
about this Customs-house business. A dam’ young swine who’d been out
here about ten minutes wanted to know why I didn’t reply to his chits.
I told him all right!” Earnshaw nodded. “I told him what I thought of
him, and this offensive and the army and the War. I told him I’d see
one of the members for Lancashire. I told him to go to hell.”
Skene reached for his friend’s dirty plate, gave him a clean one full
of fruit salad, and pushed over the biscuits.
“He said it was mutiny, and all that, so I told him where to find me
and cleared off. Now if you’ll put me under arrest, I’ll wait until
they come for me....”
Then queerly, almost emotionally:
“You know, Skene, if I’ve got to be arrested, I’d rather be arrested by
you. I’ll go quiet.”
Skene wiped his mouth, and swung out of the dug-out. On his way across
to the Signal dug-out, the voice of Earnshaw pursued him, high and
excited, the voice of a man who seldom uses it, its verbiage starred
with Americanisms, and trailing off very near a “Ba Gom!”
“We’ve been out here two years and more; what’s it been but waste of
men and waste of animals and waste of materials and nothing done.”
Skene rang up Corps, asked for Colonel Castle and told him the whole
story, ending:
“He’s such a useful officer, sir, surely something----”
The answer came.
“You might teach him manners, not to mention discipline. We can’t have
junior officers shouting and storming all over Corps Head-quarters.”
“No, sir!”
“He ought to go to Mesopotamia, but send him in your box car to
railhead. I’ll have a warrant to meet him at R.T.O.’s. We want some
Railway men for Forestry. Mind, I don’t promise.”
Skene was beginning thanks, but the receiver was replaced. In half
an hour Earnshaw went to railhead in the box car. An hour after that
a young man in a Vauxhall staff car came to enquire for him. Uncle
interviewed him:
“And who might you be?”
“Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal Umpteenth Corps!”
“Ho, well we don’t keep spare officers here. Try the first turn to the
right before the bridge. He may be that way.”
Twenty minutes later, Skene saw that young man in the same Vauxhall,
still alone, going Corpsward.
“You’ve been misleadin’ Corps staff, Uncle!”
“Well, I gave him the road straight to the trenches,” Uncle said.
“He’d never been there, and I thought it might do him good.”
CHAPTER XX
_Fly-by-Night_
A FINE evening, on the edge between summer and autumn, dim soft blue
above, red glow on walls and trees, and along the ground, a filmy mist.
Skene and his Quartermaster-Sergeant were putting together, from wires
and telephone messages received from Corps and elsewhere, the evening’s
duties, so many parties of men and officers, so many loads of materials
to be seen, checked and directed rightly. “Bosche over, sir, arter the
balloon!” At the same moment, the Lewis gun at the bridge struck up its
demon rattle.
Skene turned to look. The enemy ’plane had made a sort of pecking dip
at the grey shape of the “sausage” balloon still clear in the dusk,
against the pale sky. A whiff of smoke and a spurt of flame. “’Ere he
come!” “T’laad’s joomped!”
Sure enough, high in mid-air, the shape of a parachute with its
tiny burden had sprung like one of the magic flowers of the Japanese
conjuror, and sailed with slow gyration, downwards, heading, it seemed,
straight for the river. Then, swinging aside, the top-heavy-looking
mushroom of pink silk settled slanting down the scarred avenue of the
Bethune road. Skene and his corporal raced on signallers’ bicycles
over the potholed pavé. Some gunners from a neighbouring battery were
already hanging on the cords and folding the unwieldy thing.
“T’laad” seemed tolerably bumped and bruised, and had sprained his
shoulder when the parachute had taken his weight up with a jerk. Skene
had the little Ford box car out and sent him off to his unit, just as a
very clean and capable mechanic dashed up in a cycle-side-car to take
charge of the parachute. The fallen aeronaut, called back: “If I come
back to this crush, I’ll ask you to come and dine with us!”
Not many weeks passed before that invitation came, and on the
appointed day, at dusk, up rolled a sumptuous Crossley. Skene left
his section and his conscience to “Uncle,” and went spinning over the
Route Nationale, to where, carefully placed far from church, windmill,
railway or main road, the aerodrome was spread on uncultivated clover,
dotted with marquees, and striped with camouflage. His host explained:
“We’re such a small mess at the Section, I thought you’d rather come
here!” Waiting for the offensive, five squadrons and a balloon school
were jammed together. The great hangars and workshops, the tenders,
cars, cycles coming and going reminded Skene of a goods station. But
no railway ever displayed such costly efficiency. He was taken to a
marquee where a gramophone was being accompanied on the piano, and
two smooth-faced schoolboys were playing diabolo. They all seemed
schoolboys. Skene and the Doctor and the Quartermaster were the only
men in the place over thirty. Yes, and the tragedy of that! There
was an atmosphere of waiting. An orderly fixed a blue-pencilled list
to the tent-pole. And one by one, these pale, slim boys, with their
blue-circled eyes, went up and looked at it. Curiously matter-of-fact
and fatalistic that quiet procession! Then those who were playing
diabolo began again, those who were drinking drained their glasses,
and ordered another; a new record was set on the gramophone. “List of
patrols for to-morrow!” said Skene’s host, Carruthers of the balloon.
They went in to dinner.
The faces round the table were impassive, eyes fixed on plates, very
little conversation went on. Coffee appeared, two or three of them
retired amid a chorus of “Cheerio! old thing, I’ll come and see you
off!” “They’re the first lot; they’ll be over Lille before it’s
properly light,” explained Carruthers.
Restraint seemed lifted. The Doctor and the Quartermaster were the next
to go. Some one put a ragtime record on the gramophone. Some one else
ordered a round of liqueurs. A tall boy, with Yeomanry badge in his
lapel, whom everyone called “Barney” (explaining: “because he owns a
bulldog”), leaned over to Carruthers. “What about an evening off? I’m
not on in this act!”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘off.’ I may have to go up to-morrow, and
so may you!”
“Oh--to-morrow! It’s to-night!”
In that “to-morrow” was the reason why English air-fighting was so
irresistible. Skene, thinking of the traffic on his bridges, with no
better guidance than “Uncle,” said he must be home by midnight.
“Oh, but we’ll drive you home!”
“I can walk really. I come from the Infantry!”
“So have heaps of us, but you can’t possibly walk!”
Carruthers, wavering, put in: “What’ll we go in? They’ll never give you
a tender, Barney!”
“Simplicitas is my motto! There’s a tender going into St. Blanque with
the mails--_compris_?”
To Skene it seemed like proposing to go to Boulogne or Folkestone.
“It’s over twenty kilos back, and not even in the Army area!”
“My dear old Footslogger” (Barney took his arm) “nothing can stop the
R.F.C.”
Skene buttoned his British-warm with a certain zest. To avoid
attracting attention they were to walk in twos down to the Motor
Transport park, a few hundred yards away. The night was dark and
fresh, and the breeze rising. Some one stood a last round of drinks.
A high square tender swung off its asphalt stand. Barney was driving.
In they scrambled. Past a British sentry and a French gendarme, the
steel-studded double wheels of the tender hissed pleasantly along the
Route Nationale, over a railway crossing and along an avenue, through
villages, past camps, under the shadow of a high tower, into the narrow
streets of St. Blanque. They were dropped in the square at another
mess, some lines-of-communication Head-quarters, where they drank
whisky. Then out again, through narrow streets, to a spiked door over
which shone the Red, White and Blue of one of those establishments to
which, in deference to bishops at home, British officers were forbidden
to go. About as much attracted as by a butcher’s shop, Skene saw
nothing for it but to follow into a big, square room, where, to the
grinding of a desolating waltz, some officers were giving an exhibition
of the then novel Jazz. Skene took a tumbler of champagne that had
never seen Epernay, from a houri in a garment swathing her from below
the breasts to the thighs. The noise, the smoke, of fumes and alcohol
and scent made him want to vomit, but he sat squarely on a dilapidated
ottoman, keeping those unattractive attractions at a distance by fluent
French, which drove them to describe him as “muffle” or “mauvais
farceur.” A quarrel had arisen. Skene saw his chance, unbolted the door
and slipped out into the clean night air. He had hardly got outside
before two red-capped English military police and a couple of French
gendarmes filed into the house. The English Sergeant, an immense
Metropolitan policeman, called over the mob’s head: “Meen-wee, Madame,
fermee!” The French “Brigadier,” with the special surliness of his
kind, grunted: “Fermez votre boite, mon de Dieu!” thumping the floor
with his scabbard.
Some had to find clothes, others to settle for wine, or conclude
arguments. Skene, smoking his pipe outside, watched. He found
Carruthers, bemused with drink, at his elbow, and Barney, as alert as
if he had never had a drop. “Where’s young Cumming?” (a youngster from
a county regiment who had come with them in the tender). “Did he go
upstairs?”
“I didn’t see him. Besides, he was keen on the dark one--what’s her
name?--wears a yellow thing! She was booked to-night, I heard Madame
say!”
“Then he’s not upstairs; he’s a regular little thing in his habits!”
“Bet you he’s gone back to the tender!”
“Let’s go and look!”
Skene went too. Uncle must keep awake for once and see to things.
The tender was standing in the Square, like a bathing machine on a
promenade. The driver was singing gently to himself; going round
to flood the carburetter, he fell across the bonnet and lay there,
laughing.
“Tight!” commented Barney: “here you, get into the tender!” The man
obeyed with the sketch of a salute. A sleepy voice under the hood
protested. “Is that you, Cumming?” called out Carruthers. “No, I’m
going!”
They thrust the tipsy driver on one side, and peered in with Barney’s
torch. An Infantry officer was lying across the seat with his feet on
his pack. “Lord!” cried Barney, “who are you, and what the devil are
you doing here?”
“You said you’d take me on to Boulogne....” Then, with weary
wakefulness: “Oh, it wasn’t you, it was another chap!”
They stood and stared. Overhead, a night bomber droned. The drunken
chauffeur snored. The clock of the baroque church struck--“one.” Then
Carruthers said:
“134 were sending down to pick up one of their fellows. I bet you
Cumming’s got into their tender. He’ll be halfway to Boulogne by now!”
Barney said: “Hell! Cumming and I are due out together at nine. We can
do it and we d----d well must. Come on!”
Skene protested feebly. “Look here, I must leave you chaps and get back
on my own. I really can’t take a trip to Boulogne when I ought to be
back with my Clearance Post!”
“You awful old slop,” was all the answer he got. “How d’y’think you’re
going back to your billet through a dozen police posts? And you can’t
stop here. You’ll get arrested. Get in!”
Out over the cobbles, under an archway, and away on a wide road
between trees. Skene could tell by the gradients that they were out
of Flanders, further from the Line than he had often been. Under the
hood next the sleeping chauffeur, he talked to their “guest,” as Barney
called him. The boy was dazed and worried. He had had no leave for over
six months, no sleep for two nights. He wanted to get home. “D’you
think we’ll get there before the boat goes?” he kept asking Skene,
“because I don’t want to miss it!” with a quiet fatuity which the War
had taught to a whole generation.
Suddenly, round a bend, their headlights encountered another pair
as strong. The brakes shrieked. It was the other tender with young
Cumming. The chauffeur had found him asleep behind, assumed that it
was his proper passenger, and started. When Cumming awoke and realized
with a pilot’s “sense” that he was going the wrong way, there had been
a scene, almost a panic. Now there was corresponding joy. They said
“good-bye” to their “temporary gentleman,” as Berry called him, and
started back. At three they were recrossing the Grand Place of St.
Blanque. At four they were at the aerodrome, having hot coffee and
sausages in the nipping cold of dawn.
While they were eating off tin plates in the Mess Kitchen, one of the
quiet boys who had gone to bed early came and put his hand on Barney’s
shoulder.
“All right, old thing?”
“Tight as a rivet--I mean right as a trivet,” Barney spluttered: “Such
a game, believe me, friends, is hardly worth the playing!” And nodding
“good-bye” to Skene, he went across to bathe and sleep.
“A rum pair!” commented Carruthers. “Division of labour. Barney does
all the drink and devilment, and his chum stays at home and looks at
the clock. But neither will go on patrol without the other!” Then, as
if he had been guilty of an exhibition of intelligence, he hastily
added: “Very glad you were able to come; good-bye for just now!”
At five Skene was slipping along to his billet. It was too light to
take the tender nearer the line than Deporter’s farm, and he walked
the last half-mile. His faithful Corporal was awake, at the entrance
of the Garden City. All was well, Skene thanked God. He felt very cold
and sleepy. Overhead, two planes were droning out toward the enemy, two
little bright-coloured insects crawling on the breast of the soft-lit
dawn. The grey shape of the observation balloon bellied up to the end
of its attachment, like some monster pursuing them. Skene thought of
the men up there and somehow envied them. In the cold fit of dawn,
tired and empty, he wished with all his heart he were one of those
thoughtless boys, fooling away the dull hours of the evening and riding
the clouds of the morning to imminent death.
Stale scent and tobacco on his clothes--a dab of powder where one of
the “attractions” of St. Blanque had leaned against him, it was like
some grinning mockery of the one woman he wanted, then, at the cold
hour, to put her arms around him.
CHAPTER XXI
_The Cousin of my Uncle_
AT dusk one evening, autumn dusk, grey, misty, still, Skene, off duty
for once, was moody, smoking his after-tea pipe, when he heard a hail
from the northern shore, “Hi, digger!”
Across the darkening water were two high-shouldered, slouch-hatted
figures--“Anzacs,” famous already at Gallipoli and Bullecourt, about to
achieve greater fame at Passchendaele and Villers Brettonneux.
All Skene knew of them, then, was their splendid physique, their fine
fighting qualities, and the tact needed to manage them behind the Line.
He hailed back, “Hallo!” and waited.
“We are coming across!” And sure enough they came on a sort of raft,
propelling themselves with a spade and a bit of board, to the remains
of the model suburb’s plaster steps.
Quite against orders to cross corps boundaries in this fashion!
“What do you want?” hailed Skene.
“We are looking for my Uncle Jake.”
“Well, you won’t find him here. This is the Umpteenth Corps post.”
“Is it now?” came the reply. “If you’d only said that before, we’d have
written and asked King George before we ventured to approach.”
The other added: “Steady her, will you! I don’t want to swim!”
Skene made no movement. The less voluble of the two, balancing the
craft with difficulty, added:
“Don’t mind him, digger. He’s been drinking out of a bottle marked
‘fixatif’ in the hopes it contained vin blanc. It’s a real uncle we’re
after.”
“Well, who are you, anyway, and what do you want?”
The voluble one with the spade answered:
“I’m Sam Dakers and my servant here is Andy Dakers, my brother, and we
are looking for our Uncle Jake,--th Canadians.”
“Oh, that’s all right. You’ll find _him_ here.”
“Now, how clever you are! We knew we should. We’ve known it for weeks,
only your brass policemen wouldn’t let us over the bridge.”
“No, those are his orders,” said Skene.
“You needn’t tell me. Well, we’ve been obliged to take the door off the
estaminet with the Greek name.”
“Greek name?”
“Well, it looks like the sound of the name of the old man who used to
keep donkeys at Cairo.”
They got ashore, and hitched what Skene saw to be, in truth, a large
yard-door from some agricultural building, to the steps, with a piece
of barbed wire.
Sam, the talkative one, whom Skene perceived to be an officer, walked
on one side of him on their way to the billet, while Andy, the private,
walked with no more ceremony on the other. Sam continued sweetly:
“So you thought we were practising for the cinema?” Skene coughed.
Perhaps what was called the cinema element did not come from the
influence of the cinema on the colonies, but from the influence of the
colonies on the cinema!
Uncle no sooner saw the visitors than he lifted his curved pipe from
beneath his shaggy moustache and said slowly:
“Blank me if it ain’t Alf’s boys!”
“So it is, Uncle Jake--and fancy your dragging your sixty years into
the great European conflagration!”
“I’m as good as most. Burnside: Tea--a lot, quick!”
Such tea-drinking and whisky-drinking! Skene sat in the background and
listened and mused.
“Well, how’s Sis?”
“Last time Mum wrote, she said we was to give her love when we saw
you; do you remember when you fastened the Chinaman’s wooden collar
on Shepheard!” How many meetings like this--since the War began--of
nephews with uncles, from thousands of miles apart! And there it was,
the simplicity, the shy good temper, the sufficient brutality ready to
show on certain pretexts, the individual self-reliance. Those two went
back very late, and after seeing them safely past his policemen on the
bridge, Skene went his evening round warmed all through.
Two days later, the two nephews were back again, this time with wire
netting and cable.
“We thought it was such a pity your lovely tennis court should be
wasted, Uncle Jake, and Andy had to go to St. Omer, so he brought these
back.”
From a sack they drew four racquets and a box of balls a year old.
With broom and shovel they cleared the required space, marked out the
court, and strung their net on two pit-props won from the nearest dump.
Then began for Skene one of the happiest months of the whole War.
At night, his rounds were long and heavy. In the morning there were
reports, orderly room, detail of all kinds. But as the sun climbed
high above the grass-grown streets and deserted marshes, there was
silence and abandonment. The Bosches were quiet at this hour, his own
men asleep or on duty. Then would come the whistle of Sam or Andy and
the hauling of the raft across, and instead of a restless afternoon of
brooding and boredom, a hard, fast game that made him sweat, and sent
him happy and quiet-minded to the evening’s work.
All too short those weeks of jolly comradeship and indomitable good
humour. More men were wanted, and more men; the Australian Corps went
off and Sam and Andy with it.
From Ypres to the sea, there was raging a new bombardment, greater in
extent if not in intensity, than the historic gun fire of Verdun and
the Somme.
The fabled German artillery was not only equalled, but outmatched, by
day; the ground shook all night; thirty miles of horizon were lit by
flashes. Andy, returning from duty in the north, had seen the French
pouring through above Poperinghe.
The weather broke again on the very morning of the Australians’
assault; and the peace of Skene’s sector, a byword in France for three
years, was broken too. The Bosches, how nearly beaten few of them
guessed, began their systematic retaliations.
Skene was called out one drizzling afternoon to find one of his
bridges half-blown down and his policeman lying in the road with his
head a little further on. This was only the prelude. Having failed, by
some tiny detail, to become a final victory, the great offensive of
the North sank and wallowed between the muddy ridges of Passchendaele
and Moorslede. The weather became more uncertain, the Germans more
obstinate and resourceful. Bombardment by day, bombing by night,
exceeded the Somme offensive of the previous year, the so-called
Line became nothing more than an impassable chequer of gas-sodden,
water-logged craters defended by machine-guns. Thousands of all races,
from all corners of the earth, were working on the roads. The traffic
in men and materials was enormous.
As the low ridges of Flanders were conquered yard by yard, hopes
rose, wavered and rose again. Uncle Jake was always confident. Skene
was merely thankful that their billet lay out of range of the lesser
artillery, and was too inconspicuous for the great guns that were
turned on railway-depots and railheads, miles in their rear.
One rain-washed morning, the post orderly brought a thin-papered
besmudged note in indelible pencil. It was from nephew Sam.
“Andy has got it bad, in the Countess’ Hospital near St. Omer.” Uncle
Jake, who hated deathbeds, would rather Skene went, and they were
still talking it over when a hail came from the northern bank, and Sam
himself on a raw-boned, mud-caked mule shouted in the teeth of the wind
that he had forty-eight hours’ leave....
That settled it. Skene jumped on a civilian bicycle that had been won
no one knew how, pedalled across the bridge and joined Sam on the Aire
road. They reached railhead and a friendly Colonial R.T.O. within an
hour.
In a soiled and broken-windowed first-class compartment Skene brooded
over the strange, vivid, absorbing life so many millions were living
in conditions varying from those of the Garden of Eden on a wet day to
those of a broker’s man in a bankrupt boarding-house. It seemed to him
that never could the intimate associations of the two years he had thus
passed go from him, and that for always after there would be two races
of men--those who had been in it, and those who had not.
It was still early afternoon when they stood in the pale twilight of a
marquee, before a narrow bed, where what seemed but the skeleton of the
big-boned Andy was propped against his pillows, breathing little short
breaths with great difficulty.
Nurse and Doctor were there. But why the padre in the corner, and an
obviously English girl in neat, dull-coloured clothes, whose face Andy
never quitted with his glazing brown eyes, while she leant over him,
supporting him with her left arm, and holding his clasped hands with
her right?
On being brought into the casualty clearing station, the injuries to
Andy’s backbone and lungs had been recognized as fatal. When he had
with difficulty comprehended this, he had made it understood that he
wished the nurse who had been on night shift, when he was brought in,
to marry him then and there.
So, that great gaunt man, whose hair and eyebrows appeared impenetrably
black against the sunken pallor of his flesh, whose great powerful
bones protruded through the moist, flaccid skin, was married to a
plain, kindly girl from the suburbs of a manufacturing town, the last
beautiful thing his primitive, boylike spirit was to desire in this
world, while she guided his trembling fingers through the changing of
rings, and sealed her promise with a kiss on his forehead.
The nurse on duty put a screen around them; others withdrew. After a
few hurried words about the necessary papers, Skene and Sam went out to
the poplar-lined road leading to Hesdin.
They plodded along towards the railway station, Sam crying into an
enormous khaki handkerchief.
And just then they were hailed from a Flying Corps tender by Carruthers
of the balloon section, who was going down Skene’s way with supplies.
Sitting in the back of the tender, going about twenty miles an hour
through the autumn dusk, Sam dried his eyes and maintained a silence
broken only by gruff monosyllables.
“Luckier I than he,” thought Skene. “To him the extinction of life must
seem horrible, he has so much of it; to me--what do I care?”
Indeed it seemed to him that the fading out he had just witnessed was a
fortunate release. What would he not give to discard his aching nerves
and rheumatic bones in the arms of some one who at least looked as if
he were all-important?
Carruthers was saying, “Old man Fritz is beat--he can’t hang out more’n
another fortnight!” Skene thought: “A good job, too; everyone’s had
enough!” To this had the crusade against Germany dwindled--the War for
Civilization!
Next evening, by candlelight in the dug-out, while Uncle and Sam, with
some gunners from the neighbouring battery, played poker, while the
shells whistled and the planes droned overhead, he sat down and wrote
to Madeleine.
He found great difficulty in beginning. And when he had begun, he found
great difficulty in going on.
He was sitting on his bed, a wire mattress scrounged from a derelict
house. The circle of light from a wangled lamp fell on the players’
cropped heads and soiled waterproofs. Sam’s hands looked enormous.
Uncle uncorked another bottle of whisky. At a louder crash than usual
outside Skene called the duty orderly:
“Where was that?”
“Right over, sir, near the old bath-house!”
“Clear of the bridge?”
“Yes, sir, a good bit!”
Skene turned back to the paper which he had headed, “Ma chère
Madeleine,” “Madelon chérie,” and now, in a last attempt, “Chérie
Made--!” He got no further. Some one turned on the gramophone; it made
him think of those early days when “To-night’s the night!” had been all
the go. And back came the ghostly armies of the first year, the men not
only dead but buried and forgotten. Ah! Well! He gulped his whisky and
watched the players. More in a game of poker than in any comfort he
could get from Madeleine! What was the good in writing to a woman and
asking her to comfort him? What could she do?--what had she done?--be
nice to him, perhaps, see him on leave, tantalize him, use him for her
own inscrutable ends with that so simple cunning of an unreflective
woman living a hard life. He wrote: “It’s a long while since I heard
from you. I am sick of this, and would like to see you again!” crossed
it out, tore up the paper, and leaning forward, began betting on
Uncle’s cards.
CHAPTER XXII
_The Third Birthday_
THE Canadians delivered the final attack on Passchendaele in October.
By that time the town in which Uncle and Skene were quartered had
begun to be deserted. The civilians were leaving in a steady stream.
The gas-shelling was every day more regular and the cellars were
becoming sodden. Only in patches on the outskirts was any inhabited
house to be found. Gradually, even these were abandoned and the whole
place became a great empty sepulchre, where feet rang on the stones of
grass-grown streets and voices echoed from the walls of houses where no
one lived. Pathetic, those last dregs of civilian evacuation! An old,
half-paralysed man pushed before him an invalid’s chair in which sat an
older and more helpless woman.
“Courage, Father,” Skene said to him, taking his pass on the bridge.
“I have courage enough, thank you, sir. It is Mother who makes herself
bad blood because she has had to leave behind all her things! This is
all she can bring.”
The old lady was nursing a pink vase, some knitting, and a portrait of
the Pope.
Next came the poor prostitute--the girl who went with mechanics and
gendarmes in peace time and with British Tommies during the War, too
poor and too damaged to bribe the necessary authorities to get her
papers to Boulogne or Amiens, or one of the better pitches of her
trade, or even to get taken out in a British car to Bethune, Abbeville
or Hazebrouck. She had often tried, and had, amongst others, come up
against Skene. With the undying courage and humorous philosophy of her
sort, she bore no grudge.
“So they’ll let you go at last, Sylvie,” said Skene, holding out her
_carte_ stamped and signed.
“Yes, old friend, they always said they wouldn’t, but you see, in the
end it is I who have won.”
This was the extent of her malice, just a child’s “So there!” She
plodded off, on her cheap, thin, heel-twisted boots, her slack,
much-corseted figure bent over by the wicker dress basket she was
carrying, the unhealthy white of her skin showing through all artifice,
turning her head left and right, even in that parade of misery, because
it was her business. The last to go was the little white-haired,
apple-cheeked Secretary of the Mairie. Skene had been associated with
him in investigating a dozen cases of military looting or civilian
stealing. Portfolio under arm, he was carrying away the matrix of the
Cadastral map; tears were running down his face. He could only say,
“Oh, mon bon Monsieur!”
So they went. It was not like the panicky evacuations in the early
months of the War. For three years they had been supporting conditions
that grew steadily worse, and now at last were impossible. They were
leaving behind a whole history of sacrifice and endurance, going to the
cold charity of people a little more fortunate than they, but already
sick to death of the War, and very likely themselves being shelled or
bombed.
They left an empty shell of a town filled with gas. Skene wandered
about it a little in the bright autumn midday, but the place had
already passed beyond the looting stage. Some of it was stripped by the
owners, some surreptitiously by soldiers, some was securely locked up
and some already half-destroyed by shell fire. He gathered plums from
outlying gardens, grapes from a hothouse where the last splinters of
glass were falling.
To east and south was the thin ring of British trenches.
Inside--nothing.
So another winter crept on, and people said to themselves, “A year ago
I was doing such-a-thing with old So-and-So,” or “two years ago,” or
“three years ago,” and now “So-and-So is dead--let’s see, was it 1915?
How time goes!”
To Skene and Uncle all the difference was the shorter daylight, which
should have meant less shelling but more bombing, instead of which
everything seemed to grow more, and nothing less.
They had one great gain--a new Town Major. He was one of those young
Scotchmen who appear thirty whether they are nineteen or thirty-nine,
loose-limbed, long-striding, hard in build and fibre, great in width
of loin, pale and often unkempt-looking, not from lack of blood or
shaving, but from a great thickness of skin and wiry toughness of hair.
A young gunner who quarrelled with this Captain Gilmour, “Gillie” as
he was immediately called, about bridge, or stores, or passes for
the men, or some such trifle, called him: “A wild Jock with heather
growing out of his ears.” He paid no heed. In his personality there
was something completely unbeatable, comforting in those days when
disappointment gradually deepened into apprehension. Mobilized on the
outbreak of war, in one of the old Scottish Territorial units, he had
brought to the business a ferocity and cunning scarcely to be hoped
from an educated and well-mannered Chartered Accountant. Wounded early,
he was sent, on recovery, to Gallipoli, and his stories of that epic,
of personal valour and hand-to-hand combats, were entirely refreshing.
He came to France in time to get his second wound on the Somme, and his
third at Vimy, and was now allowed, by a thankful country, to take the
comparatively “soft” job of Town Major.
He had arrived just as news of Cambrai had set ringing the bells of
London. It had also set “reacting” all the German guns on the Front.
For three days Uncle and Skene lost all their sleep, many of their
meals, and five men. The shelling was indiscriminate, on account of
the mists, but perfectly constant. On the third morning a hatless
apparition, with a gas-mask strung round his neck, had halted a party
of police, scavengers and storemen in the Garden Suburb.
“Good morning,” said the apparition with a nice manner and a Glasgow
accent. “Can I use your telephone?”
Skene had conducted him to the “Signal Dug-out,” of which he and
Uncle were very proud. He could not help hearing the beginning of the
conversation on the telephone:
“Army Head-quarters--Army Head-quarters--yes, Army--d’you think I said
Hind-quarters?--Hallo, Army Ten--is that you, Major?--yes--well, I
have! I’ve got ’em all here at A19 at the Clearance Officer’s--and now
what the hell do you want me to do with ’em?”
Skene touched him on the shoulder. “Come over and have breakfast when
you’ve done! My Quartermaster-Sergeant will billet your men!”
He came over. It was an hour before he was washed and shaved and
breakfasted, and seated before a whisky, just as the Bosche shells
began getting unpleasantly close on the road. His men were fed and
housed on a derelict barge until accommodation could be found.
He never moved away, but formed part of their mess. His old job of
billeting, etc., being completely gone, the Army did not seem to know
what to do with him, and let him be. It was a good job they did, for
Skene’s work had more than doubled, and Uncle took less and less
interest in anything.
Normally the Town Major was responsible for all that went on in the
town, irrespective of change of unit or situation; Skene was not
supposed to go beyond his dumps and bridges and the direction of
traffic towards its proper unit.
All this was obsolete. In the streets where workpeople had gossiped and
children played, nothing was now heard but the clank of hurried men and
animals anxious to get away from those toppling houses and high walls
that held the gas, the crash of falling wall or roof and the curious
squashy explosion of the gas shell, whose tone differed completely from
the crack of the old shrapnel, or high explosive’s short dry sound. Now
both officers made a journey a day into that deserted rubbish heap to
see what road was clear, what had “fallen in,” or been “stunk out,” in
the last few hours.
The echoes of Cambrai and Caporetto died away; no one knew exactly how
many divisions had gone to Italy. The winter became strangely silent,
strangely empty. Instead of being merely an incident in a considerable
civil and military population, the post where Gillie the Town Major
lived with Uncle and Skene had become an isolated little camp, without
a soul within call, between the trenches that girded the empty town on
one side, and some two or three miles of well-shelled roads and farms
on the other. First one and then another farm or cottage, where gunners
or engineers, Balloon Section men, or medical units had succeeded each
other for years, was shelled out and abandoned. Christmas passed; and
then in that queer silence came the first rumours of the great Bosche
offensive.
Uncle, Gillie and Skene had seen such a lot of offensives that, to
them, it seemed unlikely this new one would go any farther than the
others. Offensives at Ypres and Loos, at Verdun and the Somme and
Champagne and Arras! They had all ended--where? In stalemate. No, it
was not taken very seriously in their little mess.
Sometimes they entertained Infantry officers going to the line, or
field gunners on their way to their unsavoury positions. The little
mess had become well-known throughout the Corps, and divisions changing
over, in rest areas within sight of the sea, would ask each other, “Are
they still all right at Uncle’s?”
From these visitors little or nothing could be learned. The Front was
abnormally quiet. The trenches in most places had almost disappeared.
“We hold shell-holes with camouflage net over us and precious little
wire in front. Can’t keep anything repaired--we hold ’em with patrols
and live in the support line!” said the Infantry. Skene thought of his
report on the state of the front line he had written in October, 1915.
“Our battery positions are full of gas--every shell seems to contain
some!” said the gunners. But both agreed about the enemy: “We can’t
find him--can’t see him. He’s miles back. We think he’s got the wind
up!” “Like our people at home!” they added.
February came, fairylike with its wonderful early weather, clear skies,
and all the promise of spring. Aconites and anemones bloomed in Plug
Street Wood, in the deserted battlefields of the Somme, in the parks of
Vlamertinghe or Trois Tours.
March came in; and with it that great apotheosis of Prussianism--that
greatest effort at window-dressing which advertisement has ever devised.
To Skene, of course, it was all danger and discomfort. After weeks
of publicity, that great bombardment opened over most of the British
front, deeper in reach and greater in volume than any yet, and behind
it deployed the rested, heartened, full-fed German troops from the
collapsed Russian front, while thousands of labour battalions and gangs
of civilian or captive labour prepared their roads and emplacements,
their railways and jumping-off positions.
The day came at last; and that great avalanche of guns and men was
launched.
To Skene, who had been able to sleep little, and that only in the
daytime, it was almost a relief to hear that the great blow had fallen.
It brought to the front of him all that was most English.
By night, watching from the door of the dug-out the far-reaching
barrage of enormous guns; by day, watching the stream of divisions
going south, to hold the Bosche at Ham or Peronne, and then to stop
him at all costs from entering Amiens, Skene’s feelings toughened and
hardened and he could only feel what his Corporal said, when he saw
his brother brought home, with legs from the knee downwards a mass of
bloody rags: “By God. I’ll land them one for this!”
The night after he definitely knew that the Somme break-through had
been frustrated, Skene woke a little after midnight, leapt out of bed,
and shook himself.
No dream. Super-bombardment! Scrambling into gum boots and
British-warm, he got out of the dug-out and looked round.
The desolation of the Garden Suburb was lit by one continual
conflagration from Ypres around the whole horizon, dwindling into the
flats towards La Bassée. The ground shook and tiles were flying off
the buildings, though the actual shells were falling some thousands of
yards away, except for a steady, punctual crash every two minutes in
the direction of the bridge. He found his Sergeant beside him, the men
all standing-to, and nothing to be done but wait.
Diving back into their resting-place Skene woke Uncle. The old man came
out, shivering with night air and whisky, and murmuring the headline of
the Daily Paper of the previous week:
“All is quiet on the Western Front, but the situation is not without
danger!”
“Where’s Gillie?” Skene shouted in his ear.
“Dunno. Suppose he’s run away. Fool if he hasn’t!”
“Who’s that on the road there?”
“Go and see while I have a tin-hat and gas-mask parade for our lot!”
Skene found two people in British-warms who said they were Canadian
Demolition Engineers, looking for Captain Dakers.
“We’ve got to blow up his bridges, the Bosche are ‘through’!”
“Is that what all the noise is about? Captain Dakers is busy: I’ll come
along to the bridge with you, to see that our sentry don’t shoot you.”
The atmosphere was chokier by the bridge, and Skene loosened his mask.
His eyes watered from the whiffs of gas and the bridge seemed all out
of shape. Then he saw that the brick pillar on the near side of the
step-off was gone, with the sentry’s shelter, all down into the dark,
flash-reflecting water.
He bawled in the Canadian’s ear: “They’ve done our men in; here’s your
bridge; come and have a drink at the dug-out, by where you met me, when
you can!”
He left them, stepping quickly aside. An old familiar rushing filled
the air. A big ’un had just missed the bridge, and plunging into the
river sent water and débris over everything. By the time he had wiped
his face and head, he found a tractor on the top of him, lugging a
six-inch howitzer. Behind came Gillie and an orderly confirming the
news “The Bosche are through!” “Better get everything north of the
river,” they agreed, and went back to Uncle, who had packed his own
valise, and was giving directions to get out the barge. “No go,”
commented Gillie, “they’re through that side too!”
“Very well. The moral of the troops is excellent!” quoted Uncle.
“Wheels and animals over the bridge, we’ll ferry the personal estate!”
He pointed to Skene’s valise that Jerry had just dumped, properly
strapped, by the door.
“Thank God, the dumps are nearly empty!”
“What have you got?”
“Shovels and pick-handles and sandbags and camouflage, all trench
stuff.”
“Put a match to it, take a tin of petrol. I’m just going to see what
Corps is up to. I’ll be back in an hour!” No one doubted Uncle for an
instant. “Where shall we meet?” asked Gillie.
“The old brigade bombing ground, at White Farm!”
After setting light to all that was inflammable, Skene got to the
bridge in time to join in the cheers for the ambulances going through
to try and reach the wounded from the battalion dressing station.
Walking wounded, guns, and stragglers were coming the other way; Gillie
was turning the latter back with a shovel.
Skene gazed. A New Army man, he had never seen anything like it.
Regulars of Mons, and early Canadians of the second battle of Ypres,
had seen it before; but not Skene; not the New Armies. Presently, whole
units began coming over, Brigade Signals with their instruments, trench
mortars, a whole platoon of Infantry, then the ambulances, all but one
having failed.
The shelling was replaced by machine-gun fire, nearer and always nearer.
About half a mile to the north of the bridge was the old “White Farm,”
where, after Skene had come to the sector, old Josef Deporter had gone
on planting beet and pulling flax in fields ever more and more pitted
with shell-holes and the curious flat saucer-like mark of the shrapnel
bomb. The brigade then holding the line coveted his home pasture for a
Bombing School. There, authorized by an enthusiastic Staff, some R.E.’s
had constructed trenches and a model pill-box, to show young soldiers
the use of the smoke bomb. Old Deporter had gone to Skene, who offered
compensation, then to the French Mission, who referred him back to
Skene, finally to his Deputy in the Chamber. That worthy, hoping to
be in the next Government, had made a violent attack on the present
Government, whose parrying enquiries, percolating from Whitehall
through Montreuil to Skene’s corps; had caused the abandonment of the
Bombing School just as the Bosche long-range fire made farm and pasture
alike untenable.
Just as the grey morning pierced the drizzle (the weather had broken
the very hour it ceased to be of use to the Bosche) Skene found Uncle
getting out of the Ford car at the bombing ground, and Gillie placing
the men and siting the Lewis guns. “Beaten old Deporter, anyhow!” said
Skene, and Uncle grunted.
“I’ve been up to Corps. They’re gone!”
Skene whistled. Corps gone! It was like saying that King’s Cross
Station had run away.
“That means railhead and I dunno what!”
“Look!” Gillie pointed back over their right shoulders. The glare of
burning dumps was dying in the lighter sky and becoming clouds of dim
smoke. The inevitable Jerry, who had carried a “Queen” stove on his
back, now produced tins of hot tea. It was nectar. The humour of it
touched Skene.
“This isn’t the first time _you’ve_ run away, is it, Jerry?”
“No, sir,” and then, in the same matter-of-fact voice: “Did you wish
to sleep in the pill-box, or in the Farm?” And looking at the skeleton
timbers and gaping walls of Deporter’s farm, they all laughed.
Uncle stopped first: “Your friend Colonel Castle is at the Station, at
least I think it’s Castle, but he’s got a tin hat. He’s making things
shift with Italian labourers, and Zulus, and some railway people.
Railhead’s like a fortress. He told me to stick on as long as we could.
He says the French are coming and he’s tired of being shelled.” It
was a sentiment that found a general echo. Exasperated by mechanical
routine, carried on under long-range fire, neither Skene nor anyone
else felt much discomfort or panic. Let the Bosche come, man to man,
and see.
He was coming.
One of the men Gillie had left under a Corporal at “hedgerow” some
hundreds of yards nearer the bridge, which they commanded with a Lewis
gun, put his head round the corner of the trench.
“They’re going to blow up the bridge, sir!” A roar and rain of
fragments echoed him. Gillie, standing on the parapet, swore under his
breath.
“Bossed it! the girders are still standing! Look here, I’m going to
watch with that Lewis gun!”
In a few minutes the gibber of the Lewis was heard. Two men crawled
up the ditch, with a stretcher, carrying a third. The Corporal had
a message. “Mr. Gilmour sent this Canadian, who’s wounded, sir; the
other’s killed trying to reset his charge, and ’ave you any ammunition?”
They put the collapsed Demolitions officer away in the box car, and
sent three boxes of S.S.A. by hand down to Gillie. They were not short
of it, thanks to the dumps about. Let the Bosche cross the bridge on
the girders if he could!
Uncle had set everyone to work, roofing in here, digging out there,
dividing the time into watches, until the dummy trenches, the model
pill-box, and the ruins of the farm were “not too bad to die in!” as he
put it, wiping his eyes that the gas had made to water.
The day wore on, with gas-shelling. Gillie and his gun seemed to be
keeping the bridge, and the Bosche, not as yet too sure of what he
was up against, had still to gather himself for his second stroke. An
aeroplane, dipping like a swallow, was machine-gunning the opposite
bank of the river.
Once Skene turned to Uncle:
“What do you reckon we’ve lost?”
“Ten miles of line and most of the Infantry of two divisions.”
“Bad as that?”
“Well, there was a brigade in the town and one each side. What have we
seen come back?”
“The worst isn’t opposite us!”
The April dusk drew down in grey showers; Skene walked up the road and
found an N.C.O. and some men standing in front of Deporter’s gate under
the notice “Private! Entry Forbidden!” They were the billeting party of
a labour battalion, sent forward by some order never countermanded, and
then hurriedly armed and told to do their best. Presently an officer
and nearly two hundred men turned up, mostly greyheaded. They confirmed
Skene’s worst fears. His men and they were the only troops between the
advancing Bosche and the half-fortified railhead.
The night that followed was the queerest Skene had ever spent. On
all sides, rumours, a sense of thousands in motion; darkness and
silence where was usually lights and traffic; lights and the rumble
of machine-gunning or shelling, where darkness and silence should
be. During his turn of duty, he walked round and round their little
fortress with Jerry. Gillie had gone to the next farm, where the labour
battalion were digging in, back across the road to Deporter’s and the
pill-box where the spare Lewis was. There came to him bursts of English
song:
“I want to go home,
No more I want to roam,
Oh my, I don’t want to die,
I want to go home!”
from cheery souls eating and drinking round smothering braziers; then
the certainty that the firing was dead behind him.
Uncle took his turn, but awoke Skene at dawn.
“Who’s that on the road?”
Skene took Jerry and crept along the hedge, a “Mills” in each hand,
shaking the sleep out of him and trying to subdue his breathing. The
approaching figures were a great Australian and a small bandy-legged
Jock, smoking and snuffing the air. As Skene came out on the road, the
Scot gave him “Good morning, sir!” and the Aussi: “Hallo, digger, seen
any Fritzes?”
“I thought I heard him your way!”
“There were some, but we settled ’em. Show the gentleman your watch,
Jock!”
The little Scot produced a beautiful chronometer from his shirt: “We’d
sell it for a drink. ’Tis an officer’s.”
“Are there any more of you?”
“Bags of us coming, and the French. Well, we’ll be getting on. We’d
like some more watches!”
Skene looked down the road and saw another couple, Jock and Aussi. Back
at Uncle’s trench he found Gillie shaking hands.
“Good-bye, old lads. This is good enough for me, I’m going on with this
crowd!”
So passed Gillie from their ken, with that motley band, chasing
Ludendorff’s deadly “tactics of permeation.”
The next visitors were French Cavalry, on foot, with musketons and
machine-guns.
“Two nights one day we came from Soissons!” the officer told Skene. “We
kill all our ’orses!”
Uncle and Skene and the Labour officer gathered their men and marched
them to railhead. At the railhead were orders from Corps. They could
“pull out.”
They did. From railhead, a whole countryside plus an army was
retreating.
In the fine spring rain, they trudged up the pavé, between heavy guns,
farm carts, cows and ambulances, going the same way, and an opposite
stream of English lorries, full of sardonic French gunners, with their
seventy-fives rattling behind. Skene was busy counting his men, looking
out for the lame, scrounging a lift for this one or that, seeing that a
collapsed civilian cart was cleared out of the road, helping to unload
a ditched lorry. Now that he was again out of the actual touch with the
Bosche, his forebodings returned upon him and he worked with a heavy
heart.
Not so the private soldier. With little or no grasp of the realities
of the business, content to be in motion, going somewhere to do
something, he inevitably sang. A limping, slouching crowd, nearly
all freshly wounded, or lame with old wounds, marching or carried
in vehicles, bearing, or surrounded by God knows what collection of
impedimenta, and all singing:
“Mademoiselle of Armentières
She hasn’t been worried for forty years.”
While the women and the old men who led the cows and drove the carts
joined in the chorus: “Vinky, Blinky, parley-vous!”
Apocalyptic, biblical, the crowd moved on. Behind it, a pillar of
smoke by day, of flame by night, rose from the burning dumps.
CHAPTER XXIII
_Colonel Werner’s Revelations_
ALL very well for Corps to say “Pull out,” meaning “Come out of the
zone taken up by the French, where we lost half our Infantry and a
third of our guns, and come back here, where we are, and recognize!”
All very well. Corps had twenty-four hours’ start. Skene and Uncle
brought along their details--all unfit men--at the best pace they could.
Passing beyond railhead they met increasing streams of French men and
guns, taking up the new line. They found some deserted horse-lines for
billets, but were roused by shelling all round them, and tumbled out
in the dark, to find the French coming back. The thin film of a labour
battalion here, a Scotch machine-gun company there, and an Australian
tunnelling company anywhere, had not sufficed to stem the Bosche, who
had now moved up his guns and was coming on again. Mixed up with the
débris of the Corps and the civilian refugees of fourteen communes, it
took them three days’ marching to get clear.
In the very long run, of course the Bosche was stopped. Uncle had
always known the reason, since that April day in 1915 when the handful
of the original Canadians had outlived even the surprise of gas. The
reason was simple: give him the finest chances in the world, the
individual Bosche could not or would not fight. April petered out in
shelling and reorganization. May came, but British and French were now
reorganized and gaps closed. The Bosche tried other sectors in the
French line--got a little way and stuck.
The corps to which Skene belonged took up a part of the new line,
that ran through the old railhead. It seemed a queer topsy-turvy
world to Skene, working his advanced area where the aerodrome and the
rest billets used to be. Uncle had found a billet in the Estaminet
de la Couronne, in the village of Bertezeele, on the edge of the
Flemish-speaking plateau. Here they pursued their old habits as far
as possible, taught the French units to play football, and in return
learned a good deal about field cookery such as the British Army had
never dreamed of.
One of those American divisions incredible to Ludendorff, and
incredibly cheering to the tired French and English troops to whose
support they came, appeared in the corps area, in size and spirit a
complete surprise to minds stunned by nearly four years of continuous
battle. Nearly fifty per cent. stronger in numbers than either the
French or English divisions, and composed exclusively of young men
between twenty and thirty, selected for physical fitness from millions
mobilized, they overflowed the old camping grounds, horse-lines,
depots, manœuvre areas and battlefields. Their officers, well-read,
short-haired, spectacled young men of earnest and enquiring minds,
less hampered than the English by regular army associations, and
without the conscriptive tradition of the French, let loose a torrent
of enquiry, experiment, and endeavour. The few experienced officers
spared to them by the older armies for instruction and guidance were
soon swept completely off their feet, and Skene, like many another
of those semifit, odd-job-detachment officers, was impressed to give
such instruction as might be possible in the few days before the new
division went up into the Line.
He was accosted one morning by a tall, spare officer with tanned
cheeks and grizzled hair--a Colonel Werner, U. S. Infantry, attached
for instruction.
To have a Colonel attached to him, arriving before the order under
which he moved, without servant or groom, off-saddling himself and
putting up his own horse, did not surprise Skene at all--he had been
too long in France. Moreover, he was genuinely thankful to see the
Americans and curious to make their acquaintance.
Colonel Werner neither spat, nor touched strong drink, nor began his
sentences with the “See here, Stranger,” of the comic papers. He
resembled nearly in face, voice, and manner that miniature of Skene’s
maternal great-grandfather, Quaker, banker, brewer, and Mayor of
Over-water during the Peninsular War, touched, say, by the influence of
ten years’ residence in the larger colonies.
The tight, stock-like collar of the American tunic, the clean-shaven
lips and chin, faint suggestion of whisker, old-maidish precision in
thought and speech, scrupulous care taken of a pair of long, fine hands
unblistered by manual labour--such exterior details contributed to the
illusion. But there was more than this--a clean freshness of the mind,
great patience, respect for material means and for decisive action.
They soon became fast friends.
At this period of the War stale weariness had brought almost complete
uniformity to the Sunday afternoon procedure of units not actually
in the front line. Skene did nothing on Sunday morning that was not
strictly necessary, lunched rather better than usual, then sat in a
wicker chair that a thoughtful orderly had plundered from surrounding
desolation, and took his ease, till the “stand-to” at dusk and the
increasing traffic again brought duties that could not be neglected.
Colonel Werner was an agreeable addition to these occasions. Seated in
a corner of that Flemish meadow over which guns from Essen and Skoda
were raging and ramping against guns from the Tyne or St. Etienne,
smoking an endless succession of long butt-ended cigars--his only
indulgence, his one claim to be the real American of cinema and comic
story--he would talk of his country, township, estate, home, wife
and children, business and place of worship. In the long weeks of
summer-lit suspense before Mangin’s flank attack of July ushered in
the final phase, he brought before Skene’s imagination an ample wooden
house in rolling wooded hills, where big, healthy, plain-minded people
did, more than any other human beings perhaps since the world began,
just what seemed good to them.
Once the Colonel was talking to the natives, their endurance, their
passionate love of the soil--above all of the heroism of the women.
“There’s a farm,” he said, “in J34. I went there while I was attached
to that ---- Corps” (he pointed northward, beyond the French), “to
see about the burial of fourteen of our men, killed by a long-range
shot right in the yard--I expect you know the place--an ancient
building--our Quartermaster, who’s a professor of history, says it was
built by Dagos.”
For half a minute Skene tried to persuade himself that he did not know,
but the blood rushing to his temples gave him the lie--he held tight to
the left arm of his chair and pulled at his pipe. The American went on:
“There’s a girl there that has a history, I should say, but you
can hardly ask her what it is, and it beats imagining. She lives
there--it’s so near the Line--she billets in her own home, so to
speak--and borrows artillery horses, to pull her old buggy to market.
Yes, I assure you, she drives from her home in a gun emplacement, in a
buggy that Noah must have driven out of the Ark.”
Skene puffed his pipe; he could see every crease in the varnished
leather cover of the so-called “buggy.”
“She wanted our fellows buried in the small patch next the road, and
not in her home paddock where the Quartermaster had begun to dig.
She wasn’t getting on too well with our ‘Quarters’ on account of
having said that there were graves enough in France without having to
walk over them every time she went to milk the cows. Quarters didn’t
take it very kindly, and neither did I, at first, until I had been
talking to her for some minutes, and then her face kind of got me. I
knew her trouble, through the difficulty we had in finding out how
to make up the billeting return. It seems they were well-to-do until
the Bosche broke through. She had lost her father, too, under unusual
circumstances. It seems she had a married sister down Laventie way,
carrying on a farm, as they all do, the man being mobilized, and the
children going to school in gas-masks. Then the Bosche came round each
side--you know.”
Skene did know. He could see the stream of wounded and stragglers
getting over the bridge between the shells.
“When the news got up here--news travels among these people as if they
were Indians--the old man apparently thought he must go and see to the
married daughter. Partly affection, partly they’d got--I don’t know how
much land under potatoes--potatoes for manufacture, not to eat. Anyhow,
the girl says, he harnessed the old hoss with his three-cornered
tumbril--you know, the sort with an iron rudder on the front wheel, and
off he went, plumb into the battle! Can you imagine it!”
Skene nodded. Perfectly plain to him! The old, big-limbed, bent figure,
going snail’s pace beside the old horse in the tumbril, down roads
at first empty, then full of refugees and wounded, then empty again,
past burning farms and dumps, over shelled crossings of road, river or
railway--down into the rattle of machine-gun fire and the stench of gas.
“So she lost her father!” Colonel Werner went on. “Think she was
beat? Not she! The farm was too far forward for much work to be done. A
line of reserve trenches was dug through it, and marked the zone from
which civilians were evacuated. The labourers were all gone, and the
place in such a state one would have thought she couldn’t live there.
But could she be kept away? Not for a day! Every morning at ‘stand-to’
we heard her out and about, issuing orders to the men--telling them
‘Don’t!’ like a pack of children. We arrested her twice, but what
could you do? The French Mission wouldn’t prosecute, the civil power
had moved to Evreux in Normandy, the A.P.M. said it wasn’t his
jurisdiction. Every evening, she shut the place up, like a shop. We got
accustomed to her, the men used to do odd jobs for her--they got to
washing down the buggy--repairing the shrapnel holes it got, harnessing
up for her on market days. She spoke good English and ruled that billet
with a rod of iron. No outstanding claims for damage there! Then she
got to cooking for the men. They got to saluting her. In my country we
have one tradition of which we are proud!” (“Only one!” thought Skene,
who, though he admired the Colonel’s manners, had noticed how right
America always was.) “It’s that of the civil war. That girl reminded me
of tales my father used to tell of some of our women, in the old days.
She might almost have passed for an American girl, I tell you. However
pale and tired she grew, however the weather or the shelling might be,
there she was, well-dressed and quiet, and mistress of the situation!
Not from any high principle, but simply, as she said, because she had
lost enough, and couldn’t afford to lose any more. Yes, sir, the women
are fine, I reckon!”
CHAPTER XXIV
_Victory_
IN the middle of July the Bosche made what history now knows to be his
last effort--the drive at Soissons. The French who lay next Skene’s
corps were summoned south. Uncle and Skene paid little attention.
Besides being now permanently sceptic regarding all offensives, they
knew that, submarines or no, the Americans were in France, some
hundreds of thousands of them. English statesmen talked of “fighting
on three, or five years if necessary!” Such sentiments, uttered in
London, passed over the heads of those who had lived for years east
of Amiens and St. Omer. Besides, for a long while everyone had been
hearing rumours that Foch, now Commander-in-Chief, had many divisions
in reserve. In their journeys backwards and forwards, Skene and Uncle
both found that as a fact there were, not only American, but English
and French divisions, far back, being “saved up” for something, and
their stoicism took again the rosy tinge that seldom deserted it for
long.
To arrange for billeting the English troops that came to relieve
the French, Skene had to go as far as St. Firmin to see a French
Head-quarters about detail. He found the dry, hard old French regulars,
in their little temporary office, unusually elated, moving little flags
on a big-scale war map, and _Moving Them Forward_. He was shown a
communiqué. It told of what is now called Mangin’s flank attack.
“Better news this morning?”
“I believe you, the news is better--and it is about time.”
“What does it mean?” asked Skene--“the turn of our luck?”
“It shows we have still some strength!” was all the dry answer. “Now,
about these special units of the British Army for which you require
space in our area....”
Presently, his business done, Skene went across to the Coq d’Or
Restaurant. The place was full of Frenchmen, dismounted cavalrymen
turned into machine-gunners, but still the aristocrats of their army,
with money in their pockets, doing themselves well, ransacking that
little market-town inn, used to quiet English subalterns who would
take what was put before them, not having sufficient command of the
language to ask for anything better. Skene saw the red piping on their
service-blue uniform, and remembered that they must be Cuirassiers, and
that he had once asked news of one of that lot.
By this time the best wine of local hostelries was labelled “Pontet
Canet”; in earlier days it had been “La Rose.” Skene ordered some, and
invited the co-operation of a nice young Frenchman. If a celebration
was forward, why not an allied celebration? The nearest young Frenchman
was not unwilling. Like Skene, he had been too long in the War to
refuse a possible drink.
Skene ordered a second bottle, and as the crimson liquid shrank behind
the label asked casually:
“You didn’t have a D’Archeville in your lot?”
“I believe you, we had D’Archeville. He was, like myself, a Cuirassier,
and went to the Flying Corps. He was a type!”
Skene knew that this meant, not that D’Archeville was typical, but that
he was “some lad.”
“Was? He’s gone, then?”
“Died in Champagne in 1917--as I should have been, if I hadn’t had a
leg all in marmalade.”
“That’s a pity; I had good wishes to give him, from an acquaintance.”
“You must give them now at the cemetery, at Avenant-le-Petit. He was
a type, I tell you, Georges--cared for nothing but sport--I knew him
well.... I had made sport with him, on his father’s land, up in the
north there, where one is nearly in Belgium.... The War breaks out....
A changed Georges ... everything in life left behind him. Nothing for
Georges but Glory, Patriotism, and the regulation tobacco allowance!”
Skene filled up the young man’s glass and nodded.
“Well! He was not a philosopher, as I am. One can’t smoke glory in
one’s pipe. Georges is full of devotion, repents his past life, and
carries on. But he forgot one thing. Among his _amies_ was the
daughter of the gamekeeper of his sport in those parts--an old Fleming
living in a farm of his fathers. They have that system there. Giving up
the various things Georges gave up, meant giving up that woman. Ah! but
one is never finished with women!”
Before Skene’s eyes there seemed to rise the dirty little railway
station of his first railhead, and a figure with face turned towards
the _décrets_ and _arrêtés_ that papered the walls--and
a voice begging him to telephone to an English hospital, about a
Frenchman.
“There was Verdun. You know where we were, in shell-holes out of whose
sides ran little dribbles of blood.
“Both Georges and I were invalided, I with my leg, he with his lungs.
I did not see him again until the following February. He and I were
down at the great camp at Mailly, beginning the rehearsals of that
_sacré_ offensive of May, 1917. We both took influenza, and they
sent us to the hospital that used to be at the Hôtel Vitzman, Avenue
Kruger, Paris!
“That woman found Georges. I used to see her when I visited him
during his convalescence. She was not like the girl one used to see at
Vanderlynden’s farm, when one went shooting. She was still not quite
Parisienne, but well-arranged. She had lived and learned. He took an
apartment for her. But then he went back, of course. He was wounded at
Chemin des Dames, and took consumption. He died. Poor Georges! He was
a type!” The young man rose to go, with an elaborate English “So long,
chum!”
So he had found Madeleine’s “fiancé” at last, with the fatal
appropriateness of war time.
Jolting home in the box car Skene felt as if every word of the young
Frenchman had stroked the hardened scars of an old wound.
Once back at his post, however, he had little time for reflection--at
last the old Bosche line, which Skene had first seen three years
before, gave way before the attacks of English, French, Belgians and
Americans. From below Lille up to Nieuport on the sea, it suddenly
melted away. The frontier that had split the world in half just ceased
to be, one fine morning.
Uncle was amazed. A real victory, won in battle! He gave it up. But to
Skene there came an afterglow from his early enthusiasm. Of all those
laughing boys who, in the great training camps of the New Army in 1915,
had sung with such zest “The only step the Kaiser’s got to learn is the
quick-step back to Germany,” how few, how very few, were seeing the
fruit of all those years of effort and unceasing bloodshed! And he was
one.
His job had almost ceased. The battle suddenly lengthened out into a
pursuit in which English patrols had all they could do to find the
retreating enemy. Corps itself was preparing to move. Skene and other
minor details received their orders. On a bright October morning, he
stopped the Ford in which he and Uncle were travelling, within sight of
the morass in which young Murdon had been killed.
“There,” he pointed to Uncle, “that’s where I was, three years ago,
this blessed day.”
The Line had shifted at most a few yards since Skene’s time. But the
whole place had a look of decay. The continuous trenches, gradually
abandoned, had fallen in or been blown flat. The last traces of trees
had disappeared. Old landmarks, such as the remains of a cottage, or a
length of paved road, had been dispersed. The coarse foliage--dock and
ground-ivy and grass mixed with wild corn--stank of gas, and concealed
grenades and pieces of shell. At every turn Skene noted with envy the
concrete pill-boxes that would have saved so many lives, and the light,
concealed, trench tramway that would have spared so many weary hours
of fasting vigil. Standing just inside the old Bosche line, he could
see how exposed was the angle of the British communication trench from
his old dump to his old Head-quarters dug-out--“How many times,” he
thought, “have I come round that corner! They must have seen my head
and had a pot at it. I remembered the splintered ‘A’ frames of the
revetment; we couldn’t think where they were enfilading from!” He had
a sensation of not being really there--of being dead with Murdon and
Corporal Ames and the rest, of having returned from death to visit the
place.
Uncle was poring over his 5A map of Belgium.
“Wasn’t there a conservatory at the corner of the wood and a bit of
kitchen garden?”
“Gone before my time--practically front line!”
“Well, that’s where _we_ were--first Canadian division, July,
1915. Our horses used to go in the stables--here--and the château and
the heavy gunners’ mess was in the cellar!” Another war that Skene had
never known, the war of the first few months--regular divisions with
Colonials and Territorials attached, before trenches and the New Army.
“But the stables,” Uncle went on, “were stone and very solid!”
They walked on. Nothing but spongy mud, coarse grass, scrap iron,
stench!
Was this what they had fought for, this draggled scrap-heap; bereft
now even of the comradeship that had once made it bearable--robbed now
even of its importance as the frontier where Justice and Fairplay stood
at issue with Oppression and Greed? This was what he had won through
to--these dregs!
Uncle wiped his mouth and fastened the stopper of the flask.
“You ain’t going t’ buy the site, are y’, Skene?”
Skene got back into the box car and dropped into a discussion as
to whether there was not, in fact, money in the idea of buying and
reclaiming the front line in Flanders.
The Umpteenth Corps did not share the Allied entry into Lille. Instead
they had an entry of their own into a Flemish manufacturing town, with
a core of old market-place, cathedral and town hall, and an old bridge
with dropsical flanking towers, surrounded by a rind of new red-brick
suburbs. For a moment the old enthusiasm flared up. Flemish mechanics
and shopkeepers and womenfolk, who had heard but never seen the English
soldiers fighting for them all these four years, suddenly saw in
their own streets khaki and tin helmets, and a young officer of the
Intelligence collecting municipal officials. Sober twentieth-century
people, from offices and shops, wearing the shawls of mill-hands, the
bowlers and black coats of a laborious life, danced, shouted, wept and
wrung the hands of officers and men. Ladies with every appearance of
invincible propriety kissed perspiring R.E.s putting up the bridges the
Bosche had destroyed, and dragged out materials for their work from
unsuspected hiding-places.
Skene, borrowed by Intelligence to help straighten things out, sat in
the magnificent “Salle des Chevaliers” of the Town Hall, interrogating
and docking batches of Bosche prisoners. When he came out he was set on
by troops of children who clung all over him, demanding to be kissed,
and would soon have left him buttonless in their thirst for souvenirs.
Struggling to his billet in the front room of a miner’s cottage, he sat
with Uncle over a bottle of whisky, waiting for news of the Armistice
terms that had been sent to the Bosche. It was the evening of November
the tenth.
The field telephone stood on the treadle sewing machine in the window.
Corps Signals had been duly bribed.
The man of the house came in from work, and passed by them, with doffed
cap, to the back kitchen where his family were collected round the
stove.
“Have ye explained to him about the billeting?” said Uncle, doctrinaire
in his cups.
Skene called the man back. The Frenchman protested. It was payment
enough to have English in the house: but his wife struck in. It was
none too good, no doubt, but acceptable. “Give ’im a drink!” said Uncle.
Man, wife, old aunt, and little daughter Simone all came, and from
liqueur glasses drank “to our deliverers” with tears and smiles, partly
joy, partly unaccustomed whisky.
In the pitiful bare respectability of the little room, a cheap clock
ticked, Uncle snored; Skene sat with his hand on the field telephone.
Before his tired eyes came faces from the great training camps,
peopled by happy boys, now dust and decay in any corner from Dunkirk
to Baghdad--visions of fine light-hearted mornings, or wet benumbing
twilight in Bailleu and Villers Brettonneux, of which no stone now
rested on another--visions of the waste of No-man’s Land, in the dreary
machine-gun-punctuated dawn, of Christmas dinners in the Officers’
Restaurant at Amiens, where a hundred and fifty officers from all
corners of the world with hands crossed sang “Auld Lang Syne”--visions
of all that great cataclysm which had turned the ease-loving,
sport-following manhood of England into the New Armies--turned the New
Armies into Armed and Fighting England stretching through France and
Italy, half across Asia and the oceans of the world--the cataclysm
which had caught him, Skene, like a straw, whirled him out of the quiet
certainty of his office life in the Close of an English cathedral
town--bumped him against this and that until he had become a person
unrecognizable to himself, with all the landmarks of his existence
changed; caught him too against Madeleine and wrenched the heart out of
him.
The telephone bell buzzed. He took up the receiver.
“Umpteenth Corps Clearance Officer!”
“Speaking! Who are you?”
“Corps Signals. Is that Mr. Skene?”
“Speaking!”
“We’ve just intercepted Bosche wireless, sir. They are going to sign in
the morning!”
“Thanks! Good night!”
Reaching over the little table, he shook Uncle. The old man opened his
eyes, owl-like, and sat up.
“They’re going to sign!”
“Who?--what?--oh! the Bosche!”
The old man looked at Skene and then away.
“Well, that’s the end of it then!” he said.
“That’s the end of it!” repeated Skene.
And suddenly he could not look at Uncle. He could only struggle with an
emotion not admissible in an officer. The end of it! This little mean
room, in a Flemish slum! The laconic printed “Order” that would appear
on the morrow. Victory!
Rounds! He went outside into the chill and darkness of that November
night. At the small factory where his men were billeted, he found his
sentry; in the little pay-office, his superior New Army Corporal,
reading a paper-covered novel over a brazier;--beyond, in the low sheds
where his men were sleeping, his mules tied up and his carts stacked,
all was in darkness and silence. “Celebrations!” he thought. Emerging
again into the little paved street, he met what to him was typical of
war as he had waged it. In the lampless glimmer of the night, a string
of square boxes on wheels, known as limbers, was being drawn with a
springless rattle over the pavé, by weary mules, beside whom were men
just sufficiently awake to guide them. At the head a muffled figure,
for all the world like the leader of some North Pole Expedition, was
plodding beside a somnambulistic horse.
Abreast of Skene he muttered:
“This’ll get me to Werlies, I s’pose! Is it true they’ve chucked it?”
Skene nodded. “I believe the Bosche are going to sign the Armistice
terms in the morning!”
“Good job. We should have chucked it, if they hadn’t!”
And he stumped on.
Skene pulled off his boots and got into his blankets. “Too long,” he
thought. “Who cares now?”
He had forgotten that this was Victory.
CHAPTER XXV
_Glory_
THEN over Skene, as over many of his kind, within a week or two of the
armistice, a great black cloud seemed to shut down. Try as he would,
he could not shake it off. It had gradually dawned on him, that he
had come to regard war as the normal condition of things, that it had
become a habit.
His extraordinary luck, that had never allowed him to sink below a
certain level, stuck to him to the very end; though he knew, no more
than any of us, what luck is! Is it a perfectly equable shifting of
pieces on a chessboard by a player with superhuman knowledge of each
piece and a definite ordered plan? Does the player know and care, or
does he merely upset the board in a drunken sleep--or can the pieces,
by a sort of latent facility of their own, take some part in the game?
Anyway his luck held. Skene’s Corps was not one of those that moved
up to the Rhine; certain units and individuals went, but the bulk
remained, a skeleton of its former self, just where it had left off
fighting, among mining villages on the edge of a wooded plain. The
people, though hard up for all the small comforts of life and daunted
by years of a foreign occupation, tried to be hospitable.
When the demobilization scheme was made public, his one thought was to
get out of it, away from it all, at once--from this War into which he
had thrown himself with such enthusiasm, which had used him, to the
point almost of extinction, and which now suddenly had ceased--and left
him high and dry. Lying in a too-short bed in the ground-floor bedroom
of a workman’s cottage, he read Murray’s version of the Hippolytus. Ah!
but some who loved the gods didn’t die young, and--wished they had!
That was his mood, waiting for demobilization.
Uncle, of course, had no difficulty in placing himself in half a dozen
different categories for instant demobilization. Skene filled up the
same papers. Why not? Thomas’s death had removed the last person who
was more than a mere mess acquaintance. Jerry, his servant, with an old
soldier’s instinct, had gone sick and got himself demobbed. Burnside
had taken a Commission, as Education Officer, to the Corps.
A train more incredibly slow-moving even than the average military
train, passed across battlefields already green round their
evil-smelling pools.
It was a grey damp winter, whose frosts had begun early; and anything
more desolate than that wilderness of coarse weed slowly obliterating
shell-hole and trench, was inconceivable. Nothing moved over those
hummocks of tortured soil that had swarmed with agony and effort, but
the rat and the crow. Rounding the corner of a skeleton wood, Skene
looked out of the window on a place he knew too well.
In the first battle of the early days a Midland Yeomanry regiment,
flung desperately into the fight, had held the advancing Bosche, at the
price of two-thirds of its men. “Market Harbro” they had called it,
and the name had stuck. It was still just recognizable. And to-day, it
was alive. A Chinese labour company had been sent to remove explosives
from the spot. The curious Celestials, moving inimitably about what
had been an outpost of England--one of those stubbornly held mounds
that had prevented London perhaps from having a German governor like
Brussels--amused Skene. It reminded him of a Bible illustration by
Doré, where the less-exemplary characters were working out destiny in
terms of manual labour. In the midst of those flat-faced, shuffling,
guttural Celestials, stood a figure different as West from East.
There was something familiar in the prominent nose and jaw, the square
shoulders, humped in the British-warm, the sturdy, almost bandy legs in
good breeches and boots, the hands thrust out of sight, the bridle of
the horse trailing from one arm. Earnshaw, by George!
The train was in a doze characteristic of military trains after
the Armistice. The driver and one of those R.E. corporals who used
to spring out of the soil, like a natural growth, were smoking and
chatting together over the alleged subsidence of a piece of the line.
There seemed no hurry; Skene dropped from the carriage. It
astonished him to find what affection he had for that bullet-headed,
square-shouldered body. Earnshaw was not effusive, but he kept smiling
and his eyes were very blue. “Come over to my dug-out, and have a
drink!”
He called a “Chink” to hold his horse, but as they moved off over the
morass Uncle could be heard shouting from the train: “She’s off!”
“It’s no odds,” muttered Earnshaw, “she’s through every day--come and
stay the night and bring your friend!”
So they turned and both began to shout across that waste: “Get down and
come and have a drink!”
Heads popped out, English, Scotch, Welsh, Colonial, French heads,
amused, interested, uncomprehending. A private who had been giving
a ventriloquial entertainment, held up his improvised dummy at
the carriage window and made it say, “Go to hell! Give my love to
Kitchener, when you get there, and ask when the three years will be up!”
The train was on the move. With a final shout: “See you in Dunkirk!”
Skene turned away with Earnshaw.
Near by they lighted on one of those quiet polyglot men who used
to officer the Chinese Labour Contingents in France--a Missionary
by calling. The kindly spectacled face in that forlorn place seemed
to Skene one of the most cheerful yet lost things he had ever seen.
Farther on were German prisoners at work and the transport section
which was Earnshaw’s special care.
Standing on the shell-pocked ridge, covered with French grenades and
German long-barbed wire, above the neat huts where Earnshaw’s formation
was encamped, Skene stopped and pointed.
“There--hospital farm--where that machine-gun emplacement is--there the
Ypres road--and you’re in the white château!”
Earnshaw nodded. Three years the War had surged backwards and forwards
within a few thousand yards of the road from Ypres to Bethune, which
had lined the original front of the B.E.F. in October, 1914. Nearly
every officer in the earlier divisions had at one time or another
been billeted in that white château which, because it was owned by an
Austrian, some said, was never shelled. Its very boundaries were gone,
as a footmark fades on wet sand. Skene and Earnshaw went into the big
mess hut. This was the Head-quarters of a formation composed more of
Chinese and Bosches than of English. At lunch and dinner, a field-grey
Fritz stood statue-like behind his chair and doubled to execute an
order. In Skene’s bunk were electric light and an electric bell--on
the floor, walls, windows, and from one door to another were wonderful
mats, woven of twigs, of wire, of anything, by squatting “Chinks.”
In the dusk that drew down after tea, they played badminton, and after
dinner, sat, pipe in mouth, drink at elbow, not referring to their
common past, while officers from the ends of the earth, and officers
who had spent the whole War at training camps in England, officers
from Straits Settlements, or Glasgow, put records on the gramophone,
played bridge, and told yarns, Skene realized how much of the War he
had missed, Italy, Salonika, Dardanelles, Palestine, “Mespot,” China,
Samoa, the naval shows.
It was Earnshaw who said:
“What about that girl at the farm!”
Skene swallowed with an effort.
“What about her?”
“We’ve got to ride to the station--we could call there on the way!”
“My dear fellow!” began Skene.
“May as well. We’ve got to pass the door.”
Skene put the matter out of his mind. A thin bent officer, lecturer at
some Colonial University, was describing the experiences of Plummer’s
army sent to Italy to help the Italians in the dark hour of Caporetto.
He described the arrival of the English and Scotch regiments among
the Italian villages full of old men in cloaks and leg-wrappings,
like Shakespearian or biblical characters, full of magnificent women,
and sprawling statuesque children--and how they were still jumbled
up with cockney or north-country Tommies, khaki-clad, hatchet-faced,
jocular--he described the Italian dignity and shiftlessness and
dramatic bombast, cheek-by-jowl with that indomitable sporting desire
to “larn” the Austrians even as the Germans had been “larned.” And
then Earnshaw spoke the words that were afterwards to be most often in
Skene’s ears. He had bought some land in Nairobi. Skene did not know
where it was. “It’s where you’re still let alone,” said Earnshaw.
At eleven next morning Skene was riding, as he had ridden more than
three years before, with the same companion, towards that gravelly
ridge, to north of which lay the railhead town whence he had first
detrained, on coming out to France. The battle of 1918 had washed right
up to the south of the ridge. The trees were gone, the land still
covered with the rank waste to which the crops had run. They crossed a
road. On a new English signboard were the names Calais and Courtrai.
Earnshaw stopped and turned to the left. Skene recognized the familiar
road and looked for the old red-brick tower above the thatched roof.
There were buildings, but the shape was strange. Something jibbed in
Skene’s heart. Did he want to go, or not? Was he curious--angry--what?
After all, it was he who had broken off the connection--for what? For a
matter of taste!
Earnshaw was saying: “Come on, they’ll give us a drink!”
Perhaps she wasn’t there.
A “five-nine” must have hit the top of the old short tower, and the
delicate fuse, bursting the charge at once, had only flung down some
cubic feet of the solid old brickwork. A smaller field-howitzer shell
had dropped vertically through the great ridge of the thatched roof.
The wall flowers were dead, and the dirt and neglect that trailed
wherever battle had been, hung as the smuts hang after snow. But most
of all Skene missed the rough bark of the old half-blind watch-dog, who
used to drag his chain like a lost spirit, at fall of foot or hoof.
They tied their horses by the bridge, and walked over the dinted
cobbles, among neat stacks of wire and pickets, harvest of many
trenches, toward the shutterless kitchen windows blocked with army
canvas. Something like an uneasy ghost in dark clothes shuffled along
the cobbles by the wall. Yes, yes--old Vanderlynden! “Good morning,
patron, how goes it?” But the old bowed figure only shuffled on, and
passed out of sight round the corner of the house.
“The old boy seems to have forgotten us,” said Earnshaw.
“You know what happened to him!”
“Walked straight into the Bosche, going to rescue his married
daughter’s goods, but he must have got back weeks ago!”
He was evidently not moved by what, to Skene, was one of the most
pathetic stories of the War.
“Good morning, Mam’selle.”
Skene looked up. There stood Madeleine, framed in the dark doorway....
The pallor he had found so charming was gone. She was browned and
reddened by hard work. The great bunch of dark hair was more closely
and simply done--her nondescript blouse rolled to the elbows, her dark
skirt looped up. Her boots, alone, on the cobbles, had that sort of
solid elegance he had first noticed, distinguishing her from her kind,
the unæsthetic elegance of one who always chose the best, because it
gave her more for the money! Earnshaw spoke again.
“Good morning, Mam’selle, how’s the patron!”
“As he always is, now, since the Bosche took him prisoner!”
“You remember my friend?”
“Certainly I remember!” She did not even turn her head. “Enter then,
and have some coffee. We have no wine, your troops stole it all!”
In the half-dismantled, war-worn kitchen, Skene surveyed her filling
the cups. She still moved with the grace of limbs toughened and
stretched with hard work, and of healthy nerves working like well-oiled
machinery.
Her voice was harder, her expression more severe--trouble, no doubt,
and the responsibility of the farm! When she had finished an argument
with Earnshaw on the price of eggs, she turned to Skene as though
divining his thoughts.
“You know, I lost my fiancé after all!”
Skene replied:
“I am sorry!” She leaned on the table, musing.
“What a horror of a war, all the same!”
“Well, it’s finished now!”
That seemed to excite her. She raised her voice: “Yes--it was time.
There’s my brother Marcel dead now, the other was killed at the
beginning. My father going about like a lost dog. Out of fifty
hectares, ten or more are flooded--on the remainder there are tons of
wire and filth. No labour, no tools or horses--what the Bosche didn’t
destroy, the Allies stole....”
Skene gazed. Was any other motive behind that unaccustomed vehemence?
The final loss of D’Archeville--irritation against Skene himself?
Such vindictiveness in one so self-contained, so ready to forget her
troubles in any passing entertainment!...
“--and we can get no labour, and now every one is going away, to leave
us to it ... and they have not started paying us our reparations that
are due to us from the Bosche--and no one cares----”
She folded her arms and stared out of the doorway at the grey and
sodden landscape:
“But we shall do it. Everything will be put right; we will see
ourselves paid, to the last halfpenny!”
Earnshaw was getting fidgety under this tirade of which he understood
perhaps a sixth. He got up and made a remark in English. She did not
reply.
“Come on!” he said, and moved out into the yard to unhitch his horse.
Skene followed. Madeleine was standing there and staring, obstinate,
intractable. Whatever she was looking for, it was nothing from him.
He was forgotten. Whatever had once made her give herself up to him,
had vanished as though it had never been. And this was right! She and
he alike were part of a former phase, of a time already history, and
long-past history at that!
Mounting his narrow hairless veteran of a horse, he looked back;
she was turning from the doorway, without a word or sign. But she was
to haunt him many a year--symbolic of post-war France--a woman still
young, pushing aside even her attractiveness, to toil and bargain
ruthlessly--a woman widowed and childless, wrestling with Fate for the
uttermost sou of compensation due to her.
CHAPTER XXVI
_The End of a Perfect Day_
THEY had said nothing at parting, except: “So long, old man!” “Good
luck!” Through the glassless window of his railway carriage, Skene saw
Earnshaw leading away the spare horse, solid, unreflecting, absorbed in
the matter in hand. And with him real England seemed to turn its back
and go on to something else.
Thus he came to Dunkirk, to that grey Flemish town, last outpost in
the marshes open to the North Sea and its mists. He hadn’t been in the
place since he had gone buying white shifts for patrols going out in
the snow of 1916. Then it had seemed civilization itself, now just a
dingy obstacle to freedom.
He enquired for Uncle. It took him all the afternoon. By accident he
heard that he was in that Canadian hospital on the dunes where hundreds
lay, stricken by influenza, while they waited for the boat to take them
home.
Of that pestilence some said one thing, some another. Skene wondered if
the real cause were not the sudden slump in the vitality of men, who,
strung up to war for years, and suddenly hurled into peace, stood, as
it were, beside themselves, searching in vain for the men they had once
been.
The doctors attributed Uncle’s collapse to his having gone ten hours
without whisky. He was sinking when Skene arrived and did not recognize
him. Skene stood there until the hard, free, good-humoured old spirit
had passed; and was told: “We must clear up, you know, heaps more
waiting! Funeral in the morning!” Skene shuddered, and passed out of
the tent, and as he went a bugle rang out in that call--the first he
had ever heard in France:
“Sixty-four--ninety-four,
He’ll never go sick no more,
The poor beggar’s dead.”
The great demobilization camp with its thousands of men and hundreds
of officers lay at the greyest depth of the Marsh, separated by sand
hills only from the sea. It had all the marks of emergency like
everything else in the War. There was the atmosphere that hangs about
great docks after the launch of a ship, or street decorations after
a procession. Gleaming arc lights on telegraph poles shone green on
the multitudes being shifted hither and thither, sorted, registered,
docketed, housed, fed and prepared for the boat and freedom on the
morrow. Skene found his way to an officer to whom he had provided
himself with an introduction. He knew too much to get mixed up with
the unfortunate mob that went through the official treadmill. His new
friend, a limping, infantry major, greeted him kindly and enquired
about the corps. “We’ll get out of this, if you’ll wait for me a
moment!”
Skene waited, and they caught a tram back into the town to a noisy
restaurant, full of officers celebrating night after night the morrow
they had been longing for during anything up to four years; full
of Frenchmen and Belgians, greeting, laughing, drinking, or in low
tones, at little side tables, reckoning up the loss of properties, and
landmarks, the break up of families, and industries, and forming plans
for the future.
“We’re better here!” he was told. “Our camp is rotten with ’flu, the
fellers are going sick in shoals. Have some of this Château Yquem, it’s
the last of the real stuff and there’ll never be any more, they say!”
They returned early to the camp; and Skene, philosophic with food and
drink, walked up and down to finish his pipe, in the muggy darkness of
the Flemish winter night.
From the N.C.O.’s mess, a gramophone was roaring out a tune. It was an
old worn record, one of the songs of recruiting days ground out on a
powerful new machine.
“For we don’t want to lose you,
But we think you ought to go,
For your King and your Country,
They both need you so!”
“Cut it out!” came a thick voice, “it’s worn out! Any road, I’m sick of
it!” The tune stopped with a jerk.
Skene moved quickly away. That music-hall tune had rung through every
parish hall in England, in the great days when the New Armies were
enlisting and training by the hundred thousand. What hurt was the truth
of the remark. Worn out--the emotion that it recorded. He was sick of
it; every one was sick of it. A new record now was spinning out its
song: “When you come to the end of a perfect day.”
Skene went to bed, for the last time in that atmosphere of
disinfectant, brazier-smoke, mules and tarpaulin.
Next morning dawned with the muggy cold and wet that reaches its
perfection in Dunkirk. It was the third anniversary of Skene’s first
attack of trench fever and a fine ripe rheumatism gripped his bones. He
managed to avoid being picked for duty, and made his way down to the
quay.
He left the street through which was already flowing the long
dun-coloured river of English soldiery, with its good humour, and
invincible school-treat unmilitariness; and came suddenly on a
commotion to which Babel must have been child’s play.
A broad quay ran before one of the old Napoleonic barracks, and all
about it men were swarming, in French, German, Austrian, Italian,
Serbian, Russian and who knows what other uniforms, parts of uniforms,
civilian suits with military cap or pair of field boots. Blue,
blue-grey, slate-grey, grey-green, grass-green, ivy-green, with flat,
peaked, feathered or merely shapeless head-gear--one in a thing like a
lady’s muff--one in a bowler--sweating and stinking, talking in tongues
of all races, they were eddying, forming and breaking around banners,
interpreters, and gendarmes.
It was one of the great clearing houses set up by the French to collect
and redistribute to their homes the masses of prisoners--allied
prisoners, enemy prisoners, interned of all nations, Flemish civilians
who had been haled away for who knows what forgotten and defeated
purpose, to some strange place within the cordon of the German
trenches--Russians from Siberia, captured in some great Galician or
Caucasian drive--every type of German-speaking male--from Tyrolese
to Hamburger--all mixed up with men of appearance and speech
indistinguishable from Skene’s own--who might have come--and probably
did--from London, Glasgow or New York.
Leaning on a stone coping, Skene gazed and discussed the scene with one
of those disillusioned, well-educated middle-aged corporals that could
exist in no army but the French, and who summed it all up thus:
“One would almost say that the Devil had mixed all these poor souls
expressly for the pleasure of seeing us comb them out again! This
pot-pourri of races and tongues is the remnant escaped--and has had
the good luck to preserve life, without home or family, existing like
beasts for years. What have they learned? Nothing, my lieutenant, give
them rifles and rum, a flag to follow and a master to drive, and they
would start another war to-morrow!”
Skene delighted him with a present of English cigarettes, and left him
explaining the difference between a Pole and a Jugo-Slav.
The homeward-bound boat was getting up steam. Skene made his way on
to the upper deck. And when she slid out of the narrow bottle-necked
harbour, past the destroyers tied up to the shell-and-bomb battered
quays, he turned his back on the low shore, that rose from the Belgian
sandhills where the Bosche guns used to stand, towards the downs which
made a shadow on the sky-line beyond Calais. He did not want to look at
it just then.
Below, on the main deck, the men were singing to a well-known hymn tune
the doggerel:
“When I get my civvy suit on,
Oh, how happy I shall be.”
“Good-bye B.E.F.,” muttered Skene.
England hove grey-white out of the mists to meet him--a tender parent
no doubt, but occupied for the moment with other things. It hurt him
afresh to see those scraps of the victorious army disembark, without
a cheer, without a sign--the lucky percentage of the New Armies--the
biggest, most hastily gathered body of volunteers that had ever flocked
together.
Demobilization had already been going on some weeks--every one had seen
too many of the crowds in those hurrying trains to feel enthusiasm.
The War had outlasted all patience, and all interest, become a cosmic
stupidity like bad weather or high rates.
Dispersal Station in England was even more breathless and hasty than
Demobilization Camp in France. Hundreds poured through it daily--shed
all but their bare uniform, and passed away into civil life. The great
machine of five years was reversing, spilling out civilians as it
turned. So, in the grey twilight of a winter afternoon, Skene in a
first-class carriage made his last journey. He was “released”--with
permission to wear uniform for twenty-eight days, would be given
“Special Instructions” if he were required.
Homewards!
But in his heart was a nasty qualm, a feeling that he was not really
going home, that home lay behind him, in the rough-and-ready,
meagre-hearty “mess”--even further, in some well-groomed graveyard on
the Belgian frontier, where most of his friends and comrades lay.
The train paused at a wayside station. He saw in the dusk a
half-finished munition works already abandoned--endless new sidings
full of queer devices--very young soldiers on the platform.
The train moved on again, and he seemed to be moving too. The railway
carriage faded round him into another and a wetter twilight--the
twilight of a dawn in which he had been relieved in the front line by
Mansfield. The cold of filthy water seemed rising round his knees. The
everylasting crackle and swish of machine-gun fire was soothing to his
ears. The dawn showed bleary in the sky; he would have spoken to the
ghost of Mansfield, but another voice spoke in his dream: “Medal! ’ow
can they give a medal to the ’ole world--we’ll just get a bit o’ brass
with ‘I was there’ on it!”--the voice of his servant, Jerry, speaking
to Sergeant Strood. And Skene awoke, awoke to gathering shadows in a
railway carriage. The draught was whistling round his knees, the train
moved with a rattle and a swish.
But that dreaming moment had brought its comfort. He saw things in
proportion. After all, four years and more of service and discipline,
of risk and discomfort--that was something.
He had gone into the thing neither because he was paid, nor because
he was forced--and that was something. Processions and speeches were
empty show--even the eventual effect on Europe was irrelevant--but deep
within himself he had fulfilled a need, worked out a destiny. In what
an abyss of self-contempt would he now be sunk had he not gone to that
War--he, fit and of age?
That was it--the call had come, and he had answered; surely he had his
reward in: “I was there!”
THE END
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