PART TWO 5 page

“Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are!”

He said “your men”, instead of “our” or even “the” men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command—and was likely to be to-morrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a rag-time collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.

The Sergeant flushed with pleasure. “Hit was,” he said, “good to 'ave prise from Regular officers.” Tietjens said that he was not a Regular. The Sergeant stammered:

“Hain't you, sir, a Ranker? The men all thinks you are a promoted Ranker.”

No, Tietjens said, he was not a promoted Ranker. He added, after consideration, that he was a militia-man. The men would have, by the will of chance, to put up with his leadership for at least that day. They might as well feel as good about it as they could—as settled in their stomachs! It certainly made a difference that the men should feel assured about their officers: what exact difference there was no knowing. This crowd was not going to get any satisfaction out of being led by a “gentleman”. They did not know what a gentleman was: a quite un-feudal crowd. Mostly Derby men. Small drapers, rate-collectors' clerks, gas-inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen.

It was another tradition that was gone. Still, they desired the companionship of elder, heavier men who had certain knowledges. A militiaman probably filled the bill! Well, he was that, officially!

He glanced aside and upwards at the whitewash cockscomb. He regarded it carefully. And with amusement. He knew what it was that had made his mind take the particular turn it had insisted on taking… The picks going in the dark under the H.Q. dugout in the Casse-noisette section. The men called it Crackerjack.

He had been all his life familiar with the idea of picks going in the dark, underground. There is no North Country man who is not. All through that country, if you awake at night you hear the sound, and always it appears supernatural. You know it is the miners, at the pit-face, hundreds and hundreds of feet down.

But just because it was familiar it was familiarly rather dreadful. Haunting. And the silence had come at a bad moment. After a perfect hell of noise; after so much of noise that he had been forced to ascend the slippery clay stairs of the dug-out… And heaven knew if there was one thing that on account of his heavy-breathing chest he loathed, it was slippery clay… he had been forced to pant up those slippery stairs… His chest had been much worse, then… two months ago!

Curiosity had forced him up. And no doubt FEAR. The large battle fear; not the constant little, haunting misgivings. God knew! Curiosity or fear. In terrific noise; noise like the rushing up of innumerable noises determined not to be late, whilst the earth rocks or bumps or quakes or protests, you cannot be very coherent about your thoughts. So it might have been cool curiosity or it might have been sheer panic at the thought of being buried alive in that dug-out, its mouth sealed up. Anyhow, he had gone up from the dug-out where in his capacity of second-incommand, detested as an interloper by his C.O., he had sat ignominiously in that idleness of the second-in-command that it is in the power of the C.O. to inflict. He was to sit there till the C.O. dropped dead: then, however much the C.O. might detest him, to step into his shoes. Nothing the C.O. could do could stop that. In the meantime, as long as the C.O. existed the second-in-command must be idle; he would be given nothing to do. For fear he got kudos!

Tietjens flattered himself that he cared nothing about kudos. He was still Tietjens of Groby; no man could give him anything, no man could take anything from him. He flattered himself that he in no way feared death, pain, dishonour, the after-death, feared very little disease—except for choking sensations!… But his Colonel got in on him.

He had no disagreeable feelings, thinking of the Colonel. A good boy, as boys go: perfectly warranted in hating his second-in-command… There are positions like that! But the fellow got in on him. He shut him up in that reeling cellar. And, of course, you might lose control of your mind in a reeling cellar where you cannot hear your thoughts. If you cannot hear your thoughts how the hell are you going to tell what your thoughts are doing?

You couldn't hear. There was an orderly with fever or shell-shock or something—a rather favourite orderly of the orderly room—asleep on a pile of rugs. Earlier in the night Orderly Room had asked permission to dump the boy in there because he was making such a beastly row in his sleep that they could not hear themselves speak and they had a lot of paper work to do. They could not tell what had happened to the boy, whom they liked. The acting Sergeant-Major thought he must have got at some methylated spirits.

Immediately, that strafe had begun. The boy had lain, his face to the light of the lamp, on his pile of rugs—army blankets, that is to say… A very blond boy's face, contorted in the strong light, shrieking—positively shrieking obscenities at the flame. But with his eyes shut. And two minutes after that strafe had begun you could see his lips move, that was all.

Well, he, Tietjens, had gone up. Curiosity or fear? In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet… Swept your brain off its feet. Someone else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul. Waiting for its C.O. to be squashed flat by the direct hit of a four point two before you got control again.

There was nothing to see; mad lights whirled over the black heavens. He moved along the mud of the trench. It amazed him to find that it was raining. In torrents. You imagined that the heavenly powers in decency suspended their activities at such moments. But there was positively lightning. They didn't! A Verey light or something extinguished that: not very efficient lightning, really. Just at that moment he fell on his nose at an angle of forty-five degrees against some squashed earth where, as he remembered, the parapet had been revetted. The trench had been squashed in. Level with the outside ground. A pair of boots emerged from the pile of mud. How the deuce did the fellow get into that position?

Broadside on to the hostilities in progress!… But naturally, he had been running along the trench when that stuff buried him. Clean buried, anyhow. The obliging Verey light showed to Tietjens, just level with his left hand, a number of small smoking fragments. The white smoke ran level with the ground in a stiff breeze. Other little patches of smoke added themselves quickly. The Verey light went out. Things were coming over. Something hit his foot; the heel of his boot. Not unpleasantly, a smarting feeling as if his sole had been slapped.

It suggested itself to him, under all the noise, that there being no parapet there… He got back into the trench towards the dug-out, skating in the sticky mud. The duck-boards were completely sunk in it. In the whole affair it was the slippery mud he hated most. Again a Verey light obliged, but the trench being deep there was nothing to see except the backside of a man. Tietjens said:

“If he's wounded… Even if he's dead one ought to pull him down… And get the Victoria Cross!”

The figure slid down into the trench. Speedily, with drill-movements, engrossed, it crammed two clips of cartridges into a rifle correctly held at the loading angle. In a rift of the noise, like a crack in the wall of a house, it remarked:

“Can't reload lying up there, sir. Mud gets into your magazine.” He became again merely the sitting portion of a man, presenting to view the only part of him that was not caked with mud. The Verey light faded. Another reinforced the blinking effect. From just overhead.

Round the next traverse after the mouth of their dug-out a rapt face of a tiny subaltern, gazing upwards at a Verey illumination, with an elbow on an equality of the trench and the forearm pointing upwards suggested—the rapt face suggested The Soul's Awakening!… In another rift in the sound the voice of the tiny subaltern stated that he had to economise the Verey cartridges. The battalion was very short. At the same time it was difficult to time them so as to keep the lights going… This seemed fantastic! The Huns were just coming over.

With the finger of his upward pointing hand the tiny subaltern pulled the trigger of his upward-pointing pistol. A second later more brilliant illumination descended from above. The subaltern pointed the clumsy pistol to the ground in the considerable physical effort—for such a tiny person!—to reload the large implement. A very gallant child—name of Aranjuez. Maltese, or Portuguese, or Levantine—in origin.

The pointing of the pistol downwards revealed that he had practically coiled around his little feet, a collection of tubular, dead, khaki limbs. It didn't need any rift in the sound to make you understand that his loader had been killed on him… By signs and removing his pistol from his grasp Tietjens made the subaltern—he was only two days out from England—understand that he had better go and get a drink and some bearers for the man who might not be dead.

He was, however. When they removed him a little to make room for Tietjens' immensely larger boots his arms just flopped in the mud, the tin hat that covered the face, to the sky. Like a lay figure, but a little less stiff. Not yet cold.

Tietjens became like a solitary statue of the Bard of Avon, the shelf for his elbow being rather low. Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horseshoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra's crescendo is comic. Crescendo!… Crescendo! CRRRRRESC… The Hero must be coming! He didn't!

Still like Shakespeare contemplating the creation of, say, Cordelia, Tietjens leaned against his shelf. From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home. When one jammed he took another. He found himself keeping up a fairly steady illumination.

The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun. He came over, all legs and arms going, like a catamount; struck the face of the parados, fell into the trench on the dead body, with his hands to his eyes, sprang up again and danced. With heavy deliberation Tietjens drew his great trench-knife rather than his revolver. Why? The butcher-instinct? Or trying to think himself with the Exmoor stag-hounds? The man's shoulders had come down heavily on him as he had rebounded from the parados-face. He felt outraged. Watching that performing Hun he held the knife pointed and tried to think of the German of Hands Up. He imagined it to be Hoch die Hände!! He looked for a nice spot in the Hun's side.

His excursion into a foreign tongue proved supererogatory. The German threw his arms abroad, his—considerably mashed!—face to the sky.

Always dramatic, Cousin Fritz! Too dramatic, really.

He fell, crumpling, into his untidy boots. Nasty boots, all crumpled too, up the calves! But he didn't say Hoch der Kaiser, or Deutschland über alles, or anything valedictory.

Tietjens fired another light upwards and filled in another charge, then down on his hams in the mud he squatted over the German's head, the fingers of both hands under the head. He could feel the great groans thrill his fingers. He let go and felt tentatively for his brandy flask.

But there was a muddy group round the traverse end. The noise reduced itself to half. It was bearers for the corpse. And the absurdly wee Aranjuez and a new loader… In those days they had not been so short of men! Shouts were coming along the trench. No doubt other Huns were in.

Noise reduced itself to a third. A bumpy diminuendo. Bumpy! Sacks of coal continued to fall down the stairs with a regular cadence; more irregularly, Bloody Mary, who was just behind the trench, or seemed like it, shook the whole house as you might say and there were other naval howitzers or something, somewhere.

Tietjens said to the bearers:

“Take the Hun first. He's alive. Our man's dead.” He was quite remarkably dead. He hadn't, Tietjens had observed, when he bent over the German, really got what you might call a head, though there was something in its place. What had done that?

Aranjuez, taking his place beside the trench-face, said:

“Damn cool you were, sir. Damn cool. I never saw a knife drawn so slow!” They had watched the Hun do the danse du ventre! The poor beggar had had rifles and the young feller's revolver turned on him all the time. They would probably have shot him some more but for the fear of hitting Tietjens. Half-a-dozen Germans had jumped into that sector of trenches in various places. As mad as march hares!… That fellow had been shot through both eyes, a fact that seemed to fill the little Aranjuez with singular horror. He said he would go mad if he thought he would be blinded, because there was a girl in the teashop at Bailleul, and a fellow called Spofforth of the Wiltshires would get her if his, Aranjuez's, beauty was spoiled. He positively whimpered at the thought, and then gave the information that this was considered to be a false alarm: he meant a feigned attack to draw off troops from somewhere else where the real attempt was being made. There must be pretty good hell going on somewhere else, then.

It looked like that. For almost immediately all the guns had fallen silent except for one or two that bumped and grumped… It had all been just for fun, then!

Well, they were damn near Bailleul now. They would be driven past it in a day or two. On the way to the Channel. Aranjuez would have to hurry to see his girl. The little devil! He had overdrawn his confounded little account over his girl, and Tietjens had had to guarantee his overdraft—which he could not afford to do. Now the little wretch would probably overdraw still more—and Tietjens would have to guarantee still more of an overdraft.

But that night, when Tietjens had gone down into the black silence of his own particular branch of a cellar—they really had been in wine-cellars at that date, cellars stretching for hundreds of yards under chalk with strata of clay which made the mud so particularly sticky and offensive—he had found the sound of the pickaxes beneath his fleabag almost unbearable. They were probably our own men. Obviously they were our own men. But it had not made much difference, for, of course, if they were there they would be an attraction, and the Germans might just as well be below them, countermining.

His nerves had been put in a bad way by that rotten strafe that had been just for fun. He knew his nerves were in a bad way because he had a ghostly visit from 09 Morgan, a fellow whose head had been smashed, as it were, on his, Tietjens', own hands, just after Tietjens had refused him home leave to go and get killed by a prize-fighter who had taken up with his, 09 Morgan's, wife. It was complicated but Tietjens wished that fellows who wished to fall on him when they were stopping things would choose to stop things with something else than their heads. That wretched Hun dropping on his shoulder, when, by the laws of war, he ought to have been running back to his own lines, had given him, Tietjens, a jar that still shook his whole body. And, of course, a shock. The fellow had looked something positively Apocalyptic, his whitey-grey arms and legs spread abroad… And it had been an imbecile affair, with no basis of real fighting…

That thin surge of whitey-grey objects of whom not more than a dozen had reached the line—Tietjens knew that, because, with a melodramatically drawn revolver and the fellows who would have been really better employed carrying away the unfortunate Hun who had had in consequence to wait half an hour before being attended to—with those fellows loaded up with Mills bombs like people carrying pears, he had dodged, revolver first, round half-a-dozen traverses, and in quite enough of remains of gas to make his lungs unpleasant… Like a child playing a game of “I spy!” Just like that… But only to come on several lots of Tommies standing round unfortunate objects who were either trembling with fear and wet and sweat, or panting with their nice little run…

This surge then of whitey-grey objects, sacrificed for fun, was intended… was intended ulti… ultimo… then… A voice, just under his camp-bed, said:

“Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze…” As who should say: “Bring a candle for the Captain…” Just like that! A dream!

It hadn't been as considerable a shock as you might have thought to a man just dozing off. Not really as bad as the falling dream: but quite as awakening… His mind had resumed that sentence.

The handful of Germans who had reached the trench, had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called Strategy. Probably. Stupid!… It was, of course, just like German spooks to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibelungen-like. Dwarfs probably!… They had sent over that thin waft of men under a blessed lot of barrage and stuff… A lot! a whole lot! It had been quite an artillery strafe. Ten thousand shells as like as not. Then, somewhere up the line they had probably made a demonstration in force. Great bodies of men, an immense surge. And twenty to thirty thousand shells. Very likely some miles of esplanade, as it were, with the sea battering against it. And only a demonstration in force…

It could not be real fighting. They had not been ready for their spring advance.

It had been meant to impress somebody imbecile… Somebody imbecile in Wallachia, or Sofia, or Asia Minor. Or Whitehall, very likely. Or the White House!… Perhaps they had killed a lot of Yankees—to make themselves Transatlantic popular. There were no doubt, by then, whole American Army Corps in the line somewhere. By then! Poor devils, coming so late into such an accentuated hell. Damnably accentuated… The sound of even that little bit of fun had been portentously more awful than even quite a big show say in '15. It was better to have been in then and got used to it… If it hadn't broken you, just by duration…

Might be to impress anybody… But who was going to be impressed? Of course, our legislators with the stewed-pear brains running about the ignoble corridors with cokebrize floors and mahogany doors… might be impressed. You must not rhyme!… Or, of course, our own legislators might have been trying a nice little demonstration in force, equally idiotic somewhere else, to impress someone just as unlikely to be impressed… This, then, would be the answer! But no one ever would be impressed again. We all had each other's measures. So it was just wearisome…

It was remarkably quiet in that thick darkness. Down below, the picks continued their sinister confidences in each other's ears… It was really like that. Like children in the corner of a schoolroom whispering nasty comments about their masters, one to the other… Girls, for choice… Chop, chop, chop, a pick whispered. Chop? another asked in an undertone. The first said Chopchopchop. Then Chup… And a silence of irregular duration… Like what happens when you listen to typewriting and the young woman has to stop to put in another page…

Nice young women with typewriters in Whitehall had very likely taken from dictation, on hot-pressed, square sheets with embossed royal arms, the plan for that very strafe… Because, obviously, it might have been dictated from Whitehall almost as directly as from Unter den Linden. We might have been making a demonstration in force on the Dwolologda in order to get the Huns to make a counter-demonstration in Flanders. Hoping poor old Puffles would get it in the neck. For they were trying still to smash poor old General Puffles and stop the single command… They might very well be hoping that our losses through the counter-demonstration would be so heavy that the Country would cry out for the evacuation of the Western Front… If they could get half-a-million of us killed perhaps the Country might… They, no doubt, thought it worth trying. But it was wearisome: those fellows in Whitehall never learned. Any more than Brother Boche…

Nice to be in poor old Puffles' army. Nice but wearisome… Nice girls with typewriters in well-ventilated offices. Did they still put paper cuffs on to keep their sleeves from ink? He would ask Valen… Valen… It was warm and still… On such a night…

“Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!” A voice from under his camp bed! He imagined that the Hauptmann spook must be myopic: short-sightedly examining a tamping fuze… If they used tamping fuzes or if that was what they called them in the army!

He could not see the face or the spectacles of the Hauptmann any more than he could see the faces of his men. Not through his flea-bag and shins! They were packed in the tunnel; whitish-grey, tubular agglomerations… Large! Like the maggots that are eaten by Australian natives… Fear possessed him!

He sat up in his flea-bag, dripping with icy sweat.

“By Jove, I'm for it!” he said. He imagined that his brain was going: he was mad and seeing himself go mad. He cast about in his mind for some subject about which to think so that he could prove to himself that he had not gone mad.

II

The key-bugle remarked with singular distinction to the dawn:

dy

I know a Lad fair kind

and

Was never face

so mind

please my

y

A sudden waft of pleasure at the seventeenth-century air that the tones gave to the landscape went all over Tietjens… Herrick and Purcell!… Or perhaps it was a modern imitation, Good enough. He asked:

“What the devil's that row, Sergeant?”

The Sergeant disappeared behind the muddied sacking curtain. There was a guard-room in there. The key-bugle said:

Fair kind…

and

Fair Fair Fair

kind…

and… and… and

It might be two hundred yards off along the trenches. Astonishing pleasure came to him from that seventeenth-century air and the remembrance of those exact, quiet words… Or perhaps he had not got them right. Nevertheless, they were exact and quiet. As efficient working beneath the soul as the picks of miners in the dark.

The Sergeant returned with the obvious information that it was 011 Griffiths practising on the cornet. Captain McKechnie ad promised to ear im after breakfast n recommend im to the Divisional Follies to play at the concert tonight, if e like im.

Tietjens said:

“Well, I hope Captain McKechnie likes him!”

He hoped McKechnie, with his mad eyes and his pestilential accent, would like that fellow. That fellow spread seventeenth-century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun's rays were beginning to flood a yellow wash. Then, might the seventeenth century save the fellow's life, for his good taste! For his life would probably be saved. He, Tietjens, would give him a pass back to Division to get ready for the concert. So he would be out of the strafe… Probably none of them would be alive after the strafe that Brigade reported to be coming in… Twenty-seven minutes, by now! Three hundred and twenty-eight fighting men against… Say a Division. Any preposterous number… Well, the seventeeth century might as well save one man!

What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the Silurist?… Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!… By Jove, it was that!… Old Campion flashing like a popinjay in the scarlet and gilt of the Major-General, had quoted that in the base camp, years ago. Or was it months? Or wasn't it: “But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariots hurrying near,” that he had quoted?

Anyhow, not bad for an old General!

He wondered what had become of that elegant collection of light yellow, scarlet and gilt… Somehow he always thought of Campion as in light yellow, rather than khaki, so much did he radiate light… Campion and his, Tietjens', wife, radiating light together—she in a golden gown!

Campion was about due in these latitudes. It was astonishing that he had not turned up before. But poor old Puffles with his abominably weakened Army had done too jolly well to be replaced. Even at the request of the Minister whot hated him. Good for him!

It occurred to him that if he… call it “stopped one” that day, Campion would probably marry his, Tietjens', widow… Sylvia in crepe. With perhaps a little white about it!

The cornet—obviously it was not a key-bugle—remarked:

: her pass by…

ing

I did but view

and then stopped to reflect. After a moment it added meditatively:

. her…

And . .

now . .

I . .

love . till

I die!

That would scarcely refer to Sylvia… Still, perhaps in crepe, with a touch of white, passing by, very tall… Say, in a seventeenth century street…

The only satisfactory age in England!… Yet what chance had it to-day? Or, still more, to-morrow? In the sense that the age of, say, Shakespeare had a chance. Or Pericles! or Augustus!

Heaven knew, we did not want a preposterous drumbeating such as the Elizabethans produced—and received. Like lions at a fair… But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows, slowly creeping plough-lands moving up the slopes?… Still, the land remains…

The land remains… It remains!… At that same moment the dawn was wetly revealing; over there in George Herbert's parish… What was it called?… What the devil was its name? Oh, Hell!… Between Salisbury and Wilton… The tiny church… But he refused to consider the plough-lands, the heavy groves, the slow highroad above the church that the dawn was at that moment wetly revealing—until he could remember that name… He refused to consider that, probably even to-day, that land ran to… produced the stock of… Anglican sainthood. The quiet thing!

But until he could remember the name he would consider nothing…

He said:

“Are those damned Mills bombs coming?”

The Sergeant said:

“In ten minutes they'll be ere, sir. HAY Cumpny had just telephoned that they were coming in now.”

It was almost a disappointment: in an hour or so, without bombs, they might all have been done with. As quiet as the seventeenth century: in heaven… The beastly bombs would have to explode before that, now! They might, in consequence, survive… Then what was he, Tietjens, going to do! Take orders! It was thinkable…

He said:

“Those bloody imbeciles of Huns are coming over in an hour's time, Brigade says. Get the beastly bombs served out, but keep enough in store to serve as an emergency ration if we should want to advance… Say a third. For C and D Companies… Tell the Adjutant I'm going along all the trenches and I want the Assistant-Adjutant, Mr Aranjuez, and Orderly-Corporal Colley to come with me… As soon as the bombs come for certain!… I don't want the men to think they've got to stop a Hun rush without bombs… They're due to begin their barrage in fourteen minutes, but they won't really come over without a hell of a lot of preparation… I don't know how Brigade knows all this!”

The name Bemerton suddenly came on to his tongue. Yes, Bemerton, Bemerton, Bemerton was George Herbert's parsonage. Bemerton, outside Salisbury… The cradle of the race as far as our race was worth thinking about. He imagined himself standing up on a little hill, a lean contemplative parson, looking at the land sloping down to Salisbury spire. A large, clumsily bound seventeenth-century testament, Greek, beneath his elbow… Imagine standing up on a hill! It was the unthinkable thing there!

The Sergeant was lamenting, a little wearily, that the Huns were coming.

“Hi did think them bleeding 'uns, 'xcuse me, sir, wasn' per'aps coming this morning… Give us a rest an' a chance to clear up a bit…” He had the tone of a resigned schoolboy saying that the Head might have given the school a holiday on the Queen's birthday. But what the devil did that man think about his approaching dissolution?

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 580