Mr. Britling read this through, and then his thoughts went back to
Teddy's disappearance and then returned to Hugh. The youngster was right
in the front now, and one had to steel oneself to the possibilities of
the case. Somehow Mr. Britling had not expected to find Hugh so speedily
in the firing line, though he would have been puzzled to find a reason
why this should not have happened. But he found he had to begin the
lesson of stoicism all over again.
He read the letter twice, and then he searched for some indication of
its date. He suspected that letters were sometimes held back....
Four days later this suspicion was confirmed by the arrival of another
letter from Hugh in which he told of his second spell in the trenches.
This time things had been much more lively. They had been heavily
shelled and there had been a German attack. And this time he was writing
to his father, and wrote more freely. He had scribbled in pencil.
"Things are much livelier here than they were. Our guns are getting to
work. They are firing in spells of an hour or so, three or four times a
day, and just when they seem to be leaving off they begin again. The
Germans suddenly got the range of our trenches the day before yesterday,
and begun to pound us with high explosive.... Well, it's trying. You
never seem quite to know when the next bang is coming, and that keeps
your nerves hung up; it seems to tighten your muscles and tire you.
We've done nothing but lie low all day, and I feel as weary as if I had
marched twenty miles. Then 'whop,' one's near you, and there is a flash
and everything flies. It's a mad sort of smash-about. One came much too
close to be pleasant; as near as the old oil jars are from the barn
court door. It bowled me clean over and sent a lot of gravel over me.
When I got up there was twenty yards of trench smashed into a mere hole,
and men lying about, and some of them groaning and one three-quarters
buried. We had to turn to and get them out as well as we could....
"I felt stunned and insensitive; it was well to have something to do....
"Our guns behind felt for the German guns. It was the damnest racket.
Like giant lunatics smashing about amidst colossal pots and pans. They
fired different sorts of shells; stink shells as well as Jack Johnsons,
and though we didn't get much of that at our corner there was a sting of
chlorine in the air all through the afternoon. Most of the stink shells
fell short. We hadn't masks, but we rigged up a sort of protection with
our handkerchiefs. And it didn't amount to very much. It was rather like
the chemistry room after Heinrich and the kids had been mixing things.
Most of the time I was busy helping with the men who had got hurt.
Suddenly there came a lull. Then some one said the Germans were coming,
and I had a glimpse of them.
"You don't look at anything steadily while the guns are going. When a
big gun goes off or a shell bursts anywhere near you, you seem neither
to see nor hear for a moment. You keep on being intermittently stunned.
One sees in a kind of flicker in between the impacts....
"Well, there they were. This time I saw them. They were coming out and
running a little way and dropping, and our shell was bursting among them
and behind them. A lot of it was going too far. I watched what our men
were doing, and poured out a lot of cartridges ready to my hand and
began to blaze away. Half the German attack never came out of their
trench. If they really intended business against us, which I doubt, they
were half-hearted in carrying it out. They didn't show for five
minutes, and they left two or three score men on the ground. Whenever we
saw a man wriggle we were told to fire at him; it might be an unwounded
man trying to crawl back. For a time our guns gave them beans. Then it
was practically over, but about sunset their guns got back at us again,
and the artillery fight went on until it was moonlight. The chaps in our
third company caught it rather badly, and then our guns seemed to find
something and get the upper hand....
"In the night some of our men went out to repair the wire entanglements,
and one man crawled halfway to the enemy trenches to listen. But I had
done my bit for the day, and I was supposed to sleep in the dug-out. I
was far too excited to sleep. All my nerves were jumping about, and my
mind was like a lot of flying fragments flying about very fast....
"They shelled us again next day and our tea dixy was hit; so that we
didn't get any tea....
"I slept thirty hours after I got back here. And now I am slowly
digesting these experiences. Most of our fellows are. My mind and nerves
have been rather bumped and bruised by the shelling, but not so much as
you might think. I feel as though I'd presently not think very much of
it. Some of our men have got the stun of it a lot more than I have. It
gets at the older men more. Everybody says that. The men of over
thirty-five don't recover from a shelling for weeks. They go about--sort
of hesitatingly....
"Life is very primitive here--which doesn't mean that one is getting
down to anything fundamental, but only going back to something immediate
and simple. It's fetching and carrying and getting water and getting
food and going up to the firing line and coming back. One goes on for
weeks, and then one day one finds oneself crying out, 'What is all this
for? When is it to end?' I seemed to have something ahead of me before
this war began, education, science, work, discoveries; all sorts of
things; but it is hard to feel that there is anything ahead of us
here....
"Somehow the last spell in the fire trench has shaken up my mind a lot.
I was getting used to the war before, but now I've got back to my
original amazement at the whole business. I find myself wondering what
we are really up to, why the war began, why we were caught into this
amazing routine. It looks, it feels orderly, methodical, purposeful. Our
officers give us orders and get their orders, and the men back there get
their orders. Everybody is getting orders. Back, I suppose, to Lord
Kitchener. It goes on for weeks with the effect of being quite sane and
intended and the right thing, and then, then suddenly it comes whacking
into one's head, 'But this--this is utterly _mad_!' This going to and
fro and to and fro and to and fro; this monotony which breaks ever and
again into violence--violence that never gets anywhere--is exactly the
life that a lunatic leads. Melancholia and mania.... It's just a
collective obsession--by war. The world is really quite mad. I happen to
be having just one gleam of sanity, that won't last after I have
finished this letter. I suppose when an individual man goes mad and gets
out of the window because he imagines the door is magically impossible,
and dances about in the street without his trousers jabbing at
passers-by with a toasting-fork, he has just the same sombre sense of
unavoidable necessity that we have, all of us, when we go off with our
packs into the trenches....
"It's only by an effort that I can recall how life felt in the spring of
1914. Do you remember Heinrich and his attempt to make a table chart of
the roses, so that we could sit outside the barn and read the names of
all the roses in the barn court? Like the mountain charts they have on
tables in Switzerland. What an inconceivable thing that is now! For all
I know I shot Heinrich the other night. For all I know he is one of the
lumps that we counted after the attack went back.
"It's a queer thing, Daddy, but I have a sort of _seditious_ feeling in
writing things like this. One gets to feel that it is wrong to think.
It's the effect of discipline. Of being part of a machine. Still, I
doubt if I ought to think. If one really looks into things in this
spirit, where is it going to take us? Ortheris--his real name by the by
is Arthur Jewell--hasn't any of these troubles. 'The b----y Germans
butted into Belgium,' he says. 'We've got to 'oof 'em out again. That's
all abart it. Leastways it's all _I_ know.... I don't know nothing about
Serbia, I don't know nothing about anything, except that the Germans got
to stop this sort of gime for Everlasting, Amen.'...
"Sometimes I think he's righter than I am. Sometimes I think he is only
madder."