NO ANSWER
But the grey period for Jim was drawing to a close. To-day it's the man
over the road that tops the bill; to-morrow it's you, as I said before:
and a change of caste was imminent in our friend's performance. One does
not seek these things--they occur; and then they're over, and one waits
for the next. There is no programme laid down, no book of the words
printed. Things just happen--sometimes they lead to a near acquaintance
with iodine, and a kind woman in a grey dress who takes your temperature
and washes your face; and at others to a dinner with much good wine
where the laughter is merry and the revelry great. Of course there are
many other alternatives: you may never reach the hospital--you may never
get the dinner; you may get a cold in the nose, and go to the
Riviera--or you may get a bad corn and get blood-poisoning from using a
rusty jack knife to operate. The caprice of the spirit of Topsy Turvy is
quite wonderful.
For instance, on the very morning that the Staff Officer came back to
his job, and Jim returned to his battalion, his company commander asked
him to go to a general bomb store in a house just up the road, and see
that the men who were working there were getting on all right. The
regiment was for the support trenches that night, and preparing bombs
was the order of the day.
Just as he started to go, a message arrived that the C.O. wished to see
him. So the company commander went instead; and entered the building
just as a German shell came in by another door. By all known laws a man
going over Niagara in an open tub would not willingly have changed
places with him; an 8-inch shell exploding in the same room with you is
apt to be a decisive moment in your career.
But long after the noise and the building had subsided, and from high up
in the air had come a fusillade of small explosions and little puffs of
smoke, where the bombs hurled up from the cellar went off in turn--Jim
perceived his captain coming down the road. He had been hurled through
the wall as it came down, across the road, and had landed intact on a
manure heap. And it was only when he hit the colonel a stunning blow
over the head with a French loaf at lunch time that they found out he
was temporarily as mad as a hatter. So they got him away in an ambulance
and Jim took over the company. As I say--things just happen.
That night they moved up into support trenches--up that dirty, muddy
road with the cryptic notices posted at various places: "Do not loiter
here," "This cross-road is dangerous," "Shelled frequently," etc. And at
length they came to the rise which overlooks Loos and found they were to
live in the original German front line--now our support trench. They
were for the front line in the near future--but at present their job was
work on this support trench and clearing up the battlefield near them.
Now this war is an impersonal sort of thing taking it all the way round.
Those who stand in front trenches and blaze away at advancing Huns are
not, I think, actuated by personal fury against the men they kill. You
may pick out a fat one perhaps with a red beard and feel a little
satisfaction when you kill him because his face offends you, but you
don't really feel any individual animosity towards him. One gets so used
to death on a large scale that it almost ceases to affect one. An
isolated man lying dead and twisted by the road, where one doesn't
expect to find him, moves one infinitely more than a wholesale
slaughter. The thing is too vast, too overpowering for a man's brain to
realise.
* * * * *
But of all the things which one may be called on to do, the clearing of
a battlefield after an advance brings home most poignantly the tragedy
of war. You see the individual then, not the mass. Every silent figure
lying sprawled in fantastic attitude, every huddled group, every
distorted face tells a story.
Here is an R.A.M.C. orderly crouching over a man lying on a stretcher.
The man had been wounded--a splint is on his leg, while the dressing is
still in the orderly's hand. Then just as the orderly was at work, the
end came for both in a shrapnel shell, and the tableau remains,
horribly, terribly like a tableau at some amateur theatricals.
Here are a group of men caught by the fire of the machine-gun in the
corner, to which even now a dead Hun is chained--riddled,
unrecognisable.
Here is an officer lying on his back, his knees doubled up, a revolver
gripped in one hand, a weighted stick in the other. His face is black,
so death was instantaneous. Out of the officer's pocket a letter
protrudes--a letter to his wife. Perhaps he anticipated death before he
started, for it was written the night before the advance--who knows?
And it is when, in the soft half-light of the moon, one walks among
these silent remnants, and no sound breaks the stillness save the noise
of the shovels where men are digging their graves; when the guns are
silent and only an occasional burst of rifle fire comes from away in
front, where the great green flares go silently up into the night, that
for a moment the human side comes home to one. One realises that though
monster guns and minenwerfer and strange scientific devices be the paper
money of this war, now as ever the standard coinage--the bed-rock gold
of barter--is still man's life. The guns count much--but the man counts
more.
Take out his letter carefully--it will be posted later. Scratch him a
grave, there's work to be done--much work, so hurry. His name has been
sent in to headquarters--there's no time to waste. Easy, lads,
easy--that's right--cover him up. A party of you over there and get on
with that horse--_there's no time to waste_....
But somewhere in England a telegraph boy comes whistling up the drive,
and the woman catches her breath. With fingers that tremble she takes
the buff envelope--with fearful eyes she opens the flimsy paper.
Superbly she draws herself up--"There is no answer...."
Lady, you are right. There is no answer, no answer this side of the
Great Divide. Just now--with your aching eyes fixed on _his_ chair you
face your God, and ask Why? He knows, dear woman, He knows, and in time
it will all be clear--the why and the wherefore. Surely it must be so.
But just now it's Hell, isn't it? You know so little: you couldn't help
him at the end; he had to go into the Deep Waters alone. With the
shrapnel screaming overhead he lies at peace, while above him it still
goes on--the work of life and death: the work that brooks no delay. He
is part of the Price....