lights leaping all about him; and when, from the Vermelles road, there
came other men, tramping steadily together, he enjoyed the modulated
voices which asked him: “I say, this is right for Loos, isn’t it? Thanks
so much.”
These voices, when he inquired who they might be, all replied with one
word: “Guards”; and tramped on through the night. . . .
Later, there arrived a car, with a Staff officer who inquired for
Colonel Stark. Him, the doctor directed to a trench covered with a
water-proof sheet: under which, after a moment, showed the light of a
candle. The Staff officer with a “Thanks. Feels like rain,” departed:
but the candle still shone. And after about an hour, another car
arrived, with another Staff officer.
Doctor Carson, seeing blue cigar-smoke curling up against the
candle-glow, thought to himself: “Hello. They’ve woken P.J.”
They had; and Peter, note-book in hand, squatted on his chalk-covered
valise, peering at two maps; copying little red dots from one to the
other. The original map from which Peter copied had been sent from
Beuvry; and the last note in his book read “Report to G.O.C. Guards D.A.
at Le Rutoire farm eleven A. M.”
§ 3
Weasel Stark’s preliminary instructions, given in the candle-lit gloom
of a dirty trench at 3 o’clock in the morning, confined themselves to
few words. The problem consisted firstly, secondly and lastly in
efficient communication: Peter, awake at dawn, got busy on it. As
primary difficulty, he encountered Purves.
Said Purves yawning: “As I understand things, you and the Colonel are
going off to Le Rutoire. I remain here as Adjutant to Major Lethbridge,
who will command the Brigade. Communication will of course be arranged
by Divisional Signals.”
Growled Peter, shivering in the misty dawn: “For God’s sake forget
‘Training Manual Signallers.’ How much wire have we got on the telephone
cart?”
Purves sent for Corporal Waller. Corporal Waller said he thought they
had four and a half miles of “D 3.” Peter pulled out his map: showed the
Corporal what he wanted done. Purves sulked in the background.
At five-fifteen, Seabright and Pirbright, carrying a red drum between
them, set out to find the Third Brigade. At ten minutes to six, a very
sleepy battery commander of that unit protested down the new wire that
he had no instructions as to taking orders from the Adjutant of another
Brigade. At five minutes to six Weasel Stark—overhearing the long range
wrangle—came to the phone and explained the situation at some length of
blasphemy. Throughout breakfast, eaten squatting on damp clay, similar
conversations took place.
At ten-thirty, Corporal Waller again telephoned. He had found the Second
and First Brigades; was tapping into their wire. Also, he had nearly run
out of wire. . . .
“See that he gets some more,” rasped the Weasel to Purves. “You and I
must be off, P.J.”
They made their way on foot, through sparse traffic, down a sodden road,
towards the huge gutted farm. As they passed under the great gateway
into the crowded courtyard, something exploded with an earth-shaking
concussion.
“Six-inch How,” said the Weasel.
A very tall young subaltern, with carefully up-curled moustache and tiny
bronze buttons on his loose tunic, came up; saluted the Colonel; and
said, “Are you Colonel Stark, sir? . . . The Artillery General won’t be
here till two o’clock.” Then, to Peter, “Hallo, Jameson, haven’t seen
you since you left. . . . Come and have a drink before lunch, won’t you,
sir?”
Peter introduced “Sandiland of Impey’s” to his Colonel; and the young
Guardee led downstairs to the foul cellar they had visited on the night
of the twenty-fifth. It was no longer a charnel-house. Down the middle
of it, a long table, spread with a white cloth, testified the imminence
of lunch. About the table, talking quietly, stood other tall men, all in
identical tunics, all with the same carefully up-curled moustaches, the
same modulated voices.
They called each other by nicknames: “I say, Bunny, what about those
smoke-bombs?” “My dear Trousers, don’t panic.” “Where’s the General?”
“Is Muggins about?”
Sandiland produced gin and vermouth. Talk grew general.
Peter did not take long to recognize the peculiar social atmosphere. It
was merely glorified Eton. Everybody trying their best to assume that
facts didn’t exist; that emotions didn’t exist; that they knew little
and cared less about the job they had at heart. It was over twelve years
since Peter had lived in that particular atmosphere: but he sniffed it
gratefully. His voice changed to it. He said, “Oh, really. Well, of
course, _I_ don’t know much about Gunnery,” knowing perfectly well that
he knew considerably more about it than Sandiland—and, “It’s been very
quiet round the batteries”—feeling that nobody had ever been quite so
heavily shelled as the Fourth Southdown Brigade.
The Weasel, who happened to have been at Winchester before going on to
Woolwich, felt suddenly and immensely superior to everybody on earth.
For, on that point, all old English “public-school” men feel alike:
which is what makes them at times so insufferable to outsiders. If a
foreigner had asked any of the men in that cellar _why_ he was fighting,
the foreigner would have met with an incredulous lift of the eyebrow:
that particular lift of the eyebrow which no foreigner understands; but
which conveys—to one who can interpret—“My dear fellow, I was at Eton”
(or Winchester, or Haileybury, or Harrow, or Radley or a hundred other
foundations of that classical tradition which literary pacifists
despise) “and _one does, don’t you know, one just does_.”
Luckily, there is no “education” at English “public-schools.” They
merely train boys to be _men_.
§ 4
The Infantry Brigadier, arriving about mid-day, declared to his
Brigade-Major:
“My dear fellow, the whole countryside looks like Hampstead Heath. Have
some one go out and clean it up, please. I really can’t have men
wandering about _all_ over the skyline.”
The Brigade Major, strolling across the room, said: “I say, Bunny, I
wish you’d take a peep round and see what we’re to do about these
fellows wandering about on the skyline.”
Bunny disappeared and did not return till after lunch.
Nobody in all that farm seemed in the least degree excited about
anything. Work was not _done—it proceeded_. Stark and Peter, returning
to the outer air, watched the procedure. By now, their own communication
orderlies, servants and telephonists had arrived. It began to rain,
vaguely, unpleasantly. . . .
At one minute to two, a limousine, mud-spattered from roof to axle, tore
down the road; pulled up slithering before the gateway. From the car,
sprang a tall aquiline eye-glassed man; who said, “Hello, Stark. Sorry
to be late. Look here”; drew a very dirty map from his pocket; and swept
one finger over a blue semi-circle of it. Stark, drawing an identical
map from his pocket, copied the semi-circle; asked: “Any particular
instructions?”
“No.” The aquiline one was obviously working under extreme pressure.
“You’ll get those from Trench later. This isn’t as much fun as
pig-sticking, is it?” He leapt back into his car; whirled off down the
road.
Two minutes afterwards Peter—note-book on knee—was writing from orders
Stark’s dictation. . . .
§ 5
The remainder of the afternoon resolved itself into a constant
dispatching of orderlies, a constant running in and out to the jingling
clicking telephone station.
At half-past four, the aquiline one returned. Peter, instructed to
report communication completed, found him closeted with a big vaguely
seen man in the semi-dusk of yet another dug-out. At five o’clock, these
two removed themselves.
Said the Weasel: “What sort of a dug-out was the one in which you found
him?”
Said Peter: “Pretty good, sir.”
Ordered the Weasel: “Then we’d better occupy it.”
§ 6
In that flimsy tin-roofed tunnel, hidden away in mud between brick
walls, glass-doored at each end, perpetually illumined with guttering
candles, Peter spent three days and three nights. Incredible things
happened in that tunnel: equally incredible things in the farm above.
Our own howitzers shook it till the glass-doors rattled to splinters:
shells, screaming down out of nowhere, missed it by inches, plunging
visibly through the shattered roof of the farm, extinguishing candles,
shattering telephone wires. Men came to it—all sorts and conditions of
men: orderlies and Generals, Colonels and battery commanders. Guardsmen,
dizzy with shell-fumes, staggered down its steps, were given
gas-capsules, departed. Murchison the Brigade Major came to it,
sojourned with them two days. A weary officer of the Third Southdown
Brigade, who had been shelled out of his position with the loss of two
guns and twenty men, dropped down on its muddy floor and slept like a
dog, cap under head, in his spurred field-boots.
And always, Peter—in the dark forward compartment—sat by the telephone
operator. Men were blown to bits above—(there were one hundred and
twenty casualties in Le Rutoire during those three days): orderlies,
sent out on cycles, failed to report, were never again heard of: men
died at the batteries even as he spoke to the batteries: the farm
rocked: lights went out: shelling stopped: shelling began again. But
always, Peter Jameson was trying to explain over a wire which either
carried four different voices or went absolutely dead, that Colonel
Stark wanted fire directed here, that the Coldstreams reported two
field-guns 200 yards South West of Metallurgique tower firing on G 24,
that the Bois Hugo was full of M.G’s, that if Major Lethbridge couldn’t
fire with A Battery, because A battery had three guns out of action, he
must fire with B. . . .
The world-famous attack on Hill 70, when the Guards went over the top,
(“By the right,” as the unemotional Pettigrew reported afterwards, “just
as if there hadn’t been a Boche within miles of them”) resolved itself
for P.J. into a jumble of buzzes, translated to scribbled message-forms,
a pile of scribbled message-forms, translated to buzzes. (For by that
time, speech on the majority of the sodden lines had become
impossible.). . .
By late afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when the most incredible
occurrence of all took place, Peter—still sitting at the
telephone,—was too weary to appreciate it.
It had been a baddish day. Fosse Eight seemed by the accuracy of the
hostile shell-fire, to have fallen at last. Major Lethbridge reported
twelve guns of his sixteen now out of action, the remaining four being
pushed up by hand owing to buffer troubles. Third Brigade wires refused
to act. They had run out of whisky. A five-nine shell had missed the
bomb-store wherein the servants and the orderlies slept by two feet;
killing a horse and wounding three men. Murchison slept. The Colonel,
just returned from visiting the Infantry Brigadier in his dug-out across
the road, had found the Brigadier absent; tripped in a sodden trench;
looked like a scare-crow; was swearing like a fish-fag. . . . At which
precise moment, “Royalty” appeared in the tunnel!
“Royalty,” represented by a jolly fair-haired youngster in a darkish
rain-coat, followed the missing Infantry Brigadier past the telephone
shelf where Peter sat, into the rear part of the tunnel. Murchison,
miraculously awaking, and the Weasel, with his tunic off, stood up and
said “Sir.”
Peter, who imagined them to be greeting the Brigadier, found a
dark-moustached young man beside him.
Whispered the dark-moustached young man, taking Peter’s knowledge for
granted: “I’d rather be a Tommy in the front line than have to look
after _him_. Once the Guards are in the trenches, we can’t keep _him_
away from them. _He_ ran away from G.H.Q. this morning, and _he’s_
insisted on tramping all round the front line. _He_ enjoys it. I don’t!
It isn’t right, you know. It really isn’t. _He_ might remember that
_he’s_ the heir to the throne. Don’t you think so?”
Peter, realizing the jolly fair-haired youngster to be the Prince of
Wales, whispered agreement. The conference in rear of the tunnel broke
up.
“Thank goodness _he’s_ going,” whispered Peter’s companion. “This job
will turn my hair gray.”
The three passed out through the shattered glass-door; up mud-steps into
the farm. . . . Very far away, Peter heard a low whistle, a whistle that
rose to a high-pitched scream, seemed to surge up the skies.
Interminably they waited; penned in the dusk. Impotent! Down upon them,
faster and faster, shrieking and howling, rushed noise. . . . They were
deaf. . . . The tunnel staggered. . . . Light disappeared. . . . Glass
tinkled about them. . . . Things thudded from walls to floor. . . .
Noise stopped. . . . Peter heard the Weasel’s voice: “Good God, I hope
that didn’t get him”: saw a shadow stumble up the steps. They
waited—interminably. Murchison’s voice called: “It’s all right,
Colonel.” . . .
“Will you please speak to Mr. Purves, sir?” asked the unconcerned
operator at the telephone.
§ 7
And the next night, first of October, they were relieved. The thing
seemed impossible. They had always lived in the tunnel; would continue
to live there till the end of time. The big man in khaki who sat talking
to them had no corporeal existence. He was a joke—an elaborate joke.
“Of course, Stark, I shan’t occupy _these_ headquarters.” Of course he
wouldn’t. Why should he? Nobody except themselves. . . .
“Hallo,” laughed a voice, “your Adjutant’s gone to sleep.”
“I’m not asleep, sir.” Peter, very indignant, started up from the
Weasel’s berth on which he had been sitting; dived back to his own part
of the tunnel. The two Colonels heard his voice down the telephone:
“Very well Corporal. If the Brigade’s gone, you can disconnect. Are the
horses ready? Just coming up the road. Thanks. . . .”
And then, for the first time in his life, Peter knew fear. Real crazy
fear. It was midnight. Pitch-dark. Not a shell falling. But a shell
might fall. If it did, what would happen to Little Willie? Little Willie
was trotting up that damned road. If anything happened to Little Willie.
If Jelks hadn’t fed Little Willie properly. Little Willie was the finest
horse. . . .
“Your coat, sir, and your spurs. I’ve packed your belt in the valise.
And there’s only two cigars left, sir?”
Driver Garton, smiling, proffered one of them.
“Got a match?” asked Peter.
§ 8
The batteries of the 4th Brigade had been amazingly fortunate; got away
almost without a casualty.
Laughed the Colonel, as he and Peter trotted side by side through cool
rain: “Well, P.J., you won’t forget Le Rutoire in a hurry.”
Peter turned in his saddle, looked back towards the farm: “I should
think not,” he said, and added, “Though I suppose that dug-out must have
been pretty safe.”
“Safe?” Stark laughed again. “Why, man, it wouldn’t have stopped a
direct hit from a pip-squeak.” . . .
They passed the cross-roads of Corons de Rutoire. “Francis!” thought
Peter suddenly. Through the blurr of sleep, memory came back, clear-cut,
horribly personal. He must find out what had happened to Francis. Then
he fell fast asleep in his saddle; woke with a start to find Little
Willie at walk through shadowy traffic.
“It’s a pity that attack didn’t succeed,” the Colonel was saying. “If it
had, we might have got a brace of medals between us. As it is, if you
live to be as old as Methuselah you’ll never see a worse show than the
first two days of the battle of Loos.”
§ 9
Next morning, as they rode, Brigade behind them, through the streets of
Béthune, Peter fumbled in his breeches pocket; found a coin; stretched
it down to the boy trotting at Little Willie’s head; took the proffered
paper; spread it on his saddle-peak.
“Any news?” asked the Weasel.
For answer, Peter held up the staring headlines.
“Great British Victory,” they read. “Triumph of Staff Work. Hill 70
Ours. Official.”
* * * * *
Peter ripped the paper to shreds; flung it in the gutter.
PART EIGHTEEN
RESPITE
§ 1
Francis Gordon was not killed at the disaster of Loos. A
stretcher-bearer wheeled him, unconscious of whistling shrapnel, to the
casualty-clearing station at Vermelles; and thence, still unconscious,
he came by Ford ambulance and Red Cross train and yet another ambulance
to a great bare hospital at Rouen.
For three days he knew nothing. Life ebbed and flowed back again in
waves as of morphia: pain throbbed and receded through the torn body it
could not awaken. On the fourth day, very dimly, he grew conscious of
his suffering self. It seemed to him that he lay in a four-poster bed,
round which figures moved vaguely. He heard one of the figures speaking:
“It’s time for his injection”; felt something prick his fore-arm;
drowsed off again into unconsciousness.
Next morning he awoke to pain. Some one was questioning him. The some
one had a board in her hand; wanted to know who he was. (For secret
service men wear no “identity discs”; and Nurse Prothero had been
ordered to find out the name of the patient). He told her: “Gordon,
Francis, Captain, Intelligence Corps.” “Religion?” she asked. “Church of
England, sister.”
The nurse, a comely middle-aged creature, smiled down at him; and he
slept. But gradually, the morphia ebbed away from him. Pain called to
consciousness. . . .
It took his drugged mind three whole days to grasp its new realities. He
had been wounded, badly wounded. (How, he could not yet remember.) His
left thigh-bone was shattered; his right foot badly smashed. The thing
above him—which made the bed seem like a four-poster—was a
“super-structure”: a frame-work with a pulley arrangement whereby his
left leg, a mass of bandages, could be hauled up and down for dressing.
Both left leg and right foot were “septic”: in the wounds, had been
inserted indiarubber-tubing—Carrel-Dakin tubes—to drain them. The
changing of these tubes caused him constant pain.
The screens round his bed prevented him from seeing the other patients
in the ward. But he knew them to be many; and, lying awake at night, he
could hear the orderlies shuffling round in their list slippers: their
“Are you awake, sir?” sounded an unceasing chorus to his dreams.
For the alert clean-shaven doctor had only reduced, not stopped, the
morphia: and Francis had many dreams. They came as the morphia-wave
surged over him in comfortable pain-killing warmth; receded as the wave
ebbed, leaving him prey to suffering. And always, in his dreams, he saw
Beatrice, a gracious figure vignetted in silver radiance against the
background of his thought. It seemed as though her spirit watched over
him, tender, infinitely solicitous. . . .
He had been in hospital eight days before it was borne in on his dazed
intellect that he must write to her. They fought him, sisters and
doctor, for three weary hours. “He was too ill to write letters,” said
the doctor. “Let me write for you,” begged Sister Prothero. But Francis
insisted. They could neither persuade nor coerce him. He would write a
letter; write it with his own hand. Lying there, feverish, broken, not
even certain of the exact words his lips uttered, he forced them to his
will. At last, they yielded—for they knew his chance of life still hung
by a hair: and an orderly brought him paper, an envelope, an indelible
pencil.
The sister propped him with pillows. As she lifted him, he felt his head
turning, spinning. . . . Yet he wrote, tracing each word with pain. A
letter of lies, of glorious lies. He was in hospital, wounded—only
slightly wounded, she must understand—in a few days, he would be about
again—would write her a long letter—meanwhile, he sent his “very kind
regards.” He folded the sheet himself; put it in the envelope; wrote the
address; signed in the left-hand bottom corner. . . . Then he fainted;
and, for a week, doctor and sisters blamed themselves for their
yielding, fearful lest the man should die.
As a “case,” he puzzled them. The wounds were healing, slowly, very
slowly. Thinking to cheer him, they told him of his progress. It
appeared to have no interest for him. He was content to drowze away the
hours: watching his leg move up and down for its dressing; listening to
the murmur of the ward. For he had lived in a year, this broken man who
lay there so quietly, a thousand aeons of terror. He had walked, unarmed
and alone, through countless caverns of fear. Now, fear had departed;
and the mind took its revenge for long coercion, refused to function.
The mind knew that its body would not die; and with that knowledge, was
content. . . .
They pronounced him “out of danger.” Nurse Prothero brought him many
letters. He read them languidly. It appeared that Peter had been moving
heaven and earth to find out if he lived: Patricia wrote asking him if
he wanted books, cigarettes: Prout wrote and sent on a package of
press-cuttings: his name had been in the “Roll of Honour”: the literary
press of England noticed him, praised him, printed his photograph in
their columns. But Francis Gordon cared for none of these old things. He
wanted Beatrice!
He used to lie there, hour after hour, screened from the world, thinking
of her. His mind went back to days before the War, and he saw himself as
he had been: the tango-dancing champagne-bibbing egotist, very proud of
his little literary achievements, neither good nor bad, merely a
drifter. He saw himself, ruined financially, miserable. And he met her
again, in his dreams; sailed with her, once again, the tropic seas of
their delight.
Beatrice, the Woman Denied! Surely that God who had once denied her to
him, calling him unworthy, would not refuse her to him now. Surely, now,
he might say to himself, in clean pride: “I have done my Work; paid full
price for any happiness this world can offer me?” . . .
And then, five weeks after he had written, came her cable: “Am anxious,”
she wired, “have you told me the truth about your wounds.” He spread the
cablegram on his bed; read it again and again. Intuition, sounder than
judgment, told him the truth. To this girl, five thousand miles removed
from the cataclysm of Europe, he stood for “heroism”—a vague figure
dowered with all the virtues of war. It needed only a word, a _weak_
word, to make her love him.
The mere thought was a flaring temptation. Why not? If ever man had
earned woman. . . .
When the doctor made his midday visit, Francis—looking down at his
swathed legs—asked one straight question.
“You mean,” said the doctor, “is there any reason, any physical reason,
why you should not marry?”
“Exactly, doctor.”
“None whatever.”
“But I shall always be more or less a cripple?”
“You will walk with a limp—a slight limp. That isn’t being a cripple.”
Alone, he fought the problem out again: and decision came to him,
clear-cut, obvious. She was twenty, rich, beautiful: he, a cripple—and
a pauper cripple into the bargain. Leaving God out of the question, to
take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman. . . .
Chivalrous, stubborn, a fool if you will but no weakling, he traced the
answer to her cablegram: “Much better thanks writing.”
* * * * *
In the middle of December, 1915, they shipped him—still a
“stretcher-case”—to England.
§ 2
In those early days, the Endsleigh Gardens Hospital for officers was a
place of easy discipline, comely V.A.D. nurses and frolicsome patients.
Francis, still unable to walk, could not be frolicsome: but they gave
him a room to himself, a tiny room, linoleum-carpeted, high up on the
sixth floor; and in a funny introspective way, he was happy.
The “faithful Prout,” overjoyed at his master’s return, insinuated
himself somehow or other into the Hospital; brought meals; ran errands
as of yore. A new doctor substituted “B.I.P.”—a saffron ointment of
bismuth, iodoform and petroleum—for the Carrel-Dakin treatment; and
pain departed. His kit arrived from France. He began to read,
omnivorously, old books and new: dreamed even of working. But no poem
came, only vague inspirations which refused to materialize. Beatrice
wrote—a chatty letter; was answered in the same strain. And, of course,
there were visitors, flowers, cigarettes, well-wishes from admirers.
For, among a limited circle, Francis enjoyed “celebrity.” . . .