For a second, Peter Jameson hesitated. Brain, still numb from the
shell-kick, conveyed no message to faltering limbs. Then that fine sixth
sense which is the inmost core of courage seemed to whisper: “And your
men!”
“I think I’d better be getting back, sir,” said Peter. . . .
Pain stabbed at him as he hauled himself up the mud-chute to open air.
At the top of the chute, he lay gasping. A stretcher-bearer helped him
to his feet. “Thanks.” Peter leaned heavily on his stick. He began to
cough; stood there, racking his throat out. . . .
The barrage had shifted to the left; seemed to be slackening. Only every
now and then, a near crash shook the ground. Peter stopped coughing.
Fear departed from his soul. The brain cleared. He knew himself very
weak. But he knew, also, knew definitely, that he was not yet beaten;
that enough will-power for the ultimate effort still remained in him.
“The last ounce,” he thought again, “the last absolute ounce,” and
started to toil back through the mud. In his absence, riflemen had
packed the trench; he edged past them; found his own men.
“How much longer, sir?” asked Finlayson.
“About half-an-hour.”
They waited in silence. All about them, infantrymen were grousing. “Wish
we wasn’t in the supports.” “Supports always get it wust.” “Must have
had a lot of casualties already.” . . . Five walking wounded, ticketed
tunics buttoned over strapped arms, accountrements abandoned, puttees
cut away, came toiling towards them through the mud; edged past them;
disappeared wordless round the traverse. . . . Shelling increased. . . .
Some one on their left cried, “Stretcher-bearers. Hi!
Stretcher-bearers.” . . . They saw a body on a stretcher heaved up out
of the trench; saw two men bearing it steadily along the open ground
behind. . . . More shells came, but the bearers trudged on. . . . A
fleet of British ’planes sailed across Trônes Wood, stayed circling
above them. . . .
“Ten minutes more,” said Peter Jameson. He looked over the parapet
towards the brown cleft below. He turned to his two signallers, repeated
his instructions: “I shall make for that shell-hole the moment our
barrage starts.”
Again, he took his place at the parapet; glued his eyes to the ground in
front.
“Five minutes more,” he called over his shoulder. . . . “Three minutes.”
. . . “Two.” . . . “One.” . . .
Finlayson and Mucksweat heard a vast rush as of wings above their heads;
saw Peter scramble over the parapet; followed him blind in a mad
stumbling run. The three dropped in a panting heap to earth.
“So far, so good,” gasped Peter, extricating his head from Finlayson’s
legs. He hauled himself on his elbows up the side of the crater; looked
over. A hundred yards in front of him, a row of helmets marked the front
line. Beyond these billowed a roaring wall of flame-spangled smoke.
Above the wall, red and green rockets soared despairingly. Shells
whistled over him towards the wall—a stream of shells—ceaseless. And
always the wall billowed higher, blurring the rockets. Now, the helmets
rose from the ground, became men—a long line of men who walked slowly
towards the flaming wall, lay down at foot of it. Sunk-road, chalk-pits,
desert beyond, skyline—everything had disappeared. Peter could see only
the wall, the wall and the prone figures at foot of it.
Suddenly, flame died out in the wall: the prone figures rose; flung
themselves forward into the smoke. . . . From behind the smoke came the
sharp reports of bombs bursting, little whickers of machine-gun
fire. . . . The wall thinned, revealing the sunk road, glimmer of
chalk-mounds, of shapes struggling with shapes. . . . But beyond the
struggling shapes, other shapes moved forward with the moving
smoke. . . .
Peter called over his shoulder, “Come on, you chaps, we’ve got ’em.” The
three rose to their feet, dashed downhill. As they ran, they were
unconscious of everything except the one strong desire to get forward.
All about them, from the edges of Trônes Wood, from Arrowhead Copse,
other men were running; men moved by that same desire; men equally
unconscious, in that one moment of supreme elation, of the enemy barrage
that screamed over their heads, plunged to ground in bolts of flame
behind them. . . .
Finlayson reached the old front line first; stumbled as he leaped; fell
headlong. Peter and Mucksweat, slowing their pace, scrambled
deliberately across; helped the Bombardier to his feet. For a second
they looked back. “You were right about that shell-hole, sir,” gasped
Finlayson. “They’re knocking hell out of the supports.”
“Come on,” said Peter. “They’ll be barraging the sunk road next.” . . .
He set off at a swift walk; scrambled up a bank; dropped down, the pair
of them at his heels.
In the sodden roadway, between the bloodstained chalk, the killers were
still at work; ferreting the Beast with bombs, braining him as he
crawled from his hole. The place stank of cordite, of blood and the
flesh of men. But the three gunners had not been sent out to kill. . . .
Peter, scrambling first up the chalk-bank, saw a shattered roadway
ahead; caught a glimpse of two gigantic chalk-mounds, of the barrage
beyond; heard a terrific explosion overhead; felt a clanging
hammer-stroke on his helmet, knew frightful pain at his heart; knew a
great darkness—a darkness through which he sank to merciful
oblivion. . . .
Mucksweat and Finlayson, blown back by the shell, looked at each other
for one panting second. Then they scrambled up the bank.
Peter had fallen forward on his face, left arm doubled beneath him.
There was a great dent as from a hammer in his helmet. They turned him
over. He gave no sign of life. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
“Is he dead?” asked Mucksweat.
Half-a-dozen blood-mad infantrymen surged past.
“Dead or alive, we can’t leave him here”—Bombardier Finlayson’s eyes
took one quick glance at the chalk mounds, Bombardier Finlayson’s mind
took one quick decision. “Can you carry him, Muckie?”
“Carry him?”—Mucksweat laughed—“carry ten of him.”
“Take him to those dug-outs then. Do you understand? There’ll be some
cover there. And wait till I come back.”
“What are you going to do, Bombardier?”
“Me? I’m going to do his job, of course. What the hell do you think
we’re here for—a picnic.”
Lips set, eyes resolute, Finlayson set off down the shattered road
towards the disappearing infantrymen. Mucksweat bent down; wound his two
bare arms round Peter’s body; picked him up like a child; and started
for cover. . . .
§ 5
For an hour and three quarters, “B” battery’s guns had been
thudding—steady fire—one round per gun per minute. For an hour and
three quarters Cresswell and Charlie Henry had been walking from shelter
to quivering shelter—asking always the same question—getting always a
different reply.
“What’s your range, Sergeant.”
“Four seven hundred, sir—Four seven fifty, sir—Four eight hundred,
sir.”
Sandiland, watch at wrist, firing-schedule in hand, stood at the mouth
of the telephone-pit. Every five minutes he called across to his
subalterns, “What are you at now?” referred their answers to the paper
in his hand; ticked off the ranges.
There was no excitement at the battery; and, for the moment, no danger.
Work proceeded automatically.
Right and left of the battery, in the valleys behind and even among the
woods in front, other batteries were firing in the same orderly
unhurried manner. The great voice of massed pieces rolled and echoed in
continuous thunder to the observers in the sausage-balloons behind them,
to the observers in the high-circling ’planes above. Only the makers of
that thunder were deaf to it, isolated, cut off by the thudding of their
own labours from all other sound. Steadfastly they worked—eye and
hands, ears and mind concentrated on the leaping guns.
But Sandiland’s mind was not with his guns!
“Any news?” he called down into the telephone-pit.
“Message just coming through from Headquarters, sir”—a pause—“Have we
heard from Mr. Jameson yet?”
“Tell them, No. And get on to Blenkinsop again.”
“Blenkinsop’s on, sir.” Sandiland stepped down into the pit—a square
tin-roofed cave scooped from the soil; took the instrument from his
telephonist. “Captain Sandiland speaking. Are they still barraging
Trônes Wood?”
“Yes, sir. Firing’s very heavy. Five-nines, I think, sir.”
The battery-commander returned to his guns. What could have happened to
Peter? Charrington, Liaison Officer on the right, had already reported
twice; “B” battery’s signallers had overheard the messages repeated to
Headquarters: “Infantry had gone over”: “Infantry were in Guillemont.”
Sandiland tried to put away apprehension. P.J. was no fool. P.J. knew
that no message of his could affect the ordered barrage. P.J. would not
risk a runner’s life till he had definite information. And yet,
Sandiland was afraid. His conscience reproached him. He ought to have
made P.J. report sick days ago. If anything happened to P.J. . . .
Sandiland wrenched thought back to his guns.
One fifty three? Already, the figures on the range dials marked six
thousand yards. In another few minutes, they would reach maximum. “Six
one hundred, sir,” called Henry’s voice. “Six one fifty—six two
hundred. . . .”
Undoubtedly, something must have happened to P.J.!
“Six two fifty—six three hundred.” Still the guns lifted. . . .
“Bombardier Finlayson on the ’phone, sir.” The battery commander dived
to his telephone pit as a rabbit dives to its burrow, seized the
instrument.
“Our infantry crossed the Ginchy road at 12:50”—Finlayson’s voice came
so distinct over the wire that Sandiland could almost hear the pant in
it—“and are pushing on. Patrols are going forward to Lousy Wood.”
Sandiland wrote down and checked back the message; said, “Call up the
Adjutant on the other ’phone.” But the instrument at his ear went on.
“Is that Captain Sandiland speaking? This is Bombardier Finlayson, sir.
Mr. Jameson was hit just after the infantry went over. I left him with
Gunner Mucksweat and went on. . . .”
“Mr. Purves speaking, sir.”
Sandiland said, “Wait, Bombardier,” grabbed the second telephone,
repeated Finlayson’s first massage, (“Splendid,” murmured the voice of
Purves) “and I want to speak to the Colonel. . . . Thanks. . . . Is that
you, sir? . . . Jameson’s been hit . . . I don’t know, sir. . . . I’m to
send out another F. O. O. . . . Very good, sir.”
The battery-commander handed back the instrument with a little gesture
of disgust. Technically, of course, Revelsworth was right. They _ought_
to send out another F. O. O. Still, it seemed unnecessary risk of a
valuable life. Whom should he send? . . . He spoke to Finlayson again.
Finlayson had not seen Mr. Jameson since he was hit. Finlayson could not
say if Mr. Jameson were alive or dead. Finlayson had obtained his
information, come straight back with it. Finlayson, too, was in the
right. . . . And the battery-commander thought: “Which is worse? To face
danger oneself or send others into it? There’s the very devil of a
barrage on Trônes Wood, and the sunk road will be hell. Cresswell’s got
a wife and eight kids. Henry’s never been in a show before.”
Then he took a five-franc piece from his pocket; said “Heads Henry.
Tails Cresswell”; and spun the coin in the air.
§ 6
The mind of Peter Jameson, emerging slowly from the dark of
unconsciousness, was aware of pain. Thought followed; then sight.
He was in a dug-out, lying at the foot of deep steps—atop of which
light glimmered. Opposite to him, propped against the wall, sat a
wounded officer—a subaltern of infantry. The subaltern, who was smoking
a cigarette, said: “Hallo. Thought you were dead.” Then he shouted up
the steps: “Hi, you gunner—hi.”
Mucksweat’s voice answered, “Yes, sir. What is it, sir?”
“Your officer isn’t dead. He’s just opened his eyes.”
The huge coal-miner clambered backwards down the steps, bent over Peter;
and Peter spoke to him, vaguely, as men speak in delirium: “My
water-bottle. Do you understand? My water-bottle”—Mucksweat unslung his
own. “No. Not yours. Mine.”
Mucksweat pulled out his clasp-knife—it was impossible to unsling the
bottle without moving the man—cut the straps, uncorked, put the
aluminium neck to Peter’s lips.
The whisky-and-water—a good tumbler-full of which splashed over his
face as he drank—woke Peter to effort. He sat up; looked at his
throbbing bandaged arm; asked where he was.
Mucksweat explained: “You remember they chalk-heaps, sir. Well, we’re
inside one of them. Bombardier said I was to wait here till he come
back. That’s why I was waiting upstairs, sir.”
“Who bandaged this arm of mine?”
“I did, sir.”
“Good lad.” Gradually, Peter’s aching brain pieced the situation
together. He could just remember the scramble out of the sunken road,
the hammer-clang on his helmet. “Where’s the Bombardier gone to?”
“I dunno, sir. He _said_ he was agoing to do your job.”
“Agoing to do your job.” The words acted like a spur on Peter’s dazed
mind. “Do _my_ job”—he echoed—“I’ll see the fellow damned first. Give
me a hand, will you?”
Wonderingly, the coal-miner obeyed; and Peter staggered somehow to his
feet. The dug-out spun round him; his arm hurt abominably; but he was
going to do his job—oh, undoubtedly, he was going to do his job. It
lay, the job he was going to do, somewhere up above—up those damned
steps—blast the steps—there must be millions of them—and the light
atop of them had gone out. . . .
“Better lay him down again,” said the infantry subaltern calmly. “I
expect it’s only a faint.”
He lit a cigarette, looked down at his own legs, both broken by
machine-gun bullets, thought: “They can’t get us away before dark”; and
went to sleep.
Mucksweat, left alone with two unconscious officers, picked up the
smouldering cigarette, put it in his mouth, scratched head
meditatively—and returned to his watch at the stair-head.
§ 7
A torch, flashing in Peter’s face, recalled him to a moment’s
consciousness. A voice asked:
“How are we going to get him up those steps, sir?”
Answered another voice: “Tote him on a blanket if we can find one,
Bombardier.”
Said Peter Jameson: “That’s you, isn’t it, Henry?”
“Yes.”
“Well—all I can say is”—the words were hardly
audible—“that—it’s—damn—sporting—of—you—to—have—come. . . .”
Then he fainted again: leaving Charles Henry, American Citizen, to
puzzle out the exact meaning of the sentence as he had puzzled his way
through the barrages on Trônes Wood.
PART TWENTY-SIX
BROKEN MEN
§ 1
Charlie Tebbits, faithless to all traditions of the building trade, kept
his promised date; and Patricia moved into Sunflowers by the end of
June. She “moved in” without servants or children; assisted only by a
great grenadier of a woman who came from Arlsfield Village just too late
to prepare breakfast and left just too early to prepare dinner. But
Patricia had been homeless eighteen months, long enough to revel even in
the discomforts of home-making—scamped meals, chairs without
loose-covers, curtainless windows, floor-boards minus carpets, workmen
all day and solitude all night.
The more she grew to know this house she had fallen in love with, the
more she fell in love with it. Compared to Lowndes Square, Sunflowers
was tiny—she loved it for its tininess. Sunflowers possessed no second
staircase—she found she had never really approved of second staircases.
Sunflowers had no wine-cellar—she decided wine-cellars inevitably
harboured black-beetles. All through ten unhampered days, she delivered
herself up, hand and brain, to this new infatuation.
Still, infatuation apart, it really was a jolly house; and by the time
that Charlie Tebbits, assisted by Harry Tebbits, old man Tebbits, Miss
Tebbits, and an amazing handyman from Little Arlsfield, had laid
carpets, tacked down linoleum, hung curtains, arranged old furniture and
carried up new; Patricia could honestly look round and say to herself:
“This is just how I planned things the day I first saw it.”
She spent a whole twenty-four hours wandering from the berugged
cream-papered hall into Peter’s little study, (for which Charlie Tebbits
was still making her walnut bookshelves to match Peter’s writing-table),
through the dining-room and the servants’ quarters; up the balustered
dark-blue-carpeted staircase, (stopping always to look out from the
window-seat on the half-landing) to the nurseries, gay with Cecil Aldin
hunting-friezes, with chintz curtains and shiny white furniture; and
from there (giving only a casual glance at the spare room) into her own
bedroom and Peter’s dressing-room—white-papered both, both looking out
across the orchard towards the river.
Her own room, except for the blue carpet saved from the cupidity of M.
Van Woumen, contained no relics of Lowndes Square: the low gray-painted
Empire bedstead of carved wood and basket-work, she had “looted” from
her father’s house in Harley Street; Tebbits’ ingenuity provided
flounced dressing-table to match; artfully enclosed wall-spaces evaded
the difficulties of a wardrobe; the fireplace (as all the fireplaces at
Sunflowers) was of irreproachable white tilework, devoid of unnecessary
brass and iron. But Peter’s dressing-room contained all Peter’s own
familiar furniture—his mahogany bow-fronted wardrobe, his brass
bedstead, the glass-doored wall-case of guns and hunting-crops and
fishing-rods, his collection of hunting prints.
“He must like the place,” she kept saying to herself, “he _will_ like
it.”
For Sunflowers represented—though Patricia would never have admitted
the fact—her last bid for Peter’s love. Their house in Lowndes Square
had been a ready-made residence, full of Peter’s inherited chattels:
entering it, she too had become his chattel—mere Mrs. Jameson. Whereas
Sunflowers was of her own finding, her own creating; the house she,
Patricia, would make “home” for her man against his return from the
wars.
§ 2
Rainy June turned to a glorious July. Patricia found two servants;
engaged a gardener; sent for the children; dismissed their governess;
was “called on” by the vicar and half-a-dozen neighbours—and began to
buy her experience of life on a moderate income in the English
home-counties.
Peter’s wife possessed all the town-dweller’s illusions about living in
“the country”: one took a “little place”—and banished care
automatically; one’s servants smiled and sang about their deft work;
one’s garden grew by itself (“the man does everything, my dear”),
provided vegetables, eggs, fruit and flowers as a department-store
provides groceries; while one wandered about in a floppy hat with a pair
of scissors, or went for long walks in green lanes where one met the
most attractive people—the Squire, the sporting parson, peasant women
who curtsied and farmers’ boys who touched their hats. And in this
paradise—chiefly owing to the honesty of the country-folk as compared
with the rascality of town—one spent literally nothing at all!
Strong in that last belief, Patricia came like a godsend to the hungry
village of Arlsfield: and Arlsfield robbed her as the country mouse robs
the town mouse—with effective simplicity. Roger Fry the gardener,—a
hulking fellow with a sly smile—acted principal go-between. “The
Grounds,” said Roger Fry, “needed a lot of seeing to.” Patricia agreed.
Roger Fry saw to them: he made her a sunk lawn at the foot of the
paddock, near the walnut tree—and pouched a week’s extra wages over the
price of turf; he regravelled the “drive” and extracted 5/-a load
commission from the gravel-supplier; he re-fenced the orchard—on the
same financial basis.
Then she desired chickens—and Roger Fry found them for her, (“ten and
sixpence each, Madam, and the best little lot I’ve seen for a long
time”). Also, Roger Fry arranged with a friend of his for the supply of
chicken-corn—and by a judicious admixture of maize contrived to keep
the four-year-old birds in lay for nearly six weeks.
Grocer, greengrocer (she had arrived too late to plant her summer
vegetables), butcher and baker, ironmonger and laundrywoman—all joined
the league of plunder: keeping back their accounts till such time as
memory would find it impossible to check them.
Still it was a joyous conspiracy, a conspiracy of smiles and “Thank you,
Madams”—and, at the outset, none of the conspirators enjoyed it half so
much as their victim.
For nearly two months Patricia was happy as husbandless woman can be.
She had her disappointments, of course: the servants who made her long
for the efficient Smith of Lowndes Square days, the Vicar’s oleaginous
questing after charity subscriptions, the persistence of callers when
she wanted to be by herself: but these were very minor flies in the
ointment of a sunlit existence. . . .
She began the re-education of her children; finding them hopelessly
backward in everything except parrot-knowledge. She gossiped with old
man Tebbits, who sold her a piglet at the exact market-price of the day,
provided her with milk and butter; but kept shut mouth about the
delinquencies of “the Arlsfielders.” She entertained her father for a
week-end, and her brother Jack—still only a Gunner Captain and rather
disgruntled at having been transferred to a Kitchener battery—for half
his leave. She superintended Fry’s greasing and oiling of the Crossley,
which the Standard Oil Company’s price for petrol had put out of
commission till “after the war”; and explored the country afoot.
She got up at seven and went to bed at ten, living every minute of the
fifteen wonderful hours.
Towards the end of August, Francis Gordon arrived to stay for a week,
while Prout engaged what he called a “female,” and got Glen Cottage
ready for occupation. Patricia had not seen her cousin for two months;
and the first sight of him, stepping carefully down from the hired trap,
shocked her. It was not his physical infirmities she noticed at that
first meeting, but his face. She remembered him a smooth-faced boy, she
saw him now a middle-aged man. His hair had grayed at the temples; his
eyes had lost their laughter. He walked easily enough, using only one
stick; but he no longer held himself upright; his shoulders drooped as
though he carried a burden on them.
She led him to a deep chair in the hall; brought him tea; began to
question him.
“So they invalided you out after all.”
“Yes. I could have got an office-job; but I wouldn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“Frankly, Pat, I don’t know. Somehow or other, I feel done in. It wasn’t
so bad in hospital, you see one had other”—he looked down at his
legs—“cripples to talk to. But London. . . . No, I don’t think I could
stick London. The streets, you know; and getting in and out of tubes.
People jostle one.”
“But what _are_ you going to do?”
“Oh, write, I suppose.”
The last sentence struck Patricia as the most hopeless words she had
ever heard from human lips. She felt desperately sorry—yet furiously
angry with him. She said to herself: “Here is a man who is almost whole.
He has enough money to live on. He has brains. The one thing that he
cares for in the world is literature, there is nothing to prevent
him. . . .”
But at that, Patricia’s anger vanished: for intuition, and her own love
for Peter, told her clearly that “literature” was not the one thing in
the world for which Francis Gordon most cared. She remembered the
photograph incident at Mecklinburgh Square, the postcard she had read
unwittingly at Brighton, his look when she chaffed him about being in
love at the end of her Christmas Eve visit to Endsleigh Gardens. Her
curiosity itched to ask him about this mysterious girl in America. Why
didn’t he marry her? Or was she already married? Wouldn’t she have
anything to do with him? Had they quarrelled? Couldn’t they make it up?
. . .