to know, but from business habit he had already possessed himself of
the essentials. He did not like the way the thing was shaping. He
knew only too well what happened in the army. Some individual being,
besides a number on a pay roll, a human creature, would do something
quite natural, perhaps rather useful, something which a mile or two
farther on, in the trenches, would be worth, and might occasionally
gain, the Military Medal. This business of breaking down a bit of wood
and plaster, to shelter mules, had it occurred a little farther on, had
it been a matter of making a machine-gun emplacement in an emergency,
would have earned praise. It showed just that sort of initiative one
wanted in War-time, and which was none too easy to get from an army
of respectable civilians. But at the same time, in billets, there
was another set of rules just as important, which in their essence
discouraged initiative and reduced the soldier to a mere automaton. The
otherwise excellent thing which he did broke those rules. That again
did not matter much, unless it was brought into accidental prominence
by colliding with some other event or function--this Maire and his
dignity for instance, would play the very devil, make a mountain out of
a molehill, such was the perversity of things. Fascinated against his
better judgment which told him “The less you know about the business,
the better,” he found himself asking:
“What was this man like, Mademoiselle?”
There was no answer, and he looked up. She had left him, gone into the
back kitchen to some job of her own. She had left him as though the War
were some expensive hobby of his that she really could not be bothered
with any longer. On hearing his voice she returned and he repeated his
question. He never forgot the answer.
“Like--but he was like all the others!”
“You couldn’t pick him out in a crowd?”
“Perhaps. But it would be difficult. He was about as big as you, not
very fat, he had eyes and hair like you or anyone else.”
“You didn’t, of course, hear his name or number?”
“They called him ‘Nobby.’ It was his name, but they call every one
‘Nobby.’ His number was 6494. I saw it on his valise.”
“On his pack?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You have told me all I want.” In his heart
he feared she had told him much too much, but she had gone on with her
work. He rose to go, but passing the dark entry of the back kitchen,
he stopped, as though to avoid a shell. He thought he saw a headless
figure, but it was only a shirt which Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had
flung over a line before putting it through the wringer. He went out.
She did not accompany him. She was busy, no doubt.
He had to walk to the main road, but once there, found no difficulty in
“jumping” a lorry that took him back to Divisional Head-quarters. On
the steps of the Town Hall he crossed the A.P.M. It was very late for
that functionary to be about. He had not even changed into “slacks.”
“Hello, young feller, you got back then?”
“Yes, sir.” Dormer rather wanted to say, “No, sir, I’m not here, I’m at
the farm where you left me.”
The A.P.M. passed on, but turned to call out: “No bridge to-night.
We’re on the move!”
So it seemed. The interior of the old building was in confusion. The
Quartermaster-Sergeant was burning orders, schedules, rolls and parade
states of the Corps they were leaving. Signallers were packing their
apparatus, batmen were folding beds and stuffing valises. Policemen
were galvanized into a momentary activity.
To Dormer it was the old, old lesson of the War. Never do anything,
it is always too late. He had been bound, by a careful civilian
conscience, to try to get to the bottom of the matter. He might just as
well have torn it up and let it take its chance. No, the Vanderlyndens
would never let it rest until they got some sort of satisfaction. The
Mayor and the French Mission and Heaven knows who else would have
something to say. He wrote a brief but careful report, and sent the
thing off to an authority at Boulogne who dealt with such matters.
* * * * *
The weeks that followed were full of education for Dormer’s detached,
civilian mind. Accustomed to be part of a battalion, almost a close
family circle of known faces and habits, then associated with the
staff of a division that stuck in one place, he had never before seen
an army, and that army almost a nation, on the move. Under his eyes,
partly by his effort, fifteen thousand English-speaking males, with
the proper number of animals and vehicles, impedimenta, movable or
fixed, had got into trains, and got out of them again, and marched
or been conveyed to a place where Dormer had to take leave of all
preconceived notions of life.
No-Man’s-Land, with trenches beside it, he was familiar with, but here
were miles of had-been No-Man’s-Land, grassless, houseless, ploughed
into brown undulations like waves of the sea by the barrages that had
fallen upon it; covered with tents and huts, divided by wandering
rivers of mud or dust, which had been at some distant time, weeks
before, roads. Into this had poured, like the division to which he was
attached, forty other divisions, always in motion, always flowing from
the railhead behind, up to the guns in front, shedding half the human
material of which they were composed, and ebbing back to railhead to go
elsewhere.
He came to rest in a tiny dug-out on a hillside of loose chalk, which
he shared with a signal officer, and past which, at all hours of the
day and night, there passed men, men, men, mules, men, guns, men,
mules, limbers, men, men, men.
At least this is how they appeared to him. Forced by Nature to sleep
for some of the hours of darkness, and forced by the Germans to be
still for all the clearest of the daylight, it was at the spells of
dusk and dawn that he became busiest, and that infernal procession was
ever before his eyes. It was endless. It was hopeless. By no means
could his prim middle-class mind get to like or admire anything so far
from the defined comfort and unvarying security to which he belonged
and to which he longed to return. It was useless. With the precision
of a machine, that procession was duplicated by another moving in the
opposite direction. Lorries, ambulances, stretchers, men, men, guns,
limbers, men, men, men. The raw material went up. The finished article
came back. Dormer and his companion and their like, over twenty miles
of line, sorted and sifted and kept the stream in motion.
That companion of his was not the least of his grievances. The fellow
was no Dormer, he was opposite by name and nature. His name was
Kavanagh, and one of the meagre comforts Dormer got was by thinking
of him as a d----d Irishman. He was, or had been going to be, a
schoolmaster, and next to nature (or nationality), the worst thing
about him was he would talk. And he would _not_ keep his hands still.
Two things that Dormer most gravely disapproved of, and which he
attributed in equal shares to lack of experience of the world, and too
much signalling.
His talk was such tripe, too! He never lost a moment. He started first
thing in the morning. All the traffic that was going up forward was
gone. The earth was empty, save for anti-aircraft guns pop-popping at
planes high in the Italian blue. Dormer had shaved and breakfasted and
hoped to catch up some of the sleep he had lost during the night. But
would that fellow allow that? No. Listen to him now, under the tiny
lean-to they had contrived, by the dug-out steps, for washing purposes.
He was--reciting--would one call it?
“The last tattoo is beating, boys,
The pickets are fast retreating, boys,
Let every man
Fill up his can
And drink to our next merry meeting, boys!”
“Do you call that poetry?”
“No.”
This was rather awkward. Dormer had intended a snub. Not caring for
poetry himself, he had tried to take a high line. He went on lamely:
“Oh! What do you call it then?”
“A most amazing picture of the mentality of 1815. Compare it with that
of 1915. In that old war of ours against the French, we swore, we
drank, we conquered. What do you think that same fellow would have to
write about us to-day?”
“He wouldn’t,” put in Dormer, without avail.
“Something like this:
“‘’Z day is fast approaching, boys,
In gas-drill we want coaching, boys,
Our iron ration
Will soon be in fashion.’
What rhymes to coaching?”
“How should I know?”
“Joking apart, Dormer!” (As if Dormer had been joking.) “Do you catch
the impulse of the slogan? Of course, iron rations and gas helmets make
a much more efficient soldier than drums and bayonets and rum, but the
zest is all gone!”
Dormer did not reply; a belated party of engineers of some special
service were passing up the road, and from where he lay in the dug-out
he could see khaki-covered bodies upon dusty legs, but no heads, the
beam of the entrance was too low. Suddenly he said:
“Did you ever dream that the army was like a giant without a head?”
“What did you say?”
Good gracious, what had he said? He replied, “Oh, nothing,” and bit his
lips. It must be want of sleep. Fortunately Kavanagh did not hear. He
was going on with his poetry.
“The Colonel, so gaily prancing, boys,
Has a wonderful way of advancing, boys,
Sings out so large
Fix bayonets and cha-a-a-rge,
It sets all the Frenchmen a-dancing, boys!
“What days they must have been, Dormer! You ought to have been a
Colonel. Can’t you see yourself on a big brown horse, gaily prancing?
There ought to be a school for gaiety, just as there is for bayonet
fighting and bombing. Can’t you imagine yourself in a shako, like
a top hat, with the brim in front only, glazed, with whacking great
numerals?”
Dormer wanted to say: “You’ve got a marvellous imagination!” which
would have been intended as an unfavourable criticism. But the words
stuck on his lips. Instead he said:
“It’s all very well. You don’t seem to see the serious part of all
this--waste!”
“Waste, my dear fellow!” And to Dormer the harsh, cheerful voice had
all the officious familiarity of a starling, gibing at one from an
apple tree. “Waste is not serious. It is nature’s oldest joke. It used
to be called Chaos. From it we came. Back to it we shall go. It will
be called Immortality. The Graves Commission will give it a number, a
signboard, and a place on the map, but it will be Immortality none the
less. From Titans to tight ’uns, ‘each in his narrow grave.’”
“Oh, chuck it,” said Dormer, disgusted and having no memories of that
quotation. “You’ve evidently never been in charge of a burying party!”
“I have. I did twelve months in the line, as a platoon commander. How
long did you do that?”
“Twelve months about!”
“I believe you, where thousands wouldn’t. Twelve months was about the
limit. In twelve months, the average Infantry subaltern got a job, or
got a blighty! I know all about it!”
“Then you ought to know better than to speak so. It’s not a joke!”
“My dear Dormer, if it were not a grim joke it would be utterly
unbearable.”
“I disagree entirely. It’s that point of view that we are suffering
from so much. You don’t seem to see that this army is not an army
of soldiers. It is an army of civilians enlisted under a definite
contract. They aren’t here for fun.”
“Oh, come, Dormer, don’t you believe in enjoying the War?”
“I believe in getting it done.”
“You never will, in that frame of mind.”
“Oh, shan’t I? What would happen if I didn’t see that the right people
get to the right place, with the right orders and right supplies,
including you and your blessed flagwaggers?”
“Nothing to what will happen if the troops once begin to regard the
show as a matter of business! You haven’t got a shako and a big brown
horse, but you must play up, as if you had!”
“What rot you talk. I have a tin hat because it will stand shrapnel
better than a shako. I have mules because they stand the life better
than a horse?”
“Yes, but do you admire your tin hat? Do you really care for mules!”
Something made Dormer say in spite of himself:
“I did once come across a man who cared!”
“There, what did I tell you. He was winning the War!”
(“Whatever did I tell him that for?” Dormer asked himself vexedly. “A
nice song he’ll make of it.”) But he only said:
“You’re all wrong, as usual. He did nothing of the sort. He just made a
row in billets!”
“Quite right too. Most of ’em deserve a row!”
“Possibly, but he went the wrong way to work!”
“Ah, that depends!”
(Irritating brute!)
“No, it doesn’t. Were you ever at Ypres?”
“Was I not. I was hit at Hooge stables, and had to walk nearly a couple
of miles to get to a dressing station!”
“Well, then, you remember, in the back billets, a place called the
‘Spanish Farm’?”
“Don’t I just. Great big old house, with a moat, and pasture fore and
aft.”
What a way to put it!
“Well, this chap I’m telling you of, was billeted there. He was
attached to a Trench Mortar Battery. He was in charge of the mules. He
didn’t talk a lot of rot about it, as you suggest he should. One of his
mules was wounded and the other sick. He broke down the front of the
shrine at the corner of the pasture to get a bit of shelter for them!”
The effect of this recital was not what Dormer expected.
“That was an unspeakably shocking thing to do, worse than losing any
number of mules!”
“I suppose you’re a Catholic?”
“Yes, I am!”
“I thought as much. Well, I’m not, nor was this driver I’m telling you
about. He just hated the waste and destruction of it all.”
“So he destroyed something more precious and permanent.”
“He thought a live mule was better than a dead saint.”
“He was wrong!”
And then the fellow shut up, got quite sulky. Dormer was delighted
with his prowess in argument, waited a moment, turned on his side, and
slept, as only men can who live in the open air, in continual danger of
their lives, and who lose the greater portion of the night in ceaseless
activity.
* * * * *
When his servant woke him, with tea and orders and the nightly
lists of traffic and stores, it was a wonderful golden and green
sunset, tremulous with the evening “hate.” The purple shadows were
just sufficiently long to admit of getting the wounded back, and
the road was filled with ambulances, whirring and grinding as they
stopped, backed, and restarted, while a steady punctual crash, once a
minute, showed that the Bosche were shelling the road or one of the
innumerable camps or dumps along it, in the neighbourhood. Amid all
this clamour, Kavanagh was not silenced, but recited at the top of
his voice, and Dormer had a suspicion that the real reason was that
it helped to keep down the nervousness that grew on men, as the years
of the War rolled on, and the probability of being hit increased.
Especially as, far overhead, the planes that circled and swooped like
a swarm of gleaming flies, were attracting considerable anti-aircraft
fire, and all round, big jagged bits were coming to earth with a noise
almost echoing that of the ambulances.
Dormer’s tidy mind was soon called into action. Some wounded who had
died on the way to the dressing station, had been laid out beside the
road as the ambulances had enough to do without carrying corpses ten
miles. He went to make sure the M.O. had arranged for a burial party,
as he had the strongest belief that casualties lying about were bad for
the morale of the troops. When he got back to the dug-out, Kavanagh was
“going on,” as he bent over a map of the extensions of the divisional
cable lines, like a crow on a gate.
“See those chaps, Dormer?”
“Quis procul hinc--the legends writ
The--er--Picard grave is far away,
Quis ante diem periit
Sed miles, sed pro patria.”
“Do you believe in pronouncing Latin like Julius Cæsar or like Jones
Minor?”
“I don’t believe in it at all. Pure waste of time!”
“Dormer, you are a Utilitarian!”
“Have it your own way so long as you get that cable line of yours
sited. I’ve got parties coming up to-morrow to dig it in!”
“I shall be ready for them. Think of all that language, and language is
only codified thought, buried in the ground, Dormer!”
“I have all the thinking I want over all the men buried in the ground.
We’re losing far too many!”
The “victory” of the Somme had been a saddening experience for Dormer.
“That shows how wrong you are. We are mortal. We perish. But our words
will live.”
“Rot! Do you mean to say that ‘825 Brigade relieve you to-morrow Nth.
Div. Ack, ack, ack’ will live! Why should it? It’ll be superseded in
four days. Who wants to perpetuate it?”
“I disagree with you, Dormer, I really do. Here we are at the great
crisis of our lives, of the life of European Civilization perhaps. Some
trumpery order you or I transmit may mean in reality ‘Civilization is
defeated, Barbarism has won!’ or it may mean, I hope, ‘Lift up your
eyes unto the hills from whence----’”
“I wish you wouldn’t joke about the Bible!”
“I’m not joking, and you’ll find it out before long. Men will fight so
long as they’ve got something to fight about!”
“Well, they have. They want to get home. They’ll fight fast enough
about that.”
“Not they. That isn’t the thing to make ’em fight. It’s more likely to
make ’em run away. They want an idea.”
“They’ve had enough ideas, I should think. I seem to remember the walls
covered with posters, with an idea a-piece.”
“Those ideas were much too superficial and temporary. They want to feel
that they are something, or that they do something so important that it
doesn’t matter whether they live or die!”
“That’s all wrong. It does matter. This War will be won by the side
that has most men and most stuff left.”
“Nonsense. It will be won by the side that has the most faith.”
“Oh, well, you go and have faith in your cable line. I’ve got to have
it in these working parties.”
It was now dusk enough for the main body of troops to get on the
move. The broad valley below was in ultramarine shadow, the round
shoulders of the down touched with lemon-coloured afterglow. Up the
drift of chalk dust that represented where the road had once been,
an insignificant parish road from one little village to another, but
now the main traffic artery of an Army Corps, there came pouring the
ceaseless stream, men, men, men, limbers, men, mules, guns, men.
The longer he looked at them, the more certain he became that he was
right. Not merely the specialists in mechanics, engineers, ordnance,
signals, gunners, but the mere infantry had taken months to train, and
could be knocked out in a moment. The problem, of course, was to save
them up until the moment at which they could produce the maximum effect.
How docile they were. Platoon for this, platoon for that, section of
engineers, then a machine-gun company. Then rations, then limbers,
wagons, hand-carts full of every conceivable kind of implement or
material. Very soon he was obliged to stand in the middle of the
road, with the stream of traffic going up, before him, and the stream
of traffic coming back, behind, so that in addition to checking and
directing one lot he had to keep an eye on the other to see that they
did not begin to smoke until they were well down the side of the
hill. Gradually the darkness thickened, and the crowd thinned, and
the thunder of the front died down. At length he was left with only a
belated hurrying limber or two, or ambulance, sent back for the third
or fourth time to clear the accumulation of casualties. At last he felt
justified in getting into his bunk and shutting his eyes.
Thank goodness that fellow wasn’t back. He, Dormer, would be asleep,
and would not hear him. He counted the khaki shoulders and dusty wheels
that went round and round beneath his eyelids, until he went off.
Unfortunately for that particular _malaise_ which the War occasioned to
his precise and town-bred spirit, that was not his last sleep that he
slept that night. Many a one never woke again to hear the earth-shaking
clamour of the barrage, to see that eternal procession of men, men,
mules, limbers, men, guns, ambulances, men, lorries, going on and on
like some gigantic frieze. But Dormer did. He was one of those who, had
he been born in the Middle Ages, would have been described as under a
curse, or pictured as working out an atonement for his own or some one
else’s misdeeds. He had to go on doing his very best, and the more he
disliked the whole business the harder he worked. The harder he worked
the longer it seemed to that desired day when he might return to the
quiet niceties of a branch bank in a provincial town. And all the time
Kavanagh kept up that ceaseless argument as to one’s mental attitude.
Dormer didn’t really believe in having such a thing, for he felt bound
to join issue with the absurd ramblings of the other, and he could not
escape, because their jobs naturally threw them together and because he
secretly admired the way that Kavanagh did his work.
So the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the casualty
lists grew longer and longer, the visible fruits of the immense effort
grew smaller and smaller, and as the year wore on, the weather broke,
and the only conditions that make life in the open tolerable, light and
drought, disappeared, and they dwelt in the sodden twilight of tent or
hut, while what had been the white powdery dust, became the cement-like
mud that no scraping could remove. Sitting dejectedly over some returns
he heard
“Still, be still, my soul, the arms you bear are brittle!”
“It’s all very well to sit there and sing. This offensive is a failure,
we shall never get through.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Dormer. I told you how it would be. I hope we
shall learn the lesson.”
“It means another winter in the trenches.”
“Evidently.”
“It’s very bad for the men. They’ve nothing to show for all that’s been
done.”
“That’s nothing new.
“‘I’m sick of parading,
Through cold and wet wading,
Or standing all day to be shot in a trench!
I’m tired of marching,
Pipe-claying and starching,
How neat we must be to be shot by the French.’
That’s what the men thought of it a hundred years ago. Then, they
had to pipeclay their belts, two whacking great chest-constricting
cross-belts. And their officers didn’t arrange for them to play
football, every time they went out to rest. In fact they didn’t go out
to rest. They just stayed in the line.”
“It wasn’t very dangerous, was it?”
“There wasn’t the shell-fire, of course, but what about disease?”
“They were regulars.”
“My dear fellow, when is a soldier not a soldier?”
“I don’t like riddles.”
“This is a serious question. How long will the War last?”
“Oh,” cried Dormer bitterly, “another two years, I suppose.”
“You’re about twenty wrong. We shall have conscription shortly, then
the real strength will be put into the fight and will compensate for
the losses of France and the inertia of Russia. We shall then settle
down to the real struggle between England and Germany for the markets
of the world.”
Dormer frowned. “You’re a Socialist,” he said.
“Never mind my opinions. It won’t matter by the time we get back into
civvys what we are!”
Something rose up in Dormer. He said with certainty:
“You’re wrong. The men’ll never stand it. Two years at most.”
“The men stood it very well in the Peninsular for six years, and most
of them had been fighting somewhere or other for the previous quarter
of a century.”
“Once again, they were regulars.”
“Once again, so are you.
“‘For gold the sailor ploughs the main,
The farmer ploughs the manor,
The brave poor soldier ne’er disdain,
That keeps his country’s honour!’
That’s you to the life, Dormer. Twenty years hence you’ll be a bronzed
veteran, in a dirty uniform, with a quarter of a century’s polish on
your Sam Browne. You have already had more iron whizz past your head
than any regular soldier gets in a lifetime, or even the lifetime of
two or three generations. You’ve had a practical experience of war that
any general might envy. The only complaint I have to make against you
is that you’re conducting the whole business as if you were back in
your beastly bank, instead of, as the song says, behaving as one ‘That
keeps his country’s honour!’”
“That’s all nonsense. I’ve just sent the 561 Brigade to occupy the new
line that was taken up after the stunt last Thursday. You know what
it’s like. It’s the remains of a German trench turned round, so that
they have all the observation. They’ve strafed it to Hell, and we are
firing on photographs of trenches that are probably empty. It’s all
nonsense to say the defending side loses more men than the attacking.
That’s true while the attack is in progress, but an attack in its very
nature cannot last long, and then the defenders get their own back.”
As he said the words they were enveloped in an explosion that shook the
wet out of the canvas upon them, and whose aftermath of falling débris
was echoed by stampeded traffic in the road.