back billets as a spectacle rather than as one of the serious parts of
warfare, and got out to stroll about the platform with officers going
up as reinforcements. They exchanged cigarettes and news and hardly
stopped to laugh at the horrified whisper of the R.T.O., “Don’t light
matches here!” It was soon over, like all bombing. If you were hit
you were hit, but if you weren’t hit in the first minute or two, you
wouldn’t be, because no plane could stay circling up there for very
long, and the bomber was always more frightened than you were. Then
the train moved on, and Dormer could feel on each side of him again
the real camp life of units just behind the line, mule standings, gun
parks, and tents and huts of infantry, and services. It was midnight
before he got out at Bailleul. He had left the camp on the Arras road
in the morning, had made a great loop on the map and reached a railhead
as near the line as he had been twenty-four hours before. He stumbled
up the stony street to the Officers’ Rest House, drank some cocoa out
of a mug and fell asleep, his head on his valise.
In the morning he got a lift out to Bertezeele, and found the Trench
Mortar School. He reflected that it would really be more correct to
say that he took a lift to the Trench Mortar School, and incidentally
touched the village of Bertezeele. For the fact was that the English
population of the parish exceeded the French native one. Men of all
sorts and conditions from every unit known to the Army List (and a
good many that had never graced the pages of that swollen periodical)
were drawn into this new device for improved killing. Dormer himself,
one of those who, since the elementary home camp training of 1915,
had been in or just behind the trenches, wondered at the complicated
ramifications with which the War was running. Apparently those curious
little brass instruments, the bane of his life as an infantry platoon
commander, which used to come up behind his line and there, while
totally ineffective in the vital matter of beating the Germans, were
just sufficiently annoying to make those methodical enemies take great
pains to rob him of his food and sleep for many ensuing days, were all
done away with.
Stokes, whoever he was, but he was certainly a genius, had effected a
revolution. Owing to him, neat tubes, like enlarged pencil-guards, with
a nail inside the blind end, upon which the cap-end of the cartridge
automatically fell, were being used, as a hosier might say, in all
sizes from youths’ to large men’s. Stokes was branded with genius,
because his invention combined the two essentials--simplicity with
certainty. He had brought the blunderbuss up to date.
What else were these short-range, muzzle-loading, old-iron scattering
devices? Just blunderbusses. History was not merely repeating itself.
As the War went on it was moving backwards. Tin helmets of the days of
Cromwell, bludgeons such as Cœur de Lion used upon Saladin, and for
mere modernity, grenades like the original British Grenadiers of the
song. He had never had any head for poetry, but he could remember some
of the stuff Kavanagh had sung in the dug-out. Not tow-row-row. That
was the chorus. Ah! he remembered.
“Our leaders march with fusees,
And we with hand-grenades,
We throw them from the glacis
About the enemy’s ears.
With a tow-row-row,” etc.
Well, now we didn’t. If we had grenades we carried them in aprons,
like a market woman, with a skirt full of apples. And if we had
a blunderbuss, like the guard of the coach in the “Pickwick
Papers,” we kept it, and all the ironmongery that belonged to it,
on a hand-barrow, and pushed it in front of us like fish-hawkers
on a Saturday night. What a War! Kavanagh was quite right of
course. There was neither decency nor dignity left in it.
Wouldn’t do to admit that though! And putting on his very best
“Good-mornin’-Sah-I-have-been-sent-by-Divisional-Head-quarters”
expression, he asked his way to the “office” as they were beginning
to call the orderly room in most detachments, and inquired for 469
Battery. Yes. They were to be seen. Orderly room, as a Corps formation,
was distant and slightly patronizing, but the information was correct.
He could see the Officer commanding the battery. Certainly he could,
as soon as morning practice was over. That would do. He made himself
as inconspicuous as possible until he saw the various parties being
“fallen in” on the range, and heard the uncanny ear-tickling silence
that succeeded the ceaseless pop-pop of practice and then drifted
casually into the wooden-chair-and-table furnished ante-room, where the
month-old English magazines gave one a tremulous home-sickness, and
men who had been mildly occupied all the morning were drinking all the
vermouth or whisky they could, in the fear of being bored to the point
of mutiny in the afternoon.
There was, of course, the usual springtime curiosity as to what the
year might bring forth, for every one always hoped against hope that
the next offensive would really be the last. An orderly wandering
among the tables appeared to be looking for him, and he found himself
summoned before the Officer commanding the School.
Although his appointment was new, Colonel Burgess was of the oldest
type of soldier, the sort who tell the other fellows how to do it.
The particular sort of war in which he found himself suited him
exactly. He had the true Indian view of life, drill, breakfast, less
drill, lunch, siesta, sport, dinner, cards. So he ruled the mess
cook with a rod of iron, took disciplinary action if the stones that
lined the path leading to the door of the ante-room and office were
not properly white, and left the technical side of the business to
Sergeant-instructors who, having recently escaped from the trenches,
were really keen on it.
He received Dormer with that mixture of flattery due to anyone from
Divisional Head-quarters and suspicion naturally aroused as to what
he (Dormer) might be after. He was annoyed that he had not heard of
Dormer’s arrival, and hastened to add:
“Not a very full parade this morning, units come and go, y’know. We can
never be quite sure what we are going to get! What did you think of our
show?”
Dormer realized that the old gentleman was under the impression he was
being spied on:
“I really didn’t notice, sir. I have been sent to see the Officer
commanding 469 Trench Mortar Battery. Matter of discipline arising out
of a claim for compensation.”
“Oh, ah! Yes indeed. Certainly. See him now. Sergeant Innes!”
The efficient Scotch Sergeant to be found in all such places appeared
from the outer office.
“Have we anyone here from 469 T.M.B.?”
The officer required was duly produced, and the Colonel retired to the
Mess, leaving them together. Dormer sized up this fellow with whom
he was thus brought into momentary contact. This became by necessity
almost a fine art, during years of war. Dormer was fairly proficient.
The fellow opposite to him was of the same sort as himself. Probably in
insurance or stockbroking, not quite the examination look of the Civil
Service, not the dead certainty of banking. He had obviously enlisted,
been gradually squeezed up to the point of a Commission, had had his
months in the line and had taken to Trench Mortars because they offered
the feeling of really doing something, together with slightly improved
conditions (hand-carts could be made to hold more food, drink and
blankets than mere packs) and was getting along as well as he could. He
heard what Dormer wanted and his face cleared.
“Why, that’s last April. I couldn’t tell you anything about that. I was
in Egypt!”
“You don’t know of any officer in your unit who could give some
information about the occurrence?”
“No. There’s only young Sands, beside myself. He couldn’t have been
there.”
“Some N.C.O. then?”
“Heavens, man, where d’you think we’ve been? All the N.C.O.’s are new
since I was with the crowd!”
“But surely there must be some record of men who were with your unit?”
“Well, of course, the pay rolls go back to Base somewhere. But I
suppose you can pick the name and number up from the conduct sheet.”
“You see, I don’t know the man’s name. His number was given as 6494.”
“That’s a joke, of course. It’s the number that the cooks sing out,
when we hold the last Sick Parade, before going up the line.”
“Of course it is. You’re right. I ought to have remembered that, but
I’ve been away from my regiment for some time.” Dormer pondered a
moment, relieved. Then the thought of going back to the Q. office with
nothing settled, and the queries of the French Mission and the whole
beastly affair hanging over his head, drove him on again. He made his
air a little heavier, more Divisional, less friendly.
“Well, I’m afraid this won’t do, you know. This matter has got to be
cleared up. It will be very awkward if I have to go back and inform
Head-quarters that you can’t furnish any information. In fact, they
will probably think it’s a case of not wanting to know, and make a
regular Court of Inquiry of it.”
He watched the face of the other, and saw in a moment how well he had
calculated. The fellow was frightened. A mere unit commander, and a
small unit at that! To such a one, of course, Divisional Head-quarters
were something pretty near omniscient, certainly omnipotent. Dormer
watched the fellow shift in the chair without a qualm. Let some one
else be worried too. He himself had had worry enough. The face before
him darkened, smirked deferentially, and then brightened.
“Oh, there was old Chirnside. He might know.”
“Who was he?”
“Chirnside? He was a sort of a quarter bloke. It was before we were
properly formed, and he used to look after all our stores and orderly
room business. He had been with the battery since its formation. We
were just anybody, got together anyhow, chiefly from the infantry, you
remember?”
Dormer saw the other glance at his shoulder straps and just refrain
from calling him sir, poor wretch. He took down the information and
thanked his friend. Chirnside had apparently gone to some stunt Corps,
to do something about equipment. That was all right. He wouldn’t be
killed.
Having got thus far, Dormer felt that he had done a good deal, and
went to take his leave of Colonel Burgess. But he soon found that he
was not to be allowed to get away like that. He was bidden to stay to
lunch. There was no train from Bailleul until the evening and he was
willing enough. The lunch was good. Food remained one of the things in
which one could take an interest. He did so. After lunch the Colonel
took him for a walk over the golf course. This was the margin of
land around the range, on which no cultivation was allowed, and from
which civilians were rigidly excluded, for safety’s sake. At least
during range practice, which took place every day more or less, in
the morning. After that, of course, they could be without difficulty
excluded for the remainder of the day for a different, if not for so
laudable a purpose.
The Colonel was a fine example of those qualities which have made
an island Empire what it is. Having spent most of his life from
sixteen years old at Sandhurst, then in India or Egypt, and finally
at Eastbourne, he knew better than most men how to impose those
institutions which he and his sort considered the only ones that
made civilization possible, in the most unlikely places and upon the
most disinclined of people. Dormer had seen it being done before,
but marvelled more and more. Just as the Colonel, backed of course
by a sufficient number of his like, and the right sort of faithful
underling, had introduced tennis into India, duck-shooting into Egypt,
and exclusiveness into Eastbourne, against every condition of climate
or geographical position, native religion or custom, so now he had
introduced golf into Flanders, and that in the height of a European War.
At the topmost point of the golf course, the Colonel stopped, and began
to point out the beauties of the spot to Dormer. They were standing on
one of those low gravelly hills that separate the valley of the Yser
from that of the Lys. Northward, beyond Poperinghe, was a yet lower
and greener ridge that shelved away out of sight toward Dunkirk. East
lay Ypres, in an endless rumour of war. Southward, the Spanish towers
of Bailleul showed where the road wound towards Lille, by Armentières.
Westward, Cassel rose above those hillocks and plains, among the most
fertile in the world. But the Colonel was most concerned with a big
square old farmhouse, that lay amid its barns and meadows, at a crook
in the Bailleul road.
The Colonel’s eyes took on a brighter blue and his moustache puffed out
like fine white smoke.
“I had a lot of trouble with that fellow.” He pointed to the farm.
“Wanted to come and cultivate the range. I had to get an interpreter to
see him. Said he could grow--er--vegetables in between the shell-holes.
At last we had to order afternoon practice to keep him off. Then he
wanted this part of the land. Had to move the guns up and make some new
bunkers. Four rounds makes a bunker, y’know. Come and have tea?”
It was very nice weather for walking, dry and clear. The Mess had
seemed tolerable at lunch, but Dormer had not been long at tea before
he recollected what he seldom forgot for more than an hour or so,
that it was not tea, one of the fixed occasions of his safe and
comfortable life. It was a meal taken under all the exigencies of a
campaign--chlorinated water, condensed milk, army chair, boots and
puttees on one, and on this particular afternoon a temperature below
zero, in an army hut.
The Colonel, of course, occupied the place of warmth next the stove.
The remainder of the Mess got as near to it as they could. The result
was, that when the Colonel began to question him as to the object of
his visit, and how he had progressed towards attaining it, everybody
necessarily heard the whole of the conversation. He now realized
that he was telling the tale for the fourth time. He had told it to
Kavanagh, then to Colonel Birchin. Now he had told it to the Officer
commanding 469 T.M.B. and finally here he was going over it again.
He resented it as a mere nuisance, but was far from seeing at that
moment the true implication of what he was doing. The matter was not a
State secret. It was an ordinary piece of routine discipline, slightly
swollen by its reactions in the French Mission, and by the enormous
size and length of the War.
If he had refused to say why he was there the Colonel would certainly
have put him down as having been sent by the Division, or some one
even higher, to spy on the activities of the School. He didn’t want to
be labelled as that, so told what he knew glibly enough. The Colonel
waxed very voluble over it, gave good advice that was no earthly use,
and dwelt at length on various aspects of the case. The French were
grasping and difficult and superstitious, but on the other hand,
drivers were a rough lot and must be kept in check. They were always
doing damage. The fellow was quite right of course to look after his
mules. The animals were in a shocking state, etc., etc., but quite
wrong, of course, to damage civilian property, tradition of the British
Army, since Wellington all the other way, the French naturally expected
proper treatment, etc., etc.
Dormer had heard it all before, from Colonel Birchin, Major Stevenage
and others, with exactly the same well-meant condescension, and the
same grotesque ineffectiveness. This old Colonel, like all his sort,
couldn’t solve the difficulty nor shut the French up, nor appease G.H.Q.
Presently, the old man went off to the orderly room to sign the day’s
correspondence, the Mess thinned and Dormer dozed discreetly, he had
had a poor night and was desperately sleepy. Some one came to wake him
up and offered him a wash, and he was glad to move, stiff with cold,
and only anxious to pass the time until he could get the midnight train
from Bailleul. They were very hospitable, made much of him at dinner,
and he ate and drank all he could get, being ravenous and hoping to
sleep through the discomforts of the long train journey in the dark. He
was getting fairly cheerful by the time the Colonel left the hut, and
only became conscious, in the intervals of a learned and interesting
discussion of the relative theories of wire-cutting, that a “rag” was
in progress at the other end of the room.
A gunner officer, a young and happy boy who was still in the stage of
thinking the War the greatest fun out, was holding a mock Court of
Inquiry. Gradually, the “rag” got the better of the argument and Dormer
found himself being addressed as “Gentlemen of the jury.” A target
frame was brought in by some one to act as a witness-box, but the
gunner genius who presided, soon had it erected into a sort of Punch
and Judy Proscenium. Then only did it dawn on Dormer that the play was
not Punch and Judy. It was the Mayor of Hondebecq being derided by
the troops, with a Scotch officer in a kilt impersonating Madeleine
Vanderlynden, and receiving with the greatest equanimity, various
suggestions that ranged from the feebly funny to the strongly obscene.
O.C. 469 T.M.B. found a willing column formed behind him which he had
to lead round the table, an infantryman brought a wastepaper basket to
make the Mayor’s top hat, and in the midst of other improvisations,
Dormer discovered the gunner standing in front of him with a mock
salute.
“Do you mind coming out of the Jury and taking your proper part?”
It was cheek, of course, but Dormer was not wearing red tabs, and
beside, what was the use of standing on one’s dignity. He asked:
“What part do I play?”
“You’re Jack Ketch. You come on in the fourth Act, and land Nobby one
on the nob!”
“I see. What are you?”
“Me? I’m the Devil. Watch me devilling,” and with a long map-roller he
caught the players in turn resounding cracks upon their several heads.
They turned on him with common consent, and in the resulting struggle,
the table broke and subsided with the whole company in an ignominious
mass. The dust rose between the grey canvas-covered walls and the tin
suspension lamp rocked like that of a ship at sea. Everybody picked
themselves up, slightly sobered, and began to discuss how to get the
damage repaired before the Colonel saw it in the morning.
O.C. 469 T.M.B. stood at Dormer’s elbow:
“We’ve just got time to catch your train.”
“Come on.” Dormer had no intention of being marooned in this place
another day. Outside a cycle and side-car stood panting. Dormer did
wonder as they whizzed down the rutted road how long such a vehicle had
been upon the strength of a Trench Mortar School, but after all, could
you blame fellows? They were existing under War conditions, what more
could one ask?
* * * * *
He woke to the slow jolting of the train as it slowed up in smoky
twilight at Boulogne. He bought some food, and sitting with it in his
hands and his thermos between his knees, he watched the grey Picard
day strengthen over those endless camps and hospitals, dumps and
training grounds.
He was retracing his steps of the day before, but he was a step farther
on. As he looked at the hundreds of thousands of khaki-clad figures,
he realized something of what he had to do. With no name or number he
had to find one of them, who could be proved to have been at a certain
place a year ago. He didn’t want to, but if he didn’t, would he ever
get rid of the business?
The “rag” of the previous evening stuck in his head. How true it
was. The man who did the thing was “Nobby” with the number 6494 that
was beginning to be folk-lore. Of course he was. He was any or every
soldier. Madeleine Vanderlynden was the heroine. O.C. 469 T.M.B. was
the hero. The Mayor of Hondebecq was the comic relief, and he, Dormer,
was the villain. He was indeed Jack Ketch, the spoiler of the fun,
the impotent figure-head of detested “Justice,” or “Law and Order.”
And finally, as in all properly conducted Punch and Judy shows, the
Devil came and took the lot. What had Dendrecourt said: “The Devil had
taken the whole generation.” Well, it was all in the play. And when he
realized this, as he slid on from Étaples down to Abbeville, he began
to feel it was not he who was pursuing some unknown soldier in all that
nation-in-arms that had grown from the British Expeditionary Force,
but the Army--no, the War--that was pursuing him.
When he got out at Doullens, and scrounged a lift from a passing car,
he found himself looking at the driver, at the endless transport on
either side of the road, at the sentry on guard over the parked heavies
in the yard of the jam factory, at the military policeman at the
cross-roads. One or other of all these hundreds of thousands knew all
about the beastly business that was engaging more and more of his mind.
One or other of them could point to the man who was wanted.
He found himself furtively examining their faces, prepared for covert
ridicule and suspicion, open ignorance or stupidity. He had, by now,
travelled a long way from the first feelings he had about the affair,
when he had thought of the perpetrator of the damage at Vanderlynden’s
as a poor devil to be screened if possible. He wouldn’t screen him now.
This was the effect of the new possibility that had arisen. He, Dormer,
did not intend to be ridiculous.
On reaching the Head-quarters of the Division, he found the War in full
progress. That is to say, every one was standing about, waiting to do
something. Dormer had long discovered that this was war. Enlisting as
he had done at the outbreak of hostilities, with no actual experience
of what such a set of conditions could possibly be like, he had then
assumed that he was in for a brief and bitter period of physical
discomfort and danger, culminating quite possibly in death, but quite
certainly in a decisive victory for the Allies within a few months.
He had graduated in long pedestrian progress of Home Training, always
expecting it to cease one fine morning. It did. He and others were
ordered to France. With incredible slowness and difficulty they found
the battalion to which they were posted. Now for it, he had thought,
and soon found himself involved in a routine, dirtier and more
dangerous, but as unmistakably a routine as that in which he had been
involved at home.
He actually distinguished himself at it, by his thoroughness and
care, and came to be the person to whom jobs were given! Thus had he
eventually, after a twelvemonth, found another false end to the endless
waiting. He was sent to help the Q. office of Divisional Staff. He had
felt himself to be of considerable importance, a person who really was
winning the War. But in a few weeks he was as disabused as ever. It was
only the same thing. Clerking in uniform, with no definite hours, a few
privileges of food and housing, but no nearer sight of the end of it.
The Somme had found him bitterly disillusioned. And yet even now, after
being two days away from the Head-quarters where his lot was cast, he
was dumbfounded afresh to find everything going on just as he had left
it.
They were all waiting now for orders to go into a back area and be
trained. For, as sure as the snowdrop appeared, there sprang up in the
hearts of men a pathetic eternal hopefulness. Perhaps nothing more than
a vernal effusion, yet there it was, and as Dormer reported to Colonel
Birchin, in came the messenger they had all been expecting, ordering
them, not forward into the line, but backward to Authun, for training.
It was some time before he could get attention, and when he did, it
seemed both to him and to the Colonel that the affair had lessened in
importance.
“You’ve asked 3rd Eccleton to give you the posting of this Chirnside?”
“Yessir!”
“Very well. That’s all you can do for the moment. Now I want you to see
that everything is cleared up in the three Infantry Brigade camps, and
don’t let us have the sort of chits afterwards that we got at Lumbres,
etc.”
So the Vanderlynden affair receded into the background, and Dormer
found before his eyes once more that everlasting mud-coloured
procession, men, men, limbers, cookers, men, lorries, guns, limbers,
men.