one-fiftieth part of the British Army in France. It took over a day
to get on the move, it occupied miles of road, absorbed train-loads
of supplies, and would take two days to go thirty miles. The whole
affair was so huge, that the individual man was reduced and reduced
in importance until he went clean out of sight. This fellow he was
pursuing, or Chirnside, or anyone who could have given any useful
information about the Vanderlynden claim, might be in any one of those
cigarette-smoking, slow-moving columns, on any of those springless
vehicles, or beside any of those mules.
He gazed at the faces of the men as they streamed past him, every
county badge on their caps, every dialect known to England on their
lips, probably the best natured and easiest to manage of any of the
dozen or so national armies engaged in the War. He was realizing deeply
the difficulty of discovering that particular “Nobby” who had broken
the front of the shrine at Vanderlynden’s. It was just the thing any of
them would do. How many times had he noticed their curious tenderness
for uncouth animals, stray dogs or cats, even moles or hedgehogs, and
above all the brazen, malevolent army mule. He was no fancier of any
sort of beast, and the mule as used in France he had long realized to
have two virtues and two only--cheapness and durability. You couldn’t
kill them, but if you did, it was easy to get more. He had been, for
a long while now, a harassed officer, busy shifting quantities of war
material, human, animal, or inanimate, from one place to another, and
had come to regard mules as so much movable war stores. Added to the
fact that he was no fancier, this had prevented him from feeling any
affection for the motive power of first-line transport. But he was
conscious enough that it was not so with the men--the “other ranks”
as they were denominated in all those innumerable parade states and
nominal rolls with which he spent his days in dealing.
No, what the fellow had done was what most drivers would do. That queer
feeling about animals was the primary cause of the whole affair. Then,
balancing it, was the natural carelessness about such an object as a
shrine--this same brown-clothed nation that defiled before him, he knew
them well. As a churchwarden, he knew that not ten per cent of them
went inside a place of worship more than three or four times in the
whole of their lives. Baptism for some, marriage for a good proportion,
an occasional assistance at the first or last rite of some relative,
finally, the cemetery chapel, that was the extent of their church-going.
A small number, chiefly from the North or from Ireland, might be
Catholics, but also from the north of Ireland was an equal number of
violent anti-Catholics, and it was to this latter section that he
judged the perpetrator of the outrage to belong. No, they would see
nothing, or at best something to despise, in that little memorial
altar, hardly more than an enlarged tombstone, in the corner of a
Flemish pasture. It was strange if not detestable, it was foreign; they
never saw their own gravestones, seldom those of any relative. He
sympathized with them in that ultra-English sentimentality, that cannot
bear to admit frankly the frail briefness of human life. And so the
thing had happened, any of them might have done it, most of them would
do it, under similar circumstances.
The tail of the last column wound out of B camp, the N.C.O. he took
with him on these occasions was reporting all clear, and might he hand
over to the advance party of the incoming Division. Dormer gave him
exact orders as to what to hand over and obtain a signature for, and
where to find him next, for he did not believe in allowing an N.C.O.
any scope for imagination, if by any possibility such a faculty might
have survived in him.
The weather had broken, and he jogged along in the mud to C camp and
found it already vacated, but no advance party ready to take over, and
resigned himself to the usual wait. He waited and he waited. Of course,
he wasn’t absolutely forced to do so. He might have left his N.C.O.
and party to hand over. He might have cleared them off and left the
incoming Division to shift for itself. That had been done many a time
in his experience. How often, as a platoon commander, had he marched
and marched, glancing over his shoulder at tired men only too ready to
drop out, marched and marched until at length by map square and horse
sense, and general oh-let’s-get-in-here-and-keep-any-one-else-out, he
had found such a camp, a few tents subsiding in the mud, a desolate hut
or two, abandoned and unswept, places which disgusted him more than any
mere trench or dug-out, because they were places that people had lived
in and left unclean.
He had never experienced such a thing before he came into the army.
His nice middle-class upbringing had never allowed him to suspect that
such places existed. And now that he was Captain Dormer, attached H.Q.
Nth Division, he endeavoured to see that they did not. So he hung about
intending to see the thing done properly. He got no encouragement. He
knew that when he got back to the Division Colonel Birchin would simply
find him something else to do, and the fact that no complaints followed
them, and that the incoming Division had a better time than they would
otherwise have had, would be swallowed up in the hasty expedience of
the War. Still, he did it, because he liked to feel that the job was
being properly done. To this he had been brought up, and he was not
going to change in war-time.
As he hung about the empty hut, he had plenty of time for reflection.
His feet were cold. When would he get leave? What a nuisance if these
d----d people who were relieving him didn’t turn up until it was dark.
The February day was waning. Ah, here they were. He roused himself from
the despondent quiescence of a moment ago, into a crisp authoritative
person from Divisional Head-quarters. Never was a camp handed over more
promptly. He let his N.C.O. and men rattle off in the limber they had
provided themselves with. He waited for a car. There was bound to be
no difficulty in getting a lift into Doullens, and if he did not find
one immediately there, he would soon get a railway voucher. As he stood
in the gathering dusk his ruminations went on. If it were not for the
War, he would be going home to tea, real proper tea, no chlorine in
the water, milk out of a cow, not out of a tin, tea-cakes, some small
savoury if he fancied it, his sister with whom he lived believing in
the doctrine. “Feed the beast!” After that, he would have the choice of
the Choral Society or generally some lecture or other. At times there
was something on at the local theatre, at others he had Vestry or Trust
meetings to attend. Such employments made a fitting termination to a
day which he had always felt to be well filled at a good, safe, and
continuous job, that would go on until he reached a certain age, when
it culminated in a pension, a job that was worth doing, that he could
do, and that the public appreciated.
Instead of all this, here he was, standing beside a desolate Picard
highway, hoping that he might find his allotted hut in time to wash
in a canvas bucket, eat at a trestle table and finally, having taken
as much whisky as would wash down the food, and help him to become
superior to his immediate circumstances, to play bridge with those
other people whom he was polite to, because he had to be, but towards
whom he felt no great inclination, and whom he would drop without a
sigh the moment he was demobbed.
Ah! Here was the sort of car. He stepped into the road and held up his
hand. The car stopped with a crunch and a splutter. They were going
as far as Bernaville. That would suit him well. He jammed into the
back seat between two other people, mackintoshed and goggled, and the
car got under way again. Then he made the usual remarks and answered
the usual inquiries, taking care to admit nothing, and to let his
Divisional weight be felt. Finally he got down at a place where he
could get a lorry lift to H.Q.
His servant had laid out some clean clothes in the Armstrong hut. For
that he was thankful.
* * * * *
The Division now proceeded to train for the coming offensive.
“Cultivators” had been warned off a large tract of land, which was
partly devoted to “Schools,” at which were taught various superlative
methods of slaughter, partly to full-dress manœuvres over country which
resembled in physical features the portion of the German line to be
attacked. The natural result was that if any area larger than a tennis
court was left vacant, the “cultivators” rushed back and began to
cultivate it. Hence arose disputes between the peasants and the troops,
and the General commanding the 556 Brigade had his bridle seized by an
infuriated female who wanted to know, in English, why he couldn’t keep
off her beans.
The matter was reported to G. office of Divisional Head-quarters,
who told the A.P.M., who told the French Liaison Officer, who told
an Interpreter, who told the “cultivators” to keep off the ground
altogether, whether it were in use or not. In revenge for which
conduct the “cultivators” fetched the nearest gendarme, and had the
Interpreter arrested as a spy, and tilled the land so that the C.R.A.
Corps couldn’t find the dummy trenches he was supposed to have been
bombarding, because they had all been filled up and planted. So
that he reported the matter to Corps, who sat heavily on Divisional
Head-quarters, G. office, for not keeping the ground clear. The A.P.M.
and French Mission having been tried and failed, Q. office had the
brilliant idea of “lending” Dormer to G., upon the well-tried army
principle that a man does a job, not because he is fit, but because he
is not required elsewhere.
So Dormer patrolled the manœuvre area, mounted on the horses of senior
officers, who were too busy to ride them. He did not object. It kept
him from thinking. He was, by now, well acquainted with manœuvre areas,
from near Dunkirk to below Amiens. It was the same old tale. First the
various schools. The Bombing Instructor began with a short speech:
“It is now generally admitted that the hand-grenade is the weapon with
which you are going to win this War!”
The following day in the bayonet-fighting pitch, the instructor in that
arm began:
“This is the most historic weapon in the hands of the British Army. It
still remains the decisive factor on the field!”
And the day following, on the range, the Musketry expert informed the
squad:
“Statistics show that the largest proportion of the casualties
inflicted on the enemy are bullet wounds.”
Dormer was not unkind enough to interrupt. He did not blame those
instructors. Having, by desperately hard work, obtained their
positions, they were naturally anxious to keep them. But his new
insight and preoccupation, born of the Vanderlynden affair, made him
study the faces of the listening squads intently. No psychologist, he
could make nothing of them. Blank, utterly bored in the main, here and
there he caught sight of one horrified, or one peculiarly vindictive.
The main impression he received was of the sheer number of those
passive listening faces, compared with the fewness of the N.C.O.’s and
instructors. So long as they were quiescent, all very well. But if that
dormant mass came to life, some day, if that immense immobility once
moved, got under way, where would it stop?
It was the same with the full-dress manœuvres. Dormer had never been
taken up with the honour and glory of war. He was going through with
this soldiering, which had been rather thrust upon him, for the plain
reason that he wanted to get to the end of it. He considered that he
had contracted to defeat the Germans just as, if he had been an iron
firm, he might have contracted to make girders, or if he had been the
Post Office, he would have contracted to deliver letters. And now that
he watched the final processes of the job, he became more than ever
aware that the goods would not be up to sample. How could they be? Here
were men being taught to attack, with the principal condition of attack
wanting. The principal condition of an attack was that the other fellow
hit you back as hard as he could. Here there was no one hitting you
back. He wondered if all these silent and extraordinarily docile human
beings in the ranks would see that some day. He looked keenly at their
faces. Mask, mask; mule-like stupidity, too simple to need a mask;
mask and mask again; one with blank horror written on it, one with a
devilish lurking cunning, as if there might be something to be made out
of all this some day; then more masks.
He wondered, but he did not wonder too unhappily. He was beginning
to feel very well. Away from the line, the hours were more regular,
the food somewhat better, the horse exercise did him good. There was
another reason which Dormer, no reader of poetry, failed altogether
to appreciate. Spring had come. Furtive and slow, the Spring of the
shores of the grey North Sea came stealing across those hard-featured
downs and rich valleys. Tree and bush, blackened and wind-bitten, were
suddenly visited with a slender effusion of green, almost transparent,
looking stiff and ill-assorted, as though Nature were experimenting.
Along all those ways where men marched to slaughter, the magic
footsteps preceded them, as though they had been engaged in some
beneficent work, or some joyful festival. To Dormer the moment was
poignant but for other reasons. It was the moment when the culminating
point of the Football Season marked the impending truce in that game.
He did not play cricket. It was too expensive and too slow. In summer
he sailed a small boat on his native waters. Instead, he was going to
be involved in another offensive.
The Division left the manœuvre area and went up through Arras. Of
course, the weather broke on the very eve of the “show.” That had
become almost a matter of routine, like the shelling, the stupendous
activities of railways and aeroplanes, the everlasting telephoning.
Again Dormer saw going past him endlessly, that stream of men and
mules, mules and men, sandwiched in between every conceivable vehicle,
from tanks to stretchers. When, after what communiqués described as
“continued progress” and “considerable artillery activity,” it had to
be admitted that this offensive, like all other offensives, had come to
a dead stop, Dormer was not astonished. For one thing, he knew, what
no communiqué told, what had stopped it. The Germans? No, capable and
determined as they were. The thing which stopped it was Mud. Nothing
else. The shell-fire had been so perfect, that the equally perfect and
necessarily complicated preparations for going a few hundred yards
farther, could not be made. The first advance was miles. The next
hundreds of yards. The next a hundred yards.
Then the Bosche got some back. Then everything had to be moved up to
make quite certain of advancing miles again. And it couldn’t be done.
There was no longer sufficient firm ground to bear the tons of iron
that alone could help frail humanity to surmount such efforts.
For another thing, he could not be astonished. For weeks he worked
eighteen hours a day, ate what he could, slept when he couldn’t
help it. Astonishment was no longer in him. But one bit of his mind
remained, untrammelled by the great machine of which he formed an
insignificant part. It was a bit of subconsciousness that was always
listening for something, just as, under long-range, heavy-calibre
bombardment, one listened and listened for the next shell. But the
particular detached bit of Dormer was listening and listening for
something else. Watching and watching, too, all those faces under tin
helmets, and just above gas-mask wallets, all so alike under those
conditions that it seemed as difficult to pick out one man from another
as one mule from another. Listening for one man to say “I am the one!”
to be able to see him, and know that at last he had got rid of that job
at Vanderlynden’s. But nothing happened. It was always just going to
happen.
At length the Division moved right up into the coal-fields and sat down
by a slag heap near Béthune. Then Colonel Birchin called to him one
morning across the office: “I say, Dormer, I’ve got the whereabouts of
that fellow Chirnside. He’s near Rheims. You’ll have to go.”
Dormer went. For two whole days he travelled across civilian France.
France of the small farm, the small town, and the small villa. Far
beyond the zone of the English Army, far beyond the zone of any army,
he passed by Creil to Paris, and from Paris on again into a country of
vine-clad hills above a river. He was in a part where he had never been
as a soldier, never gone for one of those brief holidays to Switzerland
he had sometimes taken. It caused him much amusement to think of the
regular Calais--Bâle express of pre-War days. If they would only run
that train now, how it would have to zig-zag over trenches, and lines
of communication.
He entered the zone of a French Army. On all sides, in the towns and
villages, in the camps and manœuvre areas, he saw blue-coated men, and
stared at them, with the same fascinated interest as he now felt, in
spite of himself, in spite of any habit or tradition or inclination,
in his own khaki variety. These fellows carried more on their backs,
had far less transport. His general impression was of something
grimmer, more like purgatory, than that which English troops gave
him. The physical effort of the individual was greater, his food,
pay and accommodation less. And there was none of that extraordinary
volunteering spirit of the Kitchener Armies, the spirit which said:
“Lumme, boys, here’s a war. Let’s have a go at it!” The French had most
of them been conscripted, had known that such a thing might, probably
would happen to them, had been prepared for it for years. They had not
the advantage of being able to say to themselves: “Well, I jolly well
asked for it. Now I’ve got it!”
A saturnine fate brooded over them. He noticed it in the railway and
other officials he met. They were so much more official. R.T.O.’s and
A.P.M.’s--or the equivalent of them, he supposed--who surveyed his
credentials, and passed him on to the place where he was going, did so
with the cynical ghost of amusement, as who should say: “Aha! This is
you. You’re going there, are you? You might as well go anywhere else.”
Eventually, in a stony village, beneath a pine-clad ridge, he found
the familiar khaki and brass, the good nature and amateurishness of
his own sort. He stepped out of the train and across a platform and
with a curious pang, almost of home-sickness, found himself in England.
Here was the superior corporal in slacks from the orderly room. Here
were the faultless riding horses, being exercised. There was nothing
like them in all the blue-coated armies through which he had passed.
The Commandant to whom he reported, treated him partly as an officer
reporting, partly as a nephew, asked amused questions about billets in
Flanders, who was doing such-and-such a job with Corps, what were the
prospects of leave, and above all, did Dormer play bridge? He did. Ah!
Then the main necessities of modern warfare were satisfied.
And as he found his billet and changed his clothes, Dormer reflected
how right it all was. What was the good of being officious and
ill-tempered? What was the good of being energetic even? Here we all
were, mixed up in this inferno. The most sensible, probably the most
efficient thing to do, was to forget it every night for a couple of
hours, and start fresh in the morning. Chirnside was away with his
detachment, but would be back shortly. In the meantime the Commandant
hoped Dormer would join his Mess. The billet was comfortable and
Dormer made no objection. On the contrary, he settled down for a day
or two with perfect equanimity. It was always a day or two nearer the
inevitable end of the War, which must come sometime, a day or two
without risk, and actually without discomfort. What more could one ask?
The Commandant, Major Bone, was a fine-looking man, past middle age,
with beautiful grey hair and blue eyes with a twinkle. His height and
carriage, a certain hard-wearing and inexpensive precision about his
uniform, suggested an ex-guards Sergeant-major. It was obvious that he
had spent all his life in the army, took little notice of anything that
went on outside it, and felt no qualms as to a future which would be
provided for by it. He was one of those men with whom it was impossible
to quarrel, and Dormer pleased him in the matter of blankets. The Major
offered some of those necessities to Dormer, who was obliged to reply
that he had six and feared his valise would hold no more. He had won
the old man’s heart.
The Major had fixed his billet in a little house belonging to the
representative of some firm auxiliary to the wine trade. The little
office had become his office. Orders, nominal rolls, lists of billets
and maps hung over the advertisements of champagne, and photographs of
Ay and Epernay. On the other side of the hall, the little dining-room
suited the Major admirably, as his Mess. It had just that substantial
stuffiness that he considered good taste. The chairs and table were
heavy, the former upholstered in hot crimson, as was the settee. Upon
the mantelpiece, and upon pedestals disposed wherever there was room
and sometimes where there was not, were bronze female figures named
upon their bases “Peace,” “Chastity,” “The Spirit of the Air.” Dormer
did not admire them. They were nude. As if this were not enough they
had their arms either before them or behind them, never at their
sides, which seemed to him to aggravate the matter. Together with a
capacious sideboard, full of glass and china, _couronnes de noces_ and
plated ware, all securely locked in, these decorations made it almost
impossible to move, once the company was seated at table.
Indeed, during the winter, the Major complained he had been in the
position of having one place frozen at the door, and one roasted next
the Salamander anthracite stove. But with the milder weather, things
were better, for the two big casement windows could be opened, and
filled the room with sweet country air in a moment; they gave on to the
street which was merely a village street, and across the road, over the
wall was a vineyard. The Mess consisted of the Major, Doctor, Ordnance
Officer, and Chirnside, whose place Dormer temporarily took. There they
were a happy little family, removed far from the vexations attending
larger and smaller formations, isolated, with their own privileges,
leave list, and railway vouchers, as pretty a corner as could be found
in all that slow-moving mass of discomfort and ill-ease that was the
War.
On the third day, Dormer’s conscience made him inquire how long
Chirnside would be. “Not long,” was the reply. “You can hear what’s
going on?” He could indeed. For two days the earth and air had been
atremble with the bombardment. French people in the village, and the
French soldiers about the place had a sort of cocksure way of saying
“_Ça chauffe?_” Indeed, the offensive had been widely advertised and
great things were expected of it.
Then finally Chirnside did return. Dormer had been doing small jobs
for the Major all day, because idleness irked him, and on coming back
to change, found a grizzled oldish man, thin and quiet, a slightly
different edition of the Major, the same seniority, the same ranker
traditions, but memories of India and Egypt instead of Kensington and
Windsor. Dormer listened quietly while the two old soldiers discussed
the offensive. There was no doubt that it was an enormous and costly
failure. That hardly impressed him. He was used to and expected it.
But he had never before seen an offensive from outside. He had always
been in them, and too tired and short of sleep, by the time they
failed, to consider the matter deeply. But this time he listened to
the conversation of the two old men with wonder mixed with a curious
repulsion. They were hard working, hospitable, but they had the
trained indifference of the regular soldier that seemed to him to be
so ominous. In the regular army, where every one shared it, where it
was part of a philosophy of life derived from the actual conditions,
and deliberately adopted like a uniform, all very well. But no one
knew better than Dormer that none of the armies of 1917 contained
any appreciable percentage of regulars, but were, on the other hand,
composed of people who had all sorts of feelings to be considered and
who had not the slightest intention of spending their lives in the
army. Not for the first time did he wonder how long they would stand it.