replacing stores, there was no bridge that evening and he was able to
approach Chirnside as to the object of his journey. The old man heard
him with a sort of quizzical interest, but was evidently inclined to
be helpful, twisted his grey moustache points and let his ivory-yellow
eyelids droop over his rather prominent eyes.
“Spanish Farm. April 1916. Oh, aye!”
“Could you recall an incident that occurred there. Damage to a little
chapel in the corner of the pasture where the roads met. A driver
wanted to shelter his mules and broke into the place?”
Chirnside thought hard, looking straight at Dormer. It was obvious to
Dormer that the old man was thinking, with army instinct, “Here, what’s
this I’m getting involved in? No you don’t,” and hastened to reassure
him.
“It’s like this. The case has become unfortunately notorious. The
French have taken it up very strongly. You know what these things are,
once they become official test cases. We’ve got to make an arrest and
probably pay compensation as well, but at present our people at Base
are sticking out for treating it as a matter of discipline. The unit
was the 469 T.M.B., but there have been so many casualties that no one
can tell me the name of the driver who did it.”
Dormer was thinking: “There, that’s the umpteenth time I’ve told the
yarn, and what good is it?” When suddenly he had a stroke of genius:
“Of course, they’ve got hold of your name.”
It succeeded remarkably well. A sort of habitual stiffening was obvious
in the Army-worn old face in front of him. Chirnside shifted his legs.
“I can’t tell y’much about it. I don’t know the chap’s name or number,
and I expect all the rolls are destroyed. Anyway he might not be on
them, for he wasna’ a driver!”
Chirnside was relapsing into his native Scotch, but Dormer didn’t
notice. He had got a clue.
“What was he then?”
“He had been servant to young Fairfield, who was killed.”
“You don’t remember Fairfield’s regiment. That might help us?”
“No, I don’t, and it wouldn’t help you, for he came out to Trench
Mortars, and not with his own crowd. This servant of his he picked up
at Base, or from some employment company.”
“What on earth was he doing with those mules?”
“What could you do with ’em? The driver was killed and the limber
smashed to matchwood. The feller had nothing to do, so he did that!”
“You don’t remember what happened to him after that?”
“Um--I think he went as young Andrews’ servant.”
“Ah! What did he come from?”
“Andrews? Gunner, he was!”
“Thanks. That may help. You saw the row when the Mayor of the village
came to certify the damage?”
“Aye, there was some blethers about the business. You couldna’ wonder.
The old feller was got up like a Tattie Bogle. The men had had no rest,
and were going straight back to the line. They marched all right, but
you couldn’t keep them from calling names at such a Guy--young troops
like that!”
“You couldn’t describe Andrews’ servant to me?”
“No. He looked ordinary!”
A mistake, of course, no use to ask old Chirnside things like that. A
third of a century in the army had long ago drilled out of him any sort
of imagination he might ever have had. He was just doing a handsome
thing by a brother officer in remembering at all. His instinct was
obviously to know nothing about it. But, piqued by the novelty of
Commissioned rank, he went on: “Yes, I can tell you something. That
feller had a grievance. I remember something turning up in one of his
letters, when we censored ’em. Lucky spot when you think how most of
the censoring was done.”
“I should think so. What was it?”
“Couldn’t say now. Grievance of some sort. Didn’t like the army, or the
War, or something.”
Dormer sat down and wrote out the information obtained and made his
preparations to rejoin the Division. The Major said: “Oh, no hurry,
stop another day, now you’re here!” And all that evening, as he thought
and wrote, and tried to believe this fatal business a step nearer
completion, he heard the two old soldiers, like two good-natured old
women, gossiping. Each expected the other to know every camp or barrack
in which he had lain, each named this or that chance acquaintance,
made any time those thirty years, anywhere in the world, as though the
other must know him also. Often this was the case, in which they both
exclaimed together, “Ah, nice feller, wasn’t he?” Or, if it were not
the case, the other would rejoin, “No, but I knew So-and-so, of the
sappers,” and probably the second shot would hit the mark. It could
hardly fail to do so in the old close borough of the Regular Army. And
then they would exclaim in unison again.
Dormer was as impressed as he ever was by any member of the
Professional Army. They knew how to do it. He would never know. The
army was their God and King, their family and business. In a neat
circle they went, grinding out the necessary days to their pensions.
The present state of Europe, while verbally regretted or wondered at,
did not scratch the surface of their minds. How could it? It had been
a golden opportunity for them. It made the difference to them and to
any human wife or family they might have accreted, between retiring on
Commissioned pay-scale, or taking a pub or caretaker’s place, as the
ex-Sergeant-major they would otherwise have been. But there was charm
in their utter simplicity. Nothing brutal, very little that was vain,
and some nicely acquired manners.
The offensive of the French Army, in the machinery of which they had
their places, moved them not at all. Chirnside casually mentioned
that he gathered it had been a big failure. Dormer expected to hear
him recite some devastating tale of misdirected barrage, horrible
casualties or choked communications. Nothing so graphic reached him.
The old man had simply attended to his job, and when he found that the
troops were returning to the same billets, drew his own conclusions.
That was all. Dormer was horrified, but no one could be horrified long
with Chirnside. Of course, he didn’t mind how long the War went on.
Having completed his preparations, Dormer went up to his little
room and was soon asleep. He was in fine condition and thoroughly
comfortable, and was astonished after what appeared to be a very short
interval, to find himself wide awake. There was no mistaking the
reason. It was the row in the street. He pulled on his British Warm and
went to look. It was quite dark, but he could make out a confused crowd
surging from side to side of the little street, could see bayonets
gleaming, and could hear a clamour of which he could not make out a
word. It was like nothing he had ever heard in the War, it recalled
only election time in his native city, the same aimless shuffling
feet, the same confusion of tongues, the same effervescence, except
that he had instinct enough to know from the tones of the voices that
they were raised in lamentation, not triumph. He was extremely puzzled
what to do, but clear that no initiative lay with him. For ten minutes
he waited, but the situation did not change. He opened his door very
quietly. Not a sound from the Major. From Chirnside, opposite, heavy
regular breathing. Above, in the attics, the low cockney brevity of
soldier servants discussing something with the detachment of their
kind. Reassured, he closed the door, and got back into his blankets.
The noise was irritating but monotonous. He fell asleep. He next awoke
to the knocking of his servant bringing his morning tea, and clean
boots.
“What was all that row in the night?”
“Niggers, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“French coloured troops, sir. They got it in the neck seemingly. They
don’t half jabber.”
Major Bone was more fully informed. There was no doubt that the
French had had a nasty knock. Black troops were coming back just
anyhow, out of hand, not actually dangerous, the old soldier allowed
it to be inferred, but a nuisance. What struck him most forcibly was
the dislocation of the supply services. Defeat he accepted, but not
unpunctuality.
“These Africans are besieging the station, trying to board the trains,
and get taken back to Africa. I can’t get hold of an officer, but
Madame says they’re all killed. She’s in an awful state. I don’t
suppose you’ll get away to-day!”
He was right enough. Dormer’s servant shortly returned, humping the
valise. The station was closed, the rolling stock had been removed.
The black troops were swarming everywhere, collapsing for want of
food and sleep, disorganized and incoherent. Dormer went out shortly
after and verified the state of affairs. He was not molested, so far
had the breakdown gone, but was the object of what appeared to him most
uncomplimentary allusions, but all in pidgin-French, too colonial for
his fair, but limited, knowledge of the language. There was clearly
nothing to be done, so far as transport went, that day, and he resigned
himself to spending his time in the little Mess.
The Doctor and Ordnance Officer appeared at dinner with reassuring
news. The failure of the offensive had been bad, but the French had
never really lost control and were getting their people in hand
immediately. There was a rumour that a General who tried to restore
order had been thrown into the river, but it might be only a tale.
Major Bone was contemptuous of the whole thing. Do--what could they
do, a lot of silly blacks? The French would cut off their rations and
reduce them to order in no time. Thus the old soldier. But he did not
prevent Dormer going to bed with a heavy heart. To him it was not
so much a French offensive that had failed. It was another Allied
effort, gone for nothing. His life training in apprehension made him
paint the future in the gloomiest colours. Where would fresh men be
obtained from? Whence would come the spirit--what they called morale
in military circles--to make another attempt? If neither men nor
morale were forthcoming, would the War drag out to a stalemate Peace?
He had no extravagant theories for or against such an ending to it. To
him it meant simply a bad bargain, with another war to make a better
one looming close behind it. And his recent military training had
also received an unaccustomed shock. A new army enlistment, he had
seen nothing of the retreat from Mons, and was far from being able to
picture March or April 1918, still twelve months in the future.
For the first time in his life he had seen panic, confusion, rout.
True, it was already stopped, but that did not expunge from his mind
the sight, the noise, the smell even, of that crowd of black soldiers
who had suddenly ceased to be soldiers, numbers standing in line, and
had so dramatically re-become men. The staring eyeballs, the physical
collapse, the officer-less medley of uncertain movement were all new to
him, and all most distressing. Of course, the fellows were mere blacks,
not the best material, and had probably been mishandled. But under a
more prolonged strain, might not the same thing happen to others? The
Germans were the least susceptible he judged, the Russians most. What
would he not see, some day, if the War dragged on?
Whatever narrow unimaginative future his unadventurous mind conjured
up, his far stronger faculty for getting on with the matter in hand
soon obliterated. He was no visionary. Contemplation was not in him.
Directly the trains were running he left that cosy little Mess of Major
Bone’s to rejoin. He left off thinking about the War, and took up his
job where he had, for a moment, allowed it to lie, disregarded under
the stress of new events and strange emotions.
As the train moved on and on through French lines of communication
he was wondering again about the fellow who had done the trick at
Vanderlynden’s, of how he was to be found, of how the whole thing would
frame itself. These French chaps, whose transport he saw each side of
him, Army Corps after Army Corps. Biggish men, several of them, in a
round-shouldered fashion, due partly to their countrified occupation,
partly to their uniform, with its overcoat and cross-straps. Browner
skinned, darker of hair and eye than our men, they confirmed his
long-established ideas about them, essentially a Southern people,
whose minds and bodies were formed by Biscayan and Mediterranean
influences. They would not be sentimental about mules, he would
wager. On the other hand, they would not laugh at a Mayor. They did
not laugh much as a rule, they frowned, stared, or talked rapidly
with gestures, and then if they did laugh, it was uproariously,
brutally, at some one’s misfortunes. Satire they understood. But they
missed entirely the gentle nag, nag, nag of ridicule, that he used
to hear from his own platoon or company, covering every unfamiliar
object in that foreign land, because it was not up to the standard
of the upper-middle-classes. To the French, life was a hard affair,
diversified by the points at which one was less unfortunate than one’s
neighbour.
To the English, life was the niceness of a small class, diversified
by the nastiness of everything else, and the nastiness was endlessly
diverting. For the French were mere men, in their own estimation. Not
so the poorer English of the towns. They were gentlemen. If they lapsed
(and naturally they lapsed most of the time) they were comic to each
other, to themselves even. How well he remembered, on the march, when
the battalion had just landed, passing through a village where certain
humble articles of domestic use were standing outside the cottage
doors, waiting to be emptied. A suppressed titter had run all along the
column.
A Frenchman would never have thought them funny, unless they fell
out of a first-floor window on to some head and hurt it. Again, to a
Frenchman, Mayor and Priest, Garde Champêtre and Suisse were officials,
men plus authority and therefore respectworthy. To Englishmen, they
were officials, therefore not gentlemen, therefore ridiculous. If a
big landowner, or member of Parliament, or railway director had walked
into Vanderlynden’s pasture, just as 469 T.M.B. fell in for their weary
march back to the line, would they have laughed? Not they. But then
those members of England’s upper classes would not have worn tricolour
sashes to enforce authority. So there you were. With this philosophic
reflection he fell asleep.
Dormer returned to an army which was at its brightest. It had held the
initiative in the matter of offensives for over a year and a half, and
if no decision had been come to, a wide stretch of ground had been won,
and hope on the whole was high. From time to time there were rumours of
a queer state of things in Russia, but it was far off and uncertain.
The matter of the moment was Messines, the famous ridge which had been
lost at the very beginning of the War and which was now to be regained.
In this affair Dormer found himself busily engaged. Here were no waste
downs of the Somme, but some of the most fertile land in the world.
Among other matters confronting the Generals was the problem of how to
keep civilians from rushing back to cultivate land of which they had
been deprived for three years. The day came, the explosion of the great
mines, so Dormer was told, was heard in London. If he did not hear
it, it was because a well-directed long-range artillery bombardment,
complicated by a bombing that was German and German only in its
thoroughness, deafened and bewildered him, took his sleep, killed his
servant, and stampeded the horses of all the divisional ammunition
columns near him, so that his tent was trampled down, his belongings
reduced to a state hardly distinguishable from the surrounding soil.
However, the blow, such as it was, was successful. Irish and Scotch,
Colonial and London divisions took that battered hillock that had
defied them so long, and Dormer in spite of all his experience could
not help thinking: “Oh, come, now we are really getting on.”
But nothing happened. Dormer heard various reasons given for this,
and twice as many surmises made about it, but well aware how much
importance to attach to the talk that floated round Divisional Offices
and Messes, relied upon his own experience and arithmetic. According
to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months
of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of
activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground.
Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to
every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to
prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few
miles more.
This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by
fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the
neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of
reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the
“front” of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument
that we went no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an
average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by
the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again.
The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the
pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred
and eighty years.
For the only time in his life Dormer wished he were something other
than Dormer. For a few moments after arriving at his conclusion, he
desired to be a person of power and influence, some one who could say
with weight that the thing ought to stop here and now. But this very
unusual impulse did not last long with him.
All that remained of Belgium and wide tracts of French Flanders
adjoining it, became one huge ant-heap. Never had there been such a
concentration, Corps next to Corps, Services mosaiced between Services,
twenty thousand men upon roads, no one could count how many handling
munitions, as, from Ypres to the sea, the great offensive of 1917
slowly germinated.
Dormer was soon caught up and landed in the old familiar
blackly-manured soil of the Salient. He was not disgusted or surprised.
He was becoming increasingly conscious of a sensation of going round
and round. Now, too, that troops were always pouring along a road
before him, he had again the feeling that his head was an empty
chamber, round which was painted a frieze, men, men, mules, men,
limbers, guns, men, lorries, ambulances, men, men, men. It might be
just worry and overwork, it might be that he was again forced to share
his limited accommodation with Kavanagh. They were in a dug-out on the
canal bank, just by one of those fatal causeways built to make the
passage of the canal a certainty, instead of the gamble it had been in
the days of the pontoon bridges. The passage became, like everything
else in the War, a certainty for the Germans as much as for the Allies.
The place was registered with the utmost precision and hit at all times
of the day and night. It probably cost far more than the taking of any
trench.
Amid the earth-shaking explosions that seldom ceased for long, in the
twilight of that narrow cavern in the mud, Kavanagh was as unquenchable
as he ever had been on the high and airy downs of the Somme. During the
daylight, when nothing could be done outside, he bent over his map of
cables while Dormer perfected his plan for getting first-line transport
past that infernal canal. He purposed to send an N.C.O. a good two
miles back, with small square pieces of card, on which were written
9.0 p.m., 9.5 p.m., and so on, the times being those at which the unit
so instructed was to arrive beside his dug-out. He thought rather well
of this idea, no jamming and confusion, and if the enemy made a lucky
hit, there would be fewer casualties and less to clear away. In the
middle of his calculations he heard
“Why, soldiers, why
Should we be melancholy,
Whose duty ’tis to die!”
He could not resist saying:
“If you must make that d----d noise, I wish you’d put some sense into
it.”
“Sense. I was trying to cheer you up!”
“‘Duty ’tis to die’ is jolly cheering, and quite untrue.”
“Oh, is it? What is our duty then?”
“Our duty is to live if we possibly can. And I mean to do it. It’s the
people who keep alive who will win the War.”
“According to that, all one has got to do is to get to Blighty, or
preferably the United States, and stay there?”
“Not a bit. You exaggerate so. All I said was, that it is foolish to
make it a duty to become a casualty.”
“Dormer, I shall never get you to see things in the proper light.
You’re like a lamb trying to leap with joy, and never able to get its
hind legs off the ground.”
“This is all rot. What connection is there between lambs and leaping,
and our jobs? Mine is to see that various people and things are in the
position where they will be wanted, at the moment at which they will
have most effect in winning the War. Yours is to see that they can
speak and be spoken to when required.”
“Lovely, lovely! What a teacher you would have made.”
“I had a better job.”
“There is no better job, except perhaps the one we are doing. I do
admire your descriptions of them. All you want is to put in a personal
allegorical note. You might condense the whole thing by saying that you
will be Minerva if I will be Mercury. Yep?”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
“Yours to see that all is in order. That is a matter of reason.
You are the Goddess. I am merely a lesser God. Mercury was God of
Communications. I wonder whether they’d let me design a cap badge for
signallers. Mercury playing on a buzzer. You may have your Owl!”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I fear I must, the bugle calls, and I must follow, or my watch shows
it is time I was looking after my chaps. But you’ve had a brilliant
idea, Dormer.”
“I?”
“You’ve had the idea of fighting the War allegorically. Wisdom and
Light we are. That would do away with half the horror. So long!”
Then queerly, instead of feeling relieved from an annoyance, Dormer
felt more despondent than ever. What could it be? Was the fellow
right? Surely not! All that nonsense! And yet--and yet what would not
he, Dormer, conscious of his own probity, have given to be conscious
instead, of Kavanagh’s lightness of heart? That very probity drove
him out in the all-too-late summer dusk to see that everything was
going right. Yes, here they were; details of transport, parties to
dig, parties to carry, details of services, engineers of all their
various grades. Punctual, incredibly docile, honest English in their
gestureless manner of getting on with the job. They took care of
their mules, look at these beasts pulling as though they were English
too (instead of the Argentine crossbreds he knew them to be), not
because it was a duty, although it was, and not because the mule was
a miracle, like a tank or an aeroplane, but just because it was a
mule, that meant, to English soldiers, and to English soldiers only,
a fellow-creature, a human being. On they went, reporting to him,
and pushing on, sometimes with a hurried question as to map square,
or other crucial uncertain detail, sometimes with only a grunt. That
endless procession had not been in progress many minutes before, amid
the considerable and gently growing shell-fire, there came a bang that
seemed to go right through his head. He knew from old trench experience
what it was. Nothing but a gun pointing straight at you could make that
particular hrrmph.
He set his feet, not a moment too soon. It was a five-nine, the sort
the French called “_Grande Vitesse_.” A whirlwind, a small special
whirlwind pointed like an arrow, hit the causeway so that it shook
and then went up with a wheel of splintered bits. He was glad he had
devised his patent card system. The units were not too close together.
He had time to shout to the next, “Come on, you’ve two minutes to get
over!” and over they went, as if the Devil were after them, instead of
a lump of Krupp steel fitted with lethal chemicals. They were hardly
over before the second came, whump! To say that Dormer was frightened,
was to fail to describe the matter. He was stiffened all over, his hair
stood up, his heart thumped so that it hurt him, his feet were stone
cold, but he knew his job and did it.