and although he hurried them, the tail of the brown column was still
high and exposed when the shell came. They ducked and darted into any
cover that was available, and he heard his voice, as the voice of
some one far away speaking to a public meeting, like a voice on the
wireless, saying:
“Come on. Get out of that and come on. If I can stand here, surely you
can get out of it.”
They did so. Behind them came a special party to dig in the
Meteorological Officer. What a menagerie it was! Every trade, every
nation too, Chinese, Zulu, West Indian, Egyptian. He did not blame the
Germans who had chalked in blue on the bare back of a Portuguese, whom
they captured and stripped, “The Monkey House is full,” before they
drove him back into English lines.
Even truer did Dormer find it when he had to go back for any reason,
to Corps H.Q. or beyond. French and Belgians he knew, he had found
them in the trenches beside him years before. Portuguese he had become
accustomed to, Americans he looked forward to with anticipation. But
farther back, he found Chinese, Africans of all descriptions, Indians,
East and West, while the French, in addition to their black troops, had
Spanish and Italian labour.
It did not please his parochial mind. He felt increasingly that there
was something wrong when you had to drag in all these coloured people
from every remote quarter of the globe, without even the excuse the
French had, that they were “Colonials.” But no one could tell, least of
all Dormer himself, whether his feelings were the result of a strong
belief in the Colour Bar, or whether it were merely the futility of it
all. For in spite of the omnium gatherum of race, tongue and religion,
the offensive failed. As a matter of routine, the weather broke on Z
day. Within forty-eight hours it was obvious that the affair had stuck.
Apart from a feeling of the hand of Fate in it, a sinister feeling of
great incomprehensible forces working out his destiny for him, without
his having the least power to influence the matter for better, for
worse, which was so desolating to his pre-War habit of mind, where a
certain line of unostentatious virtue had always carried a reward that
could be reckoned on with the greatest exactitude, there were other
disturbing elements in the situation.
Of course the Bosche was ready. He was bound to be ready, couldn’t
avoid it. He had immensely thickened his depth of defence, which
was now composed not of the old obvious trenches full of men, all
of which could be blown to pieces, but of small isolated turrets of
ferro-concrete, where two or three machine gunners (and who made better
machine gunners than the careful Germans) could hold an army at bay,
until dislodged by a direct hit by a shell of six-inch calibre or over,
or laboriously smoke-screened and bombed out, at the rate of perhaps
a mile a day, on good days. He saw his computation of one hundred
and eighty years altogether insufficient for getting to the Rhine.
Moreover, for such work this medley of nations was of no good at all.
It reminded him of a book by Anatole France he had been compelled by
a friend to read, wherein a great conqueror enlisted in his army all
the men of his nation, then all the men of the neighbouring nations,
then all the savages at the end of the earth, and finally the baboons
and other combatant animals. That was all very well. That was just
story telling. But it horrified Dormer all the more to see such story
telling coming true before his eyes. As coloured-labour company after
coloured-labour company filed past his tent, guttural and straggling,
he was able to pull himself together, and see that it was not true
after all.
These people, little better than beasts, uglier in some cases and far
more troublesome, were no good. They couldn’t fight. You couldn’t trust
them to stand the shelling or to obey an order. Then just as he was
feeling rather relieved, he saw the logical result of his conclusion.
All the fighting would have to be done by those very men who had
volunteered or been conscripted and who had been so generously wasted
ever since. They were sticking it, and sticking it well, but this new
offensive that had just opened promised to try them pretty high. Would
they stick that? Would the day ever come when he would see them a
mere mob, like those French black troops he had seen in May? Perhaps
peace would be made. Such is the eternal hopefulness of men, that he
even hoped, against all previous experience. That quenchless gleam
common to all human souls, one of the basic things that makes war so
long, and peace, where it is so much less necessary, just that much
less attractive, added to work for fifteen hours a day, kept Dormer
sane and healthy for weeks, in spite of worsening conditions, and
the steady increase in enemy shelling. It was with a return of that
uncanny feeling of being haunted that he found himself called up to
Divisional Head-quarters. He knew quite well what it was, but he had
relied on the difficulty of finding Andrews, on the tremendous strain
of this most costly and urgent of all offensives, to keep the matter
out of his path, or rather to keep him out of its path, for he had long
dropped into the habit of feeling himself as in a nightmare, pursued
by something he could not see or even imagine, but which was certainly
sinister and personally fatal to him.
When he got to the office his feeling of nightmarishness was rather
aggravated than allayed. Colonel Birchin was talking to the A.D.M.S.
The fact was that the A.D.M.S. was a new one, patently a Doctor who had
been fetched out from Doctoring, had been found capable of organization
and had been shoved into the job vice some one else gone higher up.
Beside him Colonel Birchin shone, as it were, with the glamour of
another world. Dormer had seen him in camp and hut, and château and
Mairie for a year and a half, just like that, handsome and sleek,
filling his plain but choice khaki with a distinction that no foreign
officer could gain from all the blues and reds and yellows and greens
and blacks, varnished belts and metal ornaments of other armies. And
in that moment of sharpened nerves and unusual power of vision Dormer
seemed to see why. Colonel Birchin was not an officer of a national
army in the sense that any French, German, Italian or Russian Colonel
was. There was nothing of the brute and nothing of the strategian about
those nice manners, that so easily and completely excluded everything
that was--what? Unmilitary? Hardly. There was nothing consciously,
offensively military about the Colonel, “regular” or professional
soldier that he was. He would never have swaggered in Alsace,
massacred in Tripoli, Dreyfused in France. He would never have found
it necessary. For Colonel Birchin was not a state official. He was an
officer of the Watch, the small band of paid soldiers that Stuart and
subsequent kings kept to defend themselves from mobs, national armies
and other inconvenients. Colonel Birchin might write himself as of
“The Herefordshire Regiment,” but it made no difference. His chief,
inherited, and most pronounced quality was that he was a courtier. He
represented the King. Preferably, at home, of course, where one could
live in all that thick middle-class comfort that had ousted the old
land-owning seignorial dignity and semi-starvation. But upon occasion,
Colonel Birchin could betake himself to Africa, India, and now even
to this France, sure that even in this most tedious and unpleasant of
wars, he would be properly fed and housed.
So here he was, representing the King even more exactly than before
he was seconded from the King’s Own Herefordshire Regiment. He spoke
and looked, in fact, rather as if he were the King. Ignorant and
unused to the immense transport, the complicated lists of highly
scientific equipment, he judged rightly enough that his one safe
line was to represent authority, and see that these semi-civilians
who did understand such things got on with the War. So he listened
in a gentlemanly way to the A.D.M.S. (who wore beard and pince-nez)
explaining at great length a difficult alternative as to the siting of
Forward Dressing Stations, and contributed:
“You do what is best, Doctor, and we shall back you up!”
Then he turned to Dormer, hunted a moment among the papers on the
table, and spoke:
“Look here, Dormer, about this affair of yours?”
It took all Dormer’s training to keep his mouth shut. He saw more
clearly than ever how Colonel Birchin and all like him and all he
represented, were divesting themselves of any connection with what
looked like a nasty, awkward, tedious and probably discreditable
business. But he had not grasped it.
“They’ve found Andrews--this--er--gunner, who will be able to give you
information. And--look here, Dormer--this affair must be cleared up, do
you understand? Andrews is in hospital. You can go by car to Boulogne,
but we expect you to get it done this time. Corps are most annoyed.
There’s been a nice how-d-y-do with the French.”
Dormer swallowed twice and only said:
“Really, sir.”
“Yes. Car starts at seven.”
Accordingly at seven, the big Vauxhall moved off from that little
group of huts, in the meadow that was so regularly bombed every night.
Dormer, sitting next to Major Stevenage, did not mind. As well Boulogne
as anywhere, while this was going on. All the roads were full of
transport, all the railways one long procession of troop and supply
trains. It was about as possible to hide it all from the Germans, as
to conceal London on a Bank Holiday. In fact it was rather like that.
The population was about the same, if the area were rather larger, the
effect of the crowd, the surly good humour, the air of eating one’s
dinner out of one’s hand was the same.
There was very little sign of any consciousness of the shadow that hung
over it all. Hospital trains and ambulances abounded, going in the
opposite direction, but no one noticed them, so far as Dormer could
see. The type of man who now came up to fight his country’s battles
was little changed. The old regular was hardly to be found. The brisk
volunteer was almost gone. Instead there had arisen a generation that
had grown used to the War, had had it on their minds so long, had been
threatened with it so often that it had lost all sharpness of appeal to
their intellects.
Right back to St. Omer the crowd stretched. Beyond that it became more
specialized. Air Force. Hospitals. Training grounds. Then, across high
windy downs, nothing, twenty miles of nothing, until a long hill and
the sea.
Up there on those downs where there was no one, never had been anybody
ever since they were pushed up from the bed of some antediluvian ocean,
and covered with short turf, Dormer had one of his rare respites
from the War. Briefer perhaps, but more complete than that which he
experienced on his rare leaves, he felt for a while the emancipation
from his unwilling thraldom. It was the speed of the car that probably
induced the feeling. Anyhow, on the level road that runs from Boulogne
to Étaples--the ETAPPS of the Army in France--he lost it. Here there
was no escaping the everlasting khaki and transport, that State of War
into which he had been induced, and out of which he could see no very
great possibility of ever emerging. He had no warning of what was to
come, and was already well among the hospitals and dumps that extended
for miles beside the railway, when a military policeman held up a
warning hand.
“What’s the matter, Corporal?”
“I should not go into Etapps this morning, if I were you, sir.”
“Why not?”
The man shifted his glance. He did not like the job evidently.
“Funny goings-on, there, sir.”
“Goings-on, what does that mean?”
Dormer was capable of quite a good rasp of the throat, when required.
He had learned it as a Corporal.
“The men are out of ’and, sir!”
“Are they? The A.P.M. will see to that, I suppose.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Drive on!”
Dormer didn’t like it, to tell the truth. But he was so used to
bluffing things he didn’t like, and his own feelings, and other
people’s awkwardness, that he could not do otherwise than go on. Also
he didn’t realize what was on foot. A certain amount of daily work was
being done in among the dumps and sidings where the population was of
all sorts of non-combatant, Labour Corps units, medical formations,
railway people, and others. But from the rise by the Reinforcement
Officers’ hut, he began to see. The whole of the great infantry camp
on the sandhill--and it was very full, he had heard people say that
there were a hundred thousand men there--seemed to have emptied itself
into the little town. Here they sauntered and talked, eddying a little
round the station and some of the larger estaminets, in motion like an
ant-hill, in sound like a hive of bees. The car was soon reduced to a
walking pace, there were no police to be seen, and once entered there
was no hope of backing out of that crowd, and no use in appearing to
stop in it.
“Go slow,” Dormer ordered, glancing out of the corner of his eye at
the wooden face of the chauffeur. Nothing to be seen. Either the man
didn’t like it, or didn’t feel the necessary initiative to join in it,
or perhaps considered himself too superior to these foot-sloggers to
wish to be associated with them. Most probably he hadn’t digested the
fact that this mob, through which he drove his officer, was Mutiny,
the break-up of ordered force, and military cohesion. It might even be
the end of the War and victory for the Germans. All this was apparent
enough in a moment to Dormer, who was careful to look straight again
to his front, unwinking and mute, until, with a beating heart, he saw
that they were clear of the jam in the Market Place, and well down the
little street that led to the bridge across which were the farther
hospitals, and various sundry Base Offices, in the former of which he
was to find Andrews. Now, therefore, he did permit himself to light a
cigarette. But not a word did he say to his chauffeur. Now that it was
behind him he had the detachment to reflect that it was a good-humoured
crowd. He had heard a gibe or so that might have been meant for him or
no, but in the main, not being hustled, all those tens of thousands
that had broken camp, chased the police off the streets, and committed
what depredations he did not know, were peaceful enough, much too
numerous and leaderless to make any cohesive threat to an isolated
officer, not of their own unit, and therefore not an object of any
special hatred, any more than of any special devotion, just a member
of another class in the hierarchy, uninteresting to simple minds, in
which he caused no immediate commotion.
Here, on the road that ran through the woods to Paris Plage, there
were little knots of men, strolling or lying on the grass. They became
fewer and fewer. By the time he arrived at the palace, mobilized as a
hospital, for which he was bound, there remained no sign of the tumult.
Here, as on the other flank, by the Boulogne road, Medical and Base
Units functioned unmoved. But the news had been brought by Supply and
Signal services and the effect of it was most curious.
Dormer had to pass through the official routine, had to be announced,
had to have search made for young Andrews, and finally was conducted
to a bed in Ward C., on which was indicated Captain Andrews, R.G.A.
Dormer of course wanted to begin at once upon his mission, but the
other, a curly-haired boy, whose tan had given place to a patchy white
under loss of blood from a nasty shrapnel wound in the leg, that kept
on turning septic, had to be “scraped” or “looked at,” each of these
meaning the operation table, and was only now gradually healing, would
not let him.
Once away from the theatre and the knife, Andrews, like any other
healthy youngster, soon accumulated any amount of animal spirit,
lying there in bed, adored by the nursing sisters, admired by the men
orderlies. He was not going to listen to Dormer’s serious questions.
He began:
“Cheerio! Sit on the next bed, there’s no corpse in it, they’ve just
taken it away. Anyhow, it isn’t catching. Have a cigarette, do for
God’s sake. They keep on giving me the darned things, and they all end
in smoke!”
“Sorry you got knocked out.”
“Only fair. Knocked out heaps of Fritzes. I gave ’em what for, and they
gave me some back. I say, have you just come from the town?”
“I have just motored through.”
“Is it true that our chaps have broke loose?”
“There’s a certain amount of disorder, but no violence that I could
see.”
Dormer was conscious of heads being popped up in all the surrounding
beds. So that was how it took them! Of course, they were bored stiff.
“How topping. Is it true that they’ve killed all the red-caps?”
“I didn’t see any signs of it.”
“Cleared up the remains had they? Picked the bones, or fallen in proper
burying parties.”
“I don’t think there was anything of that sort.”
“Oh, come now, first we heard they had set on a police-corporal that
had shot a Jock.”
“What did he do that for?”
“Dunno. It isn’t the close season for Jocks, anyhow. Then it was ten
police-corporals. The last rumour was that they’d stoned the A.P.M. to
death----”
And so it went on. Lunch-time came. A Doctor Major, impressed by
Dormer’s credentials, invited him into the Mess, and asked a lot of
questions about the front, the offensive, and the state of Étaples.
Dormer always liked those medical messes. It seemed so much more worth
while to mend up people’s limbs, rather than to smash them to bits. The
Doctors had their professional “side” no doubt, but they had a right to
it.
After lunch Dormer made his way back to Ward C. He was met by a hush,
and by a little procession. The Sergeant-major came first and after
him bearers with a stretcher covered by the Union Jack. The hush in
the ward was ominous. They were all so close to what had happened. It
was not like the open field where the casualty is a casualty and the
living man a different thing. Here the dead were only different in
degree, not in kind. They were worse “cases”--the worst, that was all.
So there were no high spirits after lunch. They had gibed about Death
in the morning, but Death had come and they had ceased to gibe. In
the silence, Dormer felt awkward, did not know how to begin. When he
had made up his mind that he must, he looked up and found Andrews was
asleep. So the day wore on to tea-time, and after tea he was not wanted
in the ward, and was wanted in the Mess. He himself was not hurrying
to return to any regularly bombed hut near Poperinghe. The Commanding
Officer was even more emphatic. Étaples was not safe. Dormer let it go
at that, and got a good game of bridge.
In the morning he found young Andrews as young as ever and got down to
his job at once:
“Do you remember joining 469 T.M.B.?”
“Yes, sh’d think I do.”
“Do you remember the man you had as servant while you were with them?”
“I do. Topping feller. Gad, I was sorry when I had to leave him behind.
Of course, I dropped him when I went to hospital. Never was so done!”
At last!
“You couldn’t give me his name and number, I suppose?”
“I must have got a note of it somewhere. I say, what’s all this about?
Do you want to get hold of him?”
“I do. He’s wanted, over a question of damage in billets. They’ve sent
me to find him out.”
“Then I’m damned if I’ll tell you. Because he was a topping chap!”
rejoined Andrews, laughing.
“You’d better tell me, I think. The matter has gone rather high up,
and it might be awkward if I had to report that the information was
refused.”
“Lord, you aren’t going to make a Court of Inquiry affair of it, are
you?”
“It may come to that, and they’ve got hold of your name.”
“Gee whizz! I don’t like landing the chap. I may not have got any
particulars of him, now, my things have been so messed about.”
“Well, look and see!”
“All right.”
Andrews fumbled out from the night-table beside his bed, the usual
bedside collection. Letters in female handwriting, some young, some
old--from one or more sweethearts and a mother, thought Dormer.
Paper-covered novels. The sort (English) that didn’t make you think.
The sort (French) that make you feel, if you were clever at the
language. Cigarettes, bills. One or two letters from brother officers.
“Blast. It’s in my Field Note Book, in my valise, in store here. I
shall have to send to have it got out. Wait half a mo’ and I’ll get an
orderly.”
As they waited, he went on:
“What’s he wanted for? Some dam’ Frenchman going to crime him for
stealing hop-poles?”
“Something of that sort. You wouldn’t remember it, it happened before
you joined the Battery.”
“Then it jolly well wasn’t my man Watson. He’d only just come up from
Base!”
“Come, the man was of middle size and ordinary to look at, and had been
servant to an officer of the name of Fairfield, who was killed!”
“Oh, that chap. I know who you mean now. I don’t call him my servant.
I only had him for a day or two. His name was Smith, as far as I
can recollect. We were in the line, and I never got his number. He
disappeared, may have been wounded, or gone sick of course, we were
strafed to Hell, as usual. I should have got rid of him in any case. He
was a grouser!”
“Didn’t like the War?”
“I should say not.”
Hopeless, of course. When Andrews saw Dormer rise and close his
notebook, he apologized:
“Beastly sorry. Afraid I’m no good.”
“That’s all right. I don’t want to find the fellow, personally. It’s
simply my job.”
“Fair wear and tear, so to speak?”
“Yes. Good morning.”
“Don’t go--I say, don’t. You’re just getting interesting!” Heads popped
up in the surrounding beds. “Do tell us what it’s all about.”
“Merely a matter of damage in billets as I said.”
“Go on. There’s always damage in billets. You must ha’ done heaps,
haven’t you? I have. There’s something more in it than that.”
“Well, there is. Perhaps it will be a lesson to you not to go too far
with other people’s property.”
“I say, don’t get stuffy. What did the feller do?”
“He broke into a shrine.”
“I say, that’s a bit thick.”
“It was!”
“What did he do it for? Firewood?”
“No. He wanted to shelter a couple of mules!”
“Good man. Don’t blame him!”
“No!”
“But they can’t crime him for a thing like that?”
“They will if they can catch him.”
“Go on!”
“It didn’t stop at that.” Once more it seemed to Dormer that a good
lesson might do no harm to the light-headed youth that Andrews
represented, and several of whom were listening, anxiously from that
corner of the ward.
“Did G.H.Q. take it up?”
“Yes. They had to. The Mayor of the village came to make an official
inquiry and the Battery made fun of him.”
“Lumme! I bet they did!”
“They should not have done so. That made the French authorities take it
up. Goodness knows where it will end!”
“End in our fighting the French,” said some one.
Dormer felt that it was high time to put his foot down. “You may be
privileged to talk like that while you’re in hospital. But I don’t
recommend you to do so outside. You ought to have the sense to know
that we don’t want to fight anyone, we most certainly don’t want to
fight some one else after Germans. In any case, we don’t want to do the
fighting in England!”
There was a dead silence after he had spoken, and he rose, feeling that
he had impressed them. He stumped out of the ward without another word,
went to the Mess, rang and demanded his car. The Orderly Officer would
have liked to detain him, insisted on the possible state of Étaples,
but he would not hear of it. In those few hours he had had enough and
more than enough of the Base--the place where people talked while
others Did--the place where the pulse of the War beat so feebly. He
felt he would go mad if he stayed there, without sufficient occupation
for his mind. His car appeared and he soon left the palace and the
birchwoods and was rattling over the bridge into Étaples. “Now for it!”
he thought. But no policeman warned him off this time. He soon saw why.
The streets had resumed their normal appearance. He might have known.
That fancy of his, about the Headless Man, came back to him with its
true meaning. What could they do, all those “Other Ranks,” as they were
designated? Just meander about, fight the police, perhaps. But they had
no organization, no means of rationing or transport. Of course, they
had had to go back to their respective camps with their tails between
their legs in order to get fed.