feeling his way for crossing the canal, but had found it far less easy
than in the sectors farther north. Tolerably certain that the main
attack would come at dawn, Dormer and Kavanagh got what rest they
could, though proper sleep was out of the question. Their servants had
found a well-upholstered sofa, and a superior brass bedstead, which now
adorned the cellar, causing Kavanagh to gibe about damage in billets.
Their vigil was lightened by the sounds of song from the stables where
such men as they had set apart as reserves were lodged.
“Old soldiers never die,
They only fade away.”
to a well-known hymn tune, made Dormer home-sick, but delighted
Kavanagh.
“Listen to that!”
“I can’t help it, unless I send and stop them.”
“Never, man, never stop men who can sing at such a moment. It means
philosophy and courage!”
“It means foolishness and rum!”
“Dormer, I fear you are no born leader!”
“No, of course I wasn’t.”
“But you’ve got to lead men now, and lead ’em to victory.”
“I don’t mind much so long as I lead ’em to Peace!”
“Yes, but don’t you see, mere Peace will mean Revolution!”
“I don’t believe it. I saw that affair at Étaples. I saw the trouble
among the French troops in May. Those chaps prefer to take orders from
you and me rather than from their own sort.”
“How do you account for Russia, then?”
“I can’t. But it’s an object lesson rather than an example, I should
say.”
“You used not to talk like that. You used to say that the men wouldn’t
stand it.”
“I’ve lived and learned!”
“Both, I am sure.”
“You needn’t be so superior. No one knew what any of this would be like
until it was tried. We’ve something to go by, now! This War depends
on turning a crank. The side that goes on turning it efficiently the
longer will win. Our chaps look like lasting!”
“So do the Bosche. No, Dormer, you’re all wrong----”
At that moment a fresh burst of song came from the stables. A Cockney
voice to a waltz tune:
“Orl that I wawnt is larve,
Orl that I need is yew----”
“There,” cried Kavanagh, his voice rising into his excited croak.
“That’s what we want!”
Dormer did not reply. With dusk came a few long-range shots, gradually
broadening and deepening into a bombardment towards dawn. Both of them
had to be out and about all night. They had several casualties, and the
whole place reeked with gas. As the grey light of another day began
to change the texture of the shadows, movement was discernible about
the road. It was their chance and with a higher heart and the feeling
of relief, they were able to let loose the Lewis guns, which they had
managed to save intact. For more than an hour, Dormer crawled from one
to the other, seeing that they did not overheat or jam, for the fact
that they were killing Germans pleased him. Then there was a slackening
of fire on both sides.
They waited and the suspense from being irksome, became tolerable.
There was a good deal of noise each side of them, and Dormer began
to wonder if his detachment were surrounded, especially as the
servants whom he had sent back to get into touch with Brigade, had
not returned. It was a dull rainy afternoon prematurely dark, and
the rain as it increased, seemed to beat down the gunning, as water
quenches a fire. He must have been in that half-waking state that often
superimposed on sleeplessness and the awful din, when he was thoroughly
roused by trampling in the trees round the Château. He called to
Kavanagh but got no reply. Then there was a pushing and scrambling at
the wall behind the stable, and English cavalrymen came swinging over
it. Dormer and Kavanagh were relieved, and were shortly able to hand
over and prepare to march their command back to rejoin their Division,
which, depleted by four weeks of continual mauling, was being taken out
of the line.
The battle was by no means over. They next went in farther north, and
Dormer had the queer experience of going into trenches where Corps
H.Q. had been, of billeting in rooms where Major-Generals had slept.
Gradually he became aware of lessening tension, reduced shelling, and
slackened machine-gun fire, but it was the end of May before he found,
when sent to raid an enemy post, that there was no one there. He had
been right after all. The German offensive also had failed. Anticlimax
was the rule of the War. He was glad that he had parted from Kavanagh,
who had gone back to his proper job with his Division, goodness knew
where. He felt that the fellow would remind him that for several hours
while they lay together in those scratched-out trenches round that
little Château by the canal, he had given up hope. He need not have
bothered. If the Bosche could not win on that day, he never would.
Slowly now the British lines were creeping forward. Then he found
American troops behind him.
It was during this phase of things that he found himself upon familiar
ground. Except on Kavanagh’s lips, he had not heard of the crime at
Vanderlynden’s since before Christmas. It was now September. Here he
was, detrained and told to march to Hondebecq. He passed what had
been Divisional Head-quarters in 1916 and noticed the shell-holes,
the open, looted, evacuated houses. He passed along the road which he
and Major Stevenage had traversed all those years ago. The Brigade
were in Divisional Reserve, and were quartered in a string of farms
just outside the village. He looked at the map squares attentively,
but on the larger scale map he found it actually marked Ferme
l’Espagnole. Being Dormer, he just saw to the billeting of his company
and then learned that the Battalion Head-quarters were located at the
Vanderlyndens’, and had no difficulty in finding good reason to walk
over there, after tea.
The place was not much changed. It was soiled, impoverished, battered
by War, but the German advance, which had stopped dead a few miles
short of it, had been spent by the time it reached its limits in this
sector, and had early been pushed back. Trenches had been dug and
camouflage erected all round the place, but it had not suffered damage
except by a few long-distance shots, the routine of trench warfare had
never reached it. In the kitchen, darkened by the fact that the glass
was gone from the windows, which were blinded with aeroplane fabric,
stood the familiar figure of Mademoiselle Vanderlynden. He asked for
the Colonel, and was civilly directed to the parlour on the other side
of the door. Not a word of recognition, hardly a second glance. He did
not know if he were sorry or glad. He would have felt some relief to
hear that the claim that had caused all that trouble had been settled.
But he did not know what he might bring down upon his head by inquiry
and held his tongue. His business with the Colonel was the usual
regimental routine, nominal and numerical rolls, reinforcements and
indents, training and movements. It did not take long. On his way out
he passed the kitchen door and said just:
“Good night, Mademoiselle!”
“Good night, M’sieu!” And then calmly: “They are going to pay us for
the damage to _La Vierge_!”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“I thought you would like to know. It has been a long time.”
“Yes, a long time. I hope it will soon be settled.”
“Ah, not yet. I know these offices at Boulogne! They have a good deal
to pay for, no doubt.”
“No doubt. Good night, Mademoiselle!”
“Good night, _mon capitaine_.”
Walking back to his billet, he had once more that sensation of escape.
Was he really going to get away from that business, this time, for
ever? True, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden seemed little enough inclined to
be vindictive. He could not help feeling that her view of the affair
was after all reasonable and just. She bore no malice, she wanted
things put right. Money would do it. She was going to get the money,
or so she seemed to think. She had no animus against the man who had
broken a piece of her property. She had neither animus against nor
consideration for himself, the representative of the British Army,
who had so signally failed to hasten the question of compensation.
She took it all as part of the War, and she was seeing it correctly.
It was the British Army that had done it. Her home, where she was
working so peacefully in 1914, had become first a billet, then all but
a battlefield. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more
nor less. That was exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been
done to any furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to
get out of it with his body intact, and resume the broken thread of
existence, where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago.
True he had not been badly paid, but he had taken a considerable
risk--it was much more dangerous to be an officer than a private, more
dangerous to be a private than a civilian. She had gauged the whole
thing correctly, right down to the necessarily slow and complicated
process of getting it adjudicated by some set of fellows down by the
coast, who ran these things off by the hundred and had a whole set of
rules that had to be complied with. He turned at the end of the farm
road and took a look back at the old place. There were worse billets
than the Spanish Farm and people more awkward to deal with than the
Vanderlyndens. In the Somme he had come across farms where they charged
you for the water and people who removed everything right down to
the bedsteads. Vanderlynden had only wanted to be paid for what was
wantonly damaged. They were French, you couldn’t expect them to be
sympathetic about other people’s mules. What a queer world it was, he
would never have suspected all the crotchets that human nature could
present, had he not been thrust nose-foremost into this infernal show.
All his philosophy forsook him, however, on entering the billet where
his company was lodged. The woman had been selling not merely beer,
which was connived at, but spirits, to the men. Two of them had got
“tight” and had been arrested, and he would have them up before him in
the morning. Then there would be the question as to where she got the
spirits from, whether some Quartermaster-sergeant had been making away
with the rum, or whether she had induced some one to buy it for her at
the Expeditionary Force Canteen. It all came back to the same thing.
Men kept under these conditions too long.
No one had been more surprised than Dormer, when the Allied Armies
took up the initiative again in July, and appeared to keep it. With a
lugubrious satisfaction he found himself retracing the advances in the
Somme district of 1916. It was an ironical comment on his hard-earned
War-wisdom, two years devoted to doing precisely the same thing at
precisely the same place. Of course, he had learned some lessons, but
his estimate of one hundred and eighty years was still too small. But
when the movement became perpetual and he found himself on ground he
no longer recognized, among villages that showed all the signs of
methodical German occupation, he began to wonder. A slight wound in
the forearm threw him out of touch for a week or two, and when he went
back, he found himself in a more northern sector again, and for the
first time found cavalry in front of him. It suited him all right, he
didn’t want to have the job of bombing out little nests of machine
gunners, that marked each step in the line of advance. His feelings
were pretty generally shared. Men began to ask themselves whether there
was any glory in being knocked out at the moment of victory. When his
battalion was again obliged to move in advance of the cavalry, against
obstacles which, although always evacuated, were out of the sphere of
cavalry tactics, he found for the first time a definite unwillingness
among his command to obey orders in any but the most perfunctory manner.
He had sufficient sense to see that it was very natural. In the early
days the job had been to keep men under cover, to avoid useless and
wasteful casualties. The lesson had been learned at length with a
thoroughness that he could never have instilled. The old, old boast
of the Territorial Colonel who had first enlisted him, and whose
tradition was actually of pre-Territorial days, from the period of the
Volunteers of before the Boer War, was far better founded than he had
ever supposed. He had been inclined to scoff when he had heard the old
boy talk: “Our motto was Defence not Defiance!” He did not scoff now.
It was deeply, psychologically true. The army that had survived was an
army that had been made to fight without much difficulty, while its
back was to the sea, with the knowledge that trenches lost meant worse,
if possible, conditions of existence, and it was moved by some rags of
sentiment, as to holding what one had got; an army which displayed all
the slowly aroused, almost passive pugnacity of the English working
class, so docile, yet so difficult to drive out of a habit of mind,
or an acquired way of living. They had no real imperialism in them,
none of the high-faultin’ Deutschland über Alles, none of the French or
Italian bitter revengefulness, nor peasant passion for acquisition. The
Rhine had never figured in their primary school education. They had no
relatives groaning under Austrian or German domination--no rancorous
feelings bred from the attempt to force alien language or unassimilated
religious forms down their throats.
He had always regarded the boast about an Englishman’s House being his
Castle as so much claptrap. He knew by daily experience of business,
that any Englishman was governed by economic conditions. Religious
and racial tyranny were so far removed from the calculations of all
his sort, and all above and below it, that the very terms had ceased
to have any meaning. This War had no effect on the lightly borne if
real tyranny of England, the inexorable need to get a permanent job
if possible and keep it, with constant anxiety as to the tenure of
one’s lodging, and the prospect of old age. These fellows who fell
in with blank unmeaning faces, in which there was no emotion, and
who marched with the same old morose jokes, and shyly imitated the
class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from
the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools, had
done what they had promised to do, or had (the late comers) been
conscripted to do. They had engaged or been called up for duration.
That was a typically English slogan for a European War. Their Anglia
Irridenta lay in the football fields and factories, the music-halls
and seaside excursions that they talked of, and now hoped to see once
again. Their Alsace Lorraine lay in the skilled occupations or soft
jobs that women or neutrals had invaded. When he listened to their
talk in billets, and occasionally caught some real glimpse of them,
between their mouth-organ concerts, and their everlasting gamble at
cards, it was of the keen Trades Unionists who were already talking of
purging this, that or the other skilled industry from all the non-union
elements that had been allowed to flow into it, behind their backs,
while they were chasing Fritz across this b---- country, where Belgium,
France, or Luxembourg were simply “billets,” and the goal was “dear old
Blighty”--behind them, over the Channel, not in front, still ringed
about by German trenches.
There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The
French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at their
farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their country
without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built,
hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable
sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the mechanical
nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest proportion of
regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting their one
chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their command
of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant ammunition.
The machine gunners, containing some proportion of picked men, and able
to feel that they could easily produce some noticeable effect with
their weapon, were still game. But the mass of infantry, tired enough
of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted by generations of
peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were rapidly adopting the
attitude, unexpressed as always with the humbler Englishman, of “Let
the gunners go on if they like. We don’t mind!”
On a grey November morning, Dormer went to his billet in the suburb of
a manufacturing town. It was the most English place he had set eyes
on in all his three years. It was not really suburban, very nearly,
not quite. There was no garden before the door, it was close to the
factories and workshops where the wealth that had built it was made,
instead of being removed a decent mile or so. In fact, it just lacked
the proper pretentiousness. Its owner had made money and was not in the
least ashamed of admitting it, was rather prone to display the fact
and his house looked like it. It was a villa, not a château. It was
the home of a successful manufacturer who did not want in the least
to be taken for a country gentleman. He, poor fellow, had been called
up and promptly killed, and his home, with its stained-glass windows,
expensive draping and papering, clumsy if efficient sanitation, was
inhabited only by his widow.
Dormer thought there could not be in the world any person so utterly
beaten. Broken-hearted, exposed during four years to considerable
bodily privation, being in the occupied area, she was no Mademoiselle
Vanderlynden of the Army zone that Dormer knew, making a bold front
against things. She was a delicate--had been probably a pretty
woman--but it was not from any of her half-audible monosyllabic replies
that Dormer was able to discover to what sort of a country he had come.
A little farther down the street was the factory, long gutted by the
Germans and used as a forage store, where his company were billeted.
The old caretaker in the time-keeper’s cottage told Dormer all that
was necessary, and left him astonished at the moderation of tone and
statement, compared with the accounts of German occupation given by the
Propagandist Press. Possibly, it was because he addressed the old man
in French--or because he had never parted with his English middle-class
manners--or because the old fellow was nearly wild with delight at
being liberated. This was what Dormer heard:
“Enter, my Captain. It is a Captain, is it not, with three stars?
The insignia of Charles Martell!” (Here wife and daughter joined in
the laugh at what was obviously one of the best jokes in father’s
repertory.) “You will find that the Bosches removed everything, but
that makes less difficulty in the workshop. You have only to divide
the floor space between your men. I know. I was a corporal in the War
of ’Seventy. Ah! a bad business, that, but nothing to what we have now
supported. You will do well to make a recommendation to your men not
to drink the water of the cistern. The Bosches have made beastliness
therein. Ah! You have your own watercart? That is well done, much
better than we others used to have, in Algeria. It is always wise to
provide against the simple soldier, his thoughts have no connection.
You say you are accustomed to Germans and their mannerisms? I do not
wonder. We too, as you may judge, have had cause to study them. I will
tell you this, my Captain, the German is no worse than any other man,
but he has this mania for Deutschland über Alles. It comes from having
been a little people and weak, and so often conquered by us others.
So that to give him some idea of himself, since he cannot invent a
culture like us other French, he must go to put all above below, and
make a glory of having a worse one. That shows itself in his three
great faults--he has no sentiment of private property--what is others’,
is his. He must be dirtier than a dog in his habits--witness our
court-yard--and he has to make himself more brute than he really is.
You see, therefore, he has stripped the factory, and even our little
lodging, down to my daughter’s sewing-machine, and the conjugal bed
of mother and myself. You see also, that we had our grandchildren, our
dog Azor, our cat Titi. Now many of the Bosches who lodged here were
certainly married and had their little ones and domestic animals. Yet
if they found a child or a beast playing in the entry when they entered
or left, they must give a kick of the foot, a cut with the riding-whip.
Not from bad thoughts, I assure you. It is in their code, as it is
in that of us others, English and French, to lift the hat, to make a
salutation. The officers are the worst, because in them the code is
stronger. For the German simple soldier, I have respect. They sang like
angels!” (Here the old man quavered out the first bars of:
“Ein feste Bourg ist unser Gott.”)
Dormer wanted to get away, but could scarcely forbear to listen when
the daughter broke in:
“But, Papa, recount to the officer the droll trick you played upon
those who came to demolish the factory!”
“Ah, yes. Place yourself upon a chair, my officer, and I will tell you
that. Figure to yourself that these Bosches, as I have explained, were
not so bad as one says in the papers. They had orders to do it. I know
what it is. I have had orders, in Algeria, to shoot Arabs. It was not
my dream, but I did it. I will explain to you this.
“It was the day on which they lost the ridge. One heard the English
guns, nearer and nearer. Already there were no troops in the factory,
nothing but machine gunners, always retreating. A party of three came
here with machinery in a box. One knew them slightly, since they also
had billeted here. They were not dirty types; on the contrary, honest
people. Sapper-miners, they were; but this time one saw well that they
had something they did not wish to say. They deposit their box and
proceed to render account of the place. They spoke low, and since we
have found it better to avoid all appearance of wishing to know their
affairs, we did not follow them. Only, my daughter had a presentiment.
Woman, you know, my officer, it is sometimes very subtle. She put it
in her head that these would blow up the factory. She was so sure that
I lifted the cover of their box and looked in. It was an electric
battery and some liquids in phials. I had no time to lose. I placed
myself at the gate and ran as fast as I can to where they were, in the
big workshop. I am already aged more than sixty. My days for the race
are over. Given also that I was experiencing terrible sentiments--for
you see, while we keep the factory there is some hope we may be able
to work when the War is finished, but if it is blown up, what shall we
others go and do--I was all in a palpitation, by the time I reached
them. I cried: ‘There they go!’
“‘Who goes?’ they asked.
“‘The cavalry,’ I cried.
“They ran to the entry, and seeing no one, they feared that they were
already surrounded. I saw them serpentine themselves from one doorway
to another all down the street. The moment they were lost to sight I
flung their box into the big sewer!”
* * * * *
Dormer billeted his company in the factory. He did not fear shell-fire
that night. He himself slept in a bed at the villa. It was the first
time he had left the night guard to a junior officer. In the morning,
he paraded his company, and proceeded, according to plan, to await
the order to move. The days were long gone by when a battalion was a
recognizable entity, with a Mess at which all the officers saw each
other once a day. Depleted to form Machine Gun Companies, the truncated
battalions of the end of the War usually worked by separate companies,
moving independently. There was some desultory firing in front, but his
own posts had seen and heard nothing of the enemy. About nine he sent a
runner to see if his orders had miscarried. Reply came, stand to, and
await developments. He let his men sit on the pavement, and himself
stood at the head of the column, talking with the two youngsters who
commanded platoons under him. Nothing happened. He let the men smoke.
At last came the order: “Cease fire.”