The regiments of the new armies have gathered into their rank and file
a mixed crowd transcending the dreams of Democracy. At one end of the
social scale are men of refined minds and gentle nurture, at the other
creatures from the slums, with slum minds and morals, and between them
the whole social gamut is run. Experience seems to show that neither
of the extreme elements tend, in the one case to elevate, or in the
other to debase the battalion. Leading the common life, sharing the
common hardships, striving towards common ideals, they inevitably,
irresistibly tend to merge themselves in the average. The highest in
the scale sink, the lowest rise. The process, as far as the change of
soul state is concerned, is infinitely more to the amelioration of the
lowest than to the degradation of the highest. The one, also, is more
real, the other more apparent. In the one case, it is merely the
shuffling-off of manners, of habits, of prejudices, and the assuming
of others horribly distasteful or humorously accepted, according to
temperament; in the other case, it is an enforced education. And all
the congeries of human atoms that make up the battalion, learn new and
precious lessons and acquire new virtues--patience, obedience,
courage, endurance.... But from the point of view of a decorous
tea-party in a cathedral town, the tone--or the standard of manners,
or whatever you would like by way of definition of that vague and
comforting word--the tone of the average is deplorably low. The
hooligan may be kicked for excessive foulness; but the rider of the
high horse is brutally dragged down into the mire. The curious part of
it all is that, the gutter element being eliminated altogether, the
corporate standard of the remaining majority is lower than the
standard of each individual.
By developing a philosophical disquisition on some such lines did
Phineas McPhail seek to initiate Doggie into the weird mysteries of
the new social life. Doggie heard with his ears, but thought in terms
of Durdlebury tea-parties. Nowhere in the mass could he find the
spiritual outlook of his Irish poet-warrior. The individuals that may
have had it kept it preciously to themselves. The outlook, as conveyed
in speech, was grossly materialistic. From the language of the canteen
he recoiled in disgust. He could not reconcile it with the nobler
attributes of the users. It was in vain for Phineas to plead that he
must accept the _lingua franca_ of the British Army like all other
things appertaining thereto. Doggie's stomach revolted against most of
the other things. The disregard (from his point of view) of personal
cleanliness universal in the ranks, filled him with dismay. Even on
Salisbury Plain he had managed to get a little hot water for his
morning tub. Here, save in the officers' quarters--curiously remote,
inaccessible paradise!--there was not such a thing as a tub in the
place, let alone hot water to fill it. The men never dreamed of such a
thing as a tub. As a matter of fact, they were scrupulously clean
according to the lights of the British Tommy; but the lights were not
those of Marmaduke Trevor. He had learned the supreme wisdom of
keeping lips closed on such matters and did not complain, but all his
fastidiousness rebelled. He hated the sluice of head and shoulders
with water from a bucket in the raw open air. His hands swelled,
blistered and cracked; and his nails, once so beautifully manicured,
grew rich black rims, and all the icy water in the buckets would not
remove the grime.
Now and then he went into the town and had a hot bath; but very few of
the others ever seemed to think of such a thing. The habit of the
British Army of going to bed in its day-shirt was peculiarly
repellent. Yet Doggie knew that to vary from the sacred ways of his
fellow-men was to bring disaster on his head.
Some of the men slept under canvas still. But Doggie, fortunately as
he reckoned (for he had begun to appreciate fine shades in misery),
was put with a dozen others in a ramshackle hut of which the woodwork
had warped and let in the breezes above, below, and all round the sides.
Doggie, though dismally cold, welcomed the air for obvious reasons.
They were fortunate, too, in having straw palliasses--recently
provided when it was discovered that sleeping on badly boarded floors
with fierce draughts blowing upwards along human spines was strangely
fatal to human bodies--but Doggie found his bed very hard lying. And
it smelt sour and sickly. For nights, in spite of fatigue, he could
not sleep. His mates sang and talked and bandied jests and sarcasms of
esoteric meaning. Some of the recruits from factories or farms
satirized their officers for peculiarities common to their social
caste and gave grotesque imitations of their mode of speech. Doggie
wondered, but held his peace. The deadly stupidity and weariness of it
all! And when the talk stopped and they settled to sleep, the snorings
and mutterings and coughings began and kept poor Doggie awake most of
the night. The irremediable, intimate propinquity with coarse humanity
oppressed him. He would have given worlds to go out, even into the
pouring rain, and walk about the camp or sleep under a hedge, so long
as he could be alone. And he would think longingly of his satinwood
bedroom, with its luxurious bed and lavender-scented sheets, and of
his beloved peacock and ivory room and its pictures and exquisite
furniture and the great fire roaring up the chimney, and devise
intricate tortures for the Kaiser who had dragged him down to this
squalor.
The meals--the rough cooking, the primitive service--the table manners
of his companions, offended his delicate senses. He missed napkins.
Never could he bring himself to wipe his mouth with the back of his
hand and the back of his hand on the seat of his trousers. Nor could
he watch with equanimity an honest soul pick his teeth with his little
finger. But Doggie knew that acquiescence was the way of happiness and
protest the way of woe.
At first he made few acquaintances beyond those with whom he was
intimately associated. It seemed more politic to obey his instincts
and remain unobtrusive in company and drift away inoffensively when
the chance occurred. One of the men with whom he talked occasionally
was a red-headed little cockney by the name of Shendish. For some
reason or the other--perhaps because his name conveyed a perfectly
wrong suggestion of the Hebraic--he was always called "Mo" Shendish.
"Don't yer wish yer was back, mate?" he asked one day, having waited
to speak till Doggie had addressed and stamped a letter which he was
writing at the end of the canteen table.
"Where?" said Doggie.
"'Ome, sweet 'ome. In the family castle, where gilded footmen 'ands
sausage and mash about on trays and quarts of beer all day long. I
do."
"You're a lucky chap to have a castle," said Doggie.
Mo Shendish grinned. He showed little yellow teeth beneath a little
red moustache.
"I ain't 'alf got one," said he. "It's in Mare Street, Hackney. I wish
I was there now."
He sighed, and in an abstracted way he took a half-smoked cigarette
from behind his ear and relit it.
"What were yer before yer joined? Yer look like a clerk." He
pronounced it as if it were spelt with a "u."
"Something of the sort," replied Doggie cautiously.
"One can always tell you eddicated blokes. Making your five quid a
week easy, I suppose?"
"About that," said Doggie. "What were you?"
"I was making my thirty bob a week regular. I was in the fish
business, I was. And now I'm serving my ruddy country at one and
twopence a day. Funny life, ain't it?"
"I can't say it's very enjoyable," said Doggie.
"Not the same as sitting in a snug orfis all day with a pen in your
lily-white 'and, and going 'ome to your 'igh tea in a top 'at. What
made you join up?"
"The force of circumstances," said Doggie.
"Same 'ere," said Mo; "only I couldn't put it into such fancy
language. First my pals went out one after the other. Then the gels
began to look saucy at me, and at last one particular bit of skirt
what I'd been walking out with took to promenading with a blighter in
khaki. It'd have been silly of me to go and knock his 'ead off, so I
enlisted. And it's all right now."
"Just the same sort of thing in my case," replied Doggie. "I'm glad
things are right with the young lady."
"First class. She's straight, she is, and no mistake abaht it. She's
a----"
He paused for a word to express the inexpressive she.
"--A paragon--a peach?"--Doggie corrected himself. Then, as the sudden
frown of perplexed suspicion was swiftly replaced by a grin of
content, he was struck by a bright idea.
"What's her name?"
"Aggie. What's yours?"
"Gladys," replied Doggie with miraculous readiness of invention.
"I've got her photograph," Shendish confided in a whisper, and laid
his hand on his tunic pocket. Then he looked round at the half-filled
canteen to see that he was unobserved. "You won't give me away if I
show it yer, will yer?"
Doggie swore secrecy. The photograph of Aggie, an angular,
square-browed damsel, who looked as though she could guide the most
recalcitrant of fishmongers into the paths of duty, was produced and
thrust into Doggie's hand. He inspected it with polite appreciation,
while his red-headed friend regarded him with fatuous anxiety.
"Charming! charming!" said Doggie in his pleasantest way. "What's her
colouring?"
"Fair hair and blue eyes," said Shendish.
The kindly question, half idle yet unconsciously tactful, was one of
those human things which cost so little but are worth so much. It gave
Doggie a devoted friend.
"Mo," said he, a day or two later, "you're such a decent chap. Why do
you use such abominable language?"
"Gawd knows," smiled Mo, unabashed. "I suppose it's friendly like." He
wrinkled his brow in thought for an instant. "That's where I think
you're making a mistake, old pal, if you don't mind my mentioning it.
I know what yer are, but the others don't. You're not friendly enough.
See what I mean? Supposin' you say as you would in a city restoorang
when you're 'aving yer lunch, 'Will yer kindly pass me the
salt?'--well, that's standoffish--they say 'Come off it! 'But if you
look about and say, 'Where's the b----y salt?' that's friendly. They
understand. They chuck it at you."
Said Doggie, "It's very--I mean b----y--difficult."
So he tried to be friendly; and if he met with no great positive
success, he at least escaped animosity. In his spare time he mooned
about by himself, shy, disgusted, and miserable. Once, when a group of
men were kicking a football about, the ball rolled his way. Instead of
kicking it back to the expectant players, he picked it up and advanced
to the nearest and handed it to him politely.
"Thanks, mate," said the astonished man, "but why didn't you kick it?"
He turned away without waiting for a reply. Doggie had not kicked it
because he had never kicked a football in his life and shrank from an
exhibition of incompetence.
At drill things were easier than on Salisbury Plain, his actions being
veiled in the obscurity of squad or platoon or company. Many others
besides himself were cursed by sergeants and rated by subalterns and
drastically entreated by captains. He had the consolation of community
in suffering. As a trembling officer he had been the only one, the
only one marked and labelled as a freak apart, the only one stuck in
the eternal pillory. Here were fools and incapables even more dull and
ineffective than he. A plough-boy fellow-recruit from Dorsetshire,
Pugsley by name, did not know right from left, and having mastered the
art of forming fours, could not get into his brain the reverse process
of forming front. He wept under the lash of the corporal's tongue; and
to Doggie these tears were healing dews of Heaven's distillation. By
degrees he learned the many arts of war as taught to the private
soldier in England. He could refrain from shutting his eyes when he
pressed the trigger of his rifle, but to the end of his career his
shooting was erratic. He could perform with the weapon the other
tricks of precision. Unencumbered he could march with the best. The
torture of the heavy pack nearly killed him; but in time, as his
muscles developed, he was able to slog along under the burden. He even
learned to dig. That was the worst and most back-breaking art of all.
Now and then Phineas McPhail and himself would get together and walk
into the little seaside town. It was out of the season and there was
little to look at save the deserted shops and the squall-fretted pier
and the maidens of the place who usually were in company with lads in
khaki. Sometimes a girl alone would give Doggie a glance of shy
invitation, for Doggie in his short slight way was not a bad-looking
fellow, carrying himself well and wearing his uniform with instinctive
grace. But the damsel ogled in vain.
On one such occasion Phineas burst into a guffaw.
"Why don't you talk to the poor body? She's a respectable girl enough.
Where's the harm?"
"Go 'square-pushing'?" said Doggie contemptuously, using the soldiers'
slang for walking about with a young woman. "No, thank you."
"And why not? I'm not counselling you, laddie, to plunge into a course
of sensual debauchery. But a wee bit gossip with a pretty innocent
girl----"
"My dear good chap," Doggie interrupted, "what on earth should I have
in common with her?"
"Youth."
"I feel as old as hell," said Doggie bitterly.
"You'll be feeling older soon," replied Phineas, "and able to look
down on hell with feelings of superiority."
Doggie walked on in silence for a few paces. Then he said:
"A thing I can't understand is this mania for picking up girls--just
to walk about the streets with them. It's so inane. It's a disease."
"Did you ever consider," said Phineas, "how in a station less exalted
than that which you used to adorn, the young of opposite sexes manage
to meet, select and marry? Man, the British Army's going to be a grand
education for you in sociology."
"Well, at any rate, you don't suppose I'm going to select and marry
out of the street?"
"You might do worse," said Phineas. Then, after a slight pause, he
asked: "Have you any news lately from Durdlebury?"
"Confound Durdlebury!" said Doggie.
Phineas checked him with one hand and waved the other towards a
hostelry on the other side of the street. "If you will give me the
money in advance, so as to evade the ungenerous spirit of the
no-treating law, you can stand me a quart of ale at the Crown and
Sceptre and join me in drinking to its confusion."
So they entered the saloon bar of the public-house. Doggie drank a
glass of beer while Phineas swallowed a couple of pints. Two or three
other soldiers were there, in whose artless talk McPhail joined
lustily. Doggie, unobtrusive at the end of the bar, maintained a
desultory and uncomfortable conversation with the barmaid, who was of
the florid and hearty type, about the weather.
Some days later, McPhail again made allusion to Durdlebury. Doggie
again confounded it.
"I don't want to hear of it or think of it," he exclaimed, in his
nervous way, "until this filthy horror is over. They want me to get
leave and go down and stay. They're making my life miserable with
kindness. I wish they'd let me alone. They don't understand a little
bit. I want to get through this thing alone, all by myself."
"I'm sorry I persuaded you to join a regiment in which you were
inflicted with the disadvantage of my society," said Phineas.
Doggie threw out an impatient arm. "Oh, you don't count," said he.
A few minutes afterwards, repenting his brusqueness, he tried to
explain to Phineas why he did not count. The others knew nothing about
him. Phineas knew everything.
"And you know everything about Phineas," said McPhail grimly. "Ay, ay,
laddie," he sighed, "I ken it all. When you're in Tophet, a
sympathetic Tophetuan with a wee drop of the milk of human kindness is
more comfort than a radiant angel who showers down upon you, from the
celestial Fortnum and Mason's, potted shrimps and caviare."
The sombreness cleared for a moment from Doggie's young brow.
"I never can make up my mind, Phineas," said he, "whether you're a
very wise man or an awful fraud."
"Give me the benefit of the doubt, laddie," replied McPhail. "It's the
grand theological principle of Christianity."
Time went on. The regiment was moved to the East Coast. On the journey
a Zeppelin raid paralysed the railway service. Doggie spent the night
under the lee of the bookstall at Waterloo Station. Men huddled up
near him, their heads on their kit-bags, slept and snored. Doggie
almost wept with pain and cold and hatred of the Kaiser. On the East
Coast much the same life as on the South, save that the wind, as if
Hun-sent, found its way more savagely to the skin.
Then suddenly came the news of a large draft for France, which
included both McPhail and Shendish. They went away on leave. The
gladness with which he welcomed their return showed Doggie how great a
part they played in his new life. In a day or two they would depart
God knew whither, and he would be left in dreadful loneliness. Through
him the two men, the sentimental Cockney fishmonger and the wastrel
Cambridge graduate, had become friends. He spent with them all his
leisure time.
Then one of the silly tragi-comedies of life occurred. McPhail got
drunk in the crowded bar of a little public-house in the village. It
was the last possible drink together of the draft and their pals. The
draft was to entrain before daybreak on the morrow. It was a foolish,
singing, shouting khaki throng. McPhail, who had borrowed ten pounds
from Doggie, in order to see him through the hardships of the Front,
established himself close by the bar and was drinking whisky. He was
also distributing surreptitious sixpences and shillings into eager
hands, which would convert them into alcohol for eager throats.
Doggie, anxious, stood by his side. The spirit from which McPhail had
for so long abstained, mounted to his unaccustomed brain. He began to
hector, and, master of picturesque speech, he compelled an admiring
audience. Doggie did not realize the extent of his drunkenness until,
vaunting himself as a Scot and therefore the salt of the army, he
picked a quarrel with a stolid Hampshire giant, who professed to have
no use for Phineas's fellow-countrymen. The men closed. Suddenly some
one shouted from the doorway:
"Be quiet, you fools! The A.P.M.'s coming down the road."
Now the Assistant Provost Marshal, if he heard hell's delight going on
in a tavern, would naturally make an inquisitorial appearance. The
combatants were separated. McPhail threw a shilling on the bar counter
and demanded another whisky. He was about to lift the glass to his
lips when Doggie, terrified as to what might happen, knocked the glass
out of his hand.
"Don't be an ass," he cried.
Phineas was very drunk. He gazed at his old pupil, took off his cap,
and, stretching over the bar, hung it on the handle of a beer-pull.
Then, staggering back, he pointed an accusing finger.
"He has the audacity to call me an ass. Little blinking Marmaduke
Doggie Trevor. Little Doggie Trevor, whom I trained up from infancy in
the way he shouldn't go----"
"Why Doggie Trevor?" some one shouted in inquiry.
"Never mind," replied Phineas with drunken impressiveness. "My old
friend Marmaduke has spilled my whisky and called me an ass. I call
him Doggie, little Doggie Trevor. You all bear witness he knocked the
drink out of my mouth. I'll never forgive him. He doesn't like being
called Doggie--and I've no--no pred'lex'n to be called an ass. I'll be
thinking I'm going just to strangle him."
He struck out his bony claws towards the shrinking Doggie; but stout
arms closed round him and a horny hand was clamped over his mouth, and
they got him through the bar and the back parlour into the yard, where
they pumped water on his head. And when the A.P.M. and his satellites
passed by, the quiet of The Whip in Hand was the holy peace of a
nunnery.
Doggie and Mo Shendish and a few other staunch souls got McPhail back
to quarters without much trouble. On parting, the delinquent,
semi-sobered, shook Doggie by the hand and smiled with an air of great
affection.
"I've been verra drunk, laddie. And I've been angry with you for the
first time in my life. But when you knocked the glass out of my hand I
thought you were in danger of losing your good manners in the army.
We'll have many a pow-wow together when you join me out there."
The matter would have drifted out of Doggie's mind as one of no
importance had not the detested appellation by which Phineas hailed
him struck the imagination of his comrades. It filled a long-felt
want, no nickname for Private J. M. Trevor having yet been invented.
Doggie Trevor he was and Doggie Trevor he remained for the rest of his
period of service. He resigned himself to the inevitable. The sting
had gone out of the name through his comrades' ignorance of its
origin. But he loathed it as much as ever; it sounded in his ears an
everlasting reproach.
In spite of the ill turn done in drunkenness, Doggie missed McPhail.
He missed Mo Shendish, his more constant companion, even more. Their
place was in some degree taken, or rather usurped, for it was without
Doggie's volition, by "Taffy" Jones, once clerk to a firm of outside
bookmakers. As Doggie had never seen a racecourse, had never made a
bet, and was entirely ignorant of the names even of famous Derby
winners, Taffy regarded him as an astonishing freak worth the
attention of a student of human nature. He began to cultivate Doggie's
virgin mind by aid of reminiscence, and of such racing news as was to
be found in the _Sportsman_. He was a garrulous person and Doggie a
good listener. To please him Doggie backed horses, through the old
firm, for small sums. The fact of his being a man of large independent
means both he and Phineas (to his credit) had kept a close secret, his
clerkly origin divined and promulgated by Mo Shendish being
unquestioningly accepted, so the bets proposed by Taffy were of a
modest nature. Once he brought off a forty to one chance. Taffy rushed
to him with the news, dancing with excitement. Doggie's stoical
indifference to the winning of twenty pounds, a year's army pay, gave
him cause for great wonder. As Doggie showed similar equanimity when
he lost, Taffy put him down as a born sportsman. He began to admire
him tremendously.
This friendship with Taffy is worth special record, for it was
indirectly the cause of a little revolution in Doggie's regimental
life. Taffy was an earnest though indifferent performer on the penny
whistle. It was his constant companion, the solace of his leisure
moments and one of the minor tortures of Doggie's existence. His
version of the _Marseillaise_ was peculiarly excruciating.
One day, when Taffy was playing it with dreadful variations of his own
to an admiring group in the Y.M.C.A. hut, Doggie, his nerves rasped to
the raw by the false notes and maddening intervals, snatched it out of
his hand and began to play himself. Hitherto, shrinking morbidly from
any form of notoriety, he had shown no sign of musical accomplishment.
But to-day the musician's impulse was irresistible. He played the
_Marseillaise_ as no one there had heard it on penny whistle before.
The hut recognized a master's touch, for Doggie was a fine executant
musician. When he stopped there was a roar: "Go on!" Doggie went on.
They kept him whistling till the hut was crowded.
Thenceforward he was penny-whistler, by excellence, to the battalion.
He whistled himself into quite a useful popularity.