A Fox Under My Cloak (10 page)

The corporal, in an aside, explained that the man on crutches was a peasant, and could neither read nor write, being a
foundling
who had worked on a farm for his keep before being mobilised. He was worrying, he said, because after the war he would have to starve. His leg was very bad, the wound would not heal; but he would not have it off, lest he be unable to work on the farm after the war. He knew no other life except on the farm. He himself, explained the corporal, had his job to go back to, in a bank; so had Jacques, who worked in a bakery. But Jules—he had, how do you speak it, no prospects.

Phillip got from the corporal the full name of Jules; and in his first letter to his mother asked her to send Jules a “parcel of goodies”, up to ten shillings in value, including postage, and “debit his a/c with this sum”. She must on no account mention her name, as it must be an anonymous gift. “Just put a card in it, in French, ‘To Jules, from a Soldier’s Friend who knows
and loves Belgium’. It is you who are the Soldier’s Friend who loves Belgium, not me, but I will pay.”

*

The doctor visited once every morning. He was a bluff old grey-moustached country doctor who wore a floppy tweed hat stuck with rusty trout-flies from which the gut had rotted. A straight wooden stethoscope always stuck out of his pocket. His visits were brief, his questions perfunctory.

“Everyone all right? No change? Everyone mending nicely? That’s right! Hullo, you’re new, aren’t you? Feeling all right?”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“What’s your name? Regiment?”

“Maddison, sir. London Highlanders.”

“Good fellow. No aches, no pains?”

“No, sir.”

“Good! Keep warm. Like your food?”

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

“Good. Well, I must be trottin’. See you all tomorrow. G’morning, Matron!” and out he went again, to his trap on the drive, where a red-faced groom in bowler hat held the striped hammer-cloth to wrap round the doctor’s knees before jumping up behind, and away dashed the pony to a wave of the whip.

There were other visitors. The matron greeted them. She explained beforehand that the most important was the Countess of Cheshire, who should always be addressed as “m’lady”. When she came, she spoke to each man, asking him one or two questions in a smiling, easy, Irish voice. She invited some to tea every afternoon, six at a time, taking turns. The six went for a motor-ride first in a large black Daimler, driven by a big, clean-shaven chauffeur, who spoke in a gentle, quiet voice. He saw that the dark-blue rugs, each with its coronet, were tucked neatly and solidly round their legs.

Phillip, when his turn came, sat in front, hardly daring to speak to the chauffeur of such a lordly equipage proceeding at a uniform rate of twelve miles an hour round the roads for half an hour before arrival at the Big House, where rugs were taken off knees, refolded correctly for the return journey, coronet upwards; and the six went hesitant and curious into a hall like a small church, where coat-armour stood with pikes and
halberds
, and old pictures hung on the walls.

Tea was served by a man-servant in a large room of inlaid furniture with spidery legs, glass cases holding china and other valuables, and a polished steel hearth wherein enormous logs blazed. There were lovely water-colour paintings on the walls. In another large room, which he heard mentioned as the
Ballroom
, were rows of beds, and men in civilian tweeds and officer uniforms sitting on them smoking. After one glance, Phillip fled. The beds, he learned, were occupied by sick and wounded officers; the châtelaine had turned her mansion into a private hospital, paying all the expenses herself. Two of the nurses were her daughters, others their friends. He had no feeling of being over-awed, as he had been when visiting Aunt Victoria at Epsom, for here everything seemed very free and easy. The countess was very natural, he thought, and just like any other old lady—except that she seemed more energetic, and to the point. She wore a floppy old blue hat with a riband round it, a man’s upright starched linen collar, and a black sort of man’s coat. He was not in the least afraid of her. Her husband, the earl, was at the front. She asked him where he lived; and remembering that Mr. Purley-Prout, the scoutmaster, had addressed the Countess of Mersea, when she had come to visit the camp, as “Mar’m”, Phillip said “mar’m” now and again, instead of “m’lady”. Then, on learning that she had known his first colonel, the Earl of Findhorn, Phillip lost his tongue.

“Do come and see us again before you go, won’t you? And when you are stronger, you must tell me about Findhorn, a dear friend and schoolfellow of Cheshire.”

Phillip said he would while thinking that he must avoid it by all means in his power, since the countess obviously believed that he was the
friend
of the Earl of Findhorn, and
posh.
When next his turn came to visit the Big House he pretended to have a headache; and went instead to visit the epileptics in their room where they played billiards and snooker. The soldiers were
welcome
any time during the day.

Among the inmates he had made friends with a man who had misty blue eyes and fair hair. This man had already given him some lessons in billiards: how to hold a cue properly, resting your left hand on the table and making a bridge with your fingers, how to strike with the cue steadily, not jerkily, or you would tear the cloth and likely send the ball bouncing heavily over the cush onto the floor.

When he arrived at the epileptics’ wing a concert was being given by the patients. A contralto was singing on the platform
When
you
come
down
the
Vale,
Lad,
clutching her music at arm’s length before her, while another woman tried to keep time on the piano. The contralto was just singing the words
There’s
music
in
the
air
when a third woman got up in the middle of the hall, gave a wailing cry and collapsed, and was carried off while the song proceeded. Two others followed the same way before the last verse, and then the singer herself had an attack, while the accompanist hastily beat out
God
Save
the
King.

“Funny,” said Phillip’s misty-eyed friend. “But When you come down the Vale, Lad often sets off the female patients. Do you notice that there is a similarity between the sort of cooing bellow of the contralto and the cooing or moaning of the patient before she goes down? There’s a reason for it, to my way of thinking.”

“Does it have to do with sympathetic vibrations? You know, Caruso was supposed to have shattered the chandelier once in Covent Garden?”

“You’ve said it!” cried the other, putting down his billiard cue. “You’ve got it! I advanced that theory to Dr.
Shufflebotham
, you know, the one who sees to you fellers, but he
pooh-poohed
it. Ah, what does he know what we have to go through, in our minds, before we feel a fit coming on? In the old days, they used to pummel the patients, to get them out of it, to make them fight the attack. Some used to recommend dousin’ ’em with water. Barbarous old times, weren’t they? Can you imagine it?”

“I should think I can! Why, in our battalion, a chap…” and Phillip recounted the story of the man whose appendix was about to burst being given a No. 9 pill and duty. Only this time he varied the details. “He lies buried in the Brasserie cemetery, by the cross-roads between Vierstraat and Elzenwalle, at this very moment!”

“I know, you needn’t tell me, the whole world’s gone off its rocker. There’s a soldier here now, who has fits. He was at Mons, and never had so much as a quaver before the war. He was blown up by a shell. ‘Dusty’ Miller, they call him. He lies in bed next to me, and often I hear him crying. He bites through his sheets, not in a fit, mark you, but just lying in bed. But the doctor says it is a variant of epilepsy. Can you beat that?”

Phillip wondered how he could beat it, while he tried to pot the red. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you one thing, old chap!” (He never knew his friend’s name.) “And that is this! No-one who has not been out in France can possibly imagine what it is really like. If you read the papers, with their humorous descriptions of our chaps, and the ‘humourless Hun’ opposite, you’ll get no idea at all!” He bent down to do the stroke. The red went wide. “Curse, I can’t get the angle.” He stood up. “I suppose, in the old days, cannon balls used to bounce off positions, like these balls. Nowadays they don’t bounce off any more. They strike home, and the chips fly—chips of flesh and bone, I mean. And the worst feeling of all is not the fear, but the loneliness. I don’t mean that we have no pals, but——”

“That’s all right, old man, I understand. You’ve done your bit, so take it easy!”

Another interesting place to visit was the back-door of the boozer, as O’Casey called the village pub. They weren’t allowed to sell drinks to soldiers in hospital blue, and it was war-time closing anyway, during the day, explained O’Casey, an old sweat of the Liverpool Regiment, who took Phillip. “Say nothing at all, at all.” “Not a word,” replied Phillip, paying for the drinks of hot Irish whiskey with water and sugar in the kitchen. It was a wry taste, he didn’t really want it, but it was the thing to do. He didn’t want the clay pipe he bought, either, on O’Casey’s advice, with the twopenny roll of thick twist; but he smoked it, until he was sick. Then O’Casey got him some brandy, to cure the sickness, and had one himself to keep him company. “A rookie ’as allus to buy his way in the army, and you’re with a real so’jer now, my lad,” said O’Casey.

Phillip wondered how he could get rid of O’Casey, without hurting the old fellow’s feelings. The Liverpool Irishman, who had long grey-black hair brushed back over a nobbly forehead, and a cunning rather lined but handsome face, one night in the dormitory did it himself. O’Casey was telling funny stories, chuckling as he spoke, of his adventures in Dublin and
Liverpool
, and stories of the army, too. One was about a soldier in India who got the “doolally tap”, according to his mates. His madness took the form of crawling about on hands and knees, examining every little bit of paper he came across. He even pursued this peculiarity, said O’Casey, across the barrack square while the Commander-in-Chief of India and the Viceroy
themselves with their ladies had come a-visiting the Colonel. “Put that pore feller in hospital,” cried no less a man than the Viceroy himself. In hospital the soldier continued to crawl about on hands and knees, examining the most minute pieces of paper. At last, as a harmless lunatic, he was discharged; whereupon he walked upright, and passing the guard-room on his way out, waved his discharge and said: “I’ve found that little bit of paper I was looking for!”

O’Casey laughed ferociously, revealing teeth brown with chewing quids of thick twist. “He was a clever sod, to think that one out!” The word
sod
was frequently used among the old soldiers in the dormitory, so, when the laughter had stopped, Phillip called across, meaning it as a compliment, “You are a clever old sod yourself, O’Casey!” whereupon without a moment’s hesitation the Liverpool Irishman leapt out of bed, ran across the floor in nightshirt and bare feet, and bending over Phillip’s face, his clenched fists an inch off Phillip’s nose, cried harshly, all humour gone from his attitude, “I’ll batter yer head off if you insult me mother! How dare you call me a sod! Me mother was an honest woman!” with such intense fury that Phillip shut his eyes, awaiting blows on his face, after saying that he was sorry. O’Casey went back to bed, just as the lights went out, muttering and spluttering about rookies who had not yet got their foreskins back daring to tell him, who had gone through every campaign from Chitral and Oomdurman, North-West Frontier, South Africa, and Mons, who his father was.

Phillip went no more with this ferocious joker to drink Irish whiskey in the kitchen of the little pub. He had already given clay pipe and black twist to Jules, the Belgian
blessé,
who seemed much more cheerful since he had had a parcel,
containing
socks, scarf, tin of
café-au-lait,
plum cake, chocolate, raisins, figs, a book of the convent at Thildonck with pictures, a pair of mittens, a red flannel chest-protector, and what he liked best of all, a small crucifix, silver on ebony, of the kind Phillip wore.

*

While he was at Alderley Edge, Phillip had letters from Desmond, Mrs. Bigge, Mrs. Todd, and others, welcoming him back. One was in the meticulously neat writing of Tom Ching, on Admiralty writing paper. It might have been written, he
thought, by a tender male nurse. It described the wonderful times he, his dear old school chum, would give Phillip when he was safely home: the walks he would take him, holding his arm in memory of old days; the fatted ox that would be killed to welcome him home, etc. Tom Ching even wrote the last word on every page twice, as a carry-over word, to aid the
eyesight
, apparently.

This letter, slightly nauseating, told Phillip only that Tom Ching was still after his sister Mavis. And Phillip had never forgotten the occasion when Tom Ching had spat in his eye, and run away. Ugh! What a creature! He threw the letter in the fire.

At the end of a fortnight he was passed Fit for Light Duty after a brief listening-patrol by the old doctor with his brown wooden stethoscope. The examination was about as useful as a listening-patrol, because the doctor, whose white moustache was yellow with nicotine, was wheezing away all the time one end of the stethoscope was on Phillip’s ribs and the other end in the doctor’s ear. The next day he was driven into the town for a medical board, with several others, including O’Casey. Jules, Jacques and Pierre waved in the doorway, beside Matron and the nurses. In an ambulance they rode to Manchester, to the Ancoats Military Hospital. On the way they passed some of the new Kitchener’s Army, in odd blue uniforms with red forage caps worn more or less flat and square on their heads. They marched with yellow Japanese rifles at the slope, and what a slope! That rag-tag-bob-tailed lot, remarked Phillip to O’Casey, what use would they be—rookies!