A Fox Under My Cloak (8 page)

At last the dead weight and inertia of life in the T-trench yielded to the hopes of relief. The sniper could not see you as you got out of the trench, which was low after many cavings-in, and now perilously shallow; but if you lost your balance as you struggled to climb up the collapsing back wall in the
quarter-ligh
t, and fell back into the marn, and were not seen and pulled out, you could at the worst drown in voiceless feebleness; while at the best you would have to stand on the ground above and drain off, shuddering and heavy with mud up your sleeves, your hands and arms and face thick with clay, icy cold on your spine and upon your stomach.

This minor calamity happened to Lance-corporal Blunden when the order came to leave the trench, on the fifth night. The prolonged spell in the front line was due to the casualties in the brigade, in the local attacks of 19 December. There was no relieving platoon; the T-trench was now to be held, until breastworks of sandbags could be built behind it, by
machine-guns
posted on the flanks, to give cross-fire. Two Maxims had just been issued to the London Highlanders, to replace the lost pride of Vickers guns which had been bought privately out of battalion funds before the war: the only two Vickers guns in the British Expeditionary Force in 1914.

Lance-corporal Blunden, disinterred troglodyte, was lugged into the wood by Sergeant Douglas holding the arms and two men each holding a leg of that living weight of wool and flesh, seemingly the heavier for being unconscious. Before he went away, Sergeant Douglas left Phillip, as the oldest soldier, in charge of the rest of the half-platoon left to cover the withdrawal.

“Do not fire unless there is an attack,” were his orders. “I will send a runner to tell you when to bring the men to the rendezvous on the road by the Château. Is that clear?”

“Very good, Sergeant.”

After twenty minutes waiting, the runner came; and Phillip, with a little reserve energy from his nerves, helped to push others up, while those already out pulled from above. It was a long, slow affair, amidst gasps and cramps and collapsings of men and clay into the water. Phillip, his life feeling wider with responsibility, was last in the trench. Searing pains transfixed him. He must be alone when he squittered; have one last peaceful moment alone.

“Lead on you fellows. I’ll follow in a moment. I can get out by myself.”

The hot stream relieved his pain; and feeling now content, he gave himself two minutes rest, before the effort of climbing out. Closing his eyes, he sank into the desired moment of
nothingness
, which soon enclosed him.

When he opened his eyes again it was to an awareness of a face staring down at him. He saw the face quite clearly to be that of Tommy Atkins, the stretcher-bearer. Tommy’s voice said that he must get out, he must not go to sleep there. The voice urged him to try again when he slipped back. He wanted to be alone, but the face was so insistent that he began to push with deadened fingers at his web belt, to lighten himself of equipment that was carrying only mud. Then it began to rain heavily. Somehow he got out of the trench, and was staggering among watery boot-impressions gleaming in the mud of the field behind. He sat down to rest, indifferent to the wind-up beginning to move down from Ypres. He was quite clear as to what was happening; everything around him was distinct in the light of flares popping up from the German trenches, making bright the rain hissing all around him. He saw drops spirting up from watery boot-holes, miniature craters of heel and sole sharply outlined by greenish light above the musketry crackle. He lay down,
indifferent
to rain, bullets, flares. He sank from it all in thoughts of sleep, sleep, sleep.

When the firing had gone away down the line, he heard again the voice of Tommy Atkins telling him to get up. It was all he could do to get on elbows and knees to empty the pouches of ammunition. He heard Tommy Atkins saying that he must not go to sleep.

When he reached the road by the Château he was warmer, and more sure of his balance. Mr. Thorverton told him that
Sergeant Douglas and Glass had gone back to look for him. The officer stood by the wagon waiting behind the wall of an
outbuilding
. Figures were lying in the wagon.

When Sergeant Douglas returned, he was furious; but in a level voice said:

“Why didn’t you come with your party?”

“I couldn’t get out, Sergeant.”

“Why did you wait behind, instead of accepting their help?”

“I wasn’t very well, Sergeant. It’s this gastritis.”

“All the more reason why you should have been helped out.”

“I was, Sergeant, by Tommy Atkins.”

“Who?”

“Tommy Atkins, Sergeant.”

The reply confirmed Douglas’ doubts about Maddison. Mr. Thorverton, since the good example set by the voluntary
pumping
effort, had spoken to him about giving Maddison a stripe. He was now the oldest soldier, and Lance-corporal Blunden was due for promotion to corporal. Sergeant Douglas had demurred. Now he thought that Maddison was a stupid liar, as well as being irresponsible: for less than half an hour ago he had heard, from the driver of the wagon, that Tommy Atkins had died of pleuro-pneumonia in hospital at Kemmel that morning.

“Very well, get up in the wagon.”

“I’d rather walk, and get warm, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Douglas turned away abruptly and reported all present to Mr. Thorverton.

“Thank you,” replied the voice of Mr. Thorverton. “Lead on, men.”

T
HE
transport wagon followed the lurching figures along the road to rest billets, leaving behind the line of flares diminishing with the crackle of musketry. It was not a march back, but a slouch; nobody spoke, nobody kept step. They entered billets dazed by oil-light, buffeted by heat of pot-belled stove. To Phillip the faces of the old woman with her sons and daughters standing by the open back-kitchen door were flat like an old painting.
Potage
?
After the hot cabbage soup he floated in warm thoughts of sleep, sleep, sleep. His goat-skin was a drowned object on the floor; buttons of greatcoat thick, thick in hard shrunken cotton-holes. With fingers of pale canvas he took his little packet of letters, and sat down again, but could not read them, and flopping down with clenched eyes sank into a wave of contentment that he could sleep, sleep, sleep. The others were getting down on the straw, too, and the oil-lamp disappeared with the kitchen door closing to the old woman’s “C’est triste, si si! Quel pauvres!” while in the darkness of the room the top of the stove began to glow dull red.

The next thing he knew was that it was morning, and his body was achingly comfortable in half-dry clothes. He lay for some time enjoying the thought that he could lie there all day, and it was after noon before he sat up, with others, to remove tunic, unwind puttees, and take off boots. This last act was done with difficulty, for his feet hurt sharply. When the socks were peeled off, he saw that they were puffy from toes to ankles. Within half an hour they had swelled red, while the little toes remained greenish-grey.

After dinner, wearing borrowed
sabots,
he hobbled along to sick parade. Iodine was painted on his feet, a No. 9 pill for bowel disorder was dropped into his hand. He had to swallow the fearsome thing while the R.A.M.C. corporal watched; and spent the afternoon and evening, when he was not lying down, straining in the
cabinet
at the bottom of the cottage garden. He ate only a little soup, between periods of delicious drowsiness. Glass had a thermometer, and by it he saw that his temperature was 101. Happiness filled him; he floated deliciously in the straw.

When the company paraded for the trenches again, three days later, he remained behind in the billet, well content that his feet, still swelled and painful with frost-bite, would keep him on light duty in his billet.

It was quiet and peaceful, alone in the cottage. About noon he clobbled woodenly to the estaminet for a
café-rhum
and omelette. At night he looked away east over the fields, thinking that the low rising parabolas of the flares were the lilies of the dead. Night after night it was going on, the misery and the
sadness
; night after night the pale horizon quivering as with a thousand, thousand sighs. It was a
spotted
horizon. The line of lights stretched away south along the crest of Messines, ever
pale, ever sad. How long would it all last? The Russian
steam-roller
had apparently failed; the Wolff Wireless, or Liarless as
The
Daily
Trident
called it, claimed a great German victory at Tannenberg, with hundreds of thousands of prisoners and
hundreds
of guns. Why call it the
Wolff
Liarless,
when liarless meant you were less a liar? Rather like the Corps Bulletin, which had claimed that the local attacks of 19 December were successful, in that they had held down German reinforcements to Russia. But, according to the Saxons on Christmas Day, the Prussians had already gone by then.

He thought about the brigadier’s parting message to the colonel, which Sergeant Douglas had read to them in the billet. After the usual compliments, it had said that, “when hard fighting comes, your men will stick it out both in attack and defence with the tenacity and courage that your battalion has displayed unfailingly in every phase of its service in the field”. The brigadier was going away, to command a division.
When
hard
fighting
comes
… was there no end to what they would have to go through? But putting away his thoughts, he wrote a letter to the Magister of his school. Dare he address him as Dear Magister?

Having written this letter, Phillip had to hasten away to the closet in the garden. The usual scalding stream, which by now had made him so sore that only by gritting his teeth and holding his breath dare he wipe himself.

The next day, to his concealed delight, he was sent in the horse ambulance to the Field Hospital at Kemmel. His feet were examined by R.A.M.C. doctors in new uniforms who looked more kindly than those he had met so far. Then he had to provide a “specimen stool”.
Severe
enteritis
and
frostbite,
suspected
gangrene
of
little
toes
was written on his chart. It was better than he had dared to hope. He must lie very still, as though he were really ill. It was wonderful to lie between army blankets again. The blankets were lousy, but what matter: so was he, so what were a few extra sharp itching pin-points? He kept telling himself that he was warm, he was under a roof, he was in a bed.
Unfortunately
his temperature was only 100. If only it would go up. Then his chart might be marked
Train.

In the evening came the deciding inspection—the lieutenant, the captain, the colonel of the Field Hospital all together by his cot.

“How long have you been out?”

“Since September, sir.”

“What were you in civil life?”

“Junior clerk, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen, sir.”

He heard the R.A.M.C. captain say to the sergeant, as they moved to the next cot, “Base.”

The Base! Never did bread and butter and cocoa for supper taste so good.

A motor-car ambulance took him and three others to the train next morning.

He had never imagined that there could be such a train. It had red crosses on its outside; and inside the big coaches were wide compartments of soft grey upholstery, electric lights over each seat (though they did not switch on) and thick grey carpets.
Wagon
lits,
much better than the Belgian trains he had ridden in before the war, with Mother and Mavis, and cousin Petal. It was almost unbelievable, but the nurses on the train were actually English. One nurse came into the compartment with a basket of apples. She wore a grey and red uniform, with the letters
Queen
Alexandra
and stars of rank on her shoulder. She was an officer nurse; and a little subduing as she smiled frostily when he said, before he could stop himself, “Oh, are you English, how wonderful! “Then she said, “You are the enteritis case, no fruit for you!” with a little warning wag of her finger and left the carriage as swiftly as she had entered it.

Phillip wanted the money as a present for the R.A.M.C. orderly, who might then recommend that the word
Bunk
be written on his chart by the doctor.
Bunk
meant that you were for home. He dreaded that, being more or less well after a
fortnight
in the hotel, he would be sent back to the battalion. The newspapers said that the mud at the front was drying up, and soon it would be the turn of the British Army to take the offensive.

The skin had come off his feet, but the little toes had not gone bad. The enteritis had stopped; he was on a light diet, milky foods and fish. He was weighed, in his coarse holland nightdress, by the medical orderly. “Blime, you’re a lamp-post all right! Four pounds under nine stone.”