How Dear Is Life (27 page)

“Vous!” he shouted, spitting between his sabots. “Vous! Soldats anglais! Allez! Allez!” He flipped a hand angrily towards the north. Growled agreement supported his words.

“I suppose they think we’re letting the French do all the fighting,” said Baldwin, quietly.

Suddenly, in the fourth week of October, the order came for the detachment to entrain the next morning. Mr. Ogilby told them that all the other detachments were being recalled at the same time, to reassemble as a battalion. The Germans were making a supreme effort to capture the Channel ports, he said; news which they had already gathered from the smudgy-printed local paper in the Goldfish estaminet.

   *

The London Highlanders were about to be flung into the battle.

A
LL NIGHT
the train moved north, halting and shunting in sidings under spluttering purple arc-lamps. At each stop there were shouts, the stamp of horses, and often a jabber of argument outside the truck wherein they were trying to sleep on one another’s legs, thighs, even boots. Some were sitting up, others a row of bent backs and heads on arms along the one bench. The door rolled open to excited French talk. Wearily he thought that French troops were joining the train. At last the feeble toot of the engine-driver’s horn announced the
en
avant
,
to the accompaniment of more ringing jolts of buffers striking, clank of chains, and the wheels underneath the floor began to grind again.

An increase of lights, jolts, stops, and shakings across points was vaguely noticeable in the small dispiriting hours. With the first pallor of dawn came relief from vain attempts to sleep. Rising into the mist above grey roofs and walls was the Eiffel Tower.

“I wish I hadn’t drunk that red wine.”

“So do I.”

Collins gave a loud belch, without putting his hand up. He was a lout, thought Phillip.

Once clear of the capital, the train seemed to be making up for lost time. It puffed steadily through the misty countryside, which passed by slowly.

“We’re in no hurry, so we may as well ride.”

Their iron rations, six hard thick biscuits in small cloth bag, and blue tin of bully beef, were still uneaten. The sergeant’s face looked in at the window space, and told them to open a tin between two men, for breakfast.

“Hurray!” cried Phillip, thinking of Mortimore. “English cooking! Vive la France!”

“Sergeant, what about the lats? Where are they?” asked Tommy Atkins.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do, my bonny lads! Only don’t go dropping yourselves off by mistake,” and the sergeant walked to the next truck along the running-board.

The sun was rising up and they felt more cheerful. Looking out of the open window space, he saw several French soldiers crouched down on the running-board, holding to the rail, red trousers down. It was rather fun that way. He rejoiced that he had kept a newspaper. All along beside the track was a litter of paper and empty ragged ration tins, extending as far as he could see. Thousands of troops must have passed that way.

The journey became tedious. They passed slowly through another large station, marked
Beauvais
. At midday they were at
Amiens
,
where the train stopped. No one was allowed to leave the truck. The bully beef had made him feel rather sick. Then someone said tea was coming; and soon afterwards two men were told off to go to where smoke arose near a signal-box. They returned carrying the familiar black dixie between them. Who cared that the tea tasted of skilly? It was hot, that was all that mattered.

Soon the old familiar song was rising from the truck, 

but now von Kluck was properly rhymed, as in the original composition.

In the darkness of that night, after twenty-two hours in the truck, the train stopped at a station lit by arc-lamps subdued by the mist. On the top of the iron posts—
St.
Omer
.

Shadowy cavalrymen on the platform told them it was the headquarters of Sir John French. Among them was a familiar hodden grey kilt. The scout saluted Mr. Ogilby,

“All London Highlanders form up on the platform!”

Following the scout and Mr. Ogilby, the detachment was
marched to French cavalry barracks where the rest of the battalion was said to be. They marched under an arch, seeing flames against a wall. “Fall out for a meal!” Two black-faced cooks stood by steaming dixies, cursing French coal. “Here you are, laddy, a hot meal!” It was bully beef stew with lumps of biscuit, but it brought a glow to life. Carrying half-filled steaming mess-tins to the strawed loft over the stables, they sat and ate with their spoons. The straw was damp, but who cared?

Elliott sat next to Phillip. Phillip rather liked him. He envied him, in a way, for having a girl of his own. She had come to see him with her parents every Sunday at Bleak Hill. All he had noticed about Elliott’s girl was that she had a very white skin, and Cambridge-blue eyes the same colour as her dress; and she had smiled at him. He had wondered how Elliott had seen anything in her; but still, she was his girl.

“Letters! Letters!!”

The wonderful, life-giving moment when the post-corporal appeared with letters and parcels, hundreds of letters and parcels carried in sacks up the wooden steps. In the candle-lit loft men were soon living in the past. He saw that Elliott had a thick wad of letters from his girl.

He himself had two parcels from home, each containing a cake, a tin of
café
au
lait
,
chocolate, some soap, a pair of socks, and a packet of Hignett’s Cavalier. An almost formal note in one of the parcels informed him that the enclosed tobacco had been paid for, in accordance with his declared wish, out of the money
Your
Affectionate
Father
had in trust for him.

There were four letters from Mother. He read them in a happy feeling of aloneness shared by the haze of his wavering little candle-flame beside him on his mess-tin lid. The letters were more or less identical, feeling as though Mother was always in a hurry, each beginning
My
dearest
Boy,
and ending,
Ever
your
loving,
Mother
. There had been a moment in the loft, before the hot meal, when he had felt that he must tell his officer he could not face the unthinkable gap between present and future: that he was lost in darkness for ever and ever; but now, as the pages shone in the candle-light, he re-entered the world which lived in Mother’s handwriting.

The sentences said little in themselves; but in them was all happiness, all life, all safety.

They were all well at home, and hoped he was, too. Father was working long hours, as more younger men from the Moon had left to join up. Mavis had begun work at Head Office, in the Country Department. Willie had stayed with them for his first leave, after inoculation, and sent his love. He was such a kind boy, so sympathetic and helpful, Father thought very highly of him. Of course Father was very proud, too, of his own son. Gran’pa sent love, and asked him especially to keep his feet dry, and not to run unnecessary risks. He was going to send him a red chest-protector, for his lungs. Mrs. Neville sent her love. She had promised to write to him, so had Mrs. Bigge. Mrs. Rolls had enquired after him, and sent her very good wishes. Ah! she was knitting a pair of socks for him! He must not forget his prayers, God would always answer his prayers. He had answered her prayers when her little son was such a long time in coming into the world. There was one sentence underlined.
Do
write
when
you
have
a
moment
to
spare
,
dear
,
and
don’t forget
to
mention
Father
,
will
you
,
lest
he
feel
that
you
do
not
care
about
him
.
Mavis and Doris both sent their love, and would write to him. Aunt Marian also sent fondest love. Timmy Rat was well. Father had hung a mutton bone on the tree in the garden for the titmice. He asked her to say that he would not forget to repair the nesting boxes.

*

Phillip cut a slice of cake and ate it, after closing the tin and hiding it under his valise. It was Mother’s own cake, the wellknown flavour of raisins, currants, and beef-dripping, with the usual burnt paper on the bottom. He hesitated several times before putting the segment of burnt paper, from which he had gnawn every hard fragment of cake, into the sack provided for waste-paper. Many times he had seen Mother put paper in the baking tin after smearing it with margarine, then the cake into the oven. And perhaps, as she was playing chess opposite Father, “Oh dear, I had almost forgotten my cake!” and then hurrying footfalls along the passage and up the steps to the kitchen. He could see her now, her head bent down to look inside the oven.

After a pause he rose and put the burnt paper in the sack, to reassure himself when he sat down again by a touch of the letters in his breast pocket.

Then down the ladder into the yard to brush teeth and wash,
up again to arrange bed, blow out candle, lie down, immediately to induce before closed eyes pictures of his home, scenes and faces in the silence of the corridors of the mind.

One by one the candles died out, until only Elliott’s shone in the dark dusty loft, as he sat up writing. At ten o’clock he blew out his flame, and settled down with the muttered remark, “God bless the man who first invented sleep.”

*

In the morning they marched out of St. Omer along a road lined with poplars, turning off into a lane which led to rolling hedgeless fields of stubble whereon grass and clover were growing, and plowland extended to the skyline where teams of large grey dappled horses were at work. There were copses in the hollows and lanchetts, and against the sky a clump of beech trees. It was rather like the Kent country on the way to the Salt Box.

Across this land the battalion carried out an exercise, advancing in companies in line to a distant objective: first in artillery formation of half-sections at each point of a diamond; then at a signal from the Company Commander to his subaltern officers, into extended order. It began to rain as the advance took place up the gradual slope to the ridge, on which a group of staff-officers was standing. After the charge, with cheers, and the position captured, a line of trenches had to be dug in the brown loamy soil, which became stickier as rain fell steadily. It was slow work with the short-handled entrenching tools. About four o’clock, when they were wet to the skin, water squelching in muddy shoes, the exercise was stopped; and the trenches ordered to be filled again. There was no grumbling, although they had had no food since breakfast at seven o’clock that morning.

As ‘B’ Company marched at ease over the stubbles, and Captain Forbes was walking beside his section, Phillip saw a mouse running and jumping away through the big wet clover leaves. Captain Forbes saw it at the same time; and Phillip saw his eyes bulge as, raising his walking stick, he ran after it, striking at it again and again as it darted sideways, until a final heavy thwack like the stroke of a cane, stopped it. Captain Forbes hit it several times, making sure the mouse was dead before returning to walk beside the company once more, a satisfied look upon his face. Phillip recalled the poem of Burns he had read, about the mouse’s nest turned up by the plow, and wondered
vaguely why Captain Forbes had been so determined to kill a stray mouse.

The march back lay along a track under a sort of plateau. They were passing below a raised bank near a windmill, when he saw some men in forage caps standing above.

“Royal Flying Corps!” exclaimed Baldwin.

Looking up at the faces above him, he saw, with a start, the be-spectacled grinning face of Jack Hart among them. He had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves. At the same time Jack saw him, and waved; then they had gone past. He told Baldwin about Jack’s legendary wickedness. And now he was a sergeant!

At the end of the march the company entered in twilight through the iron gates of a large building set among trees. It turned out to be a new and unfinished convent. A high wall surrounded the grounds. The rooms within were wide and lofty, without doors; the building had no lavatories, no kitchen range, no fires where their clothes might be dried; but what matter, they were under a roof.

“Wonderful how cheerful the men always are, isn’t it?” he heard Mr. Ogilvy say to an officer of another company.

“Yes, a wonderful feeling to be with them, Bruce.”

These untried men accepted all that came, buoyed by a feeling that was not yet of the present. Tommy Atkins perhaps expressed that feeling—though not by his words—by the attitude that all was in the hands of God—an attitude which had not yet become discredited at its face value; for all were yet amateurs of war and its machinery, mental and physical.

*

They were indeed happy to be under shelter. Candles winked on the parquet floors, as stew was eaten hungrily, followed by tea, drunk out of unwashed mess-tins. It was hot, it had rum in it. Firmly Tommy Atkins refused his portion. Animation filled the room flickering with shadows on the walls; each candle-light was a personal beacon of security and shelter; and when the post came, with three letters for him, from Mother, Desmond, and Father, Phillip wanted nothing more.

After a game of solo with some of the fellows, he and Baldwin went outside to explore the grounds. Against one wall the cooks’ fires smouldered, beside a heap of branches for the morrow. Tommy Atkins stood there, cheerfully sipping from a mess-tin his own brew of rumless tea.

The clouds had lifted. A star shone in the clear sky. There was a slight hillock among the trees, and seeing several men standing there, they wandered that way. As they drew near, Phillip sensed something strange in the attitude of the men on the hillock. No one was talking as they stared towards an open space through the trees. As the two friends joined them a cock pheasant flew crowing through the darkness, a thing unheeded by the watching group, so intent were they upon something else. What could it be?