How Dear Is Life (29 page)

The trooper explained that the rest of the squadron was in the line.

“What’s it like up there?” asked Elliott.

“Bloody terrible, mate.”

“How far away are the Germans?” asked Phillip.

“Just over that ridge. Why, you blokes in a ’urry to git at the Allymands?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” replied Elliott. “It’s what we came for. When do we attack?”

At this, other troopers gathered round. They were unshaven; one had almost a ginger beard; their cap badges were missing, and their shoulder numerals. Some of them had marked the numerals with indelible pencil.

They stared at the rolled blankets. “Blime, goin’ on a picnic? Where you blokes from? You don’t talk like Jocks.”

“We’re the London Highlanders,” said Elliott.

“London Islanders? Then we’re the pushin’ Horse Marines.”

“We’re territorials,” explained Phillip. “For lines of communication.”

“Ah, Saturday ar’ternoon sojers!”

“Blime, you blokes come to the right place fer lines o’ communication!”

They were reservists from East London. They asked about the prices of food. Was there a shortage? Had it gone up? Was there enough to go round? Phillip wanted to hear about the front. He wanted to ask about any special tips, what to do in order to avoid any undue risk. He dared not ask. O, it was too late now——

“‘B’ Company, lead on.”

“Good luck, mates!”

“Thanks, same to you.”

As he slung his rifle, he heard one of the lancers say to another, “Blime, Burlington Berties wiv’out umbrellas!”

Soon his kit was weighing on his collar bones. He marched with thumbs under the webbing straps, to ease the weight. They passed wounded soldiers moving down the road, some with bloody bandages, walking slowly, uniforms crumpled, torn, shapeless; without interest in anything. Others were sitting down by the wayside. They looked like ragged clay-men. One was trying to light a cigarette, holding a matchbox in fingers coagulated with blood dripping from an arm bandage. His face was clay-coloured, like all his trousers and tunic. His puttees had dropped round his ankles. More refugees were coming down the road. By contrast, a kestrel was hanging in the air over the field less than fifty yards away, fluttering its wings as it watched the stubble below, apparently indifferent to the noise.

“Halt! Fall out on the right side of the road. No man to leave the ranks without permission!”

On the other side of the road was a château, white in pale sunlight. Dismounted troopers with polished bandoliers and boots and spurs, looking strangely smart, were on guard outside the open iron gate. He lifted his head to watch them present arms as the Earl of Findhorn, the Adjutant beside him, walked through the gate. Motor-cycle dispatch riders, white-and-blue bands on arms, were arriving and departing all the time. There
were red-cap military policemen on duty, with revolvers in their holsters, and hard faces.

The heavy black shells, the Jack Johnsons, were falling in the fields. A soldier told them they were after the naval guns. “We’ve got a battery ’id away, see. The Alleyman’s searchin’ for it.”

“Why don’t the naval guns fire back?”

“They only fire when the Alleyman attacks, mate.”

“When do you think they will attack next?”

“They’re coming over all’v’e time, mate.”

“Then why don’t our guns fire?”

“They ain’t got no shells left. They only gets a ration’ v two shells a day, each gun, see.”

After about ten minutes Colonel Findhorn was seen to be returning with several other officers, among them a General with a big grey moustache, hatless. Phillip noticed his highly polished riding boots, as he walked to the tall iron gates with the Colonel. There he stopped, smiling. After shaking hands, the General turned back, and the Colonel, between a redbanded
staff-officer and the Adjutant, walked to the head of the battalion.

Baldwin, who had been talking to a despatch rider, said the General was the corps commander, named Haig, of the whiskey family.

“Fall in, ‘B’ Company.”

They crossed over a railway line embedded diagonally in the
pavé
. Wounded men were limping down the road, bearded, hatless, ragged, their faces set beyond desperation. One was lying in the ditch, beside a spread of dark blood. Field guns were now firing on both sides of the road. Their reports smote hard on the ear-drums. The 18-pounder shells tore narrow, screaming furrows in the air as they sped away to the horizon. More and more German shells were arriving in front, very close to the road, darkening the mind with their prolonged and terrifying bass droning, growing deeper and louder until the whole sky was being opened for rending metallic crashes in black smoke. Fragments hummed and buzzed through the air, spun and whistled to fall to earth with little plops that seemed almost as slight as the clay-bullets of rival-band days in the Backfield long ago.

A wild half-thought faded in his mind of a policeman in uniform to stop it all.

Phillip was not the only one unsteadied by fear. Drivers of limbers and waggons on the road, and other mounted troops, ducked their heads as each shell droned down. Dead horses lay about. He thought with some sort of slight relief that, as he was second in his file of four, Collins on his left, and Elliott and Baldwin on his right, would save him, if any splinters came their way. Then the morning was filled with a rising crackle as of thorns in a fire, an increasing crackle of musketry that grew more and more with hundreds of black spots of shrapnel over the woods in front.

*

Nearer and nearer the dreaded noises of rifle and maxim-gun fire they marched, up the rising straight road, coming to a dark spruce plantation on the crest of the rise. Here, he saw with relief, the companies ahead were turning. Shells were falling away in the wood, up in the unseen front. Bullets cracked, seeming a foot or two above their heads, causing them to duck every time the alarming crack was heard. A bearded soldier standing by a fire, over which a large black iron kettle was hanging on a tripod of sticks, said in a calm voice, as they passed by, “Keep yer ’air on, mates.” He seemed entirely unconcerned, so Phillip thought that perhaps after all things were not too bad.

Some of the shell-holes in the yellow, sandy soil had a little water in them, at the bottom. The sides were of broken lumps of yellow clay, blackened as by a coal fire. Going deeper into the wood, they passed other unshaven soldiers, who were smoking, and laughing at some joke.

“Whatyer, Jocks!” cried one.

His friendly tone encouraged Phillip to ask where the Germans were. Cocking his thumb over his shoulder, the soldier said, “’Arfa mile, up by the Gellyvelt cross-roads.”

“Do you think they will get here?”

“Naoh! If any pushin’ Alleyman do, ’e won’t pushin’ well git back!”

“He pushin’ well won’t,” agreed Elliott. Then seeing the face of Tommy Atkins, he said, “The main explodent of every human oath, old son, is directly related to what has been described as an overrated pastime. And when you consider it, moreover, all life is, in its various origins, more or less of an explosion.”

“Long words won’t excuse foul language, Elliott. And in my opinion you as an educated man should set a good example.”

“That’s what the monkey said to the looking-glass, old son.”

At the next halt, Phillip looked at an oak that had been severed by a shell splinter, and thrown across the path. The trunk was broken, or smashed, in every ring or layer, which had split into scores of frayed ends, like huge wooden pen-holders gnawed by the children in Wakenham Road School. He thought of Cranmer, and how he used to squirm and cry on the floor when Mr. Twine gave him the cane, which swooshed down again and again with all Mr. Twine’s strength, as shown in his fierce eyes and distended nostrils. Why had Mr. Twine always chosen Cranmer for the cane, day after day? Was it because Cranmer was so ragged and dirty, without stockings or boots, and cried so easily, not having had any food to eat before coming to school, and therefore he could not pay attention? Cranmer never did anything wrong in the classroom, except to smile at others. These desperate pictures rose up and died away in his mind, as he followed Baldwin in front, the company now in single file.

At last there was a halt. Mr. Ogilby told them that they might take off blankets and packs, and lie down. No sooner had they done so, when a series of high descending screams swooped upon the wood, and four black blotches burst simultaneously in the grey sky above the trees in front.

“Keep your heads down when you hear them coming,” shouted Mr. Ogilby; but they needed no telling.

Bullets were now cracking incessantly overhead, clipping off twigs. In one of the treetops was a sort of brushwood shelter, reached by a rough ladder made of pieces of sawn-off branch nailed to the trunk. Phillip asked Baldwin if he knew what it was. Baldwin suggested a look-out post, perhaps a sniper’s platform. Mr. Ogilby glanced round and said to Phillip, “That’s for pigeon shooting. The ladder doesn’t look particularly safe, does it?”

“No, sir,” agreed Phillip, pleased that his officer had noticed him.

Captain Forbes came and knelt on one knee by Mr. Ogilby. Listening, Phillip heard him say that the battalion was to take over the first-line transport of the Coldstream, which had been cut to pieces.

“Have your men got their iron rations intact, Bruce?”

“Yes, Fiery, I inspected them this morning in the Cloth Hall.”

Captain Forbes took out a gold cigarette case, and offered it to Mr. Ogilby. He lit both cigarettes, which were gold-tipped, and casually spun the matchstick away.

The sun now shone weakly upon the resting company. Phillip felt pleased that he no longer minded the bullets cracking overhead. He lay back and closed his eyes, wondering what Desmond would think when he learned he was at the front. Pigeons flew over, wheeled, and returned the way they had come. Lifting his head, he stared at them, then caught his officer’s eye again. Mr. Ogilby smiled; glanced up at the shelter above; Phillip felt warmly grateful to him. Mr. Ogilby was popular, quiet-spoken, and always courteous to them. A brother of his had come to visit them in a Minerva motor car at Bleak Hill, bringing some dark-plumaged birds with feathery feet which he had recognised, from prints, as grouse. The officers must have wonderful food in their mess. Skeuse, Mr. Ogilby’s batman, said they had drunk a toast with one foot on the mess trestle-table at dinner, on the last evening at Bleak Hill.

He closed his eyes, trying to sleep. Ricochets occasionally fell down from the height of the sky, making sounds strangely like bird cries. Some were like the plaintive whistle of the buzzard on Exmoor; others had the descending cry of a curlew prolonged to a dying fall.
That
note
again;
it
had
a
dying
fall
—he saw the English master at school, repeating the phrase, the only one he had remembered from
Twelfth
Night
. How strange that Mr. Ogilby’s voice should be saying,

“It’s Hallowe’en tomorrow, Fiery. I’d very nearly forgotten.”

*

The firing east of the wood seemed to have died down. A battalion runner came to tell Captain Forbes that the company was to return to Hooge Château, the divisional quarters they had passed on their way up. They formed up and marched back, past batteries of 13-and 18-pounders beside the road now silent, the gunners drinking tea, and smoking. Obviously the German attack had failed.

“I wonder if they stop fighting to have their dinners, on both sides.”

“It looks rather like it, Phil. I don’t know about you, but I’m peckish. This is rather fun, isn’t it?”

“Have a biscuit? I’m beginning to enjoy it.”

The pipers led the battalion into a field just outside the village they had passed on the way up. There they halted, while company markers were spaced out by the Regimental Sergeant-Major. Then, in front of the red-brick château, the Divisional General, who had commanded the London Territorial Division in peace, went round the lines with the Earl of Findhorn and other officers, inspecting them. The officers spoke affably, and all looked cheerful. Perhaps they would not be wanted after all, he thought with wild joy.

After the inspection, they fell out near the road, and ate what food they had in their haversacks. They remained there all the afternoon, resting, indifferent now to shells bursting at regular intervals some distance away. The news had been confirmed that the German attacks had been beaten off that morning.

At five o’clock the order came for the battalion to march back to Ypres.

Now exhilarated, uncaring of shells dropping as though aimlessly in the fields, Phillip marched with happy confidence beside his comrades down the long straight incline, seeing in the distance, exactly in the middle of the road between the poplars, the tall blue belfry of one of the great churches of Ypres silhouetted in the last light of the sun now leaving the plain of Flanders. His mind was fixed on the arched door leading into the painted Hall, on the ultimate moment before lying down on the floor, wrapping blankets round himself, and sleeping. This hope became joy as, coming to the centre of the city, he saw, drawn up upon the wide cobbled Grande Place, two lines of motor buses. The fellows were saying that they were going back to St. Omer, and so to the lines of communication. This was the life!

W
HEN
the battalion was halted in the shadow of the Halles aux Drapiers, all officers were called to the Colonel. On their return, the company sergeants were called to Captain Forbes.

“This is the situation, as far as is known. A new attack has developed, and the Germans have penetrated between the high
ground of the Gheluvelt ridge where we lay in reserve this morning, and the Wytschaete-Messines spur to the south. If I had a map I would show you the position, but we haven’t any. Briefly, the enemy holds the ridges, which command the roads into Ypres. This very square where we are now is the centre of all roads to the front. If he gets here, our Army won’t be able to move as an Army in the cramped space between us and the sea. There won’t be enough railway to bring up the necessary supplies.”

Captain Forbes continued. “All the troops are in the firing line, where they have been continuously since the Retreat. The London Highlanders are the only reserve at present, though a French corps is on the way.”

Phillip watched the sergeants, as they all stood very still.

“Well,” went on Captain Forbes, “it looks as though it is up to us. Sir John French himself has sent the order that we are to be placed in immediate support of the cavalry holding the Messines ridge. The men are tired, and hungry, I know; but there will be a meal of sorts waiting for them where we are going. There are enemy agents in this town, so do not mention what I have just told you. The Commanding Officer is most particular about this. However, there is no harm in passing on to your half-sections the news that an open wireless message was intercepted this morning, from Brussells, to the German general in charge of operations on this front, that the Kaiser is arriving at Courtrai tomorrow, which incidentally is Hallowe’en! That fact speaks for itself. The Germans are bringing up two new corps, possibly a hundred thousand fresh troops. The London Highlanders are the only reserve, at present, of the British Expeditionary Forces.”

Phillip saw that the officers, and the sergeants, had serious faces.
He felt something fluttering in his throat, as he stared into the air.

*

With a sort of dream-incredulity he was sitting in the bus, seeing before him the old panelled advertisements on roof and wall—Steedman’s Teething Powder for Babies, Bluebell Metal Polish, Lipton’s Tea, Dr. Toogood’s Trusses and Surgical Appliances, Bird’s Custard Powder—when he took notice again, he was aware, behind the driver’s seat, of a theatrical poster advertising
The
Girl
in
the
Taxi
.

“Good lord!” he heard Baldwin saying. “I went to a Saturday-afternoon matinée with Mary, to see that!”

It showed a Barribal girl with dimpled rouged cheeks, hobble skirt, and little black hat with a feather in it entering one open door of a taxicab, while a handsome, sprightly man raised his hat by the open opposite door. 

He
.
“My cab, I believe.”

She
.
“Mine, I think.”

He
.
“Ours, I hope.”

Phillip always thought of Uncle George Lemon whenever he saw the poster.

As the daylight lessened, the great trembling flickers and vibrating cones of light filled half the entirety of the sky over the German lines. Shells could be seen bursting in fans of fire a mile or two away. Small red stars were pricking the sky-line all along the east, to the left side of the bus. Away in front a ruddy glow played upon the clouds. He listened to the voices of unknown men near him saying it must be a village on fire. He stared around, losing himself in the romantic scene. All along the eastern horizon, far up to the north over his shoulder, was a sight that thrilled him. This was War! He imagined some mighty giant forging a giant horse-shoe upon some colossal anvil, hammer-blows resounding, sparks flying from the iron in a myriad curves, each to die in sullen splashes of fire upon the darkness. It was terrible. It was wonderful.

The night breeze blew upon his cheeks as he sat there; the convoy stopped to let long files of cavalry pass. Hundreds of horses. They clattered past below, taking the best part of half an hour to go by.

The man beside him was Collins, like a flat tyre without his fellow-comic Kerry. The two had nightly returned from the canteen, arm in arm, singing songs in deliberate discord, pretending that it was necessary to support one another—Collins
big and bulky, unsmiling, clean-shaven with sloppy lips: Kerry small and perky, pince-nez spectacles on fox-sharp face and a brown moustache that he had cut and brushed up at the ends in imitation of the Kaiser Bill. Collins and Kerry had been inseparables—they even belched and broke wind together—until orders had come for overseas. Both had been home service before, but Collins had changed his mind. He and Kerry had parted coolly.

Perching on the end of the seat (for Collins’ bulk took up most of the room) Phillip said to him, “It’s a rather wonderful sight, isn’t it?” Collins made no reply, but sat as before, chin on tunic. He must still be angry for being called one of the Leytonstone louts, thought Phillip.

The convoy was moving in front. After a series of grating crashes in the gear-box, the bus moved on with a jerk, followed by a slither. They passed over what looked like a canal, water gleaming with the fiery hues of the sky. The journey was slower than that of the previous night, which seemed now to be such a long time back in the past. More halts. Refugees, mounted troops, horse-drawn waggons passed. He was shivering with cold when at last they entered a village, and were ordered to get out, and fall-in.

They stood in the flickering darkness, under a church; they waited with hope of billets, following with their eyes the forms of Captain Forbes and the new Colour-sergeant passing down a row of cottages, the officer banging on each door with his stick, then the flash-light of an electric torch, and some of their numbers ordered in by Mr. Ogilby. The platoon officer had already told them that a cooked meal would be arriving soon, after which they must get what sleep they could. They must not take off their shoes.

“We may move at a moment’s notice.”

Phillip and Baldwin were among the last to go into a barn behind the cottages. It was a wooden affair, with a ladder up to a loft, cracks in the floorboards, and in the upright plank walls which gave glimpses of the dilating sky; but it was dry, with hay soon spread.

Unwrapping his blankets, he made some sort of a bed. The loft was shaking with the distant explosions, which seemed to travel through the ground. Then Lance-corporal Douglas’ voice shouted from below that grub had arrived; and Phillip followed
the others down the ladder. The field-cooker had not turned up; only a ration of cheese, with hard biscuits. Phillip was surprised how hungry he was. There was tea, sweet with sugar and rum. He soon felt cheerful, and went out into the street, where G-S waggons and horses were drawn up. With relief he saw cousin Bertie.

“Hullo. I thought you were back at the convent.”

“We came up to take over the Coalie’s transport.”

“Goal?” Phillip thought of leather helmets, grimy faces.

“The Coldstream. The transport is about all they’ve got left.”

Someone had got hold of a bottle of wine. Phillip and Baldwin went down the street, looking for the estaminet. It was on the corner, open, a dim light on the counter. Baldwin opened a tin of Maconochie and put it on the stove, watched by an old woman with a wrinkled face, in black bodice, skirt, loose cotton stockings and wooden sabots. She stood and watched with
expressionless eyes from the doorway leading to the back kitchen.

“Allemands no bon. Obus
poom
!
No bon!” she muttered, as the oil-flame jumped with the reports of 60-pounder guns firing in a field some distance away, the shells screaming low over the cottage.

“Anglais!” said Baldwin. “Bon, n’est ce pas, madame?”

“Avez vous du bif-tek, madame?” enquired Phillip.

“Si si,” she replied, and turned away to light a candlestick. Phillip followed her into the back-kitchen. With the light in her hand she went through a door and down three steps. Looking down, he saw that the entire floor of the little cellar was piled with bully-beef tins.

“Un franc!” she said, holding up a finger, while retaining a tin in the other.

“Bully bif no bon! Mon ami et moi, nous desirons bif-tek frit avec pommes-de-terre, madame!”

“Ne hichny niet! Allez, allez!” she cried, shooing him away. Phillip laughed with Baldwin at the idea of buying bully pinched from the troops.

There was a pot of coffee on the stove. They each drank a tall thick cup, with rhum, and shared the tin of stew; and feeling more cheerful, went out into the street, in time to listen to an altercation between the Quartermaster and the Army Service Corps officer in charge of the buses.

“I’m sorry, but my orders are to return with my convoy to Ypres immediately after your troops have de-trained.”

“Look, old boy, my chaps are going into action, and as I told you before, all our transport is back at St. Omer. We’ve been allotted the first-line Coldstream transport, to take up rations and ammunition to the line. If I have to use them as second-line transport, to go all the way back to rail-head to draw supplies, where’s my first-line transport?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s nothing to do with me. You should indent with D.A.D.O.S. for more transport.”

“By that time the Germans may be in Ypres! We are under orders to go into the line at a moment’s notice. Where will our boys be without supplies? I need three of these buses, and as your superior officer I am ordering you to leave them here, with their drivers!”

“Then the responsibility must rest entirely with you, sir,” said the young A.S.C. officer, who was a second-lieutenant, while the Quartermaster was an honorary Captain. “This is my first convoy, sir. I only arrived from the base this morning.”

“That’s all right, I’ll give you a chit.”

The Quartermaster wrote in his Field Service book, signed it, tore it out, gave it to him.

“That will cover you, my lad.”

Phillip had already realised that the Army Service Corps had a much better time than the infantry. Herbie Low, who lived down Hillside Road, and had enlisted at the beginning of the war, got six shillings a day. The A.S.C. were always in the rear areas, far behind the front. An idea struck him, and he went to find his cousin. “I suppose there isn’t a vacancy in the transport, is there, Bertie?”

“Not now, at any rate, young Phil. But there may be. By the way, you should address me as sergeant. I came up because the Coldstream sergeant was killed when a salvo of Black Marias fell on their picket line. Fed up with foot-slogging?”

“Well, sort of—Sergeant.”

*

To Phillip it seemed that he had hardly lain down in the moon-chinked loft before Sergeant Henshaw’s voice was saying, “Come on, wake up, there! Corporal Douglas, get your men fallen-in by the church!”

“Come on everyone, out of it!”

In silence they folded their blankets, then down the ladder to where rifles and equipment were piled by the wooden wall below. “It’s four minutes to midnight,” said Baldwin, peering at his wristlet watch.

While the company was forming-up by the church there was the sound of a multitude of trotting hooves. In the moonlight a mounted column came down the
pavé
street, tall helmets gleaming above the horses. They were French cuirassiers. Behind them came flat British caps, and Phillip saw they were all mounted on grey horses.

“How’s it going?” called out Elliott.

“Fine, laddie! There’s bluidy thousands won’t goose-step afore the Cayser no more. Who are you?”

“London Highlanders. Territorials.”

The news spread down the squadrons. There were friendly cries, some cheers.

“Gude luck, London Highlanders!”

“Same to you, Scots Greys!” More cheers, this time from the London Highlanders.

The trotting of horses died away to the north. They waited in the street of St. Eloi, until the order was given to return to billets, but to be ready to move again before dawn.

Heedless now of gunfire and remote crackle of musketry Phillip curled up in his corner of the loft; then, warm again, stretched his legs and worked his feet to and fro, as the tensions of day left his mind. Touching his crucifix, he prayed voicelessly for safety, and had sighed himself to sleep when, “Good lord!” said the voice of Elliott, across the loft. “It’s Hallowe’en, old son!”

*

They awakened to crashing gunfire. Out of the hay they crawled, unspeaking. Down below hot tea was ready, with bread and bacon. Afterwards an inspection of iron rations, ammunition in pouches, field-dressings. Water-bottles to be filled from the chlorinated water-cart. Cloth bandoliers of the new Mark VII ammunition were handed out. In clips of five, they looked like pointed nickel teeth.

As the
pavé
with its steam-tram rails began to gleam with the grey sky, brutal torpid downward dronings filled the air above the dark church, seeming to Phillip to be growing heavier and more massive while he waited in a cold sweat of utter defencelessness, until one tremendous metallic rending upon another
rose with wafts of blackish smoke in which darker objects were thrown up into the dawn beyond the tiled roofs of houses. Were these Black Marias? Then the first British aeroplane seen in France drew his gaze upwards, as the biplane passed over the village, the painted Union Jack under each lower wing clearly visible, and the helmet’d heads of pilot and observer looking over the side of the fuselage. They waved: a cheering sight.