Love and the Loveless (16 page)

Having assured himself that they were being taken care of, Hobart went on talking to Phillip about the day’s foxhunting they had had with the Brownlow. Phillip felt anxious, but concealed it, even when there came the drone of a descending shell. It burst a hundred yards from the tents. Phillip wondered what Jack would do. He went on talking. Another shell—a 4.2 like the first—groaned down and exploded. Two more followed at intervals, the fourth fifty yards from the picket lines. Showing no concern, Hobart went on talking. Splinters, thought Phillip, could do some damage at fifty yards. The mules were bundling together, some of the drivers were trying to calm them.

“I think I’ll go and see if I’m wanted, skipper.”

No animal had been hit. Sergeant Rivett was not to be seen. Cutts, the driver who had replaced the one gone to hospital with pneumonia, was standing about twenty yards away, held by the arm of Nolan. Going to find out what was the matter, Phillip saw he was slobbering at the lips. At that moment Sergeant Rivett hurried up, his face staring with fear.

“I saw you slinking off, Cutts! You did that once before!” he cried. “I know all about you, and if you don’t take care you won’t be so lucky next time!”

Anger arose in Phillip: and with it the thought or self-portrait of himself uttering involuntarily the words
Filthy
beast
to the Canadian’s scornful ‘dry goods clerk’ who had got syphilis. He checked himself; remained still within himself, impersonal, as Sergeant Rivett turned to him, saluting, to say, “Sir, I wish to report Cutts for dereliction of duty. I saw him leaving the line when the first shell burst. I consider he was deserting his post, sir, in the face of the enemy!”

“If you please, sir——” began Nolan, but Sergeant Rivett cut him short. “Speak to the officer only when you are addressed! Have I your permission to dismiss Nolan, sir?”

“Very well, Sergeant Rivett.”

When Nolan had saluted and gone, Phillip said, “How did
you know that Cutts had been sentenced to death before he came to us?”

“He told me himself, sir, when he came. He has told many of the drivers, too, sir. If you ask them, they’ll corroborate my word.”

“Why do you think Cutts was sent to another branch of the service?”

“I suppose to give him another chance, sir.”

“Exactly! So we must give him another chance, don’t you think?”

“Do I take that to mean, sir, that I as Sergeant am to take no notice if one of my men deserts his post in the face of the enemy?”

“Everyone gets wind up at times. I was so jumpy when I came out first that I was almost out of my mind.”

“I am responsible for discipline, sir. Almost solely so, if I may say so.”

“You’re windy, too, you know, Rivett.”

“Sir!—I ask to see the commanding officer, with your permission, with a view to handing my stripes!”

“Look at it from Cutts’ point of view. We ought to try and help him. Something’s broken his nerve. A shell, perhaps; or, from the look of him, he probably had hell as a child. He hasn’t had your advantages, coming from a good home.”

This reference to his social superiority seemed to satisfy Rivett, for he said, “Very good, sir, I’ll say no more about it.”

The sergeant came to see him before dinner. He asked if he might detail Cutts for limber duty that night. “I feel sure he’s trying to work his ticket, sir. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a lead-swinger.”

“I think not. Put him on picket duty until further orders.”

“Then who will look after his mules, sir?”

“He can. But not take them up the line.”

Half an hour after sunset Phillip set out, four fighting limbers with eight pairs of mules. A full moon shone above the track following the course of the brook, and along the bottom of a shallow valley leading to the embankment below the Hindenburg outpost line. Great white clouds were now passing over the moon, a cold wind blew from the north-west. The Hindenburg Line was dissolved in a dusky pallor; not a shot was fired. The silence was strange. Saying goodbye to Jack and the others, he led the empty limbers back at a trot, with a moonlit feeling of having a highwayman’s shadow.

When they had unlimbered, and the mules were rugged up at the picket line, Phillip went to have a word with Cutts. He found him sitting by the fire, one arm round Little Willie, the German dog. Little Willie was paying the company a visit. According to Nolan, Little Willie had been on leave in the Hindenburg Line, as his coat smelled of stale sausage and cigar smoke.

Phillip sat on an empty shell-box opposite Cutts. Since the shelling that afternoon, a tarpaulin shelter had been rigged up, to conceal the light from the east. He warmed his hands over the coloured flames of the coke fire, in which could be seen
dull-red
boulets.
These egg-shaped objects of compressed clay and coal-dust had been scrounged from the remains of an old German dump beside the railway line at Achiet by Sergeant Rivett, who had brought back a couple of filled sandbags that morning.

“I was blown up by a shell, Cutts. It was at Messines, in the first year of the war, when I was a tommy like you. I was buried, and when an old sweat who had befriended me dug me out, my eyes flickered with electric snakes for some time afterwards. When we came out of the battle I couldn’t sleep, for fear of going back again. So I understand anyone else who feels like that.”

The driver said nothing. His teeth began to chatter. When he opened his mouth to speak he gulped. Phillip saw that his hands were tightly clenched.

“It’s a bad old war, Cutts. The only thing to do is to try and stick it out. Nolan and I will help you. So when you feel awful, or terribly afraid, come and see me, will you? An officer is the soldier’s friend you know.”

“T-t-thank you, sir!”

“I am like you. I can’t get used to shells. It’s the
noise
which frightens me. It’s such an absolutely final, brutal noise, isn’t it? Well, goodnight, Cutts, and don’t worry. Don’t fight
yourself
in your brain. That’s the worst thing to do. I know, I used to do it. Still do, in fact. Prayer does help, you know.
Good-night
, old fellow.”

Cutts gulped thanks.

Some hours later Sergeant Rivett came to Phillip’s tent. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but it’s Cutts again. He’s wounded in the hand. I’ve put on a dressing. I think you should see him, sir.”

Phillip pulled on his long rubber thigh boots, which he had “won” from an R.E. dump in Albert after his boot-caps had
been burnt by the stove. Worn with thick woollen stockings, over socks, they had kept his feet dry and warm. It had made a great difference to his outlook, he found.

“What happened?”

“The fire bucket exploded, sir. I think someone must have put a Mills bomb in it.”

“Who can have done that?”

“Well, sir, I won’t go so far as to say that it comes within the category of a self-inflicted wound, but it cannot be ruled out——”

“Just a moment, Sergeant Rivett! Didn’t you scrounge some coal from the Achiet dump? German coal? And you know the orders about looting, surely? Moreover, that was a booby-trap—their egg-bombs look just like the French
boulets.
I expect we’ll be able to find fragments lying about in the morning. If any
are
found, it will look like dereliction of duty—isn’t that what you said—on our part, won’t it? You for taking the coal, I for not running you in for looting. However, Cutts is the one who matters.”

The wounded man was lying back, wrapped in a blanket. Nolan was with him. Phillip lifted up his arm, with the bandage on the hand.

“I don’t trouble!” exclaimed Cutts, as though proud of his power to bear pain. “I can git up. Look!” as he struggled on his feet, revealing in the light of a torch the dripping of blood.

“Take it easy, Cutts. How did it happen?”

“Bookit blowed up sudden like, sir, after I’d put on coal to keep it goin’ for next picket, sir. It caught Little Willie, sir. I’m very sorry, sir.”

“Is the dog hurt?”

“I don’t know, sir. He cleared at the clap.”

“He can’t be very hurt, if he could run. Well, I think it’s a straightforward case of egg
bombs being mixed in with the coal we got, another booby trap. Gall it gunshot wound due to Enemy Action. Or do you think it’s a case for a Court of Enquiry, Sergeant Rivett?”

“That’s for you to decide, sir.”

“Now let Nolan take him down to the Aid Post. Best of luck, and let me know how you get on, won’t you, Cutts? Write me a letter. I’ll help you in any way I can—remember!” He shook the uninjured hand and, having said goodnight to Nolan and Sergeant Rivett, went back to his tent, which he had to himself, having got it the same time as the boots from Albert.

But there was not much sleep: a battery of 60-pounders during the day had taken up position in a sunken road a hundred yards away, and was firing over the tents. Every white stab buffeted the canvas. He lit a candle, and read the Oxford Book.

Every time a gun fired it snuffed out the flame, so he gave up reading; and lying back, was soon asleep.

He awoke at first light, and lay motionless in his flea-bag, listening. The ground seemed to be bubbling. A prolonged bombardment was taking place somewhere. Was it falling on the front line, in the valley below the Hindenburg Line? Had the Germans retired only to lure on the Fifth Army, to cut it off by driving into the flanks of its untrenched positions? In contour’d chalky country sound acoustics behaved oddly; it was not possible always to determine how far away a bombardment was taking place.

He got up, and roused the sergeant, ordering all animals to be saddled, and hooked into limbers, all stores and officers’ valises to be loaded, ready for emergency. When it was light he mounted Prince and rode east, crossing the Arras-Bapaume road, seeking the highest ground where he could use his field-glasses. From the crest of a field of young wheat he saw the Hindenburg Line across intervening folds in the ground as a bluish-grey riband of new barbed wire against grass. The trenches were on the reverse slope, out of view. All was quiet, no shell-spoutings of counter-barrage upon the horizon. While he sat upon his black horse, looking east, a drift of wind, or some eddy in the strata of heavy dark clouds, amplified a roll of gunfire from the north. He remembered the rumoured attack on the Vimy Ridge, near Arras. The spring push had begun!

Heavy cold rain fell, with intervals of sleet, all the morning. The news in the afternoon, at the Brigade forage dump in Achiet-le-Grand—where already new railway lines were being laid by Canadian engineers—was that the First and Third Armies had gone over at dawn, and taken thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns. But the attack made by the Australians near Bullecourt had failed.

“Who’s windy now?” said Sergeant Rivett, to the
lance-corporal
in charge of the grooms. “We had to load up all the stores, now we’ve got to put them all back again.”

*

The next morning a message came from Brigade to stand by to move forward in the event of the Germans evacuating the
Hindenburg Line opposite Fifth Army. Allenby’s Third Army up north had got through the last line of the Hindenburg System, and now before them was only the Drocourt-Quéant Switch, still under construction. Rumours late at night, via the post-corporal from Sapignies, were of a cavalry massacre at Monchy-le-Preux, when a charge had come up against uncut barbed-wire and machine-gun fire. Hundreds of riderless horses were running about the countryside, said the corporal. Phillip thought about going there the next morning, to see if he could pick up one or two; but orders came to stand by to move forward at half an hour’s notice. Hobart told his officers, in confidence, that if the Hindenburg Line was not evacuated, the division was to take part in an attack at the hinge by Croiselle-les-Fontaines. The French, too, under a new General, Nivelle, who had replaced that old dud Joffre, were about to open a very big attack down in Champagne. So it looked as though, at last, the old Hun might crack! That night, under the tarpaulin roof of the mess, the levels of initialled whiskey bottles were lowered.

The next morning there was another casualty among the drivers. All the military telegraph poles had been cut down by the Germans, the wires lay tangled and spread about. Driver Tallis, walking through them, tripped on a wire, there was a sharp brittle explosion, and he dropped, writhing with pain in one leg, into the flesh and bone of which small white fragments of porcelain had cut deep. One piece went through his ankle, penetrating boot leather twice. He was congratulated on his luck. Just in time, he was told: for while he was being carried away a Special Duty Squad of the R.E.s came and dismantled all the telephone insulators, finding that several had been removed from the cross-pieces and detonators fixed into the hollows before being tied on again with wire. Phillip saw him before he went away to hospital. “Write to me, Tallis, and tell me how young Phil is getting on.”

*

The company moved a mile and a half away, to lower ground near the piles of bricks and rafters called Ervillers, a village through which passed the neatly swept road from Bapaume to Arras. They camped on a pasture field a couple of hundred yards from the village. Phillip thought how much cleaner and finer was the country than that of Belgium. It was so open and wide. Enemy aircraft were often flying over; one shot up the camp, approaching suddenly with a roar fifty feet above the
grass. It was gone before the sentry could fire his rifle. So Phillip, finding a cart-wheel in the village, with the axle, had it fixed to a post put in the earth, so that the wheel revolved horizontally. Upon this a Vickers gun was mounted, to fire into the sky. Late one afternoon, when the sun was dipping to spill golden light upon an otherwise peaceful scene—the ground was being prepared for a gymkhana—an aircraft dived through the luminous haze from about twelve thousand feet, firing tracer and incendiary bullets. One of the observation balloons tethered in a line a couple of thousand feet up showed a lick of flame, while a tiny figure jumped from the basket below; and as the balloon broke raggedly, issuing black smoke and redder flames, the aeroplane zoomed up, fell over at the turn, and dived, firing upon a second. This, too, caught fire. Both were falling when the zoom and turn was once more repeated. A third caught fire. Down dived the Hun scout, to flatten at twenty feet and roar over the camp, while the Vickers gun shook the wheel as it fired but the aeroplane, its black crosses quite large, tore away east. By this time the balloons had shed their crews who floated down on parachutes, fortunately away from the burning ruins which dragged down at the end of their cables, in shreds and flaming tatters.