Love and the Loveless (33 page)

When after a day this letter was apparently ignored Phillip went to see Major Downham.

While he stood to attention, his C.O. said, “Sergeant Rivett has asked to be allowed to hand in his stripes. I have refused to consider it. I note that you sign yourself as belonging to the Gaultshire Regiment, while in fact you have already been transferred to the Machine Gun Corps. Far be it from me to do anything to stand in your way, if you prefer the infantry, as apparently you do. Now will you hand over your Section to Mr. Pinnegar, and the Orderly Room sergeant will give you your warrant to proceed to the course you’ve already been warned for, at No. 3 Infantry Base Depot, Etaples, tomorrow morning.”

*

“I’ll leave my gramophone here, I think. If I don’t come back, would you like to keep it, and the case of records, Teddy?”

“Of course you’ll come back, old man!”

*

“Thank God I’ve seen the last of that horrible little one-eyed dorp!” exclaimed a captain opposite Phillip, as the train clanked and jerked out of Poperinghe station. Looking across, he said, “Don’t I know your face? Weren’t you with the London Highlanders in September ’14? I thought so! I’m on my way to Blighty. With any luck I’ll have a job in England for the duration. Ministry of Information, Whitehall. Extra pay and allowances and green tabs! Where are you going? Etaples? My God, I don’t envy you! I’d rather be in the line than instructing at an I.B.D., any old day!”

At Hazebrouck the train stopped long enough for them to share a bottle of champagne at the E.F.C. Phillip felt better. He began to enjoy a copy of
The
B.E.F.
Times,
a local rag produced up the line, said his new acquaintance. Some blokes had scrounged type and a printing press from a shelled house in Ypres, way back in ’15, and had started
The
Wipers
Times,
which became
The
New
Church
Times
when they moved to Neuve Eglise, then
The
Kemmel
Times,
then
The
Somme
Times,
and now
The
B.E.F.
Times.

Phillip said it was jolly good, and why hadn’t he seen it before; to be told that it was a Divisional paper only.

“Why doesn’t someone at G.H.Q. get it printed and distributed all over the B.E.F.? I am sure it would go like hot cakes!”

The
B.E.F.
Times
had all sorts of queer bits of decorative printing on its pages, long curling thistle leaves, and other wigglywoggly bits. It was very funny reading too.

H’m, thought Phillip. That must be Plumer. He was
cognisant
of the Salient, as Gough wasn’t.

He wondered how Eugene was getting on, and if he had hit it off with Mavis. Gene had not written since his return, although he had written twice to Gene. Perhaps he and Mavis—but it was unthinkable.

He put down the paper. Father had got angry like that with Aunt Theodora, who had wanted the war to stop two years ago, and had been boo’d with others when she tried to make a speech from the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. He
must write to her, and ask how she was getting on with the
crèche
for babies in the East End, organised by Sylvia Pankhurst.

Like Mr. Bloody Brendon, probably still having a bon time in his big dug-out at Neuve Eglise.

Oh, feeble, feeble!

He had caught a glimpse of Horatio Bottomley in early July, at Poperinghe, a ridiculous over-fed figure in a frock coat and tin-hat, his pasty face large, flabby and level with the shoulders of the lesser Staff officers surrounding him.

There was a feeling of desolation in the Infantry Base Depots on both sides of the railway at Etaples. He sensed it at once. The men might have been prisoners of war, without the freedom, such as it was, of a P.O.W. camp. At least the German prisoners of war knew where they were. The fact that they were in a hostile country gave them some sort of resistance, if not resilience. But here in an I.B.D. the men did not know where they were. They had lost the only thing that held them together: the spirit of being “all in it together”; they lacked the friendly encouragement of their own junior officers, a spirit which was to be found only in a regiment.

The camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Military police carried loaded revolvers. Sentries with fixed bayonets guarded the gates. Only 10% of each Depot was allowed out on pass at any one time. If you had been warned for reinforcement, the time allowed you, whether officer or man, was only between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. of any one day. It was not damned well good enough! No wonder the poor devils had a pathetic faith in Horatio Bottomley—at whom
The
B.E.F.
Times,
written comfortably in the rear, had jeered! So had he himself, Phillip reflected. One lived and learned.

Near the Depot camps, occupying hundreds of acres of sandy soil, was the Bull Ring.

Here thousands of men daily received intensive training with bombs, rifle-grenades, Lewis gun and rifle fire, and bayonet practice. They passed finally through a series of assault courses, in and over trenches, past exploding shells (gun-cotton slabs detonated beside small tins of petrol), through water plashes and barbed wire. Urged on by instructor-voices screaming almost hysterically to simulate sufficient patriotic pretence (Phillip thought) in order to keep their safe jobs, the effect of these ex-boxers, ex-wrestlers, and cheap-jacks was more horrible than being in the line; for at least that was real. There was something damnable about a Base system which treated old soldiers, some with two and three wound stripes, as though they were rookies, expecting them at bayonet practice on the usual straw-filled dummies to show frenzy for blood—Gar’n, smash th’ bastard! Gar’n, three inches in the throat!—right nipple—left nipple—groin—then the butt of the rifle crashed into—(voice dropping to a sneer)—“the right place to stop him having any more little Huns”.

The brass-braided wound-stripers, half dead inside their heads, three-quarters of their courage expended with the deaths of old comrades, muttered quietly to themselves. Loos—Somme—Langemarck—they’d had enough. Keep the bullshit for the rookies, who do they think we are?

In one of the camps, passed four times daily, to and from the great arena of the sandhills, was the Punishment Compound, in full view of the marching columns which were called to attention as the leading platoons drew level with the gates and sentry boxes. Here Field Punishment No 1 was on display: men tied back to back along a taut picket line, their arms stretched to the limit. Those who sagged during the time in which they were spread-eagled—one hour in the morning, another in the afternoon—were checked by red-capped military police. The effect on the beholders was degrading. Phillip heard men muttering. There were stories of legs and arms being twisted, of screams from the cells at night, and punishment by open-handed blows of boxing gloves. The cells were dark, with tiny ventilation holes at the top, each little more than the size of a sentry box, so that a man could not lie down in his solitary confinement. The whole place was rancid with subdued anger, with an under-current of bitterness and despair making for sullenness: the idea, it was said,
was to make life there so bad that up the line would be cushy by comparison.

The second-in-command of Phillip’s depot was a very young major called Traill. He had three wound stripes and a Military Cross. The pale delicacy of his face was emphasised by dark wavy hair. Clean shaven, gentle-voiced, Traill looked to be about twenty years old. Seeing Phillip reading
The
Oxford
Book
of
English
Verse
one evening, he came and asked rather diffidently if he might sit beside him. They talked. Phillip was delighted to find a kindred soul; and his depression, which had persisted ever since leaving the company, began to lift. Soon they were talking frankly.’

“Why do they let the men marching to the Bull Ring see the Jankers Compound, and those poor devils doing F.P. No 1, Major?”

“The G.O.C. is an old-fashioned type of martinet, and I suppose feels it’s a case of ‘pour encourager les autres’. Anyway, the A.P.M. is a bit of a sadist, otherwise a coward, and likes to throw his weight about.”

“What’s a sadist?”

“Some people feel better, temporarily at least, by hurting others. It excuses a deficiency in themselves, I suppose.”

“I think I know what you mean. A bully.”

“Exactly. Moreover, the men all know he has never been near the front, and it doesn’t help him to know that the men know it. And because of his feeling of not being good enough, he is the more determined to carry out, to the letter, the orders of his martinet master. You may think this a bit fanciful, but that’s how it seems to me.”

“No, I don’t think it fanciful! I know someone else like that. Two people, in fact. No, three!” as he added the image of his father to those of Downham and Brendon. “No—four,” as he added himself to the other three.

“I know,” said Traill, sympathetically, thinking that the sigh was for the thought of men tied up on the picket line. “My dear Maddison, I’ve spoken about it to the Colonel, and so has the Padre. The answer was, ‘Oh, one mustn’t interfere in the Provost Marshal’s sphere,’ and that’s followed by, ‘When you’ve served as long as I have, my boy, you’ll see the wood and not just single trees. Force must be used with discretion against the incalcitrant.’ By the way, I suppose you know they’ve got Broncho Bill?”

“So that’s where they sent him!”

“Yes. He’s waiting to be sent up the line, to be shot.”

“You said just now, ‘force with discretion’, Major. Surely the point is that it is used with no discretion, if those undergoing F.P. No 1 are visible? It does no good. In fact, the reverse. And another bad thing is the way men are drafted to go up the line, regiments mixed up indiscriminately! Don’t these dug-in base-wallahs
know
that it destroys morale? What is morale but the feeling to stick to your pals, otherwise pride in your own crowd? They don’t do it with the Guards; if they did, the Guards would cease to be what they are, the élite. They
are
the élite, because they feel it, and so act it out!”

“I do so agree. By the way, how comes it that you’re at an I.B.D., when you’re M.G.C.?”

“I was told that it was a sort of liaison course. Though how a transport officer——” He stopped. “At least, that’s what I was given to understand.”

“Well—— Of course, I can’t really say——”

Phillip knew then that Downham had got rid of him. He was for it again, with the infantry. Any old lot, O God.

*

It was a fine dry September, sunny and calm. One morning the columns from the depots arrived at the Bull Ring drill ground, and, as usual, after the officers had fallen out behind Major Traill, the parade was handed over to the R.S.M. That red-faced giant of a man gave the order, in his stentorian voice, “Take off your packs and fall in on your markers!”; but not a man among the two thousand odd left his position. Instead, individuals began to light cigarettes; some sat down; others started to whistle. Then to sing. Phillip had not heard the song since early 1915, and hearing it now was a surprise. It belonged to the Bairnsfather grim-humour period, now almost old-fashioned.

The regimental-sergeant-major roared out, “Fall in on your markers!” Ironical cheers came from the lines of sitting men. The R.S.M. came over to Major Traill. Meanwhile another song was being sung, or rather shouted, as it passed down the lines of idle men.

Cheers came across the packed gravel of the sandy parade ground.

“I’d like to have a word with my platoon, if I may, sir,” said Phillip.

“I don’t see why not.”

From afar came a chant, swelling to a roar,

Phillip found his platoon friendly.

“That’s quite all right, sir! Nothing to do with you, sir! The boys are fed-up, sir!”

“Well, I’ve just come down from Wipers, I know all about it.”

“That’s right, sir! Nothing personal, sir.”

As he walked back, a motorcar with a brass hat drove up. It was the Commandant of the Etaples Administrative Department. After talking with Major Traill, he said, “The parade is cancelled. March back to your Base Depots in companies under their officers!”

He drove away. Major Traill passed on the order to the R.S.M., who told the sergeants.

“Parade is cancelled! Fall in your men on company markers!”

They marched back to the camp. There the men flung off their equipment, and began to move in mass to the gates. They passed the sentries and swarmed down, in good humour and some excitement, to the bridge over the railway. Phillip heard afterwards what happened there. Three military policemen were standing outside the white-washed hut which was the M.P. post. One was the sergeant. He had been a heavyweight boxer. The leading men stopped short of the bridge, which was small and narrow. The sergeant drew his revolver. “I shoot the first man who tries to cross!” Jeers and boos greeted him. A sergeant of the Gordon Highlanders shouted, “Why aren’t you at the front?” and walked forward. The boxer fired once into the air. “Go back, or I’ll let you have it next time!” he said. When the Gordon Highlander went on, the Red-cap fired at the ground. The bullet ricocheted and hit the Gordon Highlander, who dropped. Immediately the men rushed the bridge and the policemen fled, throwing away the red covers of service caps, their white lanyards, revolvers, and holsters into the railway cutting. One took refuge in the R.T.O.’s office outside the railway station. The R.T.O. was a captain with white hair and moustaches, a decrepit old man. He stood outside the door and said quietly, “Go away from here. Leave this man alone. I have put him under arrest; now go away, I have work to do.” They respected the old cock’s guts, and went on to the town, several thousand altogether. The officers were confined to camp in the Base Depots. Military pickets were formed, but held back from the streets. Phillip wrote notes in his
Army
Correspondence
Book
152
then played bridge. All kinds of rumours arrived. The estaminets were drunk dry. Some huts had been set on fire. A thousand bottles of whiskey had been taken from the E.F.
canteens, with wine and other bottles. Rumours grew wilder. Broncho Bill had escaped. He had had a gun-battle with the Australian officers who had gone among the mutineers to shoot the ringleaders. They themselves had been shot dead. The woods around the town were held by Broncho Bill’s men. Motor barges coming up the Canche estuary from Folkestone, with rum and whiskey, had been looted. The civilian crews had been flung in the mud. One had been found, head almost severed. Broncho’s Bill’s jack-knife had been found beside the corpse.

In the afternoon volunteers among the junior officers were called for to go down into the town, dressed in private’s uniforms, with tin-hats, to mix with the crowd, and try and spot the
ring-leaders
: for it was evident, said the Colonel, who had been speaking to the General on the telephone, that the mutiny had been organised, because the same procedure had been followed on all the various training grounds.

Phillip volunteer’d. At the Q.M. Stores he insisted on an old tunic, puttees, trousers, and boots. No new creased issue stuff. He was not keen, he told himself, to bring any ring-leaders to book; but only to see the sights.

He had been lounging about in the Place for half an hour or so, when a motor car drove up slowly. In it was a Brigadier-General. The A.P.M. was beside him in the back, and an armed M.P. in front beside the driver. Both were without arm-bands and red cap covers. The General got out of the car, and began to address the crowd pressing in to hear what he had to say.

“Are you British soldiers, or are you——” he got so far as saying when a corporal of the Northumberland Fusiliers pushed forward and said, “It’s no use your talking now, General. You’ve done all the talking in the past.”

“How dare you talk to me like that?”

“Now now! Take it easy, sir!” When the General seemed to be getting angry, two men held an arm each. Phillip pushed forward. He felt quivery, but also determined to step in if they started to hurt the General.

“Are you British soldiers, or are you——” the General repeated, when the corporal held up a finger, and said, “Put a sock in it, General! I’ve warned you! The boys are angry, and I’d be sorry to see you hurt, General! We don’t intend to fight any more. Get that straight! The sooner you sign the movement orders, the sooner we’ll all be back in Blighty. The war’s over!”