The Pandervils (47 page)

Nicky was still in England, taking lessons in homicide and sometimes heartily wishing he could
begin practising on the persons of his instructors. There were all sorts, good and bad, among the chevrons; and it was easy, if you considered for a moment, to distinguish the voice of conscientious authority from the snarl of the mere cad in office making the most of his chance. A ubiquitous type, this last, recruited either from the ranks of old professionals or from the gutter. During his first few weeks in khaki Nicky found that he had committed himself, body and soul, into the hands of a federation of bullies, who bawled and screamed and shoved at him and his fellows from morning till night, and were assisted in their endeavours by newly recruited toadies eager to escape the whip by learning how to use it. Nicky was sensitive and lacked philosophy; he was too young not to feel degraded when he suffered insult without protest. Denied the relief of action, for it would have been witless to resist this absolute and mechanical tyranny, he took refuge in anger and contempt The war discovered in him an unexpected capacity for hate, but it was not the enemy that he hated When from the height of a month's experience he watched still newer recruits being turned into tame cattle by men who would themselves never go out of England, he thought: What's the good of killing Germans if we leave this muck alive! But his letters home revealed nothing of this bitterness. ‘The N.C.O.'s are a pretty tough lot and they keep us on the go, but our corporal, I mean the one in charge of our barrack-room, is quite a decent chap. I dare say the officers are all right, but we hardly
ever come within miles of an officer except on parade. They're too sacred to be seen often. Imagine us all standing to attention in the middle of a muddy swamp staring respectfully at distance and hating the Hun like old boots. Then there's a sort of hush. Something's going to happen. It might be the Second Coming by the fuss they make. And then he comes—not Jesus Christ after all, but a lad of eighteen or nineteen, sort of little Lord Fauntleroy, nicely washed and brushed up and keeping a very stern look on his face so as not to burst out crying. I expect he likes the S.M. about as much as we do, poor devil. He looks so lonely standing there, like the johnny in the song. But he has to come and look at our chins all the same, and if there's any sign of a beard we're shot and if there isn't any sign of a moustache we're hanged. This war is to be won by moustaches it seems. It's a Barber's War. I don't think I shall try for a commission—it would mean starting all over again with a new lot of chaps, and we've got sort of used to each other now and with any luck we shall all get out together …' No mention of Christmas, which came bleakly and passed unregretted, a mock-festival for Egg and Jane, and for a million others.

Egg, taking what comfort he could from these letters, would not listen to his fears; and the effort not to listen was perhaps the subtlest and cruellest feature of this waiting. He was glad when, in February, the first lot of lambs began coming; and in the enthusiasm of shepherding them he forgot
for a while the necessity of telling himself, with ceaseless iteration, that the war would probably end before Nicky's training was completed. Grey mornings would find him in the field they called the near orchard, going from one pregnant ewe to another. ‘You'll not be long now, will you, missus? And how many d'you think you've got, old lady?' He looked to have some sixty lambs from his thirty-nine ewes. When twins or triplets were born he rejoiced because they swelled the numbers; and when there was but one he rejoiced because the singles were bigger and would get fat before the others did; he was determined to think well of his sheep. By timely interference he helped many a weakling into the world, saved the life of many a mother; and then, not without reason, he was wonderfully pleased with himself … until he remembered that the war, so soon to end, had not ended yet. He forgot to think of these stupid suffering beasts as so much farming stock; he found relief in worrying about them as though they had been his own kind. When a lamb was stillborn he pitied it, and pitied its mother; when a sheep died, as happened in the first fortnight, he was grieved as well as disconcerted. In reflective moments he knew it was absurd and illogical, since what he handled was only so much potential mutton; but the knowledge made no difference to his instinctive attitude.

No sooner was he deeply absorbed in this occupation than something happened to interrupt him: Nicky came home. Nicky came home for his
draft leave: a visit sudden and brief as the flash of a sword, for the boy was away again, bound for the Western Front, while Egg's eyes still dazzled with the cruel splendour of his coming. That same night, unable to sleep with Nicky gone, he got out of bed, dressed, lit a storm lantern, and went out to the near orchard. The air was crisp; a half moon shone. In the lee of a hurdle a newly born lamb, moist and steaming, was trying to struggle to its legs. Its mother lay exhausted in her straw bed; but, as Egg watched, another ewe, heavy with the womb's burden, came nuzzling up to the newly born with eager triumphant bleating. Egg gave her a gentle tap on the nose. ‘Think again, Nellie. Your turn's coming, my dear.' He looked again at the lamb. ‘A grand one, you are. And I'll get back to my bed.' Rising from his knees he recalled what had prevented his sleeping, and he thought he would never sleep again. But in this belief he was wrong: he slept, and the morning brought new courage. There was no time for moping: had he not Nicky's farm to look after? He loved to think of the place as Nicky's, and he resolved to make a fine thing of it while the lad was away soldiering. He pictured the homecoming: Well my boy, we've not wasted time, us old 'uns! Meanwhile the new root crops were ready for flat-hoeing; in less than a month there would be between two and three score lambs to tail, and a score or two to castrate; and, before March was out, the four-acre field, where last year's roots had grown, must be sown with barley and clover.

Outside, as they all knew, the evening was softly bright after rain; but here, in the dugout, darkness ebbed and flowed, eddying round a flicker of candle-flame. The water that dripped through the roof into Private Pandervil's dixie made a resonant
ping
which Frensham pretended to recognize as A-flat. Two lice, of unknown origin, occupied the men's attention. The first was plump, and shone with an ivory lustre; the second, more leggy, suggested (said Nicky) a slave-galley; both were crawling diagonally across the front of a military knapsack. ‘Two to one they meet!' said Corporal Harris. For the lice had started from opposite corners and were moving with geometrical precision, so that it was a nice point, well worth the consideration of any sportsman, whether or not they would reach the apex of the V at the same instant and so meet.

‘Take you in tanners, Corporal,' cried Frensham.

‘No you don't, Frogs! We ain't all bloated capitalists. Pennies for us.'

‘Pennies it is,' agreed Frensham, ‘and you're losing 'em, me lad.'

Someone lit a second stump of candle and waved it aloft. Seven faces clustered over the arena.

‘The money's yourn, Frogs,' said Harris, adding, with the greatest good humour, ‘Hope it chokes you, you old fecundator!'

The plump louse was now crossing its rival's path at a distance of about half an inch. The betting
began again: which would reach its corner first? The lad called Smiff cried out, in his shrill, newsboy's voice: ‘Me for the little fat bleeder. ‘E's got guts, 'e 'as. Nothing showy about 'im, eh Corp? Carm on Frogs, give us one of your sayings nah!' Frensham ignored this artless tribute. ‘ ‘Ere Goody boy, evens on the little fat bleeder? Take me on?'

But Goodwin was a cautious fellow. ‘What are you betting?'

‘All I got,' said Smiff. ‘All I bloody got, me boy. Can't say fairer. A packet of gaspers.'

‘Issue?' asked Goodwin.

‘Right first time,' said Smiff.

‘Well, you know what to do with 'em, don't you!' returned Goodwin in a sad voice.

The candle moved. ‘Keep the glim still, carn-cher!' said Smiff. ‘You'll frighten the poor lil fings.'

The plump louse won the race. ‘Good on yer, matey!' said Corporal Harris, cracking the victor under his thumbnail. ‘You've earn me fourpence.' Goodwin scooped up the vanquished on the blade of his jack-knife and held it in the candle-flame.

‘Win or lose,' remarked Frensham, idly watching this slaughter, ‘it's all one in our war.' He exchanged a grin of understanding with his friend Pandervil. ‘A plague on both your louses!'

Nicky sat waiting. For a year or so now, life had seemed to consist largely of waiting, from the first taste of hell in the Recruits Depot to this
sitting-out game in the trenches: waiting for uniform, waiting for ‘clobber', waiting for parades to begin and to end, waiting for the tide of screaming abuse to subside, waiting for trains, waiting for medical inspection, waiting for punishments, pack drills, ‘C.B.', sanitary fatigues, pay stopped, waiting for rations, waiting for pay, waiting for pass, waiting for draft, waiting for the next order. He was unfeignedly glad to be in the trenches again: the people at the Convalescent Camp had seen to it that he should be glad of that, though indeed the place was a paradise compared with the ordinary Base Depot. He was back in the trenches among men he had got used to, and under officers and non-commissioned officers who had other things to do than organize persecution of the rank and file. Here was danger and terror and filth and infinite aching monotony, but here, too, was a sense of comradeship that rendered the obscene adventure of war by one degree less ignoble.

Nicky waited. In a few hours he was to steal out across No Man's Land on a patrol. He was not thinking of that: he had learned the art of enjoying ease when one has it. But underneath his surface thoughts he was waiting for the ordeal to begin. Either I shall be killed or not, so why worry? Perhaps I shall be dead by to-morrow; perhaps I shall be dead by this afternoon; perhaps I shall be dead before five minutes have passed. He had schooled himself to face this idea of imminent death not only without flinching but with a certain detachment, as though it were something that
scarcely concerned him. Sometimes, when shelling began, he said to himself coolly: It may be this one. But when it was over, and he still alive, he could never be quite cool about that: there was always surprise in the thought, and joy, and a cruel —quickly suppressed—hope of home. Jane was now become something inconceivably lovely, in whose existence he could hardly believe. He dared not let himself think of her, and he could not, after a while, remember her face, except in dreams when he saw her—as he had seen his chum Tony Grant five days ago—mutilated and writhing and screaming for the favour of quick death. She too had faced death and had given him a son, now ten weeks old; and he tried in vain to stifle the hope that when this particular little binge was over he might get ten days' leave to England. He stared at his vision of a world gone mad, and he waited. He waited for the convulsion to cease. He had a rifle, a bayonet, and a revolver; and not infrequently he was entrusted with bombs. All this seemed to him the very height of stupidity … but the war went on and on, and he did as he was told, indulging secretly—it was the only outlet he had for the rage that consumed him—in much flamboyant rant. Will it ever end? Not till we're ail maggots. And then p'raps the old blokes at home'll be satisfied. Grand march past of the victorious army down Whitehall with the band playing and the flags wagging and the girls getting randy. All present Sa'ant Major? All present and correct sir! They don't seem to move very
smartly
, Sa'ant Major, I
must
say! No sir, you see sir, the
fact is sir, they're MAGGOTS sir! Is that so Sa'ant Major! Why what a glorious war it must have been! I'm sorry it's over by Gad! So are we all sir.… Meanwhile we soldiers sit at ease and search our shirts for lice. Rhyming with mice. But not with rats, which is a pity. They like this war, the rats do, it's a jubilee for 'em. Corpses, one of, passed to you for necessary action please. Brother Worm and Sister Louse, bless the master of this house. Ever since he met a shell, he has gone to live in hell. Or in heaven to dwell, as the case may be, according to his rank and station. Leaving these well-ventilated premises for favour of your kind occupation. Rhyming with station. But not you, you little leaping bastard … dear flea, gentle jumper, do I wrong thee when I say that thy father and thy mother were not joined by Holy Church? Anyhow you're dead now, so blast you! … Jane. I wonder what she's doing now. The last of the milking p'raps. And we've got a son—with
my
eyes too. Just in time for the next war, he'll be. That's fine, Jane. Feed him up my dear. And when he's fat enough we'll ram him into the cannon's mouth for King and Country. Oh and God too of course, but he comes a bad third. I wonder what he thinks of this war. Pooh, nothing at all; why should he? A little difference among cheesemites doesn't concern
him
. ‘Does it, Frogs?'

‘Does who what?' asked Frensham.

‘I was wondering what the Authorities think about this little do of ours.'

‘The brass hats, the red tabs, the dooks?'

‘No. The haloes. Them Above.'

Frensham winked. ‘Can't say. But I hear they've interned the Holy Ghost. They say he's related to the Zeitgeist, a notorious Hun.'

‘Oh shut yer fuddy rah for Crysike!' It was Godden, with his customary snarl. ‘You two rudders make me fuddy-well sick. Fink yerselves fuddy clever, doncher. Well I fink you're a fuddy pair of fuddy sops, see!' He turned to his fellow-Cockney, Smiff. ‘Say Smiffy, did I ever tell you about that 'ot lil piece of stuff I pick up dahn E-Taps. ‘Ere mamselle I says, do you …'

Smiff groaned with extravagant emphasis. ‘Not agyne, boy! Not agyne! Go on talking, Frogs. Don't know what you're talking
abaht
, but it's a treat to 'ear you.'