PART THREE 1 страница

Months and months before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head—and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs—were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash: it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just filtering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!

Twice he had stood up on a rifleman's step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over—in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite. So, from the bottom of a pit-shaft in broad day you can see the stars. The wind was light, but from the North-West. They had there the weariness of a beaten army: the weariness of having to begin always new days again…

He glanced aside and upwards: that cockscomb of phosphorescence… He felt waves of some X force propelling his temples towards it. He wondered if perhaps the night before he had not observed that that was a patch of reinforced concrete, therefore more resistant. He might of course have observed that and then forgotten it. He hadn't! It was therefore irrational.

If you are lying down under fire—flat under pretty smart fire—and you have only a paper bag in front of your head for cover you feel immeasurably safer than you do without it. You have a mind at rest. This must be the same thing.

It remained dark and quiet. It was forty-five minutes: it became forty-four… forty-three… Forty-two minutes and thirty seconds before a crucial moment and the slate grey cases of miniature metal pineapples had not come from the bothering place… Who knew if there was anyone in charge there?

Twice that night he had sent runners back. No results yet. That bothering fellow might quite well have forgotten to leave a substitute. That was not likely. A careful man. But a man with a mania might forget. Still it was not likely! …

Thoughts menaced him as clouds threaten the heads of mountains, but for the moment they kept away. It was quiet; the wet cool air was agreeable. They had autumn mornings that felt like that in Yorkshire. The wheels of his physique moved smoothly; he was more free in the chest than he had been for months.

A single immense cannon at a tremendous distance said something. Something sulky. Aroused in its sleep and protesting. But it was not a signal to begin anything. Too heavy. Firing at something at a tremendous distance. At Paris, may be: or the North Pole: or the moon! They were capable of that, those fellows!

It would be a tremendous piece of frightfulness to hit the moon. Great gain in prestige. And useless. There was no knowing what they would not be up to, as long as it was stupid and useless. And, naturally boring… And it was a mistake to be boring. One went on fighting to get rid of those bores—as you would to get rid of a bore in a club.

It was more descriptive to call what had spoken a cannon than a gun—though it was not done in the best local circles. It was all right to call 75's or the implements of the horse artillery “guns”; they were mobile and toy-like. But those immense things were cannons; the sullen muzzles always elevated. Sullen, like cathedral dignitaries or butlers. The thickness of barrel compared to the bore appeared enormous as they pointed at the moon, or Paris, or Nova Scotia.

Well, that cannon had not announced anything except itself! It was not the beginning of any barrage; our own fellows were not pooping off to shut it up. It had just announced itself, saying protestingly, “CAN… NON, ” and its shell roaring away to an enormous height caught the reflection of the unrisen sun on its base. A shining disc, like a halo in flight… Pretty! A pretty motive for a decoration, tiny pretty planes up on a blue sky amongst shiny, flying haloes! Dragon flies amongst saints… No, “with angels and archangels! ”… Well, one had seen it!

Cannon… Yes, that was the right thing to call them. Like the up-ended, rusted things that stuck up out of parades when one had been a child.

No, not the signal for a barrage! A good thing! One might as well say “Thank Goodness”, for the later they began the less long it lasted… Less long it lasted was ugly alliteration. Sooner it was over better… No doubt half-past eight or at half-past eight to the stroke those boring fellows would let off their usual offering, probably plump, right on top of that spot… As far as one could tell three salvoes of a dozen shells each at half-minute intervals between the salvoes. Perhaps salvoes was not the right word. Damn all artillery, anyhow!

Why did those fellows do it? Every morning at half-past eight; every afternoon at half-past two. Presumably just to show that they were still alive, and still boring. They were methodical. That was their secret. The secret of their boredom. Trying to kill them was like trying to shut up Liberals who would talk party politics in a non-political club had to be done, though! Otherwise the world was no place for… Oh, post-prandial naps! … Simple philosophy of the contest! … Forty minutes! And he glanced aside and upwards at the phosphorescent cockscomb! Within his mind something said that if he were only suspended up there…

He stepped once more on to the rifle-step and on to the bully-beef case. He elevated his head cautiously: grey desolation sloped down and away. FRRRrrr! A gentle purring sound!

He was automatically back, on the duckboard, his breakfast hurting his chest. He said:

“By jove! I got the fright of my life! ” A laugh was called for: he managed it, his whole stomach shaking. And cold!

A head in a metal pudding-basin—a Suffolk type of blonde head, pushed itself from a withdrawn curtain of sacking in the gravel wall beside him, at his back. A voice said with concern:

“There ain't no beastly snipers, is there, sir? I did 'ope there would'n be henny beastly snipers 'ere. It gives such a beastly lot of extra trouble warning the men. ”

Tietjens said it was a beastly skylark that almost walked into his mouth. The Acting Seargeant-Major said with enthusiasm that them 'ere skylarks could fair scare the guts out of you. He remembered a raid in the dark, crawling on 'is 'ands 'n knees wen 'e put 'is 'and on a skylark on its nest. Never left 'is nest till 'is 'and was on 'im! Then it went up and fair scared the wind out of 'im. Cor! Never would 'e fergit that!

With an air of carefully pulling parcels out of a carrier's cart he produced from the cavern behind the sacking two blinking assemblages of tubular khaki-clad limbs. They wavered to erectness, pink cheeses of faces yawning beside tall rifles and bayonets. The Sergeant said:

“Keep yer 'eds down as you go along. You never knows! ”

Tietjens told the Lance-Corporal of that party of two that his confounded gas-mask nozzle was broken. Hadn't he seen that for himself? The dismembered object bobbed on the man's chest. He was to go and borrow another from another man and see the other drew a new one at once.

Tietjens' eyes were drawn aside and upwards. His knees were still weak. If he were levitated to the level of that thing he would not have to use his legs for support.

The elderly Sergeant went on with enthusiasm about skylarks. Wonderful the trust they showed in hus 'uman beens! Never left ther nesteses till you trod on them tho hall 'ell was rockin' around them… An appropriate skylark from above and before the parapet made its shrill and heartless noise heard. No doubt the skylark that Tietjens had frightened—that had frightened him.

Therd bin, the Sergeant went on still enthusiastically, pointing a hand in the direction of the noise, skylarks singin' on the mornin' of every straf 'e'd ever bin in! Won'erful trust in yumanity! Won'erful hinstinck set in the fethered brest by the Halmighty! For oo was goin' to 'it a skylark on a battlefield!

The solitary Man drooped beside his long, bayoneted rifle that was muddied from stock to bayonet attachment. Tietjens said mildly that he thought the Sergeant had got his natural history wrong. He must divide the males from the females. The females sat on the nest through obstinate attachment to their eggs; the males obstinately soared above the nests in order to pour out abuse at other male skylarks in the vicinity.

He said to himself that he must get the doctor to give him a bromide. A filthy state his nerves had got into unknown to himself. The agitation communicated to him by that bird was still turning his stomach round…

“Gilbert White of Selborne, ” he said to the Sergeant, “called the behaviour of the female STORGE: a good word for it. ” But, as for trust in humanity, the Sergeant might take it that larks never gave us a thought. We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed their nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H. E. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them.

The Sergeant said to the re-joined Lance-Corporal whose box now hung correctly on his muddied chest:

“Now it's HAY post you gotter wait at! ” They were to go along the trench and wait where another trench ran into it and there was a great A in whitewash on a bit of corrugated iron that was half-buried. “You can tell a great HAY from a bull's foot as well as another, can't you, Corporal? ” patiently.

Wen they Mills bombs come 'e was to send 'is Man into Hay Cumpny dugout fer a fatigue to bring 'em along 'ere, but Hay Cumpny could keep is little lot fer 'isself.

An if they Mills Bomb didn' come the Corporal'd better manufacture them on 'is own. An not make no mistakes!

The Lance-Corporal said “Yes sargint, no sargint! ” and the two went desultorily wavering along the duckboards, grey silhouettes against the wet bar of light, equilibrating themselves with hands on the walls of the trench.

“Ju 'eer what the orfcer said, Corporal, ” the one said to the other. “Wottever'll 'e say next! Skylarks not trust 'uman beens in battles! Cor! ” The other grunted and, mournfully, the voices died out.

The cockscomb-shaped splash became of overwhelming interest momentarily to Tietjens; at the same time his mind began upon abstruse calculation of chances! Of his chances! A bad sign when the mind takes to doing that. Chances of direct hits by shells, by rifle bullets, by grenades, by fragments of shells or grenades. By any fragment of metal impinging on soft flesh. He was aware that he was going to be hit in the soft spot behind the collar-bone. He was conscious of that spot—the right-hand one; he felt none of the rest of his body. It is bad when the mind takes charge like that. A bromide was needed. The doctor must give him one. His mind felt pleasure at the thought of the M. O. A pleasant little fellow of the no account order that knows his job. And carried liquor cheerfully. Confoundedly cheerfully!

He saw the doctor—plainly! It was one of the plainest things he could see of this whole show—the doctor, a slight figure, vault on to the parapet, like a vaulting horse for height; stand up in the early morning sun… Blind to the world, but humming Father O'Flynn. And stroll in the sunlight, a swagger cane of all things in the world, under his arms, right straight over to the German trench… Then throw his cap down into that trench. And walk back! Delicately avoiding the strands in the cut apron of wire that he had to walk through!

The doctor said he had seen a Hun—probably an officer's batman—cleaning a top-boot with an apron over his knees. The Hun had shied a boot brush at him and he had shied his cap at the Hun. The blinking Hun, he called him! No doubt the fellow had blinked!

No doubt you could do the unthinkable with impunity!

No manner of doubt: if you were blind drunk and all! … And however you strained, in an army you fell into routine. Of a quiet morning you do not expect drunken doctors strolling along your parapet. Besides, the German front lines were very thinly held. Amazingly! There might not have been a Hun with a gun within half a mile of that boot-black!

If he, Tietjens, stood in space, his head level with that cockscomb, he would be in an inviolable vacuum—as far as projectiles were concerned!

He was asking desultorily of the Sergeant whether he often shocked the men by what he said and the Sergeant was answering with blushes: Well, you do say things, sir! Not believing in skylarks now! If there was one thing the men believed hit was in the hinstincks of them little creatures!

“So that, ” Tietjens said, “they look at me as a sort of an atheist. ”

He forced himself to look over the parapet again, climbing heavily to his place of observation. It was sheer impatience and purely culpable technically. But he was in command of the regiment, of an establishment of a thousand and eighteen men, or that used to be the Establishment of a battalion; of a strength of three hundred and thirty-three. Say seventy-five per company. And two companies in command of second lieutenants, one just out… The last four days… There ought to be, say, eighty pairs of eyes surveying what he was going to survey. If there were fifteen it was as much as there were! … Figures were clean and comforting things. The chance against being struck by a shell-fragment that day, if the Germans came in any force, was fourteen to one against. There were battalions worse off than they. The sixth had only one one six left!

The tortured ground sloped down into mists. Say a quarter of a mile away. The German front lines were just shadows, like the corrugations of photographs of the moon: the paradoses of our own trenches two nights ago! The Germans did not seem to have troubled to chuck up much in the way of parapets. They didn't. They were coming on. Anyhow they held their front lines very sparsely… Was that the phrase? Was it even English?

Above the shadows the mist behaved tortuously: mounting up into umbrella shapes. Like snow-covered umbrella pines.

Disagreeable to force the eye to examine that mist. His stomach turned over… That was the sacks. A flat, slightly disordered pile of wet sacks, half-right at two hundred yards. No doubt a shell had hit a G. S. wagon coming up with sacks for trenching. Or the bearers had bolted, chucking the sacks down. His eyes had fallen on that scattered pile four times already that morning. Each time his stomach had turned over. The resemblance to prostrate men was appalling. The enemy creeping up… Christ! Within two hundred yards. So his stomach said. Each time, in spite of the preparation.

Otherwise the ground had been so smashed up that it was flat: went down into holes but did not rise up into mounds. That made it look gentle. It sloped down. To the untidiness. They appeared mostly to lie on their faces. Why? Presumably they were mostly Germans pushed back in the last counter-attack. Anyhow you saw mostly the seats of their trousers. When you did not, how profound was their repose! You must phrase it a little like that—rhetorically. There was no other way to get the effect of that profoundness. Call it profundity!

It was different from sleep. Flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs… Well, you can't go on with a sentence like that… But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall… Probably because they—the painters—drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form… But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi… Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God! As if He dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth… Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered…

Dawn on the battlefield… Damn it all, why sneer? It was dawn on the battlefield… The trouble was that this battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months and twenty-seven days of it still… No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony of effort by numbers. Nor yet by saying “Endless monotony of effort”… It was like bending down to look into darkness of corridors under dark curtains. Under clouds… Mist…

At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They mopped and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; drooping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying layings out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence but in accord they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black quiet nights, in dugouts where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners' picks below you; tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening… But not FEAR.

It was in effect the desire for privacy. What he dreaded at those normal times when fear visited him at lunch; whilst seeing that the men got their baths or when writing, in a trench, in support, a letter to his bank-manager, was finding himself unhurt, surrounded by figures like the brothers of the Misericordia, going unconcerned about their tasks, noticing him hardly at all… Whole hillsides, whole stretches of territory, alive with myriads of whitish-grey, long cagoules, with slits for eyeholes. Occasionally one would look at him through the eye-slits in the hoods… The prisoner!

He would be the prisoner: liable to physical contacts—to being handled and being questioned. An invasion of his privacy!

As a matter of fact that wasn't so far out; not so dotty as it sounded. If the Huns got him—as they precious near had the night before last I—they would be—they had then been—in gas-masks of various patterns. They must be short of these things: but they looked, certainly, like goblin pigs with sore eyes, the hood with the askew, blind-looking eyeholes and the mouthpiece or the other nose attachment going down into a box, astonishingly like snouts! … Mopping and mowing—no doubt shouting through the masks!

They had appeared with startling suddenness and as if with a supernatural silence, beneath a din so overwhelming that you could not any longer bother to notice it. They were there, as it were, under a glass dome of silence that sheltered beneath that dark tumult, in the white illumination of Verey lights that went on. They were there, those of them that had already emerged from holes—astonishingly alert hooded figures with the long rifles that always looked rather amateurish—though, Hell, they weren't. The hoods and the white light gave them the aspects of Canadian trappers in snow; made them no doubt look still more husky fellows as against our poor rats of Derby men. The heads of goblin pigs were emerging from shell-holes, from rifts in the torn earth, from old trenches… This ground had been fought over again and again… Then the counter-attack had come through his, Tietjens', own crowd. One disorderly mob, as you might think, going through a disordered crowd that was damn glad to let them get through, realizing slowly, in the midst of a general not knowing what was going to happen, that the fellows were reliefs. They shot past you clumsily in a darkness spangled with shafts of light coming from God knows where and appeared going forward, whilst you at least had the satisfaction that, by order, you were going back. In an atmosphere of questioning. What was happening? What was going to happen? … What the bloody hell… What…

Tidy-sized shells began to drop among them saying: “Wee… ee… ry… Whack! ” Some fellow showed Tietjens the way through an immense apron of wire that was beginning to fly about. He, Tietjens, was carrying a hell of a lot of paper folders and books. They ought to have evacuated an hour ago; or the Huns ought not to have got out of their holes for an hour… But the Colonel had been too… too exalted. Call it too exalted. He was not going to evacuate for a pack of… Damn orders! … The fellow, McKechnie, had at last had to beg Tietjens to give the order… Not that the order mattered. The men could not have held ten minutes longer. The ghostly Huns would have been in the trenches. But the Company Commanders knew that there was a Divisional Order to retire, and no doubt they had passed it on to their subalterns before getting killed. Still, that Bn. H. Q. should have given the order made it better even if there was no one to take it to the companies. It turned a practical expulsion into an officially strategic retreat… And damn good divisional staff work at that. They had been fitted into beautiful, clean, new trenches, all ready for them—like chessmen fitting into their boxes. Damn good for a beaten army that was being forced off the face of the earth. Into the English Channel… What made them stick it? What the devil made the men stick it? They were unbelievable.

There was a stroking on his leg. A gentle, timid, stroking! Well, he ought to get down: it was setting a bad example. The admirable trenches were perfectly efficiently fitted up with spy-holes. For himself he always disliked them. You thought of a rifle bullet coming smack through them and guided by the telescope into your right eye. Or perhaps you would not have a telescope. Anyhow you wouldn't know…

There were still the three wheels, a-tilt, attached to slanting axles: in a haze of disintegrated wire, that, bedewed, made profuse patterns like frost on a window. There was their own apron—a perfect village! —of wire over which he looked. Fairly intact. The Germans had put up some of their own in front of the lost trenches, a quarter of a mile off: over the reposing untidinesses. In between there was a perfect maze: their own of the night before last. How the deuce had it not been all mashed to pieces by the last Hun barrage? Yet there were three frosty erections—like fairy sheds, half-way between the two lines. And, suspended in them, as there would have to be, three bundles of rags and what appeared to be a very large, squashed crow. How the devil had that fellow managed to get smashed into that shape? It was improbable. There was also—suspended, too, a tall melodramatic object, the head cast back to the sky. One arm raised in the attitude of, say, a Walter Scot Highland officer waving his men on. Waving a sword that wasn't there… That was what wire did for you. Supported you in grotesque attitudes, even in death! The beastly stuff! The men said that was Lieutenant Constantine. It might well be. The night before last he, Tietjens, had looked round at all the officers that were in H. Q. dug-out, come for a last moment conference. He had speculated on which of them would be killed. Ghostly! Well, they had all been killed: and more on to that. But his premonition hadn't run to thinking that Constantine would get caught up in the wire. But perhaps it was not Constantine. Probably they would never know. The Huns would be where he stood by lunchtime. If the attack of which Brigade H. Q. had warned them came off. But it mightn't…

As a final salute to the on the whole not thrilling landscape, he wetted his forefinger by inserting it in his mouth and held it in the air. It was comfortingly chilly on the exterior, towards his back. Light airs were going right in the other fellows' faces. It might only be the dawn wind. But if it stiffened a very little or even held, those blessed Wurtembergers would never that day get out of their trenches. They couldn't come without gas. They were probably pretty well weakened, too… You were not traditionally supposed to think much of Wurtembergers. Mild, dull creatures they were supposed to be. With funny hats. Good Lord! Traditions were going by the board!

He dropped down into the trench. The rather reddish soil with flakes of flint and little, pinkish nodules of pebbles was a friendly thing to face closely.

That sergeant was saying:

“You hadn't ought to do it, sir. Give me the creeps. ” He added rather lachrymosely that they couldn't do without superior officers altogether. Odd creatures these Derby N. C. O. 's! They tried to get the tone of the old, timeserving N. C. O. They couldn't; all the same you couldn't say they weren't creditable achievements.

Yes, it was friendly, the trench face. And singularly unbellicose. When you looked at it you hardly believed that it was part of this affair… Friendly! You felt at peace looking at its flints and pebbles. Like being in the butts up above Groby on the moor, waiting for the grouse to come over. The soil was not of course like those butts which were built of turfs…

He asked, not so much for information, as to get the note of this fellow:

Why? What difference did it make whether there were senior officers or not? Anyone above eighteen would do, wouldn't they? They would keep on going on. It was a young man's war!

“It hasn't got that comfortable feeling, sir! ” the Sergeant expressed it. The young officers were very well for keeping you going through wire and barrages. But when you looked at them you didn't feel they knew so well what you were doing it for, if he might put it that way.

Tietjens said:

“Why? What are you doing it for? ”

It wanted thirty-two minutes to the crucial moment. He said:

“Where are those bloody bombs? ”

A trench cut in gravel wasn't, for all its friendly reddish-orange coloration, the ideal trench. Particularly against rifle-fire. There were rifts presumably alongside flakes of flint, that a rifle-bullet would get along. Still, the chances against a hit by a rifle-bullet were eighty thousand to one in a deep gravel trench like that. And he had had poor Jimmy Johns killed beside him by a bullet like that. So that gave him, say, 140, 000 chances to one against. He wished his mind would not go on and on figuring. It did it whilst you weren't looking. As a well-trained dog will do when you tell it to stay in one part of a room and it prefers another. It prefers to do figuring. Creeps from the rug by the door to the hearth-rug, its eyes on your unconscious face… That was what your mind was like. Like a dog!

The Sergeant said:

“They do say the first consignment of bombs was it n smashed. Hin a gully; well behind the line. ” Another was coming down.

“Then you'd better whistle, ” Tietjens said. “Whistle for all you're worth. ”

The Sergeant said:

“Ter a wind, sir? Keep the 'Uns beck, sir? ”

Looking up at the whitewash cockscomb Tietjens lectured the sergeant on Gas. He always had said, and he said now, that the Germans had ruined themselves with their gas…

He went on lecturing that Sergeant on gas…

He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread—that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail. He was going to be hit behind the collar-bone. He could feel the spot; not itching but the blood pulsing a little warmer. Just as you can become conscious of the end of your nose if you think about it!

The Sergeant said that 'e wished 'e could feel the Germans 'ad ruined themselves: they seemed to be drivin' us into the Channel. Tietjens gave his reasons. They were driving us. But not fast enough. Not fast enough. It was a race between our disappearance and their endurance. They had been hung up yesterday by the wind: they were as like as not going to be held up to-day… They were not going fast enough. They could not keep it up.

The Sergeant said 'e wished, sir, you'd tell the men that. That was what the men ought to be told: not the stuff that was hin Divisional Comic Cuts and the 'ome pipers…

A key-bugle of singular sweetness—at least Tietjens supposed it to be a key-bugle, for he knew the identities of practically no wind-instruments; it was certainly not a cavalry bugle, for there were no cavalry and even no Army Service Corps at all near—a bugle, then, of astounding sweetness made some remarks to the cool, wet dawn. It induced an astonishingly melting mood. He remarked:

“Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are! ”

He said “your men”, instead of “our” or even “the” men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command—and was likely to be to-morrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a rag-time collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.

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