PART TWENTY-THREE

“BEER” BATTERY

§ 1

If this were a “war-book,” at least two chapters might here be devoted to the months which the Fourth Southdown Brigade spent in and around Neuve Eglise. But since we are only considering war as it affected the fortunes of our Mr. Jameson, his wife Patricia, and a few other individuals, the reader at this point—as once before, in the City of Fear—is asked to use his or her imagination.

Suffices, that the war went on. In England, goaded by a strong Press, vacillating politicians introduced their weakling Conscription Act with a brave fanfare of trumpets; a few perverts developed a “conscience” which did not prevent their eating food brought to them at the risk of human life; the bulk of the nation, humping its pack with a shrug, were much consoled by the official announcement of the Jutland Victory as a defeat. In the firing-line, the Huns hammered vainly at Verdun, the British and French prepared counter-attack on the Somme.

But Peter Jameson, Cigar Merchant, cared for none of these things. He had reached that particular point in the soldier’s existence which is only described by the French word “_cafard_” or its Anglo-Saxon equivalent “fed-up.”

How much the mental, how much the physical contributed to this “_cafard_” of our Mr. Jameson—are questions for the psychologist. Remain the facts that he was bored, irritable, depressed—and more intolerably efficient in the routine duties of his Adjutancy than ever.

Only two thoughts consoled: one personal, “I’ve made such a muck of things at home that perhaps the front is the best place for me”: and the other, “Besides, if anything _does_ happen—Pat and the kids will get that insurance money.”

His home letters, of course, continued to depict the Brigade as a permanent poker-school established some leagues behind the firing-line!

§ 2

Meanwhile, the inevitable wastages of warfare—commenced at Loos and continued in the City of Fear—went on among that collection of voluntary fighters known as the Fourth Southdown Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. Now “re-organization” came to complete the process. “Billy” Williams and his command were transferred _en bloc_ to the enlarged Divisional Ammunition Column—still presided over by that same Colonel Mallory who had dined with the Weasel on Christmas Eve, 1914: Bromley and his eighteen-pounders were exchanged for a Howitzer battery: Doctor Carson secured a specialist appointment at the Base—his place being taken by Laurillard, a young and not too sympathetic student of St. Bartholomew’s hospital: Horrocks the Veterinary officer took promotion, Morency a leg-breaking fall from his horse, and Stanley Purves to an impassioned flow of soldier poetry.

“Shan’t have a friend left at this rate,” thought our Mr. Jameson. And then to crown disasters, the Weasel announced his own promotion to Brigadier.

“Take you with me as A.D.C.,” he rasped as they wandered out, on that last morning, to inspect the batteries.

“Thank you, Colonel.” The phrase rose easily to Peter’s lips; but the tone of it was utterly non-committal.

They walked on.

“Well?” continued Stark.

“It’s very decent of you, Colonel, but—”

“Nice soft job, P.J.!”

“Too soft, Colonel.”

They looked each other in the eyes. Then the Weasel said: “You’re a married man, P.J.” and Peter, stubbornly: “What difference does that make, Colonel?”

“The pay’s better.”

“I didn’t join the army to make money, sir.”

“Damn you, P.J. Don’t ‘Sir’ me when we’re alone.” The rasp softened. “Don’t make an ass of yourself, P.J., I know you’ve had a pretty thin time, one way and another since you joined up. . . .”

“But at that,” as General Stark wrote his young wife some days later, “he seemed to freeze up completely; and when Revelsworth came to take over command—you’ll remember Revelsworth, darling, he used to be in the old show at Hillsea—P.J. asked me, as a particular favour, to send him to a battery. . . . He’s a dashed sight too good for ordinary subaltern’s work; but of course I couldn’t tell him so. . . . Bit of the fanatic about P.J. . . . Said he wanted to kill a Hun or two. . . . I shouldn’t mention anything to that nice wife of his when you write her.”

Which will serve to explain why Lieutenant-Colonel Percival Revelsworth’s orders bore the signature: “Stanley Purves, Lieutenant and Adjutant, Fourth Southdown Bde., R.F.A.”

§ 3

“Beer” Battery welcomed Peter with cordiality if not with effusion. The clean-shaven Sandiland ordered Quarter-master Sergeant (ex rough-rider) Murgatroyd to “snaffle a tent next time he saw one lyin’ about.” Pettigrew,—cheeks redder, eyes bluer, spirits higher, than even in Shoreham days—twinkled a “Wait till we’ve put you through it, P.J.” Charlie Straker held out a big hand, and stuttered: “T-thought you w-wouldn’t stand being Adjutant much longer.” Lindsay, newly-arrived junior member of the Mess—a raw-boned raw-voiced Aberdonian boy, with a budding moustache, and a passion for what he termed “Obsairvation Duties”—immediately offered to point out some “verra interesting features of the ground”; but being informed by Straker that “P.J. knew the ground a damn sight better than he did,” subsided into disciplinary silence.

Peter himself, once he grew accustomed to the restricted viewpoint of a battery-subaltern (who sees very little of war except his own particular job), lost a little of his _cafard_ by the change of duties.

The open air life suited him, improved his temper. He felt further than ever removed from the annoyances of business. His by-weekly letters to Patricia, busy with the furnishing of Sunflowers, grew almost sentimental.

On the whole, he liked his new work better than the old. It held more excitement, less routine. During his first duty-spell alone at the “O. Pip” on Hill 63, he spotted a party of three Huns laying telephone-wires in the open; and managed to burst his shell exactly in their faces. The thrill of it—a thrill only to be compared with tiger shooting from an elephant howdah—kept Peter’s eye to his telescope for the rest of the day. And his two spells “in the trenches,” though spent in great peace at the sand-bagged Battalion Headquarters, also gave him a fresh experience.

But it was not only the freedom from responsibility and the excitement of fresh duties which appealed to Peter. Conway, with his usual luck, had tossed for—and of course won—the only comfortable habitation in the valley: a still intact though slightly battered farm-house, in which—equally of course—he had re-established his “poker-school.” Lodden disapproved—but came nightly. Bromley, still in touch with his old Brigade, was learning—an expensive process. They played in a room reduced to cabin-size by pit-props, sandbags and nine-by-two’s (the Army’s designation for its standard plank): constantly interrupted by the buzz of Conway’s telephone, and once by a misconceived S.O.S. call which sent every one scurrying back through intermittent shell-fire to their spurting cannons.

Altogether, not an unpleasant existence! Indeed, during that first easy fortnight only one thing troubled Peter: his health. Somehow or other, since the gas-attack, he had developed a little spitty cough, usually painless, but occasionally stabbing—the tiniest pin-prick—just below the heart.

“You ought to see the Doc. about that bark of yours, P.J.,” said Sandiland one evening, as they sat smoking in the Armstrong hut of batten and canvas which Q.M.S. Murgatroyd had snaffled for the Mess.

“Can’t stand Laurillard,” growled Peter—the pain had stabbed twice. “Besides, he’ll only tell me to leave off smoking cigars. Let’s go and get those five hundred francs back from Conway.”

§ 4

But the easy time did not endure.

The first of July, nineteen hundred and sixteen, which turned the British front opposite Albert from a picnic-ground to a cemetery, reacted promptly on the hitherto quiescent valleys below Messines. The words “maximum activity,” scribbled by a thousand telephonists, thumped on a thousand typewriters, stripped tarpaulin from the 12-inch naval gun on the railway by the cross-roads, unroofed its sister in the canvas house opposite Divisional Baths, woke howitzer and eighteen-pounder in their pits beneath the trees, mortar and machine-gun in their hiding-places among the trenches. To these, the Boche replied with his eight-inch at Oostaverne, his 77’s behind the ridge, and a peculiarly deadly Minenwerfer which ran on rails and changed position whenever fired at.

Gone were the unstrenuous days, the scarcely disturbed nights. Conway’s “poker-school” vanished like a raided gambling-house.

For a week, “demonstrations” continued; and on the eighth night, a handful of infantry, faces blackened, dirks at their belts, revolvers in hand, slipped over their parapet under cover of the shrapnel-barrage, crawled along the Steenbeek, dropped down into the nine-foot duck-boarded trenches of “Bon Fermier”. . . and returned, dirks bloody, revolvers reeking, with the four dazed and cowered prisoners—(four they were asked to bring and four only they _brought_)—which Brigade orders had demanded. . . .

Came rumours of the battle, “down south”: it went well, it went badly, we made progress, we did not make enough progress. Followed amazing manœuvres: Australian gunners, six-foot men who handled their leaping pieces like toys, arrived to “take over” from the Southdowns: “Beer” Battery moved back to a farm behind Bailleul, were ordered to dig gun-pits along the Stuiverbeek, laboured three days hauling beams and sand, were ordered back into action, “took over” from the Australians (who were “going to the Somme, by cripes”), were relieved by wrathy Ulstermen who cursed a place called Beaumont Hamel . . . and marched quietly westwards through Bailleul and Meteren and Fletre and Caestre to their old rest area in the farms about Eecke!

“I’m g-getting a bit fed-up with this,” stuttered Straker, “where the d-devil are we going to?”

“Oh, we’re going to the Somme all right, don’t you worry about that,” said Peter, wise in Staff mysteries. “This is just a preliminary canter.”

§ 5

And to the Somme they went.

They entrained at dawn, loading and lashing vehicles, coaxing horses into trucks, shepherding men, supervising equipment; slid off to the south; travelled endlessly through endless fields, past endless villages; till after three days they made Amiens.

“Now we shan’t be long,” said Gunner Mucksweat, as the last waggon came, groaning to ground, the last team backed into the swingle-trees.

“Dinna believe it, Muckie, we’ll no go into action yet,” warned his “Number Two.”

And Mucksweat’s “Number Two,” the canny Macnab, proved right. Back they marched, and back; through the broad tree-girt avenues of Amiens, where French munitionettes whirling homewards on rickety motor-lorries kissed greetings; over a vast canal below whose embankment silent _poilus_, blue-cloaked and blue-helmeted, sat glued to enormous fishing-rods; back, along the white and dusty road, to Hangest. . . .

“Told you we’d put you through it, P.J.,” chaffed Pettigrew late that night as—waggons unlimbered, horses tethered, men bivouacked at last—they flung themselves to bed in the lath-and-plaster room of a midden-courted farm.

“Dunno what’s the matter with me,” groused Peter. “Little Willie isn’t used to being anywhere except at the head of the column. He’s been pulling my arms out all this evening. Given me a stitch or something”—he coughed acridly in the darkness—“wonder how long we shall stop here?”

“Oh, about a week, I expect. . . . Good-night,” snored his companion.

§ 6

It took three days to concentrate the four brigades of Southdown Artillery at Hangest.

Concentration concluded, there followed a period of desultory “training”—taken with immense and harassing seriousness by Lt.-Colonel Revelsworth, a dapper arrogant-looking man of forty-five, very different from the Weasel; slightly less seriously by his subordinates.

Fortunately, the Anglo-Saxon is not imaginative. Neither officers nor men of “Beer” Battery bothered as they went about their lawful (or unlawful) business, to consider the near future. To be out of action, away from the sound of guns, sufficed them.

Thus they waited—five days—six days—a week and a week-end; till there came, one warm summer’s evening while they sat at poker, a very _affairé_ Purves, second star newly on his sleeve, with orders that, “The Colonel would like to see all available officers at Headquarters immediately.”

“Confound it,” said Lodden. “I’ve never been in such amazing luck.”

“Never bring messages like that yourself,” whispered Peter to Purves as they strolled across the cobbled courtyard to Headquarters. “What’s it all about?”

“Only a pi-jaw. We’re going into action tomorrow.”

And a “pi-jaw,” as Purves irreverently described it, they got.

Listening to it, Peter began to think of the Brigade in its Brighton days. So many of the faces about him were new since then: yet the Brigade, the Fourth Southdown Brigade, R.F.A.—the “Virgin-bosom” Brigade as Stark used to call them every time his meticulous recommendations for honours were struck out by the bemedalled Staff—still lived. The thing he, Peter, had helped to make, went on . . . went on, and would go on, right to the finish. . . . “A long wai ter get ter Berlin!” He seemed to hear his Cockneys again,—singing.

“So you see, when we begin moving up into action tomorrow,” interrupted Revelsworth’s voice. . . .

Peter looked round him at the mute expressionless faces above the khaki collars. There were a few of the “old gang” still. Lodden, Conway, Purves, Pettigrew and Straker, “Brat” Archdale, (acting orderly officer, grown from blushing boy to hollow-cheeked young man), Merrilees, solemn as an owl, unaltered. . . . Eight, including himself, nine. Nine out of twenty six!

How many of those nine would be left after this new show? Eight at most! One of them was done for already; couldn’t hope to last more than a month. And that one of them was himself. . . . Still, nobody need know about that till he came out of action. . . . _If_ he came out of action. . . .

For Peter’s cough, the cough that drove him, hacking and spitting, night after night—gum-booted, “British Warm” over his pyjamas—out of the stifling room he shared with Pettigrew into the moonlight, was not the result of over-smoking. . . . Rolleston, the kindly diffident “general practitioner” who doctored Colonel Brasenose’s Brigade, had told Peter that much; told it him unconsciously.

They had met quite by accident, that very afternoon; gone to Rolleston’s “surgery.” Peter, accepting a drink, choked over it; put his handkerchief to his mouth.

“None of my business of course,” the doctor had ventured, “but if I were you I’d consult Laurillard about that wheeze of yours. Never been gassed, have you? Slightly, I mean.”

Peter kept silence.

“Funny stuff, gas,” went on the doctor. “I had a case of it before I came out, while I was still in civilian practice. A young Canadian came to me with a frightful cough—rather like that cough of yours, by the way. I tested for tubercle, of course. Not a trace. Then he began talking about the first gas-attack; said he’d been in it. That put me on the track. . . .”

“But surely,” interrupted Peter, “after all that time. . . .”

“Oh, he wasn’t gassed, in the Army sense of the word; but there’s no doubt in my mind that a tiny molecule of chlorine must have lodged in his left lung, and started the irritation. . . .”

“Did you cure him?”

“Oh, yes. But it took rather a long time. Fresh air and no exercise. Lucky he came to me when he did. Lungs are ticklish organs. If you once start ’em downhill, they take a lot of pulling back. Besides, you never know when that sort of thing won’t turn to consumption: the tubercle bacillus doesn’t take long to find a weak spot. . . . Still, if you’ve never been actually in the gas-cloud. . . .”

“No, I’ve never been actually in the gas-cloud.” Peter had lied mechanically. His was not the breed which “goes sick” on the eve of an action. . . .

Revelsworth’s voice interrupted musing. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he was saying, “I don’t think there’s anything else—except that I should like officers to wear full equipment for tomorrow’s march.”

§ 5

At ten o’clock of a gorgeous late-summer morning the Fourth Brigade marched out from Hangest, and at high nooning of the third sun-scorched day, they dropped down a swell of that bitter plain which is Picardy into the Bois de Tailles—straggling cleft of sand and trees which strides the naked chalk and the Bray-Corbie Road. Here again—officers and men bivouacked under ground-sheets among uncleanly bushes on the slopes,—horses tethered between limbers on the red-sand floor of the valley below—they waited, waited endlessly. . . .

For this battle was no action of sure attack, of reserves moving forward punctual to clock-time, of orderly pursuit and retreat. In that vast crucible of fire which bulged northwards astride the river from French Dompierre to English Ovilliers, Infantry Divisions of twelve thousand men shrivelled as paper shrivels in flame; brigades melted to battalions; battalions to companies: between a moonrise and a sun-setting they were and they were not. But always as Infantry Divisions shrivelled, fresh Infantry Divisions flung themselves into the crucible; and always, behind the shrivelling melting infantry, stayed the guns—stayed till human sinews could serve them no longer. . . .

Vague echoes of those guns, hints of their flashes, were borne o’ nights to Peter Jameson as he lay sleepless among sleeping men; as he twisted over and over between the ruggled blankets on his creaking camp-bed; as he sweated away the darkness and shivered through the dawn-chill; to Peter with the spitting cough fouling his mouth and the pin-prick pain stabbing below his heart,—to Peter Jameson, one tiny glorious fool among the millions whose folly saved our world.