Part 10

Sipping his drink, smoking and keeping his nose carefully in his newspaper, in those bars lighted by electric light, in the middle of the dark Christmas days, he listened and reflected. The offensives he had seen? How had they all ended? How did he say himself they always must end? Exactly as these chaps had made up their minds! Would he not see if there did not remain some relative who could get him one of these jobs at home, connected with supplying some one else with munitions? No, he would not. He understood and agreed with the point of view, but some very old loyalty in him would keep him in France, close up to the guns, that was the place for him. He had no illusions as to that to which he was returning. He knew that he had never been appointed to Divisional Staff, had merely been attached. There was no “establishment” for him, and directly he had been sent down as sick, his place had been filled, some one else was doing “head housemaid” as he had been called, to young Vinyolles, and he, Dormer, would go shortly to the depôt of his regiment, from thence to reinforcement camp, and thus would be posted to any odd battalion that happened to want him. The prospect did not worry him so much as might have been supposed. He felt himself pretty adept at wangling his way along, and scrounging what he wanted, having had a fine first-hand experience of how the machinery worked. He did not want to go into the next offensive, it was true, but neither did he want the sort of job he had had, and even less did he want to be at Base, or in England. Boredom he feared almost as much as physical danger. Accustomed to having his day well filled, if he must go to War he wanted to be doing something, not nothing, which was apparently a soldier’s usual occupation. But he did not feel his participation in the next offensive very imminent. He had heard them all talking about “Not fighting any more,” and now here was Russia out of it and America not yet in, and Peace might be patched up.

The most striking thing therefore that he learned was this new idea of the Bosche taking the initiative, and attacking again. A new army officer, his knowledge of the Western Front dated from Loos, and was of allied offensives only. He had never seen the earlier battles of Ypres, the retreat from Mons was just so much history to him. When he heard heated arguments as to which particular point the Bosche would select for their offensive, in France, or (so nervous were these people at home) in England even, he was astonished, and then incredulous. The level balance of his mind saved him. He had no superfluous imagination. He had never seen a German offensive, didn’t want to, and therefore didn’t think he would. As usual, the bar-parlour oracles knew all about it, gave chapter and verse, could tick off on their fingers how many German Divisions could be spared from the Eastern Front. He had heard it all before. He remembered how nearly the cavalry got through after Vimy, how Moorslede Ridge was to give us command of the country up to Courtrai, how Palestine or Mespot were to open an offensive right in the Bosche rear, not to mention all the things these Russians had always been said to be going to do. This might be another of what the French so well called “Canards”--Wild Ducks. He would wait and see.

He was impressed in a different way by the accounts that now began to filter through, of what had been happening in Russia. Officers shot, and regiments giving their own views on the campaign. That was what happened when the Headless Man got loose! No doubt the Russians, from all he had heard, had suffered most, so far as individual human suffering went. And then, Russians were, to him, one of these over-brainy people. Had anyone acquainted with his ruminations taxed him to say if English people were under-brainy, he would have said no, not necessarily, but brainy in a different way. Left to himself he felt that all the opinions he had ever formed of the Russians were justified. Look at their Music. Some of it was pretty good, he admitted, but it was--awkward--beyond the reach of amateurs, in the main. This appeared to him, quite sincerely, to be a grave defect. He was conscious--more, he was proud--of being an amateur soldier, and knowing himself to be modest, he did not fear any comparison between the actual results obtained by English amateurs like himself, and the far more largely professional armies of other countries. And now these over-brainy ones had gone and done it. He knew as well as anyone the hardships and dangers of soldiering, had experienced them, shared them with the ranks, in the trenches. Why even in this beastly Vanderlynden affair, it would have puzzled him to say if he were more sorry than glad that the private soldier had never been brought to Justice. But English--and even Frenchmen--as he had seen with his own eyes, if they mutinied, got over it, and went on. It was only people like the Russians that went and pushed things to their logical conclusion.

He had a hatred of that, being subconsciously aware that the logical conclusion of Life is Death. Naturally, from his upbringing and mental outlook, he had no sympathy with the alleged objects and achievements of the Russian Revolution. He could not see what anyone wanted with a new social order, and as for the domination of Europe by the Proletariat, if he understood it, he was all against it in principle. He was against it because it was Domination. That was precisely the thing that had made him feel increasingly antagonistic to Germany and German ideas. It had begun long ago, during brief continental holidays. He had met Germans on trains and steamers, in hotels and on excursions. He had grudged them their efficient way of sight-seeing, feeding and everything else. But he had grudged them most their size and their way of getting there first. If it had not been for that, he had a good deal more sympathy with them, in most ways, than with the French. Subsequently he had found Germans infringing on the business of his native town, selling cheaper, better-tanned hides than its tanners, more scientifically compounded manures than its merchants. Then they invaded politics and became a scare at election times. And after the false start of 1911, in 1914 they had finally kicked over the tea-table of the old quiet comfortable life. He did not argue about this. He had felt it simply, truly, directly. Under all the hot-air patriotism and real self-sacrifice of August, 1914, it had been this basic instinct which had made him and all his sort enlist. The Germans had asked for it, and they should darn-well have it. If they didn’t they would go on asking. They were after Domination.

That craze had started something that would be difficult now to stop. Dormer saw very well that other people besides Russians might find grievances and the same wrong-headed way of venting them. The Russians would probably go on with their propaganda, all over the world. The Germans, on the other hand, had probably set the Japanese off. And so we should go on, all the aristocratic classes calling for Domination by their sort, all the ultra-brainy democracies calling for their particular brand.

So when he was passed as fit and told to rejoin the depôt of his regiment, at a seaport town, he went without any panic fear of the future, German or otherwise. He went with a deep conviction that whatever happened, life had been cheapened and vulgarized. It was not by any means mere theory. He had seen what sort of a home he might hope to make after the Peace, with his mother or sisters, or if, conceivably, he married. Not a bad home, his job would always be there, and certain remnants of that bourgeois comfort that had grown up in all the old quiet streets of the provincial towns of England during the nineteenth century, privileged, aloof from the troubles of the “continent,” self-contained. But remnants only, not nearly enough. He and all his sort had been let down several pegs in the social scale. Without any narrow spite, or personal grievance, he felt that the Germans had caused this upset and the Russians had put the finishing stroke to it, made it permanent, as it were. He happened to be opposite the Germans in the particular encounter that was not yet ended, and he was able to draw upon an almost inexhaustible supply of obstinate ill-will.

He went to the depôt in its huts on a sandy estuary. It was commanded by a Major of the usual type, and no one knew better than Dormer how to keep on the right side of such a one. He was, of course, a Godsend to the Major. He had all the practical experience and none of the fussiness. He merely wanted the job finished. That suited the Major exactly, who didn’t want it to finish in a hurry, but wanted even less to have to find ideas for training troops. Dormer, with his two and a half years in France, was the very man. He looked trustworthy. He was set to instructing the raw material, of which the camp was full. He disliked it intensely, but, as always, took what was given him in his sober fashion and did his limited best with it. He was amazed to find such reserves of men still untouched. His own recollections of early 1915 were of camps filled with an eager volunteer crowd of all ages and conditions, who were astounded when it was suggested to them that certain of them ought to take a commission. Now he found that his sort went a different way, direct to O.T.C. or Cadet Corps. There was a permanence about the camp staff that he had never seen in the old days. But most of all he was impressed with the worn appearance of the camp. Thousand after thousand had passed through it, been drafted overseas, and disappeared. Thousand after thousand had followed. In the town and at the railway, there were no longer smiles and encouragement. People had got painfully used to soldiers, and from treating them as heroes, and then as an unavoidable, and profitable incident, had come to regard them chiefly as a nuisance. He forgot how he had wondered if the men would stand it, he forgot how often he had heard the possibility of an early Peace discussed. He began to wonder now if people at home would stand it--the lightless winter nights, the summer full of bombing, the growing scarcity of comforts, the queues for this, that, and the other, the pinch that every gradually depleted family was beginning to feel, as one after another of its members had to go. He had been so long out of all this, up against the actual warfare, glad enough of small privileges and of the experience that enabled him to avoid the more onerous duties, the worst sorts of want, that he only now began to realize what he had never grasped, in his few short leaves, that there was still quite a considerable, probably the greater portion of the nation, who did not share his view of the necessity of going on. Another avenue of speculation was opened to him. What if all the people at home made Peace behind the backs of the Armies. Yet, being Dormer, he did not submit to this home-grown philosophy. He just went on and did the next thing that his hand found to do.

Of one thing he became pretty certain. All these people at home had “got the wind up.” He didn’t know which were the worst, the lower middle class, who were beginning to fear invasion, as a form of damage to their shops and houses. He thought of those ten departments of France that were either occupied by, or shot over, by the Germans. Or again the newspapers, with their scare-lines, their everlasting attempt to bring off this or that political coup. Or again the people in power, who were keeping this enormous number of troops in England, presumably to defend the beaches of the island from an armed landing. He had become during the three years that had contained for him an education that he could not otherwise have got in thirty, a more instructed person.

An offensive was an offensive, could be nothing more or less. Every offensive had been a failure except for some local or temporary object, and in his opinion, always must be a failure. The idea of an offensive conducted across a hundred leagues of sea made him smile. It was hard enough to get a mile forward on dry land, but fancy the job of maintaining communications across the water! He attended enough drills to fill in the time, organized the football of the Brigade to his liking and let it go at that. At moments he was tempted to apply to be sent to France, at others to try and join one of these Eastern expeditions, Salonika, Palestine or Mespot. But the certainty of being more bored and of being farther than ever from the only life he cared for, made him hesitate. He hesitated for two long months.

Then on the 21st March he was ordered by telegram to proceed to France. He felt, if anything, a not unpleasant thrill. With all his care, he had not been able to dodge boredom altogether. The depôt camp had also been much too near the scenes of his pre-War life. He had gone home, as a matter of duty, for several week-ends and had always returned finely exasperated, it was so near to and yet so far from home as he had pictured it, in his dreams. Now, here was an end to this Peace-time soldiering. The news, according to the papers, seemed pretty bad, but he remembered so well the awful scurry there was for reinforcements on the morning that the nature of the Second Battle of Ypres became known. This could not be so desperate as that was. Practically the whole of the rank and file in the depôt were under orders. He took jolly good care not to get saddled with a draft, and spent the night in London. People were in a rare stew there. He had a bath and a good dinner and left it all behind. He took a little more note of the traffic at the port of embarkation. On the other side, he found lorries waiting and went jolting and jamming away up to Frecourt, forty miles. He rather approved. It looked as though our people were waking up.

At Corps reinforcement camp--a new dodge evidently--he got posted to a North Country battalion; and proceeded to try and find their whereabouts. He was told that they were going to Bray, but it took him some time to understand that they were falling back on that place. When, by chance, he hit upon the Division to which they belonged, they were on the road, looking very small, but intact and singing. He soon found plenty to do, for he grasped that practically the whole battalion was composed of reinforcements, and had only been together two or three days. They set to work at once to strengthen some half-completed entrenchments, but after two days were moved back again.

It was during those two days that he saw what he had never to that moment beheld, an army in retreat. The stream of infantry, artillery and transport was continuous--here in good formation, there a mere mass of walking wounded mixed up with civilians, as the big hospitals and the small villages of the district turned out before the oncoming enemy. He thought it rotten luck on those people, many of whom had been in German hands until February, 1917, and had only had a twelvemonth in their small farms, living in huts, and had now to turn out before a further invasion. The bombardment was distinctly nasty, he never remembered a nastier, but as usual, the pace of the advance soon outdistanced the slow-moving heavy artillery, whose fire was already lessening. He had no feelings of sharp despair, for as he had foreseen, a modern army could not be crumpled up and disposed of. What he did now anticipate, was any amount of inconvenience.

Amiens, he gathered, was uninhabitable, that meant many good restaurants out of reach. New lines of rail, new lateral communications would be necessary, that meant marching. Just when they had begun to get the trenches fairly reliable, they were entrained and sent wandering all round the coast. The wonderful spring weather broke with the end of March, as the weather always did, when it had ceased to be of any use to the Bosche, and had he been superstitious, he might have thought a good deal of that. It was in a cold and rainy April that he found himself landed on the edge of the coal-fields, behind a canal, with a slag heap on one side of him, and a little wood on the other, amid an ominous quiet.

The company of which he had been given command was now about a hundred and fifty strong and he had done what little he could to equalize the four platoons. He had one officer with him, a middle-aged Lieutenant called Merfin, of no distinguishable social status, or local characteristics. The day when a battalion came from one town or corner of a county, under officers that were local personages in the civil life of its district, was long past. Dormer placed his second-in-command socially as music-hall, or pawnbroking, but the chap had been out before and had been wounded, and probably knew something of the job. The men were satisfactory enough, short, stumpy fellows with poor teeth, but exactly that sort of plainness of mind that Dormer appreciated. They would do all right. Perhaps a quarter of them had been out before, and the remainder seemed fairly efficient in their musketry and bombing, and talked pigeons and dogs in their spare time, when not gambling.

The bit of line they held was Reserve, a bridge-head over the canal, a strong point round a half-demolished château in the wood, and some wet trenches to the right, where the next battalion joined on. Battalion Head-quarters was in a farm half a mile back. Dormer and Merfin improvised a Mess in the cellar of the Château, saw that the cooker in the stables was distributing tea, and let all except the necessary guards turn in. He had some machine gunners at the strong point, and across the canal were two guns, whose wagons had just been up with rations and ammunition. His own lot of rations came soon after and he told Merfin to take the first half of the night, and rolled himself in his coat to sleep.

As he lay there, listening to the scatter of machine-gun fire, and the mutter of officers’ servants in the adjoining coal-hole, watching the candle shadows flicker on the walls that had been whitewashed, as the draught stirred the sacking over the doorway, his main thought was how little anything changed. Two and a half years ago he had been doing exactly the same thing, a few miles away, in the same sort of cellar, in front of an enemy with the same sort of advantage in ground and initiative, machine guns and heavy artillery. He was as far from beating the Germans as ever he had been. He supposed that practically all the gains of 1916 and 1917 south of Arras had been lost. On the other hand, the Germans, so far as he could see, were equally far from winning. What he now feared was, either by prolonged War or premature Peace, a continuance of this sort of thing. And slowly, for he was as mild and quiet-mannered a man as one could find, his gorge began to rise. He began to want to get at these Germans. It was no longer a matter of principle, a feeling that it was his duty as it had been in the days when he enlisted, took a commission, and had come to France. He was no longer worrying about the injustice of the attack on Belgium or the danger of a Germany paramount in Europe. He had now a perfectly plain and personal feeling. But being Dormer, this did not make him cry out for a _sortie en masse_ like a Frenchman, nor evolve a complicated and highly scientific theory as to how his desire was to be realized. The French and Portuguese who fought beside him would have found him quite incomprehensible. The Germans actually invented a logical Dormer whom they had to beat, who was completely unlike him. If he had any ideas as to what he was going to do, they amounted to a quiet certainty that once the enemy came away from his heavy and machine guns, he, Dormer, could do him in.

So he went on with the next thing, which was to turn over and sleep. He woke, sitting bolt upright, to the sound of two terrific crashes. One was right over his head. The candle had been blown out, and as he struggled out of the cellar, barking his shins and elbows, he was aware that the faint light of the sky was obscured by a dense cloud all round him. Instinctively he pulled up his gas mask, but the sound of falling masonry and the grit he could taste between his lips, reassured him. It was a cloud of brick dust. Across the canal, the barrage was falling on the front lines with the thunder of a waterfall. The Bosche had hit the Château, and if he were not mistaken, had put in another salvo, somewhere near by. At the gate of the little park-like garden he ran into a figure he recognized for Merfin, by the red light of the battle, just across the canal.

“What is it?”

“Aw--they’ve knocked in the bridge!”

“Every one standing-to?”

“Can’t help ’emselves.”

They went to look at the damage. The bridge was a small, one vehicle affair, with steel lattice sides, and an asphalt roadway. The bridge piers at the near end had been blown away, and the whole had settled down some four or five feet, on to the mud of the tow-path.

“Can you get across?”

“Aw--yes--easy!”

“Better get across and wait a bit!”

He himself went back to find up his stretcher bearers, who, he had always noticed, wanted an order to get them in motion. The guard on the bridge was dead so far as he could see, but some one was shouting, behind, at the Château.

He found the C.S.M with two men digging out the servants whose coal-cellar had been blocked. One of them was badly crushed, but his own man only shaken. Then there were horses on the road. Gunners, trying to get their teams up to the advanced guns. Hopeless, of course. Then came a runner from battalion. Send Merfin with two platoons. He saw to that, and rearranged his depleted company. It took some time. The barrage appeared to be creeping nearer. The ground shook with the continuous concussion and whiffs of gas were more and more noticeable, but the heavier stuff was already falling farther to the rear. Then came a runner from across the bridge. There was a crowd on the road. Dormer went and found just what he expected. Walking wounded and those who wanted to be treated as such. He sorted them out, directing the former down the road to the dressing station, and setting the others to dig. If he had got to hang on to this place, and he supposed he had, he meant to have some cover. The stream of people across the broken bridge increased. Trench mortars and machine gunners, platoons of his own regiment. The Bosche was “through” on the left, and they were to come back behind the canal. The barrage died out, to confirm this. The machine-gun fire came nearer and nearer.

In the cold grey light of a wet April dawn, a tin-helmeted figure dashed up on a borrowed motor-cycle. It was the Brigade Major. What had Dormer got? He heard and saw, and took a platoon and all the sundries. His last words were: “Hang on here, whatever you do!” Dormer heard the words without emotion. He realized that it meant that he was expected to gain time. He got hold of his Sergeant, and overhauled the rations and ammunition. They were not too badly off, and the cooker lay stranded in the stable yard. That meant hot water, at least. He took a turn round the place. The Château grounds had once been wired as part of some forgotten scheme of defence of 1915 or early 1916. That was all right. On the other hand, the “bridge-head”--a precious half-boiled concoction--was full of gas and the barrier on the road blown away.