Part 11

He got his few men out of it, with their several casualties, and started them carting brick rubble from the dilapidations of the Château to make an emplacement for a machine-gun on the near side of the bridge. He stood looking at the road by which the Bosche must come--a mere lane that led from one of the neighbouring coal-pits, and was used, he imagined, for transport of coal that was required locally. It meandered out of sight, among low fenceless fields, until the shallow undulations of the ground hid it. In the distance was the steamy reek of last night’s battle, but nothing that moved, amid the silence broken only by long-distance shots, and fusillade somewhere on the left. Then, down that road he saw a party advancing, led by an officer. There was no doubt that they wore khaki. He waited by the bridge for them, and shouted directions to them how to cross. He got an answer:

“Hallo, you old devil, what are you doing?”

It was that Kavanagh. There had been an advanced signal exchange, and he had gone to bring his men in. They were tired, hungry and disgusted, but Kavanagh had the jauntiness of old. He wasn’t going back to Division, he was going to stay with dear old Dormer, and see this through. Dormer thought a moment, then said: “All right.”

“All right. I should think so. I don’t suppose I could catch Division, even on a motor-byke. They must be nearly at Calais. It’s all rot. The Bosche are done!”

“Are they?”

“Sure. What are they waiting for now?”

“Bringing up their artillery?”

“That won’t blow the water out of the canal.”

“Possibly not. But we may as well have some food while it’s possible.”

“You old guts. Always eating!”

“Yes, when I can. Aren’t you?”

“Now, Dormer. You know me better than that. Glory is my manna.”

“Will you take cold bully and tea with it?” asked Dormer as they dropped into the cellar.

Kavanagh made no objection, and they ate in silence, fast, for ten minutes. Then they saw the men were being fed, and relapsed, in their hiding-place, into pipes, and whisky out of Kavanagh’s flask.

“How did you get into this show?” Dormer asked.

“The Division--your old Division, my boy, left me here to hand over! They might have spared themselves the trouble. But I’d got a most lovely scheme of lateral communication. Corps gave me a lot of sweet words about it. I suppose I shall get the M.C. Now the silly old Hun has gone and blown it all to bits. What about you?”

“You know I got wrong and was sent home sick.”

“I heard all that. It was about that Vanderlynden affair, wasn’t it?”

“It was!”

“Well, you’ve no idea what a sensation you created. Vinyolles got simply wet behind the ears with it. Some French Deputy said, after the Somme show, that English troops did more damage to France than to Germany. Of course every one on Divisional H.Q. has changed in the last few months. They all established an alibi or Habeas Corpus or something. It was one of the things that made the French Press go for unity of command! You were a boon to them!”

“I wish them joy of the business. I don’t know why you mix me up with it.”

“Why, it was your pet show, wasn’t it?”

“It got fathered on to me because I could understand what it was about.”

“Yes, you told Vinyolles, didn’t you?”

“The ignorant brute asked me.”

“I know. He’s all fresh. I find him trying also. Well, he knows all about it now.”

“Tell you the truth, I’ve no idea what I said, Kavanagh! I was feeling queer!”

“Vinyolles thought you’d gone potty.”

“He wasn’t far wrong.”

“He said you told him the whole British Army was guilty of the Kerrime at Vanderlynden’s!”

It was the first time Dormer had heard it called that.

“Well, in a sense, so they are.”

“In a sense, War is a foolish business!”

“I thought you liked it?”

“I was trying to talk like you----”

Before Dormer could reply, the sacking over the door was lifted, by Dormer’s Sergeant.

“Cop’l Arbone is back, sir!”

“Very good. Did he get in touch with the Major?”

“He only found a Lewis-gun section, sir. The Major moved most of the men along the canal, where there’s more trouble!”

“All right!”

“Well, I suppose I may as well go and have a look at my lot,” Kavanagh stretched himself.

“I told ’em to hunt round and see if they could get this place wired up!”

“Umpteenth Corps ought to have thought of that, long ago!”

“Did you ever know Corps think of anything.”

While Kavanagh was so engaged, Dormer took a turn round the various guards and posts he had established. There appeared to be fair cover from view, and even from small-arm and field-gun fire. Of course when the Bosche really wanted to get the place, nothing Dormer and Kavanagh and some forty men could do would stop it. In coming round to the stables behind the Château he found his Sergeant with two men, laboriously trundling on a hand cart what he soon verified to be slabs of marble. What would they think of next? The explanation was, “There was a champion bathroom, sir, an’ I thought we could set up our Lewis better with these!”

When Kavanagh saw what was going on, he laughed.

“More damage in billets, Dormer!”

“Well, the stuff will be smashed up anyhow, won’t it?”

“Two blacks don’t make a white. I understand why you told Vinyolles the whole army was guilty. You’re doing just what your friend did about his mules.”

“Why will you drag in that beastly business? This has nothing in common with it.”

“To the common all things are common. You tell the owner of the Château that when he finds out.”

Dormer was going to say “He won’t find out!” but refrained. He disliked arguing. This seemed a particularly bad argument. Also, at that moment, a Lewis gun began, just below. Then another. He went to the garden wall, and peered out. Nothing visible, as usual. He thought of all the battle pictures he had ever seen. The prancing horses, the gay uniforms, the engrossing action of figures that pointed muzzle or bayonet at each other, that wielded sword or lance. Here he was, an incident in one of the biggest battles in the world. All he could see was neglected arable, smashed buildings, a broken bridge and a blocked by-road, all shrouded in steamy vapour. He made out that it was the Lewis opposite the end of the bridge that was firing. He crawled along the gully that had been dug from the Château gate to the roadway, and so to the emplacement by the step-off of the bridge. The Corporal in charge of the section turned to him.

“Got ’im, sir!”

“What is it?”

“Bosche in the ditch, under them bushes!”

Dormer waited a moment, but nothing happened. He crawled back, and sent his Sergeant round to see that every one was under cover. Back in the cellar he found Kavanagh, and told him.

“I know. Once more into the breach!”

“It’s not poetry, Kavanagh. This is the start. Once they find we’re stopping them here, they’ll shift us, you may bet!”

“I shouldn’t wonder. My lot are trying to get into touch with Brigade. They’re running a line back behind the wood. There’s no one on our left, as far as can be found.”

“Must be some one.”

“Why should there be? Brigade have probably moved by this time.”

“Ah, well, can’t be helped.”

No use telling the chap that it was all useless. He just sat down and lit his pipe. He perceived clearly enough that they were being sacrificed--just left there to hold the Bosche up for a few hours, while the Division went back.

During the day there was sporadic machine gunning. The Bosche was feeling his way for crossing the canal, but had found it far less easy than in the sectors farther north. Tolerably certain that the main attack would come at dawn, Dormer and Kavanagh got what rest they could, though proper sleep was out of the question. Their servants had found a well-upholstered sofa, and a superior brass bedstead, which now adorned the cellar, causing Kavanagh to gibe about damage in billets. Their vigil was lightened by the sounds of song from the stables where such men as they had set apart as reserves were lodged.

“Old soldiers never die, They only fade away.”

to a well-known hymn tune, made Dormer home-sick, but delighted Kavanagh.

“Listen to that!”

“I can’t help it, unless I send and stop them.”

“Never, man, never stop men who can sing at such a moment. It means philosophy and courage!”

“It means foolishness and rum!”

“Dormer, I fear you are no born leader!”

“No, of course I wasn’t.”

“But you’ve got to lead men now, and lead ’em to victory.”

“I don’t mind much so long as I lead ’em to Peace!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, mere Peace will mean Revolution!”

“I don’t believe it. I saw that affair at Étaples. I saw the trouble among the French troops in May. Those chaps prefer to take orders from you and me rather than from their own sort.”

“How do you account for Russia, then?”

“I can’t. But it’s an object lesson rather than an example, I should say.”

“You used not to talk like that. You used to say that the men wouldn’t stand it.”

“I’ve lived and learned!”

“Both, I am sure.”

“You needn’t be so superior. No one knew what any of this would be like until it was tried. We’ve something to go by, now! This War depends on turning a crank. The side that goes on turning it efficiently the longer will win. Our chaps look like lasting!”

“So do the Bosche. No, Dormer, you’re all wrong----”

At that moment a fresh burst of song came from the stables. A Cockney voice to a waltz tune:

“Orl that I wawnt is larve, Orl that I need is yew----”

“There,” cried Kavanagh, his voice rising into his excited croak. “That’s what we want!”

Dormer did not reply. With dusk came a few long-range shots, gradually broadening and deepening into a bombardment towards dawn. Both of them had to be out and about all night. They had several casualties, and the whole place reeked with gas. As the grey light of another day began to change the texture of the shadows, movement was discernible about the road. It was their chance and with a higher heart and the feeling of relief, they were able to let loose the Lewis guns, which they had managed to save intact. For more than an hour, Dormer crawled from one to the other, seeing that they did not overheat or jam, for the fact that they were killing Germans pleased him. Then there was a slackening of fire on both sides.

They waited and the suspense from being irksome, became tolerable. There was a good deal of noise each side of them, and Dormer began to wonder if his detachment were surrounded, especially as the servants whom he had sent back to get into touch with Brigade, had not returned. It was a dull rainy afternoon prematurely dark, and the rain as it increased, seemed to beat down the gunning, as water quenches a fire. He must have been in that half-waking state that often superimposed on sleeplessness and the awful din, when he was thoroughly roused by trampling in the trees round the Château. He called to Kavanagh but got no reply. Then there was a pushing and scrambling at the wall behind the stable, and English cavalrymen came swinging over it. Dormer and Kavanagh were relieved, and were shortly able to hand over and prepare to march their command back to rejoin their Division, which, depleted by four weeks of continual mauling, was being taken out of the line.

The battle was by no means over. They next went in farther north, and Dormer had the queer experience of going into trenches where Corps H.Q. had been, of billeting in rooms where Major-Generals had slept. Gradually he became aware of lessening tension, reduced shelling, and slackened machine-gun fire, but it was the end of May before he found, when sent to raid an enemy post, that there was no one there. He had been right after all. The German offensive also had failed. Anticlimax was the rule of the War. He was glad that he had parted from Kavanagh, who had gone back to his proper job with his Division, goodness knew where. He felt that the fellow would remind him that for several hours while they lay together in those scratched-out trenches round that little Château by the canal, he had given up hope. He need not have bothered. If the Bosche could not win on that day, he never would. Slowly now the British lines were creeping forward. Then he found American troops behind him.

It was during this phase of things that he found himself upon familiar ground. Except on Kavanagh’s lips, he had not heard of the crime at Vanderlynden’s since before Christmas. It was now September. Here he was, detrained and told to march to Hondebecq. He passed what had been Divisional Head-quarters in 1916 and noticed the shell-holes, the open, looted, evacuated houses. He passed along the road which he and Major Stevenage had traversed all those years ago. The Brigade were in Divisional Reserve, and were quartered in a string of farms just outside the village. He looked at the map squares attentively, but on the larger scale map he found it actually marked Ferme l’Espagnole. Being Dormer, he just saw to the billeting of his company and then learned that the Battalion Head-quarters were located at the Vanderlyndens’, and had no difficulty in finding good reason to walk over there, after tea.

The place was not much changed. It was soiled, impoverished, battered by War, but the German advance, which had stopped dead a few miles short of it, had been spent by the time it reached its limits in this sector, and had early been pushed back. Trenches had been dug and camouflage erected all round the place, but it had not suffered damage except by a few long-distance shots, the routine of trench warfare had never reached it. In the kitchen, darkened by the fact that the glass was gone from the windows, which were blinded with aeroplane fabric, stood the familiar figure of Mademoiselle Vanderlynden. He asked for the Colonel, and was civilly directed to the parlour on the other side of the door. Not a word of recognition, hardly a second glance. He did not know if he were sorry or glad. He would have felt some relief to hear that the claim that had caused all that trouble had been settled. But he did not know what he might bring down upon his head by inquiry and held his tongue. His business with the Colonel was the usual regimental routine, nominal and numerical rolls, reinforcements and indents, training and movements. It did not take long. On his way out he passed the kitchen door and said just:

“Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, M’sieu!” And then calmly: “They are going to pay us for the damage to _La Vierge_!”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I thought you would like to know. It has been a long time.”

“Yes, a long time. I hope it will soon be settled.”

“Ah, not yet. I know these offices at Boulogne! They have a good deal to pay for, no doubt.”

“No doubt. Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, _mon capitaine_.”

Walking back to his billet, he had once more that sensation of escape. Was he really going to get away from that business, this time, for ever? True, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden seemed little enough inclined to be vindictive. He could not help feeling that her view of the affair was after all reasonable and just. She bore no malice, she wanted things put right. Money would do it. She was going to get the money, or so she seemed to think. She had no animus against the man who had broken a piece of her property. She had neither animus against nor consideration for himself, the representative of the British Army, who had so signally failed to hasten the question of compensation. She took it all as part of the War, and she was seeing it correctly. It was the British Army that had done it. Her home, where she was working so peacefully in 1914, had become first a billet, then all but a battlefield. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more nor less. That was exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been done to any furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to get out of it with his body intact, and resume the broken thread of existence, where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago. True he had not been badly paid, but he had taken a considerable risk--it was much more dangerous to be an officer than a private, more dangerous to be a private than a civilian. She had gauged the whole thing correctly, right down to the necessarily slow and complicated process of getting it adjudicated by some set of fellows down by the coast, who ran these things off by the hundred and had a whole set of rules that had to be complied with. He turned at the end of the farm road and took a look back at the old place. There were worse billets than the Spanish Farm and people more awkward to deal with than the Vanderlyndens. In the Somme he had come across farms where they charged you for the water and people who removed everything right down to the bedsteads. Vanderlynden had only wanted to be paid for what was wantonly damaged. They were French, you couldn’t expect them to be sympathetic about other people’s mules. What a queer world it was, he would never have suspected all the crotchets that human nature could present, had he not been thrust nose-foremost into this infernal show.

All his philosophy forsook him, however, on entering the billet where his company was lodged. The woman had been selling not merely beer, which was connived at, but spirits, to the men. Two of them had got “tight” and had been arrested, and he would have them up before him in the morning. Then there would be the question as to where she got the spirits from, whether some Quartermaster-sergeant had been making away with the rum, or whether she had induced some one to buy it for her at the Expeditionary Force Canteen. It all came back to the same thing. Men kept under these conditions too long.

No one had been more surprised than Dormer, when the Allied Armies took up the initiative again in July, and appeared to keep it. With a lugubrious satisfaction he found himself retracing the advances in the Somme district of 1916. It was an ironical comment on his hard-earned War-wisdom, two years devoted to doing precisely the same thing at precisely the same place. Of course, he had learned some lessons, but his estimate of one hundred and eighty years was still too small. But when the movement became perpetual and he found himself on ground he no longer recognized, among villages that showed all the signs of methodical German occupation, he began to wonder. A slight wound in the forearm threw him out of touch for a week or two, and when he went back, he found himself in a more northern sector again, and for the first time found cavalry in front of him. It suited him all right, he didn’t want to have the job of bombing out little nests of machine gunners, that marked each step in the line of advance. His feelings were pretty generally shared. Men began to ask themselves whether there was any glory in being knocked out at the moment of victory. When his battalion was again obliged to move in advance of the cavalry, against obstacles which, although always evacuated, were out of the sphere of cavalry tactics, he found for the first time a definite unwillingness among his command to obey orders in any but the most perfunctory manner.

He had sufficient sense to see that it was very natural. In the early days the job had been to keep men under cover, to avoid useless and wasteful casualties. The lesson had been learned at length with a thoroughness that he could never have instilled. The old, old boast of the Territorial Colonel who had first enlisted him, and whose tradition was actually of pre-Territorial days, from the period of the Volunteers of before the Boer War, was far better founded than he had ever supposed. He had been inclined to scoff when he had heard the old boy talk: “Our motto was Defence not Defiance!” He did not scoff now. It was deeply, psychologically true. The army that had survived was an army that had been made to fight without much difficulty, while its back was to the sea, with the knowledge that trenches lost meant worse, if possible, conditions of existence, and it was moved by some rags of sentiment, as to holding what one had got; an army which displayed all the slowly aroused, almost passive pugnacity of the English working class, so docile, yet so difficult to drive out of a habit of mind, or an acquired way of living. They had no real imperialism in them, none of the high-faultin’ Deutschland über Alles, none of the French or Italian bitter revengefulness, nor peasant passion for acquisition. The Rhine had never figured in their primary school education. They had no relatives groaning under Austrian or German domination--no rancorous feelings bred from the attempt to force alien language or unassimilated religious forms down their throats.

He had always regarded the boast about an Englishman’s House being his Castle as so much claptrap. He knew by daily experience of business, that any Englishman was governed by economic conditions. Religious and racial tyranny were so far removed from the calculations of all his sort, and all above and below it, that the very terms had ceased to have any meaning. This War had no effect on the lightly borne if real tyranny of England, the inexorable need to get a permanent job if possible and keep it, with constant anxiety as to the tenure of one’s lodging, and the prospect of old age. These fellows who fell in with blank unmeaning faces, in which there was no emotion, and who marched with the same old morose jokes, and shyly imitated the class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools, had done what they had promised to do, or had (the late comers) been conscripted to do. They had engaged or been called up for duration. That was a typically English slogan for a European War. Their Anglia Irridenta lay in the football fields and factories, the music-halls and seaside excursions that they talked of, and now hoped to see once again. Their Alsace Lorraine lay in the skilled occupations or soft jobs that women or neutrals had invaded. When he listened to their talk in billets, and occasionally caught some real glimpse of them, between their mouth-organ concerts, and their everlasting gamble at cards, it was of the keen Trades Unionists who were already talking of purging this, that or the other skilled industry from all the non-union elements that had been allowed to flow into it, behind their backs, while they were chasing Fritz across this b---- country, where Belgium, France, or Luxembourg were simply “billets,” and the goal was “dear old Blighty”--behind them, over the Channel, not in front, still ringed about by German trenches.

There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at their farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their country without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built, hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the mechanical nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest proportion of regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting their one chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their command of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant ammunition. The machine gunners, containing some proportion of picked men, and able to feel that they could easily produce some noticeable effect with their weapon, were still game. But the mass of infantry, tired enough of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted by generations of peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were rapidly adopting the attitude, unexpressed as always with the humbler Englishman, of “Let the gunners go on if they like. We don’t mind!”