Part 3

“It will never sound so. What did they sing?”

“Old Hindenburg has bought a hat!”

In a moment Dormer was convinced. The words painted, framed and hung the picture for him. He had just been beginning to hope that the whole thing would break down from sheer improbability. He now saw it stamped and certified with eternal truth. There was no need for her to add: “They were not gay, you understand, they were _exalté_!”

“Excited!”

“Ah! Excited, like one is after no sleep and no food and then something very strange. They were excited. They called the Maire ‘Maréchal Hindenburg,’ and ‘Bosche,’ and ‘Spy.’ Those are words that ought not to be used between allies!”

“No, Mademoiselle, they ought not.”

But for a moment, the hardness left her face, she became almost impersonal.

“It was curious. They sang that--_sur une aire de psaume_, to a church tune.”

“Yes, yes!” agreed Dormer. Out of the depth of his experience as a churchwarden welled up the strains of Whitfield, No. 671, and out of the depths of his experiences as a platoon commander came a sigh: “They will do it.”

He went through his notes to see if there were anything more he wanted to know, but from business habit he had already possessed himself of the essentials. He did not like the way the thing was shaping. He knew only too well what happened in the army. Some individual being, besides a number on a pay roll, a human creature, would do something quite natural, perhaps rather useful, something which a mile or two farther on, in the trenches, would be worth, and might occasionally gain, the Military Medal. This business of breaking down a bit of wood and plaster, to shelter mules, had it occurred a little farther on, had it been a matter of making a machine-gun emplacement in an emergency, would have earned praise. It showed just that sort of initiative one wanted in War-time, and which was none too easy to get from an army of respectable civilians. But at the same time, in billets, there was another set of rules just as important, which in their essence discouraged initiative and reduced the soldier to a mere automaton. The otherwise excellent thing which he did broke those rules. That again did not matter much, unless it was brought into accidental prominence by colliding with some other event or function--this Maire and his dignity for instance, would play the very devil, make a mountain out of a molehill, such was the perversity of things. Fascinated against his better judgment which told him “The less you know about the business, the better,” he found himself asking:

“What was this man like, Mademoiselle?”

There was no answer, and he looked up. She had left him, gone into the back kitchen to some job of her own. She had left him as though the War were some expensive hobby of his that she really could not be bothered with any longer. On hearing his voice she returned and he repeated his question. He never forgot the answer.

“Like--but he was like all the others!”

“You couldn’t pick him out in a crowd?”

“Perhaps. But it would be difficult. He was about as big as you, not very fat, he had eyes and hair like you or anyone else.”

“You didn’t, of course, hear his name or number?”

“They called him ‘Nobby.’ It was his name, but they call every one ‘Nobby.’ His number was 6494. I saw it on his valise.”

“On his pack?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You have told me all I want.” In his heart he feared she had told him much too much, but she had gone on with her work. He rose to go, but passing the dark entry of the back kitchen, he stopped, as though to avoid a shell. He thought he saw a headless figure, but it was only a shirt which Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had flung over a line before putting it through the wringer. He went out. She did not accompany him. She was busy, no doubt.

He had to walk to the main road, but once there, found no difficulty in “jumping” a lorry that took him back to Divisional Head-quarters. On the steps of the Town Hall he crossed the A.P.M. It was very late for that functionary to be about. He had not even changed into “slacks.”

“Hello, young feller, you got back then?”

“Yes, sir.” Dormer rather wanted to say, “No, sir, I’m not here, I’m at the farm where you left me.”

The A.P.M. passed on, but turned to call out: “No bridge to-night. We’re on the move!”

So it seemed. The interior of the old building was in confusion. The Quartermaster-Sergeant was burning orders, schedules, rolls and parade states of the Corps they were leaving. Signallers were packing their apparatus, batmen were folding beds and stuffing valises. Policemen were galvanized into a momentary activity.

To Dormer it was the old, old lesson of the War. Never do anything, it is always too late. He had been bound, by a careful civilian conscience, to try to get to the bottom of the matter. He might just as well have torn it up and let it take its chance. No, the Vanderlyndens would never let it rest until they got some sort of satisfaction. The Mayor and the French Mission and Heaven knows who else would have something to say. He wrote a brief but careful report, and sent the thing off to an authority at Boulogne who dealt with such matters.

* * * * *

The weeks that followed were full of education for Dormer’s detached, civilian mind. Accustomed to be part of a battalion, almost a close family circle of known faces and habits, then associated with the staff of a division that stuck in one place, he had never before seen an army, and that army almost a nation, on the move. Under his eyes, partly by his effort, fifteen thousand English-speaking males, with the proper number of animals and vehicles, impedimenta, movable or fixed, had got into trains, and got out of them again, and marched or been conveyed to a place where Dormer had to take leave of all preconceived notions of life.

No-Man’s-Land, with trenches beside it, he was familiar with, but here were miles of had-been No-Man’s-Land, grassless, houseless, ploughed into brown undulations like waves of the sea by the barrages that had fallen upon it; covered with tents and huts, divided by wandering rivers of mud or dust, which had been at some distant time, weeks before, roads. Into this had poured, like the division to which he was attached, forty other divisions, always in motion, always flowing from the railhead behind, up to the guns in front, shedding half the human material of which they were composed, and ebbing back to railhead to go elsewhere.

He came to rest in a tiny dug-out on a hillside of loose chalk, which he shared with a signal officer, and past which, at all hours of the day and night, there passed men, men, men, mules, men, guns, men, mules, limbers, men, men, men.

At least this is how they appeared to him. Forced by Nature to sleep for some of the hours of darkness, and forced by the Germans to be still for all the clearest of the daylight, it was at the spells of dusk and dawn that he became busiest, and that infernal procession was ever before his eyes. It was endless. It was hopeless. By no means could his prim middle-class mind get to like or admire anything so far from the defined comfort and unvarying security to which he belonged and to which he longed to return. It was useless. With the precision of a machine, that procession was duplicated by another moving in the opposite direction. Lorries, ambulances, stretchers, men, men, guns, limbers, men, men, men. The raw material went up. The finished article came back. Dormer and his companion and their like, over twenty miles of line, sorted and sifted and kept the stream in motion.

That companion of his was not the least of his grievances. The fellow was no Dormer, he was opposite by name and nature. His name was Kavanagh, and one of the meagre comforts Dormer got was by thinking of him as a d----d Irishman. He was, or had been going to be, a schoolmaster, and next to nature (or nationality), the worst thing about him was he would talk. And he would _not_ keep his hands still. Two things that Dormer most gravely disapproved of, and which he attributed in equal shares to lack of experience of the world, and too much signalling.

His talk was such tripe, too! He never lost a moment. He started first thing in the morning. All the traffic that was going up forward was gone. The earth was empty, save for anti-aircraft guns pop-popping at planes high in the Italian blue. Dormer had shaved and breakfasted and hoped to catch up some of the sleep he had lost during the night. But would that fellow allow that? No. Listen to him now, under the tiny lean-to they had contrived, by the dug-out steps, for washing purposes. He was--reciting--would one call it?

“The last tattoo is beating, boys, The pickets are fast retreating, boys, Let every man Fill up his can And drink to our next merry meeting, boys!”

“Do you call that poetry?”

“No.”

This was rather awkward. Dormer had intended a snub. Not caring for poetry himself, he had tried to take a high line. He went on lamely:

“Oh! What do you call it then?”

“A most amazing picture of the mentality of 1815. Compare it with that of 1915. In that old war of ours against the French, we swore, we drank, we conquered. What do you think that same fellow would have to write about us to-day?”

“He wouldn’t,” put in Dormer, without avail.

“Something like this:

“‘’Z day is fast approaching, boys, In gas-drill we want coaching, boys, Our iron ration Will soon be in fashion.’

What rhymes to coaching?”

“How should I know?”

“Joking apart, Dormer!” (As if Dormer had been joking.) “Do you catch the impulse of the slogan? Of course, iron rations and gas helmets make a much more efficient soldier than drums and bayonets and rum, but the zest is all gone!”

Dormer did not reply; a belated party of engineers of some special service were passing up the road, and from where he lay in the dug-out he could see khaki-covered bodies upon dusty legs, but no heads, the beam of the entrance was too low. Suddenly he said:

“Did you ever dream that the army was like a giant without a head?”

“What did you say?”

Good gracious, what had he said? He replied, “Oh, nothing,” and bit his lips. It must be want of sleep. Fortunately Kavanagh did not hear. He was going on with his poetry.

“The Colonel, so gaily prancing, boys, Has a wonderful way of advancing, boys, Sings out so large Fix bayonets and cha-a-a-rge, It sets all the Frenchmen a-dancing, boys!

“What days they must have been, Dormer! You ought to have been a Colonel. Can’t you see yourself on a big brown horse, gaily prancing? There ought to be a school for gaiety, just as there is for bayonet fighting and bombing. Can’t you imagine yourself in a shako, like a top hat, with the brim in front only, glazed, with whacking great numerals?”

Dormer wanted to say: “You’ve got a marvellous imagination!” which would have been intended as an unfavourable criticism. But the words stuck on his lips. Instead he said:

“It’s all very well. You don’t seem to see the serious part of all this--waste!”

“Waste, my dear fellow!” And to Dormer the harsh, cheerful voice had all the officious familiarity of a starling, gibing at one from an apple tree. “Waste is not serious. It is nature’s oldest joke. It used to be called Chaos. From it we came. Back to it we shall go. It will be called Immortality. The Graves Commission will give it a number, a signboard, and a place on the map, but it will be Immortality none the less. From Titans to tight ’uns, ‘each in his narrow grave.’”

“Oh, chuck it,” said Dormer, disgusted and having no memories of that quotation. “You’ve evidently never been in charge of a burying party!”

“I have. I did twelve months in the line, as a platoon commander. How long did you do that?”

“Twelve months about!”

“I believe you, where thousands wouldn’t. Twelve months was about the limit. In twelve months, the average Infantry subaltern got a job, or got a blighty! I know all about it!”

“Then you ought to know better than to speak so. It’s not a joke!”

“My dear Dormer, if it were not a grim joke it would be utterly unbearable.”

“I disagree entirely. It’s that point of view that we are suffering from so much. You don’t seem to see that this army is not an army of soldiers. It is an army of civilians enlisted under a definite contract. They aren’t here for fun.”

“Oh, come, Dormer, don’t you believe in enjoying the War?”

“I believe in getting it done.”

“You never will, in that frame of mind.”

“Oh, shan’t I? What would happen if I didn’t see that the right people get to the right place, with the right orders and right supplies, including you and your blessed flagwaggers?”

“Nothing to what will happen if the troops once begin to regard the show as a matter of business! You haven’t got a shako and a big brown horse, but you must play up, as if you had!”

“What rot you talk. I have a tin hat because it will stand shrapnel better than a shako. I have mules because they stand the life better than a horse?”

“Yes, but do you admire your tin hat? Do you really care for mules!”

Something made Dormer say in spite of himself:

“I did once come across a man who cared!”

“There, what did I tell you. He was winning the War!”

(“Whatever did I tell him that for?” Dormer asked himself vexedly. “A nice song he’ll make of it.”) But he only said:

“You’re all wrong, as usual. He did nothing of the sort. He just made a row in billets!”

“Quite right too. Most of ’em deserve a row!”

“Possibly, but he went the wrong way to work!”

“Ah, that depends!”

(Irritating brute!)

“No, it doesn’t. Were you ever at Ypres?”

“Was I not. I was hit at Hooge stables, and had to walk nearly a couple of miles to get to a dressing station!”

“Well, then, you remember, in the back billets, a place called the ‘Spanish Farm’?”

“Don’t I just. Great big old house, with a moat, and pasture fore and aft.”

What a way to put it!

“Well, this chap I’m telling you of, was billeted there. He was attached to a Trench Mortar Battery. He was in charge of the mules. He didn’t talk a lot of rot about it, as you suggest he should. One of his mules was wounded and the other sick. He broke down the front of the shrine at the corner of the pasture to get a bit of shelter for them!”

The effect of this recital was not what Dormer expected.

“That was an unspeakably shocking thing to do, worse than losing any number of mules!”

“I suppose you’re a Catholic?”

“Yes, I am!”

“I thought as much. Well, I’m not, nor was this driver I’m telling you about. He just hated the waste and destruction of it all.”

“So he destroyed something more precious and permanent.”

“He thought a live mule was better than a dead saint.”

“He was wrong!”

And then the fellow shut up, got quite sulky. Dormer was delighted with his prowess in argument, waited a moment, turned on his side, and slept, as only men can who live in the open air, in continual danger of their lives, and who lose the greater portion of the night in ceaseless activity.

* * * * *

When his servant woke him, with tea and orders and the nightly lists of traffic and stores, it was a wonderful golden and green sunset, tremulous with the evening “hate.” The purple shadows were just sufficiently long to admit of getting the wounded back, and the road was filled with ambulances, whirring and grinding as they stopped, backed, and restarted, while a steady punctual crash, once a minute, showed that the Bosche were shelling the road or one of the innumerable camps or dumps along it, in the neighbourhood. Amid all this clamour, Kavanagh was not silenced, but recited at the top of his voice, and Dormer had a suspicion that the real reason was that it helped to keep down the nervousness that grew on men, as the years of the War rolled on, and the probability of being hit increased. Especially as, far overhead, the planes that circled and swooped like a swarm of gleaming flies, were attracting considerable anti-aircraft fire, and all round, big jagged bits were coming to earth with a noise almost echoing that of the ambulances.

Dormer’s tidy mind was soon called into action. Some wounded who had died on the way to the dressing station, had been laid out beside the road as the ambulances had enough to do without carrying corpses ten miles. He went to make sure the M.O. had arranged for a burial party, as he had the strongest belief that casualties lying about were bad for the morale of the troops. When he got back to the dug-out, Kavanagh was “going on,” as he bent over a map of the extensions of the divisional cable lines, like a crow on a gate.

“See those chaps, Dormer?”

“Quis procul hinc--the legends writ The--er--Picard grave is far away, Quis ante diem periit Sed miles, sed pro patria.”

“Do you believe in pronouncing Latin like Julius Cæsar or like Jones Minor?”

“I don’t believe in it at all. Pure waste of time!”

“Dormer, you are a Utilitarian!”

“Have it your own way so long as you get that cable line of yours sited. I’ve got parties coming up to-morrow to dig it in!”

“I shall be ready for them. Think of all that language, and language is only codified thought, buried in the ground, Dormer!”

“I have all the thinking I want over all the men buried in the ground. We’re losing far too many!”

The “victory” of the Somme had been a saddening experience for Dormer.

“That shows how wrong you are. We are mortal. We perish. But our words will live.”

“Rot! Do you mean to say that ‘825 Brigade relieve you to-morrow Nth. Div. Ack, ack, ack’ will live! Why should it? It’ll be superseded in four days. Who wants to perpetuate it?”

“I disagree with you, Dormer, I really do. Here we are at the great crisis of our lives, of the life of European Civilization perhaps. Some trumpery order you or I transmit may mean in reality ‘Civilization is defeated, Barbarism has won!’ or it may mean, I hope, ‘Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence----’”

“I wish you wouldn’t joke about the Bible!”

“I’m not joking, and you’ll find it out before long. Men will fight so long as they’ve got something to fight about!”

“Well, they have. They want to get home. They’ll fight fast enough about that.”

“Not they. That isn’t the thing to make ’em fight. It’s more likely to make ’em run away. They want an idea.”

“They’ve had enough ideas, I should think. I seem to remember the walls covered with posters, with an idea a-piece.”

“Those ideas were much too superficial and temporary. They want to feel that they are something, or that they do something so important that it doesn’t matter whether they live or die!”

“That’s all wrong. It does matter. This War will be won by the side that has most men and most stuff left.”

“Nonsense. It will be won by the side that has the most faith.”

“Oh, well, you go and have faith in your cable line. I’ve got to have it in these working parties.”

It was now dusk enough for the main body of troops to get on the move. The broad valley below was in ultramarine shadow, the round shoulders of the down touched with lemon-coloured afterglow. Up the drift of chalk dust that represented where the road had once been, an insignificant parish road from one little village to another, but now the main traffic artery of an Army Corps, there came pouring the ceaseless stream, men, men, men, limbers, men, mules, guns, men.

The longer he looked at them, the more certain he became that he was right. Not merely the specialists in mechanics, engineers, ordnance, signals, gunners, but the mere infantry had taken months to train, and could be knocked out in a moment. The problem, of course, was to save them up until the moment at which they could produce the maximum effect.

How docile they were. Platoon for this, platoon for that, section of engineers, then a machine-gun company. Then rations, then limbers, wagons, hand-carts full of every conceivable kind of implement or material. Very soon he was obliged to stand in the middle of the road, with the stream of traffic going up, before him, and the stream of traffic coming back, behind, so that in addition to checking and directing one lot he had to keep an eye on the other to see that they did not begin to smoke until they were well down the side of the hill. Gradually the darkness thickened, and the crowd thinned, and the thunder of the front died down. At length he was left with only a belated hurrying limber or two, or ambulance, sent back for the third or fourth time to clear the accumulation of casualties. At last he felt justified in getting into his bunk and shutting his eyes.

Thank goodness that fellow wasn’t back. He, Dormer, would be asleep, and would not hear him. He counted the khaki shoulders and dusty wheels that went round and round beneath his eyelids, until he went off.

Unfortunately for that particular _malaise_ which the War occasioned to his precise and town-bred spirit, that was not his last sleep that he slept that night. Many a one never woke again to hear the earth-shaking clamour of the barrage, to see that eternal procession of men, men, mules, limbers, men, guns, ambulances, men, lorries, going on and on like some gigantic frieze. But Dormer did. He was one of those who, had he been born in the Middle Ages, would have been described as under a curse, or pictured as working out an atonement for his own or some one else’s misdeeds. He had to go on doing his very best, and the more he disliked the whole business the harder he worked. The harder he worked the longer it seemed to that desired day when he might return to the quiet niceties of a branch bank in a provincial town. And all the time Kavanagh kept up that ceaseless argument as to one’s mental attitude. Dormer didn’t really believe in having such a thing, for he felt bound to join issue with the absurd ramblings of the other, and he could not escape, because their jobs naturally threw them together and because he secretly admired the way that Kavanagh did his work.

So the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the casualty lists grew longer and longer, the visible fruits of the immense effort grew smaller and smaller, and as the year wore on, the weather broke, and the only conditions that make life in the open tolerable, light and drought, disappeared, and they dwelt in the sodden twilight of tent or hut, while what had been the white powdery dust, became the cement-like mud that no scraping could remove. Sitting dejectedly over some returns he heard

“Still, be still, my soul, the arms you bear are brittle!”

“It’s all very well to sit there and sing. This offensive is a failure, we shall never get through.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Dormer. I told you how it would be. I hope we shall learn the lesson.”

“It means another winter in the trenches.”

“Evidently.”

“It’s very bad for the men. They’ve nothing to show for all that’s been done.”

“That’s nothing new.

“‘I’m sick of parading, Through cold and wet wading, Or standing all day to be shot in a trench! I’m tired of marching, Pipe-claying and starching, How neat we must be to be shot by the French.’

That’s what the men thought of it a hundred years ago. Then, they had to pipeclay their belts, two whacking great chest-constricting cross-belts. And their officers didn’t arrange for them to play football, every time they went out to rest. In fact they didn’t go out to rest. They just stayed in the line.”

“It wasn’t very dangerous, was it?”

“There wasn’t the shell-fire, of course, but what about disease?”

“They were regulars.”

“My dear fellow, when is a soldier not a soldier?”

“I don’t like riddles.”

“This is a serious question. How long will the War last?”

“Oh,” cried Dormer bitterly, “another two years, I suppose.”