Part 7

The Major had fixed his billet in a little house belonging to the representative of some firm auxiliary to the wine trade. The little office had become his office. Orders, nominal rolls, lists of billets and maps hung over the advertisements of champagne, and photographs of Ay and Epernay. On the other side of the hall, the little dining-room suited the Major admirably, as his Mess. It had just that substantial stuffiness that he considered good taste. The chairs and table were heavy, the former upholstered in hot crimson, as was the settee. Upon the mantelpiece, and upon pedestals disposed wherever there was room and sometimes where there was not, were bronze female figures named upon their bases “Peace,” “Chastity,” “The Spirit of the Air.” Dormer did not admire them. They were nude. As if this were not enough they had their arms either before them or behind them, never at their sides, which seemed to him to aggravate the matter. Together with a capacious sideboard, full of glass and china, _couronnes de noces_ and plated ware, all securely locked in, these decorations made it almost impossible to move, once the company was seated at table.

Indeed, during the winter, the Major complained he had been in the position of having one place frozen at the door, and one roasted next the Salamander anthracite stove. But with the milder weather, things were better, for the two big casement windows could be opened, and filled the room with sweet country air in a moment; they gave on to the street which was merely a village street, and across the road, over the wall was a vineyard. The Mess consisted of the Major, Doctor, Ordnance Officer, and Chirnside, whose place Dormer temporarily took. There they were a happy little family, removed far from the vexations attending larger and smaller formations, isolated, with their own privileges, leave list, and railway vouchers, as pretty a corner as could be found in all that slow-moving mass of discomfort and ill-ease that was the War.

On the third day, Dormer’s conscience made him inquire how long Chirnside would be. “Not long,” was the reply. “You can hear what’s going on?” He could indeed. For two days the earth and air had been atremble with the bombardment. French people in the village, and the French soldiers about the place had a sort of cocksure way of saying “_Ça chauffe?_” Indeed, the offensive had been widely advertised and great things were expected of it.

Then finally Chirnside did return. Dormer had been doing small jobs for the Major all day, because idleness irked him, and on coming back to change, found a grizzled oldish man, thin and quiet, a slightly different edition of the Major, the same seniority, the same ranker traditions, but memories of India and Egypt instead of Kensington and Windsor. Dormer listened quietly while the two old soldiers discussed the offensive. There was no doubt that it was an enormous and costly failure. That hardly impressed him. He was used to and expected it. But he had never before seen an offensive from outside. He had always been in them, and too tired and short of sleep, by the time they failed, to consider the matter deeply. But this time he listened to the conversation of the two old men with wonder mixed with a curious repulsion. They were hard working, hospitable, but they had the trained indifference of the regular soldier that seemed to him to be so ominous. In the regular army, where every one shared it, where it was part of a philosophy of life derived from the actual conditions, and deliberately adopted like a uniform, all very well. But no one knew better than Dormer that none of the armies of 1917 contained any appreciable percentage of regulars, but were, on the other hand, composed of people who had all sorts of feelings to be considered and who had not the slightest intention of spending their lives in the army. Not for the first time did he wonder how long they would stand it.

The Doctor and Ordnance Officer being busy sorting casualties and replacing stores, there was no bridge that evening and he was able to approach Chirnside as to the object of his journey. The old man heard him with a sort of quizzical interest, but was evidently inclined to be helpful, twisted his grey moustache points and let his ivory-yellow eyelids droop over his rather prominent eyes.

“Spanish Farm. April 1916. Oh, aye!”

“Could you recall an incident that occurred there. Damage to a little chapel in the corner of the pasture where the roads met. A driver wanted to shelter his mules and broke into the place?”

Chirnside thought hard, looking straight at Dormer. It was obvious to Dormer that the old man was thinking, with army instinct, “Here, what’s this I’m getting involved in? No you don’t,” and hastened to reassure him.

“It’s like this. The case has become unfortunately notorious. The French have taken it up very strongly. You know what these things are, once they become official test cases. We’ve got to make an arrest and probably pay compensation as well, but at present our people at Base are sticking out for treating it as a matter of discipline. The unit was the 469 T.M.B., but there have been so many casualties that no one can tell me the name of the driver who did it.”

Dormer was thinking: “There, that’s the umpteenth time I’ve told the yarn, and what good is it?” When suddenly he had a stroke of genius:

“Of course, they’ve got hold of your name.”

It succeeded remarkably well. A sort of habitual stiffening was obvious in the Army-worn old face in front of him. Chirnside shifted his legs.

“I can’t tell y’much about it. I don’t know the chap’s name or number, and I expect all the rolls are destroyed. Anyway he might not be on them, for he wasna’ a driver!”

Chirnside was relapsing into his native Scotch, but Dormer didn’t notice. He had got a clue.

“What was he then?”

“He had been servant to young Fairfield, who was killed.”

“You don’t remember Fairfield’s regiment. That might help us?”

“No, I don’t, and it wouldn’t help you, for he came out to Trench Mortars, and not with his own crowd. This servant of his he picked up at Base, or from some employment company.”

“What on earth was he doing with those mules?”

“What could you do with ’em? The driver was killed and the limber smashed to matchwood. The feller had nothing to do, so he did that!”

“You don’t remember what happened to him after that?”

“Um--I think he went as young Andrews’ servant.”

“Ah! What did he come from?”

“Andrews? Gunner, he was!”

“Thanks. That may help. You saw the row when the Mayor of the village came to certify the damage?”

“Aye, there was some blethers about the business. You couldna’ wonder. The old feller was got up like a Tattie Bogle. The men had had no rest, and were going straight back to the line. They marched all right, but you couldn’t keep them from calling names at such a Guy--young troops like that!”

“You couldn’t describe Andrews’ servant to me?”

“No. He looked ordinary!”

A mistake, of course, no use to ask old Chirnside things like that. A third of a century in the army had long ago drilled out of him any sort of imagination he might ever have had. He was just doing a handsome thing by a brother officer in remembering at all. His instinct was obviously to know nothing about it. But, piqued by the novelty of Commissioned rank, he went on: “Yes, I can tell you something. That feller had a grievance. I remember something turning up in one of his letters, when we censored ’em. Lucky spot when you think how most of the censoring was done.”

“I should think so. What was it?”

“Couldn’t say now. Grievance of some sort. Didn’t like the army, or the War, or something.”

Dormer sat down and wrote out the information obtained and made his preparations to rejoin the Division. The Major said: “Oh, no hurry, stop another day, now you’re here!” And all that evening, as he thought and wrote, and tried to believe this fatal business a step nearer completion, he heard the two old soldiers, like two good-natured old women, gossiping. Each expected the other to know every camp or barrack in which he had lain, each named this or that chance acquaintance, made any time those thirty years, anywhere in the world, as though the other must know him also. Often this was the case, in which they both exclaimed together, “Ah, nice feller, wasn’t he?” Or, if it were not the case, the other would rejoin, “No, but I knew So-and-so, of the sappers,” and probably the second shot would hit the mark. It could hardly fail to do so in the old close borough of the Regular Army. And then they would exclaim in unison again.

Dormer was as impressed as he ever was by any member of the Professional Army. They knew how to do it. He would never know. The army was their God and King, their family and business. In a neat circle they went, grinding out the necessary days to their pensions. The present state of Europe, while verbally regretted or wondered at, did not scratch the surface of their minds. How could it? It had been a golden opportunity for them. It made the difference to them and to any human wife or family they might have accreted, between retiring on Commissioned pay-scale, or taking a pub or caretaker’s place, as the ex-Sergeant-major they would otherwise have been. But there was charm in their utter simplicity. Nothing brutal, very little that was vain, and some nicely acquired manners.

The offensive of the French Army, in the machinery of which they had their places, moved them not at all. Chirnside casually mentioned that he gathered it had been a big failure. Dormer expected to hear him recite some devastating tale of misdirected barrage, horrible casualties or choked communications. Nothing so graphic reached him. The old man had simply attended to his job, and when he found that the troops were returning to the same billets, drew his own conclusions. That was all. Dormer was horrified, but no one could be horrified long with Chirnside. Of course, he didn’t mind how long the War went on.

Having completed his preparations, Dormer went up to his little room and was soon asleep. He was in fine condition and thoroughly comfortable, and was astonished after what appeared to be a very short interval, to find himself wide awake. There was no mistaking the reason. It was the row in the street. He pulled on his British Warm and went to look. It was quite dark, but he could make out a confused crowd surging from side to side of the little street, could see bayonets gleaming, and could hear a clamour of which he could not make out a word. It was like nothing he had ever heard in the War, it recalled only election time in his native city, the same aimless shuffling feet, the same confusion of tongues, the same effervescence, except that he had instinct enough to know from the tones of the voices that they were raised in lamentation, not triumph. He was extremely puzzled what to do, but clear that no initiative lay with him. For ten minutes he waited, but the situation did not change. He opened his door very quietly. Not a sound from the Major. From Chirnside, opposite, heavy regular breathing. Above, in the attics, the low cockney brevity of soldier servants discussing something with the detachment of their kind. Reassured, he closed the door, and got back into his blankets. The noise was irritating but monotonous. He fell asleep. He next awoke to the knocking of his servant bringing his morning tea, and clean boots.

“What was all that row in the night?”

“Niggers, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“French coloured troops, sir. They got it in the neck seemingly. They don’t half jabber.”

Major Bone was more fully informed. There was no doubt that the French had had a nasty knock. Black troops were coming back just anyhow, out of hand, not actually dangerous, the old soldier allowed it to be inferred, but a nuisance. What struck him most forcibly was the dislocation of the supply services. Defeat he accepted, but not unpunctuality.

“These Africans are besieging the station, trying to board the trains, and get taken back to Africa. I can’t get hold of an officer, but Madame says they’re all killed. She’s in an awful state. I don’t suppose you’ll get away to-day!”

He was right enough. Dormer’s servant shortly returned, humping the valise. The station was closed, the rolling stock had been removed. The black troops were swarming everywhere, collapsing for want of food and sleep, disorganized and incoherent. Dormer went out shortly after and verified the state of affairs. He was not molested, so far had the breakdown gone, but was the object of what appeared to him most uncomplimentary allusions, but all in pidgin-French, too colonial for his fair, but limited, knowledge of the language. There was clearly nothing to be done, so far as transport went, that day, and he resigned himself to spending his time in the little Mess.

The Doctor and Ordnance Officer appeared at dinner with reassuring news. The failure of the offensive had been bad, but the French had never really lost control and were getting their people in hand immediately. There was a rumour that a General who tried to restore order had been thrown into the river, but it might be only a tale. Major Bone was contemptuous of the whole thing. Do--what could they do, a lot of silly blacks? The French would cut off their rations and reduce them to order in no time. Thus the old soldier. But he did not prevent Dormer going to bed with a heavy heart. To him it was not so much a French offensive that had failed. It was another Allied effort, gone for nothing. His life training in apprehension made him paint the future in the gloomiest colours. Where would fresh men be obtained from? Whence would come the spirit--what they called morale in military circles--to make another attempt? If neither men nor morale were forthcoming, would the War drag out to a stalemate Peace? He had no extravagant theories for or against such an ending to it. To him it meant simply a bad bargain, with another war to make a better one looming close behind it. And his recent military training had also received an unaccustomed shock. A new army enlistment, he had seen nothing of the retreat from Mons, and was far from being able to picture March or April 1918, still twelve months in the future.

For the first time in his life he had seen panic, confusion, rout. True, it was already stopped, but that did not expunge from his mind the sight, the noise, the smell even, of that crowd of black soldiers who had suddenly ceased to be soldiers, numbers standing in line, and had so dramatically re-become men. The staring eyeballs, the physical collapse, the officer-less medley of uncertain movement were all new to him, and all most distressing. Of course, the fellows were mere blacks, not the best material, and had probably been mishandled. But under a more prolonged strain, might not the same thing happen to others? The Germans were the least susceptible he judged, the Russians most. What would he not see, some day, if the War dragged on?

Whatever narrow unimaginative future his unadventurous mind conjured up, his far stronger faculty for getting on with the matter in hand soon obliterated. He was no visionary. Contemplation was not in him. Directly the trains were running he left that cosy little Mess of Major Bone’s to rejoin. He left off thinking about the War, and took up his job where he had, for a moment, allowed it to lie, disregarded under the stress of new events and strange emotions.

As the train moved on and on through French lines of communication he was wondering again about the fellow who had done the trick at Vanderlynden’s, of how he was to be found, of how the whole thing would frame itself. These French chaps, whose transport he saw each side of him, Army Corps after Army Corps. Biggish men, several of them, in a round-shouldered fashion, due partly to their countrified occupation, partly to their uniform, with its overcoat and cross-straps. Browner skinned, darker of hair and eye than our men, they confirmed his long-established ideas about them, essentially a Southern people, whose minds and bodies were formed by Biscayan and Mediterranean influences. They would not be sentimental about mules, he would wager. On the other hand, they would not laugh at a Mayor. They did not laugh much as a rule, they frowned, stared, or talked rapidly with gestures, and then if they did laugh, it was uproariously, brutally, at some one’s misfortunes. Satire they understood. But they missed entirely the gentle nag, nag, nag of ridicule, that he used to hear from his own platoon or company, covering every unfamiliar object in that foreign land, because it was not up to the standard of the upper-middle-classes. To the French, life was a hard affair, diversified by the points at which one was less unfortunate than one’s neighbour.

To the English, life was the niceness of a small class, diversified by the nastiness of everything else, and the nastiness was endlessly diverting. For the French were mere men, in their own estimation. Not so the poorer English of the towns. They were gentlemen. If they lapsed (and naturally they lapsed most of the time) they were comic to each other, to themselves even. How well he remembered, on the march, when the battalion had just landed, passing through a village where certain humble articles of domestic use were standing outside the cottage doors, waiting to be emptied. A suppressed titter had run all along the column.

A Frenchman would never have thought them funny, unless they fell out of a first-floor window on to some head and hurt it. Again, to a Frenchman, Mayor and Priest, Garde Champêtre and Suisse were officials, men plus authority and therefore respectworthy. To Englishmen, they were officials, therefore not gentlemen, therefore ridiculous. If a big landowner, or member of Parliament, or railway director had walked into Vanderlynden’s pasture, just as 469 T.M.B. fell in for their weary march back to the line, would they have laughed? Not they. But then those members of England’s upper classes would not have worn tricolour sashes to enforce authority. So there you were. With this philosophic reflection he fell asleep.

Dormer returned to an army which was at its brightest. It had held the initiative in the matter of offensives for over a year and a half, and if no decision had been come to, a wide stretch of ground had been won, and hope on the whole was high. From time to time there were rumours of a queer state of things in Russia, but it was far off and uncertain. The matter of the moment was Messines, the famous ridge which had been lost at the very beginning of the War and which was now to be regained. In this affair Dormer found himself busily engaged. Here were no waste downs of the Somme, but some of the most fertile land in the world.

Among other matters confronting the Generals was the problem of how to keep civilians from rushing back to cultivate land of which they had been deprived for three years. The day came, the explosion of the great mines, so Dormer was told, was heard in London. If he did not hear it, it was because a well-directed long-range artillery bombardment, complicated by a bombing that was German and German only in its thoroughness, deafened and bewildered him, took his sleep, killed his servant, and stampeded the horses of all the divisional ammunition columns near him, so that his tent was trampled down, his belongings reduced to a state hardly distinguishable from the surrounding soil. However, the blow, such as it was, was successful. Irish and Scotch, Colonial and London divisions took that battered hillock that had defied them so long, and Dormer in spite of all his experience could not help thinking: “Oh, come, now we are really getting on.”

But nothing happened. Dormer heard various reasons given for this, and twice as many surmises made about it, but well aware how much importance to attach to the talk that floated round Divisional Offices and Messes, relied upon his own experience and arithmetic. According to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground. Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few miles more.

This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the “front” of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument that we went no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years.

For the only time in his life Dormer wished he were something other than Dormer. For a few moments after arriving at his conclusion, he desired to be a person of power and influence, some one who could say with weight that the thing ought to stop here and now. But this very unusual impulse did not last long with him.

All that remained of Belgium and wide tracts of French Flanders adjoining it, became one huge ant-heap. Never had there been such a concentration, Corps next to Corps, Services mosaiced between Services, twenty thousand men upon roads, no one could count how many handling munitions, as, from Ypres to the sea, the great offensive of 1917 slowly germinated.

Dormer was soon caught up and landed in the old familiar blackly-manured soil of the Salient. He was not disgusted or surprised. He was becoming increasingly conscious of a sensation of going round and round. Now, too, that troops were always pouring along a road before him, he had again the feeling that his head was an empty chamber, round which was painted a frieze, men, men, mules, men, limbers, guns, men, lorries, ambulances, men, men, men. It might be just worry and overwork, it might be that he was again forced to share his limited accommodation with Kavanagh. They were in a dug-out on the canal bank, just by one of those fatal causeways built to make the passage of the canal a certainty, instead of the gamble it had been in the days of the pontoon bridges. The passage became, like everything else in the War, a certainty for the Germans as much as for the Allies. The place was registered with the utmost precision and hit at all times of the day and night. It probably cost far more than the taking of any trench.

Amid the earth-shaking explosions that seldom ceased for long, in the twilight of that narrow cavern in the mud, Kavanagh was as unquenchable as he ever had been on the high and airy downs of the Somme. During the daylight, when nothing could be done outside, he bent over his map of cables while Dormer perfected his plan for getting first-line transport past that infernal canal. He purposed to send an N.C.O. a good two miles back, with small square pieces of card, on which were written 9.0 p.m., 9.5 p.m., and so on, the times being those at which the unit so instructed was to arrive beside his dug-out. He thought rather well of this idea, no jamming and confusion, and if the enemy made a lucky hit, there would be fewer casualties and less to clear away. In the middle of his calculations he heard

“Why, soldiers, why Should we be melancholy, Whose duty ’tis to die!”

He could not resist saying:

“If you must make that d----d noise, I wish you’d put some sense into it.”