Part 8

“Sense. I was trying to cheer you up!”

“‘Duty ’tis to die’ is jolly cheering, and quite untrue.”

“Oh, is it? What is our duty then?”

“Our duty is to live if we possibly can. And I mean to do it. It’s the people who keep alive who will win the War.”

“According to that, all one has got to do is to get to Blighty, or preferably the United States, and stay there?”

“Not a bit. You exaggerate so. All I said was, that it is foolish to make it a duty to become a casualty.”

“Dormer, I shall never get you to see things in the proper light. You’re like a lamb trying to leap with joy, and never able to get its hind legs off the ground.”

“This is all rot. What connection is there between lambs and leaping, and our jobs? Mine is to see that various people and things are in the position where they will be wanted, at the moment at which they will have most effect in winning the War. Yours is to see that they can speak and be spoken to when required.”

“Lovely, lovely! What a teacher you would have made.”

“I had a better job.”

“There is no better job, except perhaps the one we are doing. I do admire your descriptions of them. All you want is to put in a personal allegorical note. You might condense the whole thing by saying that you will be Minerva if I will be Mercury. Yep?”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“Yours to see that all is in order. That is a matter of reason. You are the Goddess. I am merely a lesser God. Mercury was God of Communications. I wonder whether they’d let me design a cap badge for signallers. Mercury playing on a buzzer. You may have your Owl!”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I fear I must, the bugle calls, and I must follow, or my watch shows it is time I was looking after my chaps. But you’ve had a brilliant idea, Dormer.”

“I?”

“You’ve had the idea of fighting the War allegorically. Wisdom and Light we are. That would do away with half the horror. So long!”

Then queerly, instead of feeling relieved from an annoyance, Dormer felt more despondent than ever. What could it be? Was the fellow right? Surely not! All that nonsense! And yet--and yet what would not he, Dormer, conscious of his own probity, have given to be conscious instead, of Kavanagh’s lightness of heart? That very probity drove him out in the all-too-late summer dusk to see that everything was going right. Yes, here they were; details of transport, parties to dig, parties to carry, details of services, engineers of all their various grades. Punctual, incredibly docile, honest English in their gestureless manner of getting on with the job. They took care of their mules, look at these beasts pulling as though they were English too (instead of the Argentine crossbreds he knew them to be), not because it was a duty, although it was, and not because the mule was a miracle, like a tank or an aeroplane, but just because it was a mule, that meant, to English soldiers, and to English soldiers only, a fellow-creature, a human being. On they went, reporting to him, and pushing on, sometimes with a hurried question as to map square, or other crucial uncertain detail, sometimes with only a grunt. That endless procession had not been in progress many minutes before, amid the considerable and gently growing shell-fire, there came a bang that seemed to go right through his head. He knew from old trench experience what it was. Nothing but a gun pointing straight at you could make that particular hrrmph.

He set his feet, not a moment too soon. It was a five-nine, the sort the French called “_Grande Vitesse_.” A whirlwind, a small special whirlwind pointed like an arrow, hit the causeway so that it shook and then went up with a wheel of splintered bits. He was glad he had devised his patent card system. The units were not too close together. He had time to shout to the next, “Come on, you’ve two minutes to get over!” and over they went, as if the Devil were after them, instead of a lump of Krupp steel fitted with lethal chemicals. They were hardly over before the second came, whump! To say that Dormer was frightened, was to fail to describe the matter. He was stiffened all over, his hair stood up, his heart thumped so that it hurt him, his feet were stone cold, but he knew his job and did it.

The next lot to come was a whole field company to do some special duty, and although he hurried them, the tail of the brown column was still high and exposed when the shell came. They ducked and darted into any cover that was available, and he heard his voice, as the voice of some one far away speaking to a public meeting, like a voice on the wireless, saying:

“Come on. Get out of that and come on. If I can stand here, surely you can get out of it.”

They did so. Behind them came a special party to dig in the Meteorological Officer. What a menagerie it was! Every trade, every nation too, Chinese, Zulu, West Indian, Egyptian. He did not blame the Germans who had chalked in blue on the bare back of a Portuguese, whom they captured and stripped, “The Monkey House is full,” before they drove him back into English lines.

Even truer did Dormer find it when he had to go back for any reason, to Corps H.Q. or beyond. French and Belgians he knew, he had found them in the trenches beside him years before. Portuguese he had become accustomed to, Americans he looked forward to with anticipation. But farther back, he found Chinese, Africans of all descriptions, Indians, East and West, while the French, in addition to their black troops, had Spanish and Italian labour.

It did not please his parochial mind. He felt increasingly that there was something wrong when you had to drag in all these coloured people from every remote quarter of the globe, without even the excuse the French had, that they were “Colonials.” But no one could tell, least of all Dormer himself, whether his feelings were the result of a strong belief in the Colour Bar, or whether it were merely the futility of it all. For in spite of the omnium gatherum of race, tongue and religion, the offensive failed. As a matter of routine, the weather broke on Z day. Within forty-eight hours it was obvious that the affair had stuck. Apart from a feeling of the hand of Fate in it, a sinister feeling of great incomprehensible forces working out his destiny for him, without his having the least power to influence the matter for better, for worse, which was so desolating to his pre-War habit of mind, where a certain line of unostentatious virtue had always carried a reward that could be reckoned on with the greatest exactitude, there were other disturbing elements in the situation.

Of course the Bosche was ready. He was bound to be ready, couldn’t avoid it. He had immensely thickened his depth of defence, which was now composed not of the old obvious trenches full of men, all of which could be blown to pieces, but of small isolated turrets of ferro-concrete, where two or three machine gunners (and who made better machine gunners than the careful Germans) could hold an army at bay, until dislodged by a direct hit by a shell of six-inch calibre or over, or laboriously smoke-screened and bombed out, at the rate of perhaps a mile a day, on good days. He saw his computation of one hundred and eighty years altogether insufficient for getting to the Rhine. Moreover, for such work this medley of nations was of no good at all. It reminded him of a book by Anatole France he had been compelled by a friend to read, wherein a great conqueror enlisted in his army all the men of his nation, then all the men of the neighbouring nations, then all the savages at the end of the earth, and finally the baboons and other combatant animals. That was all very well. That was just story telling. But it horrified Dormer all the more to see such story telling coming true before his eyes. As coloured-labour company after coloured-labour company filed past his tent, guttural and straggling, he was able to pull himself together, and see that it was not true after all.

These people, little better than beasts, uglier in some cases and far more troublesome, were no good. They couldn’t fight. You couldn’t trust them to stand the shelling or to obey an order. Then just as he was feeling rather relieved, he saw the logical result of his conclusion. All the fighting would have to be done by those very men who had volunteered or been conscripted and who had been so generously wasted ever since. They were sticking it, and sticking it well, but this new offensive that had just opened promised to try them pretty high. Would they stick that? Would the day ever come when he would see them a mere mob, like those French black troops he had seen in May? Perhaps peace would be made. Such is the eternal hopefulness of men, that he even hoped, against all previous experience. That quenchless gleam common to all human souls, one of the basic things that makes war so long, and peace, where it is so much less necessary, just that much less attractive, added to work for fifteen hours a day, kept Dormer sane and healthy for weeks, in spite of worsening conditions, and the steady increase in enemy shelling. It was with a return of that uncanny feeling of being haunted that he found himself called up to Divisional Head-quarters. He knew quite well what it was, but he had relied on the difficulty of finding Andrews, on the tremendous strain of this most costly and urgent of all offensives, to keep the matter out of his path, or rather to keep him out of its path, for he had long dropped into the habit of feeling himself as in a nightmare, pursued by something he could not see or even imagine, but which was certainly sinister and personally fatal to him.

When he got to the office his feeling of nightmarishness was rather aggravated than allayed. Colonel Birchin was talking to the A.D.M.S. The fact was that the A.D.M.S. was a new one, patently a Doctor who had been fetched out from Doctoring, had been found capable of organization and had been shoved into the job vice some one else gone higher up. Beside him Colonel Birchin shone, as it were, with the glamour of another world. Dormer had seen him in camp and hut, and château and Mairie for a year and a half, just like that, handsome and sleek, filling his plain but choice khaki with a distinction that no foreign officer could gain from all the blues and reds and yellows and greens and blacks, varnished belts and metal ornaments of other armies. And in that moment of sharpened nerves and unusual power of vision Dormer seemed to see why. Colonel Birchin was not an officer of a national army in the sense that any French, German, Italian or Russian Colonel was. There was nothing of the brute and nothing of the strategian about those nice manners, that so easily and completely excluded everything that was--what? Unmilitary? Hardly. There was nothing consciously, offensively military about the Colonel, “regular” or professional soldier that he was. He would never have swaggered in Alsace, massacred in Tripoli, Dreyfused in France. He would never have found it necessary. For Colonel Birchin was not a state official. He was an officer of the Watch, the small band of paid soldiers that Stuart and subsequent kings kept to defend themselves from mobs, national armies and other inconvenients. Colonel Birchin might write himself as of “The Herefordshire Regiment,” but it made no difference. His chief, inherited, and most pronounced quality was that he was a courtier. He represented the King. Preferably, at home, of course, where one could live in all that thick middle-class comfort that had ousted the old land-owning seignorial dignity and semi-starvation. But upon occasion, Colonel Birchin could betake himself to Africa, India, and now even to this France, sure that even in this most tedious and unpleasant of wars, he would be properly fed and housed.

So here he was, representing the King even more exactly than before he was seconded from the King’s Own Herefordshire Regiment. He spoke and looked, in fact, rather as if he were the King. Ignorant and unused to the immense transport, the complicated lists of highly scientific equipment, he judged rightly enough that his one safe line was to represent authority, and see that these semi-civilians who did understand such things got on with the War. So he listened in a gentlemanly way to the A.D.M.S. (who wore beard and pince-nez) explaining at great length a difficult alternative as to the siting of Forward Dressing Stations, and contributed:

“You do what is best, Doctor, and we shall back you up!”

Then he turned to Dormer, hunted a moment among the papers on the table, and spoke:

“Look here, Dormer, about this affair of yours?”

It took all Dormer’s training to keep his mouth shut. He saw more clearly than ever how Colonel Birchin and all like him and all he represented, were divesting themselves of any connection with what looked like a nasty, awkward, tedious and probably discreditable business. But he had not grasped it.

“They’ve found Andrews--this--er--gunner, who will be able to give you information. And--look here, Dormer--this affair must be cleared up, do you understand? Andrews is in hospital. You can go by car to Boulogne, but we expect you to get it done this time. Corps are most annoyed. There’s been a nice how-d-y-do with the French.”

Dormer swallowed twice and only said:

“Really, sir.”

“Yes. Car starts at seven.”

Accordingly at seven, the big Vauxhall moved off from that little group of huts, in the meadow that was so regularly bombed every night. Dormer, sitting next to Major Stevenage, did not mind. As well Boulogne as anywhere, while this was going on. All the roads were full of transport, all the railways one long procession of troop and supply trains. It was about as possible to hide it all from the Germans, as to conceal London on a Bank Holiday. In fact it was rather like that. The population was about the same, if the area were rather larger, the effect of the crowd, the surly good humour, the air of eating one’s dinner out of one’s hand was the same.

There was very little sign of any consciousness of the shadow that hung over it all. Hospital trains and ambulances abounded, going in the opposite direction, but no one noticed them, so far as Dormer could see. The type of man who now came up to fight his country’s battles was little changed. The old regular was hardly to be found. The brisk volunteer was almost gone. Instead there had arisen a generation that had grown used to the War, had had it on their minds so long, had been threatened with it so often that it had lost all sharpness of appeal to their intellects.

Right back to St. Omer the crowd stretched. Beyond that it became more specialized. Air Force. Hospitals. Training grounds. Then, across high windy downs, nothing, twenty miles of nothing, until a long hill and the sea.

Up there on those downs where there was no one, never had been anybody ever since they were pushed up from the bed of some antediluvian ocean, and covered with short turf, Dormer had one of his rare respites from the War. Briefer perhaps, but more complete than that which he experienced on his rare leaves, he felt for a while the emancipation from his unwilling thraldom. It was the speed of the car that probably induced the feeling. Anyhow, on the level road that runs from Boulogne to Étaples--the ETAPPS of the Army in France--he lost it. Here there was no escaping the everlasting khaki and transport, that State of War into which he had been induced, and out of which he could see no very great possibility of ever emerging. He had no warning of what was to come, and was already well among the hospitals and dumps that extended for miles beside the railway, when a military policeman held up a warning hand.

“What’s the matter, Corporal?”

“I should not go into Etapps this morning, if I were you, sir.”

“Why not?”

The man shifted his glance. He did not like the job evidently.

“Funny goings-on, there, sir.”

“Goings-on, what does that mean?”

Dormer was capable of quite a good rasp of the throat, when required. He had learned it as a Corporal.

“The men are out of ’and, sir!”

“Are they? The A.P.M. will see to that, I suppose.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Drive on!”

Dormer didn’t like it, to tell the truth. But he was so used to bluffing things he didn’t like, and his own feelings, and other people’s awkwardness, that he could not do otherwise than go on. Also he didn’t realize what was on foot. A certain amount of daily work was being done in among the dumps and sidings where the population was of all sorts of non-combatant, Labour Corps units, medical formations, railway people, and others. But from the rise by the Reinforcement Officers’ hut, he began to see. The whole of the great infantry camp on the sandhill--and it was very full, he had heard people say that there were a hundred thousand men there--seemed to have emptied itself into the little town. Here they sauntered and talked, eddying a little round the station and some of the larger estaminets, in motion like an ant-hill, in sound like a hive of bees. The car was soon reduced to a walking pace, there were no police to be seen, and once entered there was no hope of backing out of that crowd, and no use in appearing to stop in it.

“Go slow,” Dormer ordered, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the wooden face of the chauffeur. Nothing to be seen. Either the man didn’t like it, or didn’t feel the necessary initiative to join in it, or perhaps considered himself too superior to these foot-sloggers to wish to be associated with them. Most probably he hadn’t digested the fact that this mob, through which he drove his officer, was Mutiny, the break-up of ordered force, and military cohesion. It might even be the end of the War and victory for the Germans. All this was apparent enough in a moment to Dormer, who was careful to look straight again to his front, unwinking and mute, until, with a beating heart, he saw that they were clear of the jam in the Market Place, and well down the little street that led to the bridge across which were the farther hospitals, and various sundry Base Offices, in the former of which he was to find Andrews. Now, therefore, he did permit himself to light a cigarette. But not a word did he say to his chauffeur. Now that it was behind him he had the detachment to reflect that it was a good-humoured crowd. He had heard a gibe or so that might have been meant for him or no, but in the main, not being hustled, all those tens of thousands that had broken camp, chased the police off the streets, and committed what depredations he did not know, were peaceful enough, much too numerous and leaderless to make any cohesive threat to an isolated officer, not of their own unit, and therefore not an object of any special hatred, any more than of any special devotion, just a member of another class in the hierarchy, uninteresting to simple minds, in which he caused no immediate commotion.

Here, on the road that ran through the woods to Paris Plage, there were little knots of men, strolling or lying on the grass. They became fewer and fewer. By the time he arrived at the palace, mobilized as a hospital, for which he was bound, there remained no sign of the tumult. Here, as on the other flank, by the Boulogne road, Medical and Base Units functioned unmoved. But the news had been brought by Supply and Signal services and the effect of it was most curious.

Dormer had to pass through the official routine, had to be announced, had to have search made for young Andrews, and finally was conducted to a bed in Ward C., on which was indicated Captain Andrews, R.G.A. Dormer of course wanted to begin at once upon his mission, but the other, a curly-haired boy, whose tan had given place to a patchy white under loss of blood from a nasty shrapnel wound in the leg, that kept on turning septic, had to be “scraped” or “looked at,” each of these meaning the operation table, and was only now gradually healing, would not let him.

Once away from the theatre and the knife, Andrews, like any other healthy youngster, soon accumulated any amount of animal spirit, lying there in bed, adored by the nursing sisters, admired by the men orderlies. He was not going to listen to Dormer’s serious questions. He began:

“Cheerio! Sit on the next bed, there’s no corpse in it, they’ve just taken it away. Anyhow, it isn’t catching. Have a cigarette, do for God’s sake. They keep on giving me the darned things, and they all end in smoke!”

“Sorry you got knocked out.”

“Only fair. Knocked out heaps of Fritzes. I gave ’em what for, and they gave me some back. I say, have you just come from the town?”

“I have just motored through.”

“Is it true that our chaps have broke loose?”

“There’s a certain amount of disorder, but no violence that I could see.”

Dormer was conscious of heads being popped up in all the surrounding beds. So that was how it took them! Of course, they were bored stiff.

“How topping. Is it true that they’ve killed all the red-caps?”

“I didn’t see any signs of it.”

“Cleared up the remains had they? Picked the bones, or fallen in proper burying parties.”

“I don’t think there was anything of that sort.”

“Oh, come now, first we heard they had set on a police-corporal that had shot a Jock.”

“What did he do that for?”

“Dunno. It isn’t the close season for Jocks, anyhow. Then it was ten police-corporals. The last rumour was that they’d stoned the A.P.M. to death----”

And so it went on. Lunch-time came. A Doctor Major, impressed by Dormer’s credentials, invited him into the Mess, and asked a lot of questions about the front, the offensive, and the state of Étaples. Dormer always liked those medical messes. It seemed so much more worth while to mend up people’s limbs, rather than to smash them to bits. The Doctors had their professional “side” no doubt, but they had a right to it.

After lunch Dormer made his way back to Ward C. He was met by a hush, and by a little procession. The Sergeant-major came first and after him bearers with a stretcher covered by the Union Jack. The hush in the ward was ominous. They were all so close to what had happened. It was not like the open field where the casualty is a casualty and the living man a different thing. Here the dead were only different in degree, not in kind. They were worse “cases”--the worst, that was all. So there were no high spirits after lunch. They had gibed about Death in the morning, but Death had come and they had ceased to gibe. In the silence, Dormer felt awkward, did not know how to begin. When he had made up his mind that he must, he looked up and found Andrews was asleep. So the day wore on to tea-time, and after tea he was not wanted in the ward, and was wanted in the Mess. He himself was not hurrying to return to any regularly bombed hut near Poperinghe. The Commanding Officer was even more emphatic. Étaples was not safe. Dormer let it go at that, and got a good game of bridge.

In the morning he found young Andrews as young as ever and got down to his job at once:

“Do you remember joining 469 T.M.B.?”

“Yes, sh’d think I do.”

“Do you remember the man you had as servant while you were with them?”

“I do. Topping feller. Gad, I was sorry when I had to leave him behind. Of course, I dropped him when I went to hospital. Never was so done!”

At last!

“You couldn’t give me his name and number, I suppose?”

“I must have got a note of it somewhere. I say, what’s all this about? Do you want to get hold of him?”

“I do. He’s wanted, over a question of damage in billets. They’ve sent me to find him out.”

“Then I’m damned if I’ll tell you. Because he was a topping chap!” rejoined Andrews, laughing.

“You’d better tell me, I think. The matter has gone rather high up, and it might be awkward if I had to report that the information was refused.”

“Lord, you aren’t going to make a Court of Inquiry affair of it, are you?”