Part 9

“It may come to that, and they’ve got hold of your name.”

“Gee whizz! I don’t like landing the chap. I may not have got any particulars of him, now, my things have been so messed about.”

“Well, look and see!”

“All right.”

Andrews fumbled out from the night-table beside his bed, the usual bedside collection. Letters in female handwriting, some young, some old--from one or more sweethearts and a mother, thought Dormer. Paper-covered novels. The sort (English) that didn’t make you think. The sort (French) that make you feel, if you were clever at the language. Cigarettes, bills. One or two letters from brother officers.

“Blast. It’s in my Field Note Book, in my valise, in store here. I shall have to send to have it got out. Wait half a mo’ and I’ll get an orderly.”

As they waited, he went on:

“What’s he wanted for? Some dam’ Frenchman going to crime him for stealing hop-poles?”

“Something of that sort. You wouldn’t remember it, it happened before you joined the Battery.”

“Then it jolly well wasn’t my man Watson. He’d only just come up from Base!”

“Come, the man was of middle size and ordinary to look at, and had been servant to an officer of the name of Fairfield, who was killed!”

“Oh, that chap. I know who you mean now. I don’t call him my servant. I only had him for a day or two. His name was Smith, as far as I can recollect. We were in the line, and I never got his number. He disappeared, may have been wounded, or gone sick of course, we were strafed to Hell, as usual. I should have got rid of him in any case. He was a grouser!”

“Didn’t like the War?”

“I should say not.”

Hopeless, of course. When Andrews saw Dormer rise and close his notebook, he apologized:

“Beastly sorry. Afraid I’m no good.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to find the fellow, personally. It’s simply my job.”

“Fair wear and tear, so to speak?”

“Yes. Good morning.”

“Don’t go--I say, don’t. You’re just getting interesting!” Heads popped up in the surrounding beds. “Do tell us what it’s all about.”

“Merely a matter of damage in billets as I said.”

“Go on. There’s always damage in billets. You must ha’ done heaps, haven’t you? I have. There’s something more in it than that.”

“Well, there is. Perhaps it will be a lesson to you not to go too far with other people’s property.”

“I say, don’t get stuffy. What did the feller do?”

“He broke into a shrine.”

“I say, that’s a bit thick.”

“It was!”

“What did he do it for? Firewood?”

“No. He wanted to shelter a couple of mules!”

“Good man. Don’t blame him!”

“No!”

“But they can’t crime him for a thing like that?”

“They will if they can catch him.”

“Go on!”

“It didn’t stop at that.” Once more it seemed to Dormer that a good lesson might do no harm to the light-headed youth that Andrews represented, and several of whom were listening, anxiously from that corner of the ward.

“Did G.H.Q. take it up?”

“Yes. They had to. The Mayor of the village came to make an official inquiry and the Battery made fun of him.”

“Lumme! I bet they did!”

“They should not have done so. That made the French authorities take it up. Goodness knows where it will end!”

“End in our fighting the French,” said some one.

Dormer felt that it was high time to put his foot down. “You may be privileged to talk like that while you’re in hospital. But I don’t recommend you to do so outside. You ought to have the sense to know that we don’t want to fight anyone, we most certainly don’t want to fight some one else after Germans. In any case, we don’t want to do the fighting in England!”

There was a dead silence after he had spoken, and he rose, feeling that he had impressed them. He stumped out of the ward without another word, went to the Mess, rang and demanded his car. The Orderly Officer would have liked to detain him, insisted on the possible state of Étaples, but he would not hear of it. In those few hours he had had enough and more than enough of the Base--the place where people talked while others Did--the place where the pulse of the War beat so feebly. He felt he would go mad if he stayed there, without sufficient occupation for his mind. His car appeared and he soon left the palace and the birchwoods and was rattling over the bridge into Étaples. “Now for it!” he thought. But no policeman warned him off this time. He soon saw why. The streets had resumed their normal appearance. He might have known. That fancy of his, about the Headless Man, came back to him with its true meaning. What could they do, all those “Other Ranks,” as they were designated? Just meander about, fight the police, perhaps. But they had no organization, no means of rationing or transport. Of course, they had had to go back to their respective camps with their tails between their legs in order to get fed.

There was nothing to show for the whole business but a few panes of broken glass and some splintered palings. By the time he got to St. Omer and stopped for lunch, no one seemed to have heard of it. By tea-time, he was back at Divisional H.Q. And none too soon. A fresh attack was to be made the following day. He went straight up to the canal bank, where Kavanagh was as busy as ever, and dropped into his work where he had left it. There was just the same thing to do, only more of it. A desperate race against time was going on. It was evident enough that this most enormously costly of all offensives must get through before November finally rendered fighting impossible. There was still some faint chance of a week or two of fair weather in October. Fresh Corps were massed and flung into the struggle. Engineers, Labour Corps, anyone who could throw a bomb or fire a rifle must do so. What had been roads of stone _pavé_, had been so blown about with shell-fire that they were a honeycomb of gaping holes, repaired with planks. More and more searching were the barrages, denser the air fighting. Progress there undoubtedly was, but progress enough?

Through the sleepless nights and desperate days that followed, Dormer’s feelings toward Kavanagh were considerably modified. The fellow still talked, but Dormer was less sorry to hear him. He even recited, and Dormer got into the way of listening. They were now in an “Elephant” hut. No dug-out was possible in that sector, where eighteen inches below the surface you came to water. No tent could be set, even had they wished for one. Their frail house was covered with sandbags, of a sufficient thickness to keep off shrapnel, and presumably they were too insignificant to be the object of a direct hit, but in order to leave nothing to chance they had had the place covered with camouflage netting. Outside lay mile after mile of water-logged runnels that had been trenches, on the smashed and slippery parapets of which one staggered to some bit of roadway that was kept in repair at gigantic cost in lives and materials, guided by the lines of wire that either side had put up with such difficulty, and which were all now entirely useless, a mere hindrance to free movement. But they were “in” for a long spell, and could not get away--did not want to, they were less bombed here than farther back. Rations reached them, that was as much as they had time to care about. Otherwise, the night was well filled for the one with counting off the parties that filed past into this or that attack, for the other in picking up those signal lines that had been smashed by shell-fire during the day, and replacing them.

As that endless procession went past him once more, Dormer felt that he now knew of what its component parts were thinking. Australians, Canadians, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, English, they were thinking of nothing in particular. Like the mules that went with them, they went on because they couldn’t stop. Food and sleep each day was the goal. To stop would mean less food and sleep, mules and men knew that much, without use of the reasoning faculty. It had become an instinct. All the brilliant casuistry that had induced men to enlist was forgotten, useless, superseded. Even English soldiers were conscripts now, the War had won, had overcome any and every rival consideration, had made itself paramount, had become the end and the means as well.

A man like Dormer, accustomed to an ordered and reasoned existence, who could have explained his every act up to August, 1914, by some good and solid reason, was as helpless as any. Stop the War? You wanted to go back half a century and alter all the political and business cliques in which it had been hatching. To alter those you wanted to be able to alter the whole structure of society in European countries, which kept those cliques in power, was obliged to have recourse to them, to get itself governed and financed. To do that you wanted to change Human Nature. Here Dormer’s imagination stopped dead. He was no revolutionary. No one was farther than he from being one. He only hated Waste. He had been brought up and trained to business, in an atmosphere of methodical neatness, of carefully foreseen and forestalled risks. Rather than have recourse to revolution he would go on fighting the Bosche. It was so much more real.

Somewhere about the point at which he reached this conclusion, he heard, among the noise of the sporadic bombardment, Kavanagh’s voice:

“‘Now that we’ve pledged each eye of blue And every maiden fair and true, And our green Island Home, to you The Ocean’s wave adorning, Let’s give one hip, hip, hip hurrah! And drink e’en to the coming day, When squadron, square, We’ll all be there, To meet the French in the morning!’

That’s the stuff to give the troops, Dormer!”

But Dormer, although cheered, was not going to admit it. “You’d better go and sing it to the Seventy-Worst. They go in at dawn!”

“Good luck to them. Listen to this:

“‘May his bright laurels never fade Who leads our fighting Fifth Brigade, These lads so true in heart and blade, And famed for danger scorning; So join me in one hip hurrah! And drink e’en to the coming day, When squadron, square, We’ll all be there, To meet the French in the morning!’

How’s that for local colour. Is there a Fifth Brigade in to-morrow’s show? They’d like that.”

“I bet they wouldn’t. Anyhow, it’s silly to repeat things against the French.”

“Man, it’s a hundred years old.”

“Like my uncle’s brandy.”

“You and your uncle!”

“I had an uncle once who had some brandy. It was called ‘Napoleon,’ and was supposed to date from 1815. When he opened it, it was gone!”

“There you are. That’s your materialism. But you can sing a song a hundred years old and find it’s not gone!”

“It’s not a bad song. Only silly!”

“Well, try something older:

“‘We be Soldiers three, Lately come from the Low-Countree, _Pardonnez moi, je vous en prie_; We be Soldiers three.’

That’s nearer three hundred years old. That’s what fellows used to sing coming back from Ypres in those days!”

“You talk as if we’d always been in and out of that mangey hole.”

They both leaned on their elbows and gazed out of the tiny aperture, under the sacking, away over the sea-like ridges of pulverized mud, into the autumn evening. Between the rain-clouds, torn and shredded as if by the shell-fire, watery gleams were pouring, as though the heavens were wounded and bled. They spilled all over the jagged stonework of that little old medieval walled town, compact within its ramparts, for the third time in its history garrisoned by an English army. Kavanagh told him of it, but Dormer remained unimpressed. The history of the world that mattered began after the battle of Waterloo, with Commerce and Banking, Railway and Telegraph, the Education and Ballot Acts. Previous events were all very well, as scenery for Shakespeare’s plays or Wagner’s Operas. But otherwise, negligible. Yet the interlude did him good. He felt he had brought Kavanagh up short, in an argument, and he went to his night’s work with a lighter heart, and a strengthened confidence in himself.

Of course, a few weeks later, the offensive was over, with the results he had foreseen, and with another result he was also not alone in foreseeing. Once back in rest, near Watten, he heard people talking in this strain, in G. office:

“I suppose, sir, we shall go on fighting next year?”

“Um--I suppose we shall. But perhaps some arrangement may be come to, first. There’s been a good deal of talk about Peace!”

That was the mood of Divisional Head-quarters. A growing scepticism as to the continuance of the War. At the moment, Dormer missed the motive at the back of it. Away from H.Q. while the Division was in action, he had lost a good deal of ominous news. The talk about the transference of German Divisions from one front to another was old talk. He had heard it for years. He did not at the moment grasp that it had now a new significance. Then something happened that put everything else out of his head. He was not feeling too well, though he had nothing to complain of worse than the usual effects of damp and loss of sleep. Colonel Birchin had got himself transferred to a better appointment, and his place was taken by a much younger officer, glad to take it as a “step” up from a dangerous and difficult staff-captaincy. They had been out at rest less than a week and Dormer had assumed as a matter of course that he would be put in charge of organized sports for the winter, as usual. But he was only just becoming sensible of the change that had come over H.Q. Colonel Birchin used to have a certain pre-War regular soldier’s stiffness and want of imagination (which Dormer had privately deplored), but he had kept the Q. office well in hand. This new man, Vinyolles, very amicable and pleasant, and much nearer to Dormer’s new army view of the War (he was in fact younger than Dormer, and than most of the clerical N.C.O.’s in the office), had nothing like the standoff power of his predecessor. Also, the office, like everything else, had grown, half a dozen odd-job officers were now attached, and without wearing red, sat and worked with Dormer. So that when Dormer went to show his Football Competition Time Table and his schedule for use of the Boxing Stadium, he found that he had to explain how these things were usually done. Colonel Vinyolles had no idea. Dormer ought to have been warned. But his head was not working at its very best. He had a temperature, he thought, and wanted to go and lie down at his billet for a bit and take some aconite, a remedy he had carried with him throughout the War. Colonel Vinyolles was quite nice about the Sports, and just as Dormer was turning to go, said to him:

“Perhaps you can help me in this matter. I see your name occurs in the correspondence!”

Of course, he might have known. It was the familiar _dossier_, as the French called it, the sheaf of papers, clipped together, at the bottom the original blue Questionnaire form that old Jerome Vanderlynden had signed. At the top a fresh layer of official correspondence, “Passed to you please, for necessary action.” “This does not appear to concern this office.” “Kindly refer to A.Q.M.G.’s minute dated July 1916.” And so on. Dormer knew quite a lot of it by heart and the remainder he could have “reconstructed” with no difficulty. The only fresh thing that had happened was a minute from the new chief of the French Mission enclosing a cutting from a newspaper--a French newspaper of all conceivable rags--from which it appeared that some deputy or other had “interpellated” a minister about the matter, asked a question in the “House” would be the English of it, Dormer supposed.

“What am I to tell the Mission?” Colonel Vinyolles was asking.

Dormer was not a violent man by habit, but he felt that he was getting to his limit with this affair. He thought a moment, wanting to say: “Tell them to go to the Devil!” but held it in reserve, and substituted: “Tell them the matter has attention!”

“Thanks very much!”

Dormer went and rested.

The following day he felt no better and did not do much. He had the Sports well in hand, and there was no movement of troops. The day following that he felt queerer than ever, and jibbed at his breakfast. He went along to see the D.A.D.M.S., always a friend of his, who put a thermometer under his tongue, looked at it, shook it, looked at Dormer, gave him an aspirin, and advised him to go and lie down for a bit. On his way to his billet Dormer put his head into Q. office to tell the Sergeant-major where he was to be found if wanted. He was called by Colonel Vinyolles from the farther room. It was again full of people he considered (as rank counted for less than experience) to be his juniors. He could see something was “up.” They were all highly amused except Vinyolles.

“I say, Dormer, I consider you let me down on this.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Trouble! I’ve got a nice chit back, in reply to my saying ‘the matter has attention.’ They say that any further delay is ‘inadmissible’ and that they will be obliged to carry the matter higher.”

“Let ’em!”

“Oh, that won’t do at all. The General has seen this, and he wants to know what you mean by it.”

“He ought to know by this time!”

“Captain Dormer!”

Of course he was wrong, but he felt rotten. It wasn’t Vinyolles’ fault. He pulled himself together.

“Sorry, sir. I mean that the case has been going on for nearly two years, and has certainly not been neglected. I think every one who counts is familiar with it.”

He meant it for a snub for some of those chaps who were sitting there grinning. He saw his mistake in a moment. Vinyolles was as new as any of them, and naturally replied: “I’m afraid I have no knowledge of it. Perhaps you will enlighten me?”

“It must have been June, 1916, when we first received the claim. The late A.P.M., Major Stevenage, took it up as a matter of discipline, but on investigation considered that it was rather a case for compensation, as damage in billets. The French Mission insisted that an arrest must be made, and I have made every possible effort to trace the soldier responsible. But formations change so quickly, during offensives especially, that it is impossible.”

“I see. What exactly did he do, to cause such a rumpus?”

At the prospect of having to retell the whole story, Dormer got an impression that something was after him, exactly like the feeling of trying to get cover in a barrage, and wondering which moment would be the last. He put his hand to his head and found some one had pushed a chair against his knees. He sat down vaguely conscious of the D.A.D.M.S. standing near by.

“An officer of 469 T.M.B. was wounded and his servant was given two mules, sick or wounded, to lead. He got to the billet mentioned and seems to have taken a dislike to the horse-lines. He found one of those little memorial chapels that you often see, in the corner of the pasture, and knocked in the front of it to shelter the beasts. The farmer didn’t like it and sent for the Mayor to make a _procès-verbal_. By the time the Mayor got there, the Battery was on the move again. It was about the time of one of those awkward little shows the Bosche put up to contain us during Verdun. The Battery had been badly knocked about, and the men were excited and made some sort of a scene! The Mayor told his Deputy and his Deputy told some one at French G.H.Q. It all keeps going round in my head. I don’t want to find the chap who did it. He’s no worse than you or I. He was just making the best of the War, and I don’t blame him. I blame it. You might as well crime the whole British Army.”

What had he said? He fancied he had given the facts concisely, but was not sure of himself, his head felt so funny, and he was aware that people--he could no longer be sure who they were--Q. office seemed crowded--were tittering!--Some one else was talking now, but he was not interested. He rested his head on his hand and heard Vinyolles: “Well, Dormer, you go along to your billet, and we’ll see what can be done!”

He got up and walked out. The D.A.D.M.S. was at his elbow, saying to him:

“Get into this ambulance, I’ll run you across!” but he never got to his billet. He got into a train. He did not take much notice, but refused the stuff they wanted him to eat. After that he must have gone to sleep, but woke up, under a starlit sky, with an unmistakable smell of the sea. They were lifting him under a canvas roof. Now, from the motion, he perceived he was at sea, but it did not seem greatly to matter. He was out of it, he had cut the whole disgusting show. He had done his bit, now let some one else take a turn.

* * * * *

Dormer had not been home on leave since early spring, and the leave that he got for convalescence gave him not only some idea of the vast changes going on in England, while he, in France, had been engaged in the same old War, but a notion of changes that had gone on in that old War without his having perceived them. He was let loose from Hospital just before Christmas, at that unfortunate period when the public at home were still feeling the reaction from the Bell-ringing of Cambrai, were just learning the lengths to which the collapse of Russia had gone and were to be confronted with the probable repercussion of that collapse upon the prospects of the campaign in the West. There was no escaping these conclusions because his own home circumstances had so changed as to throw him back completely on himself. His father having died while he was in France, his mother had taken a post under one of the semi-official War organizations that abounded. The old home in which he had grown up had been dispersed, and he found his only near relative in his native town was his sister, a teacher by profession, who had moved the remnants of the old furniture and his and her own small belongings to a new house in one of the high, healthy suburbs that surrounded the old town. She was, however, busy all day, and he fell into the habit, so natural to anyone who has lived in a Mess for years, of dropping in at one of the better-class bars, before lunch, for an _apéritif_, and a glance at the papers. Here he would also pickup some one for a round of golf, which would keep him employed until tea-time, for he could not rid himself of the War-time habit of looking upon each day as something to be got through somehow, in the hopes that the morrow might be better.

These ante-prandial excursions were by far the closest contact he had had with anything like a normal, representative selection of his fellow-countrymen, since they and he had become so vitally altered from the easy-going, sport-loving England of pre-War, and he had to readjust his conception considerably. He soon grasped that there was a lot of money being made, and a lot of khaki being worn as a cover for that process. There was plenty of energy, a good deal of fairly stubborn intention to go on and win, but a clear enough understanding that the War was not going to be won in the trenches. And when he had got over some little spite at this, his level habit of mind obliged him to confess that there was a good deal in it. There were many signs that those who held that view were right.