Despite constant grinding nervous thought that with his lacerated bare feet he could never continue after each ten-minute halt at every hour, Phillip did not fall out. Towards the end of the march, when all except the Guards had lost step and line, he was light-headed, feeling that he could keep on quite a bit yet He carried Lance-Corporal Blunden’s rifle for the last two hours, or nine kilometres. Blunden, kind little modest Blunden, small dark Suffolk man, was also bare-foot.
The march lasted, with halts, over eight hours.
That night and all the next day and night they slept on billet floors. On the second morning came the reaction. Phillip was rather surprised to see so many of the stronger-looking men in the sick-parade with him. Among them was Sergeant Furrow, who went to hospital. In his place Douglas acted as platoon commander. Phillip’s feet were not bad enough to get him to hospital; but he was excused duty, after they had been painted with iodine. He lay all the rest of the day in his billet, mourning in a dull void world, sometimes crying to himself, face turned to the wall. He tried to write a letter to his mother; it was put away unfinished. There was too much to say; there was nothing to say.
It was only at night that he learned of the London Rifles’ arrival from St. Omer that afternoon on their way up the line; and he realised that he had missed his cousin Willie. The next morning, when he hobbled to the centre of the town, wearing a pair of wooden sabots borrowed from the old man of his billet, he heard that the Rifles had already marched out. He sat in the Rossignol estaminet, but it was lonely there, among unknown faces, so he went back to his billet, as snow began to fall.
When the draft from the 2nd Battalion arrived, there were many new faces in No. 1 Company; but he made no new friend. Instead, he became the centre of four or five of the newcomers in his billet, all ready to defer to one of the original battalion, the man with the greatcoat ripped horizontally across the breast by a Spandau bullet. They sat together in the Rossignol at night. Almost an evening fixture there was an old soldier of the A.S.C., who owned a crown-and-anchor board, and took their money. “Come on, my lucky lads, try your fancy! Here we are again, Box and Cox, the Army bankers! The Old Sweaty Sox! Often bent, but never broke! Back your fancy, my lucky lads! You comes here in rags and you rides away in moticars! If you don’t speculate you can’t accumulate!” Rattle of dice, the throwdown. “Up she comes, the old mood-’ook!” as the anchor turned up among the Major (crown), the Curse (diamond), Shovel (spade), Shamrock (club), and Heart.
The immediate past receded into the dark region of the inner mind: shut away in moments of the day—parades, drills, route marches, football: hidden in the bright lights of smoky estaminet when songs were sung, and there was always the patter of the ‘rough and tough, the old and bold’ soldier of Ally Sloper’s Cavalry, said to be worth fifty thousand francs, sitting at his board on the table by the wall, the bloody old skrimshanking thief. This was the life!
“Where you lay, I pay! I touch the money, but I never touch the dice! Any more for the lucky old mud-’ook? Are you all done, gentlemen? Are you all done? You lay, I pay! Copper to copper, silver to silver, and gold to gold. Here she goes” (rattle of dice)—“and out she comes—the lucky heart, the Curse, and the Major.” He took in more francs than he paid out; for the odds were 6 to 1 against. But the patter went on and on, with the rattle, the throw, the chink of silver francs.
One of the main subjects of talk in the estaminets at that time was commissions. Almost daily men were leaving the battalion for England, to assume the coveted star and braid upon the tunic cuff. There was a look in their eyes as they came out of the orderly room, already temporary second-lieutenants of the New Armies, ordered to report the next morning for their passes HOME. The estaminets frequented by the Bleak Hill Boys became very noisy at night, as old friends had their final ‘wets’ together, before going back to billets in the frosty nights hung with glittering stars that remained, despite the flashing of the guns.
Hoch der Kaiser!
Donner und Blitzen!
Salmon and Gluckstein!
BAA-AA-AH!!
“Where you lay, I pay! I touch the money, but I never touch the dice!”
This was the life!
Among the remaining survivors of the company, Phillip heard rumours that the battalion was to become an Officers Training Corps. There was not much doubt about what was the best service to be commissioned in. Quite a number of fellows had already applied for the Army Service Corps, Mechanical Transport section, for not only were A.S.C. officers paid more than any other branches—even a lorry-driver private, enlisted since the war, got six shillings a day, more than a junior officer of infantry—but the A.S.C. lived in comfort in rear areas, they could sleep once every twenty-four hours, and in a bed. For that reason alone there were no more vacancies in the A.S.C.
One of the fortunate ones going home had been gazetted to the Royal Garrison Artillery, whose heavy howitzers were normally miles behind the front line. The Royal Engineers came next for comfort; they worked up the line, but they went back to permanent billets where they could sleep dry.
Next in order of desirability was the Royal Field Artillery, the 18-pounders. They were about a mile back; they ate at a table under cover; above all, they could sleep out of the rain. All second-lieutenants of the branches behind the actual trenches were paid more than infantry second-lieutenants, who got five shillings and sixpence a day.
This seemed riches to Phillip; but he knew he would not stand the ghost of a chance if he applied for a commission. Nor would he ever dare to approach Douglas to ask the new Company Sergeant-Major to take him before Captain Ogilby. In any case, the new Colonel was not forwarding any more applications, as so many men had already left the battalion: and if all who were eligible were recommended, the battalion would scarcely muster more than a platoon. And in that platoon, of course, would be himself, the original Elastic Highlander. Still, what did it matter—this was the life!
He had gone to the estaminet in the first place for its name, Au Rossignol, which brought back the bluebell woods of Kent. One night while he was sitting there with the usual four of the new draft someone sang a Kipling song, Gentlemen Rankers, that made him feel he was glad to be staying on, a café-rhum drinking lad, one of the old Bleak Hill b’hoys, don’t you know, who had fought in shoes and spats—Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha’ mercy on such as we—Bah! Yah!! BAA-AA-AH!!!
In shouted chorus, in the warmth and smoke of the Nightingale with its grey marble counter, rows of bottles on shelf of mirror’d wall, Marie leaning over the counter and smiling, madame’s china coffee pots with big ornamentated curved spouts and handles on the stove behind. This was the life!
“Have a drink, you chaps? Cinq café-rhums, Marie!”
“Oui, m’sieu.”
“Cheer-ho, you chaps!”
Downham in the office used to say Cheer-ho, and Phillip had said Cheer-ho ever since. People like the Leytonstone men said Cheer-o.
Phillip the veteran with the gaping tear across his greatcoat went back with the four new chaps to the billet at nine o’clock, when the estaminets were out of bounds to soldiers, telling himself that it was the only life. His letters home were cheery, dashed off usually in the early afternoon, after the route march of the morning and with dinner inside him. This was the life!
*
And this the death—broken sleep upon billet floor; phantoms in the silence of the night, the snorings of Church, mutterings and teeth-grindings of Collins which went on and on until the sudden shout broke from him, the cry of exploding nerves. Silence again, but not for long; movements in the straw; the shut dark hung with snore and mutter, scenes, faces, flinchings, terrors—the childhood “battle of the brain” come again, to be thrust away, pressed back, hands clenched, knees drawn up against cries ever imminent, groans to be blanket-muffled lest the new chaps in the straw discover his real self, his donkey-boy cowardice, as Peter Wallace had done, and Father, Magist
er, Martin, Furrow, and others whose faces swirled about him, distorting past his mental sight, passing through his eyes with faces of wax melting in flames of blazing stack and windmill, dripping upon shadows of broken trees in the death-pallor of lilies under which thousands of more or less donkey-boys in khaki lay dead, with tens of thousands of donkey-boys in feldgrau, while the moon looked down in frozen grief.
Mutter—mutter—mother—mother—the rain was beating on the window pane.
Chapter 31
PRIE DIEU
HOLDING his umbrella over himself and Hetty, Thomas Turney stood on the Thames Embankment, watching the funeral procession of Lord Roberts on its way to the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Drifting rain had dispelled the slight fog of the late November morning, which began in doubtful grey, so they had come well wrapped up, Thomas Turney with soft brown canvas gaiters around his trousers below the knee.
As the gun-carriage passed, he removed his black square hat and saw upon the coffin, draped with Union Jack, the sword and baton, the medals and orders and decorations, together with the service cap of the dead Field-Marshal. Behind the gun-carriage a groom led a black charger, bearing large black full-dress riding-boots reversed in the irons.
Among the twelve pall-bearers, six in single file on either side of the gun-carriage, he recognised Lord Kitchener, Sir Evelyn Wood, both Field-Marshals, and Admiral Lord Charles Beresford. It was remarkable that not one of the twelve appeared to be in step with the muffled drum-beats, the band playing Dead March in Saul in slow time which the Guards, rifles reversed, paced out with legs rigid and boot-toes pointed. No, the high and mighty seemed to be doing a step of their own forward, each in a different time, while white feathers in cocked hats undulated to the movements.
Rain swayed with the gusts of wind; a sparrow flew, a planetree leaf fell; the drum muffled in crêpe beat out hollow thuds to music seeming to sob with the finality of death, all glory done, yet all to do again, from one generation to another, anguish and hope, dust to dust.
“We’ll take the tram, Hetty, and get a cab from Blackfriars before the street is closed, if we’re so fortunate.”
So they caught up with the procession and passed it, leaving behind the bump and blare, the out-of-step elderly skipping, the rigidity of slow-marching guardsmen.
“I hope you won’t catch cold, Papa——”
“No, my girl, I’m well wrapped up. I put on my chest-protector, as a precaution. I hope Phillip is wearing his, you can’t be too careful in this weather.”
“He is well away from the trenches now, he writes this morning, Papa. They are getting up football teams among the companies. He thinks they may soon be training to be officers.”
“I see the scale of officer’s pay has been raised, Hetty, according to The Telegraph. And the messing is not to be so expensive, as it was before the war. Income tax, d’ye see how it’s gone up? Lloyd George has doubled it in the War Budget, in this morning’s paper, to one and sixpence. The unearned tax, I see, is up fivepence to one and eightpence in the pound. We shall all have to practise stricter economy now—d’ye see they’ve put an extra threepence on a pound of tea?”
“Yes, Papa, Dickie told me this morning.”
They managed to get a cab to St. Paul’s, and walked up the steps where pigeons, descendants of wild rock doves, were strutting with the sparrows, as much a part of the London scene as the look of shut-away thought on the faces of the people.
They entered the Cathedral, and were in vast gloom beaded by remote candle-points. They sat down on one side of the nave; and kneeling, prayed for their wishes: Thomas Turney that his children and grandchildren would be preserved in all trials and tribulations ahead, particularly his three grandsons, and that a successful end to the war be forthcoming before all business, on which the welfare of the nation depended, was dislocated irreparably. Almighty God, he thought in supplication, would understand his meaning, clumsily expressed as it might be—Amen.
Hetty prayed for her son to be brought safely through the war, and for all sons of mothers: would Dear God answer their prayers, and bring peace upon earth once more, in the name of the Lord Jesus, to whom all sorrows were known, and by Mary the Blessed Mother of God, who had stood by and seen the Agony of Love for the World denied as it was denied now, O God, in the dreadful war because men’s hearts were hardened against Thy Word. I beseech thee, O God, to hear my prayer, and to bring my son Phillip through all dangers and trials. He is a good boy, Dear God, and when he has come to thy Word, his goodness will be a light, Thy Light, O Lord, among men.
She sat up, her eyes gleaming in the candles that burned for the dead in that cavernous stillness of marble and stone, murmurous with the remote traffic of the city, the dull thudding of a drum, its aisles whispering with the feet of the bereaved coming to their seats, and the flutters of a solitary rock-dove high up in the dome, lost within vast space, seeking a way to freedom.
August 1953—February 1954
Devon.
By Henry Williamson in Faber Finds
THE FLAX OF DREAM
The Beautiful Years
Dandelion Days
The Dream of Fair Women
The Pathway
The Wet Flanders Plain
A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT
The Dark Lantern
Donkey Boy
Young Phillip Maddison
How Dear Is Life
A Fox Under My Cloak
The Golden Virgin
Love and the Loveless
A Test to Destruction
The Innocent Moon
It Was the Nightingale
The Power of the Dead
The Phoenix Generation
A Solitary War
Lucifer Before Sunrise
The Gale of the World
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Henry Williamson Literary Estate, 1954
The right of Henry Williamson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–31013–5
How Dear Is Life Page 39