The Valley of Bones

by Anthony Powell

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gwatkin still did not seem entirely satisfied.

  ‘You really think I ought to take her out?’

  ‘That’s what a lot of people would do – probably a lot of people are doing already.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m sure they’re not, if you mean from the School of Chemical Warfare. I’ve never seen any of them there. It was quite a chance I went in myself. I was looking for a short cut. Maureen was standing by the door, and I asked her the way. Her parents own the pub. She’s not just a barmaid.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s no harm in trying, barmaid or not.’

  During the rest of the walk back to Castlemallock, Gwatkin did not refer again to the subject of Maureen. He talked of routine matters until we parted to our rooms.

  ‘The Mess will be packed out again tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘Another Anti-Gas course starts next week. I suppose all that business will begin again of wanting to take my men away from me for their bloody demonstrations. Well, there it is.’

  ‘Good night, Rowland.’

  ‘Good night, Nick.’

  I made for the stables, where I shared a groom’s room with Kedward, rather like the sleeping quarters of Albert and Bracey at Stonehurst. As Duty Officer that night, Kedward would not be there and I should have the bedroom to myself, always rather a treat. I was aware now that it had been a mistake to drink so much stout. Tomorrow was Sunday, so there would be comparatively little to do. I thought how awful Bithel must feel on parade the mornings after his occasional bouts of drinking. Reflecting on people often portends their own appearance. So it was in the case of Bithel. He was among the students to arrive at the School the following week. We should, indeed, all have been prepared for Bithel to be sent on an Anti-Gas course. It was a way of getting rid of him, pending final banishment from the Battalion, which, as Gwatkin said, was bound to come sooner or later. I was sitting at one of the trestle tables of the Mess, addressing an envelope, when Bithel peered through the door. He was fingering his ragged moustache and smiling nervously. When he saw me, he made towards the table at once.

  ‘Nice to meet again,’ he said, speaking as usual as if he expected a rebuff. ‘Haven’t seen you since the Battalion moved.’

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Getting rockets, as usual,’ he said.

  ‘Maelgwyn-Jones?’

  ‘That fellow’s got a positive down on me,’ Bithel said, ‘but I don’t think it will be for long now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m probably leaving the Battalion.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘There’s talk of my going up to Division.’

  ‘On the staff?’

  ‘Not exactly – a command.’

  ‘At Div HQ?’

  ‘Only a subsidiary command, of course. I shall be sorry to leave the Regiment in some ways, if it comes off, but not altogether sorry to see the back of Maelgwyn-Jones.’

  ‘What is it? Or is that a secret?’

  Bithel lowered his voice in his accustomed manner when speaking of his own affairs, as if there were always a hint of something dubious about them.

  ‘The Mobile Laundry Unit,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to command it?’

  ‘If I’m picked. There are at least two other names in for it from other units in the Division, I happen to know – one of them very eligible. As it happens, I have done publicity work for one of the laundries in my own neighbourhood, so I have quite a chance. In fact, that should stand very much in my favour. The CO seems very anxious for me to get the appointment. He’s been on the phone to Division about it himself more than once. Very good of him.’

  ‘What rank does the job carry?’

  ‘A subaltern’s command. Still, it’s promotion in a way. What you might call a step. The war news doesn’t look very good, does it, since the Belgian Government surrendered.’

  ‘What’s the latest? I missed the last news.’

  ‘Fighting on the coast. One of our Regular Battalions has been in action, I was told this morning. Got knocked about pretty badly. Do you remember a rather good-looking boy called Jones, D. Very fair.’

  ‘He was in my platoon – went out on the draft.’

  ‘He’s been killed. Daniels, my batman, told me that. Daniels gets all the news.’

  ‘Jones, D. was killed, was he. Anyone else from our unit?’

  ‘Progers, did you know him?’

  ‘The driver with a squint?’

  ‘That’s the fellow. Used to bring the stuff up to the Mess sometimes. Dark curly hair and a lisp. He’s gone too. Talking of messing, what’s it like here?’

  ‘We’ve had beef twice a day for just over a fortnight – thirty-seven times running, to be precise.’

  ‘What does it taste like?’

  ‘Goat covered with brown custard powder.’

  We settled down to talk about army food. When I next saw CSM Cadwallader, I asked if he had heard about Jones, D. Corporal Gwylt was standing nearby.

  ‘Indeed, I had not, sir. So a bullet got him.’

  ‘Something did.’

  ‘Always an unlucky boy, Jones, D.,’ said CSM Cadwallader.

  ‘Remember how sick he was when we came over the water, Sergeant-Major?’ said Corporal Gwylt, ‘terrible sick.’

  ‘That I do.’

  ‘Never did I see a boy so sick,’ said Corporal Gwylt, ‘nor a man neither.’

  This was the week leading up to the withdrawal through Dunkirk, so Jones, D. and Progers were not the only fatal casualties known to me personally at that period. Among these, Robert Tolland, serving in France with his Field Security Section, was also killed. The news came in a letter from Isobel. Nothing was revealed, then or later, of the circumstances of Robert’s death. So far as it went, he died as mysteriously as he had lived, like many other young men to whom war put an end, an unsolved problem. Had Robert, as Chips Lovell alleged, lived a secret life with ‘night-club hostesses old enough to be his mother?’ Would he have made a lot of money in his export house trading with the Far East? Might he have married Flavia Wisebite? As in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat, petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment. The balance-sheet is struck there and then, a matter of luck whether its calculations have much bearing, one way or the other, on the commerce conducted. Some die in an apparently suitable manner, others like Robert on the field of battle with a certain incongruity. Yet Fate had ordained this end for him. Or had Robert decided for himself? Had he set aside the chance of a commission to fulfil a destiny that required him to fall in France; or was Flavia’s luck so irredeemably bad that her association with him was sufficient – as Dr Trelawney might have said – to summon the Slayer of Osiris, her pattern of life, rather than Robert’s, dominating the issue of life and death? Robert could even have died to escape her. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending. These were disturbing days, lived out in suffocating summer heat. While they went by, Gwatkin, for some reason, became more cheerful. The war increasingly revealed persons stimulated by disaster. I thought Gwatkin might be one of this fairly numerous order. However, there turned out to be another cause for his good spirits. He revealed the reason one afternoon.

  ‘I took your advice, Nick,’ he said.

  We were alone together in the Company Office.

  ‘About the storage of those live Mills bombs?’

  Gwatkin shook his head, at the same time swallowing uncomfortably, as if the very thought of live grenades and where they were to be stored, brought an immediate sense of guilt.

  ‘No, not about the Mills bombs,’ he said, ‘I’m still thinking over the best place to keep them -I don’t want any interference from the Ordnance people. I mean about M
aureen.’

  For a moment the name conveyed nothing. Then I remembered the evening in the pub: Maureen, the girl who had so greatly taken Gwatkin’s fancy. Thinking things over the next day, I had attributed his remarks to the amount of stout we had drunk. Maureen had been dismissed from my mind.

  ‘What about Maureen?’

  ‘I asked her to come out with me.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She agreed.’

  ‘I said she would.’

  ‘It was bloody marvellous.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘Nick,’ he said, ‘I’m serious. Don’t laugh. I really want to thank you, Nick, for making me take action – not hang about like a fool. That’s my weakness. Like the day we were in support and I made such a balls of it.’

  ‘And Maureen’s all right?’

  ‘She’s wonderful.’

  That was all Gwatkin said. He gave no account of the outing. I should have liked to hear a little about it, but clearly he regarded the latest development in their relationship as too sacred to describe in detail. I saw that Kedward, in some matters no great psychologist, had been right in saying that when Gwatkin took a fancy to a girl it was ‘like having the measles’. This business of Maureen could be regarded only as a judgment on Gwatkin for supposing Sergeant Pendry’s difficulties easy of solution. Now, he had himself been struck down by Aphrodite for his pride in refusing incense at her altars. The goddess was going to chastise him. In any case, there was nothing very surprising in this sort of thing happening, when, even after an exhausting day’s training, the camp-bed was nightly a rack of desire, where no depravity of the imagination was unbegotten. No doubt much mutual irritation was caused by this constraint, particularly, for example, something like Gwatkin’s detestation of Bithel.

  ‘God,’ he said, when he set eyes on him at Castlemallock, ‘that bloody man has followed us here.’

  Bithel himself was quite unaware of the ferment of rage he aroused in Gwatkin. At least he showed no sign of recognising Gwatkin’s hatred, even at times positively thrusting himself on Gwatkin’s society. Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort. Bithel may have regarded Gwatkin’s unfriendliness as a challenge. Whatever the reason, he always made a point of talking to Gwatkin whenever opportunity arose, showing himself equally undeterred by verbal rebuff or crushing moroseness. However, Gwatkin’s attitude in repelling Bithel’s conversational advances was not entirely based on a simple brutality. Their relationship was more complicated than that. The code of behaviour in the army which Gwatkin had set himself did not allow his own comportment with any brother officer to reach a pitch of unfriendliness he would certainly have shown to a civilian acquaintance disliked as much as he disliked Bithel. This code – Gwatkin’s picture of it, that is – allowed, indeed positively kindled, a blaze of snubs directed towards Bithel, at the same time preventing, so to speak, any final dismissal of him as a person too contemptible to waste time upon. Bithel was a brother officer; for that reason always, in the last resort, handed a small dole by Gwatkin, usually in the form of an incitement to do better, to pull himself together. Besides, Gwatkin, with many others, could never finally be reconciled to abandoning the legend of Bithel’s VC brother. Mythical prestige still hung faintly about Bithel on that account. Such legends, once taken shape, endlessly proliferate. Certainly I never heard Bithel himself make any public effort to extirpate the story. He may have feared that even the exacerbated toleration of himself Gwatkin was at times prepared to show would fade away, if the figure of the VC brother in the background were exorcised entirely.

  ‘Coming to sit with the Regiment tonight, Captain Gwatkin,’ Bithel would say when he joined us; then add in his muttered, confidential tone: ‘Between you and me, there’re not much of a crowd on this course. Pretty second-rate.’

  Bithel always found difficulty in addressing Gwatkin as ‘Rowland’. In early days, Gwatkin had protested once or twice at this formality, but I think he secretly rather enjoyed the respect implied by its use. Bithel, like everyone else, possessed one or more initial, but no one ever knew, or at least seemed to have forgotten, the name or names for which they stood. He was always called ‘Bith’ or ‘Bithy’, in some ways a more intimate form of address, which Gwatkin, on his side, could never bring himself to employ. The relaxation Bithel styled ‘sitting with the Regiment’ took place in an alcove, unofficially reserved by Gwatkin, Kedward and myself for our use as part of the permanent establishment of Castlemallock, as opposed to its shifting population of Anti-Gas students. The window seat where I used to read Esmond was in this alcove, and we would occasionally have a drink there. Since the night when he had first joined the Battalion, Bithel’s drinking, though steady when drink was available, had not been excessive, except on such occasions as Christmas or the New Year, when no great exception could be taken. He would get rather fuddled, but no more. Bithel himself sometimes referred to his own moderation in this respect.

  ‘Got to keep an eye on the old Mess bill,’ he would say. ‘The odd gin-and-orange adds up. I have had the CO after me once already about my wine bill. Got to mind my p’s and q’s in that direction.’

  As things turned out at Castlemallock, encouragement to overstep the mark came, unexpectedly, from the army authorities themselves. At least that was the way Bithel himself afterwards explained matters.

  ‘It was all the fault of that silly old instruction,’ he said. ‘I was tired out and got absolutely misled by it.’

  Part of the training on the particular Castlemallock course Bithel was attending consisted in passing without a mask through the gas-chamber. Sooner or later, every rank in the army had to comply with this routine, but students of an Anti-Gas course naturally experienced a somewhat more elaborate ritual in that respect than others who merely took their turn with a unit. A subsequent aspect of the test was first-aid treatment, which recommended, among other restoratives, for one poisonous gas sampled, ‘alcohol in moderate quantities’. On the day of Bithel’s misadventure, the gas-chamber was the last item on the day’s programme for those on the course. When Bithel’s class was dismissed after this test, some took the advice of the text-book and had a drink; others, because they did not like alcohol, or from motives of economy, confined themselves to hot sweet tea. Among those who took alcohol, no one but Bithel neglected the manual’s admonition to be moderate in this remedial treatment.

  ‘Old Bith’s having a drink or two this evening, isn’t he,’ Kedward remarked, even before dinner.

  Bithel always talked thickly, and, like most people who habitually put an unusually large amount of drink away, there was in general no great difference between him drunk or sober. The stage of intoxication he had reached made itself known only on such rare occasions as his dance round the dummy. At Castlemallock that night, he merely pottered about the ante-room, talking first to one group of anti-gas students, then to another, when, bored with him, people moved away. He did not join us in the alcove until the end of the evening. Everyone used to retire early, so that Gwatkin, Kedward and myself were alone in the room by the time Bithel arrived there. We were discussing the German advance. Gwatkin’s analysis of the tactical situation had continued for some time, and I was making preparations to move off to bed, when Bithel came towards us. He sat down heavily, without making his usual rather apologetic request to Gwatkin that he might be included in the party. For a time he listened to the conversation without speaking. Then he caught the word ‘Paris’.

  ‘Ever been to Paris, Captain Gwatkin?’ he asked.

  Gwatkin shot out a glance of profound disapproval.

  ‘No,’ he said sharply.

  The answer conveyed that Gwatkin considered the question a ridiculous one, as if Bithel had asked if he had ever visited Lhasa or Tierra del Fuego. He continued to lecture Kedward on the principles of mobile warfare.

  ‘I�
��ve been to Paris,’ said Bithel.

  He made a whistling sound with his lips to express a sense of great conviviality.

  ‘Went there for a weekend once,’ he said.

  Gwatkin looked furious, but said nothing. A Mess waiter appeared and began to collect glasses on a tray. He was, as it happened, the red-faced, hulking young soldier, who, weeping and complaining his back hurt, had made such a disturbance outside the Company Office. Now, he seemed more cheerful, answering Bithel’s request for a final drink with the information that the bar was closed. He said this with the satisfaction always displayed by waiters and barmen at being in a position to make that particular announcement.

  ‘Just one small Irish,’ said Bithel. ‘That’s all I want.’

  ‘Bar’s closed, sir.’

  ‘It can’t be yet.’

  Bithel tried to look at his watch, but the figures evidently eluded him.

  ‘I can’t believe the bar’s closed.’

  ‘Mess Sergeant’s just said so.’

  ‘Do get me another, Emmot – it is Emmot, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Do, do get me a whiskey, Emmot.’

  ‘Can’t sir. Bar’s closed.’

  ‘But it can be opened again.’

  ‘Can’t, sir.’

  ‘Open it just for one moment – just for one small whiskey.’

  ‘Sergeant says no, sir.’

  ‘Ask him again.’

  ‘Bar’s closed, sir.’

  ‘I beseech you, Emmot.’

  Bithel rose to his feet. Afterwards, I was never certain what happened. I was sitting on the same side as Bithel and, as he turned away, his back was towards me. He lurched suddenly forward. This may have been a stumble, since some of the floorboards were loose at that place. The amount he had drunk did not necessarily have anything to do with Bithel’s sudden loss of balance. Alternatively, his action could have been deliberate, intended as a physical appeal to Emmot’s better feelings. Bithel’s wheedling tone of voice a minute before certainly gave colour to that interpretation. If so, I am sure Bithel intended no more than to rest his hand on Emmot’s shoulder in a facetious gesture, perhaps grip his arm. Such actions might have been thought undignified, bad for discipline, no worse. However, for one reason or another, Bithel lunged his body forward, and, either to save himself from falling, or to give emphasis to his request for a last drink, threw his arms round Emmot’s neck. There, for a split second, he hung. There could be no doubt about the outward impression this posture conveyed. It looked exactly as if Bithel were kissing Emmot – in farewell, rather than in passion. Perhaps he was. Whether or not that were so, Emmot dropped the tray, breaking a couple of glasses, at the same time letting out a discordant sound. Gwatkin jumped to his feet. His face was white. He was trembling with rage.