by F. W. Harvey
Willie, leaving the hamper to be shared among his brother’s old tent companions, and with the little rosary like lead in his pocket, set off upon his homeward journey. A day wasted …
He arrived back in the early hours of the following day, feeling as weary as he had felt upon his return from the front – and a lot less joyous.
Standing outside his home that was humped like a sleeping animal against the eerie beginnings of early dawn, Willie with memory of his disappointment and foreboding of his own departure in his heart felt that beauty had withdrawn even from this spot so dear, so lovely. An atmosphere of death seemed to dwell upon it.
He threw gravel at the window of his mother’s room. He heard her answer, and saw colour kindling as she lighted a candle to come down. The whole thing seemed to have happened before (as he knew that after death it would again) and he waited to carry out that symbolic ritual which he knew was unfolding. Bearing a light which shone upon her face his mother, having descended the stairs from her bedroom, passed the hall window and peered through to see that it was really her son who stood waiting to enter. Her face paused against the glass. He bent forward (as he knew he must) to kiss it, and feeling only the cold barrier, burst into tears. This was foolish. He felt that all the time. but something was driving him and all the time he knew too that what had happened before, and would happen again, must happen now. His mother would open the door, and finding him in tears would kiss him and take him in. Then all the horrible eerie loneliness would vanish. He would have come home. He would be happy – happy.
‘Well dearest, back again, and very tired!’
The strange vision fled with that spoken welcome. Dream no longer perched upon reality. Brushing his eyes, he entered the familiar house, and told his tale, she sitting in her dressing gown to listen, as he sipped his hot drink and ate bread and butter.
‘Well, well, it had to be sooner or later’ said his mother. ‘He was wanting so much to get out to you. And now you will see him there instead of in England – long before I can’ she added wistfully.
‘Yes, Mother, and though I loathe leaving you I am almost glad to be going back to-morrow.’
‘To-day’, corrected she, ‘it is morning. And now you must go to bed, poor boy, and get a bit of rest before your travel!’
‘I suppose I must, Mother.’
He arose, and they went upstairs – he to sleep soundly, and she to lie awake praying, as thousands of other mothers prayed to God that night … in many countries.
The same morning at eleven o’clock he shouldered his pack, slung his rifle, and left his home behind. That night at Victoria Station he met hundreds of other returning soldiers. It was a strange sight – that huge roofed-in place of departure – at this time. None who have travelled in a ‘leave train’ will ever forget it. Smoke and arches blotting out the stars; a cavern of crowded and very various loves – a terminus of so much life, yet nothing like life: a starting point for death, yet nothing like death. A ball-room of half-naked emotions in fantastic dances!
What a company had assembled! Of women – pale, weeping girls, and laughing prostitutes, and courageously smiling mothers. Of men – fathers trying to be matter of fact, friends, and brothers affecting cheeriness, and soldiers of all sorts and conditions and in every mood of parting – cheerily or gloomily sober: gloomily or cheerily intoxicated. A.S.C. men boasting of the blood they would shed in France: Pay Office clerks who promised German helmets on their return: privates of the infantry repeating mechanically trivial messages which would be treasured – or not – when they were dead.
Snaps of comedy and of tragedy floated here and there upon general flood of talk. In that feverish expectancy of parting restraints became unendurable and were dissipated. Even self-controlled men spoke with trembling tones and tears in their eyes their last goodbyes to those from whose hearts the veil of reticence slipped with the moments.
The low whispering grew louder and at length desperately careless. Who listened? What mattered even if they did?
The half-lighted train, which had lain so quiet, now snorted like a gigantic sinister beast, and prepared to depart.
‘All aboard for Berlin!’ ‘Goodbye, mother!’ Cheerio old thing!’ ‘A V.C. next time.’ ‘Stop her, she’s got my purse: every bloody sou!’ ‘Darling, I don’t care. It will be yours, yours whether we’ve been to the church or not.’ ‘Look after Dicky!’ ‘Where’s my blasted haversack?’ ‘Another kiss then!’ Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!’ Sobs, cheering, broken shouts The train moves slowly out. ‘Thank God that’s over!’ ‘Good old Blighty!’ ‘Where’s my …’ Men settle in their seats and look at one another …
‘She is alone’ thought Willie of his mother. ‘We are both alone, but I am on my way to meet Eric. That’s not so bad is it? And I said goodbye to her in Gloucestershire – quietly.’
‘Have a swig, mate?’
‘Not now, old man, thanks.’
‘Come on; be matey!’ hiccoughed one drowning care.
‘Keep it for the crossing, and the cold night’ advised Willie, sipping, and handing back the flask.
‘No fear!’ answered the soldier, draining the whole contents of spirit prior to falling asleep.
Food was taken from haversacks and handed round, but nobody wanted to eat. It was a token of friendliness; no more; and the ritual accomplished, all snatched a chance to sleep with exception of four gamblers bunched together in the middle of the carriage, and Willie in one corner.
The train rocked on through the darkness. Willie watched the faces around him – and sleeping and the waking. Were these the saviours of England? How queer to think so! But it was true. Life (he mused) must mean something very different to each one of these men. The thing in common: and the thing which set them in dignity apart from so much wiser and more clever men, was the hazard of it. It was not mere shillings and francs that these boys were gambling with. They, he and those sleepers, had chosen, one and all, a larger game … gamblers all, they were! Time alone would show if the game were worth the playing. But time could never rob the players of their nobleness. The shame (if shame should be the end of this adventure) would never touch them. It would lie upon others – the onlookers – the wise, the clever men in England and elsewhere then abed, dreaming their wise, clever dreams.
He rubbed the moisture of breath from the window pane, and looked out, but there was nothing to be seen – not even the passing telegraph poles. He thought of his leave and saw with the mind’s eye the faces he had left behind. He heard the Gloucestershire talk … Then he took from his pocket a sealed envelope given him by Dorothy in the moment of departure. Now what’s this? A love letter? He broke the seal and read. Dear folks! Dear, dear Gloucestershire folks! Tears came into his eyes as he laughed and laughed. ‘What’s up chum? Got hold of a smart tale? Got a good joke to tell us?’ questioned the gambling enthusiasts. The sleepers wriggled and snorted at the noise and turned back into dreams.
‘No,’ said Willie, ‘not a story, but a joke if you see it right.’
‘When you fellows are back in trenches, and suffering any manner of cold: perhaps lying out on listening patrol and wanting to cough, only afraid to, and feeling your throat tickling like mad all the time – here’s a remedy.’
‘Place four new-laid eggs in a basin’ (‘Wot the ‘ell?’ began one of his listeners.) ‘Cover with the juice of six lemons’ (Mr Mill’s might do) ‘and leave for twenty-four hours.’ (You’ll be a bit stiff and cold by that when) ‘turn the eggs over and leave for another twenty-four hours’. (‘Oh Gawd!’ exclaimed one. ‘Shall we never be allowed in agen!’) ‘then beat up with four ounces of honey, and one and a half ounces of glycerine and three-quarters of a bottle of rum’ (Wot will the sergeant say!) ‘Strain through a muslin, and then bottle. Does one wineglass’ concluded Willie.
‘Now that’s an infallible cure for colds, revealed only to us five by Dorothy’s old mother who has dosed her husband with same for years, and got it from her mother.’
‘Where did she get the eggs from?’
‘I’ve noticed streams o’ blinkin’ honey running about Plug Street Wood.’
‘You’d ’ave to save your rum during the first ten years o’ war – them as they says will be the worst too – if you didn’t ’appen to be a sergeant.’
‘Well, that’s the only cure anyhow’ said Willie.
Warmed even with the thought of that recipe Willie crossed the channel (two long destroyers like grey shadows accompanying) and landed again on French soil.
CHAPTER V
‘Behold two happy mortals upon a road that leads God knows where.’
Three days before, Eric had come over on the same ship, and had proceeded up the line with thirty odd companions, occupying a cattle trench labelled thus – ‘8 chevaux, 40 hommes’
‘Pity we ain’t chevauxes, mate. Eight on us could stretch out nice on this straw’, said a soldier to Etic.
‘There isn’t much room for nearly forty chaps’ agreed Eric.
‘There’, cried another, ‘I said hommes was a misprint for tommies. That’s what they call us out ’ere.’
‘It’s like living in a gypsy van’, remarked somebody.
‘Indeed it isn’t!’ cried out a slim dark-haired boy squeezed into a further corner. There was something in the tone that made Eric ask ‘Have you ever lived in one?’ And there was a slight hesitation ere out of the shadow the voice replied ‘No – only I’ve known people who have.’
‘Gypsies?’
‘There’s plenty of people travel that way, besides gypsies.’
Eric thought it tactful not to pursue the subject. The boy was enough like a gypsy himself. He had appeared from nowhere to enlist about five months previously in the reserve battalion of Gloucesters. His accent was only faintly of the west, and while he knew many places of the country he would never admit that his home was in any of them, and no one could recognise him as a native. He learned quickly, was a good scout, and had voluntarily taken the place of another man who was booked for this draft but whose mother had fallen ill, thereby gaining the regard of his present companions who had, with the majority, mistrusted him hitherto, and called him ‘foreigner’.
His taciturnity had somewhat thawed during this journey, and he had betrayed signs of excitement which might have puzzled his companions, had they not been somewhat excited themselves. Not one of these men grudged himself to this adventure, yet each felt a deep sadness at leaving ‘for foreign parts’, and his excitement was feeding both on the thought that he was now on his way to the line, and on the apprehension that he would never return from it. This excitement was covered with jests, amusing criticism of the French country and its people, and the intermittent grousing which is Tommie’s privilege. But such was not the excitement of ‘the foreigner’.
The train pulled up in a wood, and an order was given that the soldiers might ‘fall out’, stretch their legs, and eat dinner in its covering shade.
Eric took advantage of the stop to write a letter home:–
‘My dearest: You will be surprised to hear that I am on my way to the front, and at the moment (I believe) only a dozen miles off it; so that I shall soon see Willie and give him your love. It was a rather sudden departure or I would have let you know before – but our letters would have been held up anyway I think. You have heard all about the country from Willie, so I will say no more than that I am well and happy. I shall continue to be the latter whether I live or die, for it is in me, and never more than at the present. Do not grieve if I tell you that it is also in my bones that I shall not see you again – alive. I had planned much that I hoped to carry out, but nothing better than this – to yield myself soul and body to the will of God in crusade. His will only be done. In that be our joy! So may His kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.
Ever your loving Son,
ERIC.’
He was lying on the straw of the truck reading a pocket Bible and smiling happing to himself when the other returned after the ‘Fall-in’ whistle had sounded.
‘Well, you look happy enough!’ remarked his neighbour as he settled beside him. ‘Yes’ said Eric.
‘Well, I reckon we may just as well take what comes smiling,’ rejoined the other, ‘but ty-unt going to be a picnic either.’
‘I know that.’
‘You be religious’ said the man, glancing at Eric’s book. ‘No offence. I don’t mean parsonish. ‘Tis reasonable for a man as do understand about Heaven to be happy whether a be gwaine to die or live –’
‘It is!’ said Eric.
‘But the foreigner there’, whispered the soldier and jerking his head towards the opposite corner – ‘he bain’t religious, and … and I seen him do queer things in that ’ood.’
‘What queer things?’
‘Like this – I had yut my bit o’ bait, and wer lying quiet under a bush, thinking how the ’ood were like a little ’un I knowed at home; when the foreigner comes out upon a little bare place where the sun did lie in a patch with trees all round. My bush was under oe ’em. And just as I wer going to call out to ’un, well …’
‘Well?’
‘A started dancing.’
‘How dancing?’
‘Dancing (though t’wasn’t no ordinary dance like) in the sunshine and singing a scrap o’ music as though a was glad!’
‘Perhaps he was glad.’
‘Maybe. And a held out a’s arms as though a wer welcoming summat, or somebody that a could see – though there wer nothing there. Then a broke dro’ the bushes, and wer gone afore I could say a word good or bad.’
‘Ah!’
‘It’s come to me while we bin a talking, as that there foreigner were a music hall chap, a play actor, or dancer like as had got no home to remember and long for, like; and must go back in his mind to what a did know best – the dancing a did.’
‘You think it was done because of a sort of home-sickness?’
‘That dome to me since I bin talking. Afore that, I thought a must be mad. He seemed zo glad-like.’
‘Perhaps,’ repeated Eric, ‘he was glad.’
‘Why?’
‘To be going to meet what fate brings to him.’
‘That we must face.’
‘Gladly.’
‘Well, I dunno, A man may be glad meeting friends, or meeting his sweetheart, or coming home, but we beyunt doing neither!’
‘We are meeting what God sends.’
‘Ah, you be religious. Yet you don’t dance. He bain’t religious. But he do. He’s a music-haller.’
‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’
‘And you see!’
The shadows of the truck grew darker. Evening and a few stars had come when the train presently stopped, having reached its farthest limit of safety.
As the men fell in their places to march off Eric’s companion placed himself next to the foreigner. ‘You wasn’t on the halls, mate, before you come ’ere?’ he asked.
‘The what?’
‘The halls. A hactor, or anything?’
‘No!’ laughed the other. And they marched on in silence till they reached a spot closely in rear of the lines. But there they were not destined to remain.
‘Now you’re for it, chums!’ came the voice of their guide. They marched on in darkness into reserve trenches, where duck boards broke, periodically letting them down into icy water. One man broke his leg, and so left the war before he had seen it. Then they reached a spot where for a winding mile Frenchmen were stuck, and moved neither forward nor backward.
That was an atmosphere of oaths, if you like!
‘What’s up?’
Answers were many, but unprintable.
‘Better get out of this and go across country’, said the guide; but as he spoke the air filled with a whistling which became a scream. Synchronised to a second the German guns opened fire.
Like a monstrous covey of birds those wings beating the darkness came to earth. The shrieking, the whistling, the
scream with which the air throbbed agonised, was overborne in a blast of hell. The shout of ten million demons rent the sky. Earth swayed; gathered into waves; spouted fountains of itself – and other things more precious than dirt.
The scream of those birds of death was echoed back from throats of living and dying men … Then as a mine was fired, the buried were shaken in their tombs like dice; and amongst them was ‘the foreigner’.
Not a shot was fired back. What had those poor miserable men to fire at? The scream of our own shells crossed them crowded there, or sprawling in blood, or lying grotesquely dismembered. Defiance, courage, devilry, bravery, counted for nothing. It was flesh and blood and valiant spirit against iron: bloody machinery. It was modern war.
The artillery duel continued as an attack was made upon the English trenches. Our barrage wiped out the attacks. The defenders were wiped out by German shells which murdered and buried them. The reserves on both sides suffered a similar fate, but in a lesser measure. This trench of men was perhaps decimated.
Shovels, not rifles, were wanted; and fortunately these were to hand. They dug out their own men, and then in darkness dug out covering for themselves, and a new front line, the result being that neither army had advanced a single inch by daylight, and each had caught but casual and fleeting glimpses of the other. No one could be firmly conscious of having killed a single man. Yet casualties on both sides were heavy – about even.
Of many acts of unrecorded heroism in truth performed under secrecy of covering darkness it is duty to relate but one.
In that purgatory of flame, burning flesh, smoke, spouting dirt: in those rising cries of agony; in that rain of descending death-giving shells: Eric stood up and found a shovel. Then, without waiting for a lull, he dug. He dug out a human form buried in French earth that else would have remained there till the day of Doom. It was (though he knew not) ‘the foreigner’. And meanwhile, for it was death to do it, men marvelled, and he was untouched. A hand guarded him.
(‘If anybody deserved a V.C. that madman does.’)