I had written to Dixon, telling him all about my new job, and I now received a reply. We were, apparently, in the same army corps, so he couldn’t be so very many miles away.
‘I have been wondering, sir,’ he wrote, ‘whether it might possibly be fixed up for me to exchange into your battalion as transport-sergeant. You say your sergeant has been in France since the beginning, so he’s done his bit all right! It would be quite like old times for me to be your transport-sergeant. That was a rotten business about Mr Colwood being killed, sir. We shall all miss him very much when this War is over.’
Dixon’s letter sent me off into pleasant imaginings; to have him near me would make all the difference, I thought. Everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering away and falling to pieces: Denis seldom wrote to me, and he was trying to get a job on the Staff; but with Dixon to talk to I should still feel that the past was holding its own with the War; and I wanted the past to survive and to begin again; the idea was like daylight on the other side of this bad weather in which life and death had come so close to one another. I couldn’t get used to the idea of Stephen being dead. And Denis had become so remote that I seldom remembered him, though I couldn’t say why it was.
So, by the time I was showing Dottrell the letter, I had made up my mind that Dixon’s exchange was as good as settled. Joe read the letter through twice. ‘Your old groom must be a good sport,’ he remarked, pouring himself out a couple of inches of O.V.H. and adding a similar amount of water. ‘But it would take a deal of wangling to work his exchange. And if you want my private opinion, young George, he’d far better stay where he is. We’ll find ourselves in much less cushy places than this, and you say he’s turned forty-five….’ He handed me the letter. ‘And you might find yourself back with “C” company again if we had some casualties. Things change pretty quick nowadays. And I don’t mind betting there’ll be a few changes when Kinjack rolls up to take command of the battalion!’
I nodded wisely. For everyone now knew that Winchell had got his brigade, and Major Kinjack was expected (from the Second Battalion) in a week or two. And Kinjack had a somewhat alarming reputation as a disciplinarian. He was, according to Dottrell, who had known him since he was a subaltern, ‘a bloody fine soldier but an absolute pig if you got the wrong side of him’. Old man Barton was in a twitter about the new C.O., his only hope being, he said, that Kinjack would send him home as incompetent. Barton came in at this moment, for the battalion had returned from the trenches the day before.
‘Why, Barton,’ exclaimed Dottrell, ‘you look as if you’d just come out of quod!’
Barton’s hair had been cut by an ex-barber (servant to the medical officer) who had borrowed a pair of horse-clippers to supplement his scissors. Barton giggled and rubbed his cropped cranium. He said it made him feel more efficient, and began to chaff Dick (who had come in to ask if he might go for a ride with me that afternoon) about his beautifully brushed hair. ‘Kinjack’ll soon have the horse-clippers on your track, young man!’ he said. Dick smiled and said nothing.
We arranged to go for a ride, and he went off to inspect the company’s dinners. When he had gone Barton remarked that he wished he could get Dick to take more care of himself up in the Line. ‘I sent him out on a short patrol two nights ago, but he stayed out there nearly an hour and a half and went right up to the Boche wire.’ Old Joe agreed that he was a rare good lad: no cold feet about him; the country couldn’t afford to lose many more like that….
And he got on to his favourite subject – ‘The Classes and the Masses’. For Joe had been brought up in the darkest part of Manchester, and he prided himself on being an old-fashioned socialist. But his Socialism was complicated by his fair-minded cognizance of the good qualities of the best type of the officer class, with whom he had been in close contact ever since he enlisted. He clenched a knotted fist. ‘This war,’ he exclaimed in his husky voice, ‘is being carried on by the highest and the lowest in the land – the blue-blooded upper ten and the poor unfortunate people that some silly bastard called “the Submerged Tenth”. All the others are making what they can out of it and shirking the dirty work. Selfish hogs! And the politicians are no better.’
‘That’s right, Joe. That’s the stuff to give ’em!’ said Barton.
And they both drank damnation to the (enigmatic) part of the population which was leaving all the dirty work to the infantry. Their generalizations, perhaps, were not altogether fair. There was quite a lot of blue blood at G.H.Q. and Army Headquarters. And Mansfield and Durley, to name only two of our own officers, were undoubtedly members of ‘the middle class’, whatever that may be.
My ride with Dick was a great success. Over the rolling uplands and through an occasional strip of woodland, with the sun shining and big clouds moving prosperously on a boisterous north-west wind, we rode to a village six or seven miles away, and had tea at an unbelievable shop where the cakes were as good as anything in Amiens. I wouldn’t like to say how many we ate, but the evening star shone benevolently down on us from among a drift of rosy clouds while we were cantering home to Morlancourt. But about a fortnight later, when Dick was up in the trenches, I received a letter in reply to the one I had sent Dixon. Someone informed me that Sergeant Dixon had died of pneumonia. Major Kinjack arrived to take command a day or two afterwards.
5
Lieutenant-Colonel Kinjack (to give him his new rank) exceeded all our expectations. He was the personification of military efficiency. Personal charm was not his strong point and he made no pretension to it. He was aggressive and blatant, but he knew his job, and for that we respected him and were grateful. His predecessor had departed in his Brigadier’s cap without saying good-bye to anyone. For that we were less grateful; but as Dottrell said: ‘He’d had Brigadier on the brain ever since he came back off leave, and now he’d never be satisfied till he’d got a Division and another decoration to go with it.’ Dottrell had just got his D.S.O., so he had no cause to feel jealous, even if he had been capable of that feeling, which he wasn’t. His only complaint was that they didn’t make his ‘acting rank’ permanent. He aired that grievance several evenings a week, especially when he had got back late with the ration party, and his references to the ‘permanent’ Quartermaster (at Army Headquarters) were far from flattering.
Colonel Kinjack stopped one night in Morlancourt, and on the following afternoon I guided him up to the Line, going by the short cut across the open country and the half-dug and feebly wired reserve trench which, we hoped, would never be utilized. The new C.O. had inspected the Transport in the morning without active disapproval, but he was less pleased when our appearance on the ridge (half a mile behind the front line) attracted a few shells, none of which exploded near us. This was considered quite a good joke in the battalion, and I was often reminded afterwards of how I’d got Kinjack welcomed with whizz-bangs.
‘The Boches saw Kinjack coming all right. The Transport Officer made sure of that!’ Barton would say, with a chuckle.
For in spite of my easy job, it was supposed that I could be a bit of a daredevil if I liked. Not that I wanted to be, that afternoon; Kinjack frightened the life out of me, and was so sceptical of my ability to find the way that I began to feel none too sure about it myself…. It is, however, just conceivable that at that time I didn’t care what happened to the new Colonel or anybody else….
That same day, at about midnight, I was awakened by Dottrell, who told me that I was to go on leave next morning. I drove to the station in the Maltese cart; the train started at 9.30, crawled to Havre, and by ten o’clock next day I was in London. I had been in France less than four months. As regards war experience I felt a bit of an impostor. I had noticed that officers back from their ten days’ leave were usually somewhat silent about it. Then, after a few weeks, they began to look forward to their next leave again, and to talk about this future fact. But there wasn’t much to be said about mine, for it was bitterly cold and a heavy fall of snow knocked my hopes of hun
ting on the head. So I remained quietly with Aunt Evelyn at Butley, telling myself that it was a great luxury to have a hot bath every day, and waiting for a thaw. If it thawed I should have two or three days with the Ringwell on Colonel Hesmon’s horses. And I should stay at Hoadley Rectory. But no thaw came, and I returned to France without having been to the Rectory, which had been a painful idea in any case. The Rector evidently felt the same, for he wrote me a sad letter in which he said ‘as I think of all the suffering and death, the anxieties and bereavements of this terrible struggle, I feel that in our ignorance we can only rest on the words, “What I do thou knowest not now but thou shalt know hereafter”. Obedience and self-sacrifice for right and truth in spite of suffering and death is Christianity….’ I received this letter on my last day at Butley. Sitting alone in the schoolroom late at night, I felt touched by the goodness and patience of my old friend, but I was unable to accept his words in the right spirit. He spoke too soon. I was too young to understand. And England wasn’t what it used to be. I had been over to say good-bye to Captain Huxtable that afternoon; but the War was making an old man of him, though he did his best to be bright. And kind Aunt Evelyn talked bitterly about the Germans and called them ‘hell-hounds’. I found myself defending them, although I couldn’t claim acquaintance with a single one of them (except Willie Regel, and I shouldn’t have known him by sight if I’d met him).
Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realize that my past was wearing a bit thin. The War seemed to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine. Point-to-point cups shone, but without conviction. And Dixon was dead….
Perhaps, after all, it was better to be back with the battalion. The only way to forget about the War was to be on the other side of the Channel. But the fire burnt brightly and the kettle was hissing on the hob. It was nice to be wearing my old civilian clothes, and to make myself a cup of tea. Old Joe will be on his way home with the transport now, I thought, contrasting my comfort with him joggling along the Bray road in this awful weather. His bronchitis had been bad lately, too. Dick was a thought which I repressed. He would be getting his leave soon, anyhow…. The Rector said we were fighting for right and truth; but it was no use trying to think it all out now. There were those things to take back for the others – a bottle of old brandy for Dottrell and some smoked salmon for ‘C’ company mess – I mustn’t make any mistake about that when I get to town in the morning, I thought….
And the next evening I was on the boat at Southampton; the weather had turned mild again; it was a quiet evening; I watched the red and green lights across the harbour, and listened to the creaking cries of the gulls, like the sound of windlasses and pulleys, as they swooped in circles or settled on the smooth dusk of the water. From the town came the note of a bugle, a remote call, like the last thought of home. And then we were churning across the dark sea, to find France still under snow.
There was a continuous rumble and grumble of bombardment while we were going up with the rations on the day after I got back from leave. As we came over the hill beyond Bray the darkness toward Albert was lit with the glare of explosions that blinked and bumped. Dottrell remarked that there seemed to be a bit of a mix-up, which was his way of saying that he didn’t altogether like the look of things that evening.
When we arrived at the ration dump the quartermaster-sergeant told us that the battalion had been standing to for the past two hours. It was possible that the Boches might be coming across. ‘C’ company was in the front line. The noise was subsiding, so I went up there, leaving Joe to pay his nightly call at battalion headquarters.
Stumbling and splashing up a communication trench known as Canterbury Avenue, with the parcel of smoked salmon stuffed into my haversack, I felt that smoked salmon wasn’t much of an antidote for people who had been putting up with all that shell-fire. Still, it was something…. Round the next corner I had to flatten myself against the wall of that wet ditch, for someone was being carried down on a stretcher. An extra stretcher-bearer walking behind told me it was Corporal Price of ‘C’ company. ‘A rifle-grenade got him…looks as if he’s a goner….’ His face was only a blur of white in the gloom; then, with the drumming of their boots on the trench-boards, Corporal Price left the War behind him. I remembered him vaguely as a quiet little man in Durley’s platoon. No use offering him smoked salmon, I thought, as I came to the top of Canterbury Avenue, and, as usual, lost my way in the maze of saps and small trenches behind the front line. Watling Street was the one I wanted. Finding one’s way about the trenches in the dark was no easy job when one didn’t live up there. I passed the dug-outs of the support company at Maple Redoubt. Candles and braziers glinted through the curtain-flaps and voices muttered gruffly from the little underground cabins (which would have been safer if they had been deeper down in the earth). Now and again there was the splitting crack of a rifle-shot from the other side, or a five-nine shell droned serenely across the upper air to burst with a hollow bang; voluminous reverberations rolled along the valley. The shallow blanching flare of a rocket gave me a glimpse of the mounds of bleached sandbags on the Redoubt. Its brief whiteness died downward, leaving a dark world; chilly gusts met me at corners, piping drearily through crannies of the parapet; very different was the voice of the wind that sang in the cedar tree in the garden at home….
Pushing past the gas-blanket, I blundered down the stairs to the company headquarters’ dug-out. There were twenty steps to that earthy smelling den, with its thick wooden props down the middle and its precarious yellow candlelight casting wobbling shadows. Barton was sitting on a box at the rough table, with a tin mug and a half-empty whisky bottle. His shoulders were hunched and the collar of his trench-coat was turned up to his ears. Dick was in deep shadow, lying on a bunk (made of wire-netting with empty sandbags on it). It was a morose cramped little scene, loathsome to live in as it is hateful to remember. The air was dank and musty; lumps of chalk fell from the ‘ceiling’ at intervals. There was a bad smell of burnt grease, and the frizzle of something frying in the adjoining kennel that was called the kitchen was the only evidence of ordinary civilization – that and Barton’s shining pince-nez, and the maps and notebooks which were on the table….
Smoked salmon from Piccadilly Circus was something after all. It cheered Barton immensely. He unpacked it; he sniffed it; and no doubt it brought the lights of London into his mind.
‘Gosh, if only this war would stop!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d be off to Scott’s oyster-bar like a streak of light and you’d never get me away from it again!’
He held the smoked salmon under Dick’s nose and told him what a lucky young devil he was to be going on leave in two or three days’ time. Dick wasn’t as bright as usual; he’d got a rotten headache, he said. Barton told him he’d better let Ormand go out with the wiring-party instead of him. But he said no, he’d be all right by then, and Ormand had been out last night. Barton told me they’d had a lively time with the C.O. lately: ‘He gave orders for the whole of the front line to be re-wired; we’ve been at it every night, but he came up this morning with his big periscope, strafing like hell about the gaps along by the mine-craters. He says the wire isn’t strong enough to stop a wheelbarrow – why a wheelbarrow God knows!’ He laughed, rather hysterically; his nerves were on edge, and no wonder…. For, as he said, what with the muck everything was in since the snow melted, and being chivvied by Kinjack, and then being ‘crumped’ all the afternoon, life hadn’t been worth living lately. The odd thing was that good old Barton seemed equally concerned because the snowy weather had prevented me from having any hunting while on leave. And Dick agreed that it had been very rough on me.
Mansfield and Ormand came in at that moment; these two were very good friends, and they always seemed to be cheering one another up. They had left Durley on duty in the front trench. They wanted to hear all about the ‘shows’ I had been to in London, but I couldn’t tell them anything (though I wished I coul
d) for I hadn’t been to a theatre, and it was no use talking about the Symphony Concert at Queen’s Hall, which now made me feel rather a prig.
Dick was still lying in his dark corner when I said goodnight and groped my way up the steps, leaving them to make the most of the smoked salmon. Going down Canterbury Avenue it was so pitch black that I couldn’t see my own hand; once or twice a flare went up in the spectral region on the shoulder of the hill behind me; lit by that unearthly glare the darkness became desolation.
Coming up from the transport lines at twelve o’clock next morning I found Joe Dottrell standing outside the Quartermaster’s stores. His face warned me to expect bad news. No news could have been worse. Dick had been killed. He had been hit in the throat by a rifle bullet while out with the wiring-party, and had died at the dressing-station a few hours afterwards. The battalion doctor had been a throat specialist before the War, but this had not been enough.
The sky was angry with a red smoky sunset when we rode up with the rations. Later on, when it was dark, we stood on the bare slope just above the ration dump while the Brigade chaplain went through his words; a flag covered all that we were there for; only the white stripes on the flag made any impression on the dimness of the night. Once the chaplain’s words were obliterated by a prolonged burst of machine-gun fire; when he had finished, a trench-mortar ‘canister’ fell a few hundred yards away, spouting the earth up with a crash…. A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew Death then.
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 1 - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Page 30