by Alec Waugh
But, just as at the hunt ball he would have realized that he was talking, not making conversation, so now imperceptibly he grew aware that his attention was being held, his interest roused by a girl seated across the table, whose name when they had been introduced he had not caught. She was dark-haired, pale-skinned; her eyes very dark and bright. Her teeth were very white and even; her lips were parted. She was talking quickly, in a low, eager ripple. She appeared completely absorbed in her conversation. Yet Hugh had the feeling that she was aware of him in the same way that he was aware of her, though they had not exchanged a word, though she had not once looked at him. He became interested, alert, curious. He felt resentful of the conditions of a party of this kind where you were introduced to girls, but had no chance of talking to them, where there was the width of a table in between; where the dance floor was so crowded that dancing was scarcely possible; where it was impossible if you were interested in any one person, to see them more than a little, since their place in the evening was already made, since you couldn’t break in upon another person’s party. “I wonder what she’s like.”
And then suddenly she turned away from the man beside her, she looked at him, their eyes met in a long steady glance that turned to a half smile of recognition before she turned away. He was startlingly conscious of being alive in every sense. “I’ve got to see her. I’ve got to find out about her. This isn’t going to end here. I’ve got to find out what she’s really like.”
If he had felt that way about a girl met at a hunt ball, he would have made inquiries about her among friends; he would have found out the houses that she frequented; he would have got himself invited to some party she would be at, or asked some friend to arrange a meeting that would appear casual, unforeseen. That’s how it would have been in the country, in the days of peace, when there was leisure for slow growth. But in the hothouse atmosphere of war-time London, you did not postpone things to a morrow that might never dawn. Hugh pushed back his chair. He walked round the table. “Shall we dance?” he asked the girl.
The dance was an excuse. They had agreed, all of them, that dancing was impossible; that it would be the wise thing to wait till the floor was empty. But the girl had risen to her feet. She looked up at him as they stood on the edge of the cleared floor. She smiled. He put his arm round her. He was conscious of softness, pliancy; of an electric feeling of vitality. The music had a barbaric stridency. His feet twitched to respond to it, to be lost with her in the music’s rhythm. It would be heaven to dance with her. One half turn of the room showed him how impossible that was. They could not dance. All that any of the dancers could do was to shuffle their feet and sway their shoulders. There was an excuse for contact, that was all. And Hugh wanted more than that. He wanted to dance, really dance.
“This isn’t any good.”
“Not any.”
“Why don’t we go out to-morrow somewhere where we can really dance?”
“I’d like that.”
That was how it had begun. That was how it had continued; with the sense of being alive quickening with every hour he spent with her. Not merely, not only rather, through the heightened stirring of the senses, but through the feeling that everything was more fun because she was there; everything was more amusing, more interesting. He talked more easily, he talked better. He had a new ease and confidence. The reflection of her response to him. He was only alive when he was with her. The times when he was away from her were sandy tracts of desert. He was, in fact, in love.
“And I shouldn’t be any the less in love if I’d been wooing her for eighteen months. The war telescopes things. It’s a hothouse atmosphere. It brings things to fruit quickly. But it’s the same plant. It’s just that the setting’s different. People’ll say—old people—that it’s madness for us to marry having known each other for so short a time. But every marriage is a gamble; must be, in the nature of things. We are as likely to be making a success of marriage in 1950 as any couple that have grown up in the same village and haven’t a secret from one another. We know our minds quicker now, that’s all.”
Thus he argued with himself, picturing himself a father and a husband; thirty-five years ahead.
But those were the arguments that he had rehearsed to convince the inherited cautionary instincts that regarded marriage as a stage in a logical process of self-establishment. They were the arguments that he would use to his father, to Joyce’s father. Himself he did not look ahead. He did not picture as the mid-Victorian fiancé did, a future of firesides and cradles; the wage-earner returning from his office at the day’s end to the bosom of his family; the son trotting at his father’s side; the son bringing home from school and college, later from the larger arena of life, the prizes which old men in their clubs vie with one another in comparing—nor did his imagination paint such a picture as had he fallen in love three years earlier, he would have made out of changed circumstance—a home of his own; a flat first, then a house; the fun of entertaining; the status of a married man; the pride of taking out a pretty wife; of going down into the country for week-ends; his old life, only pleasanter.
Hugh Balliol did not attempt to visualize the life that he and Joyce, when the war was over, would build up together. That was too far ahead. His vision was prescribed by the immediate future. No man could look further ahead than his next leave. And it was of his next leave, that would be his honeymoon, that picture after picture flickered before his eyes. The wedding by special licence, within forty-eight hours of his return; the little restaurant lunch party, the speech or two; all that as a prelude: the twelve halcyon days that they would spend in London, since London was the one place that weather could not spoil. They would take a suite at the Savoy, looking out over the Embankment. The windows would be banked with flowers. For that one fortnight they would consider nothing but themselves. They would tie themselves down to nothing. They would act as the mood moved them. If it were summer and the day was fine they would motor down to Taplow, leave the car beside the river, hire an electric canoe, picnic through a long afternoon in shadowed backwaters; or maybe it would be in the early spring, or autumn. It would be too late or early for the river. On days when the sky was grey but the clouds were moving too quickly for a fall of rain, they would motor out to Addington or Wentworth, for a long day’s golf, returning when the skies were darkening, when lights were waking between close-curtained, close-shuttered windows, when streets had the strange mysterious appeal of war-time London; the darkened lamps flinging their spreading cones upon the pavement. There would be restaurants and theatres, bright lights, gay frocks and music; a kaleidoscope of changing scenes. One thing upon another. Yet all that change of scene, the animation, the excitement, people and noise and music, would be the background to the hours when they would be alone together; in the flower-decked suite that looked on to the curving river.
But that he could not picture. His mind showed him no mental photographs. That was an untravelled country; a mystery that he could guess at, but not visualize. One thing alone he knew for certain: that it would be utterly different from anything he had ever known; the casual wild nights in London, Paris, or during his time in camp, at Nottingham and Watford, they had been fun enough. They had been exciting in their way. They had added their savour to a week-end leave, to a business trip to Paris, but how could they be expected to compare with this? To Joyce, someone of one’s own world, somebody that one really loved. He trod the threshold of initiation.
Through the grey-green fields of Kent the train ran into Folkestone. A wind was blowing from the shore. In the Pullman carriage there was a craning of necks, a rubbing of window panes to see whether or not there were white horses out at sea. There were more than white horses. Quite definitely it was going to be rough. Hugh thanked heaven he was sleepy. He would go below at once. He would be asleep before the boat had started. He had no sentimental “last minute” wish to take a last look at the white cliffs. He felt none of the obvious emotion of the soldier leaving for the war.
He was glad it had come at last, the test for which he had been in training for sixteen months. He had hated being out of things when he had heard others comparing notes of front-line experience. He wanted to be at one with his generation, to move side by side, in step with his age, to miss nothing that his generation accounted as experience. He did not see war in terms of Agincourt and Crecy. He did not expect glamour of it. He expected it to be dull, shot through by hours of horror, lit by an occasional excitement. He knew that through how many dark and lonely days he would turn for comfort and reassurance to the knowledge that Joyce was waiting for him. He would carry her memory as the crusaders had carried amulets. As he stepped off the dock on to the gang-plank he thought in a moment of prescience and vision, “For all that she means to me now, she’ll mean a hundred times more to me before I set foot on this dock again.”
IV
A Week later an orderly walked into the ante-room of the machine-gun base depot.
“Are any of the following gentlemen in the mess, please? Mr. Ashworth, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Balliol.…”
“Yes.”
“Sir, you have been posted to the 305th Machine Gun Company. You are to have your kit ready by six o’clock. A lorry will take you to the station.”
“What shall I do then?”
“The R.T.O. will tell you.”
The R.T.O. consulted a sheaf of papers.
“The 305th Machine Gun Company? That’ll be the 131st division. That’ll be Ambreville. They’ll tell you there.”
In England Hugh had experienced that side of war-office officialdom which Ian Hay had christened “the practical joke department.” He had indented for three G.S. wagons and received four mules. His bank account had been mysteriously credited with an allowance for lodging, light and fuel during a month that he had spent in barracks. He had filled up endless forms to account for the loss on night manœuvres of one entrenching tool and finally received in compensation a prismatic compass. But he had imagined that things were run more efficiently in France. It did not seem to be so. Through thirteen long, bleak hours, he changed trains, saluted majors with blue hat bands, shivered in an unheated carriage. He was hurried on from train to train, from R.T.O. to R.T.O. as though the administrative authorities were indulging in some elaborate adult version of “Old Maid”; as though he were the unlucky card, which each player in turn passes on to the next, indifferent to its ultimate destination, with a sigh of thanksgiving the moment he is relieved of his own responsibility. Seven o’clock had come before he reported to the R.T.O. at Ambreville. At last, he thought, at last! He was to repeat those two words a great many times, with a great many varieties of intonation, during the next twelve hours.
The R.T.O., like every other R.T.O. along the track, was affable, courteous, encouraging.
“Mr. Balliol? The 305th Machine Gun Company? Splendid! They’ll be glad to have you. They’re at Rideau now. About fifteen kilometres off.”
“How am I to get there?”
“You’re in luck. On ordinary nights you’d have to walk; to-night the light-duty railway is running a carriage down there. You can go in that as far as Langeais, then walk. It’s quite simple. Anyone will tell you the way. You’re jolly lucky to have the railway.”
With a kindly smile the R.T.O. turned his attention to the next claimant.
Rather dubious about his good fortune, Hugh returned to the railhead, to be informed by a military policeman that the train was due any minute.
“There’s no time for me to get anything to eat, then? “He had existed the whole day on nothing more substantial than the small packet of sandwiches issued to him at the Base depot.
The policeman was somewhat shocked at the implied suggestion that military railheads possessed restaurants.
“Oh no, sir, there be no time for that. Train’s due any minute, it’s the only train to-night. You can’t afford to miss it. Let’s see, where be you going? Rideau, sir? Then you’ll have to change at Lillecourt.”
“The R.T.O. told me to change at Langeais.”
“Oh no, sir, no. Lillecourt. It’s much nearer. ‘Ere, Bill!” he shouted to a perspiring orderly. “What be the nearest place for Rideau?”
“Oh, ah should think as ‘ow Millemont were,” replied Bill, without looking up from the floorboard he was scrubbing. “Or else Fleurville. One of the two, any’ow.”
Hugh looked at the Sergeant hopelessly.
“Where am I to get out?”
“Can’t say as ‘ow it matters much, sir. They be all close enough anyway. I’m for Lillecourt myself. But each man to ‘is own opinion.”
With this final expression of a philosophy of general toleration, the Sergeant departed to a Y.M.C.A. canteen, leaving Hugh seated on his valise, to grow hungrier and hungrier every minute, as he watched the raindrops splash in the muddy puddles.
The train did not arrive till ten minutes past nine. It was not a train at all; a collection of four open trucks. But Hugh could not have welcomed the Golden Arrow with greater relish. He shouldered his valise on to a truck, and climbed in after it; cheered by the Sergeant, who, having deceived and deserted him for upwards of two hours, arrived at the last moment in eager expectation of largesse with the useful information that on the whole he had best get out at Maintenant-Les-Loges.
If this were a game of “Old Maid” one of the players had cheated somewhere, Hugh suspected. One or other of the R.T.O.’s instead of passing on the unwanted card to his next door neighbour, had dropped it underneath the table and made an end of the business altogether.
“I suppose I shall get somewhere, sometime,” he reflected.
He was to feel dubious on this point later, after forty shivering minutes in an open truck when he and his valise were deposited at Langeais. He was assured that he would find Rideau without any difficulty. A corporal in the R.E.’s promised to look after his valise till his own company had time to collect it in the mess cart. The mess cart did find it in the end, but it wore a depleted look. Everyone seemed anxious for him to start as speedily as possible. It was just down the main road; less than two kilometres; twenty minutes’ walk at the outside.
Hopefully Hugh set out.
Soon he caught a glimpse through the moon-struck dusk of houses and roofs and gables. There rose before him visions of food, a bed, and rest.
But the game of “Old Maid” was only to begin in earnest. Rideau was one of the villages from which, after heavy fighting, the Germans had retreated only a few months back. There remained of it nothing but broken walls and leaning arches. In the dark, it presented an appearance of complete and utter desolation. There were no signs of life. Hugh had thought that as soon as he reached Rideau his odyssey would be completed. He now saw that it had only just begun.
Of the 305th M.G. Company there were no signs. Nor were there any signs of recognizably human habitation. After twenty minutes stumbling among stone-strewn paths he saw a light glimmering beneath a particularly dilapidated outhouse. With hope reborn, he beat on the door and pushed it open.
It was the quarters of the regimental S.M. of the 24th Westshire Regiment.
“I say, do you know where the 305th M.G. Company is?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, look here; can I see any of your officers? They might know.”
The S.M. drew himself to his full height. He was an old regular and a guardsman. He was not used to being woken up in the middle of the night by every new army officer who chose to walk in. It was out of order.
“I’m sorry, sir, it can’t be done.”
“But look here.… I mean … can’t I see the adjutant or someone?”
“It can’t be done, sir, it can’t be done.”
Hugh, realizing that he could gather nothing from this relic of reaction, turned dismally to the deserted street. Under a farther light a group of gunners were playing Crown and Anchor. No, they didn’t know nothing about no Machine Guns, “but Bill at the cookhouse, ‘e might know summat. ‘Is brother was a machine gu
nner.”
Not so hopefully now, Hugh sought the cookhouse. “No,” said Bill, “I don’t know where they could be. My brother ‘e’s in the 323rd; but they’re in England still. I dunno I’m sure, but the Corporal of the gas guard might tell ’ee. ’E do know more than I do about these things.”
The Corporal of the gas guard was equally vague. He thought there were some Machine Guns somewhere in Rideau; but where they were he didn’t know. Hugh thanked him with frigid gratitude. He had read that a soldier’s first night in the line was an unforgettable experience. It was.
He wandered on. A mounted Captain assured him that he would find Brigade Headquarters second on the right, and third on the left, that they would be able to tell him there for certain. But it was not very helpful information, for in the dark it was impossible to tell the difference between a track, a disused tradesman’s entrance, and a gap between two battered houses. After following innumerable blind alleys and tripping over countless wires, he was unable to discover the point from which he had started, so that “second on the right and third on the left” became as useful a guide as longitudinal bearings would be to a mariner without a compass.
But a limit is set to the longest pilgrimage. At last even the most weather-beaten Ulysses sees the white crags of his long-loved Ithaca. Shortly after one o’clock there came upon Hugh’s ears the well-known pop-pop-pop of the Vickers Gun. Eagerly he hurried in the direction of the sound. The Company Headquarters dug-out loomed a few yards beyond the gun emplacement.
“At last,” he thought. “At last!”
At last he would be able to get some food, a bed and sleep. He marched smartly into the dug-out. Recollecting quickly all he had been taught at the Inns of Court about reporting himself to his unit, he clicked his spurs and heels together, gave the regulation salute and rapped out: