The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  “Rations up!” cried someone.

  There was a surge forward; the men clustered round the bulging sandbag.

  The Corporal got hold of the mail and began to read the names out.

  “Parker—Griffiths—Parker —Parker—Evans—Parker —the man must write letters to himself—Jones—Fitzgerald. No parcels. That’s the lot.”

  Parker retired to read his letters; the remainder of the men stood round while the Corporal unpacked the sandbag.

  “Bacon—good bit of bacon; two tins of jam; no butter; sugar, tea. Now ’ow many loaves are there? Let’s see—six—’arf a loaf a man; that’s good. Meat—oh, bloody hell, it’s bully!”

  The men, quite forgetting the generosity of the bread ration, cursed the ration as “bloody awful” and went back to their several jobs.

  The night’s work started; as it had for the last ten nights, in the same routine. Sometimes there was a traverse to be widened, sometimes a gun position to be dug, sometimes, as to-night, a dug-out that had fallen in to be repaired. But it amounted invariably to the same thing; digging and filling sandbags.

  Slowly the hours passed. It was a very quiet part of the line. An occasional machine-gun bullet fizzed over the men’s heads, to bury itself in the bank behind them. But it was safe, as far as any spot could be called safe that was within range of German guns. So far the section had been in the line ten days and had not had a single casualty.

  For the first hour or two the men worked cheerily enough, talking and laughing together. Their conversation ran along the usual lines. There were anecdotes of past battles, of hazards that had been shared together. They talked about their chances of leave; what they would do when they got home … après la guerre.

  For the first hour or so they worked and gossiped happily. But as the night passed their jokes lost their flavour, conversation flagged; for the most part they worked in silence. They were tired now, unutterably tired; of their work, of their surroundings, of a war which was sapping their years of youth, which seemed unending. They remembered the comforts of ordinary life: sheets, pillows, tablecloths, the routine of an office that once had seemed so irksome, the intimacies of love; all the things that they had once had and might never enjoy again.

  Only Walker talked. He was the gun team’s grouser and on the whole they were grateful to him for saying what they felt and were too lazy, too tired to say; or that they thought they shouldn’t say; or that they were glad he had said so that they could tell him to shut up, could argue against him and by adducing arguments to disprove contentions that they knew were justified, might actually succeed in persuading themselves that things were not as bad as they believed them, and indeed knew them to be. They cursed at Walker, his incompetence, his laziness, his complaints; but they knew very well that they would miss him desperately if he were to go.

  As there are those who conduct their entire lives eating, reading, talking, making love, to the sound of music—that is to say, with the Radio turned on—so the gun teams worked through the long night with the river of Walker’s vituperation flowing round them. He cursed the war, the army, the general staff, the machine gun corps, the 131st Division, the 305th Machine Gun Company, its third section and, in particular, the second gun team. He cursed the life he had to lead, and the men he led it with. He was bored, bored sick, with the whole business. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get away from it. Anything for a change. The salient was better. The infantry was better. He was going to be an air mechanic. No, he was going to train as a groom for the R.G.A. Anything for a change, any bloody thing, any per bloody thing. His voice flowed on in an even, unhastened flow. It had a singularly soothing effect upon the minds and spirits of Corporal Player’s gun team.

  Towards one o’clock the sentry’s suddenly rapped-out challenge announced the nightly visit of the section officers. A minute later Tallent’s voice was enquiring for Walker.

  “No, Walker, don’t be alarmed,” he said. “It isn’t trouble this time. Mr. Balliol was wondering if you would care to be his runner.”

  Walker drew himself up. The post of runner was a very envied one. You were with an officer all the time. You shared his dugout with his servant. You got good food. You had variety. You were always being sent with messages to details. It was interesting work. It was safer than most jobs. It was a considerable tribute to be singled out for it. Walker savoured to the full the superiority that it gave him over his astonished fellows. He looked down on them with a supercilious contempt. Then he shook his head.

  “It’s very good of you, sir. But … well, I dunno … I’ve sort of got used to things ‘ere with the boys.”

  He spoke as though he were being asked to leave a party he was enjoying.

  But the moment the officers were out of earshot he resumed his litany of wrath. One by one he enumerated the articles of his hate. The war: the army: the general staff, the machine gun corps: the 131st Division, the 305th Machine Gun Company: the third section and its second gun team: the corporal, the members; that a man should have to endure such company.

  Further down the trench Hugh was turning to Tallent with some surprise.

  “Doesn’t that rather surprise you?” he asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “I should have thought he would have jumped at a softish and certainly quite pleasant job.”

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about the old soldier if you think that.”

  VI

  In England Hugh had imagined that he would find trench life utterly different from the parade ground atmosphere. He was surprised to find how alike it was. There was a difference of atmosphere that made soldiering in France infinitely preferable. In England everyone in authority from a Lance-Corporal upwards behaved as though his immediate junior in rank was trying to shirk his job. In France it was assumed that he was trying. There was an atmosphere of trust, as opposed to distrust; a soldier in the line had two concerns: to get on with his job, the one job that in war-time mattered; and to help the other man to get on with his. In the fighting areas every soldier, from a private to a divisional general, did his best to make things easy for anyone accepted as “a member of the show.” In England everything had been done to make things difficult. Before he had been a week in the line he was to contrast this atmosphere of friendliness and co-operation with the bullying non-commissioned officers of the Inns of Court; the War Office bureaucrats, the depot adjutants; all the people with soft jobs who meant to keep them, who enveloped their activities with a threat: “There’ll be trouble for you if you don’t do this;” as though the soldiers and officers under their command had not enlisted of their own free will. In France there was a freemasonry of friendship and co-operation between all “fighting area” soldiers.

  There was that big difference between soldiering in England and in France. There was a difference also of routine. Night became day, day night. You lived in a dug-out instead of in a tent; in Nissen huts instead of barracks; the days of the week had no significance. You did not know whether it was Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You judged time by the number of days you had been in the line. For nights on end you would never wear pyjamas. There were all those and innumerable other surface differences. But such differences were of kind, but not of order. The routine of the line and rest billets was another branch of military life.

  Hugh in a very little while adapted himself to the changed atmosphere. It boiled down to the same things. There were inspections of the men and their equipment; seeing that they did not lose discipline in the line. There was his care for their comfort. There was the maintenance of his prestige in the men’s eyes by personal smartness, by occasional proof that he not only knew his job but theirs as well; the slow forging of a bond of sympathy by little remarks and questions, proving that each one of them had a separate and personal significance for him; so that they would not merely respect his uniform; but recognize in him a friend and leader. All that was exactly as it had been in the barrack-room atmosphere of Grantha
m.

  There was his relationship with his senior officers. As a subsection, and later as a section officer, he was far more on his own than he had ever been in barracks. For three or four days on end he would not see his immediate superior. Yet there was a constant feeling of supervision. There were the daily reports to be sent down to Company headquarters. There was the knowledge that at any moment a visit might be expected; that everything must be in order for that visit. The Germans were less than half a mile away; from the artillery observation post he could see their curved helmets moving along an exposed trench. Every evening and every morning there was a half-hour of spasmodic shelling. Every few minutes of the night there would be the sharp pop-pop-pop of a traversing machine gun, the whistle of bullets against the parapet. But it was not of the Germans that he thought when he made sure that screens were set to mask the flash of his gun’s fire; when he satisfied himself that the sentries knew their orders; that the guns and their spare parts were in working order. He was under the orders of his own command. He saw that those orders were carried out, not so that his men would be equipped to combat hostile tactics and conceal their own, but that the Company Commander, when he came round the guns, should find everything in the condition that he had ordered. He no more took the Germans into account in the trenches than he had in the Inns of Court operations in Ash ridge Park.

  When they were out of the line in rest billets or in Nissen huts there were the same tactics of smartening up to which troops back from musketry courses or autumn manœuvres had been subjected: the recall to the discipline of the parade ground; of shining buttons; of heels clicked and wrists banged on magazines; that tightening up which the townsman finds so necessary when he returns to his chambers in Albany after a month in Cornwall.

  And though there was no longer the relaxation of London and its week-end leaves, there was an equivalent in the day passes to Amiens, and the occasional dinners at the cafés that were turning to rich profit their proprietors’ resolve to remain within distance of the guns. Though he was within sight of German helmets, Hugh did not feel that he was any nearer to the war, here, than he had been in England. Though his guns discharged daily some hundred rounds of ammunition whose indirect fire was supposed to harass German fatigue parties, he did not feel that he was so much on active service, engaged in warfare, as conducting the job of soldiering in another place.

  And here, just as in England, he found that his main concern, his main interests, were the personal relations of his fellow officers. In particular those of Rickman and Frank Tallent. They were the most vital personalities in the mess; it was with them that he was brought most in contact; especially with Tallent. At the start, he was his sub-section officer. Later, when he had a section of his own, it invariably happened that their two sections were in line together and at rest together. In the line they formed the habit of dropping in on one another two or three times a week. When they were back in billets they sought each other’s company, arranging their day passes to Amiens and their experiments in French cooking at back area estaminets.

  For Hugh his companionship with Tallent was as big a widening of horizons as the change from school to University had been. He saw the world from another angle. It was not that Tallent was informative in talk, or that he was indeed a particularly good conversationalist. He was not. He would talk very quickly, so quickly as to be almost inaudible; then pause, stammer, start off with a rush again, as though his thoughts moved faster than his powers of expressing them; as though he were unwilling to use a word that did not express his exact meaning, but could not find that word without deliberation; as though he were thinking as he talked. Oddly enough, since as a novelist he had a very real gift of narrative, he recounted an anecdote extremely badly. He seemed always to be in a hurry to get to the end quickly; as though he were afraid that he were boring his audience. Only occasionally did he speak fluently and clearly, and then it was without the eager flicker in his eyes; as though he had made up his mind about the matter, knew the exact phrase, with which to convey his meaning, but had lost interest in what was already settled for him. It was not new things, but a new way of seeing things that Hugh learnt from Tallent.

  Tallent was in the middle thirties. He was ambitious. He had earned a measure of success. He wanted more success. Yet he had no use for the success that was not of the precise nature of his seeking. He enjoyed the tributaries of success: money, position, fame; yet he could dispense with them. He regarded as means the things that other men regarded as an end. He judged men and matters by the standard of an unworldliness that Hugh had previously associated with eccentrics, neurasthenics, people weak in health, devitalized, who despised what lay beyond their grasp. Tallent did not depise material success; he was thoroughly, healthily capable of enjoying its rewards. But he set no great store by it. He regarded success as the best kind of athlete regards the actual result of a game: as something to be striven at during the game; but not to be brooded over, before and after; as ultimately unimportant.

  But there were other things which he did not look on as a game.

  It was this indifference to what constitutes for the majority an aim in life that was responsible, not actually for an unpopularity in the mess—that would be to put it too strongly—but the fact that he was not particularly liked. Not one of the men would actually admit the fact, a loyalty to the members of one’s mess forbade that. They would drop such remarks as, “Odd fellow. Moody. I suppose he must find it rather strange being in a place like this, after the kind of life he must have led before.” They called him moody because very often, in contrast to his usual restlessness, he would sit silent and immobile, staring in front of him, apparently at nothing. Hugh, who knew him best, felt that it was at such times that he was most close to happiness.

  But it was not his moodiness that set him apart from the others, nor did his position in the public eye make the rest jealous. The company of even a minor celebrity would have been a kind of privilege. They would have enjoyed discussing his peculiarities with officers from other companies. Nor did the fact that before the war he had mixed in a world different from their own, create an obstacle. With all that they could have coped.

  “Rum fellow,” they would have said. “Moody, you know; sits silent for hours on end, thinking out his novels, I suppose. Odd the way you meet fellows through the war that ordinarily you’d never be within a mile of. I suppose a fellow like Tallent spent all his time with literary blokes, painters, long-haired poets and the kind of women who take up birds like that. You’d never think it, though, to look at him; seems like everybody else.”

  There was no limit to the peculiarities that the new army were ready to overlook. They would even have overlooked it had he been a weakling, had he been inefficient, had he been unable to keep discipline in his section. “Poor devil, he wasn’t built for this kind of life. We do our best to let him down lightly.” But he was none of those things. He was as efficient as they were; as competent, as worldly, as able to cope with wordly problems; for the matter of fact, able to advise most of them on the practical management of their lives. What puzzled Tallent’s brother officers was his indifference to the things they set most store by. The fact of his indifference, never stated, but implied irresistibly in his manner, in the same way that in his novels he implied but never stated his own opinions, conveyed to his fellow officers a criticism of their absorption in interests that to him seemed trivial. They were worried by his aloofness. They never felt quite at ease in his company. They were always happier when he was away. When he left the mess the others shifted in their chairs with a sense of relief, a prospect of comfort; as one does when the window that was causing a draught is closed.

  Rickman alone spoke of him with enthusiasm.

  “He’s a grand fellow; first-class officer; first-class writer; maybe he takes a little knowing, but when you’ve once taken the trouble to break the ice, there’s no one like him.”

  He spoke with an extreme heartiness; but that se
lf-consciousness which Hugh had noticed when Rickman first talked to him about his poetry was always liable to reappear in Tallent’s presence. His attitude towards Tallent was a mixture of mental respect and emotional dislike. Hugh once found him reading Tallent’s latest novel. It was a short book: the study of a couple of late Victorian spinsters; punctilious, undramatic; with a close care for detail; the elaborate recreation of a setting, to which Tallent during a period of training in England had turned for relief from the heavily emotionalized atmosphere of the hour. It was a book addressed to a public that, small in peace time, was necessarily minute in war. It was published unobtrusively, was dropped out of the advertisements after a week, was referred to by the general press as “a relaxation from Mr. Tallent’s more usual and more important work,” but that was treated at length and with respect by those reviewers who regarded the publication of a new book not as news but as an intended contribution to literature.

  Rickman put the book down as Hugh came into the mess.

  “There’s no doubt about it. This man can write,” he said.

  It was said almost grudgingly, as though he would have been relieved if he could have taken the general view, have found it dull and trivial, so that he could have said, “He’s a dull, trivial fellow. Why should I care what he thinks of me?” For he knew that he bored and exasperated Tallent by the interminable production of poems from his tunic pocket. It infuriated him to see on Tallent’s face that look of condescension, to hear his wearily articulated “Yes, I like that” as he handed back the poem. At such moments he hated Tallent. He would have given a great deal to be able to despise what he disliked. But his good taste and his intellectual honesty would not allow him to do that. He tried to persuade himself that he really liked Tallent, because his inability to like a man of merit would have been a proof of deficiency in himself. Because he had so high an opinion of Tallent’s work, because he was proud to be able to recognize there qualities that the many could not see, he more than ever wished to earn Tallent’s approval for his sonnets. He knew that Tallent admired him as a soldier and on the whole liked him as a man. But it was not personal affection, it was not respect for himself as a soldier, but tribute to him as a poet that Rickman wanted. Every time he wrote a sonnet he thought “Now, surely this is good. Surely Tallent will notice that it is.” When he received a letter from the editor of The Poetry Magazine: “Dear Captain Rickman, I am delighted with your sonnet sequence. It will make a fine contribution to our special ‘On Active Service’ number that we are preparing for October,” or better still, when a proof from the Saturday Westminster or a cheque from Country Life proved that he had been admitted to the columns where not only was poetry paid for, but which established poets accepted as a platform, “Surely Tallent will be impressed by that.” He did not know whether he was more angry or disappointed when Tallent handed it back, after a moment’s cursory perusal, with his habitual bored “Yes, I like that.”