“Sergeant Cunninghame!”
“Sir!”
“Take this man’s name for insubordination also.”
“Very good, sir!”
The sergeant-major looks at Gray again. “And I’ll see that you get the penal battalion, my man. Fall in!”
Gray turns without haste and returns to his place in ranks, the sergeant-major watching him. The sergeant-major raises his voice again:
“Sergeant Cunninghame!”
“Sir!”
“You did not take that man’s name when ordered. Let that happen again and you’ll be for it yourself.”
“Very good, sir!”
“Carry on!” the sergeant-major says.
“But why did ye no shave?” the corporal asked him. They were back in billets: a stone barn with leprous walls, where no light entered, squatting in the ammoniac air on wet straw about a reeking brazier. “Ye kenned we were for inspection thae mor-rn.”
“A am nae auld enough tae shave,” Gray said.
“But ye kenned thae colonel would mar-rk ye on parade.”
“A am nae auld enough tae shave,” Gray repeated doggedly and without heat.
III
“For two hundred years,” Matthew Gray said, “there’s never a day, except Sunday, has passed but there is a hull rising on Clyde or a hull going out of Clydemouth with a Gray-driven nail in it.” He looked at young Alec across his steel spectacles, his neck bowed. “And not excepting their godless Sabbath hammering and sawing either. Because if a hull could be built in a day, Grays could build it,” he added with dour pride. “And now, when you are big enough to go down to the yards with your grandadder and me and take a man’s place among men, to be trusted manlike with hammer and saw yersel.”
“Whisht, Matthew,” old Alec said. “The lad can saw as straight a line and drive as mony a nail a day as yersel or even me.”
Matthew paid his father no attention. He continued to speak his slow, considered words, watching his oldest son across the spectacles. “And with John Wesley not old enough by two years, and wee Matthew by ten, and your grandfather an auld man will soon be—”
“Whisht,” old Alec said. “I’m no but sixty-eight. Will you be telling the lad he’ll make his bit journey to London and come back to find me in the parish house, mayhap? ’Twill be over by Christmastide.”
“Christmastide or no,” Matthew said, “a Gray, a shipwright, has no business at an English war.”
“Whisht ye,” old Alec said. He rose and went to the chimney cupboard and returned, carrying a box. It was of wood, dark and polished with age, the corners bound with iron, and fitted with an enormous iron lock which any child with a hairpin could have solved. From his pocket he took an iron key almost as big as the lock. He opened the box and lifted carefully out a small velvet-covered jeweler’s box and opened it in turn. On the satin lining lay a medal, a bit of bronze on a crimson ribbon: a Victoria Cross. “I kept the hulls going out of Clydemouth while your uncle Simon was getting this bit of brass from the Queen,” old Alec said. “I heard naught of complaint. And if need be, I’ll keep them going out while Alec serves the Queen a bit himsel. Let the lad go,” he said. He put the medal back into the wooden box and locked it. “A bit fighting winna hurt the lad. If I were his age, or yours either, for that matter, I’d gang mysel. Alec, lad, hark ye. Ye’ll see if they’ll no take a hale lad of sixty-eight and I’ll gang wi ye and leave the auld folk like Matthew to do the best they can. Nay, Matthew; dinna ye thwart the lad; have no the Grays ever served the Queen in her need?”
So young Alec went to enlist, descending the hill on a weekday in his Sunday clothes, with a New Testament and a loaf of homebaked bread tied in a handkerchief. And this was the last day’s work which old Alec ever did, for soon after that, one morning Matthew descended the hill to the shipyard alone, leaving old Alec at home. And after that, on the sunny days (and sometimes on the bad days too, until his daughter-in-law found him and drove him back into the house) he would sit shawled in a chair on the porch, gazing south and eastward, calling now and then to his son’s wife within the house: “Hark now. Do you hear them? The guns.”
“I hear nothing,” the daughter-in-law would say. “It’s only the sea at Kinkeadbight. Come into the house, now. Matthew will be displeased.”
“Whisht, woman. Do you think there is a Gray in the world could let off a gun and me not know the sound of it?”
They had a letter from him shortly after he enlisted, from England, in which he said that being a soldier, England, was different from being a shipwright, Clydeside, and that he would write again later. Which he did, each month or so, writing that soldiering was different from building ships and that it was still raining. Then they did not hear from him for seven months. But his mother and father continued to write him a joint letter on the first Monday of each month, letters almost identical with the previous one, the previous dozen:
We are well. Ships are going out of Clyde faster than they can sink them. You still have the Book?
This would be in his father’s slow, indomitable hand. Then, in his mother’s:
Are you well? Do you need anything? Jessie and I are knitting the stockings and will send them. Alec, Alec.
He received this one during the seven months, during his term in the penal battalion, forwarded to him by his old corporal, since he had not told his people of his changed life. He answered it, huddled among his fellow felons, squatting in the mud with newspapers buttoned inside his tunic and his head and feet wrapped in strips of torn blanket:
I am well. Yes I still have the Book (not telling them that his platoon was using it to light tobacco with and that they were now well beyond Lamentations).
It still rains. Love to Grandadder and Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley.
Then his time in the penal battalion was up. He returned to his old company, his old platoon, finding some new faces, and a letter:
We are well. Ships are going out of Clyde yet. You have a new sister. Your Mother is well.
He folded the letter and put it away. “A see mony new faces in thae battalion,” he said to the corporal. “We ha a new sair-rgeant-major too, A doot not?”
“Naw,” the corporal said. “ ’Tis the same one.” He was looking at Gray, his gaze intent, speculative; his face cleared. “Ye ha shaved thae mor-rn,” he said.
“Ay,” Gray said. “Am auld enough tae shave noo.”
That was the night on which the battalion was to go up to Arras. It was to move at midnight, so he answered the letter at once:
I am well. Love to Grandadder and Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and the baby.
“Morning! Morning!” The General, lap-robed and hooded, leans from his motor and waves his gloved hand and shouts cheerily to them as they slog past the car on the Bapaume road, taking the ditch to pass.
“A’s a cheery auld card,” a voice says.
“Awfficers,” a second drawls; he falls to cursing as he slips in the greaselike mud, trying to cling to the crest of the kneedeep ditch.
“Aweel,” a third says, “thae awfficers wud gang tae thae war-r too, A doot not.”
“Why dinna they gang then?” a fourth says. “Thae war-r is no back that way.”
Platoon by platoon they slip and plunge into the ditch and drag their heavy feet out of the clinging mud and pass the halted car and crawl terrifically onto the crown of the road again: “A says tae me, a says: ‘Fritz has a new gun that will carry to Par-ris,’ a says, and A says tae him: ‘ ’Tis nawthin: a has one that will hit our Cor-rps Headquar-rters.’ ”
“Morning! Morning!” The General continues to wave his glove and shout cheerily as the battalion detours into the ditch and heaves itself back onto the road again.
They are in the trench. Until the first rifle explodes in their faces, not a shot has been fired. Gray is the third man. During all the while that they crept between flares from shellhole to shellhole, he has been working himself nearer to the sergeant-major and the Office
r; in the glare of that first rifle he can see the gap in the wire toward which the Officer was leading them, the moiled rigid glints of the wire where bullets have nicked the mud and rust from it, and against the glare the tall, leaping shape of the sergeant-major. Then Gray, too, springs bayonet first into the trench full of grunting shouts and thudding blows.
Flares go up by dozens now; in the corpse glare Gray sees the sergeant-major methodically tossing grenades into the next traverse. He runs toward him, passing the Officer leaning, bent double, against the fire step. The sergeant-major has vanished beyond the traverse. Gray follows and comes upon the sergeant-major. Holding the burlap curtain aside with one hand, the sergeant-major is in the act of tossing a grenade into a dugout as if he might be tossing an orange hull into a cellar.
The sergeant-major turns in the rocket glare. “ ’Tis you, Gray,” he says. The earth-muffled bomb thuds; the sergeant-major is in the act of catching another bomb from the sack about his neck as Gray’s bayonet goes into his throat. The sergeant-major is a big man. He falls backward, holding the rifle barrel with both hands against his throat, his teeth glaring, pulling Gray with him. Gray clings to the rifle. He tries to shake the speared body on the bayonet as he would shake a rat on an umbrella rib.
He frees the bayonet. The sergeant-major falls. Gray reverses the rifle and hammers its butt into the sergeant-major’s face, but the trench floor is too soft to supply any resistance. He glares about. His gaze falls upon a duckboard upended in the mud. He drags it free and slips it beneath the sergeant-major’s head and hammers the face with his rifle-butt. Behind him in the first traverse the Officer is shouting: “Blow your whistle, Sergeant-major!”
IV
In the citation it told how Private Gray, on a night raid, one of four survivors, following the disablement of the Officer and the death of all the N.C.O.’s, took command of the situation and (the purpose of the expedition was a quick raid for prisoners); held a foot-hold in the enemy’s front line until a supporting attack arrived and consolidated the position. The Officer told how he ordered the men back out, ordering them to leave him and save themselves, and how Gray appeared with a German machine gun from somewhere and, while his three companions built a barricade, overcame the Officer and took from him his Very pistol and fired the colored signal which called for the attack; all so quickly that support arrived before the enemy could counterattack or put down a barrage.
It is doubtful if his people ever saw the citation at all. Anyway, the letters which he received from them during his sojourn in hospital, the tenor of them, were unchanged: “We are well. Ships are still going out.”
His next letter home was once more months late. He wrote it when he was sitting up again, in London:
I have been sick but I am better now. I have a ribbon like in the box but not all red. The Queen was there. Love to Grandadder and Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and the baby.
The reply was written on Friday:
Your mother is glad that you are better. Your grandfather is dead. The baby’s name is Elizabeth. We are well. Your mother sends her love.
His next letter was three months later, in winter again:
My hurt is well. I am going to a school for officers. Love to Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
Matthew Gray pondered over this letter for a long while; so long that the reply was a week late, written on the second Monday instead of the first. He wrote it carefully, waiting until his family was in bed. It was such a long letter, or he had been at it so long, that after a time his wife came into the room in her night-dress.
“Go back to bed,” he told her. “I’ll be coming soon. ’Tis something to be said to the lad.”
When at last he laid the pen down and sat back to reread the letter, it was a long one, written out slowly and deliberately and without retraction or blot:
… your bit ribbon … for that way lies vainglory and pride. The pride and vainglory of going for an officer. Never miscall your birth, Alec. You are not a gentleman. You are a Scottish shipwright. If your grandfather were here he would not be last to tell you so.… We are glad your hurt is well. Your mother sends her love.
He sent home the medal, and his photograph in the new tunic with the pips and ribbon and the barred cuffs. But he did not go home himself. He returned to Flanders in the spring, with poppies blowing in the churned beet- and cabbage-fields. When his leaves came, he spent them in London, in the haunts of officers, not telling his people that he had any leave.
He still had the Book. Occasionally he came upon it among his effects and opened it at the jagged page where his life had changed:… and a voice said, Peter, raise thyself; kill—
Often his batman would watch him as, unawares and oblivious, he turned the Book and mused upon the jagged page—the ranker, the gaunt, lonely man with a face that belied his years or lack of them: a sobriety, a profound and mature calm, a grave and deliberate conviction of expression and gesture (“like a mout be Haig hersel,” the batman said)—watching him at his clean table, writing steadily and slowly, his tongue in his cheek as a child writes:
I am well. It has not rained in a fortnight. Love to Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
Four days ago the battalion came down from the lines. It has lost its major and two captains and most of the subalterns, so that now the remaining captain is major, and two subalterns and a sergeant have the companies. Meanwhile, replacements have come up, the ranks are filled, and the battalion is going in again tomorrow. So today K Company stands with ranks open for inspection while the subaltern-captain (his name is Gray) moves slowly along each platoon front.
He passes from man to man, slowly, thoroughly, the sergeant behind him. He stops.
“Where is your trenching tool?” he says.
“Blawn—” the soldier begins. Then he ceases, staring rigidly before him.
“Blawn out of your pack, eh?” the captain finishes for him. “Since when? What battles have ye taken par-rt in since four days?”
The soldier stares rigidly across the drowsy street. The captain moves on. “Take his name, Sergeant.”
He moves on to the second platoon, to the third. He halts again. He looks the soldier up and down.
“What is your name?”
“010801 McLan, sir-r.”
“Replacement?”
“Replacement, sir-r.”
The captain moves on. “Take his name, Sergeant. Rifle’s filthy.”
The sun is setting. The village rises in black silhouette against the sunset; the river gleams in mirrored fire. The bridge across the river is a black arch upon which slowly and like figures cut from black paper, men are moving.
The party crouches in the roadside ditch while the captain and the sergeant peer cautiously across the parapet of the road. “Do ye make them out?” the captain says in a low voice.
“Huns, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers. “A ken their-r helmets.”
Presently the column has crossed the bridge. The captain and the sergeant crawl back into the ditch, where the party crouches, among them a wounded man with a bandaged head. “Keep yon man quiet, now,” the captain says.
He leads the way along the ditch until they reach the outskirts of the village. Here they are out of the sun, and here they sit quietly beneath a wall, surrounding the wounded man, while the captain and the sergeant again crawl away. They return in five minutes. “Fix bayonets,” the sergeant says in a low voice. “Quiet, now.”
“Wull A stay wi thae hur-rt lad, Sair-rgent?” one whispers.
“Nay,” the sergeant says. “A’ll tak’s chance wi us. Forrard.”
They steal quietly along the wall, behind the captain. The wall approaches at right angles to the street, the road which crosses the bridge. The captain raises his hand. They halt and watch him as he peers around the corner. They are opposite the bridgehead. It and the road are deserted; the village dreams quietly in the setting sun. Against the sky beyond the village the dust of the re
treating column hangs, turning to rose and gold.
Then they hear a sound, a short, guttural word. Not ten yards away and behind a ruined wall leveled breast-high and facing the bridge, four men squat about a machine gun. The captain raises his hand again. They grasp their rifles: a rush of hobnails on cobblestones, a cry of astonishment cut sharply off; blows, short, hard breaths, curses; not a shot.
The man with the bandaged head begins to laugh, shrilly, until someone hushes him with a hand that tastes like brass. Under the captain’s direction they bash in the door of the house and drag the gun and the four bodies into it. They hoist the gun upstairs and set it up in a window looking down upon the bridgehead. The sun sinks further, the shadows fall long and quiet across village and river. The man with the bandaged head babbles to himself.
Another column swings up the road, dogged and orderly beneath coalhod helmets. It crosses the bridge and passes on through the village. A party detaches itself from the rear of the column and splits into three squads. Two of them have machine guns, which they set up on opposite sides of the street, the near one utilizing the barricade behind which the other gun had been captured. The third squad returns to the bridge, carrying sappers’ tools and explosive. The sergeant tells off six of the nineteen men, who descend the stairs silently. The captain remains with the gun in the window.
Again there is a brief rush, a scuffle, blows. From the window the captain sees the heads of the machinegun crew across the street turn, then the muzzle of the gun swings, firing. The captain rakes them once with his gun, then he sweeps with it the party on the bridge, watching it break like a covey of quail for the nearest wall. The captain holds the gun on them. They wilt running and dot the white road and become motionless. Then he swings the gun back to the gun across the street. It ceases.
These 13 (1931) Page 2