by None
It was only an orchard, to look at; all ancient apple-trees, dead straight in the stem, with fat, wet grass underneath, a little unhealthy in colour for want of more sun. Six feet above ground the lowest apple boughs all struck out level, and kept so; some beasts, gone in our time, must have eaten every leaf that tried to grow lower. So the under side of the boughs made a sort of flat awning or roof. We called the layer of air between it and the ground The Six-foot Seam, as we were mostly miners. The light in this seam always appeared to have had something done to it: sifted through branches, refracted, messed about somehow, it was not at all the stuff you wanted just at that time. You see the like of it in an eclipse, when the sun gives a queer wink at the earth round the edge of a black mask. Very nice, too, in its place; but the war itself was quite enough out of the common –falling skies all over the place, and half your dead certainties shaken.
We and the Germans were both in The Garden, and knew it. But nobody showed. Everywhere else on the front somebody showed up at last; somebody fired. But here nothing was seen or heard, ever. You found you were whispering and walking on tip-toe, expecting you didn’t know what. Have you been in a great crypt at twilight under a church, nothing round you but endless thin pillars, holding up a low roof? Suppose there’s a wolf at the far end of the crypt and you alone at the other, staring and staring into the thick of the pillars, and wondering, wondering – round which of the pillars will that grey nose come rubbing?
Why not smash up the silly old spell, you may say – let a good yell, loose a shot, do any sane thing to break out? That’s what I said till we got there. Our unit took over the place from the French. A French platoon sergeant, my opposite number, showed me the quarters and posts and the like, and I asked the usual question, ‘How’s the old Boche?’
‘Mais assez gentil,’2 he pattered. That Gaul was not waiting to chat. While he showed me the bomb-store, he muttered something low, hurried, and blurred –‘Le bon Dieu Boche,’3 I think it was, had created the orchard. The Germans themselves were ‘bons bourgeois’ enough, for all he had seen or heard of them –‘Not a shot in three weeks. Seulement’– he grinned, half-shamefaced and half-confidential, as sergeant to sergeant –‘ne faut pas les embêter.’4
I knew all about that. French sergeants were always like that: dervishes in a fight when it came, but dead set, at all other times, on living paisiblement,5 smoking their pipes. Paisiblement– they love the very feel of the word in their mouths. Our men were no warrior race, but they all hugged the belief that they really were marksmen, not yet found out by the world. They would be shooting all night at clods, at tops of posts, at anything that might pass for a head. Oh, I knew. Or I thought so.
But no. Not a shot all the night. Nor on any other night either. We were just sucked into the hush of The Garden the way your voice drops in a church – when you go in at the door you become part of the system. I tried to think why. Did nobody fire just because in that place it was so easy for anybody to kill? No trench could be dug; it would have filled in an hour with water filtering through from the full stream flanking The Garden. Sentries stood out among the fruit trees, behind little breastworks of sods, like the things you use to shoot grouse. These screens were merely a form; they would scarcely have slowed down a bullet. They were not defences, only symbols of things that were real elsewhere. Everything else in the place was on queer terms with reality; so were they.
Our first event was the shriek. It was absolutely detached, unrelated to anything seen or heard before or soon after, just like the sudden fall of a great tree on a windless day. At three o’clock on a late autumn morning, a calm moonless night, the depths of The Garden in front of our posts yielded a long wailing scream. I was making a round of our posts at the time, and the scream made me think of a kind of dream I had had twice or thrice; not a story dream, but a portrait dream; just a vivid rending vision of the face of some friend with a look on it that made me feel the brute I must have been to have never seen how he or she had suffered, and how little I had known or tried to know. I could not have fancied before that one yell could tell such a lot about anyone. Where it came from there must be some kind of hell going on that went beyond all the hells now in the books, like one of the stars that are still out of sight because the world has not lived long enough to give time for the first ray of light from their blaze to come through to our eyes.
I found the sentries jumpy. ‘What is it, Sergeant?’ one of them almost demanded of me, as if I were the fellow in charge of the devils. ‘There’s no one on earth,’ he said, ‘could live in that misery.’ Toomey himself, the red-headed gamekeeper out of the County Fermanagh, betrayed some perturbation. He hinted that ‘Them wans’ were in it. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Ach, the Good People,’ he said, with a trace of reluctance. Then I remembered, from old days at school, that the Greeks, too, had been careful; they called their Furies ‘The Well-disposed Ladies’.
All the rest of the night there was not a sound but the owls. The sunless day that followed was quiet till 2.30 p.m., when the Hellhound appeared. He came trotting briskly out of the orchard, rounding stem after stem of the fruit trees, leaped our little pretence of barbed wire, and made straight for Toomey, then on guard, as any dog would. It was a young male black-and-tan. It adored Toomey till three, when he was relieved. Then it came capering around him in ecstasy, back to the big living cellar, a hundred yards in the rear. At the door it heard voices within and let down its tail, ready to plead lowliness and contrition before any tribunal less divine than Toomey.
The men, or most of them, were not obtrusively divine just then. They were out to take anything ill that might come. All the hushed days had first drawn their nerves tight, and then the scream had cut some of them. All bawled or squeaked in the cellar, to try to feel natural after the furtive business outside.
‘Gawd a’mighty!’ Looker shrilled at the entry of Toomey, ‘if Fritz ain’t sold ’im a pup!’
Jeers flew from all parts of the smoky half-darkness. ‘Where’s licence, Toomey?’
‘Sure ’e’s clean in th’’ouse?’
‘’Tain’t no Dogs’ ’Ome ’ere. Over the way!’
Corporal Mullen, the ever-friendly, said to Toomey, more mildly, ‘Wot? Goin’ soft?’
‘A daycent dog, Corp,’ said Toomey. ‘He’s bruk wi’ the Kaiser. An’ I’ll engage he’s through the distemper. Like as not he’ll be an Alsatian.’ Toomey retailed these commendations slowly, with pauses between, to let them sink in.
‘What’ll you feed him?’ asked Mullen, inspecting the points of the beast with charity.
‘Feed ’im!’ Looker squealed. ‘Feed ’im into th’ incinerator!’
Toomey turned on him. ‘Aye, an’ be et be the rats!’
‘Fat lot o’ talk about rats,’ growled Brunt, the White Hope, the company’s only prize-fighter. ‘Tha’d think rats were struttin’ down fairway, shovin’ folk off duck-board.’
‘Ah!’ Looker agreed. ‘An’ roostin’ up yer armpit.’
‘Thot’s reet,’ said Brunt.
‘I’ll bet ’arf a dollar,’ said Looker, eyeing the Hellhound malignantly, ‘the ’Uns ’ave loaded ’im up with plague fleas. Sent ’im acrorse. Wiv instructions.’
Toomey protested. ‘Can’t ye see the dog has been hit, ye blind man?’ In fact, the immigrant kept his tail licking expressively under his belly except when it lifted under the sunshine of Toomey’s regard.
Brunt rumbled out slow gloomy prophecies from the gloom of his corner. ‘’E’ll be tearin’’imself t’bits wi’ t’mange in a fortneet. Rat for breakfas’, rat for dinner, rat for tea; bit o’ rat las’ thing at neet, ’fore ’e’ll stretch down to ’t.’
‘An’ that’s the first sinse ye’ve talked,’ Toomey conceded. ‘A rotten diet-sheet is ut. An’ dirt! An’ no kennel the time the roof’ll start drippin’. A dog’s life for a man, an’ God knows what for a dog.’
We felt the force of that. We all had dogs at home. The Hellhound perhaps felt our rut
h in the air like a rise of temperature, for at this point he made a couple of revolutions on his wheel base, to get the pampas-grass of his imagination comfortable about him, and then collapsed in a curve and lay at rest with his nose to the ground and two soft enigmatic gleams from his eyes raking the twilight recesses of our dwelling. For the moment he was relieved of the post of nucleus-in-chief for the vapours of fractiousness to condense upon.
He had a distinguished successor. The company sergeant-major, no less, came round about five minutes after with ‘word from the colonel’. Some mischief, all our hearts told us at once. They were right too. The Corps had sent word – just what it would, we inwardly groaned. The Corps had sent word that GHQ – Old GHQ! At it again! we savagely thought. We knew what was coming. Yes, GHQ wanted to know what German unit was opposite to us. That meant a raid, of course. The colonel couldn’t help it. Like all sane men below brigade staffs, he hated raids. But orders were orders. He did all he could. He sent word that if anyone brought in a German, dead or alive, on his own, by this time to-morrow, he, the colonel, would give him a fiver. Of course nobody could, but it was an offer, meant decently.
Darkness and gnashing of teeth, grunts and snarls of disgust, filled the cellar the moment the CSM had departed. ‘Gawd ’elp us!’ ‘A ride! In The Gawden!’‘ ’Oo says Gawd made gawdens?’ ‘Ow! Everythink in The Gawden is lovely!’ ‘Come into The Gawden, Maud!’ You see, the wit of most of us was not a weapon of precision. Looker came nearest, perhaps, to the point. ‘As if we ’ad a chawnce,’ he said, ‘to gow aht rattin’ Germans, wiv a sack!’
‘We gotten dog for’t ahl reet,’ said Brunt. This was the only audible trace of good humour. Toomey looked at Brunt quickly.
Toomey was destined to trouble that afternoon: one thing came after another. At 3.25 I sent him and Brunt, with a clean sack apiece, to the sergeant-major’s dug-out for the rations. They came back in ten minutes. As Toomey gave me his sack, I feared that I saw a thin train of mixed black and white dust trending across the powdered mortar floor to the door. Then I saw Looker, rage in his face, take a candle and follow this trail, stooping down, and once tasting the stuff on a wet finger-tip.
And then the third storm burst. ‘Christ!’ Looker yelled. ‘If ’e ain’t put the tea in the sack wiv a ’ole in it!’
We all knew that leak in a bottom corner of that special sack as we knew every very small thing in our life of small things – the cracked dixie-lid,6 the brazier’s short leg, the way that Mynns had of clearing his throat, and Brunt of working his jaws before spitting. Of course, the sack was all right for loaves and the tinned stuff. But tea! – loose tea mixed with powdered sugar! It was like loading a patent seed-sowing machine with your fortune in gold-dust. There was a general groan of ‘God help us!’ with extras. In this report I leave out, all along, a great many extras. Print and paper are dear.
Looker was past swearing. ‘Plyin’ a piper-chise!’ he ejaculated with venom. ‘All owver Frawnce! Wiv our grub!’
Toomey was sorely distressed. He, deep in whose heart was lodged the darling vision of Toomey the managing head, the contriver, the ‘ould lad that was in ut’, had bungled a job fit for babes. ‘Ah, then, who could be givin’ his mind to the tea,’ he almost moaned, ‘an’ he with a grand thought in ut?’
At any other time and place the platoon would have settled down, purring, under those words. ‘A grand thought’, ‘a great idaya’ –when Toomey in happier days had owned to being in labour with one of these heirs of his invention, some uncovenanted mercy had nearly always accrued before long to his friends – a stew of young rabbits, two brace of fat pheasants, once a mighty wild goose. The tactician, we understood in a general way, had ‘put the comether upon’ them. Now even those delicious memories were turned to gall. ‘Always the sime!’ Looker snarled at the fallen worker of wonders. ‘Always the sime! Ye cawn’t ’ave a bit o’ wire sived up for pipe-cleanin’ without ’e’ll loan it off yer to go snarin’’ares.’ Looker paused for a moment, gathering all the resources of wrath, and then he swiftly scaled the high top-gallant of ungraciousness: ‘’E wiv the ’ole platoon workin’ awye for ’im, pluckin’ pawtridge an’ snipes, the ’ole wye up from the sea! Top end o’Frawnce is all a muck o’feathers wiv ’im!’
All were good men; Looker, like Toomey, a very good man. It was only their nerves that had gone, and the jolly power of gay and easy relentment after a jar. However they tried, they could not cease yapping. I went out for a drink of clean air. If you are to go on loving mankind, you must take a rest from it sometimes. As I went up the steps from the cellar the rasping jangle from below did not cease; it only sank on my ears as I went. ‘Ow, give us ’Owm Rule for England, Gord’s sike!’‘Sye there ain’t no towds in Irelan’, do they?’ ‘Looker, I’ve tould you I’m sorry, an’–’ ‘Garn, both on yer! Ol’ gas-projectors!’ ‘Begob, if ye want an eye knocked from ye then –! ’I was going back, but then I heard Corporal Mullen, paternal and firm, like Neptune rebuking the winds. ‘Now, then, we don’t none of us want to go losing our heads about nothing.’ No need to trouble. Mullen would see to the children.
I went east, into The Garden. Ungathered apples were going to loss on its trees. I stood looking at one of them for a time, and then it suddenly detached itself and fell to the ground with a little thud and a splash of squashed brown rottenness, as if my eye had plucked it. After that sound the stillness set in again: stillness of autumn, stillness of vigilant fear, and now the stillness of oncoming evening, the nun, to make it more cloistral. No silence so deep but that it can be deepened! As minutes passed, infinitesimal whispers – I think from mere wisps of eddies, twisting round snags in the stream – began to lift into hearing. Deepening silence is only the rise in clearness, of this or that more confidential utterance.
I must have been sucking that confidence in for a good twenty minutes before I turned with a start. I had to, I did not know why. It seemed as if some sense, which I did not know I had got, told me that someone was stealing up behind me. No one there; nothing but Arras, the vacuous city, indistinct among her motionless trees. She always seemed to be listening and frightened. It was as if the haggard creature had stirred.
I looked to my front again, rather ashamed. Was I losing hold too, I wondered, as I gazed level out into the Seam and watched the mist deepening? Each evening that autumn, a quilt of very white mist would come out of the soaked soil of The Garden, lay itself out, flat and dense, but shallow at first, over the grass, and then deepen upward as twilight advanced, first submerging the tips of the grass and the purple snake-headed flowers; and then thickening steadily up till the whole Six-foot Seam was packed with milky opaqueness.
Sixty yards out from our front a heron was standing, immobilized, in the stream, staring down – for a last bit of fishing no doubt. As I watched him, his long head came suddenly round and half up. He listened. He stood like that, warily, for a minute, then seemed to decide it was no place for him, hoisted himself off the ground, and winged slowly away with great flaps. I felt cold, and thought, ‘What a time I’ve been loafing round here!’ But I found it was four o’clock only. I thought I would go on and visit my sentries, the three-o’clock men who would come off duty at five. It would warm me; and one or two of the young ones were apt to be creepy about sundown.
Schofield, the lad in one of our most advanced posts, was waist-deep in the mist when I reached him.
‘Owt, boy?’ I whispered. He was a North-country man.
‘Nowt, Sergeant,’ he answered, ‘barrin’–’ He checked. He was one of the stout ones you couldn’t trust to yell out for help if the Devil were at them.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked pretty sharply.
‘Nobbut t’way,’ he said slowly, ‘they deucks doan’t seem t’be gettin’ down to it to-neet.’ My eye followed his through the boughs to the pallid sky. A flight of wild-duck were whirling and counter-whirling aloft in some odd pas d’inquiétude.7 Yes; no doubt our own ducks that had come during the war, wit
h the herons and snipe, to live in The Garden, the untrodden marsh where, between the two lines of rifles never unloaded, no shot was ever heard and snipe were safe from all snipers. A good lad, Schofield; he took a lot of notice of things. But what possessed the creatures? What terror infested their quarters to-night?
I looked Schofield over. He was as near to dead white as a tanned man can come – that is, a bad yellow. But he could be left. A man that keeps on taking notice of things he can see, instead of imagining ones that he can’t, is a match for the terror that walketh by twilight. I stole on to our most advanced post of all. There I was not so sure of my man. He was Mynns. We called him Billy Wisdom, because he was a schoolmaster in civil life – some council school at Hoggerston. ‘What cheer, Billy?’ I whispered. ‘Anything to report?’
The mist was armpit deep on him now, but the air quite clear above that; so that from three feet off I saw his head and shoulders well, and his bayonet; nothing else at all. He did not turn when I spoke, nor unfix his eyes from the point he had got them set on, in front of his post and a little below their own level. ‘All – quiet – and – correct – Sergeant,’ he said, as if each word were a full load and had to be hauled by itself. I had once seen a man drop his rifle and bolt back overland from his post, to trial and execution and anything rather than that ever-lasting wait for a bayonet’s point to come lunging up out of thick mist in front and a little below him, into the gullet, under the chin. Billy was near bolting-point, I could tell by more senses than one. He was losing hold on one bodily function after another, but still hanging on hard to something, some grip of the spirit that held from second to second, after muscle had mutinied and nerve was gone.