Meanwhile Captain Despard’s servant had brought him a change of uniform, and when both had gone away Phillip was sick.
The next morning, with half-dried tunic and slacks wrapped in a groundsheet within his valise, and wearing a tommy’s tunic with stars on the shoulder straps, he caught the early train to Ipswich. From Liverpool Street station he sent off two telegrams, one to Lt.-Col. West, 2nd Gaultshire Regt., B.E.F., saying he was on his way; the other to his father at Head Office, telling him that he was going overseas, and love to all at home.
*
At the beginning of March the old men on the Hill usually met of a morning in the wood-framed brick shelter near the crest, with its view of the Crystal Palace. Spring was on the way, and the talk about food was more hopeful. The new rationing system allowed 15 oz. of meat, 5 of bacon, 4 of butter or margarine per person per week. And, with rationing, prices were now controlled.
“You know,” said Thomas Turney. “Just as many firms before this war made their profit out of waste, so a lot of these rascals have made their fortunes out of farthings, which they don’t produce, blaming the shortage of coin—11¾d. for a sheep’s head, 1s. 11¾d. for unspecified scraps of meat per pound, ‘three and eleven three’ for steak—now thank the powers that be, all that is a thing of the past.”
The fixed prices for mutton, lamb, and beef were 1s. 10d. the pound, steak 2s. 2d.
Another of the regulars in the shelter was a Mr. Warbeck, understood to be something to do with Admiralty. Thomas Turney did not think much of the fellow, a man about ten years his junior, a mere sixty-nine or so. He was a bit of a fop, dressed invariably in grey frock coat and trousers, grey spats, grey cravat held by pearl pin, starched wing collar, and white slip to his waistcoat. Grey eyes, bushy eyebrows, a precise manner of speech and the sweeping grey moustaches went with the rig-out of fine Edwardian gentlemen—but he crowned it all with a black bowler hat, not exactly de rigeur, even allowing for the war. But it was the fellow’s know-all manner, with which he made pronouncements of odd facts he had read in The Daily Telegraph, and gave out as his own, that riled Thomas Turney, who had to listen with an appearance of attention to what he himself had already read in that paper after breakfast.
What would it be this morning? For Warbeck had taken a piece of folded paper from one pocket, steel-rimmed spectacles from another, and after rubbing the lenses on his grey silk pocket handkerchief, was about to hold forth. Clearing his throat for attention, he said, looking along the three sides of the shelter,
“It may interest you, Mr. Turney, to know that approximately fifteen million farthings were issued by the Royal Mint last year—thrice the number issued in the year immediately preceding the outbreak of war.”
“Extraordinary,” said Thomas Turney. “Now can you tell us, from your experience gained at the Admiralty, how the Food Minister arrived at his total of 9,380 tons of weekly bread waste we see on all the hoardings just now?”
Mr. Warbeck was ready with a reply to this attempt to turn his flank. “I know nothing about the so-called Ministry of Food, Mr. Turney, since my work concerns the compilation of Tables of Logarithms for the use of navigators, published by Mr. Potter, for the Admiralty; but, to reply to your particular question, the jumped-up bigwigs and jacks-in-office in Whitehall have to justify themselves as bureaucrats, and also they have to fill up their days somehow. But my goodness, have you considered the utter idiocy of issuing forty-two tons of farthings in the past eleven months, merely to accommodate the petty profiteers who no longer trouble to offer a packet of pins or a box of safety matches in change—and this at a time, mark you, when there is a serious shortage of copper for the driving bands of shells! Winston Churchill at the Ministry of Munitions would, one can hardly doubt, be most gratified to lay his hands on that copper!”
Then, before Mr. Turney could make a frontal attack on the tedious subject of waste bread, Mr. Warbeck turned to someone across the shelter, who had been sitting quietly attentive, and went on, “Tell me, Mr. McDonagh, you are in Fleet Street, is there any connexion between the sacking of ‘Wullie’ Robertson, our late worthy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and a ranker to boot—or perhaps one should say to be booted, in the sense of his having been hoofed out—and the fact that Lord Derby has been kicked out of the War Office?”
There was modesty in the eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles of the reporter as he spoke, in a voice pleasant with Irish brogue. “I am not on the political side of my paper, so I can hardly speak with authority, Mr. Warbeck, but perhaps it is giving away no secrets when I say that it is generally known in the Street that the considerable friction—which has long existed between the Prime Minister and the Generals—has come to a head. In fact, Sir William Robertson’s removal as C.I.G.S. was considered to be only a preliminary to greater changes—had the P.M. got his way.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Warbeck. “Do I understand that remark to include the possibility that Haig himself may go?”
“That I cannot say, sir. But it is, I think, no exaggeration to say that Lloyd George did consider the replacement of Haig by Plumer—after Haig had refused to take orders from an Extra-ordinary Committee the P.M. wanted to set up to direct the war in France. The Field Marshal is said to have replied—and quite rightly in my opinion—that the man on the spot must decide—not a round-table conference—particularly at a time when the German troops have been set free from the Russian front, and are now known to be arriving in great numbers in France.”
This information had a quietening effect. Then the discreet Mr. McDonagh turned to Thomas Turney and said, “How is your grandson, Mr. Turney? When last you spoke of him, he had just returned from the battle of Cambrai.”
“Oh Phillip, yes, he has now gone back to France—for the fifth time.”
“For the fifth time! He must be possessed of unusual moral fibre, Mr. Turney! Oddly enough, it has often been shown in this war that it is the sensitive type of civilian soldier who has shown himself to possess the greater staying power.”
“Yes, yes,” breathed Mr. Bigge, a near neighbour of Thomas Turney, a quiet inoffensive man. “Pray proceed, Mr. McDonagh.”
“Recently I had to report an Investiture at Buckingham Palace, for my paper. I made it my purpose to take a position near to those who were to receive the Victoria Cross. What, I wondered, was the common denominator in the expressions of these proved heroes? I could determine nothing! There was no characteristic expression, that I could discover. Indeed, I could not help wondering—as I saw the diffidence on some faces, the introspection in the eyes of others—what was the secret of courage. One asks oneself—How far was any one man responsible for the quality of moral fibre, or the lack of it, in his make-up? Abraham Lincoln—you may recall—was reluctant to sanction the execution of soldiers for so-called cowardice in the American Civil War. He used to say that a man could not always control his legs. ‘How do I know that I should not run away myself?’ he once asked.”
“Now I come to think of it,” said Mr. Warbeck, “did not your grandson, Mr. Turney, once tell us, in this very place, that he had run away at the battle of Messines?”
Thomas Turney felt this remark to be offensive. He decided to ignore it. Mr. McDonagh said, “Yes, I remember that occasion, Mr. Warbeck. I thought then, and I think now, that the remark derived from an unformed sense of courage. And—incidentally—from a condition of self-awareness not usually present in one so young!”
“That’s a point of view that I feel Shakespeare would have approved,” replied Thomas Turney, leaning the weight of his shoulders on hands clasping the lemon stick. “The boy’s mother is a brave woman, generous to a fault where others are concerned. I think that when such people have learned to stand up for themselves——” He checked his words; while the hands, their veined backs delicately wrinkled like cooling wax, clasped more tightly the handle of the stick he had brought back from Greece half a lifetime before. “I wonder——,” and he fell into reverie. From thinking of Dick
ie, and of the voice heard so often in complaint of Hetty next door, his memory led him to scenes of his own behaviour towards his dead wife, and inevitably to the awful occasion when he had knocked her down, and poor young Hetty as well. How then could one judge others?
Voices about him were no longer heard. His breathing seemed to struggle with the congestion of so many broken pictures within his mind. When he came out of the chaos of reverie Mr. McDonagh’s voice was saying gently, “Perhaps bravery lies in the blood, and courage is of the mind. Then again, there is the tempering of bravery by courage, which is what we call valour.” The voice held a note of diffidence, for this modest man had been quoting from his second leader written after the Investiture. “But after all is said and done, who can judge of such things? We are as Nature made us. No man can escape from himself all the time. He can, of course, raise the best of himself to the forefront, by the aid of prayer, as many in this war have discovered.” “The mother is the maker of the child’s mind, I fancy,” soliloquised Thomas Turney. “Yet there comes a stage when the young man develops traits apparent in his father, which may conflict with the other side of his nature——.” The ragged voice was knotted tight by the congestion of breathing. Again his thoughts were devastating. Scenes arose of his eldest son Charley, of the sad quarrels of that summer of seven years ago, Charley opposing him in defence of his mother, so violently that Sarah, God rest her soul, had had a stroke and died. Charley had inherited his own hot temper, how then might Charley be blamed? He sighed, and heard McDonagh saying, “It seems to me, that it is the courage of the mind which produces the great soldier—the man who rises to all occasions under ordeal. But in the last resort, all is fortuitous, it would seem. Without proper food, without sufficient sleep, where would the hero be?” “Ah,” said Thomas Turney. “There is little between a man’s best and worst but a platter of food!”
“Thank you, thank you, gentlemen,” murmured Mr. Bigge, rising with thoughts of his noonday cup of hot Bovril. “It has all been most interesting.” He inclined his head in a series of little bobs. “Now I wish you all a very good day, gentlemen!” The sun had gone behind clouds. Thomas Turney felt chilled; and thinking with weariness of the New Will he must make to include Charley, he followed Mr. Bigge down the gully to his fireside in Hillside Road, where, confound it, he would find only his sister Marian, whose silences were almost as unnerving as her pointless remarks.
Chapter 3
MOGGERS
From both sides of the carriage were to be seen, for mile after mile, the wastes of the old battlefield of the Somme. Tens of thousands of wooden crosses stood out of flattened grasses which scarcely concealed shell-holes, edge to edge, extending to all horizons. Not even the brick rubble heaps of villages remained; all had been cleared for road mending. At last the train, running very slowly beside an empty canal bed which, Phillip informed his two companions, must be the Canal du Nord, stopped with a hiss of steam as though it were expiring, followed by a shudder of groans and jolts. They were in the middle of depleted rectangles of every kind of material—iron screw-pickets, rolls of barbed wire, wood, coal, picks, shovels, and vast dumps of salvage. The R.T.O. said that a waggon from their battalion was waiting for them. How far was it? About three miles. Was there a Y.M.C.A. or Expeditionary Force Canteen anywhere? To an E.F.C. marquee they promptly went, Phillip ordering a 5-franc bottle of champagne.
“It’s the best way, to get merry and bright on coming to a new crush. One doesn’t want to arrive blotto, of course, but just enough to warm the cockles of the old heart,” he remarked, as they went out. “How far to camp, driver?”
“The White City, sir? Three mile, as makes no odds.”
“But the R.T.O. said it was Corunna Camp.”
“Everyone round here calls it the White City, sir. There’s ten thousand Toe-rags—Chinks, Sugar Babies, Macaronies, every sort of dago, as well as old Frogs and Jerry prisoners.”
“What are they all doing?”
“Making roads, and diggin’ ’Aig’s ’Indenburg Line, sir.”
The braying of mules succeeded the varied human tongues of the White City as the waggon left behind the rows of hutments, and came to acres of horse lines. They pushed through to whitewashed flints bordering the road, and arrived at a yellow board on which the regimental badge, a horned wild ox within a star, was painted in black.
Having reported to the battalion orderly room, Phillip was told by the sergeant in charge that only the Quartermaster was in camp. “Major Marsden, Second-in-command, has gone up the line to see the Commanding Officer, sir.”
“Is Major Marsden short and thick, with dark hair? I met a Lieutenant Marsden at Loos in ’15 with the first battalion.”
“That’s correct, sir. I was lance-corporal in Captain West’s company in the first battalion at Loos, and remember when you took command and led us round the flank past Bois Carré.”
“Oh, that little joy ride … Weren’t you Lance-corporal Tonks?”
“That’s right, sir!” The sergeant’s face showed pleasure. Phillip was shaking hands with him, when brassy noises came from an adjoining hut.
“Jerry instruments, sir. We scrounged them out of a dugout at Masnieres last November. Colonel Moggerhanger is trainin’ new bandsmen.”
“Colonel Moggerhanger?” For a moment he felt devastated. Could it be that ‘Spectre’ West had left the battalion? Sergeant Tonks was reassuring.
“The Quartermaster, sir, has served forty years with the R’g’mint, ’listed in ’seventy-seven as a band-boy, sir. The storeman is sewing on his stars over there. Promotion come through last night, sir.”
Phillip went to speak to the storeman, who held up a jacket coloured by many ribands, headed by those of D.S.O. and D.C.M. “I think we’d better find Colonel Moggerhanger, just to let him know we’ve arrived,” he said to Tonks.
“You’ll find him in the next hut, sir. The bandsmen are trying out those Jerry instruments. Jerry pinched ours in the counter-attack, sir, at Graincourt.”
“Just like this war! We get Jerry’s band, and he pinches ours! Come on, chaps, let’s go next door!”
“Well, sir, if you’ll excuse me a moment——” the sergeant paused. “You see, sir, the Quartermaster can be a bit of a caution, sir. His discharge was due from the 1st battalion when they were ordered to Italy just before Christmas, and he was on the way to Blighty when orders come through cancelling all time-served ranks going home. The Quartermaster is liable to be a little uncertain in temper as a consequence.”
Outside the adjoining semicircular shelter of rust and tarred wood Phillip hesitated. “All the same, I think we ought to make our arrival known to him, as a matter of courtesy,” he said to the two junior officers with him. His hand was on the handle when the door opened and a big man came out. Phillip stepped back; his salute was ignored as the Quartermaster strode away, muttering curses.
“That’s that!” said Phillip.
It was five o’clock. The three had had little food since dinner the night before at Boulogne. “He’s the only officer here, apparently, so let’s ask him where we can get some grub.”
They came upon the Quartermaster talking to what looked like the transport sergeant. The three saluted again, and Phillip, as senior, went forward. The Quartermaster continued to ignore him. So he saluted once more before turning away to find the cookhouse. “Char will probably be going.”
When at length they found the cookhouse, there was Mogger-hanger before them. Again Phillip’s salute was ignored. They walked on. “This is all rot, you chaps! He may be an honorary lieutenant-colonel, but dammit, we should be treated as guests! Lord Satchville wouldn’t behave like this! Leave it to me. You two wait here.”
He went back to the cookhouse, and standing at attention, cried out “Sir!” before presenting the Quartermaster with a salute delivered with elbow parallel with the ground, lower arm stiff and rigid and hand vibrating level with right ear in the Guards’ manner. The Quartermaster responded with
a bellowing cough, followed by hoicking to clear his throat.
“Lieutenant Maddison, reporting for duty, sir!”
The Quartermaster spat into a lime-washed dustbin by the cookhouse door. “Pick the bones out of that,” he said.
Phillip took this to mean that they could help themselves, as he led the way into the cookhouse. There they drank sweet tea and wolfed hunks of bread, butter and jam; and feeling optimistic left to look round the camp. On their way they passed the hut in which the band was apparently playing rag-time. Round the corner came the Quartermaster. They walked on pretending not to see him, and had gone a few yards when a voice roared out behind, “Come ’ere, you!”
Phillip turned and went back. “You want me, sir?”
A Test to Destruction Page 5