A Test to Destruction

by Henry Williamson

“Yes, you, you long streak of piss on a lamp-post! Don’t you know you salute a superior officer when you pass one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why didn’t you salute me?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve saluted you six times already, but as you didn’t take any notice——”

  “How the hell d’you know I didn’t take any notice? Anyway, what were you in civvy street, a Boy Scout?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “All right, you saluted me six times, did you?” He saluted Phillip seven times. “Now you owe me one, you b——r!”

  Phillip gave him the Boy Scout’s salute.

  “So you’re a bloody joker, are yer? What’s your name?”

  “Lieutenant Maddison, reporting for duty from Landguard Camp, sir,” as he saluted once more.

  “God’s teeth, ’ow many more times you goin’ to flip about like a Bill Brown? This ain’t Caterham,” said the Quartermaster, in a voice suddenly mild. “You lot want some tiffin, eh? Well, come with me to the mess. D’you play bridge? Not very well? I don’t play very well neither, so that makes us all square. Ker-ist, listen to that bloody din! Like a f——g cattle-yard on market day.” Muttering something about showing the little cuthberts where they got off, the Quartermaster kicked open the door and at his appearance there was silence. Coming out again, he grumbled, “They can’t even blow, let alone they got no bleedun kissers. I told ’em there’d be some fat lips flyin’ about if they didn’t get on with it. Would you believe what the little bleeders was playin’ at? Seein’ ’oo could first blow out the stickin’ plaster and soap stuck in the ’oles made by shrapnel!”

  *

  About eight o’clock that evening, just as the four had finished dinner of fried steak and potatoes, followed by tasteless gritty prunes, the occasional booming of howitzers became a thundering that rattled the knives on the enamelled plates. Phillip opened the door and stared into a sky flashing with light. Away in the east arose red and green rockets above the calcium flares that told of some desperate endeavour between the opposing armies.

  “Close that bloody door!” yelled Moggerhanger. “We don’t want no eggs dropped on this f——g camp!”

  Phillip shut the door; he was yet to realise that the old man’s nerve had gone, that he had had too much war, having served continuously with the B.E.F. since the retreat from Le Cateau; that he had seen too many faces, hundreds of faces, pass before his eyes; and of all the many dead faces, some were now returning at odd moments, as though waiting for him to join them.

  “Can you tell me what the British S.O.S. colours are for tonight, sir?”

  “Ask my arse.” The Quartermaster put bottle and sparklet syphon on the table. “’Ow about a rubber?” He jerked a thumb backwards. “’Elp yourselves. We don’t stand on ceremony ’ere. We’re the Royal Staybacks, and don’t you forgit it!” They sat down. Cards were shuffled and dealt. “Your call, young feller.”

  Phillip passed. Allen passed. “Well, to test the feeling of the meat, one no trump,” said Colonel Moggerhanger, dropping his cards face down on the blanket-covered table to light thick twist in his clay cutty.

  “No bid.”

  Phillip was wondering what Westy was doing. “Your call, Lamp-post.” From across the table acrid smoke of thick twist stung his eyes, “Oh, two clubs.” Red and green, red and green, was it the British S.O.S.? Had the German attack begun?

  “Two diamonds.”

  “Three no trumps,” said Moggerhanger, leaving his cards on the table.

  “No bid,” said Allen.

  “Four no trumps,” said Phillip, and spread his hand: ace, king of hearts; king to two of diamonds; queen to four of spades; ace, king, knave, ten, eight of clubs.

  “Bon, partner. Quite useful. ’Elp yourself to a spot of old man Johnny Walker.”

  “No thank you, sir.” He left the table, and moved across to the sandbag-covered window in the east wall of the hut. Why hadn’t he gone up the line to report to Westy, instead of footling about playing bridge.

  “What, you on the waggon?”

  “For the moment, sir.”

  “Got a dose?” asked Moggerhanger, as he scooped in the tricks.

  A stream of fresh air was faintly whining through the cracked talc pane behind the sandbag covering. From afar came the crackle of rifle and machine-gun fire. Probably a German raid: he could hear the fast stutter of Lewis guns.

  “Ah ha, you went to bed with that arse-piece!” said the Quartermaster, to Allen. “Little slam, partner!” Moggerhanger threw down his last three cards. “’Oo’s shuffle? Come on, get a move on.”

  The third rubber had just finished, nine hundred down, when the door opened and Major Marsden came in. His trench coat was dripping, it was now raining hard. He brought the news that a German raiding party of considerable strength, following on a bombardment with h.e. and mustard gas, had got into the battalion outpost line, and bombed its way up to the main defence line.

  “Three of our men were taken prisoner, and I’m afraid our casualties are pretty heavy, mainly from yellow-cross, but there was some blue-cross, too. Eighty odd, all of Bill Kidd’s company. The Boche left behind a wounded man, who confirmed that the country for fifty miles behind their lines was stiff with troops marching up at night, and lying doggo in villages by day.”

  “Wind!” snarled Moggerhanger. “They’ve been told to say it! Every bloody Hun pinched so far gives us the same ol’ tale! It’s a bluff! The Germans aren’t bloody fools! They know they couldn’t get far, with practically no roads over the old Somme battlefield! They’ll push up north, the shortest way to the Channel ports! I’ll lay you fifty francs to twenty it’s all a bluff down ’ere! And what’s more, it’s stoppin’ me from ’oppin’ it for ’ome!”

  He downed his whiskey, and banged the empty mug on the table.

  Phillip looked with concealed scorn at the Quartermaster’s face. What did any quartermaster know of the real war, when he had slept every night in a bed for years? His fancy played satirically with the red-purple of the old man’s face, ruinous and arrogant: the eyebrows, or lack of them, were the Passchendaele ridge of the north-eastern slopes of the Salient, coloured by ten thousand tins of bully beef. Here was the embodiment of the bad old soldier-philosophy—“F—k you Jack, I’m all right.”

  At midnight, having lost three thousand points by consistent over-calling, and paid out thirty francs, Phillip asked if he might go up the line to see Colonel West.

  “What’s up, you’re so bloody restless, you the Old Man’s bum boy?” asked Moggerhanger.

  Phillip pushed back his chair and, standing up, said, “You may be my senior officer, Colonel, but that does not give you the right to make such remarks!”

  “Come come,” said Marsden, gently, as he continued to inspect one of his twin ‘Captain’ pipes in their case. “We’re all friends here. You don’t know our old Moggers, Maddison. If he really thought that there was anything like that, he would be the last to mention it.”

  “That’s right, old cock. Don’t take no notice of me, I never mean what I say. Isn’t that right, Pluggy? You’ll soon get used to my ways. I mean no ’arm. ’Elp yerself to a spot of old man whiskey, Lampers. Never let it be said that the talkin’ stopped the drinkin’.”

  “Thank you, Colonel–

  “Cut out the ‘colonel’. I’m Moggers.” The Quartermaster gave him a prolonged wink. “You’ll do, Lampo.”

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper—Moggers.”

  The two younger subalterns went to bed, while the three continued to sit by the dull red stove. Outside the wind was blowing strongly, causing little fringes of flame to issue from the bottom of the grate. Two empty whiskey bottles lay on the floor. As Moggers talked on—about his early days as a crowstarver, and then in the Army, Phillip began to feel his underlying steadiness. He had thought him to be dense and dull, like the heavy soil of the farmlands upon which he had been raised; now he saw him as part of the strength and solidity of gault cla
y, which had made bricks enduring since Tudor times. He felt ashamed of his former attitude towards the old fellow, and thought that such were Mother’s people; that he was more Turney than Maddison, the cold-grey-eyed Viking Maddisons. Yet was he really like the Turneys? Was his nature like Father’s, or Mother’s? What was the difference between mind and nature? Did he have a mixed nature? There was something about both Mother and Father which made him feel only part of himself in their presence. Perhaps he was, as Father had often said in anger, a throw-back.

  Moggers was yawning widely, with no attempt to cover a mouth revealing stumps of teeth about as irregular and broken as the tree stumps in the Bois Carré of long ago. Poor old Moggers, a farm labourer’s son who had started life as a crowstarver for 6d. a week; dear old Moggers: but where was the original boy of clay, dragging thin young legs behind the seed-harrow strokes, or twirling his rattle to scare the rooks? Since then he had dragged his feet all over the Empire, and now wanted only to rest them before his own hearth—the bully-beef face home at last, roses round the door, and the old women along the street on sunny days working at the lace pillows. How queer—crowstarver Moggy to Lt.-Col. Moggerhanger, D.S.O.

  “What yer laughin’ like that at me for, young Lampers?”

  “I’m beginning to rumble you, mein prächtige kerl!”

  Moggerhanger obviously took this to be a compliment. His mouth became frog-like as he drew in breath, extended two arms, and started to sing Nellie Dean in a surprisingly thin little voice. Then after another drink he was bellowing

  Drunk last night,

  Drunk the night before,

  We’re goin’ to get drunk tonight

  If we never get drunk any more.

  When we’re drunk we’re as happy as can be

  For we’re all members of the Souse family!

  Glorious! Glorious!

  One cask of beer among the four of us

  Thank the Lord there aren’t any more of us

  For any of us could drink it all alone

  Pom! Pom!

  “Them’s my sentiments, Lampo! One of the Fireside Lancers, no bloody good to the army no more! That’s a bloody fact! Me, who was so’jerin’ when your mother’s milk was still in you! Khyber Pass, Omdurman, Rorke’s Drift, Blennum, Battle of Bloody Hastings, Moggers was in the thick of the bloody lot, and no jam on it like there is today! I began my so’jering with the wildest lot of sods whatever broke their mother’s ’earts, let me tell you, old cock!” His head dropped. In a little voice he murmured, “I’m popped,” and without further word staggered up on his size-thirteen issue boots and zigzagged from the hut.

  “Dear old Moggers,” said Pluggy. “Where would we be without him. Don’t take any notice of his remarks. He’s had a long war, and wants to go home. By the way, the battalion is being relieved tomorrow, I think we should all turn out to welcome them. I’m sending up the drums. Well, I’m for bed. You know your quarters, do you?”

  “I think I’ll write a letter first, major, before turning in.”

  “Righty-ho.”

  He wanted to write up his diary, an act forbidden by General Routine Orders. But there seemed nothing to say when he was alone. He began to feel depressed, his head felt to be swelled, his skin dry and tight. Was he going to spew? He hadn’t drunk very much. The yellow-hot coke in the stove was now giving out blue flames when the wind blew down the chimney pipe. He felt sleepy, with no desire to sleep: a feeling of irritability, kept down by leaden hopelessness, held him in faint complaint that the room was thick with the insidious smell of black twist tobacco. A brutal imprint of himself trying to smoke twist in a clay pipe in the Cheshire convalescent home in February 1915 pressed upon him, while his stomach hardened unbearably, so that he got up and made for the door, vainly clutching air for support while feeling himself helplessly to be the centre of a leaning gyroscope. He was scarcely aware of falling backwards, and then the sense of desperately crawling to the door faded.

  When he recovered he heard remote voices and was conscious of his chattering teeth and of arms bearing him away. He awoke into candle light, Allen offering him a cup of tea. Recalling something of the night before, he told himself that he was weak, weak, weak; so much for his good resolutions. What would Westy say? His head was aching, tea made it feel less pressed upon. “Who got me here? I suppose I was blotto?”

  “You were poisoned by the fumes of that stove. Colonel Moggerhanger found you lying on the floor, he went back when he realized that his own stove had filled his hut with carbon-monoxide fumes.”

  “Then I owe the old boy my life! And I wasn’t blotto after all!”

  “No. The M.O. said it was a case of poisoning.”

  “Thank God!”

  “I thought you’d want to be up to see the battalion arrive. They’re on the way down.”

  Phillip was soon shaved, washed, and dressed. Then to breakfast, which he had to forsake half-way through; but returning with emptied belly to the mess room, found that the headache was gone and his appetite, after a bite of bread and butter, keen. Afterwards a visit to the tailor’s shop, to have the regimental and divisional flashes—colour patterns—sewn on shoulders and behind tunic collar; and then to join the cadre officers, including the new draft, who were walking out along the track down which the battalion would come.

  The sky was beginning to turn pink; flights of scout planes were climbing overhead, already golden in the rays of the sun invisible from below. “Quiet morning,” said Phillip. “What do they say, ‘Red at dawning, shepherd’s warning’?” The wind was from the north-west, already the sky behind them was dull for another day. Sleet wandered down the sky. Then a cyclist was seen through the low haze, coming towards them. He drew up, leapt off, stood to attention, “Battalion just passing Bluet Field Ambulance, sir!”

  As they stood under a sky now rising gold in the east but still louring dark over their shoulders Phillip heard the faint throb of drums. After the night of almost continuous gun-fire, the slight sound was strangely moving. Looking back the way they had come, he saw other figures along the track; transport drivers, who had been going up when the box-barrage was put round the Bird Gage and the raid started, had come along to find out what had happened to their chums.

  The thin almost feeble wail of the pipes was heard above the throb of side-drums, but still nothing was visible in the frozen mist. The sound died away, then came again; now it was only the drums—rataplan, rataplan, ratapattaplan—swelling and diminishing as though with the contours of the ground.

  The head of the battalion appeared suddenly, and he thought the drum-skins must have been damp. In front walked the sergeant drummer: behind the band came an uneven column of khaki figures. When about a hundred yards distant from the camp entrance, upon the area of ground worn bare of grass, now faintly speckled with sleet, drum-sticks were raised, polished brass instruments held to mouths, long silver stick of drum-major held aloft as the band wheeled to a flank. Down came the silver stick, drums broke into roll, and from brass instruments, now brazed, soldered, and patched, came the regimental march, Colonel Bogey.

  Past the stationary band came the battalion, led by ‘Spectre’ on foot, his one eye staring ahead under the rim of his helmet. He took the salute, his face white and set. Behind him walked an officer Phillip remembered at Landguard, Denis Sisley, looking haggard and ill. Rows of bloodshot eyes followed, boots and puttees clogged with mud thrust desperately against drag, puffy faces smeared, trousers ripped by barbed wire and bomb splinter, helmets askew, rifles slung, greatcoats gashed, tunics showing dried blood. Was this all the battalion—under four hundred?

  In the rear came a limping captain, knitted scarf round neck and covering the lower part of his face, thus emphasising a long nose and dark staring eyes. Phillip saw that a mouth-organ was tucked into one shoulder-strap of his tommy’s tunic.

  *

  Hetty, going in the back way to play her nightly game of piquet with Thomas Turney, brought a letter from Phillip. “I
t has just come!” she said, with her gay little laugh. “But neither Dickie nor I can fathom the first part. What do you think, Papa?”

  Thomas Turney put on his spectacles, and began to read aloud.

  2 Gaultshire Regt.

  B.E.F. 27 February 1918

  Dear Mother and Father, and all Kind Relations including Sprat and his foster-Mother,

  Please enter Roxford Rameses or Northanger Endymion the Second at the Fat Stock Show, from our Vulpine——

  He paused. “What’s the next word? It’s either ‘farm’ or ‘farmy’. H’m. We need a Sherlock Holmes to decipher this——” He read on:

  I am sure that either of these boars from our Vulpine Farm will win the first prize, we have in my opinion nothing better in their class. Don’t let the bailiff deter you. If in doubt about this, ask Grandpa’s advice, for he knows the game not only forwards but backwards. The weather here is cold and some snow has fallen.

  Thomas Turney stared at the letter, while Hetty and Aunt Marian sat very still. At last he chuckled. “I think I see through it now! Phillip told me when he was last home that if we took the first letters of every word at the beginning of the first sentence, it would indicate where he was. Now where are we——” He began to spell, “P-E-R-R-O-N-E. That’s it, Peronne! But misspelled. There’s a map in the Star tonight.” He showed them. “There you are! And now for Vulpine Farm. Didn’t he say that the sign of the Army he served in all last year was a fox?”

  “Yes, Papa, the Fifth Army!”

  “That’s right. Gough’s Fifth Army, in a quiet part of the line, right away from Ypres, there it is, Peronne, on the map. So you have nothing to worry about, my girl!”

  “I’ll just slip back and tell Dickie, Papa. He doesn’t say much, but I know he is greatly concerned about Phillip. I won’t be long.”

  Richard was playing The Sea, by Frank Bridge, one of his favourite records. He stopped the motor as soon as she entered, believing that she had no feeling for such beauty, and the thought dulled him.