Fanny’s voice again:
“Hullo. Are you there, George?”
“Yes.”
“Today’s Wednesday. I’m awfully busy for some reason this week. Can you see me on Saturday for dinner?”
“Must it be as late as Saturday? I’ve only a fortnight, you know.”
“Well, you can make it lunch on Friday, if you prefer. I’m lunching with somebody, but you can come along. It’d be nicer to dine alone together, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, of course. Saturday, then. What time?”
“Seven-thirty, the usual place.”
“All right.”
“Good-bye, darling.”
“Good-bye, Fanny dear.”
He dined alone, and then went to a Circassian Café, which he had been told was the new haunt of the intelligentsia. It was very crowded, but he knew nobody there. He found a seat, and sat by himself. Opposite him at a couple of tables was a brilliant bevy of elegant young homosexuals, two of them in Staff Officer’s uniform. They paid no attention to him, after a supercilious stare, followed by a sneer. He felt uneasy, and wondered if he ought to be there in his Tommy’s uniform. Perhaps the Cafe was out of bounds. He paid for his coffee and left. After wandering about the streets for a time, he dropped into a pub in the Charing Cross Road, and stood beside a couple of Tommies drinking beer. They were home-service N.C.O.’s – instructors, he gathered from their conversation, which was all about some petty way in which they had scored off an officer who did not know his drill. Winterbourne thought he would stand them a drink and get into talk with them, but his eye fell on a notice which forbade “treating”. He paid and left.
He dropped into a music-hall. There were numbers of War songs, very patriotic, and patriotic War scenes with the women dressed in the flags of the allied nations. All references to the superiority of the Allies and the inferiority of the Germans were heartily applauded. A particularly witty scene showed a Tommy capturing several Germans by attracting them with a sausage tied to the end of his bayonet. A chorus of girls in red preWar military tunics sang a song about how all the girls love Tommy, kicking up their trousered legs in unison, and saluting very much out of unison. There was a Grand Finale of Victory to the tune of:
“When we’ve wound up the watch on the Rhine,
Everything will be Potsdam fine.”
At the end of the performance the orchestra played “God Save the King”. Winterbourne stood rigidly to attention with the other soldiers in the audience.
Eleven o’clock. He thought he would go and sleep at his Club. The place was dimly lighted and empty, except for three or four elderly men, who were earnestly discussing what ought to have been done in the hand of bridge they had just played. There were notices everywhere urging members to be economical with light. The servants were women except the head waiter, a pale little spectacled man of forty-five, who informed Winterbourne that no Club bedrooms were available. They had all been commandeered for War purposes. Winterbourne found it odd to be addressed as “sir” again.
“I’ve got me papers too, sir,” said the waiter; “expect to be called up any day, sir.”
“What category are you?”
“B1, sir.”
“Oh, you’ll be all right. Keep telling them you’re a skilled club steward, and you’ll get an Officers’ Mess job.”
“Do you really think so, sir? My wife worries about me something dreadful, sir. She says she’s sure I’ll catch my death of cold in the trenches. I’ve a very weak chest, sir, if you’ll pardon me mentionin’ it, sir.”
“I’m sure they won’t send you out.”
The little waiter died of double pneumonia in a Base Hospital early in 1918. The Club Committee made a grant of ten pounds to his widow, and agreed that his name should appear on the Club War Memorial.
Winterbourne felt sleepless. He was so much accustomed to being alert and awake at night and sleeping by day, that he found a difficulty in breaking the habit. He spent the night aimlessly wandering about the streets and sitting on Embankment benches. He noticed that there were very few occupants of the benches – the War found work for every one. Odd, he reflected, that in War-time the country could spend five million pounds sterling a day in trying to kill Germans, and that in peace-time it couldn’t afford five million a year to attack its own destitution. Policemen spoke to him twice, quite decently, under the impression that he was a leave man without a bed. He tried to explain. One of them was very fatherly:
“You take my advice, my boy, and go to the Y.M.C.A. They’ll give yer a bed cheap. I’ve got a boy your age in the trenches meself. Now, say you was my boy. I wouldn’t ‘ave ‘im goin’ with none of these London street women. ‘E’s a good boy, ‘e is. An’ they’ve treated ‘im cruel, they ‘ave. ‘E’s been in France nearly two year, and never ‘ad any leave.”
“No leave in nearly two years! How extraordinary!”
“No, not even after ‘e was in orspital.”
“What was he in hospital with?”
“ ’E wrote us it was pneumonia, but we believe ‘e was wounded and didn’t want to fret us, because he wrote afterwards it was pleurisy.”
“Do you happen to know the number of his Base Hospital?”
“Yes, Number XP.”
Winterbourne smiled sadly and cynically; he knew that was a venereal disease hospital. Pay was stopped while a man was under treatment, and he lost his right to leave. Winterbourne determined not to undeceive the policeman.
“How long is it since he came out of hospital?”
“Ten months or more.”
“Oh, well, he’ll certainly get leave before Christmas.”
“D’you think so? Reely? ‘E’s such a good boy, good-lookin’ and well set-up. P’raps you’ll see ‘im when you go back. Tom Jones. Gunner Tom Jones.”
Winterbourne smiled again at the thought of looking for Tom Jones in the swarming and scattered thousands of the Artillery. But he said:
“If I meet him, I’ll tell him how much you’re looking forward to seeing him.”
He pressed half a crown in the policeman’s hand, to drink the health of Tom and himself. The policeman touched his helmet and called him “sir”.
He had breakfast at a Lockhart’s – kippers and tea – and washed in an underground lavatory. He got back to the flat about ten. Unthinkingly he went into Elizabeth’s room. She and Reggie were having breakfast in dressing-gowns. Winterbourne apologized almost abjectly, and went to his own room. He threw off the boots from his aching feet and lay down clothed. In ten minutes he was fast asleep.
The meeting with Fanny was somehow a failure. She was extremely gay and pretty and well-dressed and charming, and talked cheerily at first, and then valiantly against his awkward silences. Winterbourne did not know why he felt so awkward and silent. He seemed to have nothing to say to Fanny, and his mind appeared to have become sluggish – he missed half her witty sayings and clever allusions. It was like being up for oral examination and continually making silly mistakes. Yet he was very fond of Fanny, very fond of her, just as he was very fond of Elizabeth. And yet he seemed to have so little to say to them, and found it so hard to follow their careless intellectual chatter. He had tried to tell Elizabeth some of his War experiences. Just as he was describing the gas bombardment and the awful look on the faces of men gassed, he noticed her delicate mouth was wried by a suppressed yawn. He stopped abruptly, and tried to talk of something else. Fanny was sympathetic, but he could see he was boring her too. Of course he was boring her. She and other people got more than enough of the War from the newspapers and everything about them; they wanted to forget it, of course, they wanted to forget it. And there was he, dumb and dreary and khakied, only awaking to any appearance of animation when he talked of the line after drinking a good deal.
He took Fanny home in a taxi, and held her hand, gazing silently in front of him. At the door of her flat he kissed her:
“Good night, Fanny dearest. Thank you so much for havin
g dinner with me.”
“Aren’t you coining in?”
“Not tonight, dear. I’m dreadfully sleepy – bit tired, you know.”
“Oh, all right. Good night.”
“Good night, darl – ”
The last syllable was cut off by the sharp closing of the flat door.
Winterbourne walked back to Chelsea. The street lamps were very dim. For the first time in his life he saw the stars plainly above Piccadilly. In the King’s Road he heard the warning bugles for an air raid. He got into bed, extinguished the light, and lay there listening, wide awake. To his shame he found the shell-fear come back as the Archies opened up, and he started each time he heard the thud of a bomb. They came closer, and one crashed in the next street. He found he was sweating.
Elizabeth did not get back until three. Reggie and she had taken shelter in the Piccadilly Hotel. Winterbourne was still awake when she came in, but did not call to her.
His leave came to an end, and he spent five weeks of vague routine at his depot. He hated coming back to barrack-room life, and did not like the men he was with. They were all Expeditionary men, but strangely different from what they were in the line. Most of the comradeship had gone; they were selfish, rather malicious to each other, and servilely flattered the N.C.O.’s who could get them passes. They seemed to think about nothing except getting passes out, so that they could meet girls or go to pubs. They grumbled ceaselessly. Some of them occasionally told hair-raising War stories, which Winterbourne thought quite probable, though he refused to accept their evidence as conclusive. He always remembered one story, or rather episode, related by a Sergeant in the Light Infantry:
“We ’ad a bloody awful time on the Somme. I shan’t forget some of the things I saw there.”
“What things?” asked Winterbourne.
“Well, one of our orificers laid out there wounded, and we see a German run up with one of those stick-bombs, pull the string, and stick it under the orificer’s head. ’E was wounded in both arms, and couldn’t move. So ’e ’ad five seconds waitin’ for his ‘ead to be blowed off by that bomb sizzlin’ under ’is ear. We ’adn’t time to get to ’im. Some one shot the German, and then some o’ our chaps picked up a wounded German orificer and threw ’im alive into a burning ammunition dump. ’E screamed something ’orrible.”
From the depot he was sent to the Officers’ Training Camp with two days’ leave. He managed to get Fanny and Elizabeth to meet and lunch with him on the day he left. They both saw him off from Waterloo, and then parted outside the station.
The months of dreary training in the cold, dreary camp dragged by. He had two days’ leave in the middle of the course, then “passed out” as an officer, and was sent on leave again, with orders to wait until he received official notice of his appointment.
Elizabeth and Fanny both admired the cut and material of his cadet’s uniform, which was exactly like an officer’s except that it bore no badges of rank and that he did not wear the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt. He looked ever so much smarter in his new officer’s clothes, with the little blue chevron, marking service overseas, sewed on his left sleeve. They both quite took to him again, and during his month’s leave gave him a good time. Fanny thought him still an excellent lover. Only, instead of gay and amusing talk “in between”, he sat heavily silent, or drank and talked about that boring, awful War. It was such a pity – he used to be such a charming companion.
This leave came to an end too. He was gazetted, and went to his new regimental depot, situated in wooden huts on a desolate heath in the North of England, a place swept by rain and wind, and deadeningly chill in the wet winter days. The other officers were sharply divided into two sections or sects. Wounded survivors from the early days of the War, now on Permanent Home Service; and the newly-gazetted officers, with a sprinkling of wounded on Temporary Home Service. They ate in one large mess-room, but had two common rooms, which seemed to be tacitly reserved for each of the two groups, who scarcely ever mingled. Only the cadets from Sandhurst were admitted into the more exclusive room.
There was very little to do – parading with the Company, inspection, a little drill, orderly officer occasionally. There were so many new officers waiting to go overseas that the quarters were uncomfortably crowded, and there seemed to be almost as many officers as men on parade. He got the impression that infantry subalterns were cheap as stinking fish.
At last he got his orders to proceed overseas – France again, though he had hoped for Egypt or Salonika. He had two more days of leave and a quarrel with Elizabeth, who found him writing a loving note to Fanny on the morning he arrived. He went off in dudgeon and spent the time with Fanny. He saw Elizabeth again on the afternoon of the day before he left, and patched matters up with her. She was now furiously jealous of his spending nights with Fanny, but “forgave” him. She said that the War had affected his mind so much that he did not know what he was doing; and anyway, as he was going out again at once, they might as well be friends. They kissed, and he went off to keep a dinner engagement with Fanny.
His train left at seven the next morning. He got up at five-thirty, and kissed Fanny, who woke up and sleepily offered to get him coffee. But he made her lie still, dressed hastily, made himself some coffee, found he could not eat anything, and went back to the bedroom. Fanny had fallen asleep again. He kissed her very tenderly and gently, not to wake her; and softly let himself out of the flat. He had difficulty in finding a taxi, and was horribly worried lest he should miss his train and be suspected of overstaying leave. He got to the platform one minute before the train started. There was no porter to carry his large valise, but he managed to get into a carriage just as the train started. It was a Pullman, so crowded with officers that he hadn’t room to sit down, and had to stand all the way to Dover. Most of them had newspapers. The news of the crushing defeat of the Fifth Army was just coming through. They were being sent out to replace losses. He thought of something which had happened the night before…
Fanny had insisted on his coming with her for a couple of hours to a party of the intelligentsia given by some one with chambers near the Temple. As they passed Charing Cross Station, Winterbourne bumped into a man from his own Company who had just arrived by the leave train.
“Go on with the others, Fanny dear. I’ll catch you up. Anyway, I’ve got the address.”
He turned to Corporal Hobbs, and said:
“Are you still with the old lot?”
“No; I left ’em in November. Got trench feet at Ypres. I was supposed to be court-martialled, but that was washed out. I’ve got a job at the Base now.”
“You’re lucky.”
“You’ve heard the news, I s’pose?”
“No; what?”
“Well, we heard there’s a big surprise attack on the Somme. We’re retiring, and our old Division is s’posed to have copped it badly – smashed to pieces, the R.T.O. said.”
“Good God!”
“I think it must be true. All leave’s stopped. I just managed to get away before the order came. There were only about ten men on the boat. Lucky for me I went down early.”
“Well, so long, old man.”
“I see you’re an officer now.”
“Yes, I’m just going out again.”
“Best of luck to you.”
“Best of luck.”
He found the man’s chambers. There were about ten people present. Winterbourne knew some of them. They had also heard the news of the battle through a man in Whitehall, and were discussing it.
“It’s a bad defeat,” he said. “I’m told that the highest authorities think it adds another year to the war and will cost at least three hundred thousand men.”
He said it carelessly, as if it were a matter of casual importance. Winterbourne heard them constantly using the phrase “three hundred thousand men”, as if they were cows or pence or radishes. He walked up and down the large room apart from the others, thinking, no longer listening to their chatter. T
he phrase “Division smashed to pieces” rang in his brain. He wanted to seize the people in the room, the people in authority, every one not directly in the War, and shout to them: “Division smashed to pieces! Do you know what that means? You must stop it, you’ve got to stop it! Division smashed to pieces!”…
13
WINTERBOURNE listened intently. Yes, it was! He turned to his runner:
“Did you hear that, Baker?”
“Hear what, sir?”
A plane droned gently and distantly in the still air, and then very faintly but distinctly:
Claaang!
“There! Did you hear it?”
“No, sir.
“It was one of the heavies falling into M—. You’ll hear them soon enough. But come on, we must hurry. We’ve a long way to go if we’re to get back before dark.”
A year, almost to the day, after he had gone into M – for the first time, Winterbourne was returning to it as an officer in command of a company.
From London he had proceeded direct to Etaples, where he remained for several days under canvas on the sandy slopes among the pines. Large numbers of officers were being sent out, and they had to sleep four to a tent. Winterbourne thought this a luxurious allotment of space, but the other three subalterns, who had never been to France before, complained that there was not enough room for their camp-beds and that they had to sleep in their flea-bags. Winterbourne had not troubled to bring a camp-bed, knowing how few opportunities there would be to use it.
There was very little to do in Etaples, even with the more extended opportunities of an officer. They messed in a large, draughty marquee, but there was a camp cinema where he spent part of each evening. There were numbers of Waacs at the Base, and he noticed that many of them were pregnant. Apparently there was no attempt at concealment; but then the birth-rate was declining rapidly in England, and babies were urgently needed for the Next War. He observed that the cemetery had doubled in size since he had last seen it from the train a few months before. That Ypres offensive must have been very costly. Such acres of wooden crosses, the old ones already battered and weather-stained, the new ones steadily gaining on the dunes. And now there was this smashing defeat on the Somme. Haig had issued his back-to-the-wall Order, there was unity of Allied command under Foch, and America had been frantically petitioned to send reinforcements immediately. And still the front daily yielded under the pressure of repeated German attacks. It looked like being a longer War than ever.
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