The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “You didn’t feel good enough, did you? So you pretended?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Well, you are damned well good enough!” shouted “Spectre” West in sudden rage. “You are an Englishman! You were in the Gaultshire Regiment! You fought at First Ypres! You are good enough, and do not need lies to bolster up your fancied feelings of not being good enough! Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “But I know how you felt,” said West, reflectively. “You need not think you are the only one.”

  *

  The air of night under the stars was being charged by a magnetic awareness that drew up the larks which lived upon the battlefield to rise above the calcium flares. It was not yet three o’clock. A thick mist lay upon the valley of the Ancre. The guns were for the moment silent. Only occasional rifle-fire sheared flatly in the distance; spinning shapeless richochets fell with chromatic piping sounds into the marshes.

  Phillip was instantly awake when a hand touched his shoulder.

  “The goddess Aurora,” said “Spectre” West, in a whisper. They stood together outside the shelter, looking towards the east. “The pale brow of Aurora.” He added, “Pale with sight at the bloody filth of Mars. All this has happened before. What a pity you were not at the ’varsity. You should have read Greats.”

  “Look!” said Phillip, “that lark up there has a red breast. I am sure they fly to see the sun, when they go up at dawn. ‘Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless’.”

  “Yes, cumberless. That is what the infantry should be on Z morning, not line upon line of pedlars.”

  When the last lark was back in the wilderness grasses again, Phillip was drinking tea with “Spectre” West, whose face in daylight looked if anything more marmoreal than by candle. He wondered if “Spectre” had been cured of his dope-taking; and remembered Dr. Dashwood saying that topers and drug-takers who had been cured lost some of their old personality, their minds became slower, their thinking involved, together with their talking. Dashwood had made a joke about it. What they lose on the swigs, Middleton, they gain on round-about talk. It did not seem so funny now.

  “Did you think of letting a Mills bomb, without its detonator, roll down the steps of one of those Hun dug-outs? You did not. You did not think to meet silence with silence, on the principle of softly, softly catchee monkey? Comparative silence, of course. Bompity-bompity-bompity! all the way home, otherwise to the bottom of the steps, while you counted the number of bompity-bomps? What, you weren’t ordered to count the steps? Of course you weren’t! Why should you be? Who knows anything but damn-all about anything in the line, except P.B.I.? You should have taken that priceless opportunity, as you went down, to find out the depth of the Hun’s fortress shelters. In future raids in this battalion will be made in plimsolls, by thieves and cut-throats, not by officers imitating hearties smashing glass at a Bullingdon dinner. We’ll have another dart at them, but I doubt if the old Hun will be so obliging a second time. I’ll have to get the B’grdear’s approval, but if he won’t give it, we’ll take out a strong patrol and get it lost the wrong side of the wire.”

  Phillip heard this with misgiving.

  “How long have you known this battalion?”

  “I’ve only rejoined less than a fortnight, Colonel.”

  “Is it the same battalion you wrote to me about, when you were at Northampton? When Frances came down?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Drop the ‘colonel’ when we are alone. I speak to you as to an old comrade. You are a second-lieutenant: my substantive rank is lieutenant. Otherwise I am merely a temporary captain with the ephemeral rank of lieutenant-colonel. And apart from that, I know damn-all about what is behind the Hun wire. G.H.Q. knows damn-all. Aeroplane photographs are deceptive. They give an illusion that much, if not all, can be reconstructed from them. But they don’t tell what we want urgently to know. For example, the Hun’s probably got listening apparatus that picks up our telephone talks. He must have, otherwise why the suddenly evacuated front trench, and that idiot left alone there? Of course he may have unexpectedly thrown a fit, and they left him there, after cutting off his shoulder numerals, and taking his identity disc and papers. I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to have cleared out and left him there, from a misplaced sense of humour.”

  “He was crying when we got into the trench.”

  “Poor little sod.”

  “Spectre” West took up a dossier of operation orders. “You’ve seen the battalion orders for the attack?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “I don’t really know, except that they seem to be part of an ordered scheme.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake——! Must you talk in clichés? I suppose you don’t know what a cliché is? Well, it’s a stereotyped phrase, which old compositors, in the days of picking out type in single letters, kept made up, to save time. ‘A wedding was solemnised’, ‘the contracting parties were …’—that sort of thing. So no clichés of thought or phrase with me, if you please. Here’s a book for you. It’s the Everyman edition of Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary.”

  “Thank you ever so much.”

  The colonel’s servant brought in another pot of tea. He wore Gaultshire badges. “Good morning, sir. Permission to say, sir, very pleased to see you again, sir.” It was Boon, last seen when “Spectre” had been hit at Loos. Phillip shook him by the hand. When Boon had gone, “Spectre” said,

  “You must forgive my sharpness, Phillip. I have been an usher too long. Now I want to know what you really think. You saw what happened at Loos. Haig’s orders were for every brigade to get out into the blue as fast as it could, and if Sir John French hadn’t kept back the Guards Division and other reserves, the Hun might have had to pull back to the Scheldt, and the war been over by Christmas. Now, this time, it is the opposite principle; limited advances to be made at a slow but steady pace, wave behind wave; every man having a special job, like the caste system in India, and incidentally carrying over sixty pounds. The idea is to be ready to meet the counter-attack from the Pozières ridge, and smash it. Then the cavalry passes through the gap, to hold the ground beyond Bapaume until the infantry can come up and break out, and roll up the Hun’s flanks. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir, of course!”

  “To all objections by local commanders, Army replies, in effect, ‘But me no buts’. The enemy positions will be rendered untenable and the Germans in them ‘wiped out’ by the preliminary bombardment. Those were the very words used by Rawlinson at the Corps Commanders’ conference at Querrieu yesterday. You will of course keep what I have told you strictly between us two.”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  *

  While he had been sleeping in headquarters dug-out the previous night, the kadaver in feld-grau was carried on a stretcher, amidst oaths and whizz-bangs, down to Albert. There, at 10 a.m. the next morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon and devilled kidneys, followed by toast, Oxford marmalade, farmhouse butter and coffee with fresh (not tinned) milk, three A.I.D. officers arrived in a Vauxhall motor-car, to try and identify from the kadaver’s remains the German regiment holding the sector opposite Usna Hill. Since neither shoulder numerals, letters, nor identity disc were available, they held what they called a sartorial post-mortem; and decided that, according to the kadaver’s tunic, he was a Bavarian; from his trousers he was a Saxon; his shirt made him a Prussian from Wurtemburg, his boots a Swabian from Pomerania; his socks gave no clue to identity, since he was not wearing any; he had a five-pfennig piece in one pocket and so (ran the joke in No. 2 mess later) he must have been a Scotsman.

  Comic Cuts, the Corps Intelligence broadsheet, did not mention the raid. There was, however, an indirect reference to it.

  There are grounds for believing that the man-power shortage among the enemy has caused young recruits of a low category of physical hea
lth to be put in the foremost positions confronting our lines.

  Phillip got back to Keats Redan by the communication trench, and reported to Captain Bason in the support line as a smell of frying bacon was coming from the servant’s shelter next door. “Just in time, old sport,” said Bason, cheerfully. “What happened last night? Did you have a binge? I hear the new C.O. can put it away. What’s he like?”

  “He’s Frances West’s cousin! My friend I told you about!”

  Bason looked sideways and said, “See any green in my eye?” and maintained a sceptical attitude until Phillip overcame the nuisance of his manner and made him listen to his story, while keeping back ‘Spectre’s’ confidences and saying nothing about the raid being repeated; but he wondered if he had said too much as soon as he had replied to Bason’s question, “Was Brigade pleased about the raid?” with “It was a failure, like all the others on the Corps front, I heard”; for thereupon Bason became indignant about ‘the bloody brass-hats moaning about failure, just because the prisoner was a ponkey and had kicked the bucket’.

  “They ordered us to go Hun-pinching and you did it, didn’t you? Anyway, I’ve put you in for the M.C.”

  Phillip was too astonished to say anything but, “Well, skipper, I think I’ll go and have a look at my platoon, then if it’s all right with you, I’ll come back and get some breakfast.”

  “You’re very keen all of a sudden, old sport. Come and tuck in now, it’s all ready.”

  After enjoying a breakfast of bacon, fried bread and coffee, with tinned butter and marmalade to follow, Phillip went down the communication trench, passing painted signs on stakes driven into the chalk, and brass 18-pounder shell-cases used for gas-gongs, and came to the front line, where men were shaving, cooking breakfast bacon on tins of solidified spirit, cleaning rifles, writing letters, in an atmosphere of cheerfulness induced by the haze of the morning sun. One man in twelve was on look-out duty with a periscope above the parapet of chalk-filled bags.

  He sat down on the fire-step, asking about their rations, particularly bread; the daily ration was 1¼ lb. per man, but they seldom got more than half a 1-lb. loaf each in the line; and if the water tasted of too much petrol; if letters were arriving all right from home, and separation allowances being paid to their families?

  “When do us go over the plonk, sir?” asked the platoon sergeant, who came from the West Country.

  “I don’t know any more than you chaps.”

  “Any chance of home leaf after the push, sir?”

  “I hope so.”

  “The gunners have a rumour we are going to Verdun, sir. Is it true?”

  “More likely that Jerry’s coming up here.”

  “Are we down-hearted?” cried someone.

  “No!” they shouted.

  “They say you knew the new C.O. before, sir.”

  “Yes, I did, at Loos. He’s the finest officer I know.”

  “A fire-eater, sir?”

  “No. A real soldier. I’d follow him anywhere, so will you.”

  “Why was Jerry silent last night, sir?”

  “Perhaps we caught them all with their trousers down.”

  That made them laugh. He left them, and went to his shelter, The Demi-Lune, made of curved elephant iron covered by three layers of bags, and entering past the gas-blanket, found Pimm his servant sitting by a steaming kettle. Telling him that he had had breakfast, Phillip lay down on a mattress of sandbag bundles, and thinking of a purple-and-white riband on his tunic, settled contentedly to sleep … until he recalled ‘Spectre’s’ words, and remained with his eyes open.

  Getting up after an unrestful half hour, he asked Captain Bason’s permission to go down the sappers’ mine-gallery. For months the Royal Engineers had been driving a gallery under the German position opposite, where the northern shoulder of the salient made by the enemy’s trenches around La Boisselle, known as Y sap, was a strongpoint of reinforced concrete forts with splayed slits at ground level holding machine-guns. Y sap was to be blown up just before the infantry assault on Z day.

  “I’ve seen the sapper subaltern, and he says he’ll take me down.”

  “You must want a job, old sport. You wouldn’t get me going anywhere near the Glory Hole for a hundred quid!”

  Phillip set off for the main shaft of the tunnel, with two ideas in his mind: to enquire if the sappers knew the depth of the German dugouts; and to find out if, by some extraordinary bit of luck, Desmond had been posted there. After all, he had never expected to see Westy; it was a small world.

  South of Keats Redan the British front line ended in a barricade of sandbags laid header-and-stretcher, a dozen courses high and two courses thick. The barricade was usually riddled by day, and rebuilt at night. Here, across no-man’s-land, the German front line turned back east along rising ground. The white scar of trench lay beside the Bapaume Road for a quarter of a mile, before returning north again across a shallow valley in the downland imperceptibly rising to a skyline of 110 metres. This slight hollow between two spurs was known as Mash Valley, up which the battalion was to advance on Z day.

  Through a periscope Phillip looked out over no-man’s-land, as he had many times before, with fascination and wonder for its human lifelessness. To leave the trench and advance over the open was something that thought broke down upon; yet one day it would have to happen.

  Far away on the skyline, beyond two diminishing lines of trees marking the straight road to Bapaume, he could see a faint serration of roof-tops: Pozières, the final objective on Z day.

  Pozières was two and a half miles distant. He could get there in three minutes on his motor cycle, if by some miracle every one of the hundreds of thousands living underground suddenly were to be lifted away, if the shell-holes and trenches were filled in, and the wire removed in the same instant, and all become as it was before 1914. Vain thought: the seasons of the world had changed: summer was harsh and bright and meaningless; winter cold and wet and pitiless; spring was a time for the greater activity of death; autumn for the dissolution of bodies into the soil, under the little hammers of the rain.

  If only he could stop thinking like that: if only he could enjoy the moment, as Bason did, and most of the other fellows: if he could feel as Kingsman felt, serene because he believed in God, that what was to happen was inevitable, and so all things must be accepted cum aequo animo. Did prayer really help? But first you must believe. He did not know what he believed; first he believed one thing, then another.

  *

  To the right of the Bapaume road the salient in front of La Boisselle projected like a shattered reef of white coral upon a grim and empty prospect of grey. Here upon the white reef of the German lines had burst storm upon storm, until immense troughs and crests of waves, expended, lay as though fossilised in Time.

  The Glory Hole was a litter of skulls on which tufts of hair remained, beside puttees coiled upon air and leather knee-boots empty save for each a bone; of charred fragments of cloth, once khaki or grey, sewn with buttons now black with sulphurous fumes, embossed with the Royal Coat-armour of Great Britain and Ireland, or the Imperial Crown of Prussia above the Gothic letter W. The Glory Hole was no charnel-house, for all flesh had long since leached into the chalk; it was a boneyard without graves, an uninhabited area making a gap of five hundred yards in the British line, an abandoned no-man’s-land of choked shaft and subsided gallery held by a series of Lewis-gun posts. Nature was trying to return here, with thin, one-stalk weeds of poppy and charlock, and those other plants of the wilderness, ragwort and dock.

  In the Glory Hole lay many British shells, of the largest calibres, which had failed to explode on impact. Observers upon the Fourth Army front had been reporting that one, sometimes two, and occasionally three of a salvo of four shells fired by the Corps siege artillery were duds.

  KEEP LOW

  SNIPER

  said a notice board, for the German front line was less than a hundred yards’ distant from the barricade beside the road.
Suddenly the grey sea rushed, the wave broke; the shock was like an interior explosion; Phillip sat down while little triangles and splinters of looking-glass tinkled down. He threw down the shattered periscope and hurried away, remembering that this was Minnie Corner—the minenwerfer wobbling up into the air, the dreaded oil-drums filled with ammonal turning over and over, falling with smoking fuse visible as sparks at night, like a Chinese cracker: thump, on the chalk; silence; then in a vast flash everything blown flat and sideways. The Germans sent them up in home-made wooden mortars like long thin barrels bound with wire; he laughed as he imagined Heath Robinson figures running away solemnly as soon as they had lit the charge with a candle, for if the wooden barrel burst before the drum left, the present to Tommy would deliver itself backwards.

  *

  “I’ll have to ask you to remove your boots when we’re farther down the sap,” said the lieutenant of Engineers, leading the way down the shaft with an Oerlix flashlamp. “And no talking, please. No smoking, either. We have to move slowly, especially at the face of the gallery, to conserve the oxygen in the air. We’ve had several cases of mine-gas poisoning.”

  There were three separate shafts leading to the gallery, for safety. Wooden steps went down into a series of tunnels, some of which appeared to be store caverns. The main gallery led away south. It was low and narrow; he had to bend down, feeling direction with his fingertips on the walls, elbows well in, the gallery being only thirty inches wide. He was glad to stop in a bay cut into one wall, where candles had made the chalk smoky. Here puttees, boots, and socks were taken off.

  The floor of the gallery from here onwards was laid with sand-bags. He was sweating, and his back aching when they rested in another bay, where the sapper officer whispered that soon they would be crossing the line of a counter-mine the Germans had been digging until ten days before, when all sound of picking had stopped.

  Phillip knew enough about mining and counter-mining to know that this might mean the blowing-in of the gallery any moment. “Camouflet or stifler no bon,” he said, making a joke of it.