by Philip Child
Beside Dan and Loversedge sat an infantryman, unconcernedly oiling his rifle. Here today, gone tomorrow — well, maybe. But what he bloody well wished was that he bloody well hadn’t ditched his fags by mistake when they were in the haversack with the army forms he was bloody well humping up to company headquarters two days ago. (Weighed down in the muck with cartridge pouches, water bottle, gas mask, entrenching tool and handle, bayonet in scabbard, rifle, overcoat and groundsheet, he had sensibly, and of course ethically, dumped the stationery into a shell hole and reported it destroyed by shell fire). How could he have forgot them blasted cigarettes in the bag? He didn’t so much mind drinking tea drummed up from a tommy cooker, brewed with water from shell holes full of urine, like as not. As long as he had a fag.… Maybe if he asked the officer — He asked for and got a handful.
“Loversedge,” said Dan, “keep a lookout. I want to see Mr. Dolughoff.” He went over to where Alastair was kneeling beside Dolughoff.
“Slip me your flashlight, Granny,” said Alastair. “Mine’s napoo.”
Dolughoff, who was in pain, wished to be let alone and said so; he added, gasping: “I have things to think about.”
“You’ll be all right. We’ll get you back, presently.”
The Russian was visibly trying to collect his energy. Presently, he whispered: “You think I’m done for, don’t you?”
“You’ll be all right,” repeated Alastair.
“You tell me, Daniel Thatcher. Do you think I’m done for?
After a moment’s hesitation, Dan said: “You’ve got a bad one, old man, but —”
“Well, you’re both mistaken,” interrupted the Russian, painfully rising on his elbow. “I’ve a job to do. I shan’t be killed until it’s done.… I’ll be back. You’ll see.”
Alastair could not resist murmuring: “Still thinking of the message, Dolly?”
But Dolughoff stared beyond him.
Loversedge was cutting off chunks of bully beef; the infantry private had his mouth full. “How about some food, sir? We have bully beef, bread, margarine, and jam with shell hole tea.” They ate like starved men. To eat reassured one about the normalcy of the body.
Dan whispered to his brother: “Are you going to report his conduct?”
Alastair shook his head. “He’s done for, Granny.”
“You shouldn’t have asked him that question, old man.”
“About his blasted ‘message’? I know. Caddish of me, under the circumstances. I shouldn’t have mocked him either. It just popped into my head — the irony of it, you know.” Alastair looked at Dan queerly. “You see, I was with him when he got the packet of steel.… Something fishy about it, Dan.”
“What do you mean?”
But Alastair would not explain. “Let it go, Dan. He’s done for. He was sort of a mixed-up blighter, wasn’t he?”
The acrid fumes had cleared away a little. Now British guns were playing about the pillbox.
“Let’s lie down and talk quietly, Al.… What are the chances?”
“Slim, I suppose. Still, if they got chased back quickly. Are we friends, Dan?”
“I hope so, old man.”
“I played you a dirty trick, Dan.”
“That’s all done with.… I was always jealous of you, Al.”
“I didn’t know you were. I’ve always been jealous of you. You’ve got character. I’m like Uncle Charles’s personality to burn, but everything by fits and starts.”
“It was damn silly of us to be like that.”
“Dan, you don’t mind now about Cynthia?”
“Cynthia? Give her my love, old man. And do let bygones be bygones like a good fellow.”
The infantry private said in a matter-of-fact tone: “Them Jerries are coming back, sir. Shall I draw bead on them?”
The subalterns looked through the firing slit. The coal-scuttle helmets were coming back in a hurry. They had not reached the second line and had gone to earth in shell holes. Now they were being cleaned out at bayonet point. They came back at the double, in a panic, like a flock of squattering chickens. They bobbled past the pillbox. Alastair exclaimed:
“We’ll get out of here at the double!”
He poked his head and shoulders underneath the tilted girder and yelled to a Canadian subaltern who had his arm drawn back to throw a bomb. “Kamerad, brother! Just throw that damn thing in the other direction, will you?”
The subaltern arrested the sweep of his arm, and stood frozen with the Mills bomb, pin drawn, in his hand. Then he threw it away from him like a hot potato. It burst in the air. The officer cursed.
They started back to the battery. “Now, old man,” said Dan, “off you go to the field dressing station to get your wound dressed. See you later. I’ll go down to the casualty clearing station, if I can get off.” They shook hands.
But on the way back, Alastair was hit again and severely wounded. When Dan arrived at the CCS, he found his brother unconscious.
Chapter XI
I
Dan sat in the bottom of a muddy sap using his shrapnel helmet as a seat. Behind him, a signboard said: “Abandoned German mine. Careful.” How exactly were you supposed to be careful of an abandoned German mine? Presumably, by keeping your mental balance continually poised for a swift ascent into the air. He thought of home.… Englishmen have a small country that is like a garden. Canadians can’t say as Shakespeare did, This other Eden, demi-paradise.… This precious stone set in the silver tea — that sort of thing. Canada is like a great, sprawling, awkward lad who hasn’t yet come into his strength. Sensitive of other people’s opinion, looking up to his parents, and yet rebellious, too. (We don’t like being called “colonials” in the tone of voice the English use.) No telling what we’ll make of our manhood when we come into it. We are pioneers still, really, and that means materialists. But we won’t always be. We ought to dream dreams. Maybe someday we, too, shall give the world something lasting just as the Greeks and the Jews, yes and the English, did.
But when you think of your country, you always have at the back of your mind your family and your friends who make it “yours.” Your family is your other self waiting for you after the war; it doesn’t change. Dan thought of the family sitting at this moment before the fire at Ardentinny, reading and talking just as they had always done in the evening.
But returning to the battery from that tour of duty at the OP, Dan found waiting for him a cable from Wellington. The curt message told him that his father, true to his principles, had faced a mob bent on mischief and that the shock of that experience had caused his death.
II
Letter from Beatrice Elton to Dan:
Dear Dan,
Though I know you won’t want to talk about it, I must write you about your father. I have thought often and often of what a mean, selfish, blind, little beast I was to you before you went overseas. I realize now that the war has wounded you as badly as it has wounded me. I was really half crazy at the time, and I just wanted to hurt somebody. I’m a selfish person, Dan, and to me, I’m afraid the war just meant my fiancé at the front. I never could take a larger view of the war and I don’t suppose I ever shall. I think most women are like me, deep down — we don’t see beyond our own kith and kin. Anyway, you’ll forgive me for what I said in those days, won’t you? Probably, you’ve forgotten all about it.
I will say this, Dan, though it will be cold comfort to you. I think your father was right. And remembering him as I do, his sense of duty and his honesty, I think he would be glad of what he did; that is, if there is any other life from which you can look back on this life. He had his loyalty, Dan, and he gave his life for it just as truly as Matthew did for his.
I go about like a lame duck, not really caring about anything, working as hard as I can to keep from brooding (I’m what they call a VAD here). If you come to
London on leave, do look me up for old time’s sake.
Your sincere friend,
Beatrice Elton
P.S. They have insisted on sending Alastair to Canada to convalesce, and they won’t let Cynthia go with him. Isn’t that just like the war!
To this letter Dan replied:
Dear Beatrice,
Thanks for your decent letter. I suppose you mean the white feather? Good Lord, I never blamed you for that; I understood well enough how you felt — and feel. Anyway, everyone is in the same boat, and in some way or another, the war is bound to get us all in the end.
I’d like you to know exactly what happened. Father died of heart failure; the crowd of God-forgotten drunken fools who did for him hadn’t the least idea of what they were about, they were simply irresponsible sheep like nine-tenths of the human race. These men were soldiers from up-country on their way to Valcartier; none of them came from Wellington, thank God! The only thing they knew about my father was that he had refused to pay his taxes to support the war (they had got hold of that fact from some yellow gutter-sheet which had printed a wild attack on Father). When they came up against a man who had a sense of responsibility and a soul of his own, they didn’t understand him (people never do!); I suppose it just made them angry to find someone who wouldn’t go with the crowd. Of course, nobody in Wellington had a hand in it, and they are all sympathetic as hell — for what sympathy is worth.
Well, these men drank too much, got hold of that dirty rag, read it, and started out for Ardentinny. The family were asleep; they were wakened by a stone thrown through a bedroom window. Mother and Aunt Fanny tried to get Father to hide in the cellar because of his bad heart, but this he simply refused to do. He insisted that the door should be opened and that these men should be allowed to come in. His exact words were, “ I will talk to them, Maud. Let’s have dignity. ”
So Graham (he’s the butler) let them in and they came scrambling up the stairs. I believe — I’d like to think — that some of the soberest among them were already a little ashamed of themselves. Fanny stood at the top of the stairs, and told them they ought to be! They said that they were not going to harm any woman, but that they had come to put something right. “ We know who we want, isn’t that right, boys? And we’re not going to hurt anybody. We’re just going to show a certain party there’s a war on, see? ” I don’t think they had the least notion of what they intended to do. They pushed past Fanny and started to kick at Joanna’s door. Then Father came out of his room and spoke to them quietly, told them they were frightening women and acting in a pretty cowardly way that disgraced their uniform. Somebody asked Father who he thought he was to criticize soldiers. Then he told them he had two sons in the army and about Alastair being wounded. That made some of them still more ashamed, but there were one or two ugly, drunken louts there who did not care what they did. One of these men staggered up to Pen and shouted: “ Here’s the man who stabs the soldiers in the back, ” with a lot of foul language. Then he drew his fist back and knocked Father down.
At any rate, it’s a consolation to think that nearly all these men, though they were drunken, irresponsible fools, were not brutes. They turned on the coward who knocked Father down and fairly threw him down the stairs.
Then the most amazing thing happened. The parrot who hasn’t spoken for years suddenly screamed: “ Down on your knees sinners! ” All the men began to laugh, and the whole atmosphere changed. After that somebody started to apologize sheepishly to Mother, and presently, they went away.
But Father never regained consciousness. He wasn’t strong, and I suppose, his heart gave out. I like to remember that not for an instant did he lose his courage. I suppose, really, that is why I wanted to tell you exactly what happened. I think I have a right to be proud of him, whatever people may say.
I am due for a leave soon, though I can’t say I care a great deal. Still, I shall take it, of course. I shall certainly look you up.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel Thatcher
III
A long way from the war, across an ocean, Alastair Thatcher, wearing a blue wound brassard, was saying to Tessa Thatcher in a strained voice:
“It’s ironical when you think of it, my being sent home to convalesce, away from Cynthia. It’s so confoundedly typical of the war, that. Isn’t it? … I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. It isn’t the right thing. Decent reserve and all that sort of thing. But good Lord! Once in a while you have to boil over to someone.… You know it’s hell being away from Cynthia. You see, we really love each other, and I need her. You’ve had experience of life, Tessa; you’re not a child. You know what I mean.
“I’m a bit morbid, I expect. I never used to bother about things. There’s no getting round it, this — (he shook his crutch) — has shaken me up a lot. I don’t seem to know myself at all these days. Want to do the craziest things sometimes.… I’ll wager you wouldn’t have guessed from the calm way we’ve talked together before today that my nerves are shot to bits. Pitcher went down to the well once too often, you know. Maybe you have guessed, though. Women tumble to what’s going on underneath the surface of a person’s thoughts. Intuition, I suppose. You’re old enough to know what people are like: yet it’s odd, I never think of you as older than I.…”
Alastair’s voice, not his words, echoed in Tessa’s nerves. It is folly for us to talk in this way .… She looked at him. Thin, pinched, his eyes restless. “This is what it has done to Alastair, to him of all people.… Why shouldn’t I mother him a little? Take Cynthia’s place a little till she can come home? Why not? Why shouldn’t I? … What am I getting from life? It’s all so barren and futile.…”
But she knew she ought not to. With another sort of young man, yes, but not with Alastair.… Alastair was right. She had had experience of life, she was not a child, she understood what he meant.
Chapter XII
I
At Folkestone Dan cabled to Joanna: On leave for ten days. Joanna and his mother had a right to their ten days’ leave, too. He meant to enjoy his leave intensely.
But he soon found that even in London you could not get away from the war. He stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel, which was a rendezvous for Canadians on leave. He played billiards, went to the British Museum and Westminster Abbey (both sandbagged), played squash, went to revues (plays weren’t fluffy enough), and even went to a ball given by a peeress, who was kind to “homeless colonials,” where the maidens he danced with had subtly the air of performing a war job. Everywhere you went, you met the British Army on leave, and you could not forget that you were only here on sufferance, “out on rest,” and that the very steward who served you a martini every night before dinner was probably wondering idly when you would go back to France and be seen no more.
One day he met Flint whom he had not seen since St. Horatius days. Flint’s RFC cap was cocked at a jaunty angle, and the rather solemn lad Dan remembered had become a debonair youth with a roving eye for “little bits of fluff.”
They had a drink. “Been out?” asked Dan.
Flint flicked his cigarette casually. “For two weeks. Copped one in the leg over Lens. An archie, you know. I’m going out again in a couple of days.”
“Anyway, you lucky devil, you fly over. You don’t have to take the leave train.”
Flint shrugged. “I wish to hell I’d spent my last leave in the country.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. London throws you off your stride, don’t you think?”
“Well, it is different.”
“It lets you down. Softens you. Just when I’d got my thyroid, or whatever it is, working at top speed.”
“Still the objective man of science, Flint?”
“Goddamn it, let’s have another drink.… We’ll drink this to good straight shooting to kill, Dan. No bungling — either side.”
They drank to no bungling.
Dan could not get into human relations with civilians; they seemed to him like puppets worked by strings that were pulled from the nineteenth century; they were walking in their sleep and they still talked as if the war were the First Crusade. After a stiff bombardment, you had a feeling of nervous relief, but that was physical. He wanted something more. What? Well, a moral holiday from himself; to be irresponsible for a short while. Charles said you could sometimes escape from yourself into what he called the largior aether — whatever that was. For Charles, it meant poetry. “The trouble with me is I can’t get out of myself easily. Flint was right. I ought to have chucked people and gone out on the moors somewhere.”
But he knew that his real enemy was time. He had four more days in England, and after that, a fifty percent chance of coming through the war if 1918 was anything like 1917. “Even in the artillery, I’ve had eleven close shaves, not counting that time up the line on the salient when, by any logical reckoning, I shouldn’t have come through at all.”
That day he met Quentin Thatcher by Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. A satirical voice behind him said: “Looking at Lord Nelson, I see. Do you know what one of Nelson’s tars said when he saw that column? He said, ‘Why, they have mastheaded the admiral!’”
They shook hands. Dan said: “I’m glad to see you. What are you doing in the king’s uniform, old man? I thought —”
“On my way to France. So am I glad to see you; a damn sight more than you would ever realize.” His eyes took hold of Dan’s with that remembered look of challenging affection. “Would you have gone back without looking me up?”