He says to me when we are left alone in the mess, “You’re for it to-day, my lad.”
I reply, casually, that if we are to be broken to active service, the sooner the better. He laughs, and sucks at his pipe.
“Well, it’s your turn, anyway. I’ve heard all about Frost’s nice country walks.”
I report at nine in the orderly room tent, and stand waiting while Frost reads through some returns. The sergeant-major is in attendance, a well-set-up, blond, clean-cut man. We go out to inspect the men in their billets, queer little cubbyholes and shelters scattered about the face of the cliff. I am impressed by the scrupulous neatness and cleanliness of these little places, the bright mess-tins, the piled kits. The men are as clean as their billets, and again I realize that all this efficiency is Frost.
He says to me as we come down a cliff path, “If one isn’t absolutely and ruthlessly clean, Brent, in a crowded, flyblown place like this, men rot. People may think a C.O. a tyrant, but tyranny is better than dysentery. Latrines may be more deadly than gas.”
My impression has been that the men do not resent his thoroughness. They understand it and respect him for it. So do I.
* * *
About ten o’clock we start for one of Colonel Frost’s country walks. The sun is hot upon land and sea. Frost calls at Divisional Headquarters on his way, and Colonel Thomas, the A.D.M.S., comes out of his glorified chicken-house to talk to him. I salute him, and he smiles at me and remembers my name.
“Finding your feet, Brent?”
“I hope so, sir.”
I gather that these two men like and respect each other, and Makins has told me that whenever some difficult and dangerous work had to be done Frost’s ambulance was given the job. From Divisional Headquarters we take a path that leads us to the plateau above. There is no cover here, nothing but bare earth and scrub and heather under a vast and cloudless sky. I wonder where the trenches are and whether our country walk is to be taken across this naked landscape, but I am in Frost’s hands. He speaks of Colonel Thomas the A.D.M.S. and of the example set by him in the matter of a serene austerity. This elderly soldier sleeps in army blankets on a wire-netting bed, drinks no alcohol, and lives on the simplest of food. He is not an office-soldier who delegates danger to his subordinates, but is always up the line, visiting his battalion medical officers and seeing for himself the conditions under which the men live.
Frost makes for a slight rise in the ground ahead of us, and pausing there points out to me Achi Baba, and Krithia, and Morto Bay and the coast of Asia. He tells me that when they first landed this desiccated, dusty land was brilliant with flowers. There were one or two farmhouses, and vineyards, but all gentler things have been swept away. We go on, and I see ahead of us a little copse of young fir trees, green and pleasant amidst all these earthly tints. We come to an old trench and cross it by plank bridge. I see a few shells bursting in the distance, and I wonder whether the Turks will trouble to shell two officers walking in the open.
We are making for the trenches of the Division on our right. Frost says he has a friend serving in one of their battalions and he wants to look him up. I feel more and more like a naked man courting what may prove to be embarrassing attention. Frost has begun to talk again of home, and hospital days, and the last holiday he had before the war. He seems quite oblivious to the chances of our being shelled, and his calmness reassures me.
At last we are off the naked earth, and walking up a shallow communication trench. We come to a fire-trench that is full of Tommies; it is a battalion in support, and the men are sitting about or sleeping, and they look almost the same colour as the soil. I see one or two with their shirts off, picking lice. Frost stops to question a N.C.O. who tells us that the battalion we are visiting is holding the front line.
It is very quiet here, but as we enter another communicating trench I hear unpleasant sounds ahead of us, queer, stinging explosions. Frost is walking ahead of me, and his firm neck and strong shoulders are deliberate and unhesitating. We come nearer and nearer to those most unpleasant sounds. The things, whatever they are, are bursting with a kind of sharp “Zing.”
Frost throws a few words back over one shoulder.
“Bombing. It may be interesting.”
Interesting! It proves more than that, for almost before I realize what is happening, we are in a strangely empty piece of trench and looking down a kind of blind alley which ends in what appears to be a rough, wooden wall. I see two brown bodies lying in this sap, one or two heads protruding from holes in the earth, and a queer spidery contraption lying smashed close to the two figures in khaki. One of these figures is groaning and making strange, squirming movements.
I see Frost walk straight into this sap, get hold of the wounded man and drag him back towards the main trench. I am standing quite still, watching Frost, and suddenly I am moved by the urge to help him. I rush forward, almost colliding with a private who emerges suddenly from one of the niches in the sap wall. He has his bayonet fixed, and it misses me by inches. His face looks yellow and pinched.
“Look out, sir.”
I hear a kind of sizzling sound and something bursts up above on the earth that has been thrown out of the sap. I am too intent on helping Frost to be concerned about the narrowness of our escape. I get my hands under the wounded man’s shoulders, and between us we carry him back into the shelter of the main trench.
More bombs burst, and a file of men headed by a hot and grim-looking sergeant appear from nowhere, and scramble round and over us as we bend over the wounded man. He has been hit in the chest and abdomen. Frost, fiercely calm, shouts after the sergeant.
“Hallo, you there, send stretcher-bearers along.”
The sergeant turns on Frost with the face of a man whose inclination is to be insolent.
“We’ve got to hold the sap, sir. He may be coming over.”
“You heard what I said. Send one of your men.”
“Very good, sir.”
There is a sudden splutter of rifle fire from somewhere. Frost is kneeling by the wounded man.
“Waste of time pulling him about here, Brent, besides, he is better left alone. These bomb wounds are pretty nasty.”
I am aware of him looking up into my face as though its expression interested him.
“That was a pretty narrow shave, Brent.”
“Was it, sir?”
He smiles at me.
“It may be good to be innocent. I’m glad it occurred to you to rush in and give me a hand.”
Stretcher-bearers arrive, and that, for us, is the end of the incident, for Frost seems to think that we have had enough of adventure for one morning. We make our way back by the way we have come, and I begin to feel that I have some right to be pleased with myself. But was it not a case of innocence rather than of courage?
As we climb out of the communication trench into the open country, Frost takes off his cap and wipes his forehead. Both of us have been sweating.
“How’s the constipation, Brent?”
He seems completely serious, and not pulling my leg.
“I took castor oil last night, sir. Nature was moved before breakfast.”
VII
To be lonely, yet never alone, save at night when I snuggle down into my flea-bag! Hitherto I have not been conscious of being a separative and solitary soul, but this almost communal and crowded life presses too closely upon one’s sacred self. There are times when I feel that we men hate each other. A crude and elemental cheerfulness may conceal irritations and secret repulsions. I dare say we vex each other in that crowded little mess. I know that Sanders irritates me, his very foul pipe and the way it smells and bubbles, and the peculiar habit he has of covering his mug with one hand when there is whisky in it. Does he expect one of us to take surreptitious drinks from his wretched little tin pot?
Also, it is possible that I feel challenged by his competing with me for Frost’s favours, though all the active competition comes from him. He is both stupidly subservient and aggre
ssively complacent, and he does not appear to see that Frost dislikes him, and that his servility increases that dislike.
Sometimes there are squabbles in the mess. Makins has a tart tongue and uses it, and he and Roberts bicker. Makins is not well, and is looking very yellow.
He complains of Sanders’s pipe, and I support him. Sanders becomes flatly ironical.
“Makins has got a liver, but you’re a Fanny, Brent. So refined and squeamish.”
He tries to stroke my head, and I give him a push that sends him backwards off the bench. The three of us laugh, but Sanders gets up swollen and raging. He makes a grab at me, but Frost happens in, and the storm is stilled.
“What’s the trouble here?”
Roberts says that it is Sanders’s pipe which is more foul than any incinerator. Frost sniffs and looks at Sanders.
“I agree. Burn it, Sanders, and try the canteen.”
* * *
I have had no letters yet, and I am hungry for news, and for a sense of contact with Mary. Even a letter from her will make me feel her presence. Frost’s wife writes to him twice a week, and I get to know when he has had a letter from her. He seems softened, and suffused with some secret satisfaction.
But I feel so unsure of things, and the peaceful and domesticated creature in me yearns for permanence and a corner that I can call mine. This passion to preserve and possess an individual something becomes concentrated in my little dug-out. I fit up shelves, and a small hanging cupboard contrived out of an ammunition box. I line the corrugated iron roof with newspapers supported on string. I have Mary’s photo pinned up on the sandbags above my bed. I like to retreat to this little cell of my own, and sit with the ground sheet that covers the door drawn back, and watch Imbros and the sea, and the coming and going on the road below. These moments of apartness seem to soothe and strengthen one, and I can dream of the future when all this fear and unrest shall have passed away.
Fear! Yes, fear is never far away. It seems to alternate with a terrible apathy that grips all of us, for this is a dead and a decaying show.
I am sitting here reading my first letter from Mary when a huge howitzer shell grazes the cliff and bursts on the beach below. I see men scurrying and throwing themselves flat. There are sudden screams.
I am on duty, and I push poor Mary’s letter into my pocket, and go down to deal with the mess, feeling shaken and sick.
* * *
Poor Makins is more yellow, and becoming fretful with it. He has jaundice, but refuses to plead sick. In the mess his quick tongue tires us. He has become strangely unfriendly to me, and I do not understand his unfriendliness until he comes and sits by me on the beach.
“How is Frost’s new pet feeling?”
I smile off the insult, for Makins cannot rub me on the raw; I like and respect him too well. Also, he is a sick man, and refusing to surrender to his sickness, and the poison in his blood colours his moods.
He puts his head into my dug-out that evening, and apologizes to me.
“Sorry, Brent, I was such a swine.”
“That’s all right, old man. It’s not you, but this accursed place.”
For, our world is a sick world, flyblown and diseased. Hundreds of men are coming down through the ambulance with dysentery and epidemic jaundice. The troopers of the yeomanry who were on the Gigantic with me seem to stand the conditions less well than these tough and undersized little Lancashire weavers. The C.O. of one of the other ambulances says to Frost during Bridge that if the rate of evacuation goes on we shall not have enough men to hold the line. Not one man in twenty is completely fit, and the prevailing depression seems to lower everybody’s resistance. So poor is the condition of some of the infantry that if a man knocks his hand against the wall of a trench a septic sore results, a stagnant and chronic point of inflammation that will not heal.
* * *
Frost comes into my dug-out before dinner, and sits down on my bed.
He says, “I’m sending Makins off.”
I tell him that the decision is kind and wise. Frost is so much less hard than he seems.
“Makins has done damned well, and much of it on his nerves. A month or two in Egypt will put him right.”
I ask Frost whether he has ever been sick.
“No, not for a day. It doesn’t seem to happen to me, Brent. There are only about a dozen of us in the whole Division who haven’t been either sick or wounded since we landed.”
“Are you proud of it?”
“What’s there to be proud of? Might I not have welcomed something that would have taken me home?”
* * *
Makins has gone. He walked up to the ambulance at the top of the cliff, and we all went with him to see him off.
* * *
We are building a new mess of stone and sandbags and corrugated iron, for there are disturbing rumours as to the roughness of the weather here in winter. The sea has been behaving like a comfortable cat purring on a cushion, but I wonder what will happen to our dressing-station if Oceanus becomes angry with us for trespassing on this precarious ledge of earth. One bad gale and a night of hungry waves might wash away our little improvisations.
My third letter from Mary; also two parcels. I had run out of my particular tobacco, and in one of the parcels I find two half-pound tins of it.
Bless her!
* * *
A windy sunset over Imbros, followed by a keen night brittle with stars. We put on greatcoats in the mess, and draw the canvas curtains, but the sound of the sea grows more and more insistent. The wind is getting up, and our wretched shelter flaps and rocks. The waves seem to be washing quite close to the mess, and Frost puts down his cards and goes out. I follow him.
The sea is tumbling up in great rollers. There are dark hollows in the earth road, and we stand and watch sections of soil sliding down into the spume. The dressing-station stands at the top of a three-feet earth wall, and already the wash of the waves is splashing against the foot of the wall. If that wall should go, and the sandbags be undermined, the whole dressing-station will dissolve.
There is nothing that we can do, but Frost and I sit up till nearly midnight to watch the earth wall and its facing of stones. One small section of it slides down, but the main portion holds. The wind has dropped with the same suddenness with which it had risen, and the sea retreats. For the moment the danger is over.
Next morning we inspect the damage and confront the danger of our being washed out. The shore is littered with boulders and pieces of rock, and I suggest to Frost that if we collect all the available stone and build a rough wall or ramp it will break the scour of the sea. He is a little sceptical, but he agrees to the experiment, and places me in charge of a working party. It is warm and still and sunny after nature’s attack of hysteria and the men enter into the job with zest. One or two of them take off socks, puttees and breeches and recover boulders from the shallow water. I shed my tunic and work with the men.
I hear the remark passed, “Mr. Brent’s a bit of a surprise-packet,” and I feel flattered.
* * *
But there is one person who scoffs, Sanders. He is orderly officer for the day, and he comes and stands at the top of the wall, with his belly stuck out, and his swarthy, fat face smeared with irony.
He calls me Balbus, and Canute, and asks me whether I think our pebble ramp is going to stop a winter gale.
I like Sanders less and less. He seems so ready to hope that I shall make a fool of myself.
* * *
Our wall grows. About twelve o’clock Colonel Thomas, the A.D.M.S., pays us a visit, and finding us at work, comes down to talk to me. He realizes the danger to our site, and such moderately shell-safe sites are rare in the Peninsula. He does not crab the experiment, but encourages us, and gives us some advice. Also, he seems to approve of an officer turning to with his coat off.
“Well, try it, Brent, try it. If you can muzzle the sea, we’ll get you mentioned in despatches!”
He has a jocund and
pleasant sense of humour, and we go on with the work.
* * *
There has been a sudden and remarkable change of heart in Sanders. Apparently he has realized that a scoffing scepticism is not good policy, and that my attempt to thwart the sea has brought me favour. This does not suit his inclination to remain with the Ambulance while I, his chief competitor, am pushed on to a battalion. Next morning I find him in fierce competition with me, strutting up and down, giving orders to the men, ordering a stone to be moved here, another to be dumped there. But he does not take his tunic off, nor do the men pay very much attention to him. They seem to regard me as the prime architect and man in authority.
I see Frost up above, standing outside his dug-out and watching us. When I go up to wash before lunch he says to me with a dry smile, “So, Sanders thought your egg was a rather good one.” He appears to have no illusions about Sanders, and at lunch I ask Sanders if he is willing to be christened Balbus Junior, but he does not seem to appreciate the joke.
He says, “I’m first and foremost a surgeon. One has to think of one’s hands.”
* * *
This is an aspect of life upon active service which the patriots and the sentimentalists at home are not likely to discover. They expect us all to be competing for the leading of forlorn hopes, whereas much of the competition is the possession of some better hole. Hence, the more generous spirits are penalized, and as Frost confesses to me, even among heroes a man with a good job is a dog with a bone. He may have to teach himself to snarl at other dogs who are eager to relieve him of it.
* * *
A M.O. from one of our battalions comes down to be evacuated with dysentery. He has a highish temperature, but is almost maudlin in his cheerfulness. He says, “I feel lovely. Alex for me.”
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