No Hero-This

by Warwick Deeping

  On Boxing Day we have sports. There is an officers’ race, and I win it by a yard from camel-backed Potter, much to Finch’s satisfaction. Apparently he had five francs on me, which, I suppose, was purblind prejudice. In the tug of war C Section beats both A and B. The Transport put up a ridiculous point-to-point on draught horses, and the race is won by a corporal dressed in clothes borrowed from an old grandam who lives at the farm. He buckets around the course shouting, “Chase me. I’m not too old at seventy for un poo d’amoor.”

  Parcels, letters, saunterings into Hazebrouck to have tea at a café where a pretty girl takes round the cakes. She is known as Mademoiselle Peut-être, for, if asked the amorous and playful question, she winks, cocks her chin, and replies “Peut-être.” Carless is always wanting Hazebrouck leave.

  I don’t think I have ever laughed so much for a week. Life seems good and secure to me for the moment, and I love this sleeping, winter landscape. Moreover, rumour has it that our division is not to return to the infernal Salient, and that new horizons and hazards lie before us. I am glad. I do not know why, but with the coming of the new year a breath of hope seems to play amid the frosted hedges. 1918. Will this year see the end? We can see no end, but somehow there is born in me an edge of hope, like the crescent of the new moon hanging above the poplars.

  XX

  Is it the Spring in the air, or the coming offensive, but I have become almost a Carless? Or is it that I feel that I must dress to my ribbon, and to the reflection in the mirror of Ye Perfect Knight? We are wearing blue flashes on our left sleeves, with 202 worked in gold on them, and we carry a blue circle with a white centre on the backs of our tunic collars. This is the Divisional sign and symbol. Also, Gibbs and I have visited an Officers’ Clothing Depot, and I have presented myself with a new tunic, a rather doggy cap, and a pair of the new peach-coloured corduroy riding-breeches.

  Fairfax teases me about these breeches.

  I don’t mind being teased by Fairfax.

  I notice that when I take a morning parade, the unit appears interested in my new breeches. I become rather self-conscious with regard to them, and confess to Finch that they strike me as being a little too baggy and colourful.

  “We’ll revert to the old ones, Finch.”

  Finch does not approve of my modesty.

  “They’re champion, sir. You look nobby in them.”

  Apparently he approves of my gay feathers, and his candour amuses me.

  “Mr. Carless oughtn’t to have it all his own way, sir. Besides, you’re It. When an orficer is a ’ard nut, sir, he can afford to look knutty.”

  The Division is moving south and into the mysterious sea of rumour. We hear that we are taking over more of the line from the French, in spite of the fact that our fighting strength has been reduced. We travel by train. The Somme country once more, but it is not the bleached, battle-worn, shabby landscape of the war. We detrain at a little wayside station in Santerre, and march in frosty, clear weather to the village of Beaucourt. It is rolling country, with great black bristling woods climbing the hills into a blue sky. The valleys are deep and secret. Fruit trees line the roads. There is exhilaration, a spaciousness in this landscape, but a spaciousness that includes secret vistas that are as fascinating as old wood-cuts.

  I find myself billeted in what is known as the Little Château. It is a rather dim, secret, silent house, and I climb to my room up a queer, spiral iron staircase painted green. My window looks across a lane at the high grey wall and the trees of the Great Château. The trees are beeches, and grown in the French fashion, shooting with grey splendour straight up into the sky. Brigade Headquarters are housed in the Great Château. It is very French and weather-worn and charming, with a long low façade of many windows and a grey roof. It possesses a little park, and an avenue that is so cunningly planted that it seems to stretch into infinite distances. Our headquarters and mess are in a farm, and Fairfax has his billet there.

  This place delights me. It is just on the edge of the front, but it has escaped the war. Also, it is completely French, and retains the life of the world before the deluge. One can hear cattle lowing, and the ploughed fields are set with winter wheat, nor has there been death and disorder in its woods. They are somehow virginal and sweet, and assure one that with the Spring there will be violets and primroses to be found. It is high, proud, peasant country, and it soothes me.

  A funny, crumpled old couple are in charge of the Little Château, kindly people. I suppose in peace time this place is a kind of Dower House. I go and sit by the stove with the old people in the evening and practise my French. I provide the old man with tobacco, and share the contents of a parcel with madame.

  Finch, too, has become domesticated. I find him on his hands and knees, scrubbing the tiled hall for the old lady, and whistling the latest song, “Roses in Picardy.” I know that the music is flagrantly sentimental, but it haunts me.

  * * *

  This war is like one of those fussy and formidable hostesses who cannot suffer their guests to stay put, but must be for ever stirring them up, especially so if you have discovered a comfortable corner and a sympathetic companion. Our ambulance is to open a hospital at Villers Bretonneux for the Divisional sick, and Potter and I are to be in charge. Damn it, I was writing up quite a lot of my journal in this Louis Quatorze atmosphere and Villers Bretonneux is so like one of those provincial towns that have gone musty.

  We are to feed at the A.D.M.S.’s mess, and the hospital is to be improvised in an empty warehouse. I am lucky in my billet, a single-storied cottage occupied by an old weaver and his wife, tucked away behind a little courtyard that is partly garden. My bed is a dream, and this war makes one a connoisseur of beds, if not of bedfellows.

  * * *

  I am becoming quite pally with Colonel Rankin. Our colours are complementary, and I find that he has a mind that has refused to submerge itself in army orders. We go for long walks together, and he confesses to me that he is profoundly anxious as to the future. It is estimated that the Germans have been able to transfer forty or fifty divisions from the Russian front, and that a furious offensive is inevitable. Obviously it is their plan to smash the French or the British before the Americans can be counted upon seriously as to training or numbers.

  But surely the offensive has always failed?

  “Yes, Brent, but Fritz is a cunning old devil. He tried out a new offensive method in Russia, and if he tries it on us and in overwhelming strength, it may be a close thing.”

  Again I say that I cannot understand how we and the French, who outnumber Germany in population, should find ourselves numerically inferior after Germany has been fighting the whole world for nearly four years. We must have wasted our substance and our opportunities.

  “We have had to spread ourselves so much. Palestine and Mespot, and Salonica. There is the Navy, and munitions.”

  I argue that Germany must have been as hard put to it as we have been. She has had to bolster up allies, improvise, adapt, feed herself on her own tail, and yet in this fourth year of the war she can bring superior forces against us.

  “I don’t understand it, sir. Why can’t we get the men?”

  “I can give you one reason, Brent. Ever visited a Labour Camp out here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll take you with me some day when I have to do an official sorting of rubbish in the attempt to find a few possible A1’s.”

  “Is it as bad as that, sir?”

  “Incredibly bad. The last time I had to comb out such a camp I examined several hundred men and found just one solitary A man, and when I marked him up for the line he burst into tears.”

  “You really think our national physique is part of the trouble?”

  “Yes, that and wangling and official cowardice at home. I’ll swear I could get two million more men out of England if I were given a free hand.”

  But I cannot convince myself that our comparative failure in this war can be explained so simply as this. Th
ere is nothing wrong with our courage, and in this war brains and character are of more importance than brawn. It continues to amaze me how civilized man has contrived to endure the prolonged and concentrated horror of trench life, for endure he does, though endurance has a limit. I have written so much of fear, being myself a fearful person, that I may have given a wrong impression in this journal of the character and courage of the average man. Mostly I have seen him as a wounded man, and his fortitude has made me feel humble.

  I think Rankin’s red head rushes somewhat at conclusions. Let us be fair to England. I doubt whether any other country could have risen to the immense effort she has made. As a Belgian schoolmaster said to me, it has been “un véritable tour de force.” It seems to me that our failure has not been in the production of power but in the application of it. Men capable of commanding battalions have been thrust into the charge of Army Corps. Our directing brains have failed, perhaps because a professional army is a clique, and a class cult, and does not attract brains of the first water. The professional mind is too stereotyped. That is their tragedy and ours.

  After all, though we have blundered, and kept butting our bloody heads unintelligently against walls, we have managed to save Europe from military damnation. Without us France would have been torn to shreds, and the west as well as the east would have been under the German boot. We must hold on. There is nothing else for us to do but to hold on.

  * * *

  I wonder what the Americans will make of war? Will they bring to it a new intelligence, some new chemic plan that will dissolve trenches and barbed wire, and neutralize machine-gun fire? Or will they blunder and buy wisdom with blood just as we have done and are doing? Mere savage fury is not enough. The marshal’s baton should postulate a brain.

  * * *

  On my way from the mess to our hospital I pass a little single-storied, red-brick cottage in which a young Frenchwoman lives with her two children. She is a comely, buxom, dusky creature with great dark eyes and a mass of rather untidy hair. She dresses in black, and shuffles about in red slippers.

  She attracts me. I know that she is sensual and a sloven, but even her slovenliness provokes me, the swell of her large hips and the ripeness of her bosom. I suppose the celibate in one cannot always be in the saddle.

  I find myself saluting her as I pass, if she happens to be at her door. Always she seems to be at her door. She smiles, and that lighting up of her face inflames me. I want to be man to her woman.

  For desire is so different from love. I know that my crave is physical, a starvation crave. But it makes me shy, and brusque and self-conscious. Sometimes I try to avoid seeing her.

  * * *

  I stop at her door and speak. I say that it is a beautiful day, and I ask after her children.

  Her children! What a humbug does sex make of one!

  She is arch with me. I see a gold ring on her finger. Her hands are work worn, but I think of the big, white, sensuous body under the rusty black, and I tremble.

  * * *

  She is emptying a tub of soapy water into the gutter. Her red slippers are like two hot coals. She looks up into my face and laughs.

  “I have been washing myself. The bath, monsieur!”

  Is it an invitation? I am horribly restless during the day, and after dark I go out and down the empty street Her cottage has shutters, and they are closed. I stand outside her window, with my heart pounding. I see a little cranny of light. I am about to knock on her shutters when I realize that the cranny light may give one a slit of vision. I bend down and peer. I see a pair of brown legs and superimposed upon them the bulge of a black skirt, and those red slippers pendent. I am conscious of feeling chilled, shocked. A horrible curiosity possesses me. I move a little and manage to see more of the interior. My Frenchwoman is sitting on a soldier’s lap, and the soldier is my man Finch.

  * * *

  I am cured. A kind of withering self-scorn blows through me. What if I had knocked on those shutters and Finch had emerged to warn off a butter-in? I go back to my billet feeling emotionally frozen. I find my old weaver and his wife sitting by their stove, and I join them. He is a white-haired, blue-eyed, world-wise old person, a kind of peasant philosopher. Is it strange and a mere coincidence that our conversation should turn upon morals, or is he somehow wise and paternally moved to warn me?

  He says: “Morality is convention, monsieur. Before the war this was a religious little town, but now there is not a girl or young woman in it who is not sick.”

  Madame nods her head. She, too, is a realist.

  “Yes, every one of them is sick with gonorrhoea or syphilis. What can one do? Our army began it.”

  I am conscious of guilty self-disgust.

  But Finch? Ought I to warn the man? Should I not feel the most consummate hypocrite? But, surely one’s humanity should be able to transcend one’s little shames and, in avoiding sepsis, help the other fellow? Am I jealous of my servant?

  I do warn Finch, but I do not indicate the particular source of danger.

  “O, by the way, Finch, be careful of these Frenchwomen. They are all venereal cases.”

  Finch grins at me.

  “Even the married ones, sir?”

  “So I am told. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Again he grins at me.

  What a relief!

  * * *

  Potter and I have orders to close our temporary hospital, and to rejoin the unit. I am sorry to leave my two old people, and my comfortable bed, and the little garden under my window in which blue hepaticas are coming into flower.

  Madame says to me, “The war is far away from us now, thank the good God. A year ago it was too near. We shall think of you often, monsieur.”

  The Division is in the line near St. Quentin. Fairfax sends three ambulances for us and our equipment and we go forward along a straight, flat road lined with poplars. Presently the live trees cease, and we come to the old desolation. I see the name of a village painted on a board, but beyond a few heaps of bricks there is no village to be seen. We cross the Somme. It is pale blue under a March sky. We pass through Peronne. It is like a carcase that has been left to rot, a mere skeleton from which the flesh has fallen.

  More ruins, grey rolling country, a landscape from which the plough has been banished, and which has become a wilderness. The road threads it like a tape. More ruined villages, slaughtered trees, collections of farm implements becoming scrap-iron. We are in country from which the Germans retreated in 1917, and upon which their malice spent itself in orderly devastation. Nothing was to be left for us in the way of head-cover.

  We arrive at another village that is a heap of rubbish in a valley amid these grey chalk hills. I will call it Blaincourt. We turn up what was a street, and the ambulances stop outside a series of broken walls. It is the usual local brewery in a state of ruin, but in this case the Boche had taken the trouble to blow in the cellars. The ground-floor rooms and offices have been cleared of broken bricks, and roofed with corrugated iron. This is my new home.

  Fairfax appears in a doorway. He has been out riding, and still carries his crop. The sun is shining; there is no sound of guns; some of our men are sitting sunning themselves under a wall. I am feeling strung up and nervous, for the change from secure and happy country—where shells are not—to the danger zone, always affects me in a particular way. From the moment I see the first shell-hole, I am conscious of a tension of the ear-drums and the stomach. It becomes listener’s land where death may be in the air. No longer does one feel secure.

  I am glad of Fairfax, for this ruined countryside has depressed me. He is more my friend than my C.O. He shows me over our station. Apparently we are to function as an additional gas-treatment centre, especially with regard to the treatment of mustard-gas cases, should the Germans attack on our front. There is one piece of good news. It is not our turn to act as the forward ambulance, and the 203 F.A. are to staff the collecting stations. I cannot help feeling relieved.

  The men
are quartered in odd holes and corners among the ruins, and the main part of the brewery is to be our gas-station. The mess is a small hut at the top of the high bank above the ruins. We also possess a large Nissen hut for walking wounded cases, and this building stands on open ground, and completely unprotected. I am to share a dug-out with Gibbs, and these dug-outs are queer little places, holes ten feet by six dug into the bank under the shelter of a hedge, and roofed with corrugated iron. They are fitted with wire beds.

  * * *

  Wonderful weather, windless, sunny and serene. By eleven o’clock in the morning it might be high summer. These chalky hills are bone dry, and the ground ripe for an offensive. I have not yet heard a shell. The landscape seems somnolent and peaceful, treacherously so. I do not like this ominous, sleek conspiratorial silence. Fairfax tells me that it is possible to ride up to the aid-posts and the battalion headquarters without being shot at. One might be on the South Downs in Sussex in the lambing season, with the sea between one and the war.

  * * *

  Apparently our Intelligence Service is convinced that the Germans will attack on this front. The system of defence is based on somewhat new lines, and consists of a series of strong posts and redoubts arranged in depth. There are supposed to be a succession of reserve lines that can be occupied in case of a partial retreat, but Fairfax tells me that these rearward systems are mere ink marks on the map. We have had neither the men nor the time to complete them.

  I am struck by the emptiness of the landscape. I should have expected these valleys to be packed with troops, in view of the imminent Boche offensive.

  * * *

  Fairfax, Gibbs and I ride over to have tea with the officers of the 203 F.A. They are a cheery crowd, but their humour causes me furiously to think. Rumour has it that the Germans possess tanks capable of travelling at twelve miles an hour. How fast can a man run? They laugh and say that they are all in training for a sprint to the rear.