The valley, the depression, strays vaguely before them. They can see that it is a series of overlapping, vaguely circular basins formed by no apparent or deducible agency. Pallid grass bayonets saber at their legs, and after a time they are again among old healed scars of trees to which there cling sparse leaves neither green nor dead, as if they too had been overtaken and caught by a hiatus in time, gossiping dryly among themselves though there is no wind. The floor of the valley is not level. It in itself descends into vague depressions, rises again as vaguely between its shelving walls. In the center of these smaller depressions whitish knobs of chalk thrust up through the thin topsoil. The ground has a resilient quality, like walking on cork; feet make no sound. “Jolly walking,” the subaltern says. Though his voice is not raised, it fills the small valley with the abruptness of a thunderclap, filling the silence, the words seeming to hang about them as though silence here had been so long undisturbed that it had forgot its purpose; as one they look quietly and soberly about, at the shelving walls, the stubborn ghosts of trees, the bland, hushed sky. “Topping hole-up for embusqué birds and such,” the subaltern says.
“Ay,” the captain says. His word in turn hangs sluggishly and fades. The men at the rear close up, the movement passing forward, the men looking quietly and soberly about.
“But no birds here,” the subaltern says. “No insects even.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The word fades, the silence comes down again, sunny, profoundly still. The subaltern pauses and stirs something with his foot. The men halt also, and the subaltern and the captain, without touching it, examine the half-buried and moldering rifle. The wounded man is babbling again.
“What is it, sir?” the subaltern says. “Looks like one of those things the Canadians had. A Ross. Right?”
“French,” the captain says; “1914.”
“Oh,” the subaltern says. He turns the rifle aside with his toe. The bayonet is still attached to the barrel, but the stock has long since rotted away. They go on, across the uneven ground, among the chalky knobs thrusting up through the soil. Light, the wan and drowsy sunlight, is laked in the valley, stagnant, bodiless, without heat. The saberlike grass thrusts sparsely and rigidly upward. They look about again at the shaling walls, then the ones at the head of the party watch the subaltern pause and prod with his stick at one of the chalky knobs and turn presently upward its earth-stained eyesockets and its unbottomed grin.
“Forward,” the captain says sharply. The party moves; the men look quietly and curiously at the skull as they pass. They go on, among the other whitish knobs like marbles studded at random in the shallow soil.
“All in the same position, do you notice, sir?” the subaltern says, his voice chattily cheerful; “all upright. Queer way to bury chaps: sitting down. Shallow, too.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The wounded man babbles steadily. The two bearers stop with him, but the others crowd on after the officers, passing the two bearers and the wounded man. “Dinna stop to gi’s sup water,” one of the bearers says. “A’ll drink walkin.” They take up the wounded man again and hurry him on while one of them tries to hold the neck of a water bottle to the wounded man’s mouth, clattering it against his teeth and spilling the water down the front of his tunic. The captain looks back.
“What’s this?” he says sharply. The men crowd up. Their eyes are wide, sober; he looks about at the quiet, intent faces. “What’s the matter back there, Sergeant?”
“Wind-up,” the subaltern says. He looks about at the eroded walls, the whitish knobs thrusting quietly out of the earth. “Feel it myself,” he says. He laughs, his laughter a little thin, ceasing. “Let’s get out of here, sir,” he says. “Let’s get into the sun again.”
“You are in the sun here,” the captain says. “Ease off there, men. Stop crowding. We’ll be out soon. We’ll find the road and get past the barrage and make contact again.” He turns and goes on. The party gets into motion again.
Then they all stop as one, in the attitudes of walking, in an utter suspension, and stare at one another. Again the earth moves under their feet. A man screams, high, like a woman or a horse; as the firm earth shifts for a third time beneath them the officers whirl and see beyond the down-plunging man a gaping hole with dry dust still crumbling about the edges before the orifice crumbles again beneath a second man. Then a crack springs like a sword slash beneath them all; the earth breaks under their feet and tilts like jagged squares of pale fudge, framing a black yawn out of which, like a silent explosion, bursts the unmistakable smell of rotted flesh. While they scramble and leap (in silence now; there has been no sound since the first man screamed) from one cake to another, the cakes tilt and slide until the whole floor of the valley rushes slowly under them and plunges them downward into darkness. A grave rumbling rises into the sunlight on a blast of decay and of faint dust which hangs and drifts in the faint air about the black orifice.
The captain feels himself plunging down a sheer and shifting wall of moving earth, of sounds of terror and of struggling in the ink dark. Someone else screams. The scream ceases; he hears the voice of the wounded man coming thin and reiterant out of the plunging bowels of decay: “A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” and ceasing abruptly, as if a hand had been laid on his mouth.
Then the moving cliff down which the captain plunges slopes gradually off and shoots him, uninjured, onto a hard floor, where he lies for a time on his back while across his face the lightward- and airward-seeking blast of death and dissolution rushes. He has fetched up against something; it tumbles down upon him lightly, with a muffled clatter as if it had come to pieces.
Then he begins to see the light, the jagged shape of the cavern mouth high overhead, and then the sergeant is bending over him with a pocket torch. “McKie?” the captain says. For reply the sergeant turns the flash upon his own face. “Where’s Mr. McKie?” the captain says.
“A’s gone, sir-r,” the sergeant says in a husky whisper. The captain sits up.
“How many are left?”
“Fourteen, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Fourteen. Twelve missing. We’ll have to dig fast.” He gets to his feet. The faint light from above falls coldly upon the heaped avalanche, upon the thirteen helmets and the white bandage of the wounded man huddled about the foot of the cliff. “Where are we?”
For answer the sergeant moves the torch. It streaks laterally into the darkness, along a wall, a tunnel, into yawning blackness, the walls faceted with pale glints of chalk. About the tunnel, sitting or leaning upright against the walls, are skeletons in dark tunics and bagging Zouave trousers, their moldering arms beside them; the captain recognizes them as Senegalese troops of the May fighting of 1915, surprised and killed by gas probably in the attitudes in which they had taken refuge in the chalk caverns. He takes the torch from the sergeant.
“We’ll see if there’s anyone else,” he says. “Have out the trenching tools.” He flashes the light upon the precipice. It rises into gloom, darkness, then into the faint rumor of daylight overhead. With the sergeant behind him he climbs the shafting heap, the earth sighing beneath him and shaling downward. The injured man begins to wail again, “A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” until his voice goes into a high sustained screaming. Someone lays a hand over his mouth. His voice is muffled, then it becomes laughter on a rising note, becomes screaming again, is choked again.
The captain and the sergeant mount as high as they dare, prodding at the earth while the earth shifts beneath them in long hushed sighs. At the foot of the precipice the men huddle, their faces lifted faint, white, and patient into the light. The captain sweeps the torch up and down the cliff. There is nothing, no arm, no hand, in sight. The air is clearing slowly. “We’ll get on,” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant says.
In both directions the cavern fades into darkness, plumbless and profound, filled with the quiet skeletons sitting and leaning against the walls, their arms beside them.
“The cave-in threw us forward,” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Speak out,” the captain says. “It’s but a bit of a cave. If men got into it, we can get out.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“If it threw us forward, the entrance will be yonder.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
The captain flashes the torch ahead. The men rise and huddle quietly behind him, the wounded man among them. He whimpers. The cavern goes on, unrolling its glinted walls out of the darkness; the sitting shapes grin quietly into the light as they pass. The air grows heavier; soon they are trotting, gasping, then the air grows lighter and the torch sweeps up another slope of earth, closing the tunnel. The men halt and huddle. The captain mounts the slope. He snaps off the light and crawls slowly along the crest of the slide, where it joins the ceiling of the cavern, sniffing. The light flashes on again. “Two men with trenching tools,” he says.
Two men mount to him. He shows them the fissure through which air seeps in small, steady breaths. They begin to dig, furiously, hurling the dirt back. Presently they are relieved by two others; presently the fissure becomes a tunnel and four men can work at once. The air becomes fresher. They burrow furiously, with whimpering cries like dogs. The wounded man, hearing them perhaps, catching the excitement perhaps, begins to laugh again, meaningless and high. Then the man at the head of the tunnel bursts through. Light rushes in around him like water; he burrows madly; in silhouette they see his wallowing buttocks lunge from sight and a burst of daylight surges in.
The others leave the wounded man and surge up the slope, fighting and snarling at the opening. The sergeant springs after them and beats them away from the opening with a trenching spade, cursing in his hoarse whisper.
“Let them go, Sergeant,” the captain says. The sergeant desists. He stands aside and watches the men scramble into the tunnel. Then he descends, and he and the captain help the wounded man up the slope. At the mouth of the tunnel the wounded man rebels.
“A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” he wails, struggling. By cajolery and force they thrust him, still wailing and struggling, into the tunnel, where he becomes docile again and scuttles through.
“Out with you, Sergeant,” the captain says.
“After you, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Out wi ye, man!” the captain says. The sergeant enters the tunnel. The captain follows. He emerges onto the outer slope of the avalanche which had closed the cave, at the foot of which the fourteen men are kneeling in a group. On his hands and knees like a beast, the captain breathes, his breath making a hoarse sound. “Soon it will be summer,” he thinks, dragging the air into his lungs faster than he can empty them to respire again. “Soon it will be summer, and the long days.” At the foot of the slope the fourteen men kneel. The one in the center has a Bible in his hand, from which he is intoning monotonously. Above his voice the wounded man’s gibberish rises, meaningless and unemphatic and sustained.
Turnabout
THE AMERICAN—the older one—wore no pink Bedfords. His breeches were of plain whipcord, like the tunic. And the tunic had no long London-cut skirts, so that below the Sam Browne the tail of it stuck straight out like the tunic of a military policeman beneath his holster belt. And he wore simple puttees and the easy shoes of a man of middle age, instead of Savile Row boots, and the shoes and the puttees did not match in shade, and the ordnance belt did not match either of them, and the pilot’s wings on his breast were just wings. But the ribbon beneath them was a good ribbon, and the insigne on his shoulders were the twin bars of a captain. He was not tall. His face was thin, a little aquiline; the eyes intelligent and a little tired. He was past twenty-five; looking at him, one thought, not Phi Beta Kappa exactly, but Skull and Bones perhaps, or possibly a Rhodes scholarship.
One of the men who faced him probably could not see him at all. He was being held on his feet by an American military policeman. He was quite drunk, and in contrast with the heavy-jawed policeman who held him erect on his long, slim, boneless legs, he looked like a masquerading girl. He was possibly eighteen, tall, with a pink-and-white face and blue eyes, and a mouth like a girl’s mouth. He wore a pea-coat, buttoned awry and stained with recent mud, and upon his blond head, at that unmistakable and rakish swagger which no other people can ever approach or imitate, the cap of a Royal Naval Officer.
“What’s this, corporal?” the American captain said. “What’s the trouble? He’s an Englishman. You’d better let their M. P.’s take care of him.”
“I know he is,” the policeman said. He spoke heavily, breathing heavily, in the voice of a man under physical strain; for all his girlish delicacy of limb, the English boy was heavier—or more helpless—than he looked. “Stand up!” the policeman said. “They’re officers!”
The English boy made an effort then. He pulled himself together, focusing his eyes. He swayed, throwing his arms about the policeman’s neck, and with the other hand he saluted, his hand flicking, fingers curled a little, to his right ear, already swaying again and catching himself again. “Cheer-o, sir,” he said. “Name’s not Beatty, I hope.”
“No,” the captain said.
“Ah,” the English boy said. “Hoped not. My mistake. No offense, what?”
“No offense,” the captain said quietly. But he was looking at the policeman. The second American spoke. He was a lieutenant, also a pilot. But he was not twenty-five and he wore the pink breeches, the London boots, and his tunic might have been a British tunic save for the collar.
“It’s one of those navy eggs,” he said. “They pick them out of the gutters here all night long. You don’t come to town often enough.”
“Oh,” the captain said. “I’ve heard about them. I remember now.” He also remarked now that, though the street was a busy one—it was just outside a popular café—and there were many passers, soldier, civilian, women, yet none of them so much as paused, as though it were a familiar sight. He was looking at the policeman. “Can’t you take him to his ship?”
“I thought of that before the captain did,” the policeman said. “He says he can’t go aboard his ship after dark because he puts the ship away at sundown.”
“Puts it away?”
“Stand up, sailor!” the policeman said savagely, jerking at his lax burden. “Maybe the captain can make sense out of it. Damned if I can. He says they keep the boat under the wharf. Run it under the wharf at night, and that they can’t get it out again until the tide goes out tomorrow.”
“Under the wharf? A boat? What is this?” He was now speaking to the lieutenant. “Do they operate some kind of aquatic motorcycles?”
“Something like that,” the lieutenant said. “You’ve seen them—the boats. Launches, camouflaged and all. Dashing up and down the harbor. You’ve seen them. They do that all day and sleep in the gutters here all night.”
“Oh,” the captain said. “I thought those boats were ship commanders’ launches. You mean to tell me they use officers just to—”
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “Maybe they use them to fetch hot water from one ship to another. Or buns. Or maybe to go back and forth fast when they forget napkins or something.”
“Nonsense,” the captain said. He looked at the English boy again.
“That’s what they do,” the lieutenant said. “Town’s lousy with them all night long. Gutters full, and their M. P.’s carting them away in batches, like nursemaids in a park. Maybe the French give them the launches to get them out of the gutters during the day.”
“Oh,” the captain said, “I see.” But it was clear that he didn’t see, wasn’t listening, didn’t believe what he did hear. He looked at the English boy. “Well, you can’t leave him here in that shape,” he said.
Again the English boy tried to pull himself together. “Quite all right, ’sure you,” he said glassily, his voice pleasant, cheerful almost, quite courteous. “Used to it. Confound
ed rough pavé, though. Should force French do something about it. Visiting lads jolly well deserve decent field to play on, what?”
“And he was jolly well using all of it too,” the policeman said savagely. “He must think he’s a one-man team, maybe.”
At that moment a fifth man came up. He was a British military policeman. “Nah then,” he said. “What’s this? What’s this?” Then he saw the Americans’ shoulder bars. He saluted. At the sound of his voice the English boy turned, swaying, peering.
“Oh, hullo, Albert,” he said.
“Nah then, Mr. Hope,” the British policeman said. He said to the American policeman, over his shoulder: “What is it this time?”
“Likely nothing,” the American said. “The way you guys run a war. But I’m a stranger here. Here. Take him.”
“What is this, corporal?” the captain said. “What was he doing?”
“He won’t call it nothing,” the American policeman said, jerking his head at the British policeman. “He’ll just call it a thrush or a robin or something. I turn into this street about three blocks back a while ago, and I find it blocked with a line of trucks going up from the docks, and the drivers all hollering ahead what the hell the trouble is. So I come on, and I find it is about three blocks of them, blocking the cross streets too; and I come on to the head of it where the trouble is, and I find about a dozen of the drivers out in front, holding a caucus or something in the middle of the street, and I come up and I say, ‘What’s going on here?’ and they leave me through and I find this egg here laying—”
“Yer talking about one of His Majesty’s officers, my man,” the British policeman said.
“Watch yourself, corporal,” the captain said. “And you found this officer—”
“He had done gone to bed in the middle of the street, with an empty basket for a pillow. Laying there with his hands under his head and his knees crossed, arguing with them about whether he ought to get up and move or not. He said that the trucks could turn back and go around by another street, but that he couldn’t use any other street, because this street was his.”
Collected Stories Page 43