Valour

by Warwick Deeping

  “Oh—my dear——!”

  She hid her face in her hands, ashamed, pitying, afraid. She had a feeling that Pierce was nearing disaster; on the eve of doing some violent thing that might disgrace him forever. How could she help him; what could she do? He said that he had lost his patriotism; that he hated his own men; that he did not care what happened.

  There was the cry, too, of a man wounded, lonely, hungry, yearning for the touch of her hands. He wrote very tenderly of his love, but there was a bitter note even in his tenderness.

  “What is England to me, when I think that I may never see you again? All this mad murder, this sacrificing of young men by the old men at home!”

  Janet spent a most miserable night, perhaps the most miserable night of her life. Her man’s faults were plain to her, and yet she loved him with a new and wounded passion. Her own helplessness frightened her. It was so ghastly—this war; you could not escape from it or struggle against it; it seized men and dabbled them in blood and horrors; there was no appeal—no pity. The machine crushed people, and rolled on; love counted for nothing; life itself was mere blood-grease for the wheels of the machine.

  And Pierce was rebelling! Most men rebelled in secret, and dared not betray themselves, but Pierce was not an ordinary man.

  She walked down to Orchards next morning, bewildered, miserable, with a feeling that she had lost herself. Perhaps old Porteous had had news, letters that were less sinister.

  Janet found him in the library, sitting opposite Gerard Hammersly’s picture. She knew at once that he had heard from Pierce, and that he was no more happy than she was.

  “Have you heard?”

  He could not rise to cheerfulness.

  “Yes. And you?”

  They looked at each other with helpless pathos.

  “My dear, this disastrous adventure——!”

  “Perhaps it is not quite so bad——”

  “Pierce writes without any suggestion of hope.”

  For the first time in her life Janet felt a rush of anger against Pierce. She realised of a sudden the full selfishness of those letters. What was to be gained by wounding the people at home?

  “I dare say he is not himself, Father. When men go sick they see things distorted.”

  “Perhaps. Poor boy!”

  Janet found her inspiration in old Hammersly’s broken look. She went home and wrote to Pierce, and it was a very wonderful letter that she wrote. A man might have gone to his death proudly and happily, after reading it. She posted it that night, and with it went her miniature.

  But Pierce Hammersly never received that letter. It was opened and destroyed by some blundering beast, and the miniature stolen from it. And a little blackguard carried Janet’s picture in his pocket, and showing it to his pals, boasted of her as his girl at home. “Hot stuff, I can tell yer.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  There is no doubt that Pierce Hammersly was unfortunate in his first experiences of active service. He had a difficult temperament, and he was learning to hate the man in authority over him with a hatred that cannot be described. It was elemental, and yet spiritual; Colonel Barnack nauseated him, filled him with a mad lust for violence. For days there was murder in Pierce Hammersly’s mind.

  The 74th Footshires were back in the trenches, and for the majority of the officers the life was one of incredible monotony. Someone has described active service as consisting of “long periods of intense boredom broken by short periods of acute fear”; men yawn and loaf and try to sleep, and there is the horror of nothing happening in contrast to the horror of too many things happening at once. A great listlessness descended upon the Footshires; men were going sick at an alarming rate; sanitary discipline was slackening; the troops were too weary to care.

  Colonel Barnack set himself to combat this slackness with all the severity of a martinet. The number of rifles in the firing line, that was his test of a battalion’s efficiency; an active worrying of the enemy, that was his proof of a soldierly spirit. He was right, too right, for he failed to allow for the human element, or to consider his men as men.

  That was Hammersly’s next discovery, the extraordinary power possessed by the doctor, a power that reaches its full development only when men are soul-sick and afraid. Leatherhead was a common little man who drank rather too much whisky. He was bumptious and knowing, and very much afraid of being fooled. The men hated him, partly because he never went into a front-line trench. They had nicknamed him “Dr. Bomb-shy,” and talked of the things they would like to do to him in a world where courts-martial and firing parties were unknown.

  About that time Pierce Hammersly caught the prevailing spiritual distemper, a horrible longing to go sick, to escape from the foul game at any cost. A deadly languor descended on him, a disinclination to move, eat, or think. He did not care what happened; his one dream was of getting away, and he had visions of a hospital ship, of Egypt or Malta, even of home. Yet this apathy was broken from time to time by sudden storms of intense mental excitement, moods of explosive impatience that made him quarrelsome, even insubordinate. The sight of Barnack caused him to show his teeth like a vicious dog.

  They discussed him in the mess, when the Colonel was not there.

  “What about Hammersly, Doc? He looks pretty yellow.”

  Leatherhead grinned.

  “Not up to colour yet. Besides, he won’t get away unless he is damned bad. The old man has an eye on Hammersly.”

  Goss looked up from the paper he was reading.

  “There is going to be trouble with that chap. I wouldn’t mind betting anyone that he’ll be court-martialled within a month.”

  “He will blow up, you mean?”

  “That’s it. He has never been licked properly, and the Colonel is out to do it. He’s a great man, the Colonel, and I believe Hammersly would shoot him if he had the chance.”

  “Well, it’s a dog’s life, anyway,” said young Lunt sulkily.

  “Hallo, Pet; we shall have to send you away if you talk like that!”

  “I shall be going—quite soon—I think,” and Lunt blushed.

  “Rot!”

  “Well, there was blood this morning. I’ll show you, Doc, to-morrow.”

  “You had better, young man.”

  “Lucky devil!”

  Three days later young Lunt went away sick with dysentery, and Pierce lost the only man who had shown him any friendliness. He saw Lunt carried away on a stretcher, white but happy, and he envied him from the very bottom of his heart. In a few hours Lunt would be off this sun-baked, fly-blackened, stinking bit of earth, and out there on the sea, bound for a place where shells did not scream. He would not have to mope about those stifling trenches, or sit in the mess and meet Barnack’s hard blue eyes.

  If only he could go sick!

  He examined his face in the glass each morning for the yellow tinge of incipient jaundice, took his temperature at night, felt a thrill of joy when he had a pain in his stomach. But nothing materialized. He felt slack, weak, miserable, but he could not say that he was ill. Even the accursed flies had failed to poison him.

  Meanwhile Colonel Barnack developed his scheme for making a man and a soldier of Hammersly. There are a certain number of unpleasant jobs that have to be handed out to junior officers, and Barnack detailed Hammersly to undertake a great many of them. But they were not given graciously, or with that rallying kindness that touches a young man’s pride. “Make or break” was Barnack’s motto, and he did not like Pierce Hammersly.

  “Mr. Hammersly, you will take a listening patrol out into No Man’s Land to-night. I am suspicious of that Turkish trench. Listen for any sounds of work. You understand?”

  Pierce understood. He crawled over the parapet that night, just before the moon rose, followed by a sergeant and three men. Rifles were popping, and bullets snacking the sandbags, and an occasional blue flare soared up. Hammersly went like a worm on its belly, working his way through the ragged heather and the debris of No Man’s Land, his s
ense of smell very much on the alert. He cut his right hand on an old fruit tin, and cursed under his breath. He also cursed the men behind him, for they seemed to be making a devil of a noise, enough noise to draw all the Turkish fire for half a mile. Then a flare went up, and they lay flat. The momentary glare showed Hammersly the yellow, sun-bleached face of a corpse within a yard of him. He sweated a little and crawled on.

  The party spent an hour squatting in a shell-crater that had been made by a big naval shell. They heard nothing suspicious in the Turkish trench. Once a Teutonic voice snarled at someone, and there was the thud as of a man being kicked.

  The sergeant put his mouth close to Hammersly’s ear.

  “Nothin’ doin’, sir. And the moon’s risin’.”

  It was a most damnably and aggressively big moon at that. They made tracks for their own trench, cursing the big yellow rim that swung suddenly above the horizon. Pierce and the men got back safely, but the sergeant was shot on the parapet, and they pulled him into the trench with his mouth full of blood.

  Hammersly reported to Colonel Barnack.

  “We could hear nothing, sir. My sergeant was shot coming back.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long were you out there, Mr. Hammersly?”

  “About an hour altogether, sir.”

  “An hour! You ought to have been out there half the night. How do you know that they aren’t working upon some sap or tunnel now?”

  “We heard nothing, sir.”

  “Answer my question, please.”

  “Of course—I don’t know, sir,” and his manner suggested that he did not care.

  Barnack told him off.

  “Mr. Hammersly, never come back and make a report like this to me again. You did not carry out your orders as they should have been carried out, thoroughly, conscientiously, deliberately. You will repeat this to-morrow night, and you will not come back until you are sure of your information.”

  So Hammersly spent some six hours next night, sitting in a hole close to the Turkish wire, cursing the moon, Barnack, the war, his own existence. How the devil could such a game end otherwise than in certain death? Barnack was victimising him, just because he had corrected him in the mess!

  He got back safely just before dawn, only to find that this gathering of experience was to become for him a sort of standing order. Two nights later he was sent with a fatigue party to help the sappers in digging a new trench, no pleasant adventure, as Hammersly discovered, for stray bullets were sweeping the ground, and he had two lads hit. He had never seen men work as those men worked to dig themselves in behind a little rampart of soil. He strolled about, hearing the bullets whispering by or kissing into the heather. His conviction grew more morbid and more obstinate; there could be only one end to the game; Barnack was going to get him killed.

  Hammersly spent most of his spare time in his dug-out, writing letters, reading, or trying to sleep. He only went into the mess for meals, for he was conscious of the hostility of Barnack’s officers. He detected a secret gloating in the mess, as though these youngsters were watching the baiting of an animal, and were wondering how long its patience would hold out. A scapegoat was useful when there was such a man as Barnack about.

  “P. H. has got it again, has he? What’s it this time?”

  “A wiring party.”

  “Do him good.”

  Hammersly ceased to speak in the mess. He came in, ate his food, and went out again, and each meal was an ordeal. His grim and restive silence isolated him still further from the men with whom he lived; they were mere boys, and just as cruel as boys, and they resented his air of aloofness. Their sympathies were with old Barnack, that stern maker of men, so long as he exercised his severity upon someone else.

  Moreover, it was Barnack’s presence that made the mess unendurable to Hammersly. He hated the man, he hated his hard head and cold eyes; he hated him for the way he ate, for his habit of sniffing, for the sound of his voice, for what he said. It was an almost insane hatred, born of the loathsomeness of the life he was living, a hatred for that land of flies and death. There were times when Hammersly thought of his revolver, and a round hole drilled in that shining bald forehead.

  Hardest of all was the perpetual fear that haunted him, a fear that had no compensations and no fine flavour of comradeship to soften it. It was the dread of mutilation, not the dread of death, that tormented him. He was forever waiting for that particular shell that was fated to smash him, and there were certain places in the trenches that filled him with superstitious fear, places that he avoided, danger spots that made him sweat when he passed them. His nerve was wearing thin and he knew it. No one reinspired him or helped him with sympathy or comradeship. There were certain doomed men in every unit, and Hammersly felt convinced that he was one of them.

  Then Goss shouted that order into his dug-out about three o’clock on a sweltering afternoon. The officers who were off duty were going down to bathe in the blue water under one of the yellow cliffs, but Pierce never joined those bathing parties.

  “Hammersly!”

  “Hallo!”

  “The sappers have asked for another fatigue party to-night. The C.O. has detailed you to take it.”

  Hammersly was lying down on his bed. He sat up in sudden, tense anger.

  “What—again? Am I the only officer available?”

  Goss ignored his savage tone.

  “You are to report at twenty one o’clock, at Liverpool Lane. The engineer officer will be there. They want thirty men and two N.C.O.’s.”

  He turned to go, but Hammersly called him back.

  “Captain Goss.”

  “Well—what’s the matter?”

  “I suppose this order comes from the C.O., or have I to thank you for it?”

  “From the C.O., of course.”

  “Thanks.”

  He heard the sound of Goss’s footsteps dying away down the brown trench.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Hammersly went straight to the orderly room, but Barnack was not there.

  “Where’s the Colonel?”

  “In the mess, sir, I think, or in his dug-out.”

  Hammersly found the mess empty, but there was an unmistakable sound of snoring coming from Barnack’s dug-out, where the C.O. lay asleep under his mosquito curtain, safe from the flies. Hammersly’s anger burnt at white heat; otherwise he might have hesitated, and perhaps have repented of his rashness.

  He lifted the blanket that closed the doorway, and stood looking down at the man whom he hated so savagely. Barnack was asleep, his face glistening with sweat, and his mouth wide open; a pipe lay on the earth floor beside him; flies were buzzing outside the curtains, eager to get at the sweating man beneath.

  “Sir.”

  Barnack’s hard blue eyes opened in a stare.

  “What’s the matter? Who is it?”

  “I want to speak to you, sir.”

  “Oh—Mr. Hammersly—is it? Well?”

  “I hear that you have detailed me to take out a fatigue party to-night, sir. Is that so?”

  “Certainly. What of it?”

  “Then I wish to protest, sir, and to protest most strongly.”

  Barnack swept the mosquito curtains aside, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and sat up. His face looked flushed and ominous.

  “Protest? Against what, Mr. Hammersly?”

  “Against this unfair treatment.”

  “What unfair treatment?”

  “I have been detailed for every unpleasant duty during the last ten days. I am not the only junior officer available.”

  They looked each other straight in the eyes, two men who were doomed to be antipathetic, each the exponent of fierce but different forms of individualism. Barnack’s egotism had certain objective ideals, ideals that gave him an immense advantage. In theory he was unanswerable.

  “In short, you protest against doing your duty.”

  “No, sir; I protest against doing a
ll the duty.”

  Barnack kept his temper. He had no self-consciousness, no diffidence, and no imagination to trouble him. Things were just black or white, true or false. It was impossible to hurt him, or to make him doubt his own sincerity.

  “Mr. Hammersly, I command soldiers—not young men who have never learnt to obey. I have been watching you, and your work, and I have not been impressed by it. Good God, man, what are we here for? An army has no use for men who flinch, and whine about danger. It is my duty to make my officers behave like gentlemen, even though it means death. War is not a drawing-room game.”

  Hammersly rocked on his heels.

  “You hint that I am a coward, sir?”

  “I never hint, Mr. Hammersly; only weak people hint. It is my business to make a soldier of you, and I have my own way of doing my work. You want hardening, disciplining. What do you think a German colonel would say to an officer who came and complained that the enemy were firing real shells?”

  Hammersly looked at him with sullen eyes.

  “Very well, sir, if you are satisfied with every other officer I must infer that I am the only delinquent, and draw my own conclusions. I suppose I was unfortunate in contradicting you that day. I will carry out to-night’s duty.”

  He turned to go, but Barnack called him back.

  “Mr. Hammersly, no more veiled insolence; you understand? Very well, you can go.”

  Hammersly went back to his dug-out and, sitting down on his bed, drew his revolver from the holster that hung from a nail. There was a glint of madness in his eyes; flies buzzed round him and he beat them off irritably with a paper that he had been reading. The heat was intense, and the yellow trench shimmered as though it were full of molten metal.

  Hammersly stared at the revolver, and meditated, with bowed head. He was on the verge of doing some violent thing, blowing that other man’s brains out, and his own, and so ending the whole business. But at that moment one of his platoon sergeants came for orders, a little fairish man with a yellow face and miserable eyes.