Hammersly hid the revolver under a blanket.
“Yes, Hobbs?”
“I was in the orderly room, sir, and they said as you are taking out a trenching party to-night.”
“That is so, Hobbs.”
The man fidgeted, and his miserable eyes touched Hammersly’s heart.
“You don’t look very fit, Hobbs.”
“I’m not, sir. I’ve been shivering, and I haven’t touched food since dinner yesterday. Can’t stomach it. I’ve never cried off a job before, sir, but my nerve’s clean gone.”
“Why didn’t you report sick?”
“I did, sir. But the doctor wouldn’t look at me.”
“All right, Hobbs; I think I can manage to let you off to-night.”
The man’s eyes lit up in his peaky, yellow face.
“Thank you, sir; I shan’t forget it, sir.”
He saluted and disappeared, but he had saved Hammersly from committing murder.
Pierce was quite talkative and humorous at dinner, and the mess was puzzled. They knew that he had the night’s dirty work on his shoulders, and his cheerfulness was quite original and unexpected. He even talked to Barnack, politely, respectfully and with easy charm, while his brother officers watched him, and drew the only obvious conclusion.
As Goss put it when Hammersly had gone and Barnack had strolled along to his dug-out to get a pipe:
“P. H.’s tail’s down. The C.O. has bruk him. And P. H. is going to be polite. Nothing like these little stunts out in the open for teaching a man to lick the right side of the bread.”
But Goss was wrong; Barnack had not broken his man; he had only made him coolly and insanely desperate.
Hammersly had left the mess to its evening bridge. A change had come over him, and he laughed as he went down the trench to pick up his men. So those fellows would imagine that he had surrendered his pride, and was ready to join them in their suave and servile charms! What a jest! He laughed again, cynical, defiant laughter. He had won a new grip of life; he began to understand what he meant to do; his individualism was almost as fanatical as Barnack’s, and far more unrestrained and fierce. What Gerard Hammersly had done, he could do also. There would be an infernal row; that was inevitable; but he did not look into the future; he wanted to break out, smash the system, protest. He would get hurt, but he no more thought of the pain than a wild bull in the arena considers the steel in the toreador’s hand. He was seeing red. Even the thought of Janet made him angrier.
Hammersly took his men along and reported to the engineer captain who was waiting for him at “Liverpool Lane.” The sapper was sitting in a bit of shallow trench, smoking a cigarette. He scrambled up, and looked out over the open country.
“Is that my trenching party?”
“Yes.”
“Pass the word along for the men to keep quiet. No talking above a whisper, and no smoking. This happens to be rather a dirty place. The Turks over there have had a funk on, and when they start rapid firing we get all the stuff over here. I had three men hit last night.”
Hammersly passed the word along.
“Where do you want us to begin?”
“Carry this trench on. I want the men out in the open to begin with; the direction pegs and tape are down. You have your tools?”
“Yes.”
“All right; carry on, please.”
Hammersly set his men at work, and strolled to and fro in the darkness with a sense of irresponsible recklessness. He wanted to whistle, but it was against orders, so he celebrated his mood of mad rebelliousness by parading up and down the line of toiling men who were swinging picks and using shovels with grim energy. The work was done ferociously and with set teeth, every man listening for a burst of rifle fire from the Turkish trench over yonder.
It came at last, and the men lay flat as the bullets spat through the air. It was mere “funk firing,” blind and unaimed, and through it all Pierce Hammersly went strolling to and fro, speaking softly to the men, with a voice that sounded gay.
“All right, boys, they’ll get tired of it in a minute.”
He felt extraordinarily exhilarated, and absolutely unafraid. Fate could not touch him that night. He had been born to defy something more deadly than Turkish bullets, even obsolete traditions, prejudices, caddishnesses, a whole system. His megalomania carried him through. And down in that scratching of yellow earth the men muttered together:
“Bit of a surprise packet, what!”
“He’s coming on. There ain’t nothing wrong with an officer like that.”
“Giving him all the dirty jobs, too, and them other blighters playing cards.”
The panic firing died down as suddenly as it had crackled into life. The men rose up and became again so many sweating, straining blotches in the darkness. Hammersly sat down on a little hummock of heather, with lips that smiled and a heart that beat sharp and hard.
He was thinking of Janet, and even his love for her was but another flame in the leaping fire of his revolt. Those other men who were playing cards had women who loved them, but Barnack had neither wife nor child and had boasted of it in the mess. And death touched the women as much as the men. Barnack was being a brute to Janet, making her face grim risks that the women of those other men were not sharing. Why should it be so? Let England ask such men as Barnack that question.
By midnight Hammersly’s party had done the work required of it, and he marched the tired men back to the Footshires’ lines. And, somehow, he felt a breath of good will flowing from these dark and earthy figures towards himself. He had proved himself in their eyes, and the knowledge hardened the reckless ferocity of his hatred of the man Barnack. His mind was made up. His purpose was like a steel spring, coiled and set, waiting for that dramatic moment when it should be released.
Hammersly turned in, and slept like a tired navvy.
CHAPTER XVIII
Doubtless there will always be a lack of sympathy between the picturesque historian who writes about what he has not seen, and the plain man who has seen the real things and cannot write about them. It is as difficult as being in love with a woman differs from being married to her. Your maker of picturesque and thrilling descriptions flirts with war; he does not go through the grim ceremony that ties him to the trenches.
Romance and colour are apt to vanish out of life when a man is thirsty, or underfed, cold and wet, or sick with the sun-glare, tormented by flies and lice, or damnably afraid. He is concerned with urgent and immediate physical distractions, food, the hole in his gas helmet, whether it is going to rain or not, the leak in the roof of his dug-out, the attentions of some particular offensive trench-mortar, the temper of the gentleman in authority over him, whether he will have a chance of drying his socks. He does not see fine, panoramic effects; he is inclined to expectorate on the purple pages of the war correspondents; he spends half his days in a hole in the ground, and he may look at you critically if you are fool enough to call him a hero.
That he is a hero, no one doubts, but heroism has changed the cut and the colour of its coat, though some of the good people at home still insist on a hero being a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel or Monsieur Beaucaire. And these good people at home have very strange notions about courage. Courage in this war has been the virtue of patient and stubborn resignation. It has consisted of sitting in mud-holes five minutes longer than the other man, in spite of gas and shells. Those old picturesque flashes of romantic movement have been few and far between.
Fame blew her brazen trumpet when the grey ships steamed up to batter a way through towards Stamboul. The trumpet note sounded again when the glorious 29th Division stormed its way ashore at Helles, brown men under a blue sky, splashing through the blue sea that was stippled white with jets of bullet-whipped foam. Red patches stained the brown uniforms. The beaches were all yellow and red; the lighters piled with the dead and wounded. The great ships rolled their thunder fire; the iron sides of the River Clyde clanged like a thousand sword-smitten shields. Wonderful days
, vivid, breathless, sweating, bleeding, heroic, damnable. As they will tell you, the Turks in that cliff trench fled from the hellish faces of those Englishmen. And such Englishmen, grown men of ten years’ service, hardened in India, brown, fierce, indomitable.
Speak to a man who knows, speak of the 29th Division, and you will see his chin go up and his eyes flash. That was one of the rare and great moments of the war, terrible, superb.
Pierce Hammersly may have imagined such happenings, such heroisms, such breathless, sweating comradeships when dying men quarrel with each other because neither will drink the last mouthful of tepid water. But he had seen nothing of the kind. He had missed the great moments, the rare, heroic rushes. There had been nothing to inspire the sentimentalist or the poet in him, and he was one of those men who need some such inspiration. He had struck all the sordidness of war, its heartbreaking monotonies, its petulances, its almost ludicrous and incredible horrors. He had not seen men bleed in a wild, exultant charge; he had seen them assassinated in holes and ditches.
The mental attitudes that are developed by the ordeal of active service are various and diverse. It is a question of psychology, temperament. There is the man who attains to the ideal of self-sacrifice, the man who is sullenly and almost bestially resigned, the man who is rebellious and dare not betray himself, the man who is never anything but a coward, and the rarest of all—the man who rebels and refuses to be suppressed. Pierce Hammersly belonged to this last type. Circumstances willed it so—circumstances, and Colonel Barnack.
His egotism had suddenly swung itself to a mountain top. He looked down on the life about him as a scuffle of slaves, of absurd creatures who were fooled by gold hats and stereotyped phrases. His egotism approached the megalomania of incipient insanity. It gave him a new arrogance, a sneering serenity, also a clarity of vision that was merciless and ironical. How devilishly absurd the whole thing seemed! Civilisation ending in rat-holes and blood and little stinking chemical atrocities! Mobs rushing together, losing their heads, getting drunk on phrases! Surely there was some wild liberty left in the world? Why should he obey the crowd, and share in its infatuations? It might come to this that no man would be allowed to decide for his own soul, or go a mile this way or that without being challenged by some petty tyrant in brown or blue. The State, one’s country, what were they after all but absurd lumps of human stupidity in which men were glued up like currants in a pudding? Who had asked him to be born? Who had asked him to call himself an Englishman? Voluntary service, yes, and had not the individual the right to volunteer himself back into sanity?
Fools! Why, a fox had more liberty than the modern man. The beast could go out on the open heath and roam the woods, while the man was called Number So-and-So, and was given a bit of metal with which to kill Number Somebody-else. And if he refused—they either shot or imprisoned him.
What a climax to end the fine flowering of all the romanticisms and colour rhapsodies of a century! The deification of a man like Barnack! It was time, for the sake of liberty and reason, that someone should refuse to live.
Many a man has felt as Hammersly felt, and argued as he argued. But foul facts have to be faced, and in the end the real man must face them. He must grant that we were fools, that certain peoples had big bellies and no hearts, that science may be brutal, that the German beast dragged us down to a death scramble in an exceedingly dirty ditch. The dirt and the ditch and the German are there, and we are in it with him. And in the end the true man faces it out. The German beast must be smothered in the dirt he has made. We can clean up, and talk over things—later.
But Hammersly had this lesson to learn, and like many proud and fastidious people, he refused at first to learn it. His egotism emulated Phaeton. He flamed like a demi-god, or an old-time blank verse hero. The sense of solidarity, of comradeship, had ceased to influence him. He even failed to divine how a woman would feel, the woman who loved him. He just flared off like a rocket, to end in a momentary and vain sparkle of stars.
His brother officers thought that Hammersly had surrendered, for he seemed a changed man, wholly at his ease in the mess; and though his new cheerfulness had the glitter of steel, they failed to discover his mutinous intentions. No one could find any fault with his attitude towards Colonel Barnack. He was very much the fine gentleman, courteous, respectful, but quite unfrightened. None of them dreamed that he was just a polished bomb on the very point of exploding.
Hammersly spent one of his last afternoons in a solitary ramble. He wandered down the gully and along the beach at the foot of the cliff, a beach that was littered here and there with old water-bottles, bits of equipment, battered sun-helmets, and an occasional dead mule. The mules were apt to be offensive and swollen, and Hammersly held his breath till he had drawn out of range. Far away out to sea a couple of monitors were crawling out from under the purple shadow of the island of Imbros, their tripod masts and fire-control platforms making Hammersly think of H. G. Wells’s Martians. And presently one of them stabbed the blue distance with a flash of fire. The huge shell screamed on its way; the report of the gun, following the flash by many seconds, came like a crack of thunder.
The monitors were out to shell Chanak or Maidos, and Hammersly sat for a while on a big boulder and watched them with ironical curiosity. They were beyond the range of the Turkish guns, nor did the Turks attempt to reply to them. It was just an example of the arrogance and the power of the big machine, and of the potential devilries that placed humanity at the mercy of the engineer. The whole business would assuredly end in a reductio ad absurdum.
Hammersly strolled on round a shallow bay to where the cliffs jutted out into a snub-nosed promontory. He had a fine view of the coast and the dim heights above Suvla, a panorama that suggested a wild and desolate French Riviera. He would have strolled farther, but a lean figure in khaki drill dissociated itself from a cleft in the rocks and warned him to stop.
“’Tain’t safe along there, sir. The Turks can snipe you.”
Hammersly looked at the man and thought he had never seen such a figure of patient and dejected weariness. The man’s bony knees and legs were burnt the colour of copper; his thin face was all yellow, and his eyes had a vacant look as though his thoughts were hundreds of miles away. His wrists and knuckles were covered with sores. He did not hold himself upright, but stooped like an old man.
“The monitors are giving Abdul something.”
“Yes, sir.”
His voice was listless, and his utter boredom obvious.
“How long have you been out here?”
“Four months, sir.”
“From the beginning?”
“That’s it, sir.”
There were remnants of smartness and of youthfulness about him; had his blue eyes been keen and his face fresh he would have passed as a good type of young Englishman. The lad’s face was intelligent, but it was also the face of a fatalist.
“I have been here about a month. Multiply that by four——”
The sentry gave him a queer, searching glance.
“Oh, you get fed up, sir—fed up to the teeth.”
“I suppose so.”
“And then you get fed up with being fed up. I’m there now.”
Hammersly talked to the man for a minute or two, while the monitors kept emitting their thundercracks, and he turned back along the beach. “Fed up with being fed up!” So that was the end and the limit of that yellow lad’s philosophy! Resigned to resignation. But was it the last phase?
His brilliant and unconsenting individualism seized on that yellow-faced, dull-eyed sentry as a figure to symbolise his scorn. He went back along the beach with smiling eyes, picking his way past the dead mules, and loftily telling those monitors to stop their bellowing. He was convinced of the tragic absurdity of the whole business. He did not believe that any of the politicians had told the truth; they were liars, gamblers, exploiters of the myriad fools. It was just a great game in which all these diplomatic gentlemen set out to gamble with
lives when words and “notes” failed them. And the only men who enjoyed it were like Barnack, men with a passion for exerting their authority.
Hammersly felt so utterly sure of his new self that he went back to his dug-out and wrote to Janet, hinting at what might happen.
“It is more than likely that I shall be out of this ghastly foolery in the course of a few days. I am going on strike. A novel attitude for a soldier! It is a pity that a few million sane men cannot arrive simultaneously at the same conclusion. We would just hang all the diplomats and the politicians, and make a fresh start.
“Of course, there will be a horrid scandal. I may be shot. Still, there it is, an end to this slavery. . . .”
His egotism flapped to its zenith in that letter. He felt insolently pleased with himself; he even fancied that he could convince Janet that he had done something fine and singular.
CHAPTER XIX
There are certain memorable days in a man’s life when every detail stands out sharply like contrasted colours in a mosaic.
A north wind was blowing, ridging with white the intense blue of the sea, and bringing a new sting and freshness into the life of those who were sick of the sun-glare and the heat. It was a day with a wonderful atmosphere, crystal-clear and vivid. Imbros looked about a mile away. Rocky Samothrace towered up with strange distinctness, and even the Bulgarian coast was visible as a dim grey line above the sea.
Sick men opened their shirts to the wind; it was as refreshing as rain after a drought. There was a new sparkle in life. Hammersly heard a man whistling, a new note in that land of sullen gloom.
About eleven that morning he went down alone to bathe, not unwarned as to the day’s possible significance. Captain Goss, with unusual friendliness, had thrown him a hint after breakfast, and Leatherhead, the doctor, had gone fussing down to the field ambulance in quest of additional and suggestive necessaries. But Hammersly felt peculiarly yet bitterly serene, convinced that the dramatic moment was approaching when he would look the man whom he hated in the eyes and quietly give him his defiance.
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