A Test to Destruction (14 page)

They went on more slowly. Phillip felt that he had known O'Gorman all his life. Together they would get through.

“It's rather fun being together, isn't it, O'Gorman?”

“It is that, sorr.”

Luck was with them, or the Germans were as tired as themselves, for they simply walked through any posts there were, or were not, above the river; and being challenged in a Manchester voice were told to advance, to the cocking of a Lewis gun handle, and found themselves among men of the Cheshire Regiment.

*

By noon that day Phillip had accosted several Staff officers, some bobbing on unaccustomed bicycles, or astride nags, to ask them—come to give orders to stand on unknown lines upon a mapless landscape—where the Division was. None seemed to know. He described the appearance of ‘Spectre', and was sometimes irritably dismissed. Cavalry was moving up a track; he wondered if he would see his cousin Willie, but they were Canadians, not the 10th Hussars. Followed by O'Gorman he went on across the ruinous tract of the old battlefield, featureless except for distant charred stalks of trees and a line of wheeled slowness moving towards the western horizon of nowhere.

At Maricourt a host of redcaps; stragglers being stopped, questioned, coloured regimental and divisional flashes noted, paybooks inspected, before direction to wired-in enclosures. Officers and men alike.

“Good, now we can find out where our crush is, O'Gorman.”

“Yes, sorr.”

“Let's sit down here,” said Phillip, coming to the low remains of a brick wall. Folding his arms, he dozed, floating beyond a voice speaking for what seemed a long time until he was jerked back to daylight by being struck on an arm.

“Stand up!” An A.P.M. was pointing at him with a cane. “Stand up, both of you!” Recognising the voice, Phillip looked up through screwed eyes and said, “Good morning, Major Brendon, how are your plans working out?”

“Are you trying to be impertinent? Stand up when you speak to me!”

Phillip felt cold anger as he got up, and holding himself limp, assumed a Satchville expression of mild impersonal geniality.

“Why are you not with your unit?”

“I'm trying to find it, Major. Perhaps you will help me? Second Gaultshires, amalgamated with No. 1 Composite battalion, in your Division.”

“Why are you not armed, but wearing only fatigue dress?”

“My runner and I were taken prisoner two days ago, and we escaped, Major.” He answered questions satisfactorily, and was told that the Division, now known as West's Force, was in support east of Suzanne, holding the heights above the great ox-bend of the river.

There towards evening he found ‘Spectre' and made his report.

“We're being relieved tonight, Phillip. ‘Gentleman' Jimmy was killed this morning. The Division now has twelve officers, counting you, and six hundred men. Bill Kidd is still with us. He took over when you were pinched. Would you like to stay here, or get back and carry on?”

“Would it upset Bill Kidd too much, sir?”

“I asked you a question.”

“I think I'd like to return to the boys, in that case. By the way, can you tell me if my orderly, O'Gorman, as an escaped prisoner, has qualified for Home Establishment?”

‘Spectre' looked at him sharply. “Did you tell him he was?”

“Well yes, I did, sir.”

“We'll have to see about that later. Does he want to go home?”

“I haven't asked him, sir.”

O'Gorman said, “I'll stay, sorr, if you will have me for your batman.”

When Phillip told ‘Spectre' this, he replied, “Good. But we'll need new N.C.O.'s when we get back to real soldiering.” He smiled as he said this. Phillip had never seen him smile before; he was filled with a warm glow, so that for the moment his fatigue was gone.

It was not quite the same feeling when he met Bill Kidd, who greeted him with, “Christ! I thought I'd got rid of you, old boy! What a war! Have a spot of old man whiskey. We've got bags of the stuff. In fact, we're known now as the Whiskey Fusiliers, thanks to Moggers, and if I may say so, to Bill Kidd.”

Whiskey was forbidden to all except officers; drunkenness was a crime which, if coupled with dereliction of duty, might lead to the death penalty. They had come upon during the retreat, at Hardecourt beside the railway, a store which had supplied E. F. Canteens in the days of static warfare. By Kidd's order a G.S. waggon had been loaded with several crates, including such brands as Johnny Walker, Highland Dew, Grant's Teacher's and mellowed Auld Scottie. Round about midnight an issue was made from a special water-cart, the first of three linked together
and brought up by Moggers, the outfit being drawn by a sight now familiar along the Suzanne-Maricourt road, which later became legendary: a steamroller, camouflaged with black and yellow vertical stripes, driven by a Chinese labourer festoon'd with Mills bombs.

The water had been brought from the river near Suzanne, but there was little to spare for the mules or light-draught horses. The grey canvas troughs of the old war had rotted, pipes laid down beside the road in the fabulous days of Kitchener's Army had opened at the seams during the frosts of a forgotten winter.

“Don't get pissed, you lads, or you'll get Bill Kidd shot. And leave a little drop for Sauer and Kraut. Come on you wheezy crab wallahs, do an allez!” Followed faint mouth-organ music, light-years away from the blonde who came from Eden, by way of Swe-den, Swe-den, Swe-den, Swe-den, one foot forced in front of the other, under the foggy light of the moon.

“Well done, Bill. You're a better man than I, Gunga Din!”

“Ger't yer!”

“I've got some bon news. We're due for relief tonight. How many do we muster now?”

“Four officers and sixty-two other ranks, old boy. Our heads are bloody but unbowed, our ribs are broken but unbent, as the poet said.”

*

A division from Second Army arrived, and West's Force was withdrawn into reserve a couple of miles back on the high ground above Albert, from where could be seen, in the words of an R.F.C. despatch rider on a P. and M. motor-bike, ‘a huge black mass of Germans stretching back as far as Cambrai'.

Blistered, bearded, with eyes stinging and bloodshot, they dropped asleep on the ground amidst an old tenantry of rusted helmets, water-bottles, leather-equipment, and wooden crosses near the Glory Hole, site of old mine explosions and the draining of a summer's sighs. Even a fusilade of near pistol shots did not rouse them; nor the shouting of an R.A.M.C. captain on a motor-cycle, threading his way down the road, “They're coming!”, to the posts put out along the road—and asleep.

All night the procession of infantry, weary mules and horses, lorries with steaming radiators, civilian carts and dryly bellowing cows passed down the road into Albert. Overhead aeroplanes
droned and dived, dropping bombs and sweeping the straight road with bullets, while parachute flares with their brilliance paled the moon above this human ebb-tide of an Army outnumbered five to one.

In the morning the survivors of No. 1 Composite battalion awoke to dull awareness of weighted bodies. Led by their tall, thin commander, they shuffled on to Albert, destination of the night before. In areas of cleared ruins, beside the river which ran through the centre of the town, were groups of Nissen and elephant huts. Among them was a welcome sight—an Expeditionary Force Canteen, the first of its kind seen intact since another war. But it was closed.

“Wait till I get round to the back, old lad,” muttered Bill Kidd, his face almost black with a week's beard.

Later in the day Phillip stood beside ‘Spectre' in the Grand' Place, watching faces of various shapes and hues going by. Upon all was the same expression—an acceptance of something beyond themselves. Sallow-grey under a week's growth of hair predominated: the fought-out men of the scattered and seldom coordinated rear-guards. Among them was to be seen the occasional yellow, black, or coffee-coloured faces of foreign labourers, sharply in contrast to the dead-white skins of very old Picardian peasants sitting expressionless, half-cocooned in swollen cotton bags as sunless as their faces—suffocating mattresses, sleeping and grinding and dying family heirlooms stuffed with the feathers of generations of semi-miserable cocks and hens, birds mis-called domestic, born in captivity and expiring in betrayal after a life as shut-in as those of their masters.

“What a scene for some Tolstoi of the future!” said ‘Spectre', feeling that he would not live to fulfil the hopes that had lain behind his eyes since the spring of 1915. In his pocket-book was a quotation from John Donne, which Phillip was shown, later, by Westy's mother.

“Have you still got your two prisoners, Phillip?”

“Yes, Colonel. Disguised a bit, though. I didn't want Sauer and Kraut to get bombed by some Chink or other.”

“What do you propose to do with them?”

“Employ them as stretcher-bearers, and spare-time cooks.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘disguised a bit'?”

“Camouflaged, sir. We found some overalls in a busted tank when we collared the Louie guns from it.”

“Well, keep an eye on them until we know where the Corps prisoners' cage is to be set up. We can't take risks. Moggers tells me that his convoy was raided, well behind the firing line, last night.”

“I don't think it could have been Sauer and Kraut, sir, they were tied up.”

“You know that's against the Geneva Convention, surely?”

“Well, only their trousers were tied. Tonks thought of it. He fixed telephone wire inside their trousers so that, if they tried to crawl away, they'd leave them behind, the other end of the wire being tied to Tonks' wrist.”

“Oh, I wasn't thinking of them in connexion with the raid on Moggers' convoy. That may have been the work of Broncho Bill, the Australian actor, whose speciality, you may remember, is lifting newly-washed breeches from any A.P.M.'s clothes' line. According to your friend Brendon there are two gangs of deserters operating now. They've been living in the devastated area for a year and more, existing on what they can raid from convoys. A cavalry troop was sent by Army to round them up last winter, after shots had been heard, apparently some rival gang raiding another. The troop couldn't do much, owing to hidden wire in the grasses hiding the shell-holes. Now come with me down to the railway embankment. Albert is to be held, with the line of the Ancre to Miraumont, up to Achiet, and thence to Arras. Albert is the hinge between Third and Fifth Armies. We are now under Third Army, by the way.”

“What has happened to Gough?”

“What is left of his Army has been placed under the French.”

They walked to the railway which ran north through the valley to Arras, by way of Achiet-le-Grand, or did, until the arrival of Spring upon the battlefield. Here, among sidings piled with stores, was a congestion of motor ambulances which had evacuated the field-hospitals. Row upon row of wounded men were lying on stretchers, blankets, ground-sheets, and on the earth itself.

The driver of the Red Cross train was looking anxious about getting away in time, for, said ‘Spectre', who wore the blue
armband of a brigade commander, “The Boche is concentrating west of Thiepval”, which was on the high ground about four miles away, above the valley.

After looking at the crossing places the two men went back to the Grand' Place.

“I'll report your care of the two prisoners, Phillip. Brendon, back again with the Provost Marshal's side, is no friend of yours, I fancy. Meanwhile, hang on until you hear from me. It's possible that we'll be relieved tonight, but keep this under your hat.”

After ‘Spectre' had gone Phillip felt a great loneliness. Above the red-brick ruins of the church hung the legendary Golden Virgin holding down the Infant Jesus; the Figure would remain hanging there, it was said, with the rust running down the twisted iron framework to blind the eyes of God until it fell, a sign that the end of the war was near. Again he thought of Lily Cornford, his love in that far summer of 1916, and of Father Aloysius, the chaplain-saint, whose deaths had once seemed to have altered the course of his life. Now, the ‘statue', as the men called it, seemed ordinary.

Towards noon howitzers sent up from the Fifth Army gun park began to fire overhead from across the valley in the direction of Thiepval. Back in weedy pits dug before July the First! There was no end to it. If they were ordered to attack, his men would be merely targets. They had had only six hours' unbroken sleep during the past six days. Out of twenty-three officers and six hundred and fifty-nine men at Corunna Camp only three officers—Moggers, Kidd, and himself—were left. Three junior subalterns had been attached: their names he could not remember, only their faces and badges, and that with an effort—acorn of Cheshire, knot of Staffordshire, grenade of Fusilier. One company was commanded by a sergeant. The rest were Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, like the advertisements for horses and cattle he had, in another world, read in
The
Kentish
Mercury.

Behind closed eyes he was a boy biking along a white dusty lane, making for the dappled woods of Spring, happy, happy, happy with Desmond. The picture was stricken; everything had an end; the opening of a flower brought about its own death. Before the flowering of Lily, he and Desmond were the greatest friends who had ever lived, their friendship was to last for ever and for ever in their lives.

Phillip was not experienced enough to know that physical exhaustion can bring forked thoughts which should be cast, lest they divide and reduce the spirit.

From the riven friendship with Desmond he passed on to present disaster, saying to himself, What use have I been as a so-called ‘commanding officer'? What lives have I saved by my taking thought? Not one. Then to the other prong: If I had not been with them, would it have made any difference?