Parade's End (86 page)

‘There ain’t no beastly snipers, is there, sir. I did ’ope there would’n be henny beastly snipers ’ere. It gives such a beastly lot of extra trouble warning the men.’

Tietjens said it was a beastly skylark that almost walked into his mouth. The acting sergeant-major said with enthusiasm that them ’ere skylarks could fair scare the guts out of you. He remembered a raid in the dark, crawling on ’is ’ands ’n knees wen ’e put ’is ’and on a skylark on its nest. Never left ’is nest till ’is ’and was on ’im! Then it went up and fair scared the wind out of ’im. Cor! Never would ’e forget that!

With an air of carefully pulling parcels out of a carrier’s cart he produced from the cavern behind the sacking two blinking assemblages of tubular khaki-clad limbs. They wavered to erectness, pink cheeses of faces yawning beside tall rifles and bayonets. The sergeant said:

‘Keep yer ’eds down as you go along. You never knows!’

Tietjens told the lance-corporal of that party of two that his confounded gas-mask nozzle was broken. Hadn’t he seen that for himself? The dismembered object bobbed on the man’s chest. He was to go and borrow another from another man and see the other drew a new one at once.

Tietjens’ eyes were drawn aside and upwards. His knees were still weak. If he were levitated to the level of that thing he would not have to use his legs for support.

The elderly sergeant went on with enthusiasm about skylarks. Wonderful the trust they showed in hus ’uman beens! Never left ther nesteses till you trod on them tho hall ’ell was rockin’ around them.

An appropriate skylark from above and before the parapet made its shrill and heartless noise heard. No doubt the skylark that Tietjens had frightened – that had frightened him.

Therd bin, the sergeant went on still enthusiastically, pointing a hand in the direction of the noise, skylarks singing on the mornin’ of every straf’ ’e’d ever bin in! Won’erful trust in yumanity! Won’erful hinstinck set in the fethered brest by the Halmighty! for
’oo
was goin’ to ’it a skylark on a battlefield?

The solitary Man dropped beside his long, bayoneted rifle that was muddied from stock to bayonet attachment. Tietjens said mildly that he thought the sergeant had got his natural history wrong. He must divide the males from the females. The females sat on the nest through obstinate attachment to their eggs; the males obstinately soared above the nests in order to pour out abuse at other male skylarks in the vicinity.

He said to himself that he must get the doctor to give him a bromide. A filthy state his nerves had got into unknown to himself. The agitation communicated to him by that bird was still turning his stomach round… .

‘Gilbert White of Selborne,’ he said to the sergeant ‘called the behaviour of the female “storge”: a good word for it.’ But, as for trust in humanity, the sergeant might take it that larks never gave us a thought. We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed their nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H.E. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them.

The sergeant said to the rejoined lance-corporal whose box now hung correctly on his muddied chest:

‘Now its HAY post you gotter wait at!’ They were to go along the trench and wait where another trench ran into it and there was a great A in whitewash on a bit of corrugated iron that was half-buried. ‘You can tell a great HAY from a bull’s foot as well as another, can’t you, Corporal?’ patiently.

Wen they Mills bombs come ’e was to send ’is Man into Hay Cumpny dug-out fer a fatigue to bring ’em along ’ere, but Hay Cumpny could keep
’is
little lot fer ’isself.

An if they Mills bombs did’n’ come the corporal’d better manufacture them on ’is own. An not make no mistakes!

The lance-corporal said ‘Yes sargint, no sargint!’ and the two went desultorily wavering along the duckboards, grey silhouettes against the wet bar of light, equilibrating themselves with hands on the walls of the trench.

‘Ju ’eer what the orfcer said, Corporal,’ the one said to the other. ‘Wottever’ll’e say next! Skylarks not trust ’uman beens in battles! Cor!’ The other grunted and, mournfully, the voices died out.

The cockscomb-shaped splash became of overwhelming interest momentarily to Tietjens; at the same time his mind began upon abstruse calculation of chances. Of his chances! A bad sign when the mind takes to doing that. Chances of direct hits by shells, by rifle bullets, by grenades, by fragments of shells or grenades. By any fragment of metal impinging on soft flesh. He was aware that he was going to be hit in the soft spot behind the collar-bone. He was conscious of that spot – the right-hand one; he felt none of the rest of his body. It is bad when the mind takes charge like that. A bromide was needed. The doctor must give him one. His mind felt pleasure at the thought of the M.O. A pleasant little fellow of the no-account order that knows his job. And carried liquor cheerfully. Confoundedly cheerfully!

He saw the doctor – plainly! It was one of the plainest things he could see of this whole show… . The doctor, a slight figure, vault on to the parapet, like a vaulting horse for height; stand up in the early morning sun… . Blind to the world, but humming
Father O’Flynn
. And stroll in the sunlight, a swagger cane of all things in the world, under his arms, right straight over to the German trench… . Then throw his cap down into that trench. And walk back! Delicately avoiding the strands in the cut apron of wire that he had to walk through!

The doctor said he had seen a Hun – probably an officer’s batman – cleaning a top-boot with an apron over his knees. The Hun had shied a boot-brush at him and he had shied his cap at the Hun. The blinking Hun, he called him! No doubt the fellow had blinked!

No doubt you could do the unthinkable with impunity!

No manner of doubt: if you were blind drunk and all! … And however you strained, in an army you fell into routine. Of a quiet morning you do not expect drunken doctors strolling along your parapet. Besides, the German front lines were very thinly held. Amazingly! There might not have been a Hun with a gun within half a mile of that boot-black!

If he, Tietjens, stood in space, his head level with that cockscomb, he would be in an inviolable vacuum – as far as projectiles were concerned!

He was asking desultorily of the sergeant whether he often shocked the men by what he said and the sergeant was answering with blushes: Well, you do
say
things, sir! Not believing in skylarks now! If there was one thing the men believed hit was in the hinstincks of them little creatures!

‘So that,’ Tietjens said, ‘they look at me as a sort of an atheist.’

He forced himself to look over the parapet again, climbing heavily to his place of observation. It was sheer impatience and purely culpable technically. But he was in command of the regiment, of an establishment of a thousand and eighteen men, or that used to be the establishment of a battalion; of a strength of three hundred and thirty-three. Say seventy-five per company. And two companies in command of second lieutenants, one just out… . The last four days … There ought to be, say, eighty pairs of eyes surveying what he was going to survey. If there were fifteen it was as much as there were! … Figures were clean and comforting things. The chance against being struck by a shell-fragment that day, if the Germans came in any force, was fourteen-to-one against. There were battalions worse off than they. The sixth had only one one six left!

The tortured ground sloped down into mists. Say a quarter of a mile away. The German front lines were just shadows, like the corrugations of photographs of the moon: the paradoses of our own trenches two nights ago! The Germans did not seem to have troubled to chuck up much in the way of parapets. They didn’t. They were coming on. Anyhow they held their front lines always very sparsely… . Was that the phrase? Was it even English?

Above the shadows the mist behaved tortuously, mounting up into umbrella shapes. Like snow-covered umbrella pines.

Disagreeable to force the eye to examine that mist. His stomach turned over… . That was the sacks. A flat, slightly disordered pile of wet sacks, half-right at two hundred yards. No doubt a shell had hit a G.S. wagon coming up with sacks for trenching. Or the bearers had bolted,
chucking
the sacks down. His eyes had fallen on that scattered pile four times already that morning. Each time his stomach had turned over. The resemblance to prostrate men was appalling. The enemy creeping up … Christ! Within two hundred yards. So his stomach said. Each time, in spite of the preparation.

Otherwise the ground had been so smashed that it was flat; went down into holes but did not rise up into mounds. That made it look gentle. It sloped down, to the untidiness. They appeared mostly to lie on their faces; why? Presumably they were mostly Germans pushed back in the last counter-attack. Anyhow you saw mostly the seats of their trousers. When you did not, how profound was their repose! You must phrase it a little like that – rhetorically. There was no other way to get the effect of that profoundness. Call it profundity!

It was different from sleep; flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs… . Well, you can’t go on with a sentence like that… . But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that
intimate
effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall… . Probably because they – the painters – drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form… . But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi. Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God? As if He had dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth… . Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered …

Dawn on the battlefield… . Damn it all, why sneer? It
was
dawn on the battlefield… . The trouble was that
this
battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months, and twenty-seven days of it still… . No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony of effort by numbers. Nor yet by saying ‘Endless monotony of effort.’ … It was like bending down to look into darkness of corridors under dark curtains. Under clouds … Mist …

At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They
mopped
and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; dropping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying laying out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence, but in accord, they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black, quiet nights, in dug-outs where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners’ picks below you: tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening… . But not FEAR.

It was in effect the desire for privacy. What he dreaded at those normal times when fear visited him at lunch; whilst seeing that the men got their baths or when writing, in a trench, in support, a letter to his bank-manager, was finding himself unhurt, surrounded by figures like the brothers of the Misericordia, going unconcerned about their tasks, noticing him hardly at all… . Whole hillsides, whole stretches of territory, alive with myriads of whitish-grey, long cagoules, with slits for eyeholes. Occasionally one would look at him through the eye-slits in the hoods… . The prisoner!

He would be the prisoner, liable to physical contracts – to being handled and being questioned. An invasion of his privacy!

As a matter of fact that wasn’t so far out; not so dotty as it sounded. If the Huns got him – as they precious near had the night before last! – they would be – they had then been – in gas-masks of various patterns. They must be short of these things, but they looked, certainly, like goblin pigs with sore eyes, the hood with the askew, blind-looking eyeholes and the mouthpiece or the other nose attachment going down into a box, astonishingly like snouts! … Mopping and mowing – no doubt shouting through the masks!

They had appeared with startling suddenness and as if with a supernatural silence, beneath a din so overwhelming that you could not any longer bother to notice it. They were there, as it were, under a glass dome of silence that sheltered beneath that dark tumult, in the white illumination of Verey lights that went on. They were there, those of them that had already emerged from holes – astonishingly alert hooded figures with the long rifles that always looked rather amateurish – though, Hell, they weren’t. The hoods and the white light gave them the
aspects
of Canadian trappers in snow; made them no doubt look still more husky fellows as against our poor rats of Derby men. The heads of goblin pigs were emerging from shell-holes, from rifts in the torn earth, from old trenches… . This ground had been fought over again and again. Then the counter-attack had come through his, Tietjens’ own crowd. One disorderly mob, as you might think, going through a disordered crowd that was damn glad to let them through, realising slowly, in the midst of a general not knowing what was going to happen, that the fellows were reliefs. They shot past you clumsily in a darkness spangled with shafts of light coming from God knows where and appeared going forward, whilst you at least had the satisfaction that, by order, you were going back. In an atmosphere of questioning. What was happening? What was going to happen? … What the bloody hell… . What …

Tidy-sized shells began to drop among them saying: ‘Wee … ee … ry… . Whack!’ Some fellow showed Tietjens the way through an immense apron of wire that was beginning to fly about. He, Tietjens, was carrying a hell of a lot of paper folders and books. They ought to have evacuated an hour ago; or the Huns ought not to have got out of their holes for an hour… . But the Colonel had been too … too exalted. Call it too exalted. He was not going to evacuate for a pack of … damn orders! … The fellow McKechnie, had at last had to beg Tietjens to give the order… . Not that the order mattered. The men could not have held ten minutes longer. The ghostly Huns would have been in the trenches. But the Company Commanders knew that there was a Divisional Order to retire, and no doubt they had passed it on to their subalterns before getting killed. Still, that Bn. H.Q. should have given the order made it better even if there was no one to take it to the companies. It turned a practical expulsion into an officially strategic retreat… . And damn good divisional staff work at that. They had been fitted into beautiful, clean, new trenches, all ready for them – like chessmen fitting into their boxes. Damn good for a beaten army that was being forced off the face of the earth. Into the English Channel… . What made them stick it? What the devil made the men stick it? They were unbelievable.