The Balliols (44 page)

He had recognized the leader in Rickman before one word had been passed to underline the real reason for his presence in this dugout. They had not spoken of soldiering. But Hugh could sense Rickman's power of leadership, his confidence, his manliness, his courage, his capacity to decide quickly. “I'll be able to give my best under a man like this,” he thought.

“You must remember me to your mother when you write. She used to encourage me with my verses. Of course, I don't suppose you'd know that: but I do a little scribbling sometimes: sonnets mostly.”

“I'd heard that.”

“Really?”

When Rickman began to speak about his verses an odd look of nervousness and embarrassment replaced the self-assured confidence with which he had been discussing the characteristic peculiarities of Lucy's husband. He flushed with an eager interest when Hugh said that he had heard about his sonnets. Had Hugh read any of them, he asked.

“Well, as a matter of fact.…”

“No, no, of course you wouldn't. They're just trifles. I scribble them off at odd moments. They have been published, though—quite a lot of them. Some of my friends have suggested
I might make a book of them. I doubt if I shall. They're not really up to anything. But people seemed to have liked them. I've had some very nice letters about them. It might be a good idea to do a book. Anthologists might care to have one of them occasionally. I must show you them some day. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that I've not got one of them on me now.”

He began to feel in the flap of his tunic pocket.

The largest and noblest contribution to the sum of the world's poetry has been made by the English language. Hugh had the normal Englishman's distrust of poetry. With alarm he watched Rickman fumble among a wad of letters. Since he had begun to talk about his poetry, Rickman had become a different person: afflicted with an intense self-consciousness; on the defence; desperately concerned about his verse; yet desperately anxious to give the impression that he set small store by it; quite unable to resist the temptation to find an appreciative audience; yet anticipating hostile criticism.

“Yes, let me see.… Here it is,” he was saying. “It won't take you a minute. It's nothing, of course; just a little thing I tossed off the other night, when I was waiting for a section officer's report. It'll give you an idea, though, of the sort of thing I do do.”

He handed across a sheet torn out of a field service pocket-book, on which fourteen lines of verse were inscribed in a clear boyish script. It was entitled
Here and There
. The octave described a young woman reading a book over a fire in a London flat. The sextet presented in contrast the picture of her lover watching from a front-line trench the light of star shells flickering on No Man's Land. Hugh would have found it hard to recall an occasion when he had read a poem of his own free will. He could not imagine why anyone should want to write one; but at the same time he considered it an achievement to be able to. The poem that Rickman handed him appeared to scan, appeared to rhyme, and one could get the general sense of what it was about. There might be no particular point in doing it, at the same time it was something to have done.

“I think that's jolly fine,” he said.

Rickman flushed with pleasure. Hugh had been conscious of his eyes fixed closely on him while he read.

“You do? I
am
glad. It's only a little thing, of course. At the same time, people seem to like them. I've always done things like that, you know. I used to show your mother my poems sometimes. She was very encouraging. I used to feel awfully shy about it.
In those days writing poetry seemed … well … rather an unmanly kind of thing to do. But it's different now, of course. With the War on. Poetry's come into its own.”

Hugh nodded his head. As far as he was concerned, it hadn't. But he had read a number of press references to War Poetry; had seen a great many photographs of War Poets; had listened on Church Parade to a great many sermons in which the poetry which had been inspired by the war had been allowed to testify to war's purifying influence. He had noticed in fashionable drawing-rooms that a slim volume tossed on to an occasional table was considered part of the general decorative scheme. He had gathered that there was a boom in verse.

“We've got a real literary light, though, in our company,” Rickman continued. “I expect you know his work well; Frank Tallent?”

Hugh shook his head. No, he was afraid he didn't.

“Oh, but you should. He's really one of the best of the younger novelists. Sombre stuff, but really powerful. I tell him that I'm looking forward to being one of the characters in
the
war novel. I shouldn't be surprised if he didn't write it. There's nothing he mightn't do.”

Rickman's eulogy could not have been delivered with a more convincing gusto. Yet Hugh fancied that he detected a quick look of relief on Rickman's face when he had denied knowledge of him, and that in consequence the praise had been given with a warmer generosity.

“You'll see quite a bit of him to begin with,” Rickman was continuing. “I am putting you in his section. Not for long, of course. I'll give you a section of your own in a month or so. But for the start I think it'll be best for you to get an idea of the way things are run out here; in particular of how we run them in this company, from someone a little bit your senior. You won't find it difficult. But things
are
different, necessarily. There are a lot of things that they bother about at depots that don't cut any ice in a front-line gun emplacement. And there are other things that do. You'll have picked them all up before you've been a week with Tallent. We'll go up to his position this afternoon. You'll find this a good company to soldier in. And now, what about an apéritif? I'm afraid I can't offer you the kind of sherry I used to sell for your father's firm. But it's drinkable.”

He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. As he did so, he began to cough. He hit his chest once or twice.

“There's only one thing really wrong with the life out here, and that's not the Germans. It's the damned havoc that the damp plays with your chest if your lungs aren't like leather.”

“I noticed you were wheezing.”

“I've had asthma since I was a kid. It's hell's own business. You never know when it's going to get you, or where. You'll get it one side of the street and not the other. You're never safe from it. Heaven only knows what mine will be like before I've finished with the trenches. Still, don't let's bother about that. You want your sherry. I need it.”

With a laugh, he had put his hand upon Hugh's elbow and led him over to the mess. As soon as he had started talking about the war, about Hugh's position as sub-section officer, about the company, he became again the leader that Hugh had recognized and respected at the beginning of their interview.

There were three officers in the mess when Rickman and he came into it. At a first glance they seemed representative of the type of officer that was to be found in a new army unit. There was a precise, middle-aged man who looked as though he had been a solicitor; rather stiff in his manner, conscious of his age, and seniority; yet rather boyishly excited at being able to mix on terms of equality with men fifteen years younger than himself.

There was a young subaltern, barely twenty; very pink and white and eager; who eight months earlier had been a prefect at a public school; who saw the war as a kind of glorified football match; who looked on the army as in different circumstances he would have looked on a University. He wanted to earn decorations so that his old school would be proud of him; as at Oxford he would have wanted to be a blue. He still read the newspapers with the eye of a public school. “I see that R. L. Maybrick who was in the Winchborough Eleven in ‘13 is in the casualty list this morning.”

The third officer was one of those men in the middle thirties whom you cannot exactly place. They have been to a recognizable public school, though they do not seem public school men and take no interest whatever in their school. They have lined faces. They are hard drinkers, but they are never drunk. They give the impression of having roughed it somewhere, some time. But they are at ease in the exhibition side of London; its restaurants and music-halls; who have no small talk, but tell an anecdote extremely well; whose idea of a “cheery evening” is either “a binge with a girl” or four or five men sitting over a bottle of whisky, each in turn telling the story that reminds another of “an interesting experience that came his way.”
A typical new army mess. And Hugh could tell from the way Rickman managed the introductions, the exact terms of friendship on which he was with each of the three others; definitely there was friendship, but definitely he was the skipper. He would be able to pass quite easily from the off parade manner of the mess to the on parade manner of the square. “I'm in luck all right,” Hugh thought.

That evening after tea he rode up with Rickman to the gun position that Tallent's section occupied. They were in a quiet part of the line. A few months back there had been heavy fighting, the Germans had withdrawn destroying the country as they went. It was through a bleak landscape that the uneven cobbled road led, between its broken footpaths to the main trench system. To the right there was an occasional shelling. The skyline would be lit by a flash. A few seconds later there would be a dull hollow roar. Every now and then the rattle of machine-gun fire would penetrate the varied noises of the night. A Véry light would mount slowly into the sky, would hang suspended, casting a white flickering iridescence over the ruined houses, the broken gates, the piles of masonry; so that they seemed through the winter dusk like the fabric of a magician's dream.

And indeed, apart from the wizardry of the star shells, the forlorn grey landscape had the beauty that is possessed by all subjects in which every detail is subdued to a single and shared harmony. Even if that harmony is sombre. Everything was in tune with winter; the silent group of men who trudged by on their way to working-parties and reliefs; the mules who dragged, with their harness slightly rattling, the limber of rations and ammunition to the line. It was all of a piece.

“We may find Tallent at the ration dump, but I don't expect so,” Rickman said. “He prefers to stay in his dug-out at this time.”

Hugh had refrained on the way up from asking what kind of person Tallent was. It was scarcely his place to put such a question to Tallent's commanding officer. He was more than a little anxious to see what he would be like, both because he would have to spend the greater part of the month in his company and because he was curious to see what an author really looked like. He had never met an author. At Oxford, there had been some tiresome aesthetes who wore odd ties and their hair long, whose rooms one shipped on bump-suppers. But he had not considered them real authors. He had seen photographs
in the illustrated paper beneath which he had read the editorial “Lieutenant So-and-so, whose new volume of poems is in the press.” But that, somehow, had not seemed to him quite real. He could imagine solicitors, doctors, architects, scientists becoming soldiers, but the idea of a poet in charge of a platoon did frankly seem rather incongruous to him. Tallent was a novelist, not a poet. But even so, a man who wrote books.… He was very curious to see what he was like.

To Hugh's surprise, he was like anybody else. He was a little wiry man, thin, sallow-cheeked, clean-shaven. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed. His eyes were very bright and restless. It was his eyes only that gave you the impression that he was in some way different from other people. Not so much that he was more intelligent, as that he was more highly-geared. If you were to see him in the ante-room of a mess reading a newspaper, you would take no notice of him. He would seem rather undersized, with no particular good looks. But the moment he looked at you, you became inquisitive; you said to yourself: “Who is this person? What is he?” His movements and his way of talking were like his eyes. They were quick and restless.

During the first few minutes in the dug-out Hugh had a good opportunity of watching him. At the head of the steps Rickman had begun to cough; by the time he had reached the bottom he had begun to choke, his face had gone scarlet, his fingers worked impatiently at his collar, loosening the tie, unbuttoning the stud. He leant forward against the table gasping, fighting for breath. Tallent, as though he were accustomed to the sight of such attacks, poured out a glass of water, splashed it with whisky, handed it across.

Rickman snatched at it, took a quick gulp, tossed back his head, then squared his shoulders. For a minute or two he stood there, breathing heavily. Then, with a little laugh, he pulled the chair back and sat down.

“God damn my chest! I don't know what it is: these damp walls, and cigarette smoke, I suppose. Thanks for the whisky, Tallent. Here's Balliol. I told you about him in my chit. I shan't be letting him stay with you long. You're too good to need as good a sub-section officer as he'll be. Just show him the ropes for a week or so. Have you anything to show me?”

“There was that matter of the alternative gun emplacement at Beauville.”

“Of course. Yes. Let's have those maps out. You listen to this, young Balliol, it will come in useful.”

The maps spread on the table, with a chart beside them to mark out the indirect fine angles, Rickman and Tallent considered the advantage and disadvantage of a scheme that the Brigadier had very tentatively suggested. There was in actual fact no particular point to it. A gun team at such a place could only have a defensive value and nothing was less likely than a German attack on that particular section of the front. They were both, however, in favour of digging it.

“It'll be something for the men to do,” said Rickman. “Give them something definite to grouse over. If you don't give them trouble, they'll imagine some; and the imaginary ones are always the worst kind.”