The Balliols (47 page)

When they were out of the line in rest billets or in Nissen huts there were the same tactics of smartening up to which troops back from musketry courses or autumn manœuvres had been subjected: the recall to the discipline of the parade ground; of shining buttons; of heels clicked and wrists banged on magazines; that tightening up which the townsman finds so necessary when he returns to his chambers in Albany after a month in Cornwall.

And though there was no longer the relaxation of London and
its week-end leaves, there was an equivalent in the day passes to Amiens, and the occasional dinners at the cafés that were turning to rich profit their proprietors' resolve to remain within distance of the guns. Though he was within sight of German helmets, Hugh did not feel that he was any nearer to the war, here, than he had been in England. Though his guns discharged daily some hundred rounds of ammunition whose indirect fire was supposed to harass German fatigue parties, he did not feel that he was so much on active service, engaged in warfare, as conducting the job of soldiering in another place.

And here, just as in England, he found that his main concern, his main interests, were the personal relations of his fellow officers. In particular those of Rickman and Frank Tallent. They were the most vital personalities in the mess; it was with them that he was brought most in contact; especially with Tallent. At the start, he was his sub-section officer. Later, when he had a section of his own, it invariably happened that their two sections were in line together and at rest together. In the line they formed the habit of dropping in on one another two or three times a week. When they were back in billets they sought each other's company, arranging their day passes to Amiens and their experiments in French cooking at back area estaminets.

For Hugh his companionship with Tallent was as big a widening of horizons as the change from school to University had been. He saw the world from another angle. It was not that Tallent was informative in talk, or that he was indeed a particularly good conversationalist. He was not. He would talk very quickly, so quickly as to be almost inaudible; then pause, stammer, start off with a rush again, as though his thoughts moved faster than his powers of expressing them; as though he were unwilling to use a word that did not express his exact meaning, but could not find that word without deliberation; as though he were thinking as he talked. Oddly enough, since as a novelist he had a very real gift of narrative, he recounted an anecdote extremely badly. He seemed always to be in a hurry to get to the end quickly; as though he were afraid that he were boring his audience. Only occasionally did he speak fluently and clearly, and then it was without the eager flicker in his eyes; as though he had made up his mind about the matter, knew the exact phrase, with which to convey his meaning, but had lost interest in what was already settled for him. It was not new things, but a new way of seeing things that Hugh learnt from Tallent.

Tallent was in the middle thirties. He was ambitious. He had earned a measure of success. He wanted more success. Yet he had no use for the success that was not of the precise nature of his seeking. He enjoyed the tributaries of success: money, position, fame; yet he could dispense with them. He regarded as means the things that other men regarded as an end. He judged men and matters by the standard of an unworldliness that Hugh had previously associated with eccentrics, neurasthenics, people weak in health, devitalized, who despised what lay beyond their grasp. Tallent did not depise material success; he was thoroughly, healthily capable of enjoying its rewards. But he set no great store by it. He regarded success as the best kind of athlete regards the actual result of a game: as something to be striven at during the game; but not to be brooded over, before and after; as ultimately unimportant.

But there were other things which he did not look on as a game.

It was this indifference to what constitutes for the majority an aim in life that was responsible, not actually for an unpopularity in the mess—that would be to put it too strongly—but the fact that he was not particularly liked. Not one of the men would actually admit the fact, a loyalty to the members of one's mess forbade that. They would drop such remarks as, “Odd fellow. Moody. I suppose he must find it rather strange being in a place like this, after the kind of life he must have led before.” They called him moody because very often, in contrast to his usual restlessness, he would sit silent and immobile, staring in front of him, apparently at nothing. Hugh, who knew him best, felt that it was at such times that he was most close to happiness.

But it was not his moodiness that set him apart from the others, nor did his position in the public eye make the rest jealous. The company of even a minor celebrity would have been a kind of privilege. They would have enjoyed discussing his peculiarities with officers from other companies. Nor did the fact that before the war he had mixed in a world different from their own, create an obstacle. With all that they could have coped.

“Rum fellow,” they would have said. “Moody, you know; sits silent for hours on end, thinking out his novels, I suppose. Odd the way you meet fellows through the war that ordinarily you'd never be within a mile of. I suppose a fellow like Tallent spent all his time with literary blokes, painters, long-haired poets and the kind of women who take up birds like that. You'd never think it, though, to look at him; seems like everybody else.”

There was no limit to the peculiarities that the new army were ready to overlook. They would even have overlooked it had he been a weakling, had he been inefficient, had he been unable to keep discipline in his section. “Poor devil, he wasn't built for this kind of life. We do our best to let him down lightly.” But he was none of those things. He was as efficient as they were; as competent, as worldly, as able to cope with wordly problems; for the matter of fact, able to advise most of them on the practical management of their lives. What puzzled Tallent's brother officers was his indifference to the things they set most store by. The fact of his indifference, never stated, but implied irresistibly in his manner, in the same way that in his novels he implied but never stated his own opinions, conveyed to his fellow officers a criticism of their absorption in interests that to him seemed trivial. They were worried by his aloofness. They never felt quite at ease in his company. They were always happier when he was away. When he left the mess the others shifted in their chairs with a sense of relief, a prospect of comfort; as one does when the window that was causing a draught is closed.

Rickman alone spoke of him with enthusiasm.

“He's a grand fellow; first-class officer; first-class writer; maybe he takes a little knowing, but when you've once taken the trouble to break the ice, there's no one like him.”

He spoke with an extreme heartiness; but that self-consciousness which Hugh had noticed when Rickman first talked to him about his poetry was always liable to reappear in Tallent's presence. His attitude towards Tallent was a mixture of mental respect and emotional dislike. Hugh once found him reading Tallent's latest novel. It was a short book: the study of a couple of late Victorian spinsters; punctilious, undramatic; with a close care for detail; the elaborate recreation of a setting, to which Tallent during a period of training in England had turned for relief from the heavily emotionalized atmosphere of the hour. It was a book addressed to a public that, small in peace time, was necessarily minute in war. It was published unobtrusively, was dropped out of the advertisements after a week, was referred to by the general press as “a relaxation from Mr. Tallent's more usual and more important work,” but that was treated at length and with respect by those reviewers who regarded the publication of a new book not as news but as an intended contribution to literature.

Rickman put the book down as Hugh came into the mess.

“There's no doubt about it. This man can write,” he said.

It was said almost grudgingly, as though he would have been relieved if he could have taken the general view, have found it dull and trivial, so that he could have said, “He's a dull, trivial fellow. Why should I care what he thinks of me?” For he knew that he bored and exasperated Tallent by the interminable production of poems from his tunic pocket. It infuriated him to see on Tallent's face that look of condescension, to hear his wearily articulated “Yes, I like that” as he handed back the poem. At such moments he hated Tallent. He would have given a great deal to be able to despise what he disliked. But his good taste and his intellectual honesty would not allow him to do that. He tried to persuade himself that he really liked Tallent, because his inability to like a man of merit would have been a proof of deficiency in himself. Because he had so high an opinion of Tallent's work, because he was proud to be able to recognize there qualities that the many could not see, he more than ever wished to earn Tallent's approval for his sonnets. He knew that Tallent admired him as a soldier and on the whole liked him as a man. But it was not personal affection, it was not respect for himself as a soldier, but tribute to him as a poet that Rickman wanted. Every time he wrote a sonnet he thought “Now, surely this is good. Surely Tallent will notice that it is.” When he received a letter from the editor of
The Poetry Magazine:
“Dear Captain Rickman, I am delighted with your sonnet sequence. It will make a fine contribution to our special ‘On Active Service' number that we are preparing for October,” or better still, when a proof from the
Saturday Westminster
or a cheque from
Country Life
proved that he had been admitted to the columns where not only was poetry paid for, but which established poets accepted as a platform, “Surely Tallent will be impressed by that.” He did not know whether he was more angry or disappointed when Tallent handed it back, after a moment's cursory perusal, with his habitual bored “Yes, I like that.”

Once Hugh asked Tallent why he wouldn't simulate a little more enthusiasm over the skipper's sonnets.

“After all, it's a very amiable weakness. It doesn't do anybody any harm.”

Tallent had replied impatiently.

“Doesn't it? No, I suppose it doesn't. But the whole business makes me sick. A concern like
The Poetry Magazine
having its ‘On Active Service' number, fashionable women getting up readings for Charity. Every subaltern with a knack for rhyming getting his poems published and his photograph in the press. And all the time
the real poets can't get a hearing. Oh, I know a great many of them can. I know poetry's selling as it's never sold before, and a lot of it's really good. But there's a great deal that's really important being swamped by this deluge of minor verse writing. It's.…”

He paused, his forehead wrinkled, trying to find the right word to convey his meaning.

“You can't see that it matters what our friend the sonneteer does with his spare time and a pencil at company headquarters, but when your friends have given their lives to a thing as mine have.… You see, before all this began there was a whole group of us: there was Granville Barker in the theatre, there were Cannan, Lawrence, Mackenzie, Walpole writing novels, there was Harold Monro running the
Poetry Bookshop
and
Poetry and Drama
, there was Eddie Marsh editing
Georgian Poetry
. In our different ways we all seemed to stand for something. But that's gone now, or going. The only poetry, the only art there's room for, is the art that fits in with the war; that can be part of an orthodox movement, and that leaves the extreme left out; people like Eliot, and Pound and Flint and Aldington. All that's
tapageur
. What's happening to them? I don't know. They've had their platform taken from them. And they matter. They matter a whole lot. But they're being elbowed out, while nincompoops like the sonneteer are allowed a hearing.”

A copy of
The Tatler
was lying on the dug-out table. Tallent picked it up. It contained a full-page portrait of an imposingly handsome woman; bare-shouldered, with high-piled dark hair, with an imperious manner. It was captioned “Indefatigable in War Work.” In smaller print appeared, “A recent photograph of the beautiful Mrs. Roy Rickman who is on the council of the new hospital at Gideon Park. Her husband, a captain in the Machine Gun Corps, is one of the many soldiers in whom the war has revealed latent but unsuspected talents as a poet. He has a volume of sonnets in the press.”

“That,” said Tallent, “is the kind of thing that makes me very sick.”

A few days later the two sections in the line were due to be relieved. It was a night that Hugh was never to forget. For days it had rained steadily. In the late afternoon it became a downpour. The sides of the trench began to crumble and fall into the rising tide of mud. The business of moving the gun kit to the limbers grew minute by minute harder. The men floundered in the slush, the
weight of the belt-boxes seeming to tear the arms out of their sockets. The communication trench was continually being blocked. Men were streaming up to the front line staggering under the weight of dixies and sandbags. There was hardly room for the outgoing party to pass. All along the trench men were getting stuck in the mud, having to be dragged out. All the time the rain was lashing against their faces, soaking them through and through.

It was the kind of night on which a relieving party would be late. The relief was due at nine. By half-past eight the gun material had been stacked away on the limbers. But by ten o'clock there was still no sign of a relief. Hugh and Tallent stood in the dug-out mouth stamping their feet and shivering. The men by the limbers huddled together for warmth; the drivers crouched against their mules to protect themselves from the rain. The minutes passed. The mud in the trench rose till in places it was knee-deep; and the men had to trudge across the open.

The limbers were in an exposed position; every now and then bullets from a machine gun would patter about their wheels. But a stage of exhaustion had been reached when the men no longer worried about safety. They were too weary to duck even, at the slow screech of a shell.