The Balliols (52 page)

“This is where we were last night before we attacked. This is where we were at eight o'clock this morning. This was our line at ten. This should be our line now. It isn't. I think it is this. I'm not certain of that even. There's another report to come in yet. There'll be a counter attack, that's certain. We must strengthen the front line with machine-guns. How many can you spare?”

Rickman glanced over the Brigadier's shoulder. He could see six small pencilled circles. That was presumably the gun positions the Brigadier had in mind. He wanted to chalk them in blue, so that they would look pretty when the divisional general asked about his defence scheme. The Brigadier had not been over that piece of ground. Rickman had. He did not believe in sending machine guns forward. Lewis guns could do that work. Vickers guns were a kind of light artillery that should be kept slightly in reserve. But this was no time for arguing about that. Guns had to be sent to the front line. All he could do was to reduce the Brigadier's estimate of their importance.

He opened his own map. He spread it beside the general.

“The great thing is to cover as much of the line with as few guns as possible. Now, there's a slight valley here that a single gun could cover. It isn't very clearly marked upon the map, but there's a spur here and a re-entrant there.”

He talked quickly, but authoritatively. In a couple of minutes he had the Brigadier befogged in a mist of topographical detail. Another minute and the Brigadier had ceased to listen. For yet another minute Rickman talked. Then he reached over to the scarlet pencil. He marked three circles on his map.

“If we were to have one gun here, another there, a third here, we should be able to arrange a cross-fire that ought to hold any counter attack.”

The Brigadier looked pensively at Rickman's map. Yes, those three red circles looked effective. He turned back to his own map. Rickman leant over him, the pencil in his hand.

“Here, here, and the last here.”

He drew the circles deftly. The chromatic effect was definitely pleasing. The Brigadier surveyed it, turning his head first to the one side, then the other. It looked all right.

“If you really think three guns are sufficient, Rickman?”

Rickman tapped the table.

“You can see for yourself,” he said.

It was an answer that was singularly soothing to the Brigadier. It was putting words into his mouth. That was what he would say when the general asked him about his defence scheme. He would tap the table with his pencil. “You can see for yourself,” he'd say.

“And that's three guns saved, anyhow,” thought Rickman, as he climbed the dug-out steps. There remained the question which guns he was to send. And that question resolved into two alternatives. For two of the sections there had been arranged a complicated defensive barrage with the divisional machine gun company that could not be disturbed. Either Tallent or Hugh Balliol had to go.

Everything pointed to his sending Tallent. Two of Hugh's guns were out of action. Tallent's three guns were a co-ordinated easily detached unit. Tallent was the senior, the elder; had been longer with the company. By every obvious reason Tallent should have been sent. And yet the very fact that he and Tallent were on the brink of quarrel, that they disliked each other, made him hesitate to send Tallent into such obvious danger. He had seen enough of the war to know that the odds were against the survival of an officer despatched on such a mission. “I can't send a man that I hate. But that's absurd,” he told himself. “Are you going to allow personal feelings to influence you to such an absurd extent that you are going to sacrifice your friends for your enemies, that you're going to reverse the process of favouritism till it would seem to be of greater use for a man to be against you than for you? Are you going to be like those fathers who when their sons work in their businesses, refuse them promotion just because they are their sons? If there were no personal feelings involved either way, you know, don't you, it is Tallent that you'd send. Is Balliol to suffer because he's your friend, and the other isn't? Don't be absurd. Come now, give the order.”

But deeper than reason was the instinct forbidding him to send into a danger that might mean death, a man that with one side of
himself he hated, with another respected, and by whom he was jealous to be liked. He did not want his relations with Tallent to end here; he could not picture himself writing to Tallent's family the condolences over a death for which he was himself responsible. Tallent's contempt for him had struck him on his weakest point. That contempt would always rankle. If only he could force Tallent to reconsider his opinion. If only he could cancel that contempt. His desire to be reinstated in Tallent's eyes was greater than his sense of justice.

“I can't,” he thought. “It's no good. It must be Balliol.”

During the brief lull of the afternoon the instructions were sent up by runner to the gun positions.

As soon as it was dark, Lt. H. S. Balliol was to take his two guns and one of the gun team from Lt. Tallent's section and proceed to the following map references. He was to hold these positions to the last. He was himself advised to remain with the most distant gun team, keeping in touch with the other two by runner.

Hugh whistled as he read the message. He handed it across to Tallent.

“That doesn't look as though the front gun teams were going to have a picnic.”

Tallent did his best to be optimistic.

“Except when an actual show's on. I'm not sure the very front line isn't the safest place. The big stuff can't get at you.”

“There may be a counter attack.”

“A half-hearted one, most likely.”

At that actual moment it was hard to believe in any very real imminence of danger. A midsummer afternoon was wearing towards evening, with the sun's heat lessening, and the sky a paling hyacinth. The brown stretch of shell holes with their occasional rows of broken tree stumps had a uniform carpetted appearance. The shelling was casual and intermittent. A spurt of earth would rise from a distant ridge where a battery was range-finding; an aeroplane was droning in the sky with the white puffs of the “Archies” scattering around it. The only sign of the morning's fury was the steady trickle of wounded down the road, some limping with bandaged heads, alone; others supporting one another. Now and then a party of stretcher bearers filed by. Once a group of prisoners slouched past under the escort of a Jock.

“I wonder how many men were killed beyond that ridge between six and ten this morning,” Tallent said.

“Don't be so cheerful.”

“Well, they're out of it, which is more than those poor devils are, limping down there with broken shoulders.”

“They'll be in England in a week. They are probably as pleased as Punch.”

“They may be now, they've got ‘blighties,' they are out of it. But the world isn't going to be so amusing for them when it's all over and they've got to face life with a permanent limp, or their lungs so full of gas that they live in perpetual terror of a chill. There'll be a good many times when they'll feel envious of the friends they left there beyond this ridge. I don't suppose that they're the only ones who'll feel envious of them, either.” He paused, leaning back on the improvised stretcher bed in the cool dusk of the dug-out, looking on to the hot, churned plain and the small parties of wounded winding their way towards the ambulances of the clearing station.

“Those fellows aren't the only casualties of war. No, not by a long chalk.”

With hands crossed behind his head he looked through the dugout's opening with an abstracted stare, as though he were seeing not so much the desolate landscape of northern France, but the future to which this landscape was the emotional and mental prelude. “It isn't going to be what we think it is,” he said. “It's going to be harder in ways we don't suspect. In many ways life is very easy now. It's been simplified. We don't have to worry about livelihood. We are clothed and fed and housed. We are welcomed when we come back on leave; we stand for romance, adventure. It won't be like that when the war's over. There'll be a spate of new problems. These fellows aren't going to find it so easy to earn a living, they won't be symbols of romance to their women-folk and families. They won't be heroes coming back from the wars with nine months' pay to spend in a fortnight. They'll be harassed clerks, worrying about the rent. It isn't only conditions that'll be different. It's the people they'll be entangled with. Their womenfolk particularly. Women aren't going to be the tame creatures that they were, now that they've learnt independence, had money of their own to spend, seen what a man's world is like. They'll be a different race. They'll be able to be themselves at last. Not just what men have wanted them to be.

“How do all these men picture the homes that they'll be returning to or building when they return? An affectionate, docile woman waiting by a hearth, and that's what women have been, up to now. That's what they've had to be, since that's what men wanted.
Men held the power. But it wasn't necessarily what they wanted for themselves. When a girl of twenty fell in love with a man of twenty-five without much money, she didn't necessarily want to set up house with him and start having children. A woman of thirty might, but not a girl of twenty. It's what she had to do, though, if she were in love with the man and wanted him. She won't have to any more. She has learnt what it is to be independent. She's known that she does not need to have children unless she wants them. She can earn her living, stand on her own feet. When the war's over, men aren't going to find waiting for them the same women that they said goodbye to, or got engaged to, in 1914. They aren't going back to the kind of home that they expect. I'm not sure that that isn't going to be the biggest surprise that's waiting for the ex-soldier.”

He paused.

“I had an experience on my last leave that I must say surprised me.”

Hugh had listened to Tallent's diatribe with attention but no particular interest. Tallent was in the habit of indulging in such outbursts. Generalizations never carried much weight with Hugh. He was only impressed by facts; by rows of figures from which a conclusion could be deduced. He became alert when Tallent spoke of a specific instance.

“Tell me.”

Tallent shrugged his shoulders.

“It wasn't anything. It's the kind of thing that's happened to hundreds of other fellows, only it hadn't happened to me before. A girl that I'd met for the first time came back to my rooms within three hours of my meeting her.”

“What kind of a girl?”

“That's the point: the last kind of girl that you'd expect it of. I've knocked about a bit. I've travelled. I've moved in what's called Bohemian circles. But this was different. She wasn't the Chelsea model type. She was what one's father would have called a lady.”

It was an experience that would have equally astonished Hugh. Before the war, and before he had met Joyce, he had knocked about in the manner of young men of his age and class. There had been wild nights in Paris; he had presented bouquets at stage doors; but he had drawn a very distinct line between
that
kind of girl and the girls one's sister knew. He was curious and inquisitive.

“How did you meet her? Tell me all about it.”

“Where one always does seem to meet people: at a dance.”

The kind of dance that was arranged in war-time, hurriedly, to collect funds for some charity or other; where you induced your friends to take tickets and “join our party”; but where the parties became dispersed and scattered before the second foxtrot had begun.

“And you fell in love with her at sight?” Hugh asked.

Tallent laughed.

“I've written so many novels in which men and women have asked themselves whether they're in love or not that I don't know what love is. We liked each other. There was attraction. You can tell that kind of thing at a first glance.”

“But how did it come to happen? How did you lead up to it?”

“Chance; in the way those things do happen. There was some trouble about getting drinks. You know what these new licensing laws are like. You never quite know where you are with them. I got impatient. I said I'd get some at my place; that I'd go back and get it. I'd just been dancing with her. I said I didn't want to go alone, would she come with me? I'd got rather a jolly flat, taken over from a friend for the fortnight of my leave. There was a fire burning, it all looked very cosy.”

“And it happened just like that?”

“Yes.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty—twenty-two.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Attractive, in a darkish way.”

“Did you know anything about her?”

Tallent shook his head.

“She was working in some government office. She had parents in the country. I think she was engaged to someone.”

For Hugh the incident had the lovely fantastic quality of a tale of the Decameron. It was the kind of thing that one dreamt of having happen to one, but never expected would. Hugh could not ask too many questions.

“But wasn't it very difficult? Hadn't you to be very eloquent? Did she take a fearful lot of persuading?”

“No. It was all very easy and natural. We'd kissed. It was one of those kisses that explain everything—that make words unnecessary. I said something about living in the moment at a time like this, that we were like mayflies destined to die at sundown, that we should live as mayflies did.”

Hugh had read of a casually dropped phrase that was like a blow between the eyes. He had read of men carrying on with the routine of their normal lives, quite competently, without realizing what they were doing; as though they had been stunned: of men moving like machines through a succession of tabulated scenes. He had read of that.