The Balliols (53 page)

He gave no sign that any such blow had crashed between his eyes. He rose from the improvised stretcher bed. He must be giving his orders to the gun teams, he told Tallent. Since he had to borrow a gun team, he might as well, for the sake of association, borrow Walker. Tallent had agreed. Since Hugh would be on trench duty for the next hour he would get a few moments' rest. By the time Hugh was back, he was asleep, curled up on his side, his knees drawn up towards his chest, an arm bent behind his head, his dark hair ruffled, his chin darkened with a half-day's stubble. His mouth a little open. In sleep his profile, sharp-cut, had dignity and distinction. Joyce must have noticed that.

Shortly after eight the rations came. There were letters for men who had been wounded or killed that morning. The rations for a complete section had been sent up. The men would not go hungry to their front line gun posts. There was a full section's rum ration. Their blood would be warm to-morrow. Whatever might happen in the line, the routine of trench life continued: rations for men who would never eat them; letters that would be returned unread. Back at details to-morrow afternoon they would be packing the mail and rations for three gun teams. There might be someone left.

At half-past eleven Hugh set out. It was a stranger, someone he did not know, who shook hands with Tallent; who lined his men up by the duckboard track; who at the sergeant's side began the long search for three obscure map references. His real self was apart from this, was watching a section of machine gunners plod slowly along the slippery track that meandered between the water-filled shell-holes, with a subaltern at its head who answered the incessant questions of weary infantry: “Are you the relief we were expecting?” It was a stranger who at last found a strip of trench that looked as though it might be the one he looked for; who put one gun team there and pushed on towards two other ditches that might or might not be the correct ones; but of which no one would be any the wiser were they wrong, since no brigadier was likely to get as far as this; since in this waste of shell-holes such a civilized science as topography had no scope; since the objects by which men computed distances were levelled to one common element: an indistinguishable brown sea of mud.

It was another man, not he, who was responsible for the protection of this morass.

The person that was himself was occupied with other thoughts. So that was what really happened. We should live like mayflies. And it was Tallent who taught her that. They meet at a dance, they are attracted by each other, they probably don't know each other's name! They know nothing about each other, but they are attracted by one another. That is enough. That is all that matters. In wartime, when we should live like mayflies. And I'd never suspected it. I thought that when you fell in love with a girl like that, you fell in love with her in terms of marriage; that there was no other way; not even in a mayfly world. But I was wrong. One lives in the moment, women as well as men; that kind of woman as well as any other. The moment comes, the lovely lyric moment. It's on the wing. One must fly with it or lose it. That's what she meant when she said: “We could have had such a lovely time;” when she looked at me in that odd wistful way. I'd loved her so; dreamt about her; planned about her; but that's not what women want; to be dreamt about, to be planned for. They want glamour: the hot-blooded moment. Tallent, who didn't love her, who never dreamt about her, it's to him she gives the thing that with all my heart and brain I'd hungered for; gives casually, carelessly, heedlessly; to someone who accepts the gift as casually. That dark profile, the dark chin, the hair tumbled forward on the forehead, that's a real man, she must have thought; a man who can take his opportunities, knowing they won't return. Not like that other one, with his “forever” promises. Mayflies; in a mayfly world.

He did not feel jealous. He did not feel revengeful. That would come later, when he saw more clearly. He was too dazed now for jealousy, or hatred. Just as he was too dazed to appreciate his danger, even when the thunder of the barrage broke around him with a sustained fury that proved itself very clearly to be no morning hate but the prelude to a counter attack; even when the lifting of the barrage and the sight, through the mist, of curved helmets and grey uniforms, told him that the front line defences had been pierced.

He knew what he was doing, in the same way that when you are reading a cheap detective story you are alert for what is going to happen next; your attention is concentrated upon the page before you. You recall the immediately preceding episodes. Yet you know that within one week you will be unable to remember one character, one incident.

Sometimes in one of those dreams, that without actually being a nightmare, seem likely to become one at any moment, he had had the sensation of simultaneously reading and living in a melodrama. He had that particular sensation now; even when the direct hit of a trench mortar scattered the gun team he was stationed with; when he strapped up as best he could the tattered flesh, covered the faces of the dead, re-organized the numbers; as later, with the sun mounting in the sky and the barrage pounding on the ridge behind the machine gun, silence on his left made him wonder whether his gun team there was still in action; made him decide to cross the rising hundred-and-fifty yards that lay between him and them; even when half-way across, the scream of a shell, and the sudden thud on his thigh rather like a heavy collar on the football field, flung him into the muddy chill of a shell-hole; with his runner whimpering feebly at his side: “Oh, kill me, kill me. I can't bear this pain!” even when his hand upon the revolver, he wondered looking upon the tortured, twitching thing that could not hope to survive another hour, whether it was not his duty as a human being to end human suffering; even when the crack of shrapnel above his head absolved him of
that
necessity.

None of it was real to him; not even when the sun mounted in the sky; when the numbness of his wound wore off; the pain mounted from his instep to his thigh; when the intensity of the pain roused him from his lethargy to the thought: “I've got to find the gun team,” when he dragged himself, the smashed leg trailing in the mud behind him, over the shell-hole's lip, along the slippery track, towards the shell-battered trench system wrested from the enemy the day before with parapet facing the wrong way, where in the dark of the previous night he had left the borrowed gun team: when his parched whisper “Any of the 305th there?“ received no answer: when he dragged himself down the trench, to find by a mounted but untended gun, with three men lifeless at his side, Walker, blear-eyed and shaken, mechanically fitting a belt with cartridges.

He could get no clear answer from his questions. He hoisted himself on Walker's arm, to the edge of the gun emplacement; looking beyond the ridge a quarter of a mile away, he could see massed in a sunken road, enfiladed to him, a clear line of fire, a cluster, a swarm of field-grey uniforms. “Belt boxes, quick!” he whispered: pulled back the crank handle, tugged through the tag, pressed the thumb piece, saw the massed cluster scatter as mayflies above a summer storm.

But it was in a dream that all that happened. He had no idea of the part he had played in the counter attack: of the havoc
suddenly wrought at a pivotal point, by a gun silent through half a day, whose existence the reforming enemy had not suspected. He knew nothing of all that. And later in the evening's hush, when the returning infantry sent out their patrols to regain contact, pain and loss of blood had placed him beyond the reach of explanation. The stretcher bearers whom a vague, inconsequent machine-gun private salvaged, found him lying across his gun, babbling, delirious.

FIVE mornings later Francis purposely overslept. It was the last week of term. Discipline was relaxed. Roll call at morning P.T. was perfunctory. There was a reasonable chance of his being able to get away with it. Nine times out of ten he would. This happened to be the tenth. It was a warm and sunny morning. The house tutor had woken early; with a headache and a bad temper. He had taken the roll himself.

“Where is Balliol?” he had asked.

There was no answer.

“Is he ill?”

Nobody had heard he was.

“Very well. Carry on with the drill, Musgrave.”

Glad of a potential opportunity of working off his ill-humour, the house tutor strode over to the dormitories. He found Francis, just back from the shower-bath, pensively considering a choice of a tie.

“Have you any excuse to give?”

“No, sir.”

The house tutor looked him slowly up and down.

“You wretched little worm. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, shirking, at a time like this. You ought to be proud of the opportunity of doing a keen thing, of getting yourself fit. It'll be a bad look-out if the war goes on long enough for worms like you to be needed in it.”

A long-handled clothes brush was lying by one of the wash-hand stands. He picked it up.

“Come on, bend over.”

He gave Francis six. They hurt exceedingly. But that, Francis considered as he stood rubbing himself, while the house tutor's footsteps clattered down the passage, was only just. If you cut P.T. and were found out, you expected to be punished. That was part of the bargain. But what was not just, what he could not forgive, was this perpetual harping on the war. If you were slack at games, if you were late for lock-up, if you were low in form, if you ragged in the dormitories after lights out, why should you be punished more
because it was in war-time you were slacking, ragging, being late and idle? It was not fair that masters should take advantage of the war; trying to make you ashamed of breaking the rules, which by long tradition it was the privilege of lower school-boys to attempt to break. Why should it be worse to rag in war-time than in peacetime? Hugh had been idle, late, slack, and been beaten when he was caught. Hugh and his generation were now held up as idols. It wasn't fair.

On his plate at breakfast was a letter from his father.

“MY DEAR BOY,

I did not send you a telegram, for I thought it would needlessly alarm you. But we received news last night that Hugh has been seriously wounded, and moved to a base hospital. Your aunt has got in touch with the authorities by telephone. In their opinion, though Hugh is very seriously ill, and still in danger, he should survive. He showed apparently great gallantry in action.…”

Francis laid the letter down. Hugh wounded. His life in danger. And twenty minutes earlier he had been grumbling because he had to get up twenty minutes earlier to do P.T. He visualized what Hugh had suffered; lying out there in agony between the lines; hungry; parched; chilled; while he, his brother, after an ample dinner, had been playing cricket. It was a contrast that shamed him. “That beast was right. I am a wretched little worm. What right have I to grumble, while my brother is going through all that, so that I can be warm, fed, safe?”

That was how he felt at first; on the wave of an emotional reaction. But later, the cold processes of logic restored him to his first point of view. Even if Hugh had been wounded, that was no reason why he as a schoolboy should be blamed for doing what Hugh had done or would have done as a fourth former. He was prepared when the time came to enlist as Hugh had done. Why, until then, should he not be allowed to enjoy his school days in the same way that Hugh had? It wasn't fair, to force on him a code that his brother and his brother's generation would have laughed at. What sufficed for them, should surely suffice for him. He felt that he was being cheated out of the enjoyment to which his boyhood was entitled.

They gave Hugh an M.C. for the part he had played on that last morning. Walker was awarded an M.M. They would have
recommended him for a D.C.M. had he been able to give any coherently consecutive account of his own performance. What apparently had happened had been this: The lance-corporal in charge of the gun team had taken one of the spare numbers in an attempt to make touch with the emplacement on his right. He had lost his way, and found himself unable to get back to his own team. He had shouted himself hoarse, he said, but unavailingly. When Walker was questioned about what happened between the departure of the corporal and Hugh's arrival he had hung his head and muttered something about a whizz-bang pitching in the trench, and his not being clear about what happened afterwards. He was unwounded, but the fact that he had been violently sick suggested that he had had a slight concussion. He was, anyhow, given a forty-eight hours' pass to Amiens to convalesce.

“He's probably deserved a V.C.,” was Rickman's comment. “But he's such a damned fool that all he'll get is a Military Medal.”

Hugh had the account of this as he lay in hospital from Mrs. Rickman. She was a tall, handsome, expensive-looking woman; dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned. She was in the early thirties. She had a slow dignified way of walking. She was the kind of woman of whom one thought, “She'll look a finer woman at forty that she did at twenty.” Hugh did not think he would ever like her, but he imagined that if he were in her company much, he would find it difficult to resist making love to her. He fancied that she would accept such a campaign very practically; that her head ruled her heart; that she would yield to a caprice if it suited her scheme of living, but not otherwise. She had a self-reliant, self-possessed look. She appeared to know exactly what she wanted, exactly how to get it. She was rich, Hugh had heard; he imagined that she had decided she was going to marry Rickman before Rickman had decided he was going to marry her.

“Roy said that you were lucky to be sent forward when you were,” she told him. “The German artillery got on to your position the next morning and blew that first position of yours to pieces. A shell pitched directly on your dug-out. Poor Mr. Tallent was killed instantaneously.”

Hugh smiled grimly to himself. He remembered how Tallent had said that someone would have to pay for Rickman's gesture.