The Golden Virgin (27 page)

“Well anyway, let’s not part in bad blood.”

“You have created the bad blood.”

“Have it your own way. Goodbye, and good luck to you wherever you are.”

He saw Mrs. Neville as he passed. “Goodbye, Mrs. Neville. May I write to you, or would you rather I didn’t?”

“Why yes of course, dear! Don’t take it to heart, Phillip, it’s only a storm in a teacup!”

“Teacups sometimes get broken, Mrs. Neville. Goodbye, and thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

*

Outside the flat Ching was waiting. “I thought I’d tell you that I heard what Keechey said to you in the Rec., and if you want a witness, I’ll say what I heard.”

“Oh, it’s all over now, thanks.”

“Lily went back to Freddy’s, and met Desmond immediately afterwards. She didn’t wait for you, I noticed. Women are rotten to the core, in my opinion. Phil——” He moved intimately close to Phillip.

“Get away from me!”

He took a taxi-cab from Charing Cross, and when he reported late that night, he found that his kit had already arrived, with a certificate of contents, from Grantham. The next morning he went before a medical board, was passed fit for active service, and given orders to leave with a draft of officers that evening from Victoria station. The barracks were almost empty, only the depot staff and those on light duty remained; for the coming offensive all available trained officers and men had been sent to France.

Phillip tottered off the gangway at Boulogne having, as he said to his companion from Victoria, catted up his heart, despite the fact that the crossing from Folkestone had been made in sunshine on a blue and waveless Channel. Fear had taken the heart out of him: fear of being sick: fear of the idea of having to face machine-guns again. The apparition of death from the back of his mind had come forward to share his living thoughts, so the voyage had been a semi-conscious froth of nausea, of endurance despite abandon.

While the transport had been crossing, with its destroyer escort, there had been a constant heavy thudding of guns. Either the Big Push had started, along the coast towards Ostend, or there had been a naval battle. When the ship docked, they heard: the German fleet had come out, and there had been a tremendous battle in the North Sea. Rumour on shore said that a German invasion force was waiting upon the issue of the battle. Heavy distant blows were still burdening the air, far away to the north-east, across the sea.

Once upon cobbled streets, and after a brandy and soda in the British Officers’ Club, followed by beef tea and soup, colour came back into Phillip’s cheeks, and he began to feel that what others had to go through, he could go through; and even beyond, like Julian Grenfell.

he would think of the sun, what astronomers called a dwarf-yellow star, slowly dying, as in the
Liebestod;
death came to all things upon the earth, and to the eventual sun: that must be the philosophy.

After lunch there were nearly two hours to wait for the train to Étaples. Ray, one of the original mess at Hornchurch, made a suggestion to pass the time, to visit a red-lamp house near the docks. They parted.

Phillip spent the time walking alone about the docks and the town, conscious of a new, alert feeling everywhere. If only he were going to the Gaultshires, and perhaps “Spectre” West, France would be quite bearable. Now—officers were liable to be sent to any regiment, it was said. Still, he might be able to wangle it.

The train for Étaples, the base for Infantry Reinforcements, left in the sunny afternoon—hundreds of officers, thousands of men, for its long, slow, clanking journey down the coast. It stopped finally in a siding surrounded by huts and tents to the horizon, and they had to jump down beside the track, and move up a loose sandy soil to level ground where acres of creosoted wood and dirty grey canvas seemed to enclose the spirit of herded nihilism. He followed other officers to the reporting centre; and when particulars had been given, Ray and he and two other officers were shown a tent by an orderly. Here their valises were dumped on wooden floor-boards. “What a ——ing hole,” remarked Ray. The Officers’ Mess, a marquee, had no food. Dinner was over. They managed to buy some bread and cheese, and ate this with pale French beer which Ray said ought never to have lost the horse. It was now half-past nine, by Phillip’s watch. Was Desmond, at that very moment, talking to Lily in Freddy’s? Or were they together in her house? What a strange person she was. What was she
really
like? But no man could ever understand a woman.

Ray was full of the details of his Boulogne adventure. When someone in the tent asked if he wasn’t afraid of a dose, he replied, “I’ve got old man gonnock already, thank God.”

“But oughtn’t you to be in hospital?”

“No, it’s only a gleet, but it will get me back to Blighty whenever I’ve had enough of out here.”

Lying on the floorboards of his tent, Phillip passed a wretched night. Apart from sleeplessness, the feared body of Ray next to him would roll over against him, snoring and gurgling. So at first light he got out of his flea-bag, in which he had lain half-dressed, and went into the morning air, where gulls were crying and afar a cuckoo was calling. The town lay below. Between the estuary and the sea beyond was a wood. Returning to his tent, he dressed, and going to the empty mess, lay back in a wicker armchair, covered with newspapers for warmth; and feeling relief at being alone, slept.

The day was hot, the work tiring. Carrying rifles and the leather equipment of the ranks with water-bottles, bayonets, and entrenching tools, a company of subalterns set out for what was called the Bull Ring. It lay beyond a sandy road past hospitals and
rows of bell tents, upon an open area of low sandhills where trenches were dug, bayonet-fighting courses laid out, with Lewis gun and bombing ranges. Scores of sergeant-instructors were waiting for them. Fall in on your markers! Carry on, sergeant instructors! Left right left right left right, about turn, left wheel, right wheel, halt! by the right, dress! Eyes front! Quick march!

After half an hour of barrack-square drill, they fell out for five minutes. Followed physical jerks; firing of rifle-grenades, throwing of Mills bombs; filing through a gas-chamber, wearing damp P.H. helmets; an obstacle race while the Canary—instructor with yellow band on his arm—yelled for greater speed from thudding hearts. Under coils and over knife-edge obstacles of barbed wire, down into the trench, to stab sacks of straw painted crudely grey and red.

“Stand on the Hun to get yer bayonet out! Tear out ’is guts. Round the traverse following the bomb! Smash ’is face before ’e can recover! Give ’im Kamerad with three inches of cold steel in ’is throat!”

On the way back to camp Phillip thought that the blue estuary, flecked with far-off tiny white wings of gulls seemed as remote as a half-forgotten holiday picture postcard. If only it were Devon.

*

The tens of thousands of other ranks in the camps were not allowed out. Their lines were enclosed by barbed wire like the German prisoner-of-war camp. Every day prisoner-squads were marched away, their
feld
grau
uniforms patched with blue circles and squares, to work on fatigues. They marched with spirit. Individual Germans about the camps snatched off red-banded caps when officers passed, leaping to stiffness before saluting. There was no ragging or barracking during roll-call in the German officers’ section of the camp, Phillip observed, as British officers were said to treat their camp-commandants in Germany. At night singing came from the prisoners’ lines of tents, with the strains of harmonica and accordion.

One early evening Phillip and Ray, sharing a common loneliness, walked down to Paris Plage. He found it to be a deserted watering-place with a long and wide concrete promenade the colour of the surrounding sands. “I’d like to practise bayonet-fighting on some of the prisoners,” said Ray.

“Why? How have they hurt you?”

“In retaliation for the way British prisoners are treated in Germany.”

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity for practising up the line,” replied Phillip. “Especially if you meet the Prussian Guards.”

“Not this baby,” replied Ray. “I’m not out for the V.C. my boy. I’m looking out for No. 1. If I don’t, who will? Sense, isn’t it?”

“Can you really get back home at any time you want to?”

“A couple of bottles of Johnny Walker, and old man gonnock takes me back to Cherry Hinton.”

Phillip had to put up with other details of his companion’s philosophy of preserving life, against the blue and empty expanse of sea and sky. How could he get rid of him, without hurting his feelings? An excuse came when Ray proposed that they try and get off with two nurses who were laughing together as they strode along the promenade, having come down from the town on the steam tram. Phillip said he would go back on the tram and write letters, and left Ray to try his hand alone. Looking back, he saw him accost them, but the nurses walked on as before, leaving Ray looking about him on the otherwise deserted concrete emptiness of Paris Plage, with its little blue and white villas in the distance.

*

After three days at the Bull Ring, officers were posted to strange regimental units up the line. Many were dismayed, despite foreknowledge of what had already happened to others. The posting system seemed to be senseless: officers in kilts were sent to southern regiments; Londoners to Scottish regiments; men of Kent to the Northumberland Fusiliers, Tyneside Scots to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry; Rifle Brigade officers, with great indignation, to the Welch Regiment; all a complete muck-up, it was generally agreed. Some were less unfortunate; Phillip was marked for the battalion of his own regiment he had been with at Northampton. The wilderness did not seem so empty.

Among the others, there was much grumbling, but the base-staff would accept no complaints. It was laid down in orders from G.H.Q. One major said, “You are destroying
esprit-de-corps
by your damned stupidity! Three hundred men of my regiment, the Black Watch, have had to discard their kilts for an issue of khaki trousers, before going as a draft to the Somerset Light Infantry! While in the next camp an equal number of the Dorsets have been issued with kilts, to serve with the Black Watch! A Boy Scout could do better than this! Bloody base-wallah Huns! Eating your fat heads off one end of your bodies, and wearing out your trousers at the other end, blast you all!”

Steel-helmets weighing two pounds, painted khaki, were issued. With the strap fixed under his chin, Phillip felt new resolution, which induced optimism when they were told that the manganese steel was capable of resisting shrapnel balls coming down at 750 feet per second. He worked this out to be about 850 miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound: as if that mattered, for it was well-known that a man never heard the bullet that hit him.

*

The battalion was some miles from Querrieu, where he and Ray detrained, to find a G.S. wagon waiting for their valises. A guide led the way through the winding town and so to a country road in a valley beside a stream. Cuckoos were calling in the woods, mayflies rising in clouds over the meadows; but the scene for Phillip was empty, flat, without meaning; for this was not England.

Walking on, the two, now some yards apart, came to a track which bore much traffic, judging by the horse dung flattened by solid tyres of lorries, direction boards with arrows, canvas watering troughs, and dumps under tarpaulins; and topping a rise, Phillip saw before him hundreds, thousands of bell tents covering a wide and shallow valley filled with troops.

It was a division withdrawn from the line, to practise over ground chosen to represent the section of the enemy lines which it was to assault. Irregular chalky white worsted lines herring-boned the threadbare scene to the misty distance. The landscape was downland, broken into arable and pasture, but now overlaid by the dusty squatting of an army, with its wheels and feet that had turned all the living garment of grass to a dust which arose with buzzing blowflies clustering upon open latrines and heaps of dung and garbage despite the scattering of chloride of lime. This was the reality of his life, now, thought Phillip, not the fancied coolth of clear water rushing past the boulders of the shadowy Lyn, or the high moor where the sun cracked the pods of the furze, and bees scrambled over the bells of the heather.

But Phillip’s depression lifted when he saw in the orderly room a face he knew; and asking if Captain Milman was still the adjutant, learned that Major Kingsman was acting CO.

“Welcome back,” said Milman, rising from his chair. He was the only adjutant Phillip had known who did that, as though greeting a guest.

Companies were marching into the lines, singing
It’s
a
long,
long
trail
a-winding,
steel-helmeted, boots, puttees, and tunics grey with
chalk dust, faces brown and cheerful. And there was dear old Bason on a horse.

Other familiar faces soon came to greet him—Bason, Tommy Thompson, Flagg, Paul—now a captain—Wigg, Cox, and finally, in the company mess with Bason, Jasper Kingsman himself. The extraordinary thing was that they all seemed pleased to see him! Why, Phillip could not imagine.

There was no officers’ mess, for they had had no time, said Bason, to do anything about it, since coming out of the line. Bason now had a ropey moustache; Phillip thought he must grow one, too. Paul, the tall shop-walker who had come to them at Northampton, had a Charlie Chaplin. Phillip envied him his three stars: perhaps, if he had remained with them, he would by now have had a captaincy. Another new captain was “Brassy” Cusack, the Glasgow Trades Union official who had given them a beer party in the pub when on the exercise for promotion. Milman’s friend, Thompson, was another—but Wigg, he saw with relief, still had only one pip, so had Cox, acting second-in-command of Bason’s company. The establishment, he knew, was two captains per company; and since he was senior to Cox, he might stand a chance for promotion.

“So they turfed you out of the Emma Gees, did they, old sport?” enquired Bason genially, as they sat together in the tent that was “A” company office. “Give us the latest about London. Still pretty hectic, I suppose? Seen anything of Frances or Alice? I’ve lost touch with Frances. I was a bit gone on her y’know—still, it’s all in the luck of the game,” he said, playing with a pencil. Then looking at him sideways, “You took her out one night, didn’t you? I rather fancy she was keen on you.”

“Oh no, nothing like that,” said Phillip, not wanting any more misunderstandings. He told Bason about the fiasco of Christmas Eve. “And that was the last I saw of Frances or Alice.”

“Alice wanted to make you jealous, and bring you on, didn’t you know?”

“Good lord, really? I thought she liked her ‘sailor man’, Timmy. Anyway, it’s all over and done with now. What about this push? I heard in London it was to be south of Arras, in the new sector taken over from the French. When are we for it?”

“Couple of weeks, maybe three, perhaps four.”

“Where do we go over, I mean, what are all the practice trenches copied from, what place?”

“North-east of Albert, astride the Bapaume Road.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“You will, old sport, or you’ll see what remains of it when we go over the bags! To give you an idea, take a look at this bumff! It’s going to be a cakewalk this time, for all opposition will be wiped out by our guns before we start, not like those dud attacks in the past.” He tossed over a bunch of cyclostyled foolscap paper, headed