The Golden Virgin (34 page)
Authors: Henry Williamson
At this point Phillip, wishing he had not had any champagne, made his way back to his quarters.
*
The post corporal had left parcels in the tent. Among them was one for him addressed in a strange, unformed handwriting. In the parcel were two tins, one of sardines, and another of café-au-lait, a packet of cigarettes, some chocolate, a cake, a packet of ginger snaps, a tin of Zam-buk, and a glossy picture postcard of Gaby Deslys dancing with Harry Pilcer. There was also a letter written on cheap lined paper.
The sender thanked him for his ever-welcome letter, and hoped he was well. She asked him to take care of himself, and prayed for his return every morning on waking up, and every night before going to sleep, and hoped he would not mind. The Zam-buk was in case he was wounded, and had nothing handy to kill germs with. She had seen none of the old faces, as she was now doing hospital work in the evenings, after the laundry.
Yours
truly,
Lily.
He was ending a reply to the letter, and about to take one of the yellowhammer’s feathers from between the pages of the book Westy had given him, to put it in the folded writing paper, when Bason came into the tent and said, “Hullo, where did you get to?”
“I didn’t feel too well, skipper.”
“What’s that you’ve got, a canary’s feather?”
“No, it’s one of the yellowhammer’s, shot by the Frenchman this afternoon.”
“Well, old sport, I just looked in to suggest that perhaps in future you’ll remember the old saying, ‘Easy come, easy go’. And I’d like you also to know, for what it’s worth, that you have a company commander who is also your pal.”
Bason put his hand for a moment on the younger man’s shoulder, and went out of the tent.
8th Bn. P.R.O. Regt.
B.E.F.
27 June, 1916
Dear Mother.
I am sorry I have not replied to your letters before this, or written to thank you for your two excellent parcels; my only excuse is the work out here, and the hectic time accompanying great preparations.
There is now an interval: I am lying on a little hill above a river valley and the sun is going down upon the long straight road we have marched up to our destination. The company is billeted in bunks put up in outhouses and barns, for this area is almost as crowded as the Hill on a Thursday band-night before the war, when people waited to see the fireworks from the Crystal Palace. We, the officers, have a room in the farmhouse, on the floor.
We started our march up yesterday morning. The road was much congested, for it is the main route to the Picnic, as we call it. Often we had to leave the road and walk in file the other side of the poplars, in and out of the ditch. At times it was a bit trying, as after the bright weather the sky became dull with heat. Then rocky grey clouds moved over, sullen and hard; the air became more oppressive; lightning struck, and the heavens began their bombardment. We were soon soaked to the skin, but afterwards regained cheerfulness, for after the rains, which fell upon an almost silent countryside, the sky came clear, the sun flashing. At night an Aurora Borealis greater than the one Father used to tell us about, when in the hard winter before I was born you were living in the canal-keeper’s house at the end of Comfort Road (I have sudden vivid pictures of a life that is gone, it seems forever, out here), filled the night sky. From where we were last night we heard nothing, for by some freak of the strata underground or the atmosphere above all the thunders of man were inaudible. The eastern sky was a wonder; the winter-god was conquered by Proserpine; a thousand butterflies fluttered there, soundlessly fluttering on wings of light, tremulous at times, suddenly flushing gold as though with some discovered nectar in the flowers of the night. It was wonderful, it was terrible, it was music and poetry and all the power of life come to play upon our little world—or should I write worlds, for each one of us is a little world, which in course of time will dissolve like the animals that once inhabited the shells, now chalk, upon which soon we are to move, as in a new creation by fire, and, for some of us,
darkness evermore. For the wondrous light is not of Proserpine; the nether world of Pluto has opened upon the earth, with the fires of hell.
When a man dies, does a wraith issue forth from the poor shell, to find its way across the sea, perhaps as suspended thought, to visit the world it has abdicated, by right of being of the European generation which has been called to account for itself? I write European generation for I know that our feelings are shared by those who are opposed to us. It is not easy to write this, in fact I feel damnably nervous, not so much about what is to be, but because what I think is, I feel, not acceptable to others.
If it happens that my fate is already resolved, I ask you not to grieve. As I wrote to you before I went out in 1914, I have had a happy life, when I have not been selfish and contrary; and so what happiness I have had has been owed to you and Father, to my sisters, my Grandfather, too, and Aunt Marian, and my neighbours. If I have been in conflict with some of the latter, it was, I am sure, due to my fault, or error.
Do you, Mother, remember our picnic on Reynard’s Common, before I left for the front last September? I remember all you told me about prayer helping to overcome fearful thoughts, by thinking of others before oneself, that is, of one’s men. They are very simple and trusting, these men, and so cheerful. For myself, to whom they look, I have accepted the idea of death, if it is to come, as pre-destined, “when the burning moment breaks”.
Reynard’s Common, when we were little! It was wonderful to go by train to the end of the line, where Father in his bicycling suit was waiting to meet us. He used to wait patiently to allow us to watch the engine being disconnected, and then put on the wooden turn-table, which was wound round by hand, until the engine pointed back to London, to puff away until it came back to the guard’s van, ready for the return journey.
I can see it all so vividly now, Reynard’s Common and the heated air over the pebble beds, where the gorse grew and the linnets nested, their breasts coloured as though with flame from so many fires in those dry summers long ago. Do you remember the chiffchaff’s nest near where we once picnic’d? Father made us bury our orange peel, but I left a little piece of yellow showing, because I wanted to go and watch the nest.
I have met Father Aloysius, of St. Saviour’s, again. He is attached to the Liverpool Irish in our division. He came to dinner in the Colonel’s billet last night; I was invited, too—just the three of us. I told you about our C.O., he was a captain at Hornchurch, and lives at Tollemere Park, and is now in command. Both he and Fr. A. were Balliol men. It is very interesting to hear them talk; I now see what Aunt Dora was driving at, with her talk of ancient Greece, etc. Fr. A. told
me that in France the symbol of religion is the mother and child, not the father as in Protestant countries.
Below me, and to the north as I sit here on the hillside, I can see a cathedral half-broken, and the Golden Virgin on the campanile, leaning down—struck by a shell—but still holding the Babe in her arms. After dinner I went to Fr. A’s billet, and we had a frank talk. I told him how Desmond and I had quarrelled, and how the misunderstanding had come about; and how I knew that a bitter remark made by D. just before I left for the depot after the telegram, was only the measure of his affection turned to bitterness. So if it happens that my turn has come, please assure Desmond that his friend understands, and sympathises with all that he has suffered through me.
The padre and I talked quite frankly about death. I told him that I had heard dying soldiers, both English and German, calling out for their mothers; he said the spiritual feeling between a mortally wounded boy and the image of his mother was of the same relation between the Son and Mary, the Mother of God, but lifted beyond the struggling human spirit into the realm of the soul, what the ancient Greeks called Eirene, which was everlastingly as a light over the Abyss.
This Abyss, said the padre, is in every man until impersonal love for his fellow men comes into his life, as a motive force for living. In a war like this, he said, which is a manifestation of the Abyss, of the eternal war between love and hate, the individual is able to escape his own terrors of the mind only by encouraging, through prayer, the good within him to dominate his life; the greater love.
He said that the Church was by no means perfect and admitted that dreadful things had been done in the past; for men were only human, and being human, could be one thing or the other. This is a bit muddled, I fear, but I think I know what he meant. Father Aloysius is very popular with the troops.
I hope that Father’s allotment flourishes, and all goes well in Hillside Road, and that your jaunts to the Old Vic with Grandpa continue. Major Kingsman, who is keen on history, told me that Henry the Fifth crossed the Somme somewhere near here, on his way to fight one of his battles. Do you remember Grandpa reading the prologue of
Henry
the
Fifth
to us the night before Uncle Hugh and Uncle Sidney went off to the Boer War? Major Kingsman lent me his Shakespeare, and told me to read the passage where the King visited his troops round their camp-fires. I must say it was a revelation to me, after the impression of complete nothingness I got from having to do this play at school. The Prince of Wales, from what I’ve heard, is rather like that. When he was dining at the Officers’ Club at Boulogne one night he invited an officer I know to have a glass of port with him at his table. He (the officer) was badly hit at Loos, and came to this battalion recently, from the regiment to which I was originally gazetted, but now for various reasons he has returned to his battalion. I wonder if by any chance
Percy Pickering will come across him, if and when Percy gets out here.
No more now. By the time you get this, perhaps Father will be reading rather special news in
The
Daily
Trident,
which, by the way, seems to be the only paper to be bought out here, in the back areas. We never know what is happening out here until we read of it in the papers; though not everything we read is what we know has happened.
I bought some excellent
patisserie
in the town below us this afternoon; almost as good as that we bought in Brussels five years ago. Do you remember?
I watched a thrilling sight today—three of the German sausage balloons behind their lines brought down in flames, leaving black smoke in the sky—coal-gas, I suppose. I have seen other wonderful sights, but cannot tell you what they are!
Your affectionate son,
P
HILLIP
.
Sursam corda! That’s what Father A. said to me. It means, broadly translated, Keep Smiling!
After hesitation he added two words to the beginning; but seeing that the addition was obviously an after-thought he rewrote the first page, beginning
My
dear
Father
and
Mother.
Then doubts of what Father, who scorned the Roman Catholics, might think arose in him. The letter began to look fanciful; then the word
throw-back,
so often heard about himself in boyhood, rose before his mind like an apparition in black. He regarded the rapidly-written pages with indecision; then tore the letter up and buried the fragments.
*
If one of the least of temporary junior officers of what was called the Citizen Army suffered from frustration, so did the greatest soldier of the British Expeditionary Force. Neither the place nor the time of the offensive were of F.-M. Sir Douglas Haig’s choosing. He had wanted to make the attack farther north, in Artois and Flanders, later in the year; for while the New Armies were in good heart, they lacked both experience and sufficient training. His own ideas and wishes had been set aside when he responded to the French call for help; Maréchal Joffre had demanded an attack in Picardy, the country of the Somme, to relieve the sufferings and annihilations of French divisions upon “the anvil of Verdun”.
Having subordinated his strategy to that of the French Maréchal, he had next to give way on tactical points. Sir Douglas Haig had wanted the infantry assault to start at first light, before the German machine-gunners could sight their targets properly; both Maréchal Joffre and his subordinate commander General Foch had
declared that the battle must begin at 10 a.m., for their artillery observers to have a clear view of the infantry in
horizon
bleu
advancing on the sector of the Sixth French Army south of the steep cliff-like right bank of the Somme.
The British Field-Marshal had chosen one of his senior generals, Rawlinson, to command the new Fourth British Army, which was to fight the battle, and had suggested to him the need for a quick preliminary assault, immediately the final intensive bombardment lifted, to rake back upon the successive German lines. Sir Henry Rawlinson had not agreed with this suggestion; the Field-Marshal had not pressed it since, having delegated responsibility, he was loyal to his subordinate’s wishes. To have forced his views upon Rawly would have been, in the English idiom, “not cricket”: a term often derided because misunderstood by those who did not play that game wherein only the better feelings of man, by the very nature of the game, can be exercised.
*
An obscure lieutenant of militia, holding the acting rank of lieutenant-colonel, had left his command during manoeuvres to address himself to Sir Henry Rawlinson, a guest of the Divisional Commander, without permission, without introduction. He had persisted in stating his uncalled-for views beyond the limit of what was considered good form. He had insisted on saying that a strong line of skirmishers should be sent to enter the enemy lines before the German machine-gunners had time to climb up and out of their dugouts: that this preliminary penetration must be made in the first light, the
prima
luce
of the great commanders of the ancient world. Holding himself rigid against his discomposure in the presence of soldiers of high rank belonging to an assured caste of which, owing to his humble birth, he was ever conscious, with beads of sweat upon his forehead, “Spectre” West had quoted, in the original Greek, from Euripides, following it by a translation—“Danger shines like sunlight to a brave man’s eyes”—but, he said, with unseen machine-guns firing into those eyes from under the blaze of the risen sun in the east, it would be a fearful price to pay for courage thrown away.
“With due respect, sir, and in humble duty to his Majesty the King-Emperor, I submit that, whatever the hour or state of light when the main assault takes place, that assault, or ordered advance of what are practically porters, must be preceded by a line of mobile skirmishers, thrusting forward immediately behind the barrage in order to contain, or to destroy, the enemy garrisons
underground, until the impedimenta-laden waves of infantry arrive.”
He was listened to in silence; and when he had seen that his remarks were apparently to be ignored, he asked formally to be permitted to see the Commander-in-Chief.
Afterwards, at Querrieu, in the garden of the château which was General Rawlinson’s headquarters, he was courteously taken by the General’s A.D.C., together with his Brigadier, to the office of a Major-General in one of the many wooden huts of Army Administration. There the matter of the existence of deep German dugouts, “some possibly between thirty and forty feet underground,” which he had spoken about previously, was discussed.
“You know, Colonel, one is inclined to be puzzled as to the reason why no subsequent report about the alleged existence of such deep shelters was sent in by you, after you took command of your battalion. A pity you did not think of it at the time. In war, and indeed in all aspects of life, everything depends on the question of timing. To cast doubt at this late hour, and without substantiation of what you say about the depth of the shelters, is only to cause uncertainty, even alarm, as by now you probably realise,” said the Major-General.