The Wanting Seed (26 page)

Platoon after platoon minced down the steep ramp in their great boots. A dark quay reeked of oil. Lamps were few, as if some modified black-out regulation prevailed. RTO men loped round with clipboards. MPs strolled in pairs. A red-tabbed major with a false patrician accent haw-hawed, slapping his flank with a leather-bound baton. Mr Dollimore was summoned, with other subalterns, to a brief conference near some sheds. Inland the
crumps of heavies and squeals of shells, sheet lightning, all part of the war film. An unknown captain with corniculate moustaches spoke to open-mouthed Mr Dollimore and his fellows, gesticulating much. Where were the brigade’s own captains? Tristram, uneasy, could see no officer of the brigade higher than lieutenant. So. Captain Behrens had merely escorted his company to the ship. Only lieutenants and below, then, considered expendable. Mr Dollimore came back, rather breathily saying that they had to march to the base camp, a mile inland.

They marched off, led by the strange captain, platoon after platoon. The troops sang softly, nocturnally:

Moonless the early evening. The flashes showed pruned trees like stage cut-outs on either side of the metalled road. Hedgeless, farmless country. But Corporal Haskell said, ‘I know this place. I swear I do. There’s something in the air. Soft. Kerry or Clare or Galway. I travelled this whole west coast in peacetime,’ he said almost apologetically. ‘Buying and selling, you know. I know this part of Ireland like the back of my hand. A rainy softness,’ he said, ‘if you catch my meaning. So it’s the Micks we’re going to fight. Well. Devils for a scrap they are. No hard feelings after, though. Cut your head and plaster it.’

Approaching the base camp they marched to attention. Barbed-wire perimeter, concrete gate-posts, an unsteady gate skirred open by the sentry. Huts with lights. Little activity. A man walking singing, balancing cakes on top of mugs of tea. The doleful hollow clatter of tablelaying in a hovel lettered SERGEANTS’ MESS, the smell of frying in fat not hot enough. The draft was halted; the men were told off, platoon after platoon, to follow to their allotted barrack-rooms conducting C
₃
lance-corporals in plimsolls (smug with the smugness of depot staff); the sergeants were led to quarters without comfort – one bare transit-camp red bulb in the ceiling, dusty kapok-oozing biscuits to lie on, no bedsteads, no extra blankets, a dirty stove unlighted. A gaunt C.Q.M.S. was their conductor. ‘Where are we?’ asked Tristram. ‘Base Camp 222.’ ‘Yes, we know that, but where?’ He sucked his teeth in answer and went off.

‘Listen,’ said Sergeant Lightbody, standing, their kit dumped, by the door with Tristram. ‘Do you notice anything queer about that crumping noise?’

‘There are so many noises.’

‘I know, but just listen. It’s coming from over there. Dada
rump
, dada
rump
, dada
rump
. Can you pick it out?’

‘I think so.’

‘Dada
rump
. Dada
rump
. What does it remind you of?’

‘It’s a very regular sort of rhythm, isn’t it? I see what you mean: too regular.’

‘
Exactly
. Doesn’t it remind you a bit of the C.O.’s farewell speech?’

‘Good God,’ said Tristram, freshly shocked. ‘A
cracked gramophone record. Would that be possible?’

‘Very much possible. Loud amplifiers. Magnesium flashes. Electronic war, gramophony war. And the enemy, poor devils, are seeing and hearing it too.’

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ trembled Tristram.

‘Nonsense. You’re as trapped here as you were on that ship. An electrified perimeter, a sentry told to shoot without asking questions. We’ve got to see it through.’

But they walked together to the twelve-feet-high wire fence. It was a sturdy piece of knitting. Tristram sprayed the damp ground with the platoon torch. ‘There,’ he said. In the tiny spotlight lay a sparrow’s corpse, charred as from a grill. Then a rabbity lance-corporal approached them, capless, tunic collar undone, swinging an empty tea-mug. ‘Keep away from there, mate,’ he said, with depot staff insolence. ‘Electric, that is. A lot of volts. Burn you to buggery.’

‘Where exactly are we?’ asked Sergeant Lightbody.

‘Base Camp 222.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried Tristram. ‘
Where?
’

‘That doesn’t apply,’ said the lance-corporal with a sagacity worthy of his stripe. ‘
Where
doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a bit of land, that”s all.’ They could hear motor noises in crescendo on the road outside the camp. A three-ton lorry bounced by with full lights, travelling to the coast, then another, another, a convoy of ten. The lance-corporal stood to attention till the last tail-light had passed. ‘The dead,’ he said, with quiet satisfaction. ‘Lorry-loads of corpses. And just to think, only two nights ago some of that lot were in here, taking a stroll before supper as you are, talking to me as it might be yourselves.’ He shook his head in factitious grief. The
distant gramophone record went Dada
rump
, dada
rump
.

Seven

N
EXT
morning, shortly after mass, they were told that they would be going up to the front that very evening, a ‘show’ of some sort being imminent. Mr Dollimore shone with joy at the prospect. ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead!’ he quoted, tactless, to his platoon.

‘You seem to have the death-urge pretty strongly,’ said Tristram, cleaning his pistol.

‘Eh? Eh?’ Mr Dollimore recalled himself from his index of first lines. ‘We shall survive,’ he said. ‘The Boche will get what’s coming to him.’

‘The Boche?’

‘The enemy. Another name for the enemy. During my officers’ training course,’ said Mr Dollimore, ‘we had films every evening. It was always the Boche. No, I’m telling a lie. Sometimes it was Fritz. And Jerry, sometimes.’

‘I see. And you also had war poetry?’

‘On Saturday mornings. After break. For our morale, Captain Auden-Isherwood said. That was one of my favourite lessons.’

‘I see.’

A cold dry day with a dusty wind. Barbed wire of high voltage, WD signboards, blasted-looking country beyond the perimeter, dispiriting as that bilious Atlantic had been, all round B6. There were still distant crashes
and bumps – a twenty-four-hour performance, probably with three shifts of lance-corporal disc-jockeys – but no fire in the sky. At noon an ancient aircraft – strings, struts, an open cockpit and waving goggled aeronaut – lurched over the camp and away again. ‘One of ours,’ Mr Dollimore told his platoon. ‘The gallant R.F.C.’ Luncheon of bully and dehydrated greens reconstituted; a couple of hours on the charpoy; a tea-meal of fish-paste and Arbuckle’s Individual Fruit Pies. Then, with the sun’s wreck seaward – a celestial panful of broken eggs – came the drawing of ammunition from the quartermaster’s stores, also a tin of bully per man and a grey hunk of cornbread. The bully-tin had a Chinese label whose key-words were:

Tristram grinned at that; any fool could read the bifurcated second word (the essence of man, then, to the Chinese, was bifurcation?) if he had a sister who worked in China. What, incidentally, had happened to her? What to his brother in America? He had received one letter in eleven months, one only, from one person dear to him, but that person most dear. He patted his breast-pocket where it lay safe.
Shou Jên
, eh? The Romanized transliteration was clear at the bottom of the label. Ripe, soft, properly cooked man.

Twilight, and they paraded in marching order, water-bottles filled, bayonets fixed, steel helmets covered with steel-helmet covers. Mr Salter of one of the other battalions appeared to take the parade, newly promoted to
Captain Salter and self-conscious about it. He seemed to have directions written out for him on a bit of paper; there was no guide. He told them, squeaking a little, to move to the right in threes, and Tristram, moving, wondered for the first time at that anachronism. Surely, in that prototypical war, they had formed fours? But the essence of modern war seemed to be eclectic simplicity: let us not be too pedantic. They marched to attention out of camp. Nobody waved them good-bye except the sentry who should, by rights, have saluted with his rifle. They left-wheeled and, after a quarter-mile, marched at ease. Nobody sang, though. The fixed bayonets looked like a Birnam Wood of spikes. Between crumps, bumps, thumps – more widely spaced than before and, surely, that cracked record had been discarded – one could hear the glug of bouncing water in water-bottles. There were flashes of sky-fire; on either side of the road the black cutout tree-corpses stood out bleakly in the sudden light.

They marched through a hamlet, a contrived Gothic mess of ruins, and a few hundred yards outside it were given the order to halt. ‘You will now micturate,’ ordered Captain Salter. ‘Fall out.’ They fell out; the duller men found out quickly what that long word meant: the road was cosy with the comfortable warm noise of hissing. They were fallen in again. ‘We are very near the front line now,’ said Captain Salter, ‘and subject to enemy shelling.’ (‘Nonsense,’ thought Tristram.) ‘We will march in file, hugging the left of the road.’ From
tre corde
to
una corda
, like a piano damped. The draft was attenuated into a single long string, and the march was resumed. After another mile they came, on the left, to what seemed to be a ruined country house.
Captain Salter consulted his scrap of paper in a skyflash, as if to see whether this was the right number. Seemingly satisfied, he marched boldly in by the front door. The long stream followed. Tristram was interested to find that they had entered a trench. ‘Queer sort of ‘ouse this is,’ grumbled a man, as if he had genuinely thought they had been invited to supper there. It was a mere shell, like something from a film-set. Tristram flashed the platoon torch down at the earth – holes, a tangle of wires, the sudden scurry of a small beast with a long tail – and immediately heard ‘Put that bloody light out.’ He obeyed; the voice sounded authoritative. Warnings were passed down the endless line – ‘Hole –’ole – ’owl; wire – wayer – wah’ – like specimens of English sound changes. Tristram stumbled on at the head of No. I Section of his platoon, seeing the whole montage clearly as the sky flashed with fireworks (that’s what they were, that’s what they
must
be). Surely there should be a reserve line, a support line, sentries on fire-steps, smoke and stink from dug-outs? The whole labyrinth seemed quite deserted, nobody to welcome them in. Suddenly they turned right. Ahead men were stumbling, cursing softly, being crammed into dug-outs.

‘The enemy,’ whispered Mr Dollimore with awe, ‘is only about a hundred yards away. Over there.’ He pointed, lit up finely by a great flash, in the direction of no-man’s-land or whatever it was called. ‘We must post sentries. One every forty or fifty yards.’

‘Look,’ said Tristram, ‘who’s in charge. What are we? Who do we belong to?’

‘Dear me, what a lot of questions.’ He gazed mildly, in a new firework flash, on Tristram.

‘What I mean,’ said Tristram, ‘is – are we reinforcements for some troops or other already in the line, or are we –?
What
are we? Where are our orders coming from? What orders have we got?’

‘Now, Sergeant,’ said Mr Dollimore paternally, ‘don’t worry about all these big issues. Those will be taken care of, never fear. Just make sure the men get settled in properly. Then arrange about sentries, will you?’ Meanwhile, the harmless racket continued: the record-players banged away at their simulacra of passionate war: the loudspeakers must be very close. Lights of exquisite intensity spewed, like fancy oil, out of the ground. ‘Woonderful,’ said a man from Northern Province, peeping out of his dug-out.

‘What,’ said Tristram, persistent, ‘is the point of posting sentries? There’s no enemy over there. The whole thing’s a fake. Very shortly this trench will blow up and the blowing-up will be done by remote control, by some bloody big spider sitting at base. Don’t you see? This is the new way, the modern way, of dealing with excess population. The noises are fakes. The flashes are fakes. Where’s our artillery? Did you see any artillery behind the lines? Of course you didn’t. Have you seen any shells or shrapnel? Stick your head over that parapet and what do you think will happen?’ Tristram clambered up some bags filled with earth, a neat pattern, obviously bricklayers’ work, and looked out. He saw, momentarily lighted by a firework, a flat stretch of country with a distant vista of trees, hills beyond. ‘There,’ he said, stepping down.

‘I’ve a good mind,’ said Mr Dollimore, shaking, ‘to put you under arrest. I’ve a good mind to strip you right down. I’ve a good mind –’

‘You can’t.’ Tristram shook his head. ‘You’re only a lieutenant. Your Temporary Acting Captain Salter can’t do it, either. And that’s another thing you can tell me – where are the senior officers? There’s not one officer of field rank anywhere to be found. Where’s Battalion HQ, for instance? I come back to my former question – who’s giving the orders?’

‘This is insubordination,’ shook Mr Dollimore. ‘This is also treason.’