When Blackbirds Sing (10 page)

If Dominic had met Harrison under any other circumstances he would probably have avoided him, but here it was impossible. They were forced together for weeks on end in the intimacy of dugouts and cottage billets. With the official enemy a hundred yards away beyond the barbed wire and the pitted earth, a far greater enmity arose between them, greatest on Dominic’s side. Harrison was again the type that he detested. They differed in every way, but in one most particularly. Dominic had to grope through his romanticism to the reality behind it; whereas Harrison had to approach reality from the other side, passing through the protection given by complete lack of imagination, until the hearty words which had given him courage had lost their meaning. This had already happened and he sweated
in his dugout. He applied no imagination to Dominic, who was both an Australian and a territorial, and therefore Harrison thought, unquestionably his inferior. He saw no reason to conceal anything so self-evident.

The conversation of the young officers was more than half the time about women. Sometimes, though Dominic had no intention of joining their excursions in search of sensual pleasure behind the lines, his desires were aroused, and he thought that Sylvia would be waiting for him when he went on leave. Harrison boasted of the number of women he had had, and kept a walking stick on which he made a notch for each of them, now seventy-four in number. While he boasted Dominic sat aloof, and Harrison said: “I don’t suppose you like your damned aristocratic company commander.”

Soon after this the sappers tunnelling under the enemy trenches came to within a few feet of a German dugout. They could hear talking and laughing. The company had to provide an officer and a few men to put explosives under the dugout and annihilate its occupants. Harrison asked for volunteers from among his three subalterns and Dominic offered. He had left his home to fight for his country and for the values of civilization, but so far he had done little more than sit in a dugout and listen to talk about sex. Here at last was something that would justify the “O.A.S.” on his envelopes.

With their dangerous equipment he and his men crept stealthily along the tunnel until they came to where they could hear the Germans talking. Dominic, with that curiosity about humanity which governed so many of his
actions, did not immediately do the job and hurry away. He signed to his men to wait while he listened to the voices from the dugout. He heard the clink of glasses and a man’s quiet contented laugh. He imagined the scene much as it was in their own dugout, when they came in for a drink during a night watch. His men were impatient to get away, but they thought that he was listening for useful information, not merely to realize his common humanity with the men he was about to destroy.

At last they set their torpedoes and fled. Soon they were rewarded by the sound of the explosion. Dominic went to Harrison and reported that the operation was successful. Harrison for once was very pleased with him and said that for this and his good routine work in the trenches he would suggest him for one of the next Military Crosses awarded to the battalion. Dominic, as so often in his life, as soon as he had won approval, immediately but unconsciously did something to lessen it. He was sweating and looked disturbed.

“Anyhow,” he said, “they would die instantly.”

“What has that got to do with it?” asked Harrison sharply. Dominic was either gloating over his victims, which was in bad taste, or he had introduced a consideration which was impossible for a soldier.

When he came out of the line he had a letter from Helena, also replies from Sylvia and Cousin Emma. The latter had been to a charity matinée, explaining that “one must keep the flag flying”. Sylvia’s letter was also about social activities, but like the other short notes she had written him, it ended “with love”. Receiving letters from
Helena and Sylvia produced one of those jams in his brain, due to the conflict of irreconcilable ideas. Strangely his infidelity to Helena had not troubled him before. Sylvia had been more the fulfilment of a youthful ambition, the payment of a debt owing to him, than an infidelity. She was also perhaps the satisfaction of a physical necessity for a hot-blooded young man separated from his wife. She may have regarded him in the same way, as her letters suggested not so much the longings of a separated lover, but that she was retaining a lien on him.

He left Sylvia’s and Cousin Emma’s letters on his bed, and taking Helena’s he walked across the fields to a neighbouring village, and went to the church to read it. It was a kind of reassurance to himself that his only true fidelity was to Helena. Her letter must be read separately, in this quiet and sacred place, where the trees in the churchyard were bursting into green. He picked a bud from a chestnut tree, and laid it on the step beside him, while he opened her letter. It was one of the least cheerful he had had from her. Soon the sheep would have to be dipped and she had not enough labour for it. She had dismissed Harry, as he was now old enough to go to the war, but would not enlist. Dominic felt ashamed that she had these cares, and yet for the first time since he left, in fact almost for the first time in his life, he felt annoyed with her. Why had she dismissed Harry without asking him? He had explicitly stated that Harry was to remain and help her till he returned. Although he depended so much on Helena and nearly always followed her advice, when he had made a decision in his own department he expected it to be followed. He would not have dismissed one of her maids.

He sat despondently on the church steps, dangling the letter. Idly he picked up the chestnut bud and examined it, becoming absorbed in its delicate beauty, the mysterious unfolding of the young leaves. As he looked at it, he was reminded of the curling fingers of his son when he held him soon after he was born. He forgot where he was sitting. Something like the feeling he had when he watched the Spanish divers, that there was no division between man and the natural world, returned to him. He had a curious feeling of contentment which was disturbed by the thin whine of a shell sailing high above him toward the German lines. With the blackbirds, death moaned and sang in the spring air. The bursting green of the trees, of the bud he held in his hand, was only a symbol of the resurgence of war. He threw the bud into the grass, and set out to walk back to the company billets.

At the door of the mess he met Hollis, who wanted him to come and dine with him in Béthune. They obtained permission and set out to walk the few miles into the old town, which was not reduced to a heap of rubble until a year later.

They went first to the Officers’ Club for a drink, and then to dine at the Hôtel de France. During dinner they shared a bottle of burgundy. Their conversation became cheerful and intimate. Hollis said he wanted to visit a whore. He said: “It would be awful to get killed before you’d done it.” Dominic discouraged him, not so much on moral grounds but because he had a poetic feeling that Hollis’s innocence should not be wasted on a prostitute. It was due to the lingering of the mood which possessed him
as he held the leaf, the sense that our bodies were of the same nature as all creative life, that they should function in innocence, and not as the result of a commercial transaction. They dawdled over their dinner, and then set out to walk back to the company. They came to an orchard by the side of the road. The trees, covered with blossoms, were like beautiful girls in the moonlight.

“Let us sit down here for a bit,” said Hollis, and they sat on the top rail of the fence. The moon was bright enough for Dominic to see the left side of Hollis’s face, which looked very sad.

They heard the thin whine of a shell far above them, and after a few minutes another. They were falling on Béthune.

“We just got out in time,” said Dominic.

“I would have looked damn silly dead in a whore-house,” said Hollis. “I’m jolly glad you dissuaded me.” They were silent again and at intervals two more shells passed overhead.

Hollis said:

There’s not the smallest orb that thou beholdest

But in its motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.

“Where did you learn that?” asked Dominic curiously.

“At school, I suppose. I just remembered it.”

“Oh God!” said Dominic.

“What’s up?”

“Our hellish lives.”

He sat on the top rail with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. Then he suddenly climbed over into the orchard, and walked away among the clouds of blossom.

“Where are you going?” asked Hollis. He vaulted the fence and followed him.

Dominic stopped in a secluded hollow in the centre of the orchard. He unfastened his Sam Browne belt, and then took off his tunic, flinging them on the ground. He undid his boots and kicked them off, and finally stripped off his remaining clothes.

“What are you doing? You’re mad,” said Hollis uncertainly.

“I want to breathe. I can’t breathe in those things,” said Dominic. He stretched his arms and buried his face in the blossom. Hollis watched him, and then, as if hypnotised, discarded his own clothes. He danced with his bare feet in the wet grass, and said: “I’ll race you,” and they ran between the lines of trees. Hollis flung himself on the grass where he rolled over and over in the dew, and then sat up laughing, and dried himself on his khaki handkerchief.

“Listen,” said Dominic. The two young men stood naked, restored to innocence in the stillness of the natural world. There was no sound, and yet it seemed that the stillness was full of sound beyond their perception, the sound of life growing in the trees, and thrusting up the young blades of grass. Hollis was going to say: “We are like the Greeks,” but he could not speak. There was something in the night far beyond this allusion, and he felt not only would it be wrong to speak, but that if he did his voice would break beyond his control. “I wish we could stay here for ever,”
he said at last. They wandered about among the trees for a while, but soon it became chilly, and they dressed and climbed back on to the road.

On the night before the battalion was due to return to the front line, Dominic and Hollis again had permission to go to dine in Béthune; and again after dinner Hollis said that he wanted to visit a whore. Dominic automatically advanced his objections, but then he thought of Harry dismissed, of the Germans he had blown up, of all the young men with the milk on their mouths poured into the Moloch jaws. Let them have any reward they could grab. He did not go with prostitutes himself, partly from fastidiousness, and partly from fidelity, either to Helena or Sylvia or both; but Hollis’s situation was different.

“I don’t see why the devil you shouldn’t,” he said. “But where can you find one?”

“There’s a place with a red light in a cul-de-sac not far away.”

“Good God, you can’t go there!” said Dominic. “It’s only for private soldiers. They’re allowed ten minutes each and you’d catch something.”

“Isn’t there an officers’ entrance?” asked Hollis. In his innocence he had never contemplated the squalors of vice, and thought only of his simple natural thrill.

“No. You might ask at the chemist’s shop. But it may be shut.”

“Frost gave me an address that he got from Harrison.”

Hollis took his pocket book from his tunic and searched through it. He found the name of the street and the number, and before long they found themselves in the conventional
and even religious-looking bedroom of a plump woman in her early thirties. She received them like a cheerful and hospitable hostess, which made Hollis behave rather as if he were having tea with an archdeacon’s wife in Salisbury Close. After ten minutes or so of polite conversation she became a little brusque and asked if there was anything doing. If not would they please go, and not waste her time. Dominic said: “I will go. My friend would like to stay.”

Hollis looked scared, and was about to say that he would go too, but thought that if he did Dominic would despise him. So he stayed to be enveloped in the businesslike embrace of this quasi-matron.

Dominic waited for him at the Officers’ Club, where Hollis joined him within half an hour. They had a drink together, and without any comment on what had happened they set out for their billets, walking in silence. When they were clear of the town Dominic asked tentatively: “D’you feel better?”

“I took a long time and she got rather cross,” Hollis said almost apologetically. They went on in silence, then Dominic said: “I should have dissuaded you.”

“Oh, no,” said Hollis, sounding resigned and experienced. “One has to learn.”

“That is not a thing one should learn. It should be the result of an overpowering impulse.”

“I felt pretty impulsive after dinner.” They walked another half mile and he added wistfully: “Still, I wish she’d been younger.”

They passed the spot where they had sat on the orchard fence.

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” said Hollis. As he spoke they heard the thin overhead whine of a shell, and the distant trump as it fell on the old houses of Béthune, perhaps, Hollis thought with a dreadful ashamed pity, on the house of the matronly whore.

On the next evening they returned to the front line. The routine was continued, but more lively, or more deathly. One morning from sunrise till noon, a 5·9 shell fell every two minutes on their small sector of the line, more unnerving than a sudden concentrated barrage. Now they returned from the trenches with their ranks more heavily depleted.

The generals ordered more raids to keep the war hot. Towards the end of June the battalion was ordered to carry out one of these. Two platoons were to attack the German trenches, and two to remain guarding their own. Hollis’s platoon was detailed to attack, Dominic’s to remain. He wanted to go with the attacking party, but Harrison was reluctant to be left with a boy like Hollis as his only subaltern in the event of a counter-attack.

In spite of their strained relations Harrison relied on Dominic to create confidence in the trenches. Frost too was going “over the top”.

The raid was to begin at seven o’clock on the evening after they entered the line. At a quarter to seven Dominic came on Hollis in a traverse between their two platoons.