When Blackbirds Sing (9 page)

As he lay beside her she put out her hand to switch off the light, but he caught it and the rosy glow remained. He wanted to see this rare and delicate beauty, his former right restored to him. He felt that at last he possessed all that he rightly owned, the other part of his double world, making it complete.

Sylvia, her mind stimulated, lay awake beside him. She thought about him, wondering about the uncertainties she had felt, now obliterated by this certainty. She was sure that she would never feel them again. She thought that at last she understood him. He performed most of his actions without reasoning about them. He did not, having recognized the inconsistencies of life, keep them in separate watertight compartments, but left the doors open between them. This was what made him so unpredictable, but also so attractive. It gave him the integrity of something untamed, the kind of savage innocence of a creature still observing the laws of the natural world.

She put out the light, and as he breathed softly and deeply beside her, she felt almost as if she were in some indefinable natural lair. He was like a dark sun, bathing her with warmth, his rays flooding her whole body with a new vitality drawn from some primitive source. She lay close against him, receiving his rays, and she felt that she had received all his mystery.

She had borrowed the servants’ alarm clock, giving as the reason that they might sleep through its ringing, as they had sometimes done, and that it was of vital importance for Dominic to catch the train. When this tinny contraption, standing on a dressing-table said to have come from the
Grand Trianon, stabbed the air with its warning, she shook Dominic out of his heavy sleep. Drowsily he made as if to embrace her, but she gave him one long kiss, and then became matter-of-fact. She sent him to the bed in the dressing-room, and went up to call her maid, who in half an hour, brought up separate trays of tea and toast to their rooms.

Still brisk and cheerful, she went with Dominic to Victoria. He was a little dazed. He had not stepped so neatly from one watertight compartment to another. His doors were all open.

They collected his luggage from the cloakroom, and followed by a porter wheeling it, came to the boat-train. On the platform was a subaltern from the depot, who was on the same draft as Dominic. He was expecting him and had kept two seats in a Pullman. When he saw Sylvia with Dominic whom he knew was married, he thought that she must be his wife. He greeted them cheerfully, but with a delicate nuance for their approaching separation, and having pointed out the seats in the Pullman, he entered the train and rearranged his luggage, to leave them alone together.

“Is that young man from the depot?” asked Sylvia sharply.

“Yes,” said Dominic, and she told him not to say who she was.

“What is his name?” she asked.

Dominic told her that he was called Hollis.

Hollis was just nineteen years of age and the son of Lord Dilton’s lawyer in Salisbury. If there had been no war he would have been learning his father’s profession. He had left school six months earlier and was excited at being on his way to a war. He had stayed the night alone at the Grosvenor Hotel, which was an enlargement of his experience, as was also the unaccustomed luxury of having his breakfast in a Pullman. His life hitherto had been spent between the monastic seclusion of his public school, and the domestic simplicity of his home. He had the naïve sensual innocence, the retarded emotional development of many boys of his kind of upbringing, which at his age gave them a certain charm. Going to the war, he imagined that he was now a man, though those who saw him in his smart new uniform, his Sam Browne belt not yet mellow and supple with use, found piquancy in the contrast of his baby face
with his accoutrements, like that of a
putto
in an Italian painting, wearing the helmet and playing with the lance of Mars. This poetic conjunction of the ideas of youth and death was found in the popular verse of the time. One sang:

Take my youth that died today,

Lay him on a roseleaf bed.

Another, more hearty, declared:

With the milk on their mouths

And the time on their wrists . . .

They spread the honour thick on the roll,

His Majesty’s second-lieutenants!

Another advised the boy to rejoice in his fate:

Earth that blossomed and was glad

’Neath the cross that Christ had,

Shall rejoice and blossom too

When the bullet reaches you.

Therefore men marching

On the road to death, sing.

Pour out gladness on earth’s head,

So be merry, so be dead!

Julian Grenfell wrote:

The blackbird sings to him; Sing brother, sing,

If this shall be the last song you sing . . .

Who dies fighting hath increase.

Mr Max Beerbohm later wrote a story about a starry-eyed young war poet, who to the disgust of his public did not get killed, and so achieve in his person the sacrificial beauty of his poems.

Though Hollis knew that he was entering the Moloch jaws of the opposing trenches, where so many of his kind were spreading honour on the roll, he went there surrounded by so much indulgence, praise and unaccustomed social privilege that in spite of the popular poems, they diminished the secret dread that he might be killed. He wanted to talk about it all, and said things like: “I bet my young brother will be envious when he gets a letter from me stamped ‘On Active Service’.”

He said: “I’ve never had a meal on a train before. It’s a good way to go to a war. It makes you feel cosmopolitan.”

He also said: “French girls are pretty good, aren’t they?”

At last Dominic said: “Shut up!” Hollis blushed. He realized that he should not have said this to Dominic who was married, and who, he imagined, had just parted from his wife.

While Hollis was eating everything available to increase his cosmopolitan feeling, Dominic drank only a cup of coffee. When Hollis stopped talking he laid his head against the back of his chair, and appeared to doze all the way to Folkestone. He was sunk in semi-conscious reverie, satisfied and relaxed. Not only his physical senses but his pride was satisfied. In the warm carriage the sense of Sylvia’s nearness was with him, soothed by the rhythm of the train.

Hollis thought that he was an odd chap. At the depot he had not had much to do with him, as they were in different companies, and in the mess Dominic talked to older men. Now he looked at his sleeping face, at the rather long jaw, the wide mouth, of which the curves had a voluptuous emphasis in relaxation. The heavy eyelids sloped downwards, giving him a look of sorrow in sleep. Hollis thought he looked jolly interesting, and wished that he had the same sombre lines of experience. He thought that his own rosy cheeks and shining hair were sickeningly puerile.

When they left the train for the boat at Folkestone, the fresh air and the bustle brought Dominic back to brisk life and action. At last he identified his interests with Hollis’s. They struggled together on to the crowded boat, and found a corner for their luggage. They helped each other on with their life-belts, and sat on their rolled-up valises watching the silvery “blimp” which flew past them, on the lookout for submarines.

At Calais, after much fuss, delay and direction, they found themselves on a curious little island in the midst of a vast expanse of railway lines. Here there were a few subalterns from other regiments, and a little shed with “
Buvette
” written on it, where stale rolls, coffee and oranges were sold. Late in the evening, they entered a train for Etaples, arriving at one o’clock the next morning. They groped through the darkness for half a mile or so to an army hut, where nothing happened for twenty minutes. Then an officer appeared and told them they had to go somewhere else, down in the town. Hollis was in that state of fatigue when any further frustration appears ludicrous, and he began to laugh. One
of the other subalterns turned on him with angry insolence. He saw truly that if once the soldier began to laugh at the futility of much of his activity, the war could not continue. Hollis, without any undisciplined intention, had offended in this.

Dominic too was exhausted, not only from the past day, but from his passion on the previous night; and was now in a state of irritable sensitivity. With his absolute loyalty to his own kind, he would at any time have been annoyed at a man from another regiment speaking in that way to his fellow-subaltern. But in his present emotional condition, heightened by his physical exhaustion, he flared out: “D’you want your damned head knocked off?”

The captain glanced up from the table where he was writing on some form, but when he saw the look in Dominic’s eyes he said nothing. The subaltern who had rebuked Hollis looked both indignant and scared. He muttered and turned away.

The party left the hut and walked down through the darkness to their billets, Dominic and Hollis a few yards behind.

“Why did you let fly like that?” asked Hollis.

“I don’t know. It happens to me sometimes,” said Dominic.

“I hope you don’t do it to me. I thought you were going to knife him.”

“I don’t do it to my friends.”

At the end of this shared and curious day, warmed perhaps by the blaze of Dominic’s anger, a friendship had sprung up between them, of which there had been no sign
when they set out. Dominic felt that he had taken Hollis under his protection. They followed the others through the darkness, comfortable in the knowledge of their friendship.

Dominic thought that he had been moved by loyalty to Hollis, and by his dislike of the type of the other man, but it was something far deeper that had aroused his anger, something that was latent in him like a diamond in a mass of coal, which did not begin to take shape until the following autumn.

At Etaples they were put through three days of intensive preparation for the trenches, throwing live bombs and stumbling, choking in inadequate masks, through gas-filled tunnels cut in the sand-dunes of the “bull-ring”. There was a rumour amongst the soldiers, probably with little foundation, that one man a day was killed there.

After this Dominic and Hollis were put in charge of a draft of men to go up to the front. The decrepit train with broken windows crawled along through the snow. It took twelve hours to go thirty miles, so that when they arrived they felt that they had travelled half-way across Europe. Some of the men lighted braziers in their carriages. They kept hopping out of the crawling train to collect fuel. For the officers it was like travelling in charge of a crate of escaping cats.

They reached Béthune after dark. While they were marshalling their men on the railway station they heard the sound of distant gun-fire. It made Hollis apprehensive, but it excited Dominic, making him feel noble and important, and about to find the fulfilment of his existence in its reason, in fighting evil. His first approach to everything was romantic,
and then slowly he had to discover its reality. His approach to Sylvia was entirely romantic and he had not yet found her reality. His approach to Helena was both real and romantic at the same time. What he saw in her and gave romantic worship to, was the reality he had known since childhood. She was not a symbol of anything, not a compensation for frustrations in his adolescence, whereas Sylvia was almost entirely a symbol and a compensation.

They spent a week billeted in peasants’ cottages, and drilling in frozen fields on the outskirts of Béthune. Then at last they were sent to join the first battalion in the trenches, travelling to Noeux-les-Mines on the top of a London bus. Here they reported to the transport officer. Outside his quarters there was a shell hole in a neatly planted onion bed. The peasants were still living in their cottages, some damaged by shell-fire, only a mile or so from the front line, so firmly fixed were the opposing trenches. If after an attack one side gained a hundred yards, the victory was a misfortune, as the newly captured trenches had their dugouts and parapets on the wrong side, and were more receptive to enemy shells.

When it was dark Dominic and Hollis set out with a sergeant as guide to the front line, stumbling along through the seemingly uncharted wastes of a ruined country, until they descended into the communication trenches. Although they had heard the gunfire at Béthune, this part of the line, having been drenched with its share of blood in the Battle of Loos, was now quiescent. The darkness was occasionally broken by the eerie flare of Verey lights, to illuminate any hostile prowlers. The scene was already familiar from photographs and comic cartoons in the illustrated papers.

At last they were shown down some steps and through a sacking curtain into a dugout, where Burns, the company commander, and a second lieutenant called Frost were waiting for their arrival to begin dinner. This meal, which was served by two officers’ servants from another dugout, consisted of grilled soles, pork chops, apple tart and cream. They drank Vichy water and white wine, which did not need cooling as some of the bottles had already frozen and had cracked.

Burns was friendly and very pleased to see them, as in these quiet trenches only one officer had to be on a watch at night. He shared this duty with Frost, and the arrival of two new subalterns would double the hours of their sleep. Frost, although he welcomed this, was a little indignant at territorial officers being posted to the first battalion, and he addressed them rather superciliously.

Dominic and Hollis had the easiest possible introduction to the war, except for the extreme cold. For two or three months nothing spectacular happened, beyond the routine of a week in the front line, a week in the reserve trenches, and a week in one of the villages close behind the line. Occasionally a man might be killed or wounded by a stray shell or a trench mortar. Two or three times there were heavy barrages in which men were killed, but no raid followed. In more realistic periods of history the opposing commanders would have agreed to move into winter quarters, but the powers-that-be were afraid that their armies might lose “the spirit of the offensive”.

Towards the end of this calm, cold period Burns, strolling along the reserve trench on a sunny April morning,
was blown to pieces by a stray shell, almost the only one to explode in their sector on that day. When they came out of the trenches at the end of the week, they were given a new company commander called Harrison. He had been slightly wounded a few months earlier and had only just returned from England. Like Frost, he was annoyed at having territorial officers under him and almost his first remark to Dominic and to Hollis was an order to take off the “T’s” under the regimental badges on their lapels. Out of the line he was more of a martinet than Burns had been, but in the trenches he became nervous. His wound, though slight, had been very painful, and he did not want it to happen again. He did not take any of the night watch, and when there was much shell-fire he stayed in his dugout. It so happened that his appointment as company commander coincided with the hotting-up of the war.