The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (5 page)

Run! Who was talking of running? He was going to save the regiment – once he could think clearly again. Everything was hazy just for the moment.

With a choking cry he lurched to his feet: and staggering, running, falling down, the dreamer crossed the open. A tearing pain through his left arm made him gasp, but he got there – got there and collapsed. He couldn't see very well, so he tore off his gas helmet, and, peering round, at last saw the wire. And the wire was indeed cut. Why the throbbing brain should have
imagined it would be cut
there
, I know not; perhaps he associated it particularly with the pollard – and after all he was the Company Idiot. But it was cut there, I am glad to say; let us not begrudge him his little triumph. He found one end, and some few feet off he saw the other. With infinite difficulty he dragged himself towards it. Why did he find it so terribly hard to move? He couldn't see clearly; everything somehow was getting hazy and red. The roar of the shells seemed muffled strangely – faraway, indistinct. He pulled at the wire, and it came towards him; pulled again, and the two ends met. Then he slipped back against the pollard, the two ends grasped in his right hand…

The regiment was safe at last. The officer would not have to kick the telephone again. The Idiot had made good. And into his heart there came a wonderful peace.

There was a roaring in his ears; lights danced before his eyes; strange shapes moved in front of him. Then, of a sudden, out of the gathering darkness a great white light seared his senses, a deafening crash overwhelmed him, a sharp stabbing blow struck his head. The roaring ceased, and a limp figure slipped down and lay still, with two ends of wire grasped tight in his hand.

‘They did, sir – very well.'

‘What are the casualties? Any idea?'

‘Somewhere about seventy or eighty, sir – but I don't know the exact numbers.'

‘As soon as it's dark I'm going back to Headquarters. Captain Standish will take command.'

‘That there Meyrick is reported missing, sir.'

‘Missing! He'll turn up somewhere – if he hasn't been hit.'

‘Probably walked into the German trenches by mistake,' grunted the CSM dispassionately, and retired. Outside the dugout men had moved the corporal; but the red pools still remained – stagnant at the bottom of the trench…

‘Well, you're through all right now, Major,' said a voice in the doorway, and an officer with the white and blue brassard of the signals came in and sat down. ‘There are so many wires going back that have been laid at odd times, that it's difficult to trace them in a hurry.' He gave a ring on the telephone, and in a moment the thin, metallic voice of the man at the other end broke the silence.

‘All right. Just wanted to make sure we were through. Ring off.'

‘I remember kicking that damn thing this morning when I found we were cut off,' remarked Seymour, with a weary smile. ‘Funny how childish one is at times.'

‘Aye – but natural. This war's damnable.' The two men fell silent. ‘I'll have a bit of an easy here,' went on the signal officer after a while, ‘and then go down with you.'

Dimly the tree stood outlined against the sky – a conspicuous mark and signpost. It was the signal officer who tripped over it first – that huddled quiet body – and gave a quick ejaculation. ‘Somebody caught it here, poor devil. Look out – duck.'

A flare shot up into the night, and by its light the two motionless officers close to the pollard looked at what they had found.

‘How the devil did he get here!' muttered Seymour. ‘It's one of my men.'

‘Was he anywhere near you when you kicked the telephone?' asked the other, and his voice was a little hoarse.

‘He may have been – I don't know. Why?'

‘Look at his right hand.' From the tightly clenched fingers two broken ends of wire stuck out.

‘Poor lad.' The Major bit his lip. ‘Poor lad – I wonder. They called him the Company Idiot. Do you think…?'

‘I think he came out to find the break in the wire,' said the other quietly. ‘And in doing so he found the answer to the big riddle.'

‘I knew he'd make good – I knew it all along. He used to dream of big things – something big for the regiment.'

‘And he's done a big thing, by Jove,' said the signal officer gruffly, ‘for it's the motive that counts. And he couldn't know that he'd got the wrong wire.'

As I said, both the Sergeant-Major and his officer proved right according to their own lights.

The rest of the Western Front has been well written up – much too well. The Garden alone – the Holy Terror, as some of the men used to call it – has not. It is under some sort of taboo. I think I know why. If you never were in the line there before the smash came and made it like everywhere else, you could not know how it would work on the nerves when it was still its own elfish self. And if you were there and did know, then you knew also that it was no good to try to tell people. They only said, ‘Oh, so you all had the wind up?' We had. But who could say why? How is a horse to say what it is that be-devils one empty place more than another? He has to prick up his ears when he gets there. Then he starts sweating. That's all he knows, and it was the same story with us in The Garden. All I can do is to tell you, just roughly, the make of the place, the way that the few honest solids and liquids were fixed that came into it. They were the least part of it, really.

It was only an orchard, to look at; all ancient apple-trees, dead straight in the stem, with fat, wet grass underneath, a little unhealthy in colour for want of more sun. Six feet above ground the lowest apple boughs all struck out level, and kept so; some
beasts, gone in our time, must have eaten every leaf that tried to grow lower. So the under side of the boughs made a sort of flat awning or roof. We called the layer of air between it and the ground The Six-foot Seam, as we were mostly miners. The light in this seam always appeared to have had something done to it: sifted through branches, refracted, messed about somehow, it was not at all the stuff you wanted just at that time. You see the like of it in an eclipse, when the sun gives a queer wink at the earth round the edge of a black mask. Very nice, too, in its place; but the war itself was quite enough out of the common –falling skies all over the place, and half your dead certainties shaken.

We and the Germans were both in The Garden, and knew it. But nobody showed. Everywhere else on the front somebody showed up at last; somebody fired. But here nothing was seen or heard, ever. You found you were whispering and walking on tip-toe, expecting you didn't know what. Have you been in a great crypt at twilight under a church, nothing round you but endless thin pillars, holding up a low roof? Suppose there's a wolf at the far end of the crypt and you alone at the other, staring and staring into the thick of the pillars, and wondering, wondering – round which of the pillars will that grey nose come rubbing?

Why not smash up the silly old spell, you may say – let a good yell, loose a shot, do any sane thing to break out? That's what I said till we got there. Our unit took over the place from the French. A French platoon sergeant, my opposite number, showed me the quarters and posts and the like, and I asked the usual question, ‘How's the old Boche?'

‘
Mais assez gentil
,'
²
he pattered. That Gaul was not waiting to chat. While he showed me the bomb-store, he muttered something low, hurried, and blurred –‘
Le bon Dieu Boche
,'
³
I think it was, had created the orchard. The Germans themselves were ‘
bons bourgeois
' enough, for all he had seen or heard of them –‘Not a shot in three weeks.
Seulement
'– he grinned, half-shamefaced and half-confidential, as sergeant to sergeant –‘
ne faut pas les embêter
.'
⁴

I knew all about that. French sergeants were always like that:
dervishes in a fight when it came, but dead set, at all other times, on living
paisiblement
,
⁵
smoking their pipes.
Paisiblement
– they love the very feel of the word in their mouths. Our men were no warrior race, but they all hugged the belief that they really were marksmen, not yet found out by the world. They would be shooting all night at clods, at tops of posts, at anything that might pass for a head. Oh, I knew. Or I thought so.

But no. Not a shot all the night. Nor on any other night either. We were just sucked into the hush of The Garden the way your voice drops in a church – when you go in at the door you become part of the system. I tried to think why. Did nobody fire just because in that place it was so easy for anybody to kill? No trench could be dug; it would have filled in an hour with water filtering through from the full stream flanking The Garden. Sentries stood out among the fruit trees, behind little breastworks of sods, like the things you use to shoot grouse. These screens were merely a form; they would scarcely have slowed down a bullet. They were not defences, only symbols of things that were real elsewhere. Everything else in the place was on queer terms with reality; so were they.

I found the sentries jumpy. ‘What is it, Sergeant?' one of them almost demanded of me, as if I were the fellow in charge of the devils. ‘There's no one on earth,' he said, ‘could live in that misery.' Toomey himself, the red-headed gamekeeper out of the County Fermanagh, betrayed some perturbation. He hinted that ‘Them wans' were in it. ‘Who?' I asked. ‘Ach, the Good People,' he said, with a trace of reluctance. Then I remembered, from old days at school, that the Greeks, too, had been careful; they called their Furies ‘The Well-disposed Ladies'.

All the rest of the night there was not a sound but the owls. The sunless day that followed was quiet till 2.30 p.m., when the Hellhound appeared. He came trotting briskly out of the orchard, rounding stem after stem of the fruit trees, leaped our little pretence of barbed wire, and made straight for Toomey, then on guard, as any dog would. It was a young male black-and-tan. It adored Toomey till three, when he was relieved. Then it came capering around him in ecstasy, back to the big living cellar, a hundred yards in the rear. At the door it heard voices within and let down its tail, ready to plead lowliness and contrition before any tribunal less divine than Toomey.

The men, or most of them, were not obtrusively divine just then. They were out to take anything ill that might come. All the hushed days had first drawn their nerves tight, and then the scream had cut some of them. All bawled or squeaked in the cellar, to try to feel natural after the furtive business outside.

‘Gawd a'mighty!' Looker shrilled at the entry of Toomey, ‘if Fritz ain't sold 'im a pup!'

Jeers flew from all parts of the smoky half-darkness. ‘Where's licence, Toomey?'

‘Sure 'e's clean in th''ouse?'

‘'Tain't no Dogs' 'Ome 'ere. Over the way!'

Corporal Mullen, the ever-friendly, said to Toomey, more mildly, ‘Wot? Goin' soft?'

‘A daycent dog, Corp,' said Toomey. ‘He's bruk wi' the Kaiser. An' I'll engage he's through the distemper. Like as not he'll be an Alsatian.' Toomey retailed these commendations slowly, with pauses between, to let them sink in.

‘What'll you feed him?' asked Mullen, inspecting the points of the beast with charity.

‘Feed 'im!' Looker squealed. ‘Feed 'im into th' incinerator!'

Toomey turned on him. ‘Aye, an' be et be the rats!'

‘Fat lot o' talk about rats,' growled Brunt, the White Hope, the company's only prize-fighter. ‘Tha'd think rats were struttin' down fairway, shovin' folk off duck-board.'

‘Ah!' Looker agreed. ‘An' roostin' up yer armpit.'

‘Thot's reet,' said Brunt.

‘I'll bet 'arf a dollar,' said Looker, eyeing the Hellhound malignantly, ‘the 'Uns 'ave loaded 'im up with plague fleas. Sent 'im acrorse. Wiv instructions.'

Toomey protested. ‘Can't ye see the dog has been hit, ye blind man?' In fact, the immigrant kept his tail licking expressively under his belly except when it lifted under the sunshine of Toomey's regard.

Brunt rumbled out slow gloomy prophecies from the gloom of his corner. ‘'E'll be tearin''imself t'bits wi' t'mange in a fortneet. Rat for breakfas', rat for dinner, rat for tea; bit o' rat las' thing at neet, 'fore 'e'll stretch down to 't.'

‘An' that's the first sinse ye've talked,' Toomey conceded. ‘A rotten diet-sheet is ut. An' dirt! An' no kennel the time the roof'll start drippin'. A dog's life for a man, an' God knows what for a dog.'

We felt the force of that. We all had dogs at home. The Hellhound perhaps felt our ruth in the air like a rise of temperature, for at this point he made a couple of revolutions on his wheel base, to get the pampas-grass of his imagination comfortable about him, and then collapsed in a curve and lay at rest with his nose to the ground and two soft enigmatic gleams from his eyes raking the twilight recesses of our dwelling. For the moment he was relieved of the post of nucleus-in-chief for the vapours of fractiousness to condense upon.

He had a distinguished successor. The company sergeant-major, no less, came round about five minutes after with ‘word from the colonel'. Some mischief, all our hearts told us at once. They were right too. The Corps had sent word – just what it would, we inwardly groaned. The Corps had sent word that
GHQ – Old GHQ! At it again! we savagely thought. We knew what was coming. Yes, GHQ wanted to know what German unit was opposite to us. That meant a raid, of course. The colonel couldn't help it. Like all sane men below brigade staffs, he hated raids. But orders were orders. He did all he could. He sent word that if anyone brought in a German, dead or alive, on his own, by this time to-morrow, he, the colonel, would give him a fiver. Of course nobody could, but it was an offer, meant decently.

Darkness and gnashing of teeth, grunts and snarls of disgust, filled the cellar the moment the CSM had departed. ‘Gawd 'elp us!' ‘A ride! In The Gawden!'‘ 'Oo says Gawd made gawdens?' ‘Ow! Everythink in The Gawden is lovely!' ‘Come into The Gawden, Maud!' You see, the wit of most of us was not a weapon of precision. Looker came nearest, perhaps, to the point. ‘As if we 'ad a chawnce,' he said, ‘to gow aht rattin' Germans, wiv a sack!'

‘We gotten dog for't ahl reet,' said Brunt. This was the only audible trace of good humour. Toomey looked at Brunt quickly.

Toomey was destined to trouble that afternoon: one thing came after another. At 3.25 I sent him and Brunt, with a clean sack apiece, to the sergeant-major's dug-out for the rations. They came back in ten minutes. As Toomey gave me his sack, I feared that I saw a thin train of mixed black and white dust trending across the powdered mortar floor to the door. Then I saw Looker, rage in his face, take a candle and follow this trail, stooping down, and once tasting the stuff on a wet finger-tip.

And then the third storm burst. ‘Christ!' Looker yelled. ‘If 'e ain't put the tea in the sack wiv a 'ole in it!'

We all knew that leak in a bottom corner of that special sack as we knew every very small thing in our life of small things – the cracked dixie-lid,
⁶
the brazier's short leg, the way that Mynns had of clearing his throat, and Brunt of working his jaws before spitting. Of course, the sack was all right for loaves and the tinned stuff. But tea! – loose tea mixed with powdered sugar! It was like loading a patent seed-sowing machine with your fortune in gold-dust. There was a general groan of ‘God
help us!' with extras. In this report I leave out, all along, a great many extras. Print and paper are dear.

Looker was past swearing. ‘Plyin' a piper-chise!' he ejaculated with venom. ‘All owver Frawnce! Wiv our grub!'

Toomey was sorely distressed. He, deep in whose heart was lodged the darling vision of Toomey the managing head, the contriver, the ‘ould lad that was in ut', had bungled a job fit for babes. ‘Ah, then, who could be givin' his mind to the tea,' he almost moaned, ‘an' he with a grand thought in ut?'

At any other time and place the platoon would have settled down, purring, under those words. ‘A grand thought', ‘a great idaya' –when Toomey in happier days had owned to being in labour with one of these heirs of his invention, some uncovenanted mercy had nearly always accrued before long to his friends – a stew of young rabbits, two brace of fat pheasants, once a mighty wild goose. The tactician, we understood in a general way, had ‘put the comether upon' them. Now even those delicious memories were turned to gall. ‘Always the sime!' Looker snarled at the fallen worker of wonders. ‘Always the sime! Ye cawn't 'ave a bit o' wire sived up for pipe-cleanin' without 'e'll loan it off yer to go snarin''ares.' Looker paused for a moment, gathering all the resources of wrath, and then he swiftly scaled the high top-gallant of ungraciousness: ‘'E wiv the 'ole platoon workin' awye for 'im, pluckin' pawtridge an' snipes, the 'ole wye up from the sea! Top end o'Frawnce is all a muck o'feathers wiv 'im!'

All were good men; Looker, like Toomey, a very good man. It was only their nerves that had gone, and the jolly power of gay and easy relentment after a jar. However they tried, they could not cease yapping. I went out for a drink of clean air. If you are to go on loving mankind, you must take a rest from it sometimes. As I went up the steps from the cellar the rasping jangle from below did not cease; it only sank on my ears as I went. ‘Ow, give us 'Owm Rule for England, Gord's sike!'‘Sye there ain't no towds in Irelan', do they?' ‘Looker, I've tould you I'm sorry, an'–' ‘Garn, both on yer! Ol' gas-projectors!' ‘Begob, if ye want an eye knocked from ye then –! 'I was going back, but then I heard Corporal Mullen, paternal and firm, like
Neptune rebuking the winds. ‘Now, then, we don't none of us want to go losing our heads about nothing.' No need to trouble. Mullen would see to the children.