A Test to Destruction (4 page)

“It turned out better than I expected, Papa. You know how Dickie does not like to see the children’s friends in the house, at
least at meal times, when he comes home tired. However, he was in a good mood; it was quite like old times.”

Thomas Turney wondered what old times, and was about to make some sardonic remark when he checked the thought. Hetty went on happily, “The four young people have gone up to London to see
Romance
at the Lyric Theatre, and Phillip has promised not to be late. Dickie remarked that he saw a great improvement in Phillip’s whole bearing and attitude. He seemed much more manly, he said. Oh, I knew everything would come right one day!”

“How old is Phillip now, Hetty?” asked Thomas Turney’s elder sister.

“He will be twenty-three in April, Aunt Marian.”

“Dear me,” said the old lady. “It seems only yesterday that he had his twenty-first birthday party! Time seems to go so slowly, and then suddenly, before we know where we are, it is gone.” She suppressed a sigh.

Miss Marian Turney was doing her best to do nothing to upset Tom. Nowadays he was inclined to be so critical of very small things about her. She had been in his house too long, she knew; but where else could she go? Her income was but £8 a
quarter, from her father’s will. She sat primly upright, ready to speak only if spoken to, as in childhood three-quarters of a century before.

“I asked Phillip particularly to come straight home after the theatre, with the two girls,” Hetty was saying. “Dickie is not on duty this week-end, and badly needs a good night’s rest. He can never settle down, you know, until he knows that everyone is in bed.”

The three came back at half-past eleven. Richard had not waited up for them, but lay on his bed in his blue-flowered dressing gown, twenty-first birthday present from his two younger sisters, Viccy and Dora, in the ’eighties. His carpet slippers waited side by side neatly below the brass bed, ready to be drawn out as soon as three pairs of feet had gone down the passage. When three bedroom doors had been shut, only then would he dare go downstairs and shoot upper and lower bolts of the front door, put the chain across, and turn off the gas-cock in the coal cellar—for safety, should a bomb drop on the house.

Only then would he be able to feel easy, despite the chronic anxiety of his mind aggravated by insufficient food.

In the morning Elizabeth, the elder daughter, said to her mother, “I don’t like the look of Bill Willoughby—that awful stutter! There’s something wrong with him—he can never look you in the eyes. Like Phillip—shifty, if you ask me!”

*

All types and ages of junior officers were now reporting to the Orderly Room. Gone were the days of one-man medical boards at Caxton Hall, with their one, two, and three months of sick leave. Three weeks at home after hospital was now the maximum; then back to duty.

On the Monday afternoon a trio of senior subalterns reported to Phillip at the same time: the eldest an Ulsterman, with an arm cut off above the elbow; the other two were Gaultshire men, one with a red weal zigzagging across his forehead and a careful manner of enunciation, as though his tongue were a little thick; the third had a glass eye, looking as though it were about to fall out of the raggedly healed skin of the socket, while the live eye stared fierce as a falcon’s.

Phillip wrote the names in the Arrivals book—Docherty, Tabor, and Hedges—all three B2—before taking them in to the colonel, after knocking on the door to ask if Lord S. would see them. Lord S. was always available for such visits.

After they had gone, Phillip was called in to take down at dictation a confidential report by the Colonel upon an officer who had overstayed his leave by two weeks, and then had deserted. He had been arrested in plain clothes by the Metropolitan Police in London, handed over to the Provost Marshal’s office at Horse Guards, and brought down under close arrest to Landguard Camp. There he awaited, without his belt but in uniform, a General Court Martial. One of Phillip’s duties was to visit him daily in his quarters to ask if there were any complaints, and to replace the officer-guard of the past twenty-four hours.

While Lord Satchville was dictating the excellent record of the officer before his unfortunate attachment to a young woman a year or two his senior, who before her marriage from the musical comedy stage was an actress much remarked for her skill in suggesting innocence and charm, Captain Henniker-Sudley knocked and entered, saying, “General Mowbray, sir!” and withdrawing, ushered in a figure with inflexibly authoritative face that Phillip remembered as belonging to the colonel of the 1st battalion at Loos.

He stood up, and with notebook and pencil, prepared to leave the room, following the adjutant; but Lord Satchville after greeting his guest turned to Phillip and said to the General, “You will remember Maddison, who took command of the First battalion after Captain West had been hit, and captured the Lone Tree position, Mowbray——?”

“Yes,” replied the General. “How do you do,” as he held out his hand.

Phillip was still glowing with satisfaction, while typing a request to all company commanders for a nominal roll of men who before enlistment were (
a
)
boiler-riveters and (
b
)
internal combustion engine crankshaft forgers, when Capt. Henniker-Sudley came to him and said, “The Colonel wants you to make notes of the information he is about to be given by General Mowbray, from which you will write a summary afterwards.”

Phillip had done a similar job before; and entering the room quietly, without speaking seated himself at a side table, notebook and pencil ready.

Colonel Mowbray, now a temporary Major-General commanding a division on the Western Front, told Lord Satchville that the order coming from Whitehall to reduce all infantry brigades from four to three battalions was considered by all commanders in the field to be a serious mistake, particularly as it was confirmed that preparations for a German attack on the greatest scale were well-advanced.

The voice, grave and modulated, declared that the newly-constituted infantry brigades would not, in all probability, be given time in which to practise and learn the new tactics required with one battalion acting as both support and reserve to two battalions in line. He said that the infantry required training in the tactics of open warfare, but every day and every night large working parties had to be found for the Sappers, to augment the pioneers and labour battalions working in the new Battle Zones now being prepared along the fourteen miles of line recently taken over from the French.

“What are the Battle Zones, Mowbray?”

“One might call them redans extended to enclose sited defensive positions of between four thousand square yards and ten thousand square yards in extent, according to the lie of the land. Each redoubt is self-contained, with ammunition and food
stores for the infantry and machine gunners, protected by barbed wire.”

“And the preparation of these Battle Zones is only now being undertaken, and mainly by fighting soldiers? Is not the Labour Corps in sufficient strength for this particular work?”

“That is the crux of the matter. For their own reasons, the Cabinet seems deliberately to be withholding reinforcements from the Western Front, while retaining well over a million men here in England, according to Freddy Maurice at the War House.”

“When I was in the Lords the other day, Mowbray, I got the impression from Derby that the Cabinet has not altogether ruled out the possibility of a series of raids in strength, coming over from the Belgian coast under cover of darkness, or fog.”

“I cannot say about that, of course, but I have it from Charteris at G.H.Q. that agents have identified forty-two German divisions rehearsing, behind barrages of live shell, fifty miles back from the German line. The rehearsals are for a land attack. Then there is the significant fact that von Hutier, who carried out that most successful attack at Riga against the Russians, has been put in opposite Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army. It is similar country, down by the marshes of the Somme, to that at Riga. There, of course, von Hutier relied on surprise, keeping his assault troops seventy miles behind his front, and only putting them into the forward areas a week or so before the attack, which was preceded by a six-hour bombardment only.”

“Where did you say von Hutier is now?”

“Opposite the junction of our Fifth Army with the French Sixth lying between the Oise and the Aisne.”

Phillip found General Mowbray’s description of how von Hutier’s presence on the Western Front had become detected so interesting that he ceased to take notes, and merely listened. He would remember it better that way. Apparently the name Oskar von Hutier had been spotted in the correspondence columns of a local Königsberg newspaper smuggled with other newspapers into Sweden. Von Hutier had written a letter of condolence to the parents of a Pomeranian Grenadier, attached to the German Air Force, who had been killed
in
France.
From that little item Intelligence had deduced the possibility of an attack similar to that across the marshes at Riga, which had broken through the Russian front and ended the war there.

That night Phillip wrote in his journal.

After writing romantically, Phillip composed a summary of the talk between the two Great Men of the Regiment, typing it out on one of the massive Orderly Room typewriters, with two fingers, like trying to play chopsticks on the piano. While he was finishing this the corporal on duty by the telephone came in and gave him a written message just in from Eastern Command.

Fourteen officers below field rank were to be detailed to proceed overseas within forty-eight hours. This was urgent: it wanted twenty minutes to the dinner bugle. He hurried over to Henniker-Sudley in Manor Terrace, and showed him the signal. Together they went to the Orderly Room, and selected the first names on the roster, which were then typed out by the corporal. The list was signed, Phillip took it to the ante-room and pinned it on the green-baize board.

Subalterns clustered round the board, reading the names in silence. Then they were gone, and a silence fell upon the anteroom. He was left alone, with a feeling that the fates of those on the board were already determined, beyond the silence of the room, beyond England, beyond the trench lines in France. A shiver up his spine, the hair of his neck twitched spiky; he hurried out to sign the railway warrants in the orderly room.

*

Among the names selected by Captain Henniker-Sudley was Devereux-Wilkins. Wilkins left for the night train for Ipswich with the others; but at 6 p.m. the next evening he was back at camp. In his haversack was a large boiled lobster. With this he called on the doctor, a seedy old fellow who had been a professional
locum
tenens
in peace time, lacking a regular practice owing to ineptitude and early waste of substance. The M.O. accepted the lobster, and gave Wilkins a chit to the orderly room, declaring that he was suffering from bleeding haemorrhoids and should go to hospital for an operation.

With a feeling that he would meet his fate, whatever it was, Phillip asked Sudley if he might go in Wilkins’s place. The adjutant spoke to Lord Satchville, who agreed.

“Inform Eastern Command of the change, and don’t forget to send the address of your next of kin, Phillip.”

Phillip wrote down the name of his father, but gave the address of his cousin,
Brickhill
House,
Beau
Brickhill,
Gaultshire.
This, he told himself, was out of consideration for Mother, should he be killed; she would not then hear directly by telegram. But while he knew it was not the real reason, he did not know the true reason, which was that while he could face the idea of death in battle, he could not face within himself the memories of his formative years.