Death of a Hero (34 page)

“Goodbye, sir. Thank you, sir. Same to you, sir. Goodbye, sir.”

“Goodbye. Draft, 'shun. Slope arms. Dis-miss.”

Simultaneously their hands tapped the rifle-butts in salute, as they turned right.

The draft confusedly moved over the darkened ground to the barrack-room, chattering excitedly:

“What's the next thing?”

“P'rade at eight-thirty to move off at nine.”

“Who said so?”

“It's in B'ttalion orders.”

“Silly ole fucker old Brandon is, give me the fair pip he did with ‘is ‘walk about soldierly' – yes! up to yer arse in mud.”

“Bloody old cunt!”

“Yes, but the Adjutant was all right.”

“Oh, ‘e's a gentleman, 'e is.”

“Makes all the difference when they've bin in the ranks theirselves.”

“Wonder what it'll be like in the line?”

“Wait till y' get there and see.”

“I reckon we'll be there this time tomorrow night.”

“Shut up, Larkin, and don't get the wind up.”

“I ain't got the wind up.”

“I say, Corporal, Corp'ral! What time do we p'rade tonight?”

“Ask the Ord'ly Sergeant.”

“Tea's up, boys. Come on!”

They fell in again at eight-thirty. The night was very dark, with a cold, damp, gusty wind from the west. All the N.C.O.s were on parade, carrying lighted hurricane lanterns which moved and flitted and stood still in the darkness like will-o-th'-wisps. The draft were in full marching order, without rifles and side-arms, wearing their greatcoats. Their excitement occasionally broke through the military restraint and rose from a whisper to a loud hum, which would cringe abruptly under the R.S.M.s “Stop talking, there!” It took a long time to read the roll-call by the flicker of the lantern. At the sound of his name each man clicked his heels, “Here, sir.

“31819, Winterbourne, G.”

“Here, sir.”

“That's the lot, Ser'ant-Major, isn't it?”

“That's the lot, sir.”

“Move off in five minutes.”

“Very good, sir.”

The draft stirred restlessly in the darkness. Winterbourne looked to his left and noticed how the line of shadowy figures disappeared into the night – he might have been at one end of a line stretching to infinity for all he could see.

“Draft! Draft! 'Tenshun! Move to the right in column of fours – form fours! Form two deep! Form fours! Right! By the right – Quick march !”

They found themselves immediately behind the regimental band, which struck up one of the Mark III marches supplied to Army musicians. The draft knew it well – “How can I draw rations – if I'm not the ord'ly man?” They marched over the familiar parade-ground, out through the postern, over the swaying drawbridge, where the sentry presented arms.

“By the left. March at – ease. March easy.”

The band had ceased playing. They were descending the long, winding hill road to the village and the station. As they went along they were joined by civilians, mostly girls, who were waiting in ones and twos. The girls called to their men in the ranks, and they, emboldened by excitement and this momentous change in their lives, dared to answer back. March discipline relaxed, and the draft was already marching raggedly as
it passed the first houses of the village. After the dense blackness of the hillside, the light from the few gas-lamps was dazzling.

The band struck up again. Although it was past ten, the whole village was awake and in the street to watch them go by. The loud brass music reverberated from the house fronts. The draft were amazed to find themselves for a moment the centre of public interest; for so long they had learned to consider themselves fatally insignificant and subordinate. Voices came from all sides: “'Ullo, Bert! Goodbye, 'Arry! Hub, Tom! Goodbye, Jack !” Winterbourne, in the front rank, looked behind; he noticed that some of the girls had broken into the ranks and were marching with their men clinging to their arms. They appeared to be enjoying themselves greatly. An exceedingly ragged company surged excitedly through the village, intoxicated by the sounding brass and the cheers and other attentions of the inhabitants.

The civilians were not allowed on the station platform. As the draft marched through the open gate, with a picket of military police on either hand, there was another chorus of “Goodbye, Bert! Goodbye, 'Arry! Goodbye, Tom. Goodbye, Jack! Good luck. Come ‘ome soon. Goodbye. Good luck. Goodbye.” They piled into the waiting troop-train, which was to pick up other drafts on the way. Twelve to a carriage. Winterbourne managed to get the window-seat next the platform. The Adjutant came up. “Winterbourne! Winterbourne!”

“Sir?”

“Oh, there you are. Looking for you. The R.T.O. says you go to Waterloo, and then proceed to Folkestone, he thinks.”

“Thanks very much, sir. It's so much less tedious when you know what you're doing and why and where you're going.”

“You ought to have a commission. You'll easily get one in France.”

“Yes, but you know why I wanted to stay in the ranks, sir.”

“Yes, I know, but men like you are needed as officers. The casualties among officers are terrifically high.”

“All right, I'll think about it, sir.”

“Well, goodbye, old man, the very best of luck to you.”

“Thank you. And to you.” They shook hands, to the impressed horror of the N.C.O.s.

The crowd had gathered outside the railings by the fore part of the train, where they were not masked by the station buildings. The band were drawn up in front of them, on the platform. The train gave a
warning whistle. The band struck up the Regimental March, and then “Auld Lang Syne”, as the train slowly steamed out of the station; they played their instruments with one hand, and ludicrously waved the other hand to the draft crowded in the moving windows. A long wavering cheer went up. The red faces of the soldiers on the platform were all turned slightly upwards, and their mouths were open. Their right arms were raised above their heads. In a blare of band music, cheering, and shouting, the cheering draft drew out of the station.

Goodbye, Bert. Goodbye, Harry. Goodbye, Tom. Goodbye, Jack. Goodbye.

The last person Winterbourne saw was the little Colonel, standing at the extreme end of the platform under a gas-lamp, standing very erect, standing rather tense and emotional, standing with his right hand raised to his cap, standing to salute his men proceeding on Active Service.

He wasn't a bad little man; he believed intensely in his Army.

2

I
N fifteen minutes the excited chatter over fags dwindled to the monotony of an ordinary railway journey. The men were tired, for it was already long after Last Post. They began to drowse. One man in the far corner from Winterbourne was already asleep. The racks were full of overcoats and equipment. Under the Anti-Aircraft Regulations the curtains of the train windows were closely drawn.

Winterbourne felt entirely unsleepy. He ceased talking to the man beside him, and drifted into a reverie. His mind slid backwards and forwards from one theme of thought to another. Already he found it difficult to read or to think consecutively. He had reached the first expressionless stage of the war soldier, which is followed by the period of acute strain; and that in turn gives place to the second expressionless stage – which is pretty hopeless.

The real test was beginning. Like everybody who had not been there, he was almost entirely ignorant of life in the trenches.
Newspapers, illustrated periodicals, almost useless. He had heard a lot of tales from returned wounded soldiers. But many of them either blathered or were quite inarticulate. Here and there a revealing detail or memory. “And all the time I was delirious after I was wounded, I kep' seem' them aeryplanes goin' round and round and then makin' a dive at me.” And the little Cockney: “'Struth! I got me tunic and me trowses all ‘ung up in Fritz's wire, an' I couldn't get orf. Got me pockets full o' bombs, I ‘ad, as well as them stick-bombs in paniers. One of the paniers was ‘ung up too, an' I ses to myself I ses, ‘If you drop them fuckin' bombs, Bert, you'll blow yer fuckin' ‘ead orf.' And there was old Fritz's machine-gun bullets whizzin' by,
zip
,
zip.
I could see ‘em cuttin' the wire – and me cursin' and blindin'. Blimey! I wasn't arf afraid. But I got me fuckin' blighty, anyway.” Where did he meet that amusing little Cockney? Ah, yes, in the depot the day after he joined. There had been several soldiers just out of the hospital in the barrack-room, all swopping yarns. Winterbourne's mind reverted to himself and the past dreary months. He had been unfortunate in the N.C.O.s of his training battalion – old regulars, who had been bullied and driven in their time, and thought they'd escape being sent out to France by zealously bullying and driving the new drafts. No doubt they were paying off some of the old Army grudge against civilian contempt for the mercenary soldier. They particularly hated any educated or well-bred man in the ranks, and delighted to impose painful or humiliating tasks on him. George remembered the man who “took particulars” of his religion.

“What are yer? C. of E., Methodist, R.C.?”

“I haven't any official religion. You'd better put me down as a rationalist.”

“Garn! What's a fuckin' rationalist? Yer in the Army now.”

“Well, I haven't got one.”

“Bloody well find one, then. Yer'll want suthin' over yer fuckin' grave in France, won't yer? An' yer'll bloody well be in it in six months. No religion! Strike me fuckin' pink !”

An amiable hero. In his zeal for religion he got Winterbourne sent on all the dirtiest and longest Sunday fatigues, until in self-defence he had to put himself down Church of England. There was, of course, no religious compulsion in the Army; that was why Church Parade was a parade.

Winterbourne smiled as he thought of the ludicrous scene. It had been none the less painful. His gorge rose at the memory of the filth he had tried to remove from the Officers' Mess Kitchen – filth which had been left there untouched by fifty less scrupulous “fatigues”. The kitchen was inspected every day.

He looked at his hands in the concentrated light of the railway carriage. They were coarsened and chapped, ingrained with dirt impossible to remove with ice-cold water. He thought of the delicate hands of Fanny and Elizabeth's slender fingers.

On parade the officers never swore at the men, the N.C.O.s rarely, whatever they might do off parade. It was an offence under King's Regs. The Physical Training Instructors were, however, an exception. They sometimes displayed an uncouth humour in their objurgations. There were time-honoured pleasantries, such as “Yer may break yer fuckin' mother's ‘eart, but yer won't break mine!” There was the Bayonet Instructor, a singularly rough diamond from Whitechapel, who in mimic bayonet-fighting at the stuffed bags loved to give the command:

“At ‘is stummick an' goolies – Point !”

This gentleman, offended at the awkward posture of a rather plump recruit doing the “double knee bend”, had apostrophized the unfortunate man:

“'Ere, you, Frost. Can't yer get down like a fuckin' soldier, and not like a bloody great pross wot's being blocked?”

Winterbourne smiled again to himself. The road to glory was undoubtedly devious in our fair island story.

From Reveille at five-thirty until Lights Out they had been driven and harassed and bullied for weeks to the strain of: “Look to yer front, there!” “ 'Old yer ‘eads
up
, can't yer? all them tanners was picked up on first p'rade.” “Smith, yer got them straps crossed wrong – if yer do it again, I'll crime yer.” And over the voices of the various sergeant-instructors shouting to their squads, boomed the R.S.M.'s inevitable “Stand still, there! Stand
steady.”
Just like the South Foreland lightship in a fog. The fatigue of continual over-exercise and of the physical and mental strain was severe to men fresh from sedentary lives, or stiff from the plough and the workshop. For the first weeks especially they were sore all over, and sank into heavy, unrefreshing sleep at night. Winterbourne bore it better than most. His long walks and love for swimming had kept him supple. He could not raise weights like the draymen or dig like the navvies, but he could out-march and out-run
them all, learn every new movement in half the time, dismount a Lewis gun while they were wondering which way the handle came off, score four bulls out of five, and saw immediately why you made head-cover first when digging in. But he too felt the fatigue. He remembered one perfectly awful day. They had been drilled and marched and drilled and inspected from dawn to evening of a baking autumn day; then at seven there had been three hours of night operations. At twelve they were all awakened by a false Fire Alarm, and had to turn out in trousers and boots. Winterbourne had taken over his shoulder the arm of a man who was too exhausted to run unassisted on to the parade-ground. The N.C.O.s yelped them on like sheep-dogs.

It was not the physical fatigue Winterbourne minded, though he hated the inevitable physical degradation – the coarse, heavy clothes, too thick for summer; the hobnailed boots; the plank bed; horribly cooked food. But he accepted and got used to them. He suffered mentally; suffered from the shock of the abrupt change from surroundings where the things of the mind chiefly were valued, to surroundings where they were ignorantly despised. He had nobody to talk to. He suffered from the communal life of thirty men in one large hut, which meant that there was never a moment's solitude. He suffered because he brooded over Elizabeth and Fanny, over the widening gulf he knew was dividing him from them, and suffered abominably as month after month of the war dragged on with its interminable holocausts and immeasurable degradation of mankind. The world of men seemed dropping to pieces, madly cast down by men in a delirium of homicide and destructiveness. The very apparatus of killing revolted him, took on a sort of sinister deadness. There was something in the very look of his rifle and equipment which filled him with depression. And then, in the imagination, he was already facing the existence for which this was but a preparation, already confronting the agony of his own death. Horrific tales – alas! only too true – were told of companies and battalions wiped out in a few instants. N.C.O. after N.C.O., as Winterbourne got to know them better, assured him that they were the only men – or almost the only men – left alive from their platoons or companies. And it was the truth. The proportion of casualties was undoubtedly high in infantry units. It was, perhaps, selfish of Winterbourne to worry about his own extinction when so many better men had already been obliterated. He felt rather ashamed and
apologetic about it himself. But it is human to recoil from a violent death, even at twenty-two or three.