Death of a Hero (36 page)

3

I
T was not nearly dawn when they reached Folkestone. The drafts from various units were now amalgamated, but still remained under their own officers. They were marched through the dull little town and bivouacked in a row of large empty houses, probably evacuated boarding-houses, fitted up with the usual inconveniences of small English hotels. They washed and had some breakfast. All rather dismal.

At seven they were marched to the quay, and then marched back. The officer had mistaken the word “eleven” for “seven”. So they had to wait again. It was their first introduction to the curious fact that much of the War consisted in waiting about and in undoing things which somebody had ordered in error or through mistaken zeal. The men, sitting on their packs in the empty room, were eagerly and vainly discussing their immediate future – which Base Camp would they go to, which unit would they be drafted to, what part of the line? Winterbourne went over to the uncurtained window and looked out. Drifting heavy clouds, a moderately rough, dirty-looking sea. The Esplanade was practically deserted. The shelters looked dilapidated; most of the glass in them was smashed. The unused gas-lamps looked somehow desolate on their rusting standards. Another wounded town – dying, perhaps.
Depression, monotony, boredom. He looked at his wrist-watch. Still more than two hours to wait. Now that the inevitable had occurred, he was very impatient to get into the front line. The only interest he had left was a consuming curiosity to see what the War was really like.

Curse this hanging about! He drummed his fingers on the window-pane. The men in the room went on talking, aimlessly, foolishly, talking to no purpose. Winterbourne wondered at his own lack of emotion. All his past life seemed a dream, all his vital interests had become utterly indifferent, his ambitions were dissolved, his old friends seemed incredibly remote and unimportant; even Fanny and Elizabeth were unsubstantial, graceful ghosts. Depression, monotony, boredom – but a peculiar sort, a strained, worried, exasperated sort. For God's sake get a move on. It'll never end, so for the love of Mike let's get it over. Let's catch our little packet. We know our numbers are up, so let's get them quickly.

One of the men was whistling:

‘What's the use of worry-ing?'

What indeed? But can you help it? You, cheery idiot, are worrying just as much as any one else. Villiers' torture by hope. If you were
quite
certain that your number was up, you'd have at least the tranquillity of resignation. But you're not quite certain. Even in the infantry men come back. With a really healthy wound you might be out of the line for six or nine months. That was called “getting a blighty one”, if you were lucky enough to get sent back to England – “Blighty”. The men were discussing blighties. Which was the most convenient blighty? Arm or leg? Most agreed that if you lost your left hand or a foot, you were damned lucky – you were out of the bloody War for good and you got a pension and a wound-gratuity. Winterbourne stood with his back to them, looking out of the window; the ghosts of past summer visitors thronged the Esplanade. Left hand or a foot. Live a cripple. No, not that, not that, my God! Come back whole, or not at all. But how those men love life, how blindly they cling to their poor existences! You wouldn't think they'd much to live for. No beautiful and smartly-dressed Fannies and Elizabeths. Oh, they have their “tarts”, they've all got a girl's “photo” in their pay-books – and what girls! Tarts for Tommies. Cream tarts for Tommies. He turned away abruptly from the window and sat down to clean his buttons. Always keep yourself clean and smart, and walk about in a soldierly way…

His mood changed and his spirits rose as they marched down to the docks. Only twelve hours had passed since they left, and yet it seemed a tremendously long time. Winterbourne realized that the monotony, the imbecile restrictions, the incredible nagging of military pedants, had been crushing him into a condition of utter stupidity. He regretted deeply that he had been kept in England so long. At least you were doing something real in France, and there was movement…

Troops were pouring along the quay, and mounting the gangways on to three black-painted troopships. Winterbourne recognized the ships as old friends – they were pre-war Channel packet-boats transformed. Huge notices were displayed on the quays: “No. 1 Ship, 33rd Div., 19th Div., 42nd Div., 118th Brigade”. An officer with a megaphone shouted: “Leave Men to the Right, Drafts to the Left.” Another megaphone shouted: “First Army Men, Number I Ship.” “Third and Fourth Armies, Number 3 Ship.” “Captain Swanson, 11th Sea-forth Highlanders, report to R.T.O.'s office immediately.” It was rather stirring – animated and efficient as well as bustling.

The draft went on board, and were shepherded to one end of the upper deck. The whole ship was swarming with leave men returning to France. Winterbourne gazed at them fascinatedly – these were the real war soldiers, fragments of the first half-million volunteers, the men who had believed in the war and wanted to fight. They made a kind of epitome of the whole army. Every arm of the service was represented – Field Artillery, Heavies, dismounted Cavalry, Gunners, Sappers, R.E. Sigs., Army Service Corps, Army Medical Corps, and infantry everywhere. He recognized some of the infantry badges, the bursting grenade of the Northumberland Fusiliers, the tiger of the Leicesters, the Middlesex, the Bedfords, Seaforth Highlanders, Notts. and Jocks, the Buffs. He was immediately struck by their motley and picturesque appearance. He and the other draft troops were all spick-and-span – buttons bright, puttees minutely adjusted, boots polished, peaked cap stiffened with wire, pack mathematically squared, overcoat buttoned up to the throat. The leave men were dressed anyhow. Some had leather equipment, some webbing. They put their equipment together as it suited them, and none of it had been shined or polished for months. Some wore overcoats, some shaggy goatskin or rough sheepskin jackets. The skirts of some overcoats had been roughly hacked off with jack-knives – not to trail in the deep mud, Winterbourne guessed. The equipment which still weighed so heavily on the shoulders of the draft
seemed to give the real soldiers no concern at all – they either wore it unconcernedly or chucked it carelessly on the deck with their rifles. Winterbourne was charmed. He noticed with amused scandal that the bolts and muzzles of their rifles were generally tightly bound with oiled rags. Winterbourne looked more carefully at their faces. They were lean and still curiously drawn although the men had been out of the line for a fortnight; the eyes had a peculiar look. They seemed strangely worn and mature, but filled with energy, a kind of slow, enduring energy. In comparison the fresh faces of the new drafts seemed babyish – rounded and rather feminine.

For the first time since the declaration of War, Winterbourne felt almost happy. These men were men. There was something intensely masculine about them, something very pure and immensely friendly and stimulating. They had been where no woman and no half-man had ever been, could endure to be. There was something timeless and remote about them, as if (so Winterbourne thought) they had been Roman legionaries or the men of Austerlitz or even the invaders of the Empire. They looked barbaric, but not brutal; determined, but not cruel. Under their grotesque wrappings, their bodies looked lean and hard and tireless. They were Men. With a start Winterbourne realized that in two or three months, if he were not hit, he would be one of them, indistinguishable from them, whereas now, in the ridiculous jackanapes get-up of the peace-time soldier, he felt humiliated and ashamed beside them.

“By God!” he said to himself, “you're men, not boudoir rabbits and lounge lizards. I don't care a damn what your cause is – it's almost certainly a foully rotten one. But I do know you're the first real men I've looked upon. I swear you're better than the women and the halfmen, and by God! I swear I'll die with you rather than live in a world without you.”

Winterbourne moved a short distance away from the draft and watched a small group of leave men. One, a Scotsman in the uniform of an English line regiment, was still wearing his full equipment. He was leaning on his rifle, talking to two other infantrymen, who were sitting on their packs. One of them a Corporal with scandalously untrimmed hair and a dirty sheepskin jacket, was lighting a pipe.

“An' wha'y'think?” said the Scot in his sharp-clipped speech: “when ah got hame, they wan'ed me ta gae and tak' tea wi' th' Meenister and than gie a speech at a Bazaar for Warr Worrkers.”

“Ab!” said the Corporal, “did you tell ‘em – puff – all about the wicked Huns – puff – and say that what we want in the line is more tiled bathrooms and girls and not so many woollen mufflers and whizz-bangs?”

“Ah did not; ah said, ‘Gie me over that bottle o' whisky, wumman, and hand y' whist.'”

“What Division are you, Jock?” said the other man.

“Thirrty-thirrd. We've bin spendin' a pleasant summer on th' Somme, and we're now winterrin' at the Health-resorrts o' Ypres.”

“We're forty-first Division. Just on your left in the Salient. We came up there a month ago from Bullycourt.”

“Bullycourt's a verry guid place to get away from…”

Winterbourne could not listen any further – a zealous N.C.O. herded him back to the draft. He went unwillingly. He had been waiting eagerly for the men to get away from their time-honoured jests and speak of their real experiences. He was disappointed that these men talked in such a trivial and uninteresting way. He felt they ought to be saying important things in Shakespearean blank verse. Something adequate to their experience, to the intensity of manhood he instinctively felt in them and admired so humbly. But, of course, that was ridiculous of him. He felt that at once. Part of their impressiveness was this very triviality, their complete unconsciousness that there was anything extraordinary or striking about them. They would have been offended at the suggestion. They were ignorant of their own qualities. As Winterbourne himself rapidly merged with these men and became one of them, he lost entirely this first sharp impression of meeting a new, curious race of men, the masculine men. It was then the other people who became curious to him. He found that the real soldiers, the frontline troops, had no more delusions about the War than he had. They hadn't his feeling of protest and agony over it all, they hadn't tried to think it out. They went on with the business, hating it, because they had been told it had to be done and believed what they had been told. They wanted the War to end, they wanted to get away from it, and they had no feeling of hatred for their enemies on the other side of No Man's Land. In fact, they were almost sympathetic to them. They also were soldiers, men segregated from the world in this immense barbaric
tumult. The fighting was so impersonal as a rule that it seemed rather a conflict with dreadful hostile forces of Nature than with other men. You did not see the men who fired the ceaseless hail of shells on you, nor the machine-gunners who swept away twenty men to death in one zip of their murderous bullets, nor the hands which projected trench-mortars that shook the earth with awful detonations, nor even the invisible sniper who picked you off mysteriously with the sudden impersonal “ping!” of his bullet. Even in the perpetual trench raids you only caught a glimpse of a few differently-shaped steel helmets a couple of traverses away; and either their bombs got you, or yours got them. Actual hand-to-hand fighting occurred, but it was comparatively rare. It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, not a war of hand-weapons. The sentry gazed at dawn over a desolate flat landscape, seamed with irregular trenches and infinitely pitted and scarred with shell-holes, thorny with wire, littered with debris. Five to ten thousand enemies were within range of his vision, and not one would be visible. For days on end he might strain his eyes, and not see one of them. He would hear them at night – clink of shovels and picks, the scream of a wounded man, even their coughing if there happened to be a cessation of artillery and machine-gun fire. But not see them. In the two hours following dawn in “quiet” sectors there was sometimes a kind of truce after the feverish work and perpetual firing during the night. After morning stand-down the front-line troops snatched a little sleep. At such a time the silence was eerie. Twenty thousand men within a mile, and not a sound. Or so it seemed. But that was by contrast. In fact, there was always some shelling going on – heavies firing on back areas – and generally in the distance the long rumble which meant a general engagement…

The soldiers, then, were not vindictive. Nor, in general, were they long duped by the War talk. They laughed at the newspapers. Any newcomer who tried to be a bit high-falutin was at once snubbed with “Fer Christ's sake don't talk patriotic!” They went on with a sort of stubborn despair-why, they didn't quite know. The authorities obviously mistrusted them, and forbade them to read the pacific
Nation
while allowing them to read the infamies of “John Bull.” The mistrust was unnecessary. They went on in their stubborn despair, with their sentimental songs and cynical talk and perpetual grousing; and it's my belief that if they'd been asked to do so, they'd still be carrying on now. They weren't crushed by defeat or elated by victory – their
stubborn despair had taken them far beyond that point. They carried on. People sneer at the War slang. I, myself, have heard intellectual “objectors” very witty at the expense of “carry on.” So like carrion, you know. All right, let them sneer.

The troopships crossing the Channel were escorted by four plunging little black torpedo-boats. Submarines in the Channel. A merchant-ship had been sunk that morning. Winterbourne had thought he would be apprehensive – on the contrary, he found that he scarcely thought about it. Nobody bothered about a little risk like that. They made for Boulogne, and the soldiers cheered the torpedo-boats as they turned back from the harbour entrance.