Death of a Hero (37 page)

In his inexperience Winterbourne had assumed that they would at once entrain for the front, and that he would spend that night in the trenches. He had forgotten the element of waiting, the deliberation necessary in moving vast masses of men about, which made the slow, ruthless movement of the huge war-machine so inexorable. You hung about, but inevitably you moved, your tiny little cog was brought into action. And this, too, was strangely impersonal, confirmed the feeling of fatalism. It seemed insane to think that you had any individual importance.

The docks at Boulogne were crowded with materials of war, and the whole place seemed English. Notices all in English, the Union Jack, British officers and troops every-where, even British engines for the trains. The leave men were roughly formed into columns and marched off to entrain. Everyone wanted to know where his Division was. The R.T.O.s dealt with them swiftly and efficiently. The drafts were also formed into a column and marched up the hill to the rest camp. They were in good spirits, and the inevitable Cockney humorist was in action. As they went up the hill, a poor old Frenchwoman came out of her cottage and began rheumatically and wearily to pump water. She did not even look at the passing troops – much too accustomed to them. The Cockney shouted to her:

“ 'Ere we are! War'll soon be over now; keep yer pecker up, Ma!”

They spent the night under canvas at the Boulogne rest camp. From his tent Winterbourne had an excellent view of the Channel and the camp incinerator. His first duty on active service was picking up dirty paper and other rubbish, and dumping it in the incinerator. They were
told nothing about their future; the Army theory being that your business is to obey orders, not to ask questions. Winterbourne fumed and fretted at the inaction. The other men speculated interminably as to where they were going.

The tents had wooden floors. The men drew a blanket and waterproof ground-sheet each, and slept twelve to a tent. It was a bit hard, but not impossible to sleep. Winterbourne lay awake for a long time, trying to get some order into his reflections. His attitude was plainly modified by that day's experience. Was there a contradiction in it? Did it imply that he now supported the War and the War partisans? On the contrary. He hated the War as much as ever, hated all the blather about it, profoundly distrusted the motives of the War partisans, and hated the Army. But he liked the soldiers, the War soldiers, not as soldiers but as men. He respected them. If the German soldiers were like the men he had seen on the boat that morning, then he liked and respected them too. He was with them. With them, yes, but against whom and what? He reflected. With them, because they were men with fine qualities, because they had endured great hardships and dangers with simplicity, because they had parried those hardships and dangers not by hating the men who were supposed to be their enemies, but by developing a comradeship among themselves. They had every excuse for turning into brutes, and they hadn't done it. True, they were degenerating in certain ways, they were getting coarse and rough and a bit animal, but with amazing simplicity and unpretentiousness they had retained and developed a certain essential humanity and manhood. With them, then, to the end, because of their manhood and humanity. With them, too, because that manhood and humanity existed in spite of the War and not because of it. They had saved something from a gigantic wreck, and what they had saved was immensely important – manhood and comradeship, their essential integrity as men, their essential brotherhood as men.

But what were they really against? who were their real enemies? He saw the answer with a flood of bitterness and clarity. Their enemies – the enemies of German and English alike – were the fools who had sent them to kill each other instead of help each other. Their enemies were the sneaks and the unscrupulous; the false ideals, the unintelligent ideas imposed on them, the humbug, the hypocrisy, the stupidity. If those men were typical, then there was nothing essentially wrong with common humanity, at least so far as the men were
concerned. It was the leadership that was wrong – not the war leadership, but the peace leadership. The nations were governed by bunk and sacrificed to false ideals and stupid ideas. It was assumed that they
had
to be governed by bunk – but if they were never given anything else, how could you tell? De-bunk the World. Hopeless, hopeless…

He sighed deeply, and turned in his blanket wrapping. One man was snoring. Another moaned in his sleep. Like corpses they lay there, human rejects chucked into a bell-tent on the hill above Boulogne. The pack made a hard pillow. Maybe he was all wrong, maybe it was “right” for men to be begotten only to murder each other in huge, senseless combats. He wondered if he were not getting a little insane through this persistent brooding over the murders, by striving so desperately and earnestly to find out why it had happened, by agonizing over it all, by trying to think how it could be prevented from occurring again. After all, did it matter so much? Yes, did it matter? What were a few million human animals more or less? Why agonize about it? The most he could do was die. Well, die, then. But O God! O God! is that all? To be born against your will, to feel that life might in its brief passing be so lovely and so divine, and yet to have nothing but opposition and betrayal and hatred and death forced upon you! To be born for the slaughter like a calf or a pig! To be violently cast back into nothing – for what? My God! for what? Is there nothing but despair and death? Is life vain, beauty vain, love vain, hope vain, happiness vain? “The war to end wars!” Is any one so asinine as to believe that? A war to breed wars, rather…

He sighed and turned again. It's all useless, useless, to flog one's brain and nerves over it all, useless to waste the night hours in silent agonies when he might lie in the oblivion of sleep. Or the better oblivion of death. After all, there were plenty of children, plenty of war babies – why should one agonize for their future, any more than the Victorians thought about ours? The children will grow up, the war babies will grow up. Maybe they'll have their war, maybe they won't. In any case they won't care a hang about us. Why should they? What do we care about the men of Albuera, except that the charge of the Fusiliers decorates a page of rhetorical prose? Four thousand dead – and the only permanent result a page of Napier's prose. We have Bairnsfather…

He gave it up. Time after time he reverted to the whole gigantic tragedy, and time after time he gave it up. Two solutions. Just drift and
let come what may; or get yourself killed in the line. And much anyone would care whichever he did.

4

T
HEY paraded at nine next morning, were casually inspected by an officer they did not know, and told to stand by. At eleven they drew bully beef and biscuits, and were ordered to parade again in half an hour, ready to move off. Winterbourne's spirits rose. At last they were getting somewhere. He would be in the trenches that night, and take his chance with the rest. No more fiddle-faddle.

He was mistaken. They entrained at Boulogne in a train which crawled interminably, and they detrained at Calais. They were simply transferred to another base.

The Base Camp at Calais was desperately overcrowded. It was filled with new drafts sent over to make up the losses on the Somme, and new columns of men kept pouring in daily from England, faster than the overworked Staff could allot them to units. They were crowded into hastily-erected bell-tents, twenty-two to a tent, which is closer than you can squeeze animals, and about as close as you can squeeze men. There was just room to lie down, and no more. Nothing to do after parade, except to moon about in the frosty darkness or lie down in one's little slice of space, or play crown-and-anchor and drink coffee-and-rum while the estaminets were open. The town of Calais was out of bounds, except to men with passes. And not many passes were granted.

The weather grew daily colder. The misery of the interminable waiting and the overcrowded tents and the lack of anything to do, was not thereby alleviated. Every morning huge greyish columns of men undulated over the sandy soil, and were drawn up in long lines. An officer on horseback shouted orders through a megaphone. Nothing much happened, and they raggedly undulated back again. Yet they drew nearer to the mysterious “line”. They were given large jack-
knives on lanyards. They were given gas-masks and steel helmets. They were given service rifles and bayonets.

The gas-masks were still the old flannel diving-bell variety soaked in chemicals. They had a sharp, acrid, inhuman taste, and if worn too long had been known to produce skin eruptions. The drafts were given constant gas-drill, and had to pass five minutes in a gas-chamber containing a concentration of the old chlorine gas sufficient to kill in five seconds. One man in Winterbourne's lot lost his head and tried to tear off his mask. The instructor leapt at him, shouting curses through his own mask, and with the help of two of the men held him until the doors were opened. Winterbourne noticed that the gas had tarnished his bright brass buttons and the metal on his equipment. Their clothes reeked of the gas for a couple of hours.

They carefully cleaned the long steel bayonets, and examined the short wood-enclosed rifles. Winterbourne's had a long groove cut by a bullet on the butt, and the bolt showed signs of considerable rust – obviously a rifle picked up on the battlefield and re-conditioned. Winterbourne wondered who was the man from whom he inherited it, and who would inherit it from him.

The days and nights grew colder and colder. Morning and evening rose and sank in blood-red mists, and at noon the sun was a cold, bloody smear in a misty sky. Ice formed on the dykes and the water-taps froze. It became more and more difficult to wash, and shaving and washing in the ice-cold water became an agony. Their skins chapped as the light north wind breathed sharper and sharper cold. There appeared to be no baths, and they could not remove their clothes at night. To sleep, they took off their boots, wrapped themselves in an overcoat and blanket, and shivered asleep, huddling together like sheep in a snowstorm. Most of them caught colds and began to cough; one man of the draft was taken to hospital with pleurisy.

And still day after day passed and they were not sent to their units. Monotony, depression, boredom. By four it was dark, and there was nothing to do until dawn. The canteens and estaminets were thronged. Winterbourne luckily discovered that the pickets could be bribed, and several evenings went into Calais to dine. He bought a couple of French books and tried to read – in vain. He found he was unable to concentrate his mind, and fell into a deeper depression. There were few parades, and he had plenty of time for brooding.

They passed Christmas Day at the Base. The English newspapers, which they easily obtained a day or two late, were filled with glowing accounts of the efforts and expense made to give the troops a real hearty Christmas dinner. The men had looked forward to this. They ate their meals in huts which were decorated with holly for the occasion. The Christmas dinner turned out to be stewed bully beef and about two square inches of cold Christmas pudding per man. The other men in Winterbourne's tent were furious. Their perpetual grumbling annoyed him, and he attacked them:

“Why fuss so much over a little charity? Why let them salve their consciences so easily? In any case, they probably meant well. Can't you see that drafts at the Base are nobody's children? The stuff's gone to the men in the line, who deserve it far more than we do. We haven't done anything yet. Or it's been embezzled. Anyway, what does it matter? You didn't join the Army for a bit of pudding and a Christmas cracker, did you?”

They were silent, unable to understand his contempt. Of course, he was unjust. They were simply grown children, angry at being defrauded of a promised treat. They could not understand his deeper rage. Any more than they could have understood his emotion each night when “Last Post” was blown. The bugler was an artist and produced the most wonderful effect of melancholy as he blew the call – which in the Army serves for sleep and death – over the immense silent camp. Forty thousand men lying down to sleep – and in six months how many would be alive? The bugler seemed to know it, and prolonged the shrill, melancholy notes – “last post! last post!” – with an extraordinary effect of pathos. “Last post! Last post!” Winterbourne listened for it each night. Sometimes the melancholy was almost soothing, sometimes it was intolerable. He wrote to Elizabeth and Fanny about the bugler, as well as about the leave men he had seen on the boat. They felt he was getting hopelessly sentimental.

“Un peu gaga?”
Elizabeth suggested.

Fanny shrugged her shoulders.

Two days after Christmas their orders came. They were taking off their equipment after morning parade when the Orderly Corporal pushed his head through the tent flap:

“You've clicked !”

“What? How? What y' mean?” said several voices.

“Goin' up the line. Parade at one-thirty ready to move off immediate. Over you go, an' the best of luck!”

“What part of the line?”

“Dunno; you'll find that when y' get there.”

“What unit?”

“Dunno. Some o' you's clicked for a Pioneer Batt.”

“What's that?”

“Fuckin' well find out. Don't f'get I warned yer for p'rade.”

And he was off to the next tent. The men began talking excitedly, “wondering” this and “wondering” that, futilely as usual. Winterbourne walked away from the tent lines, and stood looking over the desolate winter landscape. Half a mile away the tent lines of another huge camp began. Army lorries lumbered along a flat, straight road in the distance. It was beginning to snow from a hard, grey sky. He wondered vaguely how you slept in the line when there was snow. His breath formed little clouds of vapour in the freezing air. He pulled his muffler closer round his neck, and stamped on the ground to warm his icy feet. He felt as if his faculties were slowly running down, as if his whole mental power were concentrated upon mere physical endurance, a dull keeping alive. Time, like a torture, seemed infinitely prolonged. It seemed years since he left England, years of discomfort and depression and boredom. If the mere “cushy” beginning were like that, how endure the months, perhaps years, of war to come?