Death of a Hero (40 page)

After they passed the Support line, the hitherto silent men began to talk occasionally. At Reserve they got permission to smoke. Each grabbed in his pockets for a fag, and lighted it as he stumbled along the uneven duck-boards. After what seemed an endless journey to Winterbourne, they reached the four steps, climbed up, and emerged into the now familiar ruined street. It was silent and rather ghostly in the very pale light of the new moon. They dumped their picks and shovels, went to the cook to draw their ration of hot tea, which was served
from a large black dixie and tasted unpleasantly of stew. They filed past the officer, who gave each of them a rum ration. Winterbourne drank some of the tea in his billet, then took off his boots, wrapped himself up, and drank the rest. Some real warmth flushed into his chilled body. He was angry with himself for being so tired, after a cushy night on a cushy front. He wondered what Elizabeth and Fanny would say if they saw his animal gratitude for tea and rum. Fanny? Elizabeth? They had receded far from him; not so far as all the other people he knew, who had receded to several light years, but very far. “Elizabeth” and “Fanny” were now memories and names at the foot of sympathetic but rather remote letters. Drowsiness came rapidly upon him, and he fell asleep as he was thinking of the curious “zwiss, zwiss” made by machine-gun bullets passing overhead. He did not hear the two howitzers when they fired a dozen rounds before dawn.

6

E
XCEPT for the episode with the officer, this specimen night may stand as a type of Winterbourne's life in the next eight or ten days. They went up the line at dusk; they were shot at, worked, and shivered with cold; went down the line, slept, tried to clean themselves, and paraded again. Four or five times they passed corpses being carried down the trenches as they went up. There was, of course, nothing to report on the Western front.

Then, just as the monotony was becoming almost as intolerable as drilling to the home-service R.S.M.'s “Stand still, there, stand
steady!”
they had a night off, and were transferred to the day-shift. But this was even more tedious. They paraded soon after dawn, and worked in Hinton Alley, about two hundred yards from the Front line. Their job was to hack up the frozen mud – which was about as malleable as marble – extricate the worn duck-boards, dig “sump-holes”, and re-lay new duck-boards. A job which in moist weather might have occupied two men for half an hour, in that frost occupied four men all day.

A Lieutenant-General came along while Winterbourne was laboriously jarring his wrists, trying to hack up the marble-like mud.

“Well, and what are you doing, my man?”

“Replacing duck-boards, sir,” said Winterbourne, bringing his pick smartly to his side, and standing to attention, toes at an angle of forty-five degrees.

“Well, get on with it, my man, get on with it.”

Vive l'Empereur!

Diversions were few, but existed. There were, for instance, the rats. Winterbourne had been too much absorbed by other new experiences to pay much attention to them at first. And during the day they kept rather out of sight. One evening, just about sunset, as they were returning down Hinton Alley, there was a block in the trench. Winterbourne happened to be just at the corner of the Support line, with its damaged, revetted traverses, and piles of sandbags on the parapet. The Germans were sending up some rather fancy signal-rockets from their front line, and he was vaguely wondering what they meant, when a huge rat darted, or rather scrambled, impudently just past his head. Then he noticed that a legion of the fattest and longest rats he had ever seen were popping in and out of the crevices between the sandbags. As far as he could see down the trench in the dusk, they were swarming over parapets and parados. Such well-fed rats! He shuddered, thinking of what they had probably fed upon.

In a very short time he had become perfectly accustomed to the very mild artillery fire, sniping, and machine-gunning. No casualties had occurred in his own company, and he began to think that the dangers of the War had been exaggerated, while its physical discomforts and tedium had been greatly underestimated. The intense frost prevented his shaking off the heavy cold he had caught at Calais, and at the same time had given him a chill on the liver. The same thing had happened to half the men in the company, whether newcomers or old stagers; and all suffered from diarrhoea due to the cold. There was thus the added diversion of frequent visits to the latrine. Those in the line were primitive affairs consisting of biscuit-boxes and buckets, interesting from the fact that the Germans had fixed rifles trained on most of them and might get you if you happened to stand up inopportunely. If you had any sense you waited until the bullet ping-ed over, and then calmly walked out; for lack of which elementary precaution somebody occasionally was popped off. The Pioneer's latrine, just behind their billet, was a more elaborate six-seater (without separate compartments)
built over a deep trench and surrounded with sacking on posts. One of the posts had been damaged by a shell, and there were numerous rents in the sacking from shell splinters. Here Winterbourne was forced to spend a larger portion of his spare time than was pleasant in cold weather. One day when he entered he found another occupant, an artilleryman. This person was carefully examining his grey flannel shirt; and such portions of his body as were exposed to view were covered with small bloody blotches. Some horrid skin disease, Winterbourne surmised. He attended to his own urgent private affairs.

“Still terribly cold,” he ventured.

“Fuckin' cold,” said the artilleryman, continuing absorbedly the mysterious search in his shirt.

“Those are nasty skin eruptions you have.”

“It's them fuckin' chats. Billet's fair lousy with 'em.”

Chats? Lousy? Ah, of course the artilleryman was lousy. So lousy that he had been bitten all over, and had scratched himself raw. Winterbourne felt uncomfortable. He detested the idea of vermin.

“How d'you get them? Can't you get rid of them?”

“Get 'em? Everybody gets 'em. Ain't you chatty? And there ain't no gettin' rid of 'em. The clothes they gives you at the baths is as chatty as those you ‘ands in. Where there's dug-out and billets, there's chats; and where there's chats, they cops yer.”

Winterbourne departed from the lousy artilleryman with a new preoccupation in life – to remain one of the chatless as long as possible. It was not many weeks, however, before he too became resigned to the louse as an inevitable war comrade.

Like a good many recruits, when first in the line he was inclined to be foolhardy rather than timorous. When a shell exploded near the trench, he popped his head up to have a look at it; and listened to the machine-gun bullets swishing past with great interest. The older hands reproved him:

“Don't be so fuckin' anxious to look at whizz-bangs. You'll get a damn sight too many pretty soon. And don't keep shovin' yer ‘ead over the top.
We
don't care a fuck if ole Fritz gets yer, but if he sees yer he might put his artillery on
us.”

Winterbourne rather haughtily decided they were timorous, an impression confirmed by the manner they instantly ducked and
crouched when a shell came whistling towards them. So many shells exploded harmlessly that he wondered at their inefficiency. Late one afternoon the Germans began firing on Hinton Alley – little salvoes of four whizz-bangs at a time. The men went on with their work, but a little apprehensively. Winterbourne clambered partly up the side of the trench and watched the shells bursting – crump, Crump, CRUMP, CRRUMP. The splinters hummed harmoniously through the air. Suddenly he heard a loud whizz, and zip-phut, a large piece of metal hurtled just past his head and half-buried itself in the hard chalk of the trench. More surprised than scared, he jumped down and levered the metal up with his pick. It was a brass nose-cap, still warm from the heat of the explosion. He held it in his hand, gazing with curiosity at the German lettering. The other men jeered and scolded him in a friendly way. He felt they exaggerated – his nerves were still so much fresher than theirs.

That night, just after he had got down into kip, the night silence was abruptly broken by a discharge of artillery. Gun after gun, whose existence he had never suspected, opened out all round, and in half a minute fifty or sixty were in action. From the line came the long rattle of a dozen or more machine-guns, with the funny little pops of distant hand-grenades. He got up and went to the door. Ruins interrupted a direct view, but he saw the flashes of the guns, a sort of glow over a short part of the Front line, and Verey lights and rockets flying up continually. A Corporal came unconcernedly into the billet.

“What is it?” asked Winterbourne; “an attack?”

“Attack be jiggered. Identification raid, I reckon.”

The German artillery had now opened up, and a shell dropped in the village street. Winterbourne retired to his earth floor. In about three-quarters of an hour the firing quieted down; only one German battery of five-nines kept dropping shells in and about the village. Winterbourne began to reflect that shell-fire in gross might be more deadly than the few odd retail discharges he had hitherto experienced.

Next morning, the Corporal's diagnosis proved correct. As they went up Hinton Alley soon after dawn, they met a British Tommy escorting six lugubrious personages in field grey, whose faces were almost concealed in large white bandages swathed all round their heads.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Fritzes. Prisoners.”

“I wonder why they are all wounded in the head.”

“Koshed on the napper with trench clubs. I reckon they've got narsty ‘eadaches, pore old barstards.”

About a week after that, they had a day off, and were warned to parade at five p.m. to begin another night-shift. (Each platoon in turn did a week's day-shift and three weeks' night-work.) The Sergeant turned to Winterbourne:

“And you're to report at the Officers' Mess fifteen minutes before p'rade.”

Winterbourne duly reported, wondering uneasily what breach of military discipline he had committed. He was met on the doorstep by Evans, who was just coming out, all muffled up.

“Ah, there you are, Winterbourne. Major Thorpe says you may act as my runner, so hereafter you'll parade here fifteen minutes earlier than the rest each night.”

“Very good, sir.”

All this time Winterbourne was rather wretchedly ill, and remained so for weeks. He had a permanent cough and cold, and was weakened by the prolonged diarrhoea. Every night he felt feverish, passing rapidly from a cold shivering to a high temperature. On the day after his arrival in the line, he had “gone sick” to get something to relieve his hard cough. Major Thorpe had chosen to consider this as an attempt to evade duty, and had promptly insulted him. Whereupon Winterbourne had decided that so long as he could stand he would never “go sick” again. So he carried on. The stretcher-bearer in his platoon had a clinical thermometer. One night, just before going up the line, Winterbourne got the man to take his temperature. It was 102.

“You didn't ought to go up the line like that, mate,” said the man, with a sort of coarse kindness Winterbourne liked. “I'll tell the orrficer you ain't fit for service, an' make it all right with the M.O. tomorrer.”

Winterbourne laughed:

“That's decent of you, but I shan't go sick. I only wanted to see if I were imagining things.”

“You're a bloody fool. You c'd get a cushy night in kip.”

It was a relief, therefore, to act as Evans's runner. On the nights when Evans was on duty Winterbourne did not carry a pick and shovel, and did no manual labour. He simply followed Evans about on
his rounds, and carried messages to the N.C.O.s for him. It was undoubtedly cushy. Almost an officer's job.

Winterbourne was brought into much closer intimacy with Evans, and had some opportunity to observe him. The officer was distinctly friendly, and they talked a good deal in the long hours of hanging about in the Front line. Evans brought sandwiches and a flask of rum with him, and invariably shared them with his runner – a kindness which touched Winterbourne profoundly. Usually about ten o'clock they sat on a fire-step under the frosty stars, and ate and talked. Occasionally a few shells would go whining overhead, or a burst of machine-gun fire would interrupt them. Their low voices sounded strangely muffled in the cold, dead silence.

Evans was the usual English public-school boy, amazingly ignorant, amazingly inhibited, and yet “decent” and good-humoured. He had a strength of character which enabled him to carry out what he had been taught was his duty to do. He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Jeffery Farnol, Elinor Glyn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glyn, as too “advanced”. He didn't care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian Ballets, but liked to “see a good show”. He thought
Chu Chin Chow
was the greatest play ever produced, and the Indian Love Lyrics the most beautiful songs in the world. He thought that Parisians lived by keeping brothels, and spent most of their time in them. He thought that all Chinamen took opium, then got drunk, and ravished white slaves abducted from England. He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire. He rather disapproved of “Society”, which he considered “fast”, but he held that Englishmen should never mention the fastness of Society, since it might “lower our prestige” in the eyes of “all these messy foreigners”. He was ineradicably convinced of his superiority to the “lower classes”, but where that superiority lay Winterbourne failed to discover. Evans was an “educated” pre-War public-school boy, which means that he remembered half a dozen Latin tags, could mumble a few ungrammatical phrases in French, knew a little of the history of England, and had a “correct” accent. He had been taught to respect all women as if they were his mother; would therefore have fallen an easy prey to the first
tart who came along, and probably have married her. He was a good runner, had played at stand-off half for his school and won his colours at cricket. He could play fives, squash rackets, golf, tennis, water-polo, bridge, and vingt-et-un, which he called “pontoon”. He disapproved of baccarat, roulette, and
petits chevaux
, but always went in for the Derby sweepstake. He could ride a horse, drive a motor-car, and regretted that he had been rejected by the Flying Corps.