Death of a Hero (41 page)

He had no doubts whatever about the War. What England did must be right, and England had declared war on Germany. Therefore, Germany must be wrong. Evans propounded this somewhat primitive argument to Winterbourne with a condescending air, as if he were imparting some irrefutable piece of knowledge to a regrettably ignorant inferior. Of course, after ten minutes' conversation with Evans, Winterbourne saw the kind of man he was, and realized that he must continue to dissimulate with him as with everyone else in the Army. However, he could not resist the temptation to bewilder him a little sometimes. It was quite impossible to do anything more. Evans possessed that British rhinoceros equipment of mingled ignorance, self-confidence, and complacency which is triple-armed against all the shafts of the mind. And yet Winterbourne could not help liking the man. He was exasperatingly stupid, but he was honest, he was kindly, he was conscientious, he could obey orders and command obedience in others, he took pains to look after his men. He could be implicitly relied upon to lead a hopeless attack and to maintain a desperate defence to the very end. There were thousands and tens of thousands like him.

Winterbourne noticed that when they were in the line at night, Evans made a point of walking over the top, instead of in the trenches, even when it was plainly far more inconvenient and slower to do so, on account of the wire and shell-holes and other obstacles. At the time, he paid little attention to this, thinking either that it was expected of an officer, or that Evans did it to encourage the men. Evans rather deliberately exposed himself, and always maintained complete calm. If the two men were exposed to shells or machine-gun fire, Evans walked more slowly, spoke more deliberately, seemed intentionally to linger. It was not until months afterwards that Winterbourne suddenly realized from his own experience that Evans had been reassuring, not
his men, but himself. He had been deliberately trying to prove to himself that he did not mind being under fire.

Any man who spent six months in the line (which almost inevitably meant taking part in a big battle) and then claimed that he had never felt fear, never received any shock to his nerves, never had his heart thumping and his throat dry with apprehension, was either superhuman, subnormal, or a liar. The newest troops were nearly always the least affected. They were not braver, they were merely fresher. There were very few – were there any? – who could resist week after week, month after month of the physical and mental strain. It is absurd to talk about men being brave or cowards. There were greater or less degrees of sensibility, more or less self-control. The longer the strain on the finer sensibility, the greater the self-control needed. But this continual neurosis steadily became worse and required a greater effort of repression.

Winterbourne at this time was in the state when danger – and that was slight in these first weeks – was almost entirely a matter of curiosity, rather stimulating than otherwise. Evans, on the other hand, had been in two big battles, had spent eleven months in the line, and had reached the stage when conscious self-control was needed. When a shell exploded near them, both men appeared equally unmoved. Winterbourne was really so, because he was fresh, and had no months of war neurosis to control. Evans only appeared so, because he was awkwardly and with shame struggling to control a completely subconscious reflex action of terror. He thought it was his “fault”, that he was “getting windy”, and was desperately ashamed in consequence. And that, of course, made him worse. Winterbourne, on the other hand, was obviously a man who would develop the neurosis rapidly. He had a far more delicate sensibility. He had already reached a state of acute “worry” over Fanny and Elizabeth and the War and his own relation to it. And yet his pride would compel him to urge himself far beyond the point where another man would merely have collapsed. He endured a triple strain – that of his personal life, that of exasperation with Army routine, and that of battle.

Perhaps it was through the implicit if unexpressed attitude of the women that Winterbourne also endured the strain of feeling a degradation to mind and body in the hardships he endured in common, after all, with millions of other men. It was a fact that his mind degenerated; slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. This could
scarcely have been otherwise. Long hours of manual labour under strict discipline must inevitably degrade a man's intelligence. Winterbourne found that he was less and less able to enjoy subtleties of beauty and anything intellectually abstruse. He came to want common amusements in place of the intense joy he had felt in beauty and thought. He watched his mind degenerating with horror, wondering if one day it would suddenly crumble away like the body of Mr. Valdemar. He was bitterly humiliated to find that he could neither concentrate nor achieve as he had done in the past. The
éIan
of his former life had carried him through a good many months of the Army; but after about two months in the line, he saw that intellectually he was slowly slipping backwards. Slipping backwards, too, in the years which should have been the most energetic and formative and creative of his whole life. He saw that even if he escaped the War he would be hopelessly handicapped in comparison with those who had not served and the new generation which would be on his heels. It was pretty bitter. He had been forced to smash through obstacles and to triumph over handicaps enough already. These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow from which he could not possibly recover.

And he felt a degradation, a humiliation, in the dirt, the lice, the communal life in holes and ruins, the innumerable deprivations and hardships. He suffered at feeling that his body had become worthless, condemned to a sort of kept tramp's standard of living, and ruthlessly treated as cannon-fodder. He suffered for other men too, that they should be condemned to this; but since it was the common fate of the men of his generation, he determined he must endure it. His face lost its fineness and took on the mask of “a red-faced Tommy”, as he was politely told later by a genial American friend. His hands seemed permanently coarsened, his feet deformed by heavy army boots. His body, which had been unblemished when he joined, was already infested with lice, and his back began to break out in little boils – a thing which had never happened to him— either from impure drinking-water or because the clothes issued from the baths were infected.

No doubt it was the painter's sense of plastic beauty which made him feel this as something so humiliating and degrading. How else account for the feelings of shame and horror he felt at an occurrence which most men would have promptly forgotten? He had been in the line about a month, and his diarrhoea had got steadily worse. One
night, when accompanying Evans on his rounds, Winterbourne felt a physical necessity, and asked permission to go to a latrine. They were about two hundred yards away, and before Winterbourne got there the contents of his bowels were irresistibly evacuated in spite of his desperate efforts to control them. It was one of the coldest nights of that long, bitter winter – the thermometer was below zero Fahrenheit. Winterbourne halted in horror and disgust with himself. What on earth was he to do? How return to Evans? He listened. It was one of the quietest nights he ever experienced in the line, hardly a shot fired. Nobody was coming along the trench. He rapidly undressed, shivering with cold, stripped off his under-pants, cleaned himself as well as he could, and hurled the soiled clothes into No Man's Land. He dressed again and rushed back to meet Evans, who asked him a little sharply why he had been so long about it. The discomfort passed; but the humiliation remained.

January slowly disappeared; they were half-way through February, and still the frost held. It was a dreary experience. Each day was practically the replica of that before and after – up the line, down the line, sleep, attempt to get a little clean in the morning, inspection parade, dinner, an hour or two to write letters, then parade again for the line. Towards the end of February, the welcome news came that they were going out of the line for four days' rest. On the last night before they went out, Evans and Winterbourne were watching the men working, when they heard a series of rapid, sharp explosions. They looked over and could see the dull red flashes of bombs or small trench-mortars bursting about three hundred yards away. Simultaneously they exclaimed:

“It's on our sap!”

Evans jumped into the trench and rushed towards the sap, followed by Winterbourne, who tore the bolt-cover from his rifle and stuffed it in his pocket as he ran. They could hear the “crash, crash, crash-crash, crash” of the small mortars, which abruptly ceased when they were about forty yards short. Verey lights were shooting up in all directions, and the British machine-guns were rattling away. Evans dashed round a traverse and went plump into two of his own men who were staggering away from the sap, half-dazed and silly with the shock of explosions.

“What's happened?”

They were incoherent, and Evans and Winterbourne rushed on to the sap. Dimming down his torch with his left hand, Evans peered in; and Winterbourne behind him saw two bodies splashed with blood. The head of one man was smashed into his steel helmet and lay a sticky mess of blood and hair half-severed from his body. The other man, the Corporal, was badly wounded, but still groaning. Obviously, one of the mortars had dropped plump in the sap. Another discharge came crashing on either side. Evans shoved his haversack under the Corporal's head, and shouted to make himself heard over the explosions:

“Get the stretcher-bearer, and send those windy buggers back here.”

“What about the sentry?” bawled Winterbourne.

“I'll get him in. Off with you.”

Evans began to unbutton the Corporal's tunic, to bind his wounds, as Winterbourne left. The man was bleeding badly. Three hundred yards to the stretcher-bearer and three hundred yards back. Winterbourne raced, knowing that a matter of seconds may save the life of a man with a severed artery. He was too late, however. The Corporal was dead when he and the stretcher-bearer rushed panting into the sap.

They got the sentry's body later.

7

N
EXT day they marched back about four miles to another village, half-destroyed but still partly inhabited. For the first time in two months Winterbourne sheathed his bayonet. It seemed symbolical of the four days' rest they were promised. Four days! An immense respite. The men were cheery, and sang all the war songs as they marched off in platoons: “Where are the boys of the village tonight?” “There's a long, long trail a-winding.” “I'm so happy, oh, so happy, don't you envy me?” “Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag.” “If you're going back to Blighty.” “I want to go home.” “Rolling home.”
But not “Tipperary”. So far as Winterbourne knew, none of the troops in France ever sang “Tipperary”.

He had not slept well, haunted by the vision of the dead man's smashed, bloody head, and the groaning Corporal. Evans looked a little pale. But they said nothing to each other. And after all, they were going on rest, four days' rest. Winterbourne tried to join in the singing. Major Thorpe trotted past them on his horse. They marched to attention, and ceremonially saluted. That also seemed peaceful.

In the village they were billeted in large barns. A thaw set in, so rapid that they started out on frozen ground and arrived in a village street deep in slushy mud. The nights were still cold, and old broken-down barns and earthen floors made chilly bedrooms. There seemed to be no water supply in the village, and they had to wash in thawing flood-pools, breaking the new thin ice with tingling fingers. But they went to the baths and changed their underclothes. The baths were in a shell-smashed brewery. Thirty or forty men stripped in one room and then went into another which had rows of iron pipes running across it, about eight feet from the ground. Small holes were punched in the pipes at intervals of about six feet. A man stood under each hole, and then a little trickle of warm water began to fall on his head and body. They had about five minutes to soap themselves and get clean. Winterbourne went back there alone the next day. By judicious bribing he managed to get an officer's bath and a new set of underclothes. It was delicious to be clean and de-loused again.

The four days passed very quickly. They paraded in the morning, did a little drill, played football or ran in the afternoons, and went to the estaminets in the evening. Winterbourne treated his section to beer, and drank half a bottle of Barsac himself. The men, all beer and spirit drinkers, despised the finer flavour of French wines and called them “vinegar”. After dark, they sneaked out and stole sandbags of “boulets” – coal-dust made into large pellets with tar – and burned them in a brazier to warm the chilly barn. Winterbourne protested against this thievery. But since the others went anyhow, and he benefitted by the theft, he thought he might as well share the crime too. True, it was French Government property; and nobody minds stealing from governments. But still, he hated to be a thief. The men called it “scrounging”. Under pressure of necessity, every man in the line became a more or less unscrupulous scrounger.

On the third night Winterbourne “clicked unlucky”. He was on Gas and Fire Picket. They sat all night round the Company field kitchen and drank tea, while one man was always on guard. The tin hat and the fixed bayonet were unwelcome reminders that they were soon returning to the line. The men talked of their homes in England, wished the War would end, hoped anyway they'd get leave or a blighty soon, and envied the officers sleeping in beds. One man grumbled because there was no “red lamp” in the village. Winterbourne felt glad there wasn't. Not that he would have been tempted, for he was quite fiercely chaste unless in love, but he hated the thought of these men giving their lean, sinewy bodies to the miserable French whores in the war-area bawdy-houses.

“It's all right in Béthune,” said the grumbler. “You can see ‘em lining up outside the red lamps after dark under a Sergeant. Soon's the ole woman gives the signal, the Sergeant says: ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march,' and in yer go. The ole woman ‘as a short-arm inspection and gives yer Condy's Fluid, and the tart 'as Condy's Fluid too. She was a nice tart she was, but she was in a 'ell of a 'urry. She kep' sayin': ‘'Urry, daypayshay.' I ‘adn't got meself buttoned up afore I ‘eared the Sergeant shoutin': ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march.' But she was a nice tart she was.”