How Dear Is Life (22 page)

In the new canteen marquee one morning after parade, Phillip asked the younger Church if he had known Desmond, saying he was his great friend.

“What, that kid in Lower School, who blubbed and blubbed when his mater left him, and tried to run away? At least the ‘Leytonstone Louts’, as I overheard you describing us the other evening, don’t behave like that!”

Shocked by the unexpected remark, Phillip stammered, “I d-didn’t mean y-you were one of them, Church, I meant the others.”

He saw Lance-corporal Furrow standing near, listening.

“What others?”

“Oh, you know. Martin, Collins, and Kerry—they come from Leytonstone in the East End, don’t they?”

“So that makes them louts, does it?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly mean it that way. It was a passing remark.”

“Well, here’s another passing remark. Your name ought to be von Madigsohn.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You ought to, being a German. It means ‘son of a maggot’.”

“Will you fight?” cried Phillip, hotly.

Lance-corporal Furrow put his arm between them, and swung Phillip back. “Get out of the canteen, if you can’t hold your drink!” he threatened. “Get back to your tent!”

Nothing more was said about the fight—for the time being.

T
O
P
HILLIP
in his loneliness Ashdown Forest was a wilderness; but to Norman Baldwin, who was twenty-four years old and engaged to be married, the views were what he called glorious. From the high ground of six hundred and fifty feet covered with bell heather and ling, fringed by dark clumps of pine, he saw with his lady-love the Martello towers built behind Pevensey Bay against Napoleon, and the far shining sea. The smooth
grey-green South Downs lay below them, from Eastbourne in the distance to the dark beech hanger of Chanctonbury in the west beyond Shoreham Gap.

Norman’s girl came down every Sunday. They walked for hours, holding hands, integrated by love, a feeling of eternity upon them as they looked southward towards the high beacons of Firle and Ditchling, the castle of Lewes, the skiey rampart of the Devil’s Dyke. Northwards lay the escarpment of the North Downs, the wooded Weald between; and when Norman had seen his girl off by train from the station, thither he returned with Phillip in the twilight, to stare towards the faint glow of London, whither she was returning, taking his heart with her.

One such Sunday Phillip returned to camp before Norman. Within the tent Lance-corporal Mortimore was sitting, singing softly in his light and tender baritone voice
A
Broken
Doll.
There was a bottle of whiskey and a siphon of soda-water before him, and a large hamper. He had been on the musical comedy stage before the war, and that afternoon a party of friends had come by motor car to see him.

“Hullo, you look depressed, dear boy. Have a peg? Help yourself. Haven’t you got a girl to visit you? You ought to have, with those eyes of yours.”

“Oh yes,” replied Phillip. “Only at the moment her people are not very favourable.”

“You don’t know when you are well off, dear boy.”

“Hark, the cavalry trumpets!” said Phillip, to change the subject.

“The Roughriders are on the next hill, dear boy. My brother’s with them. Won’t you change your mind and have a drink?”

“No, thanks all the same.”

He went out of the tent and stared at the ridge beyond the pines to the west. The cavalry! Thunderous charges, sabres flashing, cheering, Uhlans scattered! He thrilled at the thought of the glory of the cavalry.

Many times Phillip had knelt by the piano in the front room, while Doris accompanied his song,
The
Trumpeter
.

“God-forsaken spot, isn’t it?” said Mortimore, cheerfully.

“No wonder they call it Bleak Hill!”

*

Sanitation was no longer an excruciating worry for the shy youth. He had been a little chary of standing at the edge of
the great round pit dug in the heather below the lines of grey conical tents, the vast urinal filled to the brim with yellow liquid; but the series of little oblong holes, called dogs’ graves, for squatting in the open, had been too much for his reserved nature. After one glance on the first day he had left, despairing of ever being able to be like the others there, talking as though it was nothing unusual. He waited until night and found a place in the heather, digging a small hole, and relaxing in privacy and peace. But one night the orderly corporal, Lance-corporal Furrow, going his rounds smartly, black cane with regimental crest on silver nob tucked under arm, surprised him. “You filthy little tyke!” His name and company were taken and reported to the orderly room.

After breakfast the following morning the Colour-sergeant led him to Captain Forbes’ tent in the officers’ lines. While he waited outside he saw within the tent a green canvas bed and camel-hair sleeping sack, a rug, a folding table on which was a lantern and a silver-framed photograph of a lovely woman; and Fiery Forbes’ sword, belt, and revolver-holster hanging on the back of a canvas chair—symbols of another world, awesome and slightly feared, of the rich.

While fox-haired aloof face was speaking, his own face assumed the helpless bewildered expression he had always used to conceal his mind when faced with the condemning power of authority: his only defence when apprehended for leading his own life. Captain Forbes said tersely,

“I consider that it is a damned disgraceful thing for any member of the company to have done. There can be no excuse for it. If such a thing occurs again, I shall take a most serious view of it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fiery Forbes turned away. He saluted. The Colour-sergeant told him, quietly, to go back to the lines.

The next morning he went to the dogs’ graveyard, which now had a loose hessian screen around it. Overcoming his nervousness that the other men there would look at him, he squatted; and left with secret exultation that it had not been such an ordeal as he had dreaded. No one had spoken to him. Thereafter the morning visit was, in a slight way, something to look forward to.

They went for route marches along the gritty lanes through the
heather. In hot September sunshine they extended over the wiry, toecap-scratching stalks for attacks on distant ridges. Sometimes Colonel Findhorn and the Adjutant rode up to watch them, followed by their grooms. One morning ‘B’ Company advanced up a slope to storm an imaginary trench with fixed bayonets. Early in the advance Phillip and Baldwin were told off by Mr. Ogilby as casualties. They had to lie down in the heather, pretending to be dead.

“A bit of luck for us,” remarked Phillip. Both were sweating. The sun blazed on their faces, on their red-lidded eyes. The bells of the heath and ling were colourless and shrivelled in summer’s decline, but bees still burred past to the yellow nuggets of the gorse.

“This used to be part of a great forest,” said Baldwin. “In Saxon times it was called Anderida. I suppose, when William the Conqueror defeated the Saxons after the Battle of Hastings, many of them hid here, and lived on the wild deer. The Normans must have killed thousands of leading Saxons, in the years following Hastings. The Germans, if they won, would probably do the same to the English aristocracy.”

“They have missed their chance of winning the war, now. They’re retreating on the Marne.”

“Do you think the war will be over by Christmas, Phil?”

“No, I don’t, Norman. I think Castleton is right, when he says in
The
Trident
that it will be a long war.”

“I hope we see some of it before it ends, anyway. It would be bad luck to miss the fun.” Distant cheers floated through the air. “That means we’ve stormed the trench. Don’t you think we ought to join them now?”

“I votes we stop here, Norman. After all, we were ordered to sham dead. With any luck we can spend the morning lying down. No one can see us here.”

“But we’re supposed to exercise some judgment, you know.”

“I’m going to lie here. They can’t blame us if we obey orders.”

Baldwin lay down again, his better judgment overcome, the sun soaking into him.

“Did you see that wounded soldier the other evening, in the village, Phil?”

“From the front? Good lord! What did he say?”

“He said it was simply terrible out there.”

He was startled; yet, somehow, he had known it was like that. He had known it when he had had the heavy dump-soles put on his shoes.

“I had an uncle in the Boer War. He said it was hell.”

“That’s what this chap said. He said nobody could have any idea of what it was like, unless they had been there. His regiment was cut to pieces with all the others, at Le Cateau. We lost most of our guns there. He said the retreat was as good as a rout. They went back ninety miles in twelve days, marching all night, and fighting all day, with little food and no sleep all that time.”

“What else did he say?”

“Kitchener was no good. He tried to take over from Sir John French, after some French general had been shot for cowardice.”

He felt the shadow of life, that he had always felt, very near him. He had
known
it would be like that; he had never wanted to cheer, as most of the others had, after the Bishop had asked them to volunteer, and the Earl of Findhorn had spoken of the British Expeditionary Force meeting the Germans.

He heard thudding hoofs in the ground. Then he was looking up into the almost sallow face of the Iron Colonel, crossed by its great sweep of brown moustaches.

“What are you men doing there?” asked the deep bass voice.

“We’re dead men, sir.”

“Stand to attention when you speak to an officer!”

Colonel Hatton wore the Queen’s ribbon of the South African War. Lance-corporal Mortimore joked about the Iron Colonel, calling him Tin Ribs. He said the only action he had seen was in the Modder River rout, when he was wounded in the bottom by a Boer bullet as he ran away. He carried a fly-whisk of white horse-hairs on a rhinoceros hide handle. His face was as brown as tea, deeply lined. From Morty had come the further information that he was the senior partner in a famous City firm of bullion buyers. He looked gold, somehow: dark leather, saturated with gold. The deep bass voice exclaimed,

“Report to your company immediately!”

They turned away.

“You there! Salute an officer after he has spoken to you! Who is the older soldier of you two?”

“I am, sir,” said Baldwin.

“Then take charge! Order your squad to slope arms! Salute as you move off!”

“Yes, sir. Squad, ’shun!” said Baldwin, red in the face. Phillip prayed he would not laugh. “Sloo-oo-oope—hipe! By the left, quick march! Squad, eyes left!” Baldwin struck his rifle butt with his right hand, as he trudged beside Phillip, who was now drawing his breath inwards with small clucking noises, a silent inverted laugh he had invented in the class-room for use with a blank face. It sounded like a donkey braying far away in a tunnel without echoes.

“I knew I was right, you know, Phil. What’s the joke?”

“I thought you were going to say sloo-oope—off! And the Iron Colonel telling the dead to salute him!”

“Come on, you slackers!” shouted the Colour-sergeant in the distance. “At the double!”

“Double, double, boil and bubble!” laughed Phillip.

*

Bleak Hill was now less bleak. A large Y.M.C.A. writing marquee, and another for the canteen, stood beyond the lines.

The two friends usually went there to write letters in the evenings, at one of the small tables provided. Then there was the daily pint of shandy after morning parade. Sometimes Phillip saw Gerry or Hubert there, and the Wallace brothers, always together; but having their own friends all they said to one another was “Hullo”, or “How goes it?” Being in different companies made them almost like strangers.

“Good lor’, look at this, Norman!
The
Trident
suggests that women be armed, and formed into commando bands, in case of invasion. Tommy rot!”

“I bet it’s the suffragettes.”

“Oh no, they aren’t like that, Norman.”

“Here’s an interesting article in the
National
Review
,
Phil. It shows what a near thing it was, our declaring war. No, keep it, I’ve read it.”

While he was reading, there was shouting outside. They ran out with the others. In the sky, with churring engines, was an airship. Someone said it was a Zeppelin. He was excited. Would it be fired on? If only he had his rifle! Then the Iron Colonel galloped up, saying it was the
Beta
, from Aldershot.

“Lucky for it there isn’t an aeroplane gun on Bleak Hill,” said Baldwin. “Or some fool must have shot it.”

Phillip went back into the marquee to send the news, a little exaggerated, to his mother.

*

Two days later, Hetty took the letter next door to read to Papa and Aunt Marian. She left out the passage that he had asked her not to tell Gran’pa, substituting one of her own, which in effect reversed what Phillip had written, about the socks.