How Dear Is Life (31 page)

“Please, Sergeant, really, my rifle is no good! I can’t load it!”

“It’s the same with everybody else! You must load singly. Don’t you ever listen to orders? Now go forward, like a good boy, and do what you’re told!”

With a lingering glance at the tree, as to a friend he must leave for ever, Phillip made himself walk forward with the others, like a man walking through ice giving way before him. With shaking fingers he took a clip of five cartridges from a pouch and wrenched off one. Where to put the other four? For a few moments it was an imponderable problem. Then he thought of his right-hand lower tunic pocket. But it was already full—Civic, matches, pouch, bundle of letters from Mother. With a sob he tore at the contents of the pocket, trying to wrench away a fistful. He threw all away as though his life depended upon it—red rubber Crocodile pouch of Hignett’s Cavalier, box of Bryant and May’s matches, pipe, talismanic letters. He shrieked at himself in his head as he freed other cartridges of their clips and dropped them in his pocket. Mother, mother!

His life depended on a pocket full of cartridges. But supposing a cartridge still would not feed-in?
Father
was
right
.
They
should
have
been
given
a
chance
to fire
their
rifles
. He pulled back the bolt, and at once saw that the spring of the magazine was not strong enough to push the cartridge, already in position, into the chamber. The front stop clips were the wrong shape for pointed ammunition. The pointed end of the bullet would not feed-in level; it tipped up, and when rammed in by the bolt, was sort-of
crushed. It was liable to explode like that, quite apart from the jamming.

Removing the magazine, he shook out the remaining cartridges, and put them in his pocket. Then slipping a round into the barrel, he closed the bolt, and fired it into the air. The butt in recoil struck his cheekbone, for he had been holding the rifle loosely: but the blow was not felt in the wild and trembling frenzy now that he had found out how to load. He looked from left to right, saw the long lines of men as far as the trees, and then with a secondary ice-shock realised that nothing could now save him from what was to happen when he reached the crackle of the skyline.

*

Mr. Ogilby was moving his sword from his head towards the right. They were too far to the left.
Right
incline!
shouted Baldwin’s voice only just audible in the noise.
Right
incline!
How thin his own voice felt. He could now hear machine-guns firing. Each bullet passed with a sharp hissing. He broke into a sweat. Why was Baldwin kneeling down? He seemed to be sick. Then he saw that he was vomiting blood from his mouth. He fell sideways, hands clutching face, fingers streaming bright red jerking blood.

Movement thereafter for Phillip became automatic. He was stumbling over brown furrows of a plowed field, near a tall hedge red with hawthorn haws. There were stacks at the far end of the field, and a windmill. Near the windmill was a farmhouse, with a red roof. He was a walking mass of perspiration. A jumble of memories rose before him, his head was filled with a high singing note, a steel wire seemed to make him go on after each automatic bending down, arms shielding face, from great black metallic-rending crumps in the field. He thought wildly of himself as a bony skeleton rushing down Westerham Hill on his unsteerable rigid Swift, white dust rushing up behind, the pace too fast on the hill too steep to put on brakes after he had turned the corner and seen with awful suddenness what lay below him, the straight steepness of the white dusty road, on which he would skid and crash if he put on the brakes. It was the same sort of feeling now, a thin steel wire from below his stomach to above his eyes.

With a broken-glass-like glance to the left, he saw the brown mass of Wytschaete as a flat and painful upright surface. In front
he could see the straggling first line of attack beginning to bunch like iron-filings under the hidden magnet of the field. Black blots of shrapnel were thick in the sky, floating above the huge up-spouting steel-fragments of Jack Johnsons.
Like
repels
like
,
he thought again and again, with working teeth. He passed several new holes smoking as though fires had been burned in them. The ragged clay was cracked in great lumps, some black-brown. Then to his distant surprise he saw a hare crouching between two craters, angular and terrified, its ears magnetised back over staring eyeballs. He could have touched it when it seemed to burst as it leapt away, racing. Who had left part-filled sacks in the furrows in front? When he came up to them, his white-faced eyes as though floating nearer, he saw they were dead Indian soldiers, with pale green faces. An Englishman lay near them. His face was all deeply red-brown, like the neck, swollen. His neck had a congealed wound in it, but no blood outside. The blood must have spread up, just inside his skin. Another had no legs. Only the broken-off trunk was below the tunic, with a thick vest in pink wool unravelled around the trunk. The pale face lay sideways, on an arm, pale, asleep without legs. Rifles lay by other dead men sprawled all ways, unmoving. It would be no good trying to speak to them. It seemed an eternity, as he moved past them.

He was aware of loud cracks in the air, just by his ears. He saw earth spirting: and as he lay down upon the furrows, following others, a spark glowed in the earth near his eye for quite a second after a bullet had struck. The spark died quite slowly. They were getting up again. He heard screaming. Looking to the right, to the windmill now abruptly large, he saw that several men of the line in front were gesticulating on the ground. One man was beating his arms in the air. A face was lying stare-eyed, kilt over chest, two little blue punctures in the white stomach. Farther on, a man sat on the ground, his eyes glassy, blood coming out of a hole in his throat with little rippling pulses. He had a surprised look on his face. Phillip gazed as though from a sort of isinglass-brittle unrealness at all that was happening without meaning beyond terror.

Some of the men were lying down. Others were running forward, doubled up. He saw Captain Forbes standing still, looking towards him, sweeping the line forward with his arm. Some were running half-right, with rifles at the trail. He found
himself running with them, surprised that he was doing it. It was like running for a train in a dream. All the steam-screeching engines in London Bridge Station under the sooty glass roof were now out of control. Earth was flung up darkly on the rocking buffets of black explosions. There was a ditch in front, and men crouching down in it, beside a stack. He ran to be among them, but terribly slowly, feeling awfully puffed, the wire pulling him back from reaching the safety of the drain in the ditch. With infinite slowness he pushed against the drag and lay down, and the grass and nettles and bits of straw came large and the earth beat through his body until he recovered, among men tearing at the lip of the ditch with entrenching tools.

Beside the stack, a few yards away, he saw the Iron Colonel sitting chin on chest, his brown riding boots and spurs stuck out in front, his fly-whisk and sword beside him. When he crawled nearer the shelter of the stack, he saw that something had happened. The Iron Colonel was asleep and snoring harshly. Bubbles of blood were being half-blown from his nostrils upon his big moustache. His batman, who had been his valet in civil life, sat beside him. As Phillip watched, he put a folded towel on top of the Iron Colonel’s head.

“What’s happened?” he asked, vaguely wondering why his own voice sounded so far away.

“Colonel Hatton was struck by a splinter. I heard it go through his glengarry with a sort of crack. Just as we got to this stack, it was. He would insist on coming. I advised him not to, but ‘It’s death or glory this time’, he said to me.”

The batman held out the cap. Phillip saw that it was torn, and sploshed with a mess of grey mixed up with brown crossed tufts of hair and little broken bits of reddish bone. Colonel Hatton’s cheek was very lined; he had never been close to it before. His unshaven stubble was white. His dark-brown hair at the roots was white, too.

Phillip wondered why this was. Had his hair become white with shock, from the roots up, so soon?

“Pass it down to advance in short rushes,” shouted a man up the ditch.

Peeping round the edge of the stack, Phillip saw men were scrambling across the road. Most of the shells were bursting away to the right, near the village. The faces of men about him were not those of ‘B’ Company. An officer appeared. His
revolver was in his hand. He was Captain McQuaker, who had shouted at Bleak Hill,
Come
on,
you
blighters!
He was always pale, his face sharp: it looked just the same now, but he spoke with composure.

“We must reinforce the Dragoon Guards, in trenches over the road! So no covering fire, you fellows. Go one or two at a time, keep your heads low. The Germans hold the edge of the village, and have the road in enfilade, so don’t bunch.”

Captain McQuaker saw the figure sitting under the stack with his valet. “Who is that? Not Colonel Hatton?”

“I regret to say that it is, sir,” replied the valet.

Captain McQuaker kneeled; examined the wound. “I’ll send someone to fetch stretcher-bearers,” he said. He looked at Phillip. “Who are you?”

“‘B’ Company, sir.”

“You’re in support?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Better stay here and prepare to give covering fire during the section advance, until I return.”

“Very good, sir.”

Phillip tried not to show his thoughts on his face. He sank on one knee, and peered as though earnestly towards the unseen enemy, hoping that the officer would then forget him, and detail someone else for stretcher-bearers.

Led by a sergeant, men were getting up out of the ditch, and dashing across the road. One dropped his rifle. It clattered on the
pavé
in the middle of the road. Phillip saw him turn round, holding his arm. The man made as if to come back, but knelt down instead, as though to fasten his spats. But very slowly he toppled over, face down on the road.

Captain McQuaker pushed through the thorns, and bending down, tried to lift him up. His glengarry fell off as he did so. He seemed unable to lift up the man, as he bent over him. He seemed to sit down, then turn over on his back, then his legs began kicking. A machine-gun was now very loud, from the dark-brown houses of the village. Bullets flipped bits of stone and sparks from the cobbles.

Cowering within himself, Phillip felt that it would be no good trying to rescue Captain McQuaker. Besides, Sergeant Henshaw had said he must do what he was told; and Captain McQuaker had ordered him to prepare to give covering fire. And, anyhow,
he was too afraid to leave the shelter of the stack. Peering cautiously, he saw that Captain McQuaker’s kilt was awry, showing his testicles squeezed back behind his bottom. There was a great dripping gash behind one thigh. The hair on his head stuck out at the back. It seemed very strange that an officer could be killed.

Other men crawled to the side of the stack. Their faces looked sweat-swelled, their eyes bloodshot. They said they were ‘C’ Company. They told of losses from shells and machine-gun bullets from Messines on the way up. Their company commander,
Major MacAlister, had been blown to rags by one of the Johnsons.

“God, what a bloody muck-up it all is!” said one of the men. The voice was familiar, but he did not recognise the face, which was grimy.

The huge black bursts were spouting up regularly. One roared down just behind the stack; but everyone had already thrown themselves flat. After the burst, and the stink of it, his ears cracked and went deaf, for some time. When he could hear again, the same voice was saying, “What’s our own artillery doing?” He saw that the speaker was Costello, of Head Office. With great relief Phillip cried,

“Hullo, Costello! Remember me, from Wine Vaults Lane? About your question just now. A gunner in the Grande Place told me that a lot of those batteries we saw there, the harlequin-painted ones, had been withdrawn because they had no ammunition. Those other batteries, up the Menin Road, were rationed to six rounds a day.”

“You’re a bloody cheerful bloke, I must say!” replied Costello. Then he said to Lance-corporal Furrow, who had crept to the stack, “I wish the bloody Germans would show themselves! Anything is better than this blasted shelling.”

A wounded man kept asking for water. Phillip gave him his, the man drank most of it, then began to groan. Phillip realised he himself was thirsty, but could not drink, owing to the man’s blood all over his bottle.

“Where do we get water from, when our bottles are empty?” he asked.

“There’s bound to be a pump in that farmhouse. Only we’ll have to wait until dark.”

They lay, speaking less as the morning wore on, in the shelter of the corn stack. Costello killed a rat, as it peeped out of the
stack beside him, with a blow of his fist. He slung it on the road. It fell near the two kilted figures. All day the three lay there, never moving, while high-explosive shells plunged down from the sky.

*

The red sun, distended among black and grey layers of cloud, cast a purple pallor over the plowed work behind the stack. Through thick and heavy tiredness Phillip heard the wheezy calls of a partridge among the furrows, and wondered vaguely if the bird was of a covey broken up by shelling. All day he had lain with others on sheaves pulled from the stack, close against the northern side, while bullets had cracked past from Messines four hundred yards to the south, sometimes thudding into the straw.

The Iron Colonel had died in the afternoon, moaning “Mother—Mother”, his batman holding his hand. The batman cried as he covered his master’s face with the towel.

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” he had said, at intervals during the afternoon, as he rearranged the towel respectfully with soft hands.

“What will happen to you now?” asked Costello.