The Golden Virgin (29 page)

Phillip sat motionless, for one of them looked like Polly, with short dark curls to the shoulder; he soon transferred to another with fair hair and eyes which reminded him of Lily, as he longed for her with regrets that he had not had her on Reynard’s Common, since Desmond had cast him off, in the words of the girl in Northampton who had been chucked by her boy after he had had her. Why hadn’t he had that girl, too? What was the point of being idealistic, when no one but yourself cared, really, for ideals? He stared at “Lily”, with unutterable longing, until another “girl” with golden curls sang the duet
They
’
d
Never
Believe
Me
with an actor who, Bason said, was a West End matinée idol, and the eyes and curls were those of Helena Rolls, remote and beautiful above the tragedy that was ordinary life.

“Cheer up,” said Bason, behind his hand, “still thinking of that girl who’s ‘too good for you’?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“All right, old sport, don’t get huffy. Frances told me all about it.”

The introspective mood passed when other songs followed: the Cobbler’s Song from
Chu
Chin
Chow,
and others from
Razzle
Dazzle
; and by the time they were over, he had revisited many more scenes of his secret life, with their array of swiftly-passing faces, longings, and regrets. Then he forgot himself and lived in the present, thinking of dear old faithful Eugene when the star-turn came on towards the end. This was the West End actor, now in the Kite Balloon branch of the R.F.C., who was famous before the war for his song
Gilbert
the
Filbert.
He sang it now—glass in eye, walking to and fro, so debonair with silver-topped cane, silk hat, morning coat and striped trousers with white spats—and brought down the house.

After this someone at the back—it was Ray, it
would
be—started others to join in a parody, beginning

at which the man at the piano promptly played
God
Save
the
King,
for some padres and staff-officers were in the front row. Among them, unknown to Phillip, was Father Aloysius, now a chaplain to one of the Irish battalions in the division.

He felt suddenly tired after writing this letter, lost confidence, and tore it up.

They left camp and marched away in the afternoon, for the sun was approaching the solstice, and the light was long. The sun rose in the north-east and set upon the north-west; the roll of the earth from darkness into light was brief, so that the hues of sunset were scarcely gone down when the sky was in glow again with the transfiguring pallors of dawn.

The soldiers sang as they marched in the shadows of the poplars enclosing the cobbled road.

He thought of Lily, of her white throat and yellow hair, with a rasp of longing for her tenderness. What was she thinking, in the steamy rooms of Nett’s laundry, with its soapy water gushing into the Randisbourne below the arched bridge, bubbles riding away below the backs of houses and the garden of the Conservative Club with its weeping willow. The water was dead now. He remembered his father saying to him, when he was little, that the brook had given up the ghost when the officials of London County Council crossed the Thames and asked for the fair daughter of Kent. He hoped his letter would reach Lily, c/o the laundry.
He must also write to Father; and to Mrs. Neville. And to dear old Eugene, and Mr. Howlett at Wine Vaults Lane, to show him he was in France again, in case Downham came in, and belittled him.

*

The wind waves of young summer were upon the barleys, the wheat was upright and rustling, the oats shook their green sprays. Old men with scythes were cutting hay to the tramp-tramp-tramp of nailed boots between the ever-widening rows of poplars shaking all their leaves like little heliographs or as though waving goodbye. They marched through villages of lime-washed
pisé
and thatch, where children stood and stared, but waved no more; for hundreds of thousands of
les
Anglais
had already passed that way, singing, whistling, and shouting the same remarks. Old women scowled, their thoughts shut away like their hens, as they stood beside the drying stagnancy of dirty grey washing water they had poured from their thresholds into the gutters.

The column swung along past them, singing happily. What a difference in the spirit of these men, thought Phillip, and the old survivors of the battles before Loos.

Unused to marching on the hard stone-setts, soon he got blisters; but he set himself not to think of them, thus to train himself to subdue his feelings. Do not think of the past, or of the future, when the burning moment breaks—or the burning blister. Think only of your men, never of yourself. Having thus told himself, Phillip tried not to limp; blisters must be squashed down.

In the heat they rested on the grasses along the verges of the road, under the poplars with their ceaseless flashing leaves. Or was it, he thought, as he lay on his back, with arms under head, that every leaf was saying no to the wind, no no no, leave us upon mother tree, O wind. No, he must not put his feelings into leaves, as though he were of leaves crying to the wind, Strew me not dead upon mother earth, nor these poor men with me, brown withered leaves upon the earth, lost to the sun.

“The C.O., sir,” said a hoarse voice near him. He sat up, and
saw Major Kingsman, coming down the road. He got up and saluted, and was gladdened to hear Major Kingsman say,

“Welcome back to the battalion, Phillip. By the way, you remember Lulu, Father Aloysius? He’s come to the Liverpool Irish in the Division as padre. We must foregather one evening.”

“Oh good. I hope Mrs. Kingsman is well, sir?”

“I heard from her this morning. One of her redpoll heifers made top price at Chelmsford, she’s very bucked.”

“Oh good.”

Major Kingsman talked to him for some minutes, then returned up the road to the head of the column. Could he have come down specially to see him?

Seated upon the grass again, Phillip saw the glitter of light upon the shaking poplar leaves above as part of the joy of green summer upon the earth, and the morning air was blessing the membranes of the leaves.

*

Heavy with sweat and dust they marched on, turning into a road where dust lay thickly on the grassy verges with old petrol cans, rusty tins of bully beef, and other signs of an army’s desolation, including bashed trunks of the poplars at wheel height, telling of the passage of lorries and caterpillar-drawn guns. Motor convoys passed them, both ways; the march became wearisome with halts. At last, when the sun was gilding the poplar leaves and casting long shadows, they turned off the main Amiens–Albert road and halted for the night beside an oak wood, where each man and his mate made bivouacs of their two groundsheets laced with string. Then companies were taken in turns to a river across a marsh, where ran clear water on a bed of chalk and flint. They undressed, and soon were splashing, crying out, and joking. Their brown arms and necks and faces contrasted oddly with the grey-white of their bodies and legs. Phillip among them felt reborn in a new world. Forgotten was the war and homelessness; here was cool clear water, here was the joy of life, which took one by the throat.

Sunshine floated upon the countryside, as though for ever. Twilight filtered clear light upon a blue distance. A solitary white owl flapped and skimmed slowly and silently over the swathes of hay. The last of the old men and women in sabots clattered down the road, unspeaking with their long pronged forks, thinking of calvados before coffee.

Fires speckled the margin of the wood. Mouth organs played.
The moon rose up across the hayfield. Umbered faces broke into song.
Umbered
—
Henry
V.

Melancholy, romantic, a little sad, they sang together words by which they visited and were blessed by images of tenderness and longing, in the land of their birth, in the dream which was England.

“Care for a cupper char, sir? With the boys, sir?”

It was the hoarse voice again. He had been wondering about that face, dark and cleft with little scowl-ruts; the man wore the two ribands of the South African war. The face was now offering him a mug of tea. “It’s quite clean, sir, I jus’ washed it aht in the stream.”

He remembered the prisoner in the guard room at Hornchurch—what was his name? To show that you remembered names bucked a man up—as Major Kingsman’s
Phillip
to himself. It was the name of a City brewer, famous for stout.

“Thank you, Pimm. Where have you sprung from?”

“’Ospital, sir. Shrapnel in m’ arm, sir, not enough for a Blighty one.”

“Bad luck.”

“It’s all in the game, sir.”

“May I sit by your fire?”

Half a dozen men eagerly moved to make room. He sat by the cheering flames, and sipped the strong sweet tea. He had been delegated by Bason to pay five francs to each of the men—there was a Y.M.C.A. marquee in the camp, and wheeled canteens from Division—the previous afternoon, and had made a point of speaking to each man by name, as he gave to each a green note. He must imitate the Duke’s way, in the Gaultshires, according to “Spectre” West, of asking questions about their homes, encourage them to speak. He had learned that they had been out from England for six weeks, and had had several spells in the trenches; he acted as though they knew more than he did. They seemed to like him; had Pimm given them a picture of him as a proper toff—all because he had played the sahib in the guardroom and spoken amiably to a poor devil up against it?

He wanted to leave while the good impression of him remained. Should he say
Goodnight,
men,
as was correct, or
Goodnight,
you
fellows
?
Which?

“Goodnight, boys!”

“Goodnight, sir!” in instant chorus. He felt himself to expand in the darkness, the darkness now glowing alive with a spirit beyond death, as he walked back to the bell tent he shared with three other junior subalterns, all near-strangers, all recently joined, and ready to defer to one who had been out in ’14, and ’15. Bason must have told them; he had kept to his role of quiet veteran, determined to make no mistakes this time. Jubilant that, at last, he felt that he belonged to the men of his platoon, as they to him, he washed and cleaned his teeth, got into his camel-hair bag and said a prayer for himself and others before trying to sleep. Nightingales were singing in the wood, and through the open flap of the bell-tent shone the pale moonbeams.

*

The next afternoon, when the marching battalion approached the turn-over point of a long slope leading up to the sky, suddenly upon the air fell the intermittent rumble of guns; and during a 10-minute halt, the rumour came down the recumbent men that Lord Kitchener had been drowned in the North Sea, on his way to Russia, in H.M.S.
Hampshire,
which had struck a mine. This added to the stillness of thought within Phillip as, later, he waited for dusk on the northern slope of a hill overlooking the tributary river, with its marshes and watery cries of wildfowl; for now it was known that the battalion was going into the line, for a tour of duty, to relieve other troops. Phillip lay near his men, listening to the singing of larks through the thuds of howitzers, the remote corkscrewing of shells travelling east into the height of the sky. Poppies shook in the evening breeze, with marigolds and scabious. Below the hill, to the north-east, lay the ruinous town of Albert. To the left of its red-brick sprawl was a large building, which might have been a church, with shell-holes in its fabric; and towering above the walls was a campanile with something upon its summit glinting in the western sun. Focusing his field-glasses upon it, Phillip saw a figure, which once had been upright, but now was, upon its iron frame, inclining downwards at an angle, so that the object held in the figure’s arms seemed about to drop into the void below. With a shock of recognition he saw that it was what he had seen photographed in newspapers—the Mother of God with the Babe in her arms. The iron frame supporting the figure had been struck by a
shell, and had remained half-broken in that position, to be seen by all going into the line, month after month, to inspire the legend that the war would end only when the Golden Virgin fell into the ruins below.

*

They spent the next week providing working parties for the Engineers, while occupying support trenches. One of the fatigues was the digging of ditches for the burying of water pipes. Phillip enjoyed the work of supervising his platoon, and learning about something he had never thought about before. Water, it appeared, was quite a problem when hundreds of thousands of men and animals had to be provided for. A friendly captain, entertaining him to lunch in the sappers’ mess, explained the set-up.

On the staff of the Chief Engineer of the Fourth Army was a Water Supply Officer, with three assistants, and each Corps had a Water Officer. For many months they had worked to improve existing water-supplies, and build and bore for new points. The Engineer-in-Chief at G.H.Q. had bought a large quantity of water-supply machinery and equipment from England—pumping sets of every description, including powerful steam fire-engines from the London County Council. Two water-barges, fitted with purification plant and large rotary pumps for forcing filtered water through pipes, had been sent up the Somme from Amiens. Trenches had been dug for iron pipes of 4 in. and 6 in. bore, eventually to be laid up to the British front line and beyond into re-conquered territory. Water-points, led off the main pipes, filled canvas troughs for horses and mules, and provided other points with taps for refilling eighty extra water-carts or G.S. waggons fitted with 200-gallon tanks in each Corps area, in addition to the regimental water-carts.

“A pity the water has to taste so filthy,” said Phillip.

“We can’t run risks. One carrier of paratyphoid ‘B’ in a village, chucking the old slops into a stream, might bring down the corps.”

“Even so, the chlorinated water, with the petrol taste, makes me feel sick.”

“The remedy is to dry out the petrol cans thoroughly before filling them with drinking water, surely?”