by Martin Boyd
CHAPTER EIGHT
When at last in the early dawn the crawling train reached Béthune, he learned that the battalion was out of the line at a village some kilometres away. He went to the Hôtel de France to have a bath and breakfast, and then to the Officers’ Club, where he hung about trying to get transport to the battalion, which he did not reach until late in the afternoon. He was directed to his company mess, in one of the inevitable peasants’ cottages. It was deserted except for his servant, who took him to his billet and gave him some letters. Finch, the servant, was a youth of about nineteen, modest, intelligent, with sensitive manners which put some of the public school subalterns to shame. As they walked to the billet in another peasant’s cottage, he told Dominic the battalion gossip, that it was said they were going to take part in a big attack soon.
The letters had been forwarded from his Australian bank in London. He could have had them when he was on leave but he had not called there, as it was out of his way. He had cashed cheques at Cox’s, the army bank, or at the hotel. Amongst the letters was one from Helena. He glanced through the others and took Helena’s out into a meadow behind the cottage. Here it was very peaceful. There was a little stream bordered with pollarded willows, and a row of taller trees made long shadows across the grass. He thought that in this quiet place her letter could heal him. She had always been able to dispel his evil spirits. A hideous dream, like that in the train, could not happen when she was sleeping by his side. She was his life and his health. As he took out her letter into the peaceful meadow he was not troubled by his infidelity with Sylvia, as he had never thought of her as a substitute for Helena. He had no feelings of uneasiness, as sitting on the grass by the stream he opened her letter, only the hope of his restoration.
She was ill in bed, she wrote, with some disease she had caught while dipping the sheep. She repeated that she had to do this because she had dismissed Harry who would not go to the war. She was in the hospital in the nearest town, but she expected to return to the farm in a week. She had no other news.
This letter, instead of bringing Dominic peace, churned up more conflicting feelings in him, the first an awful pity for Helena lying in bed with a disease caught from animals. The Calvinism he had been taught by his governess in his childhood at last bore on his relations with Sylvia. He felt that he had brought the disease, a divine retribution on Helena, part of the mad vindictive “justice” which he had been taught was an attribute of God. At the same time he had a recurrence of his anger with her for dismissing Harry, now more disturbing as he linked it up with Sylvia’s question to the subaltern on Victoria Station, and the staff captain’s comments on the chivalrous airmen. Why should the Hollises and the Harrys go on pouring out their blood in the trenches for Sylvia’s pleasures and the staff captain’s promotion, or even for Helena’s safety? The hatred of the old, even of people as old as himself, rose up in him again. He thrust Helena’s letter into his pocket, and feeling on edge with everything, he went along to the company mess. He found Frost there, and a new subaltern called Raife.
Harrison also had just returned from leave, three days in Paris. His bedroom opened off the room used as the mess. He was changing and when he heard voices he came in and sat on the floor in his underclothes. He was a little drunk and very pleased with himself. He drank more as he told them of his exploits. He had gone to an expensive brothel and picked one from a choice of girls. He showed them her photograph. She was rather like himself, fair, with a narrow forehead and a beaky nose. They had spent three days and nights together. He described them in detail. It had cost him fifty pounds.
Finch and another officer’s servant came in and out of the room during this recital. They were laying the table for dinner. They had faintly uncomfortable silly smiles on their faces. Dominic hated to see them degraded by this half-deference to Harrison’s squalor.
Raife lifted a glass filled with Cointreau and white wine.
“Here’s to the three F’s!” he exclaimed. They stood for war, hunting and sex.
Harrison was so pleased with himself that he tried to make a gesture of reconciliation towards Dominic.
“I bet you’ve been having some fun too, Langton,” he said. “Come on, tell us all about it, you sly old bastard.”
The turmoil in Dominic became unbearable. He demanded that there should be a difference between his feelings for Sylvia and Harrison’s for the whore in Paris, but he could find none. To be completely honest he should be sitting drunk and half-naked on the floor, shouting about the three F’s. This further conflict in his mind, added to what he had felt in the train, and the effect of Helena’s letter filled him with a new explosive violence. A spark was put to it by Harrison’s use of the word “bastard”.
Dominic’s mind was full of antique conventions, which were the cause of much of his unconventionality. He firmly believed that anyone who had been called a bastard could not honourably survive unless he had drawn the other man’s blood. He believed that Harrison had stated that his mother, in whom for him were gathered all kindness and human dignity, was no better than the woman he had bought in Paris. He knew that if he attempted to speak he would only stutter inarticulately. His eyes blazed but the flesh sagged on his face so that it looked like a skull. He pushed back his chair, knocking it over, and he left the room. The other three officers were momentarily sobered, and Raife asked: “What’s he up to?”
Dominic went back to his billet where he wrote a note to Jackson, a subaltern in C Company. He said that Harrison had grossly insulted him, and that he was going to challenge him to a duel. Would Jackson act as his second? Jackson had a French mother and both his parents lived in Paris. He was not a close friend of Dominic’s but on the few occasions when they had spoken together there had seemed to be a sympathy of ideas between them. His conventions, like Dominic’s, were more medieval than public school.
When Dominic had written his note, Finch arrived to tell him that dinner was ready. Dominic said that he was not coming to dinner and told Finch to take the note to Jackson, who, however, was not as medieval as himself.
Jackson thought it fantastic for a lieutenant to challenge his company commander, or in fact anyone else to a duel. If either of them were wounded, or even if it became known without this, there would be a terrific shindy. Dominic might be court-martialled, or even shot for wounding a superior officer in (technically) the field, and he would be a party to it. He sympathized with Dominic’s attitude, but he was extremely worried. He told Finch that there was no answer, and he went round to A Company mess to see Harrison, who was at dinner.
“Good evening,” he said. “Langton wants to shoot you.”
Raife grinned, Frost looked concerned, and Harrison went white. He thought Dominic quite capable of shooting him.
“What do you mean?” he asked, though he understood that Jackson had come in the capacity of a second.
“He says that you called him a bastard.” Jackson, although he wanted to prevent a duel, also wanted Harrison to suffer the apprehension of one.
“It was only a joke.”
“Langton doesn’t take it that way. He doesn’t think a gentleman calls another a bastard, even as a joke.”
“Is Langton a gentleman? I thought he was an Australian,” said Harrison.
“Shall I tell him that? If so you’d better say your prayers,” Jackson replied, himself now touchy that his friend was further insulted.
Harrison tried to laugh as if the whole thing were childish.
“Well, what’s the programme?” he asked.
“I only have a note from him. I haven’t seen him yet. I suppose that you choose your weapons. . . . But you’re in for a hell of a row whatever happens. If Langton wounds you there’ll be a court martial. If on the other hand it comes out that you called one of your junior officers a bastard and then shot him, it won’t help your career.”
“It’s all mad,” said Harrison irritably. “What d’you want me to do?”
“You could
apologize.”
Harrison looked sullen, but at last said: “Very well.”
“Shall I tell him that?” asked Jackson. “You’d better come with me.”
Harrison went into his room to put on his Sam Browne and a cap and they walked round to Dominic’s billet. Jackson told him to wait outside.
Dominic was sitting at a table trying to write a letter of instructions to a family lawyer in Melbourne about certain dispositions in the event of his death.
“Have you told him?” he asked Jackson as he came in.
“I’ve spoken to him. He’s willing to apologize.”
“I didn’t ask him to apologize. I sent him a challenge,” said Dominic smouldering.
“It makes things a bit awkward,” said Jackson.
“I’m used to awkwardness,” Dominic retorted. “It’s my constant companion. Did you give him my challenge?”
“I told him about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he would apologize.”
“I don’t want an apology. He sat there wallowing half naked and drunk on the floor, with the men laying the table.” A curious old-maidish primness came into his voice, grotesque in the context. “And then he insulted my mother.”
“That wasn’t his intention. You see he’s not a gentleman.” It gave Jackson a malicious pleasure to say this. He also thought, understanding Dominic’s medieval mind, that it might make him less anxious to fight Harrison. It seemed to have an effect on him.
Jackson followed up his advantage. He pointed out the possible repercussions of a duel, the harm not only to Dominic or to Harrison, but to their relatives and to the regiment. “After all,” he said, “you want to keep your bullets for the real enemy.”
As he spoke Dominic seemed to go away from him, to retreat into his private gloom. When he spoke his voice changed, and had become oddly remote.
“Harrison is my real enemy,” he said “The Germans are only my artificial enemy. I know nothing about them except what I read in the papers. When I see them, when the prisoners come in, they are not my enemies. They are the same as everyone else. They are just like the people you see in the street—in London or Melbourne or Paris or anywhere. They are not my real enemies. Harrison is my real enemy.”
Jackson was puzzled. “He’s waiting outside to apologize,” he said.
“All right. Let him come in,” said Dominic indifferently.
Jackson went to the door and signed to Harrison, who came in half-sheepishly, half-hearty. He spoke to Dominic in a slightly patronizing way, as if he had been stupid to take seriously anything said so lightly. He offered his hand. Dominic held out his own, but his clasp was lifeless.
“Now let’s go back to dinner,” said Harrison. “Will you come with us?” he asked Jackson.
Dominic said: “I must finish my letter,” and the other two thought it best to leave him.
He sat down again and stared at his unfinished letter. It had no meaning for him and he tore it up. He felt a deathly exhaustion. Both his mind and his body refused to function any more, and he lay down on the bed. After the conflicts inside him, followed by the violent currents of rage against Harrison, all his fuses were burnt out. Finch came in and found him lying asleep in his clothes, with the lights on. He woke him, and Dominic let him help him undress and get into bed.
He fell asleep at half past eight, and except for the semi-conscious five minutes while Finch put him to bed, he slept deeply and dreamlessly for eleven hours. He no longer attempted to resolve his inner conflicts. He followed his routine duties mechanically, and sat silent at meals. Except for Raife, who liked anything or anyone who increased the tension and colour of life, he was treated with mistrust. Harrison and Frost were a little afraid of him.
He had always had the idea that authority was right, and his troubles had largely come from his attempts to reconcile his own ideas of virtue with the rightness he expected to find in authority. Now after the conflict in his mind which lasted from his parting with Sylvia at Victoria until his failure to provoke Harrison to a duel, he no longer made the attempt. A kind of savage humility had come upon him. The violence in him which he had always felt was his most evil trait, revealed so clearly in his dream in the train, was now endorsed by authority; and as it happened with a new emphasis.
The governments and the generals on both sides must at this time have been on tenterhooks lest the soldiers woke up to the suicidal futility of their lives, that some common humanity such as that of Christmas 1914, or the sheer weariness which the French were beginning to show, might lead them simply to stop fighting. It would have been a disaster for either High Command if the enemy had walked away. There would have been no glory attached to victory. At Christmas 1914, this disaster had been prevented by a high-ranking English officer firing into the German lines while the opposing troops were dancing together round bonfires in No-man’s-land. At Etaples there had been a riot and the soldiers had killed five military policemen. Always there was fear of the psychological uncertainty of a million men, and everything possible was done to prevent peace breaking out. Lloyd George addressed those Old Testament exhortations to the armies, which so disgusted Lord Dilton. He would not consider an armistice “as it might be difficult to get the nations fighting again”. Raids like that in which Hollis was wounded were ordered “to keep alive the spirit of offensive”. A general came to inspect the battalion. He asked each subaltern: “What were you in civilian life?” When the young man answered modestly: “I was at school,” or “I was reading law,” the general replied: “Well, you’re going to be a soldier for the rest of your life, remember that.” And this was true for a number of them, as half the battalion was wiped out in the approaching attack, though the general ended his days playing golf in Surrey.
Now authority in its nervousness sent out orders that officers were to give their men lectures on the physical pleasures of fighting, of the orgasm of killing, of which Dominic had dreamed in the train. Each subaltern was told to take his platoon into a barn and give them this harangue. It was rather like giving them a talk on “the facts of life”. Everyone was embarrassed. Even Raife, with this opportunity to elaborate the theme of his three F’s, could only say: “Well we’re here to fight and we’ve jolly well got to do it. Anyone who doesn’t know how had better ask the sergeant-major.” Frost recited Kipling’s “If” to his platoon.
To Dominic alone this instruction was poison. If authority endorsed the evil that was in him, at last he would be obedient. He could, as it were, say “evil be thou my good” with a clear conscience. Returning from exhaustion, with an empty heart and mind he took violence as his god, and in this spirit he addressed his men. He was also the son of artists and was able to recreate his feelings in his imagination. When he spoke of the pleasure of killing another man, his words had the strength and impact of a work of art. He did not merely give them a few facts to which they could listen in half-hearted boredom. He touched their imagination. Their fundamental decency was disturbed. They came out of the barn silent, not knowing what to say to each other. Even the bloody-minded sergeant thought he had gone too far, as an extremely sensual man may object to smutty stories. Dominic himself looked haggard and haunted. Before this address, whatever the attitude of his fellow-officers, he had been popular with his men. Now they watched him with misgiving.
He felt his new isolation, but he was, with less self-consciousness, like the preposterous hero of Henley’s song, ready to take all the bludgeoning of chance. Yet at times he longed for human contact, if only physical.
He set off one evening for Béthune. Raife, who in spite of his preoccupation with the three F’s was the only one of the company officers with universal goodwill, wanted to come with him, but Dominic put him off. He liked Raife well enough, as much as he was capable of liking anyone at this time, but Raife treated lightly those things of which Dominic now thought with grim seriousness. The three F’s for him were not merely an amusing alliteration.
&
nbsp; When he had parted from Helena his agonized sense of loss had numbed his physical desires, and this condition had remained until the first night he had spent at Catherine Street. But that interlude had been too short to disturb his condition, which his immediate departure to the front had restored. Now the prolonged and passionate indulgence of his ten days’ leave had dissolved that curious static chastity. It had also destroyed his instinct of physical fidelity to Helena, which her last letter had done nothing to revive. When something stimulated his physical desires he no longer had any reason to repress them. Authority endorsed them, equally with his violence. The men were allowed to queue up at the red lamp.
He dined alone in the restaurant where, a month or two earlier, he had dined with Hollis. Tonight he drank the whole bottle of Volnay himself, and he thought about Hollis, almost the only person of whom he could think without confusion, without that kind of jam in his brain. He wished Hollis was there with him, that they could repeat the evening of two months earlier. He thought of the visit to the prostitute, and now that authority was his conscience, he decided to visit her after dinner. His body wanted a woman, but also in some way he felt that in going to this woman he was affirming his friendship with Hollis.
He found her alone, and she received him with her cheerful hostess’s manner. But he hardly treated her as another sentient human being. When he left her he also, for the time being, had lost the feeling for Hollis which had taken him there. On the way back he passed the orchard where they had walked together in innocence. It no longer meant anything to him, no more than if he passed a shop where he had once bought some apples.
The battalion returned to the line to take part in the attack. Before they left the village at dusk the officers dined early in their separate messes. In the cottage room which was A company’s mess, and probably in the others, there fell a dreadful Gethsemane depression. It was almost impossible that one of the men sitting there would not be dead in a week. It was certain that one or more of them would be wounded, perhaps with some hideous affliction, blindness or amputated legs. It was easily possible that they would all be dead. It often happened in an attack.
