II
It was a very elated young padre who, later that afternoon, swung out of Albert up the Bapaume Road. He marched along confidently and whistled as he walked, but the tunes were not hymn tunes, and some half-hour later, as he approached a pile of debris in a little wood, it was not by accident that the tune was “Old Soldiers Never Die.”
Alf’s face, in the light of one candle end, wore a relieved look. “Got back all right then, chum!” he said. “I’ve been as nervous as a blinkin’ cat the ’ole time you been away.”
Rawley put his few purchases on the rickety table. “Yes, here I am again—all present and correct.”
Alf was turning over the tin of polish, soldier’s friend, brilliantine and toothpaste. “Is this all you got?” he asked gloomily. “Didn’t yer git no grub?”
“We don’t want any,” answered Rawley, as he took off his belt.
“P’raps not now, but we bloomin’ well shall afore long.”
Rawley shook his head. “No. We are going to draw rations,” he said, with a mysterious smile.
“Rations! Here—get out! What d’yer mean rations?”
“What I say. The padre has arranged to draw rations for himself and servant from an M.T. unit in Albert. We draw three days’ rations every third day.”
“Garn!” exclaimed Alf derisively. “What, an’ rum ration as well, I reckon,” he added sarcastically.
“And rum ration as well,” repeated Rawley. “When there is one.” And he told Alf what had happened.
Alf sat on his bunk and rubbed the back of his neck in a characteristic manner. “Well, that’s a proper knock-out. Drorin’ rations!” Suddenly he looked up with a serious face. “Who’s going to drore ’em?” he demanded.
“You are,” said Rawley. “And you start tomorrow.”
Alf shook his head. “No, I ain’t. Not me. I’d never get away with it. An orficer might, but not a ruddy gunner. No, chum, you’ll ’ave to draw ’em.”
Rawley pointed out that it would excite comment for an officer to draw rations, even though he were a padre, that the risk was small, and that since he himself had taken the greater risk in asking for them, Alf might do his bit, and take the lesser.
Alf was only half convinced. “And besides, I can’t go like this,” he added triumphantly.
“No—you aren’t fit for C.O.’s parade at the moment,” Rawley conceded. “But we will soon alter that. Hair cut, shave—by the by, did you have a moustache or were you clean shaven? Before you took French leave, I mean.”
“I ’adn’t no moustache,” said Alf sulkily.
“Well, we will give you one now, then. A good, walrusy, Old Bill moustache. You can wear my old breeches; your cap will just pass muster—for a padre’s servant, that is. The difficulty is your tunic; I’m afraid that’s beyond repair. I suppose the only thing to do is to try to steal one.”
Alf rubbed the back of his neck. “Look ’ere, chum, do you really mean I’ve got to go?”
Rawley nodded. “I am afraid so, Alf. We can’t afford to chuck away a chance like this.”
Alf nodded gloomily. “You don’t think they’ll cop me?”
“When we’ve rigged you up with that moustache I honestly think that the chances of anyone recognizing you are about one in a million. I tell you, I found it as easy as pie—and so will you. Don’t talk more than is necessary, that’s all.”
“All right, chum, I’ll go.” And then he suddenly brightened and smacked his thigh delightedly. “Blimy! Drorin’ rations—ain’t that a scream!”
“And now we have to think out about that tunic,” said Rawley.
“You leave that to me, mate. As soon as it’s dark we’ll go out. You show me where there’s some troops, an’ if I don’t come back wiv a tunic or somethin’, I’ll eat my hat.”
Alf kept his word, and later that night he returned to the cellar, wearing a soldier’s greatcoat that effectively concealed his disreputable tunic. Then Rawley set to work with scissors and comb, and before they turned in for the night their preparations were complete for drawing rations on the morrow.
They walked into Albert together. Rawley had decided that this was best. It would enable him to point out the position of the M.T. unit and thus avoid the necessity of Alf asking questions of other troops; and it would give Alf confidence. And Alf gained confidence rapidly. No one gave them a second glance as they crossed the square beneath the shattered tower of the cathedral. Rawley with his slightly hunched shoulders, rather ill-fitting tunic, and clean-shaven face looked a typical padre, and Alf with his shaggy moustache, shabby cap and greatcoat with a sandbag rolled up under one arm looked the typical old soldier who, by reason of bad feet or wounds, has been given a light job as batman to a town major or padre.
Rawley walked back and waited for Alf on the Bapaume Road. Half an hour later Alf reappeared with a broad grin and a well-filled sandbag. “Everything in the garden’s luvely,” he said as he came up. “I jes said I’ve come for Capting Parker’s rations and the quarter dished ’em out like a bleedin’ lamb.”
“Good,” said Rawley. “But don’t you forget to salute me in public. We have got to be careful about details.”
III
Fresh meat and vegetables were such luxuries that for the two days following that first drawing of rations food filled the entire horizon. They vied with each other in thinking out new methods of cooking, and the hours between meals were devoted to the preparation of the next. It was the one topic of conversation and of thought. But soon the novelty wore off, and Rawley found the time hang heavy on his hands. In the old dug-out in the centre of the devastated area he had had to get his supplies by craft or by stealth, and although he had bitterly cursed the necessity it had provided an object in an otherwise objectless life. The necessities of living had occupied the mind and the body. But now there was nothing to occupy either. The bare means of living were provided, and apart from the duties of cooking, eating, and drawing water from the well, body and mind lay fallow.
After his long sojourn as an outcast in the deserted battlefields, that first walk into Albert, decently clean and clothed, had seemed a heaven of delight; but after three or four visits, on those alternate days that he was not cook, the delight faded. It was dull walking about aimlessly, with nothing to do and with nothing constructive to occupy one’s thoughts. He envied the men he saw about him. No doubt they were cursing the war and wishing themselves back in civilian life, but they were doing something; they had some object to which they were striving—if it were only to get the job done and go home. He realized bitterly that it is better to have an unpleasant job than no job at all. And at first the risk he ran of arrest as a spy or deserter had given a zest to his walks abroad, but now he was so familiar with his surroundings and moved about so freely and without question that the danger seemed almost negligible, the more so since he had learned that his old division had moved northwards from the area.
He had borrowed a magazine from the M.T. Mess and had read it from cover to cover. He had no books. Quite suddenly it occurred to him that there was nothing to prevent him from going into Amiens to buy some, and he asked himself why he had not thought of it before. It was a splendid idea; and he grew as excited as a schoolboy at the prospect of being in an undamaged, civilized town, and of looking at the windows of real civilian shops. And Alf’s suggestion that it might be a bit risky only added zest to the adventure.
IV
He set out on the following morning, leaving Alf shaking his head dolefully in the cellar. His intention was to walk to Albert and try to pick up a lorry or car, but he had barely set foot upon the Albert road before a lorry rumbled up behind him coming from the direction of Bapaume. He asked the driver if he were going anywhere near Amiens. The driver was: he was going through Amiens to Flixecourt. Rawley climbed up into the broad front seat, and the lorry rumbled on its way.
It was one of those bright, mild days that come sometimes early in the year and give a foretaste of spring. E
ven the rubble heaps of the old battlefield looked almost friendly in the cheerful light, and as the lorry topped the rise by the old British front line, Rawley saw again as he had seen on that first morning walk the Hanging Virgin of Albert flashing golden in the sunlight.
The lorry rumbled on through the narrow pavé streets of the town, across the square that, by reason of the levelled buildings surrounding it, was twice as large as its pre-war self; swung left-handed into the narrow street where the tangle of twisted metal in the shattered Schneider factory resembled a gigantic bramble bush, crossed the bridge over the grass-grown railway and climbed the hill beyond. The shattered roofs and splinter-pocked walls of the houses had been left behind. Trees bordered the road. Real trees: not splintered stumps of dead barkless wood, but trees with branches overhead already budding with the promise of spring. The road switchbacked undeviatingly across the low hills, and occasionally to his left, when the hedgeless plough-land dipped in widening curves to a transverse valley, he saw across the countless furrows some peaceful tree-embowered village in the Ancre valley below. Rawley, on the front seat of the moving lorry, enjoyed it all as a schoolboy enjoys his first homecoming.
The country became more wooded, villages more frequent. Woods, red with young shoots, nestled in the folds of the ground, and at times bordered the road. One fleeting glimpse he had of Amiens cathedral, grey and sunlit in the distance.
The driver slowed at last, where a broad road diverged to the left. “I’ll have to drop you here, sir. I go straight on, and lorries aren’t allowed in the streets of the town anyway.”
Rawley climbed down and took the left-hand road. Presently it became a broad boulevard with trees and a cycle track on either side and houses. He reached the iron bridge over the Somme and saw the city before him, tree-shaded quays by the river, and the old houses rising to the great grey bulk of the cathedral.
He walked down the Rue des Trois Cailloux feeling rather like one treading the streets of fairyland. The civilians, particularly the women and girls in pretty frocks, and the shops containing groceries, high-heeled shoes, fish and game, feminine hats, toys, silk stockings, gramophones and pianos, chocolates, and carpenters’ tools, seemed as though they must have been transported from some happy land of fancy, so remote were they from the splintered wood and bricks, mud, filth, and desolation of his recent surroundings.
He wandered slowly through the streets like a spirit revisiting the scenes of its earthly life, watching, as it were from a distance, the busy passers-by, lingering at the shop windows, and automatically returning occasional salutes. He remembered much of the city from his one previous visit, and he found that unconsciously he had begun to retrace his steps of that day not so very long ago that now seemed to belong to another life and another age. He went under the archway and stared across the cobbles at the glass door of the baths; he peered through the glass between the mounds of pastries into Odette’s tea-shop. He found the little restaurant where Rumbald, Piddock, Penhurst and he had had that riotous and rather scandalous dinner. In broad daylight in the narrow side street it looked shabby and depressing. And he went down to the canal and sat on the bench under the trees, where he had sat that night in the darkness, listening to the hum of hostile aircraft.
Here he ate the sandwiches he had brought with him. He had been sorely tempted to enter an hotel and order a good lunch. But prudence had prevailed. It would have been a shameful waste of his diminishing funds, and he had compromised with the temptation by promising himself tea in a tea-shop, which would be equally enjoyable but less expensive. He found a paper shop in a corner of the Place Gambetta, and bought an English newspaper and two paper-covered novels.
He turned into a tea-shop shortly before four o’clock. Several British officers were already having tea, but he found a little table in a corner. A French girl in a diminutive fancy apron came to take his order, and he was dismayed to find himself stuttering with embarrassment; but she was a self-possessed little lady and seemed neither flattered nor disturbed by the effect she had produced upon the shy young English padre. She brought his tea, and it was only some minutes later that he remembered the procedure, and rose, plate and fork in hand, to choose his cakes. The incident turned his thought to the tea-shop in Doullens, where he and Berney on their first meeting had chosen cakes together and had chaffed each other upon their choice. He returned to his lonely table with all his animation gone.
One or two other British officers came into the shop, and lastly a young chaplain. There were no vacant tables, and the man, after a brief glance round, came and sat down at Rawley’s little table. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. Rawley did mind, but he murmured politely, “Not at all.” Conversation with a real chaplain would have pitfalls, and he eyed the man covertly as the waitress came to take the order.
Evidently he had not been in France long, for he wore the black tie which had been discarded by most chaplains in the field. Not long ago, Rawley thought, he had worn the roman collar and black stock. He was probably rather green, and that was a point to the good. His own role, he decided, must be that of the old hand who discouraged the talking of shop.
The conversation opened in the English fashion with the weather. The man obviously wanted to talk, and Rawley let him talk. It would give Rawley a chance to finish his tea. When he tired of talking about himself, and began to display some curiosity about his fellow padre, then it would be time for Rawley to excuse himself and leave.
Meanwhile he sat and listened, putting in a word here and there to stimulate the flow. He might learn some useful points that would help him to sustain his role of a padre.
He learnt that his diagnosis was correct. The young clergyman had been in France only three weeks. He had reported to a Headquarters that he did not know the name of and had hung about for several days doing nothing. Then he had been billeted in Amiens, where he had met an older padre who was running a canteen and ministering to the needs of various details of troops in the neighbourhood. The older padre had then been ordered to report to a division in the Line and the younger man, not knowing what else to do, had taken over the canteen, which he was still running. He was enthusiastic and desperately anxious to be of use, but he had received no orders, and so he remained in the billet originally allotted to him, ran the canteen, and held a service whenever he could scrape together a congregation, which was seldom. He spoke to Rawley as an older and more experienced man. What should he do?
“One of the first principles out here,” said Rawley, “is not to go looking for trouble. It comes without any looking for. Just sit tight and do what you can. They have forgotten you, I expect. One fine day some brass hat will take his feet off the mantelpiece and have a look at the papers they have been resting on. Then he’ll discover you, and they will send you chits and things and bundle you off to some godforsaken spot. My advice is to sit tight and see what happens.
The young chaplain sighed. “It’s all rather different from what one expected,” he said. “Very different from a country parish. I am from Yorkshire. What part of the country do you come from?”
“The Channel Islands,” answered Rawley at a venture.
“Oh yes. Beautiful place, I’ve heard. Let me see, you are in the Winchester diocese, aren’t you?”
Rawley nodded and rose. “I must be getting back,” he said, and took his leave.
CHAPTER XXI
I
Rawley paid other visits to Amiens. He had discovered a cinema, and when he grew tired of walking the streets, there he could sit and pass in pleasant forgetfulness some of the hours that hung so heavily on his hands. His improved conditions of life had only increased his desire for further comfort. He enjoyed the mere act of sitting on the little tip-up seats in the cinema, and he thought it worth the price of a beer or coffee to sit on the padded red plush seat of a café. Once he was strongly assailed by a temptation to spend the night in an hotel in a real bed in a comfortable room, and he was only restrained from yielding to it by t
he realization that it would be tempting Providence in the form of the A.P.M. to sign a false name in the register.
On one of his visits he encountered the young chaplain he had met in the tea-shop. They had a drink together in a café and smoked a pipe. The young chaplain was obviously attracted to Rawley. He was lonely, feeling himself something of an outsider among the officers who came and went on leave, or to and from the Line. And Rawley was glad of somebody to talk to now that he found that it was easy to keep the conversation to safe topics.
One evening as Rawley was walking down the Boulevarde d’Alsace, intending to lorry-jump back to Albert, he met the young chaplain hurrying in the opposite direction. He seized Rawley by the arm. “Come back and have some dinner with me,” he said. Rawley demurred. “Come on,” the other insisted. “It’s my last night in Amiens. I got orders about half an hour ago. You are the very man I wanted to see; I haven’t the faintest idea what I have to do, and you can tell me everything. In return I’ll stand you a jolly good dinner at the Godbert.”
“Well, if you put it that way,” said Rawley, and he turned back.
They went into the palm-decorated foyer of the Godbert and ordered the meal. “It must be a real good one,” said the chaplain. “We will start with oysters and brown bread and butter.”
“I have no quarrel with that,” agreed Rawley. They worked through the menu together and decided on each course.
“About drinks,” said the chaplain. “I’m afraid that’s rather my weak suit. Port and champagne is about the limit of my wine knowledge. I leave it to you.”
Rawley suggested Chambertin, and the chaplain agreed. They were shown to a table in the long-mirrored room where the lights, white napery and glittering glass made Rawley feel that this was the summit of those steps of respectability and civilization that he had begun to climb with the cutting of his ragged beard in the cellar near Albert. At a table close by there was a girl actually in evening dress.
Behind the Lines Page 24
