A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  *

  The cold and the wet, and the greasy diet of salted bully beef turned Phillip’s stomach sour, his thoughts with it. He had the yellow squitters. Men who went sick with this complaint got medicine and duty; so it was no good going sick. How could he get away from it all? The rain fell, the bunkers dripped with water. The trenches were now knee-deep in water. If only he could slip and break his leg, like one of the new draft—one of his four new friends—who had an ankle broken on the corduroy path, while carrying on his shoulder one of the heavy eighteen-inch-square bright-tinned boxes containing hard biscuits. Another followed him, but with doubtful good fortune, for he had, more for bravado than alcoholic desire, drunken from the glazed earthenware S.R.D. gallon jar, supposedly containing rum, which he had found in the wood, and brought with glee to the bunker. After one swallow he dropped the jar and gave a cry and doubled up, retching. The jar contained an oily, thick blackish liquid which some rear-area thief had substituted for the rum; it was concentrated carbolic acid. He was carried away unconscious.

  Phillip hoped that his own squitters would continue: then he might get light duty for a few days, when next the battalion went back to rest.

  Owing to the many casualties in the attack across No Man’s Land, the London Highlanders had to extend their stay in the line. One night when Phillip was detailed by Sergeant Douglas for the midnight listening patrol under Lance-corporal Collins, he complained.

  “I shan’t be able to lie still for two hours, Sergeant. I can’t help it, I’m not very well.”

  Sergeant Douglas paused. “Report sick when we get back to billets.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Corporal Collins, take Church in Maddison’s place.”

  When the sergeant had gone down the trench Church said, “You bloody leadswinger! There’s damn-all the matter with you!”

  “I don’t want to give the show away, by getting up to go to the latrine.”

  “You’d only find yourself there, if you did!”

  “Will you fight?”

  “Yes! And this time you won’t get out of it.”

  “Nor will you! Come on!” said Phillip, starting to climb over the clay-bagged parapet into No Man’s Land.

  There was nothing heroic about this. The line for the past two nights had been unusually quiet. Only an occasional bullet tore flatly through the darkness, an occasional flare shot up to quaver in green deathliness over No Man’s Land. It was known that the Germans were working on their parapets, and putting up wire; and as the British were doing the same, the line was quiet during the early part of each night. According to rumour, the Prussian and Bavarian divisions had gone to the Russian front, leaving only Saxons of the Landwehr.

  For some yards beyond the British parapet the ground was littered with empty bully beef and Maconochie tins. The latter, being wider, and round, were in general use as one-occasion latrines. Phillip led the way beyond this metallic riband of litter to an area of untouched level ground, dimly seen to be free of shell-holes in the faint light of a thin moon hanging pale brown upon the western horizon. Although the German trenches were about a hundred yards away, Phillip had no fear or thought of them; for one thing, it was night, and for another, his mind was taken with the problem of standing up to Church, who could box very well indeed, while he had had only four lessons at the School of Arms before the war. He took off his goat’s-skin, then his greatcoat, while drawing deep breaths to steady his heart.

  Six feet away, Church turned to face him, then advanced slowly. Phillip awaited him, squared up, left arm held out, right bent before his face as guard. He tried to force himself to look steadily at the dim blur of Church’s face, as he waited, entirely on the defensive. Church came on slowly towards him, in a crouch, hands held low. How Church got near him so suddenly he did not know; he was conscious of an electric shock on the nose only the slightest instant before another seemed to break his lips on his front teeth, and thereafter very smoothly he felt himself going over backwards, and without any sensation of having fallen he was lying on his back, restfully upon the ground, and quite content to lie there for ever. Church’s face was near his own, “Had enough?”

  Phillip thought it best not to reply. It was peaceful to lie with all the sky above him. He would pretend he had been knocked out.

  “Want any more?”

  “No thanks.”

  When Church had given him a hand up, Phillip sought to explain the quick ending of the fight. His lips felt salty to his tongue, broken, out of shape. But Church ignored his stammered words.

  “That’ll teach you not to talk about ‘Leytonstone louts’ in future.”

  “Quite right,” replied Phillip. Whereupon Church picked up Phillip’s balaclava for him, and thrust it roughly on his head.

  “Thanks, Church. You know I didn’t really mean it when I said that of Martin and the others in the tent at Bleak Hill. I owe you an apology, quite apart from your winning the fight.”

  “That’s all right, then. Shake!”

  Their hands were still clasped when a terror of bullets fired by a machine-gun from the German trench made them drop down. Then came the sweat-breaking loud stutter shatter of another gun even nearer. Phillip could see the flashes, like an electric morse code. He pressed flat upon the wet earth, hands protecting the back of his head. Then as a flare hissed out of the low darkness of the German line, followed by another, and another, more machine-guns opened up with loud directness, accompanied by the cracking air-shear of rifle-fire. Was an attack starting? It seemed that the bullets were cracking only an inch or so above his back. Then the night was filled with swishing stalks of white light, all from the German lines, by which he knew that they would not be going to attack: remote comfort only, as he felt to be so large and visible, sweating with fear, while bullets thudded and whanged away in ricochet. The whole sky seemed to be lit up by the terrible hovering white flowers of the dead.

  The incident had set off the phenomenon known as wind-up. As before a wind, fire swept with driven bright yellow-red stabs of thorn-flame up the line towards the light-ringed salient around Ypres; bullets in flights, hissing, clacking, or whining, crossed the lines of the hosts held in the continuous graves of the living above the hosts of the unburied dead slowly being absorbed into the earth. The wind of fear, the nightly wind of the battlefield of Western Europe, from the North Sea to the great barrier of the Alps, a fire travelling faster than any wind, was speckling the ridges above the drained marsh that surrounded Ypres, stabbing in wandering aimless design the darkness on the slopes of the Comines canal, running in thin crenellations upon the plateau of Wytschaete and Messines, thence sweeping down to the plain of Armentières, among the coal-mines and slag-heaps of Artois, across the chalk uplands of Picardy, the vineyard heights of Champagne, and the plains of the rivers; the wind of fear rushed on, to die out, expended, beyond the dark forest of the Argonne, beyond the fears of massed men, where snow-field, ravine, torrent and crag ended in the peaks of the Alps rising in silence to the constellation of Orion, shaking gem-like above all human hope.

  *

  News of the fight spread up and down the trenches. Mr. Thorverton, the new platoon commander, hardly knew what to say about it; but Sergeant Douglas, calm, reliable, dutiful, had only this comment, “If you are well enough to scrap in your spare time, you are well enough for listening patrol, Maddison. You will go on the next patrol.”

  “Very good, Sergeant.”

  A listening patrol was not a thing to go on if it could be avoided without showing the white feather. It meant creeping through the gap in your own wire and crawling or wriggling over mud to just before the German wire, twenty yards before the German parapet, and then listening for any extra talking which might mean massing of troops for an attack. It meant crawling back if this was so, and then the signallers in the shelter would buzz it to battalion H.Q., who would buzz it on to the field-gunners.

  The story of the fight grew in passing from one man to anoth
er like the wind-up itself. It was said to have continued, round after round, in the light of flares while the entire German army fired at the antagonists. The story was taken back by the returning Royal Engineers to Brigade H.Q. There the Brigadier heard it from his staff-captain, and said, “Stout fellows, those London Highlanders”. The brigade-major’s report to Division at midnight contained the phrase the morale of the troops is excellent.

  In due course the story got to St. Omer, and inspired a newspaper article sent back by “Eye Witness”, which implied that so little did a famous kilted battalion of Territorials, which must of necessity remain nameless, regard the presence of the low-spirited Huns, that a level area of land in No Man’s Land, less than a hundred yards from the enemy’s wire, had been selected, after careful survey, as the only fit and proper place to form a ring, in which to settle with fisticuffs, in the time-honoured British way, a point of difference. Another account appeared in The Daily Trident, duly to be read in the Town Department of the Moon Fire Office in Haybundle Street, where the name of one of “the bold exponents of the noble art” was known, through a letter from the battalion signaller to his father, a fellow clerk of Richard Maddison’s, called Journend.

  *

  At first Richard felt unqualified pride for his son. Later, when the details were reprinted in The Kentish Mercury and The Borough News, he considered that too much was being made of it. Had “Hetty’s best boy” spoofed a bit? He said “Pouff!” when Hetty told him how Mrs. Neville had said to her, meeting her in Randiswell, that she had always known that Phillip would do splendidly, given the chance. Still, he was secretly pleased.

  Of course Mrs. Bigge, next door, had to have her say, too. “Hurray for Phillip, Mr. Maddison!” Then Mr. Pye up the road, passing Mr. Turney in the shelter on the Hill, had apparently made a point of telling him that his grandson was a credit to the district, according to Hetty, a day or two later. Richard did not like Mr. Pye. Nor did he care for the remark in the Randiswell Police Station made by Mr. Jenkins when they met at 8 p.m. one night the following week for a 4-hour spell of special constabulary duty, “It only goes to show that a father can never tell how a youngster will turn out, doesn’t it, Sergeant?”—a remark that increased Richard’s reserve towards the neighbour he had disliked ever since, in a moment of stress, the younger man had confessed to him, à propos of nothing, that his wife was not of his class. “After all, she came from a back-street.” During his 4-hour patrol of dark streets he wondered if the fellow had meant to imply that he, the boy’s father, had misjudged his son in the past? On what authority had Jenkins made his criticism? He, the father, had never spoken a word outside the house about his son’s lies and deceits, and cowardly ways, except in confidence to his sister, Victoria, as well as the boy’s mother, of course. What then did Jenkins’ remark imply? Why couldn’t the fellow keep his distance?

  In his lonely thoughts Richard wondered about the incident of the fisticuffs in No Man’s Land. Somehow it did not ring true of Hetty’s “best boy”. Still, one never knew—the boy had always been inclined to wildness, and perhaps that had been disguised adventurousness. Anyway, there it was, in The Daily Trident. The Trident had always “printed the facts”; and almost alone had revealed the German menace for many years before the war. Richard had a high opinion of Lord Castleton, the proprietor.

  *

  The newspaper accounts had different effects on Phillip’s two sisters. They made Mavis feel important—away from the house in Hillside Road where, particularly in the depth of winter, life often seemed hopeless, since Father was always so beastly to Mother. Mavis depended almost entirely on her mother. She had had no chum since leaving the convent at the outbreak of war: as for a “boy in khaki”, no jolly fear, none of that sort of vulgarity for her! Besides, men were more or less awful, young and old. Mavis was a little ashamed of her father, whose bearded presence behind his reserve in the Town Department of the Moon Fire Office, where she now worked, was a cause of nervous depletion, whenever she saw him, or heard his name. Why could he not be like the other older men, Mr. Howlett, for example, who was always jolly, or little Mr. Journend?

  Doris, the younger girl, still at school, had no nervous qualms about her father. She was adamant towards him in her thoughts; she felt a blankness in his presence. She was set against him. Hers was a simple attitude of aversion, of frigidity, an attitude based on her mother’s distress from her earliest years, when she had defended her mother, in tears because of his complaining irritability, so often, in those days before Richard had decided to sleep alone. From loyalty to her mother Doris had never shifted from that rigid attitude of devoted love. She loved no-one else on earth; but her affection was given to Phillip, a steady and unwavering affection that had survived his early snubbings and occasional Richard-like contempt of her feelings. Both sisters knew that Phillip was Mother’s favourite; but Doris felt no jealousy, as Mavis did. Doris wanted him to be her friend, so, when one afternoon she went to practise a new song, Keep the Home Fires Burning, with Muriel Todd down the road, and saw a photograph of Helena Rolls in Muriel’s brother’s new slip-in book of snapshots, Doris promptly sneaked it when Muriel was out of the room, and hid it above the elastic band of one leg of her rough blue serge bloomers. Phillip deserved it; she knew how much he had longed to be invited to the Rolls’ Christmas parties, but had never been, because of his reputation for bad behaviour, for which Father had so often caned him. Dear old Phil! She understood him. What a pity he did not want cousin Polly for his sweetheart! In the old days he and Polly had been sweethearts; it was all Helena Rolls’ fault that he had changed——

  Thus the desperate attempt of Phillip to show some sort of courage in his own eyes led indirectly to a letter from his younger sister, with a snapshot of his Ideal (as he thought of her) in white tennis coat and skirt, smiling serenely, silhouetted against the summer sky upon the Hill. O joy, O beauty, O dear, dear England! He saw beyond the photograph to the core of his life, the woods and fields of Kent, the nesting birds and the nightingale, and the spirit which he had found away from his home, which had turned early to shadow, even as the war was now the wide reality of all shade.

  During the night following the day of the letter’s delivery, after a carrying fatigue ending in the small hours, he went off alone into the wood, and made himself a fire; and crouching over it, fanning slowly with the red chest-protector, was suspended in his dream of summer’s beauty, in a drowse of half-sleep, before realising that the toe-caps of his boots were hot and brittle, so near had they been to the fire. He got up to swing his arms, and while on his feet thought to place the photograph in the fork of a small chestnut tree, so that the slanting green whiteness of the flares swept across it, giving the illusion of Helena smiling out of successive waves of darkness. He felt strangely happy; cold was defeated by fire; the rising and falling notes of ricochet bullets spinning away from No Man’s Land in front were like the notes of whimbrel and golden plover passing in the night, while Helena smiled upon him, with eternal renewal, every time a new calcium light rose dazzling through the bare trees. There he sat until it was near the time of stand-to, an hour before the dawn.

  *

  Phillip reported sick when they went out of the line, and to his astonishment he saw Lance-corporal Collins waiting in the line before him. The Medical Officer, Major Willibald, was known to be a terror, a regular who wore both the South African War ribbons; he had a grim, curt sort of expression, as though accustomed to deal with criminals, or, at any rate, sharpers. Phillip was astonished to observe that Collins, a pained, quiet expression on his face, spoke almost pathetically of the agony of bleeding piles. Collins was very roughly examined, almost curtly, by the M.O., Phillip thought. He noticed that Collins’s jaw-muscles were working rapidly when Major Willibald said sharply to the R.A.M.C. corporal, “This case to the field hospital.” Shakily Collins pulled up his trousers; his face had sagged, as though he had gone limp, in order to keep down his joy. To Phillip’s further
surprise, he received a wink from Collins.

  When his turn came, Phillip was given a large pill, out of a box numbered 9, said to be nearly as explosive as a shrapnel shell. He was also given two days’ light duty, which covered the period in billets until the company was due to return to the trenches. It meant he was excused working parties, both by day and night. It was wonderful to be able to sit by the stove in the estaminet, and to sleep in the billet until the others returned. He threw the pill away—it was for constipation, anyway—and wrote several letters, in none of which was mentioned the so-called fight, as the newspaper story was all rot. He had not fought at all; he had fallen, pretending to be knocked out, in order not to have to go on with it.

  What Phillip did not know was that he had been knocked out.

  Chapter 3

  HEILIGE NACHT

  THE Diehard T-trench, of “unsavoury reputation” as the current phrase went, was a bad, water-logged trench on the left of the battalion front. Before the October fighting, it had been a draining ditch of the arable field now part of No Man’s Land. It lay parallel to, and just behind a quick-hedge bordering a lane fifty or sixty yards away from the eastern edge of the wood. Not only was it a natural drain, but as it projected into a salient in the German lines, it was enfiladed both down the stem and along the cross of the T. Everywhere it could be shot straight down from various points in the opposing trench. A fixed rifle dominated one part of it; at least two snipers had two other places “set”. The Diehard T-trench had a bad reputation with the London Highlanders ever since two men had been shot, one behind the other, one shorter than the other, by the same bullet, apparently, passing through the head of the first and the neck of the second. It was said to be an explosive bullet, for it broke a two-inch hole in the back of the skull of the first man, and, passing out, severed the neck and wind-pipe of the taller man standing behind.