A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  “I could do with some breakfast, Twinkle.”

  “Breakfast, sir? But I got your lunch all ready! No matter, sir, no matter! Breakfast you shall have, forthwith,” and going to the stove, the servant took up a canteen and returned to tip the contents into a plate. It was an oily mess of lumps of yellow fat and meat surrounded by cabbage leaves, dumplings made of flour and lumps of biscuit, onions, and watery potatoes.

  “Breakfast up, sir! Just a moment, sir, I’ve got a French flavour for you.”

  Phillip sat back, wonderfully warmed by whiskey, with loose lips and stretched legs, and watched while his servant covered the plateful with cheese shavings. “You’re not only a chef, you’re a conjurer,” he said, feeling he was falling to pieces. “Dinner into breakfast without even the wave of a napkin.” He raised his glass. “I drink your health, Chef!”

  “Thank you, sir, I don’t mind if I do,” promptly replied the Chef, helping himself to another quartern from the bottle. That, too, was as rapidly disposed of as the first, with appreciative suckings, and clappings of gums and lips.

  “Come on, sir, aren’t you ’ungry? My word, sir, you oughter’ve sin them rookies of the new Kitchener’s mob what come up this arternoon! They’d ’ad no food all day, and was wet through and proper flogged out by forced rowt marching. Thank Gawd we’ve got the Guards a-comin’ up, that’s what I said to misself when I see’d’m.”

  Like all old soldiers of the file who had seen much military endeavour come to nothing, the Chef went on to prophesy doom. The young soldier agreed.

  “I don’t like the look of the whole business, sir. It gives me the shakes, all them rookies goin’ in for the first time, arter three nights’ forced foot-sloggin’ on the pavé, and no grub under their belts, and none seen a shot fired in anger. It ain’t Sir Garnett.” He took the bottle, and helped himself. “Here’s your very good health, sir. Aren’t you ’ungry, sir? What would you fancy like, for afters? I got prunes, and tinned milk, and a cupper kawfy. If I’d’ve knowed you was comin’ I’d’ve got the old gal to frizzle you hup han rhum souffle like the bellarenas and the ballet boys used to take afore the shows at the old Crawl fer Pardon, that’s rhymin’ slang for Covent Garden, sir, wanting something light, to settle their nerves. They was the days, or rather nights! Twinkle me boy, they used to say, Twinkle, they’d say, in their foreigner’s lingo, they was all furriners you see, sir, cor strike a light, what ’abits some’v’m ’ad, proper Oscar boys they was, talk about nancies, some on’m was jealous’ve me, sir, would you believe it, jealous o’ Twinkle! Old enuff to be all their farvers! The chorus boys all come, fur coats over tights, ’ungry as ’unters, into my ’Am an’ Beef, and wolfed thicks in the interval, that’s ’ow I got to know ’em, you see, sir, they give me their confidences, like a lot of kids they was. What you lookin’ at, sir, suthin’ in me mutton ’ot-pot?”

  “Only a hair. Your sheep must have tails like horses’, Chef.”

  “Can’t ’elp a little fing like that in war-time, sir, it must’ve come off’r butcher’s daughter, Marie, she’s called, sir. Eat up, sir, stoke up. What about those rookies comin’ up, arter nights o’ forced marchin’, on empty bellies, sir?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, certainly. By the way, surely this is a horse hair? Perhaps Marie’s father was a horse?”

  “It must’ve got in somehow,” remarked the Chef, thrusting his greasy hand before Phillip’s face and taking the hair away, to hold it up to the light of three candles before dropping it on the floor and remarking, “Nature’s a wonderful thing, sir, to my way o’ thinkin’. Didn’t you never ’ear as ’ow eels growed out’r ’ossairs, sir? I sin ’m wriggling in the Wandle near Wandsworth when I were a boy. Many a time I’ve taken of’m home in a jemjar, a proper mystery, it was, them ’ossairs a-wrigglin’ away accordin’ to nature’s law. Makes yer fink, don’t it? Yes, eels come aht’r ’ossairs.”

  “So you think the father of an eel is a horse, Chef? Well, I think I’ll have the prunes now, I’m not very hungry.”

  “What? You ain’t goin’ to eat yer plateful, sir? Wiv all them fresh dried veg I wangled aht’v A.S.C., sir? Go on, ’ave a try, sir! Must keep yer strength up, you know.” The old fellow stifled a yawn. “Manners, Twinkle!” he reproved himself. “Kripes, I could do wiv some kip, sir. I ain’t slepp a wink for nights, what wiv them Long Toms a-crackin’ off double each time just be’ind me an’ liftin’ the tiles over me ’ead. Go on, sir, stoke up! It’s me special mutton stoo!”

  “No thanks, I really can’t eat any more. It’s too fat!” He laughed to an imagined Desmond. “I’d like the prunes. I’ll put the milk on myself, thanks all the same, Chef!”

  “Very good, sir,” exclaimed the Chef. “Just as you say, sir. Prunes, sir, now comin’ up. Very good for the bowels, sir. Cawfee to follow, sir, tout suite.”

  “I’ll put the milk in, Chef!” Phillip didn’t want the blowing-act to be repeated, the old man’s breath upon the milk, as on a previous occasion with prunes. To divert his mind off the blowing he offered him another drink.

  “Come on, Chef, help yourself to a spot of old man whiskey.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the Chef, promptly putting down the tin of milk. “Here’s hopin’, sir!” Down went the raw spirit in the skinny neck. “Now, sir, polish off them prunes. Very ’ealth-giving, sir. Now for some cream——” He seized the tin before Phillip could get it, and put his lips to one of the two holes punched in the otherwise unopened end. This was the servant’s idea, to keep away flies, which swarmed in the billet.

  “Can’t let you do my work, sir, I know my duty, sir. Many’s the time I waited in the officers’ mess in India, sir, and served the young gentlemen just out from Belaite, sir—what the ignorant calls Blighty today, with no knowledge of Hindustani.”

  No cream coming from the yellow-crusted hole, the Chef shook the tin, muttered, “Them flies bin an’ bunged it up agen,” listened at one hole, for some reason; then, putting the other hole to his lips, he drew a deep breath and blew with bulbed cheeks so that a jet of cream was directed expertly upon the prunes. They were watery prunes; why didn’t he soak them, as suggested, for twenty-four hours, as Mother did, to get the rich, dark brown sweet juice? Now they would be tasteless, the juice mere cold coloured water.

  “There you are, sir,” and putting the plate before Phillip, he stood back, shaking the empty tin. “Not a drop missed the target, sir! Go on, sir, stoke up, it’s very health-giving, is cream.”

  Phillip began to laugh to himself, as he thought of a shag sitting on its favourite rocks. If only Desmond were there with him, to share the fun!

  “What, don’t you want no prunes neither, sir?”

  “I don’t feel like any food just now. By the way, you old rogue, about those sandwiches you have been giving me—where do you get the beef from? Pinch it from the ration dump?”

  “Me, sir? Me half-inch and get the wrong side of the red-caps, sir? Not Twinkle! Nearly fifty years of good conduct, sir, why, I wouldn’t be so daft as to spoil me record, sir.”

  “But don’t you supply that estaminet, what’s it called, the Demi Lune, with beef sandwiches? Come on, where does it all come from, you sprucer?”

  “Promise you won’t let on, sir, if I tell you? Well, me and a business partner oo is a butcher in civvie street do a little tradin’ with a Frenchie what buys up ’osses, sir, a nice clean beast the ’oss, a clean feeder like a bullock, sir, flesh comin’ from good oats an’ ’ay, sir, what more could you want?”

  “Where does the French knacker get ’em from, Chef?”

  “That ain’t my business, sir. I arst no questions, and get told no lies, in a manner of speakin’.”

  “Killed by shell-fire, you mean, Chef?”

  “What cleaner end to an ’oss, sir, than a sudden shell? It’s as clean as the sled on its skull in a knacker’s yard, in my opinion. Why waste good meat? Corn-fed beef, or corn-fed ’oss, where’s the difference? An Irishman’ll eat a do
nkey, a Hitalian a pussy cat, diddekais eat ’edge’ogs—everyone to ’is own taste, sir. I’ll tell you what, sir, only a little while ago, just before you come in, all the lot I’d cut up for tonight in the Demi Lune went like ’ot cakes, bought by an officer for ’is men, sir. My Gor, they’re sending out the gran-fers now. When I went to Nooless Mines this mornin’, to get them veg you refoosed, I seed the column ’alted by a redcap, and an old gineral on a ’oss come up from the rear, a-roarin’ and a-bawlin’, because the redcap wouldn’t let the head of the column carry on without a pass. ’E got a move-on, ’e put everyone in sight under arrest. I recognised ’is face, ’e were a proper hot-tempered bloke in India, a proper broth of a boy. Often I see ’im in Quetta when I were a boy just ’listed, sir, a real ole pig-sticker ’e were. ’E were in the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, we all called ’im ‘Crasher’.”

  “Crasher, did you say? Brigadier-General Joliffe-Howard?”

  “That’s ’im, sir! ‘Crasher’ by name an’ crasher by nature! When I see’d ’im gallopin’ up this morning, I says to myself, ‘That’s caused it, Twinkle, me boy,’ I says. ‘It’s all up wi’ the old Alleyman now,’ I says to myself. Nobody can’t kill Crasher. ’E’ll never die—’e’ll only fade away—but if ’e ’as ’is way, that little lot under ’im ’ll soon be with the Underground ’Oozars.”

  “He was commanding the territorial brigade I left little more than a fortnight ago in England! They had no idea, then, I’m sure, of leaving for the front! Well, I’m damned!” exclaimed Phillip. “Look here, I must go and have a look at them. Fancy Crasher and old Strawballs, and all those others, out here! What good can they possibly be, at their age?”

  In the excitement the Chef helped himself to more whiskey. He poured it down his throat; then squaring his shoulders, while a wide grin split his face, he began to hold forth with his real personality, hitherto partly suppressed in the presence of an officer: the old soldier freed by drink from the old soldier cowed by discipline.

  “There’s cunnin’ in an old dog, what takes the place o’ life, sir. Though I must admit that the other orficers looked a proper lot of twots, all waitin’ there, wiv the big push goin’ on, and them the reserves what were needed, and all allowin’ of their-selves to be ’alted by a pushin’ redcap because the leading C.O. bin a naughty boy and gone and lost ’is late-night pass. They talk about man-power, why not the women to do the clurkin’ down at the base, then they can send that little lot o’ skrim-shankin’ fireside lancers and Royal Stay backs up ’ere wiv’ a rifle and baynit——”

  But Phillip was not listening. He sat still, while within him various feelings were in conflict—curiosity, desire to show off his staff brassard, warm friendliness, caution based on self-interest—but they could not touch him, he was still on gas; besides, he had been placed on light duty. Even so——

  “Twinkle, get me a good packet of sandwiches! I’m going back for an hour or two, just to have a look at Crasher and Co.! I’m on light duty for four days, so tell the senior sergeant to carry on. I’d like to have a last look at that lot. My God, they’ve got a nasty surprise coming to them. Fill my water-bottle three-quarters full of chlorinated water, then fetch me a dry pair of socks. Quick!”

  When he was ready to go he topped up his water-bottle with whiskey, and slinging it with haversack and map-case outside his mackintosh, went out of the billet, walking-stick in right hand, brassard on arm; and coming to the square, walked beside the tramping column of weary infantrymen with long strides that overtook the files continually stopping and breaking to allow down-moving transport and ammunition limbers to pass them; and coming eventually to the cross-roads over the main road to Lens he arrived level with the halted “poor old ‘Cantuvellaunians’,” recognising the weary, bedraggled faces of many of his old acquaintances, including Chick, O’Connor, Captain Rhodes, Infant Hercules, and others. He avoided looking at them directly and walked on, until he came to the head of the column, and saw Jonah the Whale, and Strawballs talking together. “It’s bloody rot,” he heard the colonel say querulously, “taking away our cookers!” Not wanting to be recognised, Phillip walked on.

  Chapter 23

  HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

  THE reserves which had come upon the edge of the battlefield (as Phillip was returning to his billet) were tired, hungry, and bewildered. For the past five days two divisions of untried troops fresh from England had been marching from the area of the Channel coast. They had paraded each evening at 6 p.m. and continued along the roads bordered by poplars until shortly before sunrise each morning. Many of the battalion transport sections were without experience of horses and driving; battalion, brigade, and even divisional staffs were likewise without experience of moving masses of men in the field. Some brigades had less than half a dozen officers and N.C.O.s who had seen service in the present war; in the brigade commanded by “Crasher” Joliffe-Howard not one man or officer had been in France since the war.

  The night marches had been ordered lest the columns—each division took fifteen miles of road when on the march—be seen by German reconnaissance aircraft. Troops had remained in billets during each day.

  On the night of the 24th the divisions were lying about twenty miles from the battlefield. At 7 p.m., the time when Phillip was in the front assembly trench with his section being placed at the gas emplacements, the leading brigades started their fifth night march, a short one of from between seven and eleven miles, a distance taking, normally, from three to four hours. The march took double that time. All along the narrow roads to Noeux-les-Mines and Béthune there were prolonged halts. Horses drawing wagons were unable to get up slight hills. The infantry columns were marching in fours; there was a yard to spare on one side of the road only, then came the deep ditches. The roads used had been marked Down Traffic Only; convoys of lorries and motor ambulances, with lines of horse wagons, were continually passing the upgoing troops, who were forced to walk in files beside the road, often scrambling in and out of ditches. At every cross-roads were blocks, causing the broken columns to lose touch, and some even to turn off at right angles in error. There were level crossings with long white painted poles across the road, while trains shunted, whistled, stopped, rolled on slowly. At one crossing there was a delay of one and a half hours due to an accident on the line.

  Corps headquarters had made arrangements for the free passage of marching troops with the French railway authorities, but the French could not carry out the time-table. Those portions of broken columns which had lost their way and taken wrong turnings came back and found themselves in the great congestion of heavy supply transport behind an imminent battle. Thus very tired infantry, many with no hot meal at the end of the march, since the travelling steel cookers had been lost, lay down just before dawn under hedges and beside ditches and tried to sleep; but hardly were their eyes shut against the light of a drizzling dawn revealing distant pyramids and dumps when the guns opened up, forty minutes before the battle was joined.

  The reserves, which the First Army commander fighting the battle had requested, again and again, to be two thousand yards behind the British front line, were then six miles back, and in no fit condition to march on until they had rested.

  They had been kept back deliberately by Field-Marshal Sir John French.

  *

  The field-marshal was sixty-three years of age. His body was heavy on its frame, with abdominal muscles sagging from desk-work, not from indulgence in food. He had reached the time of life when a man reflects rather than acts; and for over a year of war he had been continually frustrated. He had lived with grief: the flower of his army had been destroyed. Anxiety gnawed him, a fox under his cloak.

  During early September the field-marshal had passed on to his First Army commander, the spare and active Sir Douglas Haig, Lord Kitchener’s direction for the battle—“… to act with all energy … even though by so doing we may suffer very heavy losses”—while in the field-marshal’s mind were grave doubts of
the success of an attack which he had been ordered to undertake against his judgment, and with too few guns and gun ammunition, and too few men. The field-marshal had been under great and continual strain for over a year; and now constant dread of committing the men under him too deeply—together with a wish to keep raw troops out of battle if the attack was shattered on the strong German defences as previous attacks in the first half of 1915 had been shattered—at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert and Givenchy—possessed him.

  Against these sombre thoughts a bright, contrary idea persisted with the field-marshal. If all went well in the opening stages of the battle, he, by keeping the reserves under his own direct orders, would be able to give the coup de grâce to the enemy. Put in at the right time, used with the Cavalry Corps held within his own command to pursue the enemy’s disorganised forces across the plain of Flanders, he could take the Germans in flank before they could reorganise behind the Scheldt.

  Reflection can, with an ageing man who has suffered many strains, become rumination; and rumination, a vice. The field-marshal, for various reasons within himself, had decided to keep the general reserve for the battle behind the area of battle. Thus, on Y/Z night, the two divisions, tired from England, had lain up to twenty miles behind the British front line.

  General Haig, who was to fight the battle, had more than once suggested that they be moved nearer. He was supported by General Foch, commanding the 10th French Army on his right, who had proposed to the field-marshal that they be brought to within two thousand yards of the corps reserves (which, in fact, did not exist: for the six divisions of the two corps comprising Haig’s First Army were all to be used in the assault; and he had no reserves whatsoever).

  General Haig once more urged that the two divisions be held ready, by daybreak of zero day, to move forward directly into the battle of pursuit. To this the field-marshal had replied merely that he did not agree: he, as commander-in-chief, would keep the whole of the general reserve in the Lillers area, sixteen miles back, until the course of the battle was known. The field-marshal’s two-mindedness in the matter revealed itself in the words of his formal order to Sir Douglas Haig—“Once the enemy’s defences have been pierced … the offensive must be continued with the utmost determination directly to the front …” while at the same time the field-marshal kept the reserves back.