The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  Looking in the cellar through a grating level with the street, Phillip saw four officers within, seated at a table, playing cards by candlelight. A whiskey bottle and glasses were on the table. Coloured pictures of adorable girls from English magazines were on the walls. The inmates of another world were leaning back in their chairs smoking and throwing down cards. O fortunate inmates! Probably they were field-gunners off duty; their battery was among the ruins, their guns under roofs of timber baulks and sandbags. If only he were one of them! Then he thought of his men; pray God he did not let them down.

  Beyond the church was a wooden bridge over the river, then a track across low ground marked by a line of hurricane lamps painted black with small green spots stretching away up the gentle slope of Usna Valley to the horizon of flares.

  *

  Along the front to be assaulted, of more than twenty miles, from the river Somme in the south, to Fonquevillers in the north—opposite the most powerful German fortress of Gommecourt Park and village—fourteen British infantry divisions were moving into the line. Hundreds of columns were a-foot, on routes marked by tapes, posts, and lanterns.

  There was little enemy shelling in retaliation to the usual British night bombardment; but on the northern wing of the attack, from behind the fortress of Gommecourt Park, its wood and village, two divisions, the London and the North Midland, suffered many casualties as their assembly trenches were blown in. Elsewhere only slight enemy shelling “confirmed the belief that the seven-day preliminary British bombardment had done its work”: that trenches and dug-outs were levelled, wire shot to pieces or buried; the garrisons, cut off from relief and supply, demoralised.

  *

  At Ovillers Post, where two tracks crossed, the Brigade-major was standing near the entrance leading down into the ground.

  “Who are you?”

  He acknowledged Phillip’s reply with relief, and asked what had caused the delay.

  “Held up on the road into Albert, sir, and again up the track. The men found the weights somewhat heavy, sir. Shall I lead on?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. You know your assembly trench, and your duties. Good luck,” he added, as an afterthought, as he waited tensely to check the next platoon.

  “All the best,” added another voice. It came from Paul, now second-in-command of the battalion.

  The flares from the German lines in front cast pale shadows of laden men. Overhead the copper driving-bands of heavy howitzer shells, spinning up into the height of the sky, made bass dronings, while under them 18-pounder shrapnel, shedding sparks of burning fuses, tore screaming away east, to burst as red stars pricking the horizon, while yet the 9.2-inch howitzer shells were below wallowing-point at the tops of their curves, eight miles up.

  *

  “With so much stuff going over, it will be a cake-walk,” said the Adjutant to Phillip, as he followed Lt.-Col. Kingsman round the line of the battalion front. To each platoon commander the C.O. read a message from the Fourth Army Commander; after which Captain Milman, cheerful and dapper as ever—“Little Marmaduke” to the men—told Phillip that Zero hour was at 7.30 a.m., the intensive bombardment to begin an hour earlier.

  Watches were synchronised. They were already advanced by one hour on Greenwich Mean Time, as the new Summer Time had begun in the B.E.F. at 11 p.m. on 14 June.

  “Soup will be up shortly,” said Captain Bason. It would keep hot for some hours, he added, in the new containers.

  “There’s one container for each platoon. The C.O. thinks that hot pea soup will be more staying than rum. See that it’s dished out to your blokes about ten minutes before the guns let rip at half-past six, will you, old sport?” He went on to say that the rum was to be kept for later on in the day, when they were at their final objective. “What do you think of Rawly’s message? He’s changed his tune somewhat, hasn’t he?”

  Phillip did not say what he thought: that “Spectre” had been right.

  When Bason had gone he put the rum jar beside his rifle, and telling his men to get some shut-eye, seated himself on two petrol tins containing the platoon’s water for the next forty-eight hours, closed his eyes and tried to sleep—one of nearly three and a half thousand temporary British infantry officers, of the rank of captain and below, in the assembly trenches cut in chalk.

  *

  Phillip sat on the petrol tin, repeating one of the verses of Into Battle, in order to fortify himself against the fears that hovered on the borders of his mind.

  Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so

  That it be not the Destined Will.

  Try as he might to hold himself firm in this belief, a persistent picture arose before him, crying as it were upon him with angry edges, of the poet bursting with a stock-whip into the room of another undergraduate, furnished with oriental silks and cushions: a man who did not play games, but was an “aesthete”, whose father was a Bombay merchant-banker named Sassoon, and a friend of King Edward the Seventh.

  Then there was the case of another nouveau riche Jew who had been ragged in the Cavalry Barracks at York during May 1915, and who had committed suicide, about the time that he himself was being ragged at Heathmarket by Baldersby, senior subaltern in the first officers’ mess he had joined. Baldersby had led on the pack of subalterns while blowing a hunting horn, before they had stripped him naked and beaten him. Had Baldersby suspected himself of having Jewish blood?

  For Father said that Grandfather Turney was a Jew, who had taken the Gaultshire name of Turney, and then made friends with some of the real Turney family and so bluffed people that he was English. That was rot, anyway, for Cousin Polly’s Grannie was Gran’pa’s cousin, and she had said that Gran’pa’s forebears had farmed in Gaultshire for centuries. In spite of this, Aunt Victoria Maddison had persisted in declaring that the reason why Father did not get on with Mother was because she had Jewish blood, and therefore belonged to a world entirely different from that of the English Maddisons.

  At the same time, Father hated the Germans, although his own mother had been German. As for Aunt Victoria, she was very religious, and a Protestant, and yet she disliked, even feared, all Catholics; she even thought that they were barred from Heaven. Yet Jesus had been a Jew! And He had, moreover, certainly ragged some people, and with a whip—the local bankers sitting in the Temple!

  Phillip looked at his wristlet watch; it was getting on for half-past one: in five hours the guns would open up. Quick! Quick! He must settle his mind now: if he did not, Fear would tear him apart: if the worst happened, and he broke down, he would have to shoot himself. If only he had dared to tell his fears to Father Aloysius, when he had had the chance!

  But what were his fears? He must know them, if he was to master them.

  Julian Grenfell hunting Philip Sassoon; the cavalry subalterns in York hunting Otto Beit’s son; Baldersby hunting himself; himself hunting Albert Hawkins. Ah, the missing link! Albert Hawkins! Now the chain was complete! Albert Hawkins waiting behind the garden fence to see Mavis, long ago! “Go on, Peter, give him a good lesson!” Albert Hawkins had stood still and let himself be hit by Peter Wallace until his face was woeful with tears and his new butterfly tie spoiled by his own blood.

  That was far worse than what Baldersby had done; anyway, he had deserved the ragging he had got at Heathmarket, for his conceit and bad manners. Why then was he worried because a high-spirited poet had merely cracked a stock-whip at someone he did not like? He had been only nineteen at the time; it was some years before Into Battle had been written: had he, too, perhaps grieved in retrospect when he thought of how he had bullied the man who ‘was not English’, and who now, by the irony of fate was, as Kingsman had told him, Aide-de-Camp to Sir Douglas Haig; while Julian, and young Beit, and Albert Hawkins, and Peter Wallace, lay in their graves?

  Phillip prayed for forgiveness; then he got up and went to see how he might help his men, each in a separate loneliness.

  Summer stars shone over the battlefield, owls called in the woods abov
e the marshes of the Ancre; while away in the west, trains loaded from the pit-heads around Béthune were rolling southwards to Paris, hauling trucks of coal for the hotels, factories, power-stations and living rooms of the Gay City, at the rate of one train every half hour of the day and the night.

  *

  At 2.45 a.m., Berlin time, the German Reserve Regiment in its battle headquarters underground at Contalmaison, three thousand yards behind La Boisselle, reported a portion of the British Fourth Army Commander’s message, which had been sent out by field-telephone to the troops under his command. The message had been picked up by the Moritz overhearing post in the German lines immediately south of La Boisselle.

  “In wishing all ranks good luck the Army Commander desires to impress on all infantry units the supreme importance of helping one another and holding on tight to every yard of ground gained. The accurate and sustained fire of the artillery during the bombardment should greatly assist the task of the infantry.”

  This message told the German commander that the general offensive was to begin that morning.

  Orders were given for the machine-gun garrison to evacuate the festung, or strong point known to the British as Y Sap. Under the festung, as the Germans knew, was the mine driven by the 179th Tunnelling Company, to be touched off just before Zero hour, to pile up around its crater lips loamy earth high enough to obstruct the otherwise perfect field of fire of machine-gunners across the bare, open ground of Mash Valley.

  The German machine-gunners were now waiting well away from Y Sap, in deep dug-outs behind the trench running east and parallel to the Bapaume Road, thus facing Mash Valley at right-angles, well beyond the mine area.

  *

  The steely light above the north-west horizon, beyond the valley of the Ancre and Athuille wood, had scarcely begun to fade when a new light, as of an electrified and glowing energy, began to rise in the north-east, over the Bapaume Road and the fortress of La Boiselle. Soon larks were rising above no-man’s-land, eager to see the sun.

  With the lark-song came the hot soup containers, each slung on a pole borne on the shoulders of two men. Phillip saw his sergeant, and told him to dish it out at 6 a.m.

  *

  The larks, small of impulse, had long since dropped to feed and rest among the poppies and marigolds of the open land (where still the grey stubble of the 1914 corn harvest was to be seen in places) when the sun rose above the serrated rim of the east. One whole hour and a quarter had to pass before the concentrated bombardment started. Never did time knot so tightly within the human diaphragm. Phillip tried to take interest in the outward scene, but his thoughts were of home. Would the morning be fine on the Hill, so clear and sunny and green in the early mornings of summer? At home they would still be sleeping. In the Valley of the Lyn the amber waters would be running cold and clear. Summer in England! It was as though he saw through thick plate glass soon to shatter into splinters that would pierce all his body.

  At a quarter to six Pimm brought a mug of hot tea, with the remark,

  “Proper day for a race, sir.”

  Heathmarket, Godolphin House, The Belvoir Arms, trainers on the Severals, strings of bloodstock walking back to stables. Soon the July races, Rolls-Royce and Daimler, old gentlemen and young officers, society girls in summery hats—just the same in England, goodbye, goodbye.

  He must talk about horses, to keep his mind from fastening upon death’s bitter dark in the spoke-burning sunshine. High up in the blue, a flight of scout aeroplanes was flying towards the east. For a moment he felt heavy as stone.

  “Yes sir, as I was saying, when the baskets are opened——”

  Baskets? Why must he talk? For God’s sake leave me alone.

  “—up they all flies, sir——”

  “What, horses? Oh, you mean pigeons. I see. How many have we got, did you say?” At all costs, keep the fox gnawing his guts under his cloak hidden.

  “Four birds, two blue chequers, a red chequer, and a mealie. Nice lookin’ birds, sir, all fed. Now as I was saying—up they all flies, and ’eads for ’ome after a few circles, to get direction. Some knows it at once. I can, myself, tell a good bird by the eye it has. Would you credit that I can tell a bird’s powers by its eyes, sir? Or its many eyes, for a pigeon has three in one, sir. Just you take a look at Jimmy here’s eye, see the orb and circles, sir, two circles there be, one for range and t’other for intelligence, and locked up in the apple, sir. But it’s in the ’ollow bones of the wings where their lungs extend to, that there’s the sense of homing, sir, though some say it is inside the skull, or the little bones in the ears, filled with spirit and a hair bubble, sir.”

  “Spirit? What sort of spirit?”

  “There’s no telling, sir, but Sergeant Jones thinks it’s like the hair bubble in a joiner’s level, keeps the bird on a level keel, and magnetically on the course for ’ome.”

  What rot it was, a bird flying magnetically.

  “How very interesting. Now I think I ought to go and see Sergeant Jones. Keep an eye on the water cans, and the rum, and see that no one touches it, or the rum jar.”

  The platoon sergeant had spent part of the night straightening up part of the trench wall, digging at great and continuous speed. He had removed, he claimed, seven cubic yards, from ground level down, in the four hours of darkness, picking and shovelling without help, and leaving the wall as plumb as any mason would want to see it. At the end of the self-imposed task Sergeant Jones was as fresh and cheerful as at the start.

  “Gives a bit more room for the boys to stretch out in like, you see, sir!”

  Thereupon Sergeant Jones’ manner changed; he became confidential, almost intimate, as with a slight knock of the back of his hand on Phillip’s ribs, as though he were still a Devon small-holder striking a bargain, he said, “Yurr!” while lifting his nose to suggest a withdrawal out of hearing by the others. His speech, too, changed in places, back to the Devon brogue.

  “It be one of the bombers, sir, Howells. His pluck’s left ’im, sir. ’Owells never had much, but what there was has gone and left ’im.”

  Phillip had particularly noticed Howells because he had a look of cousin Willie about him. He was a young soldier with delicate face and features, and large brown eyes which usually were reflective, even sad.

  “He be down yurr, sir.”

  Howells was lying back against the bottom wall of the meticulously plumb trench, looking as though he had been hit. His face under the sun-burn was a greenish-white. His eyes stared fixedly. Other men were standing and sitting on the floor of the trench, smoking, talking, or with arms folded, resting.

  “What’s the matter?” said Phillip, stooping down beside Howells, Had his face looked like that, before advancing up through L’Enfer wood to the crest of Messines in October 1914? What would have been the best way, then, to help him over his terror? “I think we all feel pretty bad, Howells. So don’t feel that you’re all alone.”

  The large eyes showed blue-white as they looked at him. Phillip bent down to hear what was said. Howells had to swallow several times before he could speak. “I can’t go on, sir. I feel bad.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen, sir. I gave a wrong age, please sir!”

  “Are you thinking of your mother, Howells?”

  “Sort of, sir. I feel all giddy and sick when I stand up, and my legs give way, sir.”

  “You’re not the only one, Howells. Try not to think about anything, that’s the best thing, I find. I’ve been just like you, the first time over. Anyway, if you feel too awful, stay here in the trench when we go over the plonk. I know how you feel; I am scared stiff myself, and look to all you chaps to help me. Can’t you think of how you will be able to help them with your grenades? They may make all the difference. We need your help, Howells.”

  The boy seemed not to be hearing. He stared sickly in front of him. Sergeant Jones again beckoned Phillip with his nose. “He’s got on a bullet-proof vest, sir, that’s part of the trouble
. He bain’t got the frame vor carry that and his clobber, as well as his sand-bag of thirty-two Mills bombs, sir. He was crying, coming up the Green Track last night.”

  “I’ve told him to stay behind, if he can’t face it, sergeant.”

  “Yes sir,” said the sergeant, absently. Then, “The others don’t like him, sir. They say he won’t muck in with them, as us says, sir. He’s greedy with his parcels, and won’t share and share alike.”

  “That’s because his mother sent them, sergeant. It’s fatal to imagine your mother in everything from home.”

  “Us be all in this together, sir.”

  “But Howells doesn’t feel in it yet. He’s still very young. What he needs is friendship, not scorn.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How are the others?”

  “They’ll do, sir. They don’t believe all they’ve been told about a walk-over, you know. Some talk about the old Colonel being right on Jerry’s deep dug-outs, sir. Others say us be starting too far back. But you know what talk is. They say ‘a leary cart maketh the most noise,’ dont’m? But they won’t let ’ee down, sir.”

  “I only hope I don’t let you chaps down!”

  “No fear of that, sir. The men know a proper officer when they see one.” How easily taken in they are, thought Phillip, while Sergeant Jones went on, “Only they say it’s a long way to go, sir.”

  So they know it, too, thought Phillip. As though he had read his thought, small-holder Jones came near, and lifting his nose up in beckoning, struck him with the back of his hand on the ribs and said, “Yurr! The men’d rather get close up to Jerry while ’e’s keeping ’is ’ead down, like. Then again, with all the clobber they have to carry, sir, they feel they can’t get down quickly to give covering fire, if it’s needed, and then get up again. It be worryin’ of them, like.”