The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “Oh dear, I do hope—yes I expect it will be all right,” answered Hetty, not wanting to upset his happy mood. “Your bacon is almost ready, Dickie. It won’t be a moment.”

  “The mid-day editions of the evening papers will have it, I’ve no doubt.”

  He ate his bacon happily, and helped himself from his especial pot of Cooper’s Oxford marmalade.

  “I shall be home early today, by the way, about half-past two. It was my Saturday off, but I agreed to forego it until the Midsummer rush of renewals is over.” He looked at his half-hunter gold watch, thinking that he might have a turn or two upon the Hill before descending for his train. At that moment he heard Mavis walking along the passage to the bathroom.

  “Now I want to clean my teeth, Mavis must of course choose this very moment to lock herself in the bathroom! All this prinking and prettying of herself is ridiculous! Why cannot she come down to breakfast at the proper time, like any normal, decent person?”

  “Well Dickie, she waited until you had had your cold tub. She didn’t want to be there when you came back.”

  “That is no reason for lying in bed, and on such a beautiful morning, too! Why, bless my soul, in my young days, my sisters and I——”

  Richard went into the front room, and sat down, tense with resentment that he should have to wait to get into his own bathroom; and his wife’s attempt to make things easier, by saying that he had plenty of spare time before leaving for the station, only added to his irritation. His routine was put out; the habits formed during thirty-five years in the City, when never once had he defaulted, as he put it, by being late at the office. If only he had been twenty years younger, or even ten, then he might by now be in France, living a comparatively free and spacious life, instead of slaving to keep going a family that had no understanding of responsibilities and duties.

  The brushing of teeth, preceded by work with a rubber band to clear spaces of food, made him feel less burdened by himself, but when he walked up the gully again, into quiet air, romance was gone from the Hill.

  Phillip was then lying down in no-man’s-land, with the fragments of his platoon. He had been going forward, carrying the Lewis gun which Sergeant Jones had dropped on being hit, when an apparition in coils of white smoke had run to him, screaming to be saved. It collapsed and hung to his legs. The sandbag of phosphorus grenades carried by Howells had caught fire, to enclose him in crackling loops and spurtings of white thick smoke. His tunic smouldered; fuming ulcers ate into his flesh; he ran to his officer for help. Phillip tried to knock away phosphorous fragments like broken nuts, which were dividing and sub-dividing on Howell’s uniform and equipment. His efforts were vain. Shrieking, Howells began to roll and squirm upon the ground. Phillip was about to turn the Lewis on him when he felt himself to be scalded all down his left leg. He saw Pimm sitting up, the water can torn open a few yards away, and thought that a shell had burst near and heated the water to steam, which had scalded him. He was now behind the front wave, and seeing this he hurried on. Shouldering the Lewis he tried to catch up, raging and cursing incoherently, beyond the fury of fear, followed by hoarsely yelling men. He turned to tell them, with gestures of his free arm, not to bunch—to spread out—they would draw more fire—when he felt a terrific blow on his behind, and fell over. He thought that he had been struck by a piece of shell coming from afar; the weight of iron had knocked him over, and numbed his leg. Obsessed with the idea of getting on with the Lewis gun, to give covering fire for his platoon, he started to get up, but his leg gave way, as though it were not there. The lump of iron had obviously numbed a nerve. He lay a few moments, waiting for strength to come back. When it did not, he crawled into the crater of a shell which had blackened the cracked chalk.

  His left hand was smarting and looking at it he saw the flesh blistered in spots and the centre of the blisters stuck with bits of smoking phosphorous. Dare he pour water on the biting, throbbing sores, or was it only oil that would stop them burning? There was oil in a brass cylinder in his rifle-stock—where was his rifle, the thought passed in his mind as he tried to push the Lewis gun over the torn lip of the crater. Had phosphorus been kept in the laboratory at school in oil, or water? If only he could remember. Phosphorus burned on contact with oxygen in the air, but had it, like metallic sodium and potassium, power to break up water into hydrogen and oxygen, and release the choking white fumes of Diphosphorus Pentoxide?

  The knowledge-pictures from the past occupied his mind for an instant only. They were succeeded by a raging, tearful complaint that he must catch up with the few figures advancing through the smoke in front. The nerves of his leg were still numbed, so he tried to raise the Lewis gun upon its steel prong in order to give covering fire from the lip of the crater, but he could not lift it so far, and this made him cry. Lying back, he realised that his trouser leg was soaked not with water, but with blood.

  Opening the front of his trousers, he saw a small blue puncture near the top of the thigh. Experience told him that the main wound would be at the back; feeling down his trousers he touched with his finger tips what seemed to be an enormous hole, as ragged as it was sticky. This made him feel weak and sick, so he lay back until he felt better, when he tried to break his glass iodine capsule while lifting up his leg to pour the iodine into the hole. While he was doing this a shower of earth fell over him from a machine-gun burst traversing to catch what he imagined to be the other waves coming up. He heard shouting, screams, and hoarse cries under the harsh bands of metal tearing the air. He gave up.

  When he recovered he pulled up his trousers upon the wound, after picking earth from it. The iodine capsule was lost. Figures charged past the sky-line. He heard a yell of Erin go bragh! and thought that the Liverpool Irish had come up. They were in the reserve brigade. He crawled to the lip and looked over. They were all running together, in bunches, and falling fast. He shouted and cried, pulled at the Lewis gun, and fell back helplessly, sobbing.

  He was next aware of someone beside him. The face was far away, then it came clearer. The face was reading a breviary, the lips praying. “Where are you hit?” The little book was put in a pocket.

  He saw that it was Father Aloysius, and said, “In my leg. It’s not much, but I can’t walk, Father. What’s happened to the others, do you know?”

  “We seem to be held up. Are you sure you are all right? Let me look.” After looking he said, “I must leave you. Lie quiet, won’t you. Don’t drink any water until the stretcher bearers have got you down to the Aid Post. Promise me?”

  “My bottle is gone anyway, Father, but I promise you. Is my intestine showing?”

  “No. But there’s a remote chance that it may be punctured. You’ll be all right if you don’t drink. Now I must go.”

  Earth spat into the crater. “Please don’t leave just yet, Father.”

  “There are others, my son.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Father. I meant the sniper might get you. He is lying out in front somewhere, not far, judging by the crack.”

  “Why, you are Phillip Maddison! I did not recognise you. Bless you for your concern.” He smiled and said, “Do you remember the Rough Man’s poem, Phillip

  ‘Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so

  That it be not the Destined Will.’

  “Let me go instead, Father, I can crawl. Look, I am all right now! I can get to them. Anyway, let me come with you. I must see what happened to my chaps, honestly, Father. I can’t bear lying here, when they need me.” He began to cry with weakness.

  “No, you lie here, dear boy, and take your rest, for the journey you will have to make when the darkness comes. Now I must go on. May I say one thing to you? The Virgin and Child is not a symbol of what should be, but of what is, Phillip. That Love is in the world always, waiting for all men. It is the love of God. Now I must go. Good luck!”

  *

  The glacis between the fortresses of Ovillers and La Boisselle was strewn with men of all misshapes and sizes, lying amids
t blind shells of many calibres.

  Later, the Corps assessment of casualties in the division which had attacked immediately north of the Bapaume road were: 99 officers and 1,828 other ranks killed, with 92 officers and 3,003 other ranks wounded.

  The corresponding casualties in the two German front-line battalions of the 180th German Regiment which had opposed the division were: 4 officers and 79 other ranks killed, with 3 officers and 181 other ranks wounded. Most of these losses occurred among the two front battalions of the 180th Regiment, for only one part of one company in reserve had been called upon to help during the British assault.

  Chapter 19

  REST AFTER STRIFE

  The Germans immediately north and south of the Bapaume road ceased firing when the local attack was over. The commander of the 180th Regiment not only allowed stretcher-bearers to take away the British wounded, but sent some of his own medical men to help them. By the morning of July 3 the last of the wounded were got away.

  Phillip, between periods of semi-consciousness following bouts of pain from the burns of phosphorus, and a greater drag of thirst, managed to crawl back on the afternoon of the first day, obsessed by one idea: he must get back for the sake of his mother. He could not walk, because another bullet had gone through his left boot, penetrating the metatarsal arch. On his way back through no-man’s-land he passed Pimm, lying dead among others whose lips and eyelids and wounds were already yellow-edged with blowfly eggs. He saw many rats, too. After a rest, brow on earth, he released the pigeons fluttering in the basket. Whether or no they flew back to their loft, he never knew.

  At one period on the crawl back he seemed to be hearing the bell-like colours of wildflowers with startling clearness—field scabious, poppies, marigolds, small pansies, and others he did not remember having seen before; and about these flowers were wild bees and grasshoppers, scarlet soldier flies, and bronze beetles among the grasses. They glowed and shimmered with varying sounds and colours. This period of hopeful beauty did not last long. The sunlight became harsh, frazzling all things with the return of pain. He tried to pick out bits of embedded phosphorus with his nails, and found that he was gibbering a sort of plea to himself, a beholder. Thereafter at times it seemed that he was three people; one feeble and struggling, the other a critic of his feeble self, the third a beholder watching in the air, above the back of his mind on a sort of invisible gossamer.

  The critical self knew that the feeble self had gibbered for effect. He could bear the pain if he did not pretend to himself that he could not bear it. Very well, he would show himself that he could. The beholder, without feeling, watched the body crawling on: while he mocked at the feeble self humming a fragment of tune in a minor key, the sort of song he had made up, when alone, in childhood, to show himself how sorry he was.

  Why did he have to think like that? Why in the name of Christ should he bloody well have to? His head was heavy and the untidiness of everything made him feel like screaming all of his bickering little two selves away. That feeling, too, passed, leaving his mind fixed with desire to take his shadow from the battlefield, while he had a shadow. He would lose his life if his shadow sank into the ground. It will not wait for ever, his mind told his champing jaws.

  When the top of the leaning gilt figure on the church in the valley came into view, another feeling, of shame for his abject condition, came upon him as he saw hundreds of curious faces of soldiers waiting on their way up the line. Why did they have to stare like that? Why must they look at him, had they no manners?

  Progress now became extremely painful. He resented the many curious faces. Their staring made him press back against the groans that alone could help him escape part of the pain. Every time he rested, his thigh felt heavier, as though his leg were nearly dragged off. When, when, when could he reach the small red-cross flag of the First Aid Post.

  The sunlight was vibrating in corrugated waves when he got there, to rest on an elbow, to sink into himself, one of hundreds of waiting figures. Some were smoking, and talking. Their words jarred about the wavy bars of sunlight. Orderlies were kneeling among them. At last a face looked at him, and told him to lie back on his elbows. Then with a knife that had a point of terror lest it touch the purple hole in his buttock, the bloody-handed orderly started to rip his trousers. The awful noise ground through his nerves.

  “I put Zam-buk in my wound, orderly.”

  “You’ve got several other blighty ones, sir,” said the orderly, as he painted iodine on the blue puncture in front of the thigh. “Now over on your right side, sir. It may sting a bit—that’s right. We’ll soon have you away.” As he was tying a bandage, Phillip said, “Not too tight! I don’t want to get gas-gangrene.”

  “I’ll watch it. Now will you be able to walk, sir, if I get someone for you to hold on to? Stretchers are somewhat at a premium.”

  Phillip pointed to his ankle.

  He felt as the puttee was being ripped that the woollen cloth was in his mouth and he was chewing it with his back teeth. He tried not to be sick. “Steady, steady!” he quavered, as his boot seemed to be wrenched off. To keep hold of himself he tried to think of “Spectre” West not complaining after he had been hit in front of Le Rutoire Farm during the battle of Loos ten months ago; but Westy had been doped with morphine.

  “Went clean through, this one,” said the orderly, holding the heel in one hand and working the toes with the other. “No bones gone.”

  Phillip showed his burned hand.

  “I’ll put some iodine on them.”

  Phillip shook his head. “No good,” he said through rigid jaws. The pain had throbbed back.

  “I think in that case you’d better wait till you get to the Dressing Station in Albert, sir.”

  As he lay there, covered by a blanket, a chaplain came and gave him a cigarette. “Are you badly hit?”

  “No, padre.”

  “Good man! Keep smiling. You’ll be pleased to hear that things are going well down south. The news has just come through that Mametz is taken, and also Montauban, with thousands of prisoners. The French, too, have got all their objectives.”

  “Water, padre.”

  “You must wait, I’m afraid,” said the chaplain, seeing the bandage, “until the doctor has seen you.”

  *

  Later in the afternoon he was taken down a track on a wheeled stretcher which passed under the campanile of the church. With a sort of mild wonder he saw a bearded man in uniform sitting at an easel beside the road. He was painting a tree growing near a broken wall. It was so strange a sight that Phillip asked the orderly to stop. Then he saw that it was the same man he had seen in the Café Royal. He wanted to let the painter know he was there, but could not make himself speak. The painter went on with the picture, as though nothing eke in the world was happening.

  While the wheeled stretcher remained there, six feet away from the easel, two red-cross orderlies came down the road, holding between them a man who could not walk properly. He was being held under each arm, his head hung down, he was blowing and slavering, froth on his lips. Deep, rasping shudders came from his throat. His spirit had obviously been broken into pieces within him. Somehow this was more terrible a sight than that of a wounded man, or rather one whose body had been blown to tangles and mangles, for this one’s body was apparently unhurt. All the nerves seemed to have come unhooked from the sinews. Would he be an idiot for life? Better to be that than to lie in the sun, waxen before swelling black, and turning into green and pink pudge.

  The painter glanced at the man, and went on painting; and as he was wheeled away, Phillip thought it strange that anyone could sit calmly painting while over the brow of the hill hell was going on.

  *

  The Advanced Dressing Station was a red-bricked house of gables and little turrets, as he saw when the stretcher stopped before an archway leading into a courtyard. The lower walls and entrance were protected by solid-looking sandbags. He had a glimpse of wounded men inside the courtyard, sitting abo
ut. Many more were coming down the road, among the wheeled stretchers. A padre in the road was in charge of traffic.

  “Wounded officer? Buttocks and foot? Wheel him through the archway and take the stretcher carefully off the carrier. Then pick up a spare stretcher and return to the Aid Post you came from, there’s a good fellow.”

  Another padre in the courtyard came forward, with an orderly, to supervise the lifting of the stretcher from the carrier. Phillip recognised, with a flush of happiness, Father Aloysius. Somehow he had felt he would not be killed. He was recognised as the priest came forward to examine his bandage; and felt resolute when he heard him draw in his breath before saying, “Is the pain very bad, Phillip?”

  “No, Father,” he heard his voice croak. His tongue felt like a wooden clapper.

  “Is there anything you want, Phillip? Shall I send off a field postcard for you?” The padre knelt beside the stretcher.

  “Water—please, Father, if there’s any to spare.”

  “You know, I think you’d better wait, until the doctor has seen you. I’ll come back—I must see to the poor fellow over there.”

  A German with a large black beard lay upon a stretcher, groaning. His brow and cheeks were grey-green. When Father Aloysius lifted the blanket, Phillip saw that both legs were blown off at the knee. Father Aloysius pointed to a room, beyond a sand-bagged door, hung with white sheets.

  “German prisoners go down the road, sir,” said the orderly.

  “Never mind that, take this poor fellow in next, will you?” said the priest. Then he knelt by the Bavarian, and finding a crucifix on a chain round his neck, gave him absolution. Later the stretcher went into the operation room.

  When Father Aloysius came back, he said, “Are you sure your wound is clear of your intestines?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “You must be patient, Phillip.”