by Evelyn Waugh
‘Here comes the party.’
An ambulance drove up followed by the Brigadier’s car. Ritchie-Hook, one leg huge, as though from elephantiasis, in plaster. The brigade major took his arm and led him to the edge of the quay.
‘No prisoners’ escort?’ said Ritchie-Hook. ‘Morning, Tickeridge. Morning, Crouchback. What’s all this I hear about you poisoning one of my officers? The damn nurses couldn’t stop talking about it all yesterday. Now jump to it. Junior officers into the boat first, out of it last.’
Guy jumped to it and sat as far as he could out of everyone’s way. Presently they hoisted Ritchie-Hook down. Before the boat had reached the aircraft, the brigade car was honking its way through the listless, black crowds; they had run things pretty close for the funeral parade.
The flying-boat was a mail carrier. The after half of the cabin was piled high with bags among which the Halberdier servant luxuriously disposed himself for sleep. Guy remembered the immense boredom of censoring those letters home. Here and there one came across a man who through some oddity of upbringing had escaped the state schools. These wrote with wild phonetic mis-spellings straight from the heart. The rest strung together clichés which he supposed somehow communicated some exchange of affection and need. The old soldiers wrote SWALK on the envelope, meaning ‘sealed with a loving kiss’. All these missives served as a couch for Ritchie-Hook’s batman.
The flying-boat climbed in a great circle over the green land, then turned over the town. Already it was much cooler.
It had been the heat, Guy thought, all the false emotions of the past twenty-four hours. In England where winter would be giving its first hints of sharpness, where the leaves would be falling among the falling bombs, fire-gutted, shattered, where the bodies were nightly dragged half-clothed, clutching pets, from the rubble and glass splinters, – things would look very different in England.
The flying-boat made another turn over White Man’s Grave and set its course across the ocean, bearing away the two men who had destroyed Apthorpe.
White Man’s Grave. The European cemetery was conveniently near the hospital. Six months of changing stations and standing by for orders had not corroded the faultless balance of the Halberdier slow march. The Second Battalion had called a parade the moment the news of Apthorpe’s death arrived and the regimental sergeant major had roared under the fiery sun and the boots had moved up and down the blistering road. This morning it was perfect. The coffin bearers were exactly sized. The bugles sounded Last Post in perfect unison. The rifles fired as one.
As a means of ‘showing the flag’ it was not greatly appreciated. The civil population were aficionados of funerals. They liked more spontaneity, more evident grief. But as a drill parade it was something that the Colony had never seen before. The flag-covered coffin descended without a hitch. The vital earth settled down. Two Halberdiers fainted, falling flat and rigid, and were left supine.
When it was all over Sarum-Smith, genuinely moved, said: ‘It was like the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.’
‘Sure you don’t mean the Duke of Wellington at St Paul’s?’ said de Souza.,
‘Perhaps I do.’
Colonel Tickeridge asked the adjutant ‘Ought we to pass the cap round to put up a stone or something?’
‘I imagine his relations in England will want to fix that.’
‘They’re well off?’
‘Extremely, I believe. And High Church. They’d probably want something fancy.’
‘Both Uncles gone the same day.’
‘Funny, I was thinking the same. I rather preferred Crouchback on the whole.’
‘He seemed a nice enough fellow. I could never quite make him out. Pity he made an ass of himself.’
Already the Second Battalion of the Halberdiers spoke of Guy in the past tense. He had momentarily been of them; now he was an alien; someone in their long and varied past, but forgotten.
Footnotes
* ‘Jesus Christ be praised.’
‘Today, always.’
