by Philip Child
“Well, I mean to say they’re rather dirty dogs after all, don’t you know. I mean to say —”
“Then say it, man!”
“What I mean to say is — shooting our fellows in the back, I mean to say.”
“On the contrary, my good fellow, they are simply guilty of the military crime of stirring up mutual forbearance between enemies.”
“What,” remarked the major, somewhat obscurely, “can you expect of a government led by a whippersnapper who ditched the House of Lords, and wanted to give over England to any Tom, Dick, or Harry without a public school education? If we only had a sound conservative government —”
At this moment a stooping figure entered the door of the mess — it seemed to Dan that, in France, one always entered places in a stooping position. This was none other than Jiffy Tripp, looking very much as he had always looked, Dan thought. He came into the mess like a sudden draught of air.
“Hello, Granny! I’m glad to see you, you old hound.”
“Hello, Jiffy. And I’m glad to see you, too.”
“Chr-r-r-istmas , what’s for dinner?” said Jiffy, rubbing his hands and beaming. “I’m as hungry as an elephant.”
“You always are,” said Lynch, “Thatcher, just hand me over my bottle of whisky where Tripp can’t get hold of it, will you?”
They were sitting about what had once been the counter of an estaminet, a twentieth century “round table” (which, however, happened to be rectangular, with a wine-stained marble top), the major in the role of King Arthur at one end. The estaminet, which had been ventilated by only one window, had recently been improved for the British Army by a German five-point-nine shell. This extra window was covered by a copy of the Paris Daily Mail. In the corner of the room was a stove made out of an oil drum. They dined: soup in which the meat had been boiled, the meat, tinned vegetables, apricots en casserole de tin can mâitre d’estaminet , something called a canapé made of sardines on toast, bread, margarine, and coffee. Just like the Ritz-Carlton .
After dinner inevitably everyone talked shop, though that was taboo in a peacetime mess. They talked about a broken buffer spring in Number Two gun, about laying a new Vickers platform in Number One’s gun pit, about Ypres which was beginning to warm up, about the war in general.
At one end of the table, Lynch, who liked to stir people up by taking the unpopular view, asserted that the war was as good as lost — and was jumped on. “It’s simply incredible,” said Lynch, “that we should go on pouring men uselessly into that cesspool. The Canadian Corps will go next, mark my words. In England they still think we are winning a great victory in Ypres.”
From the other end of the table, the major remarked in a calm voice: “So we are. Wearing ’em out, what?”
Brains Kinney explained the situation for the benefit of the mess at large. He said ponderously that the British Army had to keep on stonewalling in the salient because the Russians had thrown in their hand, the Americans weren’t ready yet, and the French, owing to a slight misunderstanding with the Germans at the Chemin des Dames, were not fighting this year. They had had a belly full, said Kinney, and it was rumoured that a French division had actually about-turned to march on Paris and end the war. It had something to do with Mata Hari, who, though over forty, was still sufficiently ravissante to go to bed with important French staff officers and worm secrets from them.
“Perhaps,” suggested Lynch, eyeing Dolughoff, “Mr. Bloody Dolughoff would address us on the defection of the Russian armies.”
Dan glanced quickly at Dolughoff. Evidently he and Lynch were old enemies, for he did not appear surprised. Nor did he seem in the least daunted. More than ever it struck Dan that there was something catlike about the Russian — if he was a Russian. Formidable, heedless of other people, simply going his own way — then springing suddenly with a fierce pounce.… Dolughoff eyed Lynch askance through languidly dropped lids. “The Russians,” he said, “are going to teach people to forget boundaries.… But you wouldn’t understand that. I’ll tell you why they have been beaten in terms even you can understand. They were beaten because they aped the absurd bourgeois virtues of England. They were beaten, my good Lynch, because they were too chivalrous. Twice they attacked — once at Tannenburg and once in 1916 — before they were ready, fighting with pitchforks and bare hands many of them, in order to save their allies.… Put that in your pipe and choke on it!”
Currie intervened with stolid urbanity: “Why make a fuss, Lynch? My good Dolly, must you?”
“Let ’em go!” said Tripp, beaming. “They enjoy it. Slip the leash. At him, Lynch! At him, Dolly!”
At the major’s end of the table, Kinney had embarked on his favourite topic and was talking about Egypt in a mumbling classroom drone. “The Egyptians,” he said, “pictured the soul as a little birdman with a human head and arms extending to its nostrils, in one hand the figure of a swelling sail, the hieroglyph for wind or breath, and in the other the crux ansata as the symbol of life. This little birdman-soul they called the ba. A man also had a ka , a sort of guardian spirit who aided him in the difficult and untried business of living after death.”
“A sort of spiritual gas helmet, no doubt,” said Lynch.
Tripp said: “Let not your ka know what your ba is doing.”
But even Lynch’s satirical efforts to stop Kinney were in vain; he was an enthusiast, a virtuoso; the war was a mere incident, something that happened to his external body, but the Egyptians were important, they were reality. “The fact is the notion of life after death was much more vital to the Egyptian of six thousand years ago than it is to modern, civilized man.…”
An instrument known as a Don H., which was in fact a field telephone, had uttered a sort of buzz. “Well,” thought Dan, “I suppose I am the junior sub. I might as well start my job now.” He lifted the receiver. A rumbling, which he eventually recognized as a human voice, said: “Ascot speaking. What about those coils of wire?” — ”Coils of wire?” repeated Dan, bewildered. — “Coils of wire! What’s that! Give me the phone,” exclaimed the major, pouncing on the receiver. “That you, Jeepers? … Oh, you want our coils of wire, do you? You would! Damn it, you’re taking a low advantage of us, Jeepers. You know damned well we’ve got them because you scrounged them for us yourself. I didn’t think it of you. It’s low, that’s what it is. Next time you visit the mess bring your own whisky, Jeepers.… And by the way, old man, do come and see us soon.” The major explained to Dan: “That’s Jeepers. He used to be battery signals officer, and a jolly good one. He scrounged those coils of wire for us. Now he’s signals officer at group and he’s going to take them away from us, the hound!”
“In that soil,” droned Kinney, “bodies will remain for an indefinite time without corruption. Brooding, no doubt, on this fact, the Egyptians came to the conclusion that life continued after death as long as the body remained inviolate. Hence the elaborate mummification, the vast pyramids to protect the body, all the material equipment to insure life after death. They are the most imposing manifestation of man’s ancient struggle to conquer purely physical forces.”
“They should have known Ypres,” said Lynch; “it would have given them a jolt.”
Dolughoff said in a bored voice: “I wish they’d send us to Ypres. Life is so dull here.”
“Dull ,” repeated Lynch in a soft voice, staring with jutting chin at Dolughoff. “Dolly thinks it’s dull. … What he really means,” Lynch explained to Dan, “is that he hasn’t slept with a woman since his last Paris leave. He’s an awful bastard, is Dolughoff. The fact is, Thatcher, Dolughoff is one of the seven hundred sons of Abdul Hamid, by a Circassian dancing girl. His mother and father didn’t get on. As a matter of fact, his mother only saw Abdul once in her life. Dolly has been a pimp in civil life and also a missionary of Beelzebub, and he can’t make up his mind whether he is to be a priest or a pimp; he rather thinks he can have it bot
h ways. He’s quite proud of it, aren’t you, Dolly? He is very religious. Greek orthodox á la Rasputin. Black masses, mystic orgies, the Satanic element in beauty — that sort of tripe. He prefers the authorized version of the Bible, however, and quotes it to us hot, to make us uncomfortable. He’s quite sincere in all of his two hundred different personalities. He thinks all men are brothers, though he isn’t a family man himself, and he intends to be a writer and made a life work of preaching the evangel of lust to unenlightened puritans. He’s a blasphemous lecher.… How the hell did you ever get a commission in the British army, Dolughoff?”
“Have you quite finished, Lynch?”
“Quite, thank you. Your turn.”
Dolughoff lit his cigarette and blew out the match with a reflective frown. “I pass over the more obvious aspects of your character, Lynch: that you are an acrimonious, mordacious, and envenomed male virago of an Irishman who, in his adolescence, kissed the backside of the Blarney Stone, possessing an all-embracing hypocrisy fit to make Ananias puke. Everyone knows that. For the moment I’ll content myself with pointing out that as a renegade Catholic, whom I happened to observe one day stealing the crucifix from a gutted church near Vimy for a souvenir, you are obviously unfitted to criticize the religion of an original and serious-minded person like myself.”
Lynch’s face twisted. His fingers curled about the neck of a bottle and he hurled it at the loathed face of Dolughoff who always remained so hatefully calm. The bottle smashed on the wall above the Russian’s head and showered him with fragments of glass. Dolughoff remained completely impassive. He raised his cigarette to his lips with a contemptuous expression and blew a cloud of smoke in Lynch’s direction.
“Lynch!” ordered the major in a voice that crackled. “ Go to your quarters. You, too, Dolughoff! Another word of this sort of thing from either of you and I’ll place you under arrest.”
“Right, sir. I’ll go,” stuttered Lynch excitedly, “but he told a dirty lie. He made it up on the spur of the moment.”
Dolughoff stood up languidly and crushed out his cigarette. “Oh, well, one good lie deserves another. Lynch talking about religion — to me! … You needn’t be afraid, sir. Lynch won’t start it again. He’s afraid of me now.”
Lynch opened his mouth to retort, saw the major’s expression and held his peace. He and Dolughoff went to their quarters. “If they weren’t such damned good officers …” said the major. Tripp winked at Dan.
After a while the major stood up. “I think I shall turn in.” Leaving the mess, he passed Dan. “You’ll soon find your feet, Thatcher.”
Dan found an old acquaintance in the battery; this was none other than Jobey Loversedge, the gipsy. With a full pack on his shoulders, Jobey was doing field punishment drill — twenty yards up and twenty yards back he marched, over and over, to the order of a bored corporal.
“Halt! What the devil are you doing here, Loversedge?” said Dan.
“Well, sir, you see, I did get drunk and enlist for fun.”
“Are you getting it?”
The same irrepressible grin. “In between pack drills, sir.”
“How would you like to be my servant, Loversedge?”
“Did they tell you I’d steal the shirt off your back, sir?”
“You’ll steal for me, not from me. That’s what a good batman does, isn’t it?”
“Gipsies ain’t much good as servants, sir.”
“Oh, damn it. I like you — so be cheerful about it.”
“Well, sir, I’ve tried about everything else so — is it an order, sir?”
“Yes. Mind you look after me well.”
V
The impertinent features of Gunner Loversedge appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Thatcher, sir, your brother has come back to the battery and he says he is going up to the forward section with you.”
Dan took his time going out. “I’m hanged if I’ll hurry for Alastair.”
Alastair had his shrapnel helmet tilted on one side of his head with the strap under his chin. He was tapping his stick on his boots. He grinned and half put out his hand and drew it back as Dan half put out his. They both laughed and shook hands.
“How’s Cynthia, Alastair?”
“All right. Why didn’t you call on her in London?”
Dan hated himself for flushing. “Charles says you’re a hell of a good officer.”
“I’m all right,” admitted Alastair and added gracefully, “but you’ll get the MC before I shall.” Confound his self-possession!
“You’ll smell powder tonight, Dan,” said Alastair, grinning.
“Well, there has to be a first time,” said Dan coolly, but his heart beat more quickly.
“Yes … are we friends, Dan?”
“Sort of,” conceded Dan, but his expression was obstinate.
In pitch darkness they walked for a long time up a paved road toward the flares that flowered wanly over the trenches. All at once vague heaps of rubble, which had once been the houses of a village, rose up at the side of the road.
“There are the guns,” said Alastair. “They’ll be working all night putting down a Vickers platform. I’m going back now to get some sleep. You’ll find Charles in the gun pits.”
There was a faint odour of gas — like onions, but tasting sweet, too. By the carefully shaded light of a lantern, twenty gnomes, stooped and intent, clinked pickaxe and spade against the mixed earth and foundation material; their leather jerkins glistened with wetness. Silently, in the rain, with the dim light that left their faces swathed in dark shadow, they worked with an air of tenseness and stealth, as if their nocturnal task was somehow sinister. Charles loomed in the watery half-light , taller than the rest, in gumboots and a gunner’s leather jerkin, his gas mask strapped across his chest “at the alert.”
“Hello, Dan. You’re just in time to do a spot of work. We laid the platforms last night on a centre line bearing of 90 degrees grid; it took us all night. No sooner had we got it done, than orders came through to the major that it should have been 125 degrees grid. You should have heard what the men said! They were not undemonstrative.” He and the sergeant went into a discussion about bolts, arcs, side beams, and wheel plates. It was technically remote to Dan as yet but interesting; especially when you saw the huge bulks weighing each of them, a ton perhaps, which had to be manhandled with levers and dragropes an inch or two at a time into pits dug for them, to make a snug platform for the howies.
The two howitzers projected their ugly, piebald snouts over the edges of what had once been the cellars of houses, waiting to be escorted into their new dens. About midnight the Caterpillar tractors came to Croisilles to pull the guns into position, but they arrived too soon and they also stood waiting like patient mythological creatures — gryphons or something of that sort. It began to rain heavily and Charles grumbled that it always poured when they shifted the guns. In a few minutes they were soaked to the skin and the ground became slippery glue, making them slither as they walked and sticking in heavy gobs to their boots.
“Can you handle a shovel, Dan?” asked Charles.
“Yes.”
“Then dig — here.”
Glad of even a gunner’s job, Dan dug till his muscles ached. At midnight the digging was finished, and they began to heave the balks slowly forward, inch by inch, toward the gun pit. Presently, they heard an aeroplane high above them: it sounded like the uneven drone of a mosquito, and it seemed directly over their heads. “Gotha. Put out the light,” snapped Charles, and they squatted down in silence, waiting for the first bomb to drop. It dropped with a dull boom miles away down the valley; then a sharper boom-boom — coming nearer; then sh-ssh-crash into the village by the church; then boom-boom — receding down the valley into the distance. The work went on in sober silence.
But that was only the overture to the concert. All at once
a high velocity shell erupted from the dark. No warning this time. Simply a sharp, vicious crack, like a bursting tire, on the heap of stones at the edge of the gun pit (close this time!) followed immediately by the rushing sound of the shell’s coming and, last of all, by the crack of its firing miles away behind the German line; this was one that had travelled faster than sound. No one was hit. But the sudden unheralded explosion had startled the men on the pit side of the balk so that they had let go their grip on the levers and dragropes with which they had been easing it into place, and the huge timber began to slither slowly, then faster, down the slope of the pit like an unwieldy hippopotamus taking the water, and landed with a sickening whumpf athwart the wet floor of the pit. Someone uttered a scalding shriek and went on shrieking. And in the midst of that horrible outcry, another shell arrived crack — whish — sh — boom. Not quite so close, but they could hear the splinters whining over their heads and striking the earth above the pit with a thud. “Quick — the lever here!” shouted Charles, and they saw that one of the men had slipped and been pinned by the falling balk. They placed a fulcrum and heaved all together at the balk while the man below them looked up past them with eyeballs starting and with shrieks streaming from his lips. They could not budge the huge timber. Coolly, Charles rearranged the fulcrum and they heaved again, and as they heaved, two more shells burst, one on each side of the pit. This time they got the man out. Charles took a quick look and shook his head. Then they brought a stretcher and Charles said: “You go with him, Dan. There’s a field dressing station in the village. Down the road to the right.” They went out into the darkness with the poor devil who tried to writhe and twist himself off the stretcher and had to be held down. Into a dugout in the ruins where sleepy, pale faces peered at them and where a sergeant took charge, grumbling a little, but very gentle. Routine for him.… Then back to the pit to weary hours of work at the fallen timber.
Chapter VIII
I
