God's Sparrows

by Philip Child

  “Yes, but I don’t mind now.”

  “Neither do I. I never did. It’s what I want, Cynthia. To work so hard I can’t think.”

  Cynthia did not answer.

  They are brutes, partly, thought Cynthia.… For instance, they like killing, really. The part of them that’s a brute. They like it — and they hate it. Yes, and they come back to us hungry and don’t want to talk. Just to sink down deep and forget it and themselves utterly. Alastair’s letters.… Why can’t I, too? At Shorncliffe when he was training and I was in the hospital and we only saw each other twice a week when we were both tired. Why am I like that? Somehow I never imagined him, then, in France. Why don’t I ever imagine things beforehand? If I had it over again, I’d make him happy. I’d hold him closer and closer and wouldn’t think of myself even for an instant. I’d just think of him and making him happy.… I wish I was going to have a child, then I’d forget everything, and think only of the child.… Oh, dear God, there’s got to be something ! Isn’t there something to cling to!

  “Cynthia, it’s been a long time since we went to a show. ”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Like to go tonight?”

  “Well … oh, I don’t think so.… All right. Something light. Let’s see Chu Chin Chow again.”

  Beatrice removed the cups and washed them carefully. Surely, there ought to be something else to do. I must make something to do, to put off what lies in wait for you always just round the corner. She tidied the mantelpiece and looked over her civilian clothes. Old and getting shabby. I ought to get a new evening dress. But what for? … The old emotion swept over her but fixed with a new subtle anguish that lately had come often — a kind of treachery to that singleness of emotion which she wanted to cherish. Why did I think that about the dress? … She stabbed this treacherous thought viciously and slew it. She thought of Cynthia. I ought to help her but I can’t. There’s a barrier between us you can’t pass; and we don’t help each other. Being together only makes it worse. It’s because she thinks of the living and I think of the dead.

  But do I? It’s so wretched to think and think, and pass people day after day without ever really seeing them or being seen. And when you’ve known what it is to be loved — only not really.… Everything he said and did was right just because he said it and did it. He could be tender and he knew when to be. And playful. Sometimes he was rough and almost cruel as if I was no one at all, and yet everything, and made me think … and, oh, I wish.… To want life is an obscenity. Beatrice Elton killed forever and ever on April the twenty-fourth , 1915, when her fiancé fell in the battle of St. Julien, and now she wants to be resurrected to life. I … will … not! … But I gave everything to him — all my soul. I gave it in thought before I ever knew he loved me. I couldn’t do that again. It’s gone, all the best part of it. All except being afraid and lonely and wanting.…

  On October the twelfth, 1917, Quentin Thatcher, in the company of twelve others clad like himself in private’s uniform and shackled with handcuffs, waited on the station platform at Rouen for the train to take them and their escort to Boulogne. The station was crowded with military details coming “up the line” from schools and reinforcement camps, coming out of the line to schools, or passing through to some other part of the front. Trains consisting of goods vans pulled into the station, the doors burst open like corks from bottles, and the troops foamed out and flowed instantly to stalls where coffee was being dished from buckets. Not until they had eaten and drunk did they notice the thirteen shackled privates sitting back in the dark shadows (“Jeeze, do you see them prisoners? Deserters?” — “Naw, too many of them. They’re on their way to the glasshouse.”) The thirteen stared straight in front of them with a fixed expression, but none of the little group suffered more keenly than Quentin under the lively and impersonal scrutiny of many pairs of eyes looking at them as if they were strange animals. Once he had been at one with these troops, now he was not; nor was he at one with the twelve Quakers who sat beside him. His fellow prisoners he knew well by this time; too well considering that he had not the least desire to know them at all. He felt he knew them far better than they could know him. He had been at the front; they had not. Every man of them, he knew, was sincere and honest according to his light. They were really “conscientious objectors”; if they had been merely slackers they would have compromised and accepted some sort of military duty in England. “Absolutists” they called themselves.

  One of these Quakers, a man called Perrott, spoke to Quentin. “These poor devils” — he pointed to the tired troops on the platform — “do you think they’ve come from Passchendaele?”

  “Quite likely,” murmured Quentin, “they look beaten to the wide.”

  “I don’t know how they stick it. In a way, it’s harder for them than it is for us. We know we’re right, while they know they’re being driven to commit mass murder.”

  “Nonsense!” exclaimed Quentin sharply.

  “Well, aren’t they?”

  “You don’t understand a soldier’s psychology.”

  “I think I do. What is it, then?”

  “It’s quite simple. You believe it is your duty to defend your country. Therefore, you deliver your will and conscience into the hands of your superior officer, and you are willing to pay for your belief by giving up the dearest thing you possess: your life. We don’t have to give up our lives.”

  “I should have said the dearest thing you could give up would be your sense of doing what you know is right. You haven’t a right to give up that!”

  “That,” said Quentin grimly, “is why I am sitting here with you now. And let me tell you, Perrott, it hasn’t brought me peace of mind.”

  Quentin’s tragedy was that, in taking on a new set of loyalties, even if they seemed higher, he had had to discard other loyalties which had become a part of him. He could not forget that he had been a soldier. Every evening these honest Quakers prayed for strength to carry them through their ordeals, but Quentin had been through ordeals at the front more severe physically than the most brutal prison. “These chaps,” thought Quentin, “don’t understand us — that is,” he corrected himself bitterly, “they don’t understand soldiers.” … And yet, in his heart, Quentin believed that the conchies were in the right.

  One day in England Quentin had written to the adjutant of the battalion simply refusing to rejoin the army or to accept any form of alternative service, stating that he would rather be shot than do so, and leaving his name and address for the adjutant’s “information and necessary action.”

  This letter had delivered him into the hands of a natural force, of whose existence decent men doing their duty at the front were not permitted to be aware. There was a code, a gentleman’s understanding, concerning the ordinary affairs of war, but when a man simply refused to fight, there was nothing to do but deliver him to society’s brutes and close your eyes while the brutes did the army’s necessary dirty work. Quentin’s descent into hell was in three stages. First he was given a military command which he refused to obey. He then automatically became a soldier who has refused duty and, as such, is subject to the penalties of the Army Act, liable to imprisonment if in England, liable to be shot if in France. He was taken before authorities who asked him whether he refused duty. He said he did. The authorities stared at him as at an obscene animal. “Afraid to go, eh?” — “No, sir!” — “Do you refuse duty even as a non-combatant ?” — “I do, sir.” — “God help you, you blackguard. A man like you — (authority spluttered). Do you wash?” He was paraded and stripped of his medal. Then he was sent with twelve others to France, where a soldier refusing an order could be shot.

  In France, a systematic effort was made to break their spirits. “Men, you have come to the worst prison in France. We can break a man’s heart here.” They were put in cells made of corrugated iron, so cold that frost rimed the walls; when they sat
down they got so cold and stiff that they could not get up without using their hands. They were fed on army biscuit and water, and sometimes they were ironed with their faces to the wall. They still refused duty. They were knocked about by soldiers wearing boxing gloves for two or three hours, revived with cold water and kicks, knocked about again. (The brutes who battered them had a dim idea that these men were stabbing the boys in the trenches in the back.) They refused duty. They were given shot drill to “limber them up.” One of the absolutists who refused even to march was frogmarched out of his cell and laid on his back with cable wire around his chest and dragged up a footpath of battened planks. (The three men responsible for this “discipline” were counted out by their mates and threatened with hand grenades.) Finally, they were marched into a hollow square of soldiers, had a list of their “crimes” read aloud to them, and were sentenced to suffer death by being shot. But here humanity stepped in, at last. Questions had been asked in parliament, and in the end, their sentence was commuted to imprisonment in England. (Though a number of conscientious objectors died in prison as a result of ill-treatment , and though still others lost their reason, none were actually shot during the war.) They were on their way to England now.…

  Another train came into the station, and a swarm of soldiers descended and rushed for the coffee stall. These were men not long away from the battle; little signs revealed this in an instant to one who, like Quentin, had been a soldier. Looking at them, his heart sank. They were wearing Canadian divisional patches — but that was not the cause of his agitation. He knew these men. None of them had seen him yet, but a group of officers strolled along the platform, and one of them caught sight of him and stopped stock still, the colour drained from his face. For a moment the officer hesitated, then he came uncertainly toward Quentin.

  “You, Thatcher? What are you doing here?”

  The two men stared at each other in an electric silence in which it seemed to Quentin he had lost his sense of personality. His answer, uttered from a dry throat, sounded in his ears as if it came from a long distance.

  “I am a conscientious objector, sir.”

  The officer looked at him with a kind of stupefied owlishness and opened his lips to speak twice before he could think what to say. Then he said, “Oh!” and walked away.

  The troops fell in and stood easy beside the train. Then they spied the shackled prisoners sitting in the shadow. “Hi! That’s Pill Thatcher! — It isn’t! — It is.… Hi, Thatcher! What are you doing there? I thought you were a bloody officer. — What did they crime you for? I bet you committed a rape, Pill. — Shut up, leave the poor beggar alone!”

  Battalion! Fall in.… Battalion! … Battalion! Shun!

  The wavering, murmuring line of men turned into a stone wall.

  About — turn.

  “Now, men, if I catch anyone talking to a bloody, yellow-bellied deserter, I’ll crime him! Stand at ease. Stand easy. ”

  Quentin and his fellows waited on the station platform for a long time. A Red Cross train slid quietly through the station without stopping, streaking against death for the coast. “I wonder,” thought Quentin miserably, “whether Dan is up there at this minute?”

  Chapter X

  “Time to go, sir. Sir, time to go!”

  “Eh? … All right. Cigarette, Loversedge.”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Are the men ready? “

  “At the cookhouse, sir.”

  Dan looked at Jobey whose beaked brown face and sharp eyes peered back at him under a shrapnel helmet and who was weighted down like Santa Claus with equipment and two sandbags. “And where do you think you’re going, Jobey?”

  “Up the line, sir, with you. Kekkeno mush’s poov ,” Jobey winked. “My place ain’t in the home. Look, sir, I scrounged some Mills bombs. You never know up in them shell holes. Mr. Ack Emma Thatcher is a deadshot with a Webley, but he can’t throw as straight as you, sir!” Jobey gave another wink and a grin.

  “You’re a discerning devil, Jobey. Come on, then.”

  Jobey inspected his sandbags. One of them was slotted like a string of sausages. At the bottom was tea — a knot, then sugar — a knot, butter — a knot, then bread and jam and tinned stuff. The knots were solid. You didn’t want the butter muckin’ in with the tea and sugar.

  Presently, they were on the Zonnebeke Road, the one road to the front, their faces turned toward the flares which rose and flowered over those in shell holes, regular as breathings. The men carried picks, shovels, and rifles. “I hope my gunners know how to use them.” They ploughed stoically after the officer, not knowing where they were going: that was the officer’s job. Responsibility closed round Dan and shut him off from them as completely as the darkness walled off that crowded road from the rest of humanity. There were few landmarks visible even in the daytime — farmhouses, paths, copses, and even crossroads so bravely marked in the ordnance maps simply did not exist any longer. Shading his flashlight, he took a last glance at the map, memorizing it. The thing to do was to find the right duckboard path fingering off from the road. A phosphorous shell exploded ahead of them and lit the rubbish of the battlefield: capsized wagons and limbers with mules and drivers buried in the wreckage. They went on, the beech planks squidging and tipping under foot. They marched with ears cocked for the swelling phut of that heaving drone which meant that a howitzer shell would pitch close to them with a final swoop and whinnying of splinters that would make them cringe inwardly.

  Sergeant Watts, an old policeman with a grizzled head, walked beside Dan. The sergeant was struggling with an idea. What he didn’t like about this bloody war was the obscene sense of humour displayed by blind steel. The way he put it was: “Them shells play tricks on you, sir. Like a cat with a mouse. You know that a shell could kill you with a stroke of the paw, like, if it wanted to. But that it won’t do — not yet.” He explained with melancholy moroseness that his teeth had been destroyed by shell fire three days ago during the show. “I put them down for a minute, sir, meaning to clean them, and when I got back they simply wasn’t there. A pipsqueak did it, sir. Of course, I’ve indented for a new set, but what with the red tape — I can’t chew hard tack on my gums and the bully beef gives me indigestion. Makes you feel melancholy-like all the time. It does seem hard, sir, when a man can’t eat.” It filled the sergeant with bitterness. He seemed to feel that there was something indecently sadistic about destroying a man’s teeth; it mucked up a man digestion, and so, interfered with his settled and intimate habits of thought.

  Sergeant Watts began to tell him about the mutiny at Étaples. He said it wasn’t a real mutiny, not like with them Russians walking out of the trenches and shooting their officers. It was just that the old timers thought there was too much bloody slaughter at Ypres. And getting nowhere. Going in seven hundred, coming out one hundred, filling up with fresh drafts of recruits, going in again. “Don’t seem no sense to it, sir. The men sometimes wonder at them as send us up the line know what it’s all about, sir.”

  “That’s your teeth talking, sergeant. Not you.” And Watts grinned a trifle sheepishly.

  The trouble was, Dan reflected, that except for a few zealots like Quentin, who were liable to be shot for their pains, no one felt responsible for the war. The men thought the officers knew the rights of the matter but wondered; the officers put the responsibility of Ypres on the generals and cursed; the generals, no doubt, blamed the politicians; and the politicians talked about a war to save civilization, tacitly putting the latter up to God in whose interests civilization was supposed to be preserved. One might almost say that this progressive moral incompetence was feudal. Charles said that they usually chucked out the top men after a war and Dan, thinking of his talk with Dolughoff, wondered for a moment whether God would survive the war. It looked as if the politicians might do for him.

  Dan began to think it almost certain that he had overshot the l
ine, and he had a prickling sensation in the groin where he most disliked the idea of being hit. The pillbox loomed up before them suddenly, and at the same time, a voice from a shell hole in a little mound called his name hoarsely. It was Alastair. A dirty stubble of beard disguised him, and his eyes were haggard with fatigue and yet burning with excitement.

  “Where is Dolughoff?” Dan asked.

  “That man is clean off his rocker. We had a bit of a stink, you know, trench mortars mostly, and Dolly wanted to climb up on the parapet and take off his clothes to show them how little he thought of them, I‘ve never before seen him go into a tailspin with rage.… Usually when he gets mad, you know he is simply putting on an act.”

  “Is he tight?”

  “I guess so.… I had to put him under open arrest.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Oh, he’s all right again for the time being — quite rational. He’s round somewhere.… Did you hear them strafing us? I bet you had a sticky time getting up here.”

  “It was all right,” said Dan briefly. “Let’s get on with it, Al.”

  “The OP is a crazy idea. The fellow that chose this place, for one, ought to be shot!”

  “Where are the Germans?”

  Alastair waved his hand. “Here and there, in camouflaged shell holes mostly, like us. They are ‘in depth,’ of course. They won’t let you stand up to look round. Yesterday a man started back to battalion headquarters, and the first thing he knew, he was challenged by the Buffs. He’d been through the German lines without knowing it.”

  A knee-high ditch had been cut from the shell hole to the concrete pillbox. Stooping, they scuttled to the pillbox, from the far side of which stretched another makeshift trench, somewhat deeper. Here an infantry subaltern stood talking to Alastair’s sergeant. When Dan and his brother appeared, Alastair’s men shouldered their picks and shovels with alacrity and looked meaningfully toward “home,” which twelve hours had made desirable.