by Philip Child
“Wait! You cannot damn my friend unless you damn me, too. He did it for me. How can you damn one of us unless you damn all? He is my friend. He is part of me.”
He tries to take Quentin’s arm. “Together we will go, my friend and I.” With outstretched hands, he clasps, but cannot seize. Like drifting smoke, the phantoms pass over him and beyond him. The general’s voice, unheedful of him, swells into prophetic volume.
“Contemplate your failure for a time but not forever. We are instruments of a will; that is our destiny. Out of eternal flux comes everlasting creation. Our reward is to share God’s joy in creating. There is no other joy.…”
Daniel gazes inward into the deeps of his own being. There, on the inner retina of his mind, he sees an island surrounded by a fathomless sea: a sea unchangeable, continuous, vast, still, and empty as primal chaos.
On the island there is life. Looking down upon it from a great height, it seems no larger than a fragment of floating wreckage, but still, he can make out dark, little manlike creatures, scurrying about with bent backs, casting no shadow. As he hurdles like a star nearer and nearer, the islet becomes larger, and after a time he, too, is standing upon earth amid the hastening figures.
The island is surrounded by a wall made of fresh masonry here, of old and crumbling stones there. Now he can understand why the little men are hurrying so and why they never pause nor look up. They are engaged in a desperate struggle to build a dike against time and the great sea. Whilst they labour, some sing, some pray, and some curse. At times as they work, they crowd one another, for the island is small. Then, raising a spade or a trowel, one will strike another, and in the resulting confusion, the dike begins to crumble; thereupon, they go hastily to their labour again.
Each figure is bound to another. What seems like a cord, bright and transparent as light, stretches from each man to another and from the other to another, still, until all are joined so that they look like insects struggling in a dewy cobweb glistening in the sun. Looking down at himself, Daniel perceives that he, too, has a cord of light which stretches from him to the bent back of a toiling figure.
A group of men throw down their tools and, with their bare hands, begin to struggle one with another, forgetful of the dike. Water seeps quietly through the wall and trickles onto the dry land. The men still fight, unmindful of their danger. The wall crumbles, the trickle becomes a flood, and that part of the island breaks away and sinks into the void, carrying with it the contending figures. It falls out of sight and out of remembrance except for the quivering cord from the last of the lost men to the nearest of the saved, which spins out like a cobweb stretched by a dropping spider’s weight. He to whom the cord is attached does not feel its tug at first, but presently, he turns from his work, sees, and gestures to his comrades who come running to him. Some of them set to work to build a new dike against the flood, but he and those nearest him mount the wall near the breach and peer over it fearfully. They hesitate for a moment, then jump out from the wall and plunge downward. Time passes. A new dike has checked the flood and the builders have long since gone elsewhere. Then at last a ripple glides over the still sea, the ripple become a swell, and the swell a tidal wave that breasts the island wall and hurls its flotsam onto dry land. There they lie, the lost men; and those who have brought them back bend over them as Daniel has seen soldiers stoop over men who have been hit. Beaten, weary, bedraggled, sorely wounded, they have all been cast back by the sea.
Time passes. Everywhere the dike has been made stronger and higher, though many men must still guard it and constantly repair it. But at first singly, and then in greater numbers, men turn from their toil to take leisure. They gather in groups, conversing and arguing. “What shall we create that we may know joy? What is most beautiful? … Something growing. A fine field of wheat, yellow for reaping, with the sun shining on it and a light breeze winnowing the ears so that they bend and whisper amongst themselves of fruition. And we will make new souls to live and work in that beauty, better men than we are, but part of us.”
All this is done and well done. And that mortal among mortals, Daniel Thatcher, bears a part in it.
The inexpressible joy is his of a union secretly desired with longing, though never hoped for, yet strangely inevitable, at long last: this, my hidden despair all these years — that we come to vain dust. The union is the whisper of the truth, not thought but felt, in a flash of conviction as certain as light. What I do unto my friend I do unto myself; for he is myself. The walls of the prison burst asunder and the individual called “Daniel Thatcher” ceases to be, freed and absorbed in spirit which first made the body.
But the heavy inertia that weighs upon his soul rends him from the moment of joy too great for a mortal who has not put on immortality. Horrified, he sees that once again the dike is breached and that a flood sweeps through it onto the field. The cord pulls him to the edge of the wall and he peers over it and sees the white, upturned face of his friend, Quentin, falling from him. Forward or back he must go; he cannot stand still. He leaps forward into the void like a pilot from a burning plane. Downward through revolving circles of space he falls, the emptiness beating about him till he closes his eyes and his mind. Like Satan, he falls from his immortal kinship and becomes Daniel Thatcher, a broken splinter of the one in many. The roar of space drums in his ears and a single word rises to him again and again out of the formless abysm. Time. Time. Time. It is time.
“Time. Time to go, sir. It’s time, sir.”
Dan, half awake, stared blankly at the face of Jobey Loversedge.… This was his billet. He thought: “My God, what a dream —” He had thrown off his blanket, and in his sleep, the collar of his shirt, which he had forgotten to button, had become twisted about his neck like a cord.
“You was muttering and tossing in your sleep, sir. I had a hard time waking you.”
Dan shivered. “It’s cold. I feel damned ill. Coffee, Jobey!”
“Here, sir. Strong and piping hot.… The signallers are waiting at the cookhouse, sir.”
Dan threw his legs over the side of the bunk and took he cup. He rubbed his face with his other hand to bring the blood to the dry skin and considered. The world of the flesh, with its familiar prison walls, closed round him. Through the door of his bivvy he could see the howitzers as dark masses, six great toads, squatting under their camouflage; the limber gunners were removing the breech and muzzle covers while the rest of the gun detachments were busy fusing shells. There was a steady rumbling to the east like shot rolling in a vault. The attack. I’ve got to go up.
What did I dream? Something about Quentin being dead. But there was something that made me happy, too.… It has gone from me. But I can remember the feeling of happiness. Like dreaming your mother was alive, then waking up. A lot of people, I knew: Father, Charles — yes, and Dolughoff. There was a kind of crazy logic to it. Something important, if I could only remember.… They were all dead, I think. It’s probably better not to remember. If I recalled it, it would all seem nonsense most likely.… Something that made me happy.
“What time is it, Loversedge?”
“One o’clock, sir. The signallers are waiting at the cookhouse.”
“Right. What’s it like out?”
“Bit of a do, sir,” said Jobey with a wide gesture toward the gun flashes on the horizon. “Our SOS just went up. Jerry’s nervous. Thinks something’s up, sir. This is the second raid tonight. Looks like we won’t catch him with his pants down this time.… Ten minutes ago, sir,” he added rhetorically, “it was as silent as a tomb.”
Dan stood up, slapped water on his face from a canvas bucket, and put on his equipment: gasbag, Sam Browne with revolver, field glasses, haversack, and helmet. Having thus given himself over to action, he felt better instantly. There was something about a judgment.… No, they judged themselves. God! What a dream.
From the doorway he said over his shoulder: “
Mind you have a hot bath ready for me when I get back, Jobey.”
“That’s arranged for, sir. Sir?” “What’s on your mind, Jobey?”
“I’m going up with you, sir.”
“Why in the devil should you?”
“It’s been sort of dull lately for a gipsy lad, sir, and I thought —”
“Out with it, Loversedge! What’s your real reason? Been stealing the battery rum ration again?”
“Oh, no, sir. I’m as sober as a dud pipsqueak. It’s nothing serious. I needed some nice new boots and it seems I took some as was earmarked for the sergeant-major . ‘Major’ is popping mad, sir — like a bandolier of cartridges in a bonfire. He’s going to have a kit inspection.”
“Did you steal them from his kit?”
“No, sir! It was honest scrounging. They was still in the quartermaster stores.”
“Oh, all right. Come on, then.”
“I got a nice pair for you, too, sir. Shall I put both them pairs in your kit?”
Dan began to laugh. Jobey made him feel decidedly better. “Get the signallers, Jobey.”
Coats buttoned up to the throat, bodies thrown forward and swinging to the mind-lulling rhythm of the long trudge over the muddy road, they became five shadows in a swollen river of shadows marching eastward to the line. Searchlights fingered the sky and gun lightnings briefly flashed. Gun teams passed at the trot, lorries slithered by like playful saurian, dispatch riders on motorcycles thrust arrogantly through the spattering mud, leaving a ripple of curses in their wake.
Out of darkness they tramped into the lurid light of a burning cartridge dump at the roadside; darkness waited for them again a few paces farther on. Within the momentary tableau, figures scurried purposefully, too many of them to be taken in as individuals by the inner eye. A detached figure slouched against a pile of lumber, smoking, looking on with a sardonic eye. A field gun, hit, was posed in final disintegration with its snout crazily resting upon a broken wheel.… The men swarming like maggots, the aloof gunner, the broken gun, etched themselves unforgettably on the hovering night. Dan and his men marched on, darkness received them again, and the vignette from a netherworld of fire became what, on waking, one calls a dream. The broken gun? The scurrying men? They are gone; they have no more than an instant’s life; passing this place tomorrow, one would not know it, or them.
What was it I dreamt? Why did it make me so absurdly happy? Gone from me, all but the feeling.
“Well, Jobey. Are you still a free man?”
“Still free, sir. Oh, I ain’t sayin’ I don’t get scared now and again. But I’ve got a charmed life. Shells, they won’t never touch me. I could sit down and go to sleep in the middle of a barrage, see? And I would not be hit. No, if ever a shell was made with my number on it, it was them shells that was fired at me when I was led up to the limber doing field punishment number one. I won’t be hit.”
“The time you deserted, Jobey, and then came back.”
“Yes, sir. I owed that to my pride. I’m a Romany, see? You can’t bind a Romany by tying him to no gun wheel. An’ if I’d a wanted to stay away they’d a never caught me.”
“Then why did you come back?”
“You know why, sir.… Sir, you’ve got book learning. You must know about them things. Why do the men stick it, sir? Most of ’em don’t like it. Lot’s of ’em think it ain’t right, even, though that never bothered me.”
“I daresay you know why as well as I do.”
“I dessay I do, sir. … It ain’t that they’re afraid of being shot by a firing squad, except one or two, maybe. Everyone’s got a chum … or else he’s got someone he looks up to, like. You know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“Funny about you and me, sir. Me a Romany, you a nob. In peace times we wouldn’t be walking together in a month o’ Sundays. You wouldn’t want to and I wouldn’t want to. But we meet in peace times, see? An’ that’s strange enough. Then we land in the same battery again — that ain’t chance, sir. Seems like that was meant to be, don’t it? It’s a funny thing that, when you think into it.”
“What about after the war, Jobey?”
“Oh, that! I don’t think ahead much, sir. That ain’t a gipsy’s way. That’s where we have it over the gorgio ; we don’t have no dealings with time. Not that the war ain’t made a different man of me, though.… O’course, I’ll come through. There won’t be no shell get me. Nor no bullet neither. I’m nigh sure o’ that, too.”
They left the road and slithered and floundered down a track. A battery of field guns flashed just behind them paang-paang-paang followed by the wish-wish-wish of boosted shells. Somewhere in the upright world there was a sound like rending cotton, followed by the twang of a splinter ricocheting against steel. Then CRASH — CRASH — CRASH . The intermittent intensity of battle sound, ebbing and then rising like a man’s passions, sucked the night silence into a whirling avalanche of sound that beat and burrowed and needled its way into hard-forgotten , swift-remembered crannies of the mind: Zeeurzeeurzeeur — crashcrashcrash. Zeeurzeeur-crashcrash. Zeercrash, zeercrash, zeercrash, zeercrash .
“We’re for it, now!” he thought; and in the backward of his mind: “O CHRIST ALMIGHTY, let me stick it. Christ let me stick it. Christ —”
Aloud he said: “Keep together, men. Keep in touch.”
Chapter XVIII
Thatcher?” inquired the infantry colonel, looking Dan over with a senior officer stare. Good. This is Billings. He’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Dan lit his pipe and followed Billings out of battalion headquarters. A watery dawn was thrusting under the night. Mist fumes swirled about dark figures, upright, or still wrapped in groundsheets and jackknifed into cubbyholes dug under the parapets. The guns had gone to sleep again.
“If the mist will only hold for an hour, Thatcher, and give us the luck of the weather for once. This is Desire Avenue. Silly name! I wonder who named it. Down here to the front line. There was a bit of stink last night. The Boche has the wind up. He came over up in front about one o’clock to look us over.” “Up in front” had now narrowed down to the front line not more than a hundred yards or so ahead. “They bombed along a sap, but they only got in in one place.… Got in, but didn’t get back again,” he added grimly.
“Casualties?”
“Sixteen — theirs and ours. There are ours.” He nodded toward a recess in the trench where a row of still figures lay on stretchers.
Just ahead of them, Desire Avenue ended in the front line, which was at an angle to it. As they approached, they heard talk from invisible men. “The way the captain talks,” said a cheerful voice, “you’d think we was going to have a cakewalk over no man’s land. We’re to stroll over, see? And we are to have breakfast in that village of Stinkvillers. It’s a bad sign, boys, when the captain gets cheerful. Mark my words, we’ll breakfast in hell.” Another voice whispered, “Eyes front — officer!” and the talk ceased abruptly.
Billings winked at Dan and muttered: “Grousing, grousing, grousing, always bloody well grousing, grousing in the morning, and grousing through the night.… It’s a good sign.” They went to a Vickers gun emplacement. “Want to look over no man’s land? You can’t see much in this mist.”
No man’s land sloped away in front of them down to the dried course of a stream, which was blocked from view by the wall of mist that clung tenaciously to the valley bottom. A thicket of barbed wire floated like wreckage in the mist. “That clump of trees, see it? That’s where we are going. On a bit from that there is clean country without trenches — so they say. You go over with the second wave, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose,” suggested Billings satirically, “you unroll rabbit wire and hitch your telephone to it and phone through battalion headquarters to the artillery. I understand they practise it um
pteen miles behind the line and it’s a great success.”
“No, my good chap, we don’t, not with such a barrage as we’re going to put down for your mob. The line would be cut to ribbons in no time.… We’ll signal with Lucas lamps. Runners, too, maybe.”
Dan put away his field glasses and let his eyes fall to the foreground of no man’s land. A familiar sight. Pockmarked, weedy, wire-sown , with here and there a bloated figure, swollen and black, staring with opened mouth and empty eyes — at nothing in particular. Just going back to nature. For seasoned soldiers there was no longer any horror in the sight; it had become simply an accepted part of one’s environment, like insanity, slums, and prostitution in civil life.
“In forty minutes I shall be going over there,” thought Dan, and the thought made his heart beat faster. “Once you stand upright for anyone to shoot at, and keep going, you are either free or you are done for,” he reflected. The thought of picking one’s way through the wire — not too fast, nor too slow, but in orderly fashion — with crumps dropping their seeds and rowing in an instant into black flowers with a heart of fire, and with bullets whipping the stalks of the weeds made him feel naked.
Jobey Loversedge asked: “How soon, sir? … It’s quiet. You wouldn’t think we was brewing hell, would you?”
The men had begun to realize the quickening of time toward zero hour and their nerves were tightening. But the cold hand screwing up the nerves in the pit of the stomach changed them outwardly very little; some were apathetic, some made a rapid fire of jokes at which men laughed too easily, some fussed minutely over their equipment. They smoked, worked their rifle bolts to make sure they were not clogged, and drew closer to comradeship, leaping out of fear with the thought that they were all at one — familiar faces, meeting their fate together.… The mist was lifting, the German trench system revealed itself, a loosely interwoven girdle of scars in the weedy landscape, putting forth filaments here and there to touch the British trenches, which not long before had been inside the German front line. On the horizon a dream city appeared with an unshelled church spire and toy fuses: the promised land.
