by Philip Child
A runner came along the trench distributing watches which had been synchronized at Desire Avenue.
Thirty minutes.
Time was a strange thing. “Thirty minutes to go … twenty-nine now.” It worked out into seconds; each second flowed separately over the nervous system instead of through the mind where one wanted it to flow.… It seemed to Dan that there ought to be a lot of questions one should finally settle in the last fifteen minutes. “For instance, about that dream — I wish I could remember. I haven’t come to terms with my life yet.” … But instead of thinking of things like that, one simply waited, it seemed, and let time flow over one. Twenty-five minutes.
Someone was whistling through his teeth a revue song:
Après la guerre,
There’ll be a good time everywhere.…
“I wonder? I doubt it. We’ll never be nearer death, and never so much alive as we are now. People will forget why men were willing to die. They’ll think our chaps went West for nothing. It will be a sour, cynical world; take heroes of a different sort to live in it decently, very likely. Not my pigeon, anyhow. Probably won’t matter to us … twenty minutes. … If I do come through — if I come back to the battlefield in ten years and if I should meet their ghosts outside some caved-in dugout, I’d have become a man they wouldn’t recognize. I’d have forgotten how they felt; very likely I shouldn’t even understand their talk.… Uncle Charles, now —” The sound of Charles Burnet’s ringing voice, with laughter in it ready to well up joyously at any fun. “There’s a good joint in Amiens: passable wine, music, sole in truffle sauce. Garçon, lead me to it!” The voice fades.… “We’d never again enjoy binges as we do coming out of the line.” Seventeen minutes.
“Know what you’ve got to do, corporal?”
“Yes, sir. I know. Think them Lucas lamps will show through the smoke? There ain’t much wind.”
Sixteen .… Barrage in twelve minutes.
Now he felt caught up by the stream of fate and time; a comforting feeling. Why worry? If a shell had your number on it, it got you, the men liked to say, otherwise it didn’t.… He felt quite sure of himself. “Maybe Murdo is right; maybe time doesn’t change, perhaps it is only we who change, and time is the bank of the stream we flow past. That’s a thought that would amuse Quentin. Wonder where he is now?”
Billings came along the trench, grinning at his men, who obviously liked him.
“Billings!”
“Hello. You ready?”
“You don’t happen to have a man with the same name as mine in your battalion, do you? I suppose it’s hardly likely —”
“Thatcher? That’s odd. Yes, he’s in my company, too — or was. Any relation?”
“Quentin Thatcher?”
“That’s the fellow. Brother?”
“Cousin.… Wounded?”
“Sorry, old man. Killed instantly in the raid last night.… You passed him coming down.” Looking at Dan keenly, Billings waved his stick over his shoulder toward the row of stretchers in Desire Avenue. “Want to see him? We’ve just time to make it, if you do.… he had a notebook of some sort. If you are his cousin, you might take charge of it. You know how it is; one doesn’t like to send those things to the next of kin uncensored.”
They turned back to Desire Avenue.
“How did it happen, Billings?”
“Are you his friend as well as a cousin?”
“Best friend he had, and he was my best friend.… But you can say what you were going to say. I want to know how it really happened.”
“All right, I will. He was a queer chap, was Thatcher. I’d no idea he’d have a best friend, though, of course, that’s absurd of me: he was the sort of fellow who kept to himself.… Well, the Jerries bombed into our trench and the first two Germans that turned up were a couple of boys who didn’t look more than sixteen — pin feathers on pink chins. The Germans are sending in the children now, you know. They were carrying egg bombs as if they weren’t quite sure how to use them, and they looked more like frightened rabbits than soldiers. They came round the traverse upon Thatcher, and of course, he should have shot or bayoneted them forthwith; it would have been easy enough. But instead he yelled at them, ‘Hoch die hände’ or ‘Geben Sie Sich auf’ or whatever it is you say in their lingo for ‘surrender.’ They were much too frightened to understand, and one of the kids threw his bomb and managed to smash Thatcher and himself, too. Then the others came in and there was hell to pay for a couple of minutes.”
“That was like Thatcher,” said Dan musingly, “he was bayonet shy. He simply couldn’t use it, couldn’t work his nerves up to the pitch. He had a bellyful during the Somme, you know. He had run out of bombs and had to bayonet a squad of Germans as they filed out of a dugout.”
“Well, it was damn bad soldiering, if you ask me. I had nothing against Thatcher before that. He was brave and a good soldier and quite responsible. But if he hadn’t been so blasted soft-hearted , I shouldn’t have lost him and my platoon sergeant, as well. I think charity ought to begin at home — for soldiers.”
Dan said nothing. What was there to say?
“There they are,” said Billings nodding toward the squad of stretchers aligned in a neat row in the mud. Groundsheets had been laid over the faces and quiet figures. In death they were still military, stiffly in rows and all exactly alike, even to the pairs of steel-studded ammunition boots projecting from under the rubber sheets. Those boots — without much effort of the imagination one could think of them springing upright and clicking to attention, say, on Judgment Day.
“Shall I take off the sheet?” asked Billings.
“No, let’s get on.”
Billings slipped his hand under the sheet and drew forth a black notebook from a tunic pocket. “Here it is.” Billings looked at his watch. “Ten minutes to go. We’d better be getting back.” They left the still row lying “at attention”: the only soldiers whom the battle no longer concerned.
Nine minutes to wait. Back in the battery the guns would be loaded by now and laid on their initial targets, and the battery officer would be glancing now and then at his wristwatch. Dan took out Quentin’s notebook and opened it idly. It was filled with diary jottings and with verse, some of it finished, some abortive, scrawled in indelible pencil. He turned over the pages. The last entry was dated that very morning, and it broke off in the middle of a word. “Quentin,” thought Dan, “must have been writing this when the raid came.” He lifted the notebook and peered at the rain-blurred writing.
“Idea for a sonnet ,” Quentin had written. “Call it ‘The Unwilling Slave .’ The war shows what men once were like — beasts delighting to deal pain and shed blood. But it shows, too, how far we have come, that in peace times we can largely control those primal instincts and push them under at all costs. The devil is still alive, of course, and when he gets loose there’s a war. Suggest, then, that ‘God’ chained that devil in us. No, ‘chained’ isn’t the word. God was in us from the beginning and so was the devil. God is the ‘mind’ in human nature (conscious and superconscious) that knows where we are going, the devil is the energy, the brute instinct he uses, like a slave, to carry the soul on its shoulders —”
Jobey’s voice interrupting. “Now then, pal! Go easy on that stuff! I said, ‘take a mouthful,’ not, ‘take the bleedin’ lot.’” Jobey had “half-inched ” some rum from the quartermaster-sergeant , which he was sharing with a chance-met infantryman.
“The devil,” Dan read on, “shakes the soul loose from his shoulders for a time, but the demon cannot see without the soul to guide him — and knows it. And in the end he always stoops again with his forehead in the dust for the soul to mount him again.”
Billings interrupted Dan’s reading. The infantry captain, upon reflection, was a little ashamed of his bitterness about one of his own men (after all, the chap was dead); he tried
to justify himself to Dan. “It was damned bad soldiering, you know. After all, if soldiers started mothering the Boche, where would we be?” There seemed no answer to this question, and Dan made none.
Quentin had written a few more lines. “Try and work in my theory about the Golden Rule in the sestette of the sonnet. Be careful, though; people shy away from religiosity: too softening. I want to hint that if people thought of their neighbours as really part of themselves — same flesh and blood, same sap in them from the same roots — perhaps they would pay some attention to the Golden Rule. End on the theme that all men are really broth —”
The sentence broke off abruptly. “That’s poor old Quentin to a T. Intense, humourless, soul-splitting puritan — and my very dear friend.… It’s odd he should have thought that. There was something about it in my dream. And he must have been writing that down at the very time I was dreaming. I wonder if our thoughts crossed?”
Six minutes.
Jobey was humming a hymn tune under his breath. The words, however, which everyone knew very well, were not sacred.
John Wesley had a little dog,
He was so very thin,
He took him to the Gates of Hell
And threw the bastard in.
Billings leaned against the clay wall of the trench, wristwatch held before his eyes, mentally ticking off the seconds up to the bombardment.
“Here she comes!” he shouted suddenly. “Four minutes, short and sharp, and over we go.”
A big gun fired behind them, and in an instant, rushing and roaring sound battened upon the terrain, and the German trenches blossomed in smoke and tumbling dirt. As far north and south as they could see, columns of white and brown and greenish smoke spouted, curled, intertwined into a fluctuating wall through which scarlet fangs of flame darted where shells burst. The German artillery answered the challenge. Back of the British front line and in front of it, on the parapet, on the parados, coronets of earth shot up and curled over, spattering steel helmets.
The bark of guns, the cough of howitzers, merged into a full-throated , throbbing roar that split the sky in two and held it open. And yet still the sound mounted to a climax. The chaos of noise, the twining of taut nerves, brought nausea to many of the waiting men, the nausea changed to insufferable rage and battle lust, straining to be slaked by the release of power held in tension.
Jobey’s voice shouting in his ear: “Makes up for the salient, sir … blasted shells … can’t get me!”
Quentin.… He liked to quote Homer. “Antilochus, wail thou for me rather than for the dead — for me who live.” … Damn glad I’m alive, though. “Three minutes. Here’s Quentin thrown on the dustheap for his principles and who’s the better for it? … Maybe not, though.… Two minutes. Mustn’t guard my groin. What’s coming is coming.… If I come through I’ll try to see men’s souls. Forty seconds. God Almighty and Jesus Christ forgive me if I take a life, I’m a different sort of man from Quentin.
Twenty seconds. “Fix bayonets! First wave — over we go, men. Keep up close to the barrage.” Boots, in toeholds on the front side of the trench, scrambled and hoisted an irregular line of men over the parapet. They went up, over, and disappeared to eyes below the parapet level.… Behind the flickering, rocking line of shell bursts seventy yards in front of them, the line of men advanced, then knelt to wait for the barrage to jump forward, then broke up as men darted into trenches and shell holes to clear out the Germans at bayonet point, then sped on again to the line of the barrage.
“Now us,” shouted Dan. “Come on Loversedge, let’s see if you’re really immortal.”
The copse of trees toward which they moved seemed quite near — yet far away. Machine guns chattered steadily through the barrage and the bullets zipped and cracked through the air, making the still weeds at their feet jump suddenly. Shells, bursting round them in such numbers, confused Dan’s shell sense. They advanced in short bounds, taking whatever cover there was to take between rushes. A last rush swept them into the wood, bayonets levelled to kill, teeth set and bared, breath whistling, nerves taut and burning with blood lust.
In the wood there were live Germans, some still with fight in them; field grey figures grappling with men in khaki. A wounded German cowered behind a tree, too frightened to put up his hands. Two others knelt with their hands high above their blanched faces. In the melee the wounded German who had not made up his mind got bayoneted. So did the two kneeling figures, since in a scrap where Death was dancing about among panting figures thrusting a bayonet — in, out — there was neither time nor inclination for fine distinction of conduct.… The fight was sharp and soon ended.
Gasping for breath, Dan relaxed and glanced about him. His fury died down. He was in a narrow trench just within the boundary of the wood. British infantry were about him. Of his own men, two had fallen somewhere. Jobey stood beside him.
“Well, Loversedge, here we are.”
“What did I tell you, sir? Shells never do me no harm.”
Lying on the trench bottom a few yards from them is a wounded Bavarian of the Leibregiment who had fallen with a stick bomb clenched in his hand. Stealthily, this man raised himself with one hand; then, holding the bomb under his armpit, he pulled the cord and tossed it at them, willing that they should all go to heaven together. The handle struck Jobey’s chest, the bomb bounced back into the mud and stuck there, handle down, sizzling. Moved by some impulse — Dan never knew for certain what it was — Jobey threw himself upon the bomb and covered it with his body.
The bomb exploded with a sharp crack. The German slumped down with a bullet through his brain. The war was over for Jobey Leversedge.… Dan stooped over him. You won’t need your new boots now, Jobey.… You saved my life and lost yours.… You had no dealings with time, Jobey.… All my life I have believed in death, but you saved my life and lost yours. Why did you? Why?
The Germans had given up the copse and now they turned their guns on it. Dan climbed out of the trench. “Must see about the Lucas lamp.” Shells were crashing into the trees, sending splinters of wood and steel flying. A sudden conviction flashed upon him: “I’m going to be hit, Beatrice.…”
A splinter needled through the foliage with a whine that dropped half a note in the scale as it came. He heard the whine. Then the splinter hurtled against his helmet; he fell and knew no more of that battle.
Hours later, long after the battle had rolled east, two stretcher bearers found him.
“No use carting him back, corp’ral. He’s done for. He’s copped a packet. Look at that tin hat.”
They removed Dan’s shrapnel helmet.
“Done for, my eye! He’s copped a nice blighty one, that’s what he’s copped. That’s what them tin hats are for. Here, put him on the stretcher. He’ll be all right.”
“Listen to him muttering. Something about a pair o’ new boots.… I could do with them German field glasses. I know an off’cer who’d give thirty francs for ’em.”
“Let him be. It ain’t as if he was a stiffie.”
“He won’t need ’em in blighty. He’s out of the war, the lucky lad. Besides, he’s one of them muckin’ artillery blokes.”
“Don’t argue the toss with me, my lad! You let him be. I don’t hold with that kind of scrounging.
“What about the stiffs?”
“Them? Put them in a line in front o’ the parapet. They’ll take them back later.”
“Hi, corporal! Here’s that gipsy I seen this morning while we was waiting to go over. That’s a funny thing. He says no shell is ever going to get him, see? … Look at him now!”
“By the looks of him, no shell did. Looks like he sat down on a bomb.… It’s blown off his identification disk.”
“Well, if he ain’t got a cold meat ticket, they’ll bury him Church of England.”
“That won’t matter to him. Gipsies have
no religion.… What’s his name, chum? Write it on a bit of paper and stick it in his pocket for the next of kin.
“He didn’t tell me. He had some rum, see? And he mucked in with it. Then he told me he was a gipsy and had a charm against shells.”
“Name or no name, Church of England or muckin’ atheist, it don’t matter to him now. Come on, catch ahold here. Up over the parapet. Heave !”
To a Poet Fifty Years Hence
Poet unborn, who ponder bitter rhymes
And turn a frayed and ancient calendar
To curse our shabby modes and worn out times
(Because we sowed the seed of what you are),
We suffered once, like you, and once we wondered,
We looked upon the misshaped Past, and wept;
Then to the Future set our will — and blundered:
We laughed like you and dined in state, then slept.
Think well, the quickening air of every breath
You breathe today is from our sunny sky,
We, too, for glorious moments jeered at death
In self-oblivion for some passerby,
Like you. The way that you must tread, we go —
Uphill and down, I and my living peers,
We, earthy remnants of battered bones, laid low
In green forgetful graves these many years.
Poet, do you as all men must,
Close up the book as I these passions do —
These roses, red for blood, that pricked once to the bone,
