“Quite, sir.”
Carfax comes out to me, and I see brittle scorn in his grey, strained eyes. He leads the way along the main trench and turns into a kind of blind alley. It is packed with men, squatting or leaning in attitudes of boredom and depression against the earth walls. A harsh voice calls them to attention and I am aware of their eyes fixed on me like the eyes of animals as I pass them. The regimental aid-post is a sandbagged recess cut into the earth. Carfax walks past it and stops outside a dug-out.
“This is your hole, doc.”
Instinctively I look at the roof of ground-sheets, and see holes in those sheets. This must have been Hibbert’s dug-out, the place in which he was hit, and I am conscious of faint nausea and qualms of fear. Am I to sleep in this horrible slit in the soil where my predecessor received his death wound? Carfax appears to divine my hesitation and to sympathize with me.
“I’ll have the roof made good, doc.,” and he adds, “it ought to be a safe spot. Things like that don’t happen twice.”
I give him a forced smile.
“I suppose not. What about my kit?”
“I’ll have it sent along.”
“Is that my sick parade?”
“Yes.”
“Rather a crowd.”
He gives me a shrewd look.
“It’s your first, you see, doc., and from the men’s point of view a bit of an experiment.”
I understand him. I am a new man, and perhaps raw and gullible, and capable of being fooled or cajoled by some of these poor devils who may be feeling as homesick and disillusioned as the man who is to be their judge. The sergeant in charge of the aid-post is waiting for me with the sick lists. He is a somewhat foxy-faced person with a reddish moustache and shifty eyes. He is exceedingly polite to me, but abrupt to the men.
“Now then, fall in.”
I sit down on the official box in the aid-post, and prepare to deal with that long file of men. I remember Skinders’s threat, for I had taken it to be a threat. Am I to propitiate my new master by adopting a ruthless attitude towards the battalion’s sick? I can quite understand that men must not be allowed to wangle, and that a battalion’s medical officer’s prime problem may be the detecting of the malingerer.
The first man has trench sores on his hands; they are blue and congested and chronic, and I ask him how long he has been on the Peninsula.
“Since we landed, sir.”
“Been sick before?”
“No, sir, not officially.”
“How long have you had these?”
“For weeks, sir.”
The man is blanched and in poor condition, and I know that those sores will remain with him unless he is sent off for a change and a rest. I mark him for hospital. He gives me a queer, and almost grateful look, and turns quickly away. But that is only the beginning of my problem. Half the men complain of diarrhœa and of passing blood, and I know that unless I see their stools I shall not be in a position to say how genuine each case is. I decide to hedge on this first morning, to cultivate a certain severity. I find three men with jaundice, two with temperatures of uncertain causation, and I mark them to be sent down. Six evacuations out of a parade of forty-three. That ought not to exasperate Skinders.
When the parade is over I ask the red-moustached sergeant whether he is familiar with the medical routine. He is; I am not. There are various returns to be made, medical stores to be checked and indented for, a weekly report to be made to the A.D.M.S. Also, I have to make my daily inspection of the trenches with an eye to their sanitation, and Sergeant Shrimpton will accompany me.
“About these diarrhœa cases, sergeant?”
“Mostly wangles, sir.”
“What did Captain Hibbert do about it?”
“He had a special latrine, sir, for men complaining of diarrhœa, with an orderly in charge. A man had to prove he was passing blood.”
“I see. We will carry on in the same way.”
I decide to go and unpack my kit, and tell Shrimpton to report to me in half an hour, but he looks at me with a little superior smile and remedies my innocence.
“The C.O. expects you to report to him, sir, after sick parade.”
“Did Captain Hibbert do so?”
“Yes, sir.”
I make my way back to the mess, and find Skinders there like a dangerous dog in a kennel. He watches me as though I were a rat.
“How many on parade?”
“Forty-three, sir.”
“What! And how many did you let through?”
“Six, sir.”
“Six!”
He is furious, quite unreasonably furious. I have to describe every case to him and explain my reasons for sending the men down.
He lights a cigarette and nibbles at it, while my loathing for him increases with every minute.
“Do you know what our parade strength is, Mr. Brent?”
“No, sir.”
“Four hundred and twenty-three. We haven’t had a draft for six weeks, and the last one was rubbish. Six men a day means about one hundred and eighty men in a month. How are we to carry on? This is a war, not a hospital out-patient department.”
“I suppose I have to exercise my discretion, sir.”
“What!”
“If I decide that a man is unfit to stay in the line?”
“Unfit! Damn it, man, we’re all more or less unfit. I tell you it’s no use your trying the grandmother game up here. I have got to keep a fighting unit together. Do you understand?”
“Quite, sir. I have no intention of allowing malingering, but——”
He snarls at me.
“ ‘But’ isn’t a word I’ve any use for.”
* * *
I have completed my tour of the trenches we hold. They are comparatively clean, and the battalion’s sanitary squad appears to be working efficiently. I visit the various company headquarters, and introduce myself to the officers in command of the companies. They are a tough crowd, but are kind to me, with the exception of the man in command of B Coy, who treats me with curious suspicion. In nearly all cases the welcome is the same.
“Have a drink, doc.”
Having drunk with A Coy, I refuse B’s temptation. As I leave he says, “Our losing Hibbert was a nasty knock,” which causes me to wonder whether Hibbert’s successor has failed to impress him.
I return to my dug-out and find that new ground sheets have been fixed on the roof. My kit has been placed on the wire bed, and Sergeant Shrimpton, who is still with me, tells me that Hibbert was hit while lying on that bed.
I say, “Is that so? How interesting,” and dismiss the man.
I sit down on that wire bed, and something in me shudders. Can I sleep here where that other man received his death wound? I look round this wretched hole in the earth and feel as though I were in a grave and waiting to be buried. I have no inclination to unpack my kit, and the sour, stale smell of the place disgusts me.
But I realize that this morbid mood will not do. I unstrap and unroll my valise, and put my shaving kit, etc., on a shelf that is supported on pegs driven into the earth wall. I am loth to touch anything in this dug-out, for it suggests blood. I sit down again and wonder if I can ask Skinders to let me settle myself somewhere else; but probably there is no somewhere else, and he would despise me. Besides, we are not here for ever. We shall be relieved and go into rest billets.
Lunch. Our mess consists of Skinders, Carfax, Blount the Intelligence Officer, and myself. I have brought my mess kit with me in a haversack and I hand it over to the mess orderly. Skinders sits at the head of the table, and he talks incessantly, and perhaps for that very reason the others are silent. He talks with his mouth full, and he eats so that one has a public view of the process of mastication. He tears bread with dirty fingers.
There is something loathsome to me in this man. His crudeness is only equalled by his irritable complacency. He appears to possess a store of dirty stories, and his masticating mouth with its sensual, biting hun
griness is foul both as to teeth and to language. I wonder whether he has ever employed a dentist, and where he has been educated and how. But his conversation is not all smuttiness. He pours forth boring, snappy platitudes, gives us little bits of historical information, often inaccurate, and appears to assume that as our C.O. he can not only stuff orders down our throats but compel us to swallow both his bawdiness and his half-baked views upon life in general.
I am interested in Carfax’s face and attitude. He sits opposite me, eating pickles and bully beef with fastidious deliberation, and looking as though he had learnt to despatch his secret soul into other worlds. He attends to Skinders, but without attention. He suggests a man who is infinitely but resignedly weary, but who suffers, because he must, the chatter of this ominous little monkey. Blount, the Intelligence Officer, laughs mechanically at Skinders’s stories, and when presented with some piece of information, says with éclat, “Is that so, sir? How extraordinary!”
Skinders fastens on me. Have I ever read the life of Napoleon? But why Napoleon? It appears that Skinders has a peculiar passion for the Corsican. He gives us a little lecture on Napoleon’s first Italian campaign, and mentions Austerlitz as its critical battle.
I watch Carfax’s eyes across the table. Their tired cynicism warns me that a commanding officer’s historical errors are better left uncorrected, and I gather that this little cad must be allowed to mutilate life and history as he pleases.
Assuredly, this is the most shameful and humiliating of the human relationships, when one is compelled to suffer the authority of a man whom one hates and despises. It prompts me to question all authority, or to reserve its privileges and potencies for the very few. Skinders disgusts me, and yet if I betray my feelings he is in a position to make life still more unpleasant for me. My only defences are a conventional courtesy and silence, but he is sufficiently cunning to divine my dislike of him.
Carfax tells me that in civil life Skinders was a minor provincial official in some insurance company, and that as a pre-war territorial officer his promotion to a command became inevitable. He appears to be universally feared and hated, and the hatred is all the more intense because Skinders’s physical courage is not beyond reproach. He spends nearly all his time in the mess or orderly-room, delegating danger, but reserving to himself the right to snarl and to tyrannize over his juniors.
Carfax lets his soul loose to me.
“You know, doc., it is pretty horrible to feel that you could kill the man whom you are supposed to serve and respect. One used to hear stories of bullying sergeants being shot in the back, and I understand now how such things happen. But what disgusts me most is the way this man slavers and fawns upon the powers above. He is terrified of our Brigadier, who happens to be a gentleman. It makes one sick.”
I ask him why he doesn’t ask to be transferred.
“O, well, probably I shall do. I stayed on because of Hibbert. Hibbert was the one man who stood up to this little swine, and who had some influence over him. In a way it was Hibbert who held the battalion together. We’re not a happy crowd. One of the things this war is teaching me is the power of personality for good or evil. Given a good C.O. the essence of him seems to spread right down even to the fellows who empty the latrine buckets. Skinders poisons the whole crowd of us. It’s so bad that I don’t like to think sometimes what might happen if our battalion found itself in a tight corner. Morale is a queer thing, doc. Men who will fight like hell under a man they like and respect, will chuck up and panic under some savage little cad.”
I am beginning to realize that my dislike of Skinders is returned by him with interest.
Moreover, he has me at a disadvantage, as I do not possess the experience or the prestige that was Hibbert’s, and Skinders can bluff and hector me more or less as he pleases. He is vulgarly facetious to me in the mess, and I have more than a suspicion that his plan is to provoke me to some outburst. Such loss of control on my part would put me even more at his mercy. He interferes in everything I do, makes me come and report to him in the orderly-room, and lectures me before the orderly-room staff.
Have I any right of appeal to the A.D.M.S.? I think of going to see Frost and of explaining my troubles and asking his advice, but such a confession of weakness seems rather despicable. My best plan is to carry out my work to the best of my ability, and try to keep my self-respect unashamed.
* * *
One morning just as we have finished breakfast, and I am due to take sick parade, the Turks start shelling our lines. The enemy guns are spraying shrapnel round about our headquarters, but the mess has a sandbagged roof, and is proof against shrapnel. I can assume that common sense justifies me in waiting until the morning hate is over, and I fill my pipe and prepare to light it.
Skinders is fussing with a cigarette.
“What about your sick parade, doctor?”
I light my pipe, glance at my wrist-watch, and remain seated.
“I am just going, sir.”
“I suppose you understand, doctor, that your sick parade is waiting for you. I expect my officers to set a proper example.”
Something flames in me. So, he is sufficiently clever to get me in the wrong, and to hint that I can sit in a funk-hole while the men on sick parade have to stand in a trench. But I manage to control myself. I rise, knock my pipe out against the sandbags, and put it in my pocket.
“I quite see your point, sir.”
And then I am tempted to say a most unwise thing. Skinders has been suggesting that I am still letting too many men away, and that he will come down and inspect the sick in person. Whether he has any right to exercise such interference I do not know. I pause in the mess doorway and say to him, “Perhaps you would like to see me take the sick parade this morning, sir.”
I am aware of Carfax looking up at me sharply. Skinders’s stained teeth show in a sudden snarl.
“I don’t accept impertinence from my subordinates, Dr. Brent. If it occurs again I shall report you.”
“I was not conscious of being impertinent, sir.”
“Indeed! Then you had better be a little more careful in the future.”
I go down the trench realizing that though I may have scored a hit, the reaction may not be a happy one for me. The shelling is still going on, and a shrapnel bullet plops into the parapet close to me, but my rage against Skinders is more dominating than the immediate danger. I find a very small sick parade, half a dozen men flattened against the sap wall. Sergeant Shrimpton has taken cover in the aid-post.
“Not many men reporting sick, sergeant.”
He grins and shows me the company lists.
“Most of ’em thought better of it, sir.”
I don’t blame them.
* * *
Skinders has changed his attitude towards me. He is polite, ironically polite, and I feel that he is like a treacherous dog waiting for his opportunity to bite.
How absurd and strange it is that two men who are engaged on what is supposed to be a crusade should behave to each other like a couple of snarling dogs. But this war is proving how much of the animal there is in all of us; and it seems to exaggerate our fundamental antipathies and hatreds. Nor were the crusaders Galahads, but fierce gentlemen ready to fly at each other’s throats, or to join savagely in the sacking of Byzantium. It is more and more obvious that there will be no sacking of Byzantium for us.
I am seeing much of Carfax. He comes and sits in my dug-out and talks. He is an Oxford man and a barrister, whose delicate sense of humour has been unable to survive months of contact with Skinders. He warns me against Skinders, and especially so in his present mood.
“You got him on the raw, Brent, and he will never forgive you.”
And then, Carfax laughs, but there is no mirth in his laughter.
“How pretty-pretty all that life seems before the war. We may have thought ourselves witty and wicked in a small, lisping way, but for those of us who survive what a burying there will be of old illusions. One has met ou
t here so many splendid people, and a few creatures like Skinders. You know, I have a horrid suspicion, Brent, that too much of our industrial world is run by people like Skinders.”
I confess that the type is somewhat new to me.
“Yes, and so it was to me, but we were nice, protected people, Brent; we didn’t see life in the raw. Our world was so gentlemanly and well tailored. What about the world that has to be employed by men like Skinders? They are so damned complacent and hard, and they seem to think that what I would describe as commercial cunning is the ultimate intelligence. War brings out the good and the bad in one, but one is horrified by the discovery how bad the bad can be. Yes, in one’s self. Mean fear, and careful selfishness, and all that.”
“I haven’t seen much of it in you.”
“My dear man, I spend my days trying to say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ ”
* * *
Our tour in the trenches is over. We are relieved and trail away down that valley of hell, the Great Gully. A grey sky slides by overhead, and rain is coming. We wonder what our luck will be. I march at the tail of the battalion, and I realize how stale the men are. Even this comparatively short tramp produces pinched faces and straggling feet.
We arrive at Gully Beach and turn left up the road to the top of the cliff, and slogging on arrive at a dirt patch that may once have been a cultivated field. The wind blows wet and cold, but thank heaven this colder weather has put the infernal flies to sleep. We find our rest billets in a collection of trenches and holes and slits in the earth. It is a dreary prospect, but I hear one irrepressible Tommy remark, “The same ruddy old hole, lad. What price Blackpool beach?”
The cheerfulness of some of the plain men is a virtue that makes me marvel, but perhaps they have had more to bear in civil life than we refined people wot of.
It is beyond poetic licence to call this muddy, wind-swept plateau a rest camp. More shells are in the air since Bulgaria joined in against us, and it begins to rain. Our mess is a semi-underground shack into which yellow mud and water seeps. But the men are in much worse case, for their holes and shelter trenches become waterlogged with this pouring rain. One can see them fishing for their drowned equipment, and rigging up ground-sheets over new and shallower holes. But they are never dry, and I imagine that if this wet weather continues my sick parade will cause Skinders to throw a fit. I can’t understand why we are not provided with corrugated iron and more sandbags and allowed to work on erecting winter quarters, but they tell me that corrugated iron is worth five pounds a sheet out here. Perhaps our sojourn here is so transitory that more substantial planning is not thought worth while, but I am beginning to think that in the war of the Greeks against Troy, the Homeric show was not submerged in mud.
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