“Come into the mess, Brent.”
I follow him in, feeling that I am very much in some other sort of mess. We are alone. He sits down, but I remain standing.
He looks up at me quickly.
“Sit down, Brent. Now, what has the trouble been? Tell me everything.”
I sit down, and tell him the whole story, and his face takes on an expression of grimness. Is he condemning me, or does he understand the clash of personalities, and the prejudices to which I have been subjected?
“He gave you orders to go into the crater and dress wounded?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ruddy fool.”
Am I the ruddy fool? Frost sniffs, and his nostrils are fierce.
“That’s the sort of thing Skinders would do. He went behind me in having Milsom sent up. An M.O.’s proper place is his aid-post. We have had that point thrashed out on other occasions. If Thomas had known the facts——”
He pauses and smiles at me suddenly.
“I shall see Colonel Thomas; also, I shall see Colonel Skinders. I can say what you can’t say, Brent.”
I shall never cease to be grateful to Frost for the kindness he showed me that morning, and his manner of showing it before the men. He tells me that the dug-out next to his is vacant. “Come along, I’ll settle you in.” As we walk towards the cliff path he takes my arm, and draws me gently aside. A working party of ambulance men is mending the road, and Frost and I go and watch them. He still holds my arm.
“You see your sea-wall is still standing.”
I manage to smile at the men, and one or two of them smile back at me. Frost and I go up to the cliff path to the line of dug-outs. He pulls aside the door-sheet like a host showing a guest to his room.
“I’ll have your kit sent up, Brent.”
I want to say all sorts of things to Frost, but all that I can get out is, “You are being awfully decent to me, sir.”
But his magnanimity does not diminish my secret sense of failure, and my interview with Colonel Thomas causes me to suspect that these men are being merciful. Colonel Thomas takes me to his dug-out, and tells me to give him my version of the affair. He says, “I am going to be quite frank with you, Brent, because it is part of my business to stand up for my officers. Colonel Skinders accuses you of shirking your duty and of disobeying orders. You might, if you wished it, demand an inquiry, but let us hear what you have to say.” I tell him the truth, and his shrewd, kind eyes watch my face. I feel more than ready to leave my fate in his capable and impartial hands.
He smiles at me. “Things are largely how we look at them, Brent, and we vary according to the attitude of people who may be in control of circumstances. I think I am going to take a strong line over this case of yours, but if you will follow my advice you will not try to make more trouble for yourself.”
“I am more than ready to leave it to you, sir.”
“Very good, Brent. Certain people can be peculiarly vindictive and they are capable of making an affair appear far more serious than it is. I think it would be unwise of you to give that person this opportunity.”
“I quite understand, sir.”
“I will post you again to Colonel Frost’s ambulance. I think you were happy there.”
I cannot help smiling over the word he uses.
“One seems able to do better work for a particular man, sir.”
“Yes, it is easier to take orders from a gentleman than from a cad, Brent. Let that be a generalization.”
His humorous, shrewd eyes smile at me.
“Thank you, sir.”
I salute him in the spirit as well as in the flesh, and go back to my old home feeling both helped and humbled, for it should be a source of humiliation to me that I have been brought low by a cad like Skinders. Not only have I failed to transcend circumstances, but I have been made to appear little by a man whom I despise.
But I am beginning to feel dreadfully tired and sleepy. My eyes itch and are heavy. I join the others in the mess for lunch, and I gather that the two new men know nothing of my sorry adventure. I find Frost regarding me with a physician’s eyes. At the end of the meal he says to me, “Go and doss down, Brent; get into your pyjamas and sleep the clock round.”
Yes, sleep is the one thing that both spirit and body crave for.
Someone pulls back the ground sheet covering my doorway, and lets in the light. It is Frost, stripped to the waist and towelling his hard head and big shoulders.
“Slept well, Brent?”
So I have slept right through to the morning, and as Frost stands aside I can see Imbros and a placid sea. It is one of those pearly, tranquil days. How good to be under the shelter of this benign cliff and of a man who can be both just and merciful. But, Frost, still towelling his head, has other reasons for waking me.
“Get up, Brent, and come and look at something you may never forget.”
I come out in my pyjamas, and following Frost’s pointing hand, see in the distance along the coast a column of smoke like the smoke of some vast funeral pyre.
“Suvla. We’ve gone. Stores burning.”
“Suvla evacuated!”
He stands with the towel over his shoulders.
“Yes, and Anzac.”
“Did you know?”
“I had more than a suspicion. I wonder how many men we have lost.”
His face has a sadness, as he stands head in air.
“It might have been so different.”
Our world becomes a place of strange rumours, and a hall of the promise of great happenings. We are told that the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac was carried out with less than half a dozen casualties. At first we cannot believe it, and if the thing is true we can only ascribe it to tacit collusion on the part of the Turks.
But what is to happen to us at Helles?
A sententious semi-official announcement appears, stating that Helles will be held as a species of eastern Gibraltar.
What a pleasant prospect! Tippie, dropping in on us for the daily gossip, has no enthusiasm for this pompous proposal. He declares that we shall have a lovely time sitting on this bit of the earth, while the Turks bring up all their Suvla and Anzac guns and blow the beaches to blazes.
“I believe it’s a bluff, Brent.”
“Do you think we are going off?”
“I do.”
“But shall we get off? We can’t spoof them twice.”
Tippie looks glum.
“I don’t like it, Stevie, I don’t like it at all.”
Frost may know the truth, but he keeps it to himself. Meanwhile, Roberts has gone sick and been evacuated, and Truman, one of the new men, has joined Milsom in the Gully A.D.S. Frost and I and Gregson the gynæcologist are left alone. Gregson is a matronly person who continues to survey this strange scene with an air of reflective bewilderment. There is nothing here upon which he can exercise his particular craft, and Frost refers to him as the midwife. But he is a solid, likeable person who makes one feel that England and the English still exist. Nor does he in any way add to my secret sense of failure, and to the humiliation that lies close to my soul. I am afraid that my one thought is to say farewell to this accursed place, and I have more than a suspicion that nine men out of ten share my yearning to escape.
* * *
Frost calls me into the mess. He has a sombre, serious air.
“I have rather a queer job for you, Stevie. I have had orders to supply a working party of thirty men to dig a stretcher trench down to the cliff about half a mile along the coast. Yes, to-night. You’ll be in charge. Better take Gregson with you for experience. Corporal Hands knows the place. You will meet an R.E. officer up there and report to him.”
“A stretcher trench? How deep do we dig?”
Frost gives me a significant look.
“The R.E. people will know.”
After dark Gregson, Corporal Hands and I set out with our thirty men, plus picks and shovels. We trail along the beach for some distance until we strike a
path slanting up the face of the cliff. Corporal Hands leads the way. It is a still and peaceful night, quite warm and windless. I give the order, “No smoking, no talking.” We arrive on the plateau above. Our feet brush through heather. Something zips into the heather close to me, and I realize that we are out in the open somewhere behind our trenches, and that stray bullets are coming over from the Turkish line.
I am strung up, but curiously unafraid, though why this night’s mood should be good I cannot say. We find that a short section of trench has been dug and where it peters out into nothing we discern two dim figures waiting for us. They are the R.E. officer and a sergeant.
He speaks to me in a low voice.
“R.A.M.C. working-party?”
“Yes.”
“Right’o. String your men out along here. Tell ’em to get down to it. Bullets coming over. My sergeant will stay here and see you get things right.”
He is a particularly calm person, and he strolls off leaving me to the job. I get the men strung out and tell them to put their backs into it, but there is no need for me to inspire them. Those angry zippings in the air are a sufficient inspiration. Never have I seen men work so strenuously, picks and shovels going like flails, but before they have been at it five minutes I hear a curse. One sweating wielder of a pick has applied the business end to the backside of the man working in front of him.
Breeches down, a field-dressing applied, and the injured party is returned damaged to headquarters. He goes off growling. Had his gluteus maximus been penetrated by a bullet there might have been dignity and hope in the event.
I walk up and down in the darkness. The danger somehow excites me, and I feel that I am showing these men that I am not the complete coward. The R.E. sergeant strolls up to me; he is a paternal person with a walrus moustache.
“No need to walk about, sir. Nothing like a few bullets for making chaps jump to it.”
I laugh and thank him, and suddenly I remember that Gregson is missing. Surely he hasn’t been hit? I walk along to the other piece of trench, and in the dim light I become aware of a hunched-up figure sitting in it. I jump down beside Gregson. He says nothing, but I catch the faint gleam of his eyes. He looks all tucked up and cold in his overcoat, and instantly I understand what is the matter with him. It is his first experience of acute, physical fear, and it has paralysed him, and he is squatting there overwhelmed by the fierceness and the shame of it.
I feel for my pipe.
“All right to smoke here. The men are getting on like one o’clock. Funny sort of job for a doctor, this.”
He looks at me strangely in the dim light, and makes no reply. I leave him alone and fill and light my pipe.
Suddenly he gets up.
“I’m going to walk about a bit, Brent.”
“No need, old man.”
“I must.”
I understand him, and respect him. He gets out of the trench and disappears in the darkness, and I do not interfere, for I know how he is feeling, and that his pride is whipping him to overcome crude fear. I puff at my pipe and listen to the occasional hiss of bullets overhead. They pass like solitary and swift and angry insects. I can hear the faint toiling of the men as they tear down and fling out the soil, and I think how some common emotion brings us all to earth.
I hear footsteps in the heather and Gregson comes back. He slithers down into the trench, and feels for his pipe. But now he does not sit hunched up, and I can divine the man in him giving thanks for the thing that he has done.
“My God, Brent, what a worm one can be!”
I feel warm and protective towards him.
“How are the men doing?”
“Sweating and grunting. They are more than knee deep. I just walked about a bit.”
“Tobacco tastes good, what?”
“I should say so. What do you think this damned trench is really for, Brent?”
“I don’t know, but I rather fancy it must be part of a scheme for evacuation.”
He looks at me sharply.
“Do you really think we are going off?”
“Only lunatics would stay here.”
“But one has to remember that the great men who are responsible seem to suffer sometimes from senile dementia.”
I laugh.
“Not all of them. But I shouldn’t be sorry to go. One so soon becomes proof against the mock heroic stuff. What about you?”
“Me? I think I should feel like a woman who has just got rid of her first baby.”
* * *
Frost has a serious face these days, but whatever the secret is he keeps it loyally to himself. I feel more and more under the shadow of suspense, and I find that all those precious ties that I have left at home tug at me and tempt me to play for safety. There is more liveliness on both sides, and the Turks are beginning to demonstrate the fact that a generous ration of shells will make life impossible here. We hear that the people at W Beach are having a hell of a time, and that Corps is being strafed daily. I overhear some cynical person say, “Well, that will make ’em sit up and think.” A shell explodes on the beach close to the mess, blows in our windows, and kills one of our men. I find myself loth to leave the shelter of the cliff, and I even avoid the mouth of the Great Gully. This waiting to go and wondering whether one will escape in safety, must be worse in some ways than waiting to attack. All one’s urges are negative, and push one in the wrong direction.
I remember a vivid sunset and much noise. Our heavies are firing furiously up above. An aeroplane circles. The cliffs are vivid and tawny against the sunset, and the sky green blue. A sense of stress and of imminent tragedy possesses me. I walk up and down and listen, not so much to the crack of our own guns but for that other and more sinister sound, the coming of an enemy shell. I know now that a howitzer shell can just graze the edge of the cliff and burst on the beach close to us.
I hear someone calling me. I turn and see Frost in the mess doorway, and he beckons.
“Oh, Brent, you are to take a party of men off to-night.”
“To-night, sir?”
He closes the door, and sits down with his elbows on the table.
“Yes, fifty men. You will have to leave in an hour. You report at W Beach, and pick up a guide who will take you across to V Beach. You embark from there at about ten o’clock.”
His face is hard and expressionless as though he has set himself to confront some desperate crisis.
“But why should I go, and not Gregson?”
“You’re married.”
“And you?”
He looks up at me with his very blue eyes.
“I stay on to the last.”
“But you are married.”
“That’s neither here nor there in my case, Brent. You will have to leave your kit. Take a pack and a haversack. You had better go and pack at once.”
I am tempted to ask him to let me stay, but before the words can come I am assailed by the thought that they are sending me off because my nerve is not to be trusted. I am not the man for a forlorn hope. I hesitate for a moment, but a feeling of frustration and of secret shame seem to drag me down into surrender. I turn to the door, look back and find his eyes fixed on me. He is sending me away to safety, but he has to stay here, and I can divine what is in his mind.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
He says to me almost sharply, “Go and pack.”
I climb to my dug-out and begin to bundle my belongings into my valise. Does Frost despise me? Do I despise myself? Yes, and yet I am trembling with secret and shameful exultation. I am leaving this accursed place. To-night I shall be on the sea, safe from my fear of shells. I put my washing things and razor and a pair of pyjamas and an extra shirt into the infantry pack that I have scrounged. Socks, and brushes, and my letters, tobacco, pipes and a stick of chocolate go into my haversack. I take down poor Mary’s soiled photo, and slip it into the breast pocket of my tunic.
It is dark. I go down to the road, and see dim figures parading, the men who are
to go with me. Frost is speaking to the sergeant in charge, young Rogers. Possibly Rogers may be a more reliable person on such an occasion than an officer who is under a cloud. I go into the mess, and find tea still there. I gulp a cup of stewed tea, and eat some cake.
I hear Frost’s voice.
“Brent.”
“Coming, sir.”
“You had better push off at once. The men have got a goodish tramp, and they’re stale for marching.”
I put out a hand to Frost.
“Good luck, sir.”
But he does not seem to see my hand. He is staring at his dispatch box on the table. It is full of letters from home.
* * *
This is one of the strangest walks I have ever taken. We climb the road up the cliff and set out for Lancashire Landing. The night is soundless save for the distant rattle of rifle fire from the trenches. No shells. Rogers and I walk at the head of the men, and I cannot remember saying anything to him. We arrive at W Beach. It is utterly dark, and to me a chaos of guns, wagons, motor-cycles, forage, water-carts and every sort of obstruction. I get the impression of immense activity in the midst of this black and seeming chaos. But where is our guide? I make the men sit down; they need it; they are in poor condition after all these months.
I start blundering about amid wagons and piles of stores until I hear an authoritative voice giving orders. I approach the voice.
“Excuse me, sir, can you help me?”
The voice replies, “Who the hell are you?”
I explain, and he shouts into the darkness: “Guide for the R.A.M.C. party.” A figure appears; it is our guide. The men scramble up, and we set out for V Beach over what to me seems to be a wild upland. Our guide has nothing to carry, and he walks fast. I can hear sounds of distress coming from the men; they begin to straggle, and Rogers waits to energize them. He rejoins me carrying a man’s pack.
“Some of them are pretty done already, sir.”
No Hero-This Page 13
