No Hero-This

by Warwick Deeping

  * * *

  I will endure. I will not be broken.

  * * *

  We have our Headquarters in a deserted and semi-ruined farmhouse, part of which is habitable. It is a strange place, with a fallacious air of peace, for the fields around us are full of standing wheat with red poppies threaded through them. The wheat is just beginning to turn colour. One wing of the house has caved in, but the main part of it is more or less intact, as is the barn. We use the kitchen as an orderly-room, and the parlour as a mess. Trenches have been dug in which the men can shelter in case of night-bombing or severe shelling. The garden is full of espaliers trained on an old high wall.

  Gibbs and Potter are up at the A.D.S., which is in the sandbagged cellars of another farmhouse, farther forward. The country is very flat and can be observed from Kemmel, and it is not safe to visit the A.D.S. in full daylight, for one can be sniped. One goes up at dawn or dusk and, if possible, the wounded are kept and sent down when the light is dim.

  It is a strange walk in the early morning. One takes a path through a wheat field, passes through a gap in a hedge, and follows a narrow lane, passing another little farm in which guns are camouflaged in the orchard. One leaves the lane again for another wheatfield, with Kemmel hill looming up as a sinister lump in the distance. One strikes the lane again where it is partially screened by a row of poplars. There are a few shell-holes, not many. The farm which shelters our A.D.S. lies in the middle of a paddock, and one reaches it by a ditch under a hedge, the ditch having been deepened into a shallow communication trench.

  The news is good, and unexpectedly so.

  Foch has made a trenchant flank attack on the Germans, and they are retreating from the salient into which their last offensive had thrust them.

  “Oh, boy!” as the Americans say.

  We have nearly thirty thousand of these vigorous young men behind us. By walking half a mile I can watch a whole battalion doing physical drill to music. It reminds me rather of a huge dancing class, but the physique of these Americans is comforting and impressive. They can be somewhat embarrassing neighbours at night, for when the Boche bombers come over, whole battalions will turn out and blaze away into the sky. It is an invitation to be bombed.

  * * *

  I have been to Poperinghe. It is a ghost of a town, but one can still dine and buy good wine at some shanties on the Abele road. How commerce does cling to the loincloth of death!

  * * *

  Fairfax sends for me. I find him in the orderly-room looking pink and jolly. He flaunts a yellow paper at me, a leave warrant. It must be a birthday present from Rankin!

  “Not for you, Steevie, I’m afraid. I’m going down to Calais to-night.”

  Leave! Good God, how home pulls one! But the fact that Fairfax is being allowed to go on leave is profoundly significant.

  “I’m glad, sir.”

  “You’ll be in command, Stephen. And directly I return, you will go.”

  This means that in a fortnight or so I shall be in England. O blessed country! I may have dreamed a dream in Le Mesnil, but the bitter sweetness of it is becoming a memory, and all my urge is towards home.

  I smile down at Fairfax’s happy face.

  “This means that things are easier.”

  He returns my smile.

  “Yes; Rankin hinted to me that the Boche attack up here is off. He has enough to do down south.”

  Thank God for that!

  * * *

  I am taking my responsibilities with great seriousness. I make myself walk up to the A.D.S. with Finch each morning, but I am in a most disgustingly windy state these days. If a shell lands a quarter of a mile away my tummy seems to bounce like a toy balloon. Perhaps it is the prospect of leave, and the dread of being knocked out before one has looked again at a dear and a particular face.

  I have written to Mary warning her, and I have suggested that we spend three or four days in town. I want to celebrate and be gay.

  * * *

  Finch and I have a rather nasty time one morning in the lane just before reaching the communication trench. Whizz-bangs. We have to do a belly-flop, and then run like hell for the hedge and ditch. I arrive at the A.D.S. rather dirty and breathless, and in a muck-sweat.

  Gibbs and Potter are really great souls. They dust me down in their cellar and give me a drink, and more than a drink.

  Gibbs says, “Look here, old man, don’t be silly. There’s no earthly need for you to come stodging up here each morning. Potter and I are all right, aren’t we Potts?”

  Potter looks at me in his mild, serene way.

  “Quite. Almost a reflection on us, Stephen!”

  I say that I have got to take this morning walk, just because I am so damned windy about it.

  Gibbs says, “Bosh. You’ve got the leave feeling, and too much conscience. Either Potts or I will take a morning stroll and come down and report, if you feel we are such a pair of kids.”

  I laugh and agree, but not as to their childishness. Their generosity touches me. It is good to have men who can help you through a windy patch. In the words of the rank and file, “I am sweating on leave,” and my yearning to be home makes me jumpy.

  * * *

  The D.D.M.S. Corps pays us a visit, a charming old gentleman who stays to tea with us, and then shocks me by telling me that the Division will shortly be relieved, and taken out of the line for intensive training, and that the Americans will replace us. One of our ambulances, probably ours, will remain behind for three weeks to act as wet-nurse to the Yankees.

  Will this make any difference to my leave? I put the question to him tentatively, and say that it is more than nine months since I have had leave. He says, of course, that it is a matter for my A.D.M.S. to decide, and that if Fairfax can spare me, there should be no objection.

  * * *

  Fairfax is back. He has called at Divisional Headquarters on his way, and he produces from his pocket something in an official envelope. It is a leave warrant.

  “You can buzz off to-morrow, Steevie.”

  I feel like kissing him.

  “Did you stop and see Rankin on purpose?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No wonder we are a happy crowd.”

  * * *

  The sun is shining. I have to spend the night at Calais, and I send Mary a wire. “Meet leave train Victoria to-morrow. Propose three nights at Piccadilly Hotel.” This Calais hotel is an austere and shabby place, but it might be the anteroom to Mahomet’s Paradise so far as I am concerned. I allow myself half a bottle of Beaune. I am thinking more of Mary than of the child at Le Mesnil. Mary is a reality.

  * * *

  England in August, the first week of August. It is the same England, but how different I am from the man of 1914. I suppose I am coarser and rougher and more charged with colourful and moving language, but though war may be a brutal business I feel that it has tempered me. Kent is a lovely county, and the afternoon sunlight is like amber wine. I am a little drunk with excitement and desire.

  * * *

  Mary. I see her waving to me. She looks a little flushed, and prettier than I ever remember. Her skin has a softness, bloom, and her frock and hat are to me flowerlike things. I kiss her, and she says with a flirt of the head, “How do you do, Major Brent. Do Field Officers kiss their wives in public?”

  I say, “I don’t believe you are my wife. Some strange and wicked woman!”

  There is a quality of strangeness in her that provokes me. It is all so fresh and virginal and new, as though we are to explore all the intimacies of marriage without the rawness of the conventional honeymoon.

  The Piccadilly cannot take us in, but we are accepted by a pleasant hotel in Kensington which Mary has heard of, “The Vanborough.” We have a little bathroom of our own where I can dress and shave, and that, I think, is another refinement that the war has introduced into the relations between the sexes. I do understand that double-bedded Victorianism is dead, and that marriage in its stuffy two-in-a-trough i
dea is a thing of the past. Woman, newly emancipated, will demand a more fastidious aloofness in these domestic intimacies. The war seems to have created in some of us a new shyness and a more delicate appreciation of the subtleties of other selves.

  Our windows look out on to plane trees and grass, and as I sit astride a chair while my wife unpacks some of her things, I become conscious of her as an exquisitely individual creature, not to be taken for granted in the social sense, but more of a dear Aspasia to be matched in wit and esprit.

  She says to me, “You really are a most disgraceful father, Stephen.”

  “I?”

  “You haven’t asked about our daughter.”

  “Surely, but I have.”

  “No, not properly.”

  “Well, you know, perhaps it is because you don’t look like a mother, or I’m not seeing you quite like that.”

  “It sounds almost indecent. But go and wait for me, dear. I want to powder my nose.”

  “Splendid. Shall I try and get theatre tickets, or would you like to go out and dance?”

  “I shall be quite happy here for to-night. One shouldn’t rush at things too much.”

  “Yes, I think I understand.”

  I get up, and she sits down in front of her mirror. I have my hand on the handle of the door when she calls me back.

  “Stephen!”

  “Yes, dearest?”

  “Do you know I feel that I have been an awful prig sometimes. Has it struck you in that way?”

  “I can’t say that it has.”

  “So many women seem to become so bossy now that they are running shows. Marriage is a show. I’ll try not to be bossy.”

  I go back and kiss her.

  Mary and I have never been better friends. We appear to understand each other more humanly, and to have shed the little hypocrisies that can clutter up marriage like social bric-à-brac. The war has broken so much bric-à-brac that I feel that we shall be able to move about more freely in the house of marriage, as well as in the highways of the world. Joan Phyllis’s England will be a very different England, but whether she will be happier in it, God knows! All the new freedom that is boiling up may lift the lid off all the conventions. Or, rather, I suppose we shall change our conventions, for our climate does not encourage nudism, and our habits, mental and otherwise, are the clothes our climate imposes on us.

  * * *

  This leave has not the bitter-sweet tang of the previous one. Is it that one has begun to see a little sparkle of light at the far end of the tunnel? I feel more hopeful that I may not have to leave my bones with poor Hallard’s somewhere in Flanders.

  * * *

  Chu Chin Chow! Has any piece of pretty musical fooling become more part of the War than this Chinese fantasia? But I shall never forget this particular matinée. During an interval the officer man on my left goes out and returns with a paper. There are big black headlines on the front page, and I glance across to read them.

  “Great British Victory in France. We advance eight miles. Ten thousand prisoners, three hundred guns. The German line broken.”

  I cannot believe it. I speak to the man with the paper.

  “Is that official?”

  He is as excited as I am.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In front of Villers Bret. We seem to have made a surprise attack and smashed clean through. Australians and Canadians, and some of us. A mass of tanks.”

  “It seems too good to be true.”

  “Like to read it?”

  He passes me the paper, and turns to the woman beside him.

  I hear him say, “That takes some of the worry off one’s shoulders.”

  * * *

  I feel that we must celebrate this victory. We do, but not in the champagne spirit. We go and sit in Kensington Gardens and watch the children playing. Please God, we shall all of us be able to play again, perhaps next year.

  * * *

  My small daughter is a rather adorable creature. She must have been well coached by Mary, for she does not greet me as a stranger. I’m “Daddy,” a mysterious yet viridical person who has the right to jump up into her world like a nice jack-in-the-box. I have brought her a doll from town, and we take each other and the puppet round the garden, and I am aware of Mary watching us from the french window.

  * * *

  The Australians are in Proyart. Amazing! We hear that our light tanks surprised and shot up a Divisional Headquarters in a village east of Harbonnieres.

  Proyart, Harbonnieres! I sit and smoke my pipe and think of that terrifying but fascinating week, with its superb sunlight and vast sky. Proyart. I remember that serene and very lovely French girl packing her basket and getting into her gig. I laugh when I think of how Fairfax and I smashed the bottles of wine in that courtyard. And what happened to that poor devil of a dog in Harbonnieres who ran round and round as the shells scattered the tiles?

  Hangard, Bertaucourt, Boves! Those dim villages about Abbeville, and then Le Mesnil, and that vivid spring. Pauline Malaunay! Her face will never be dim to me, but the memory causes me no pain. Joan Phyllis comes toddling into the room, and my small daughter is reality, and I am happy here in my home.

  * * *

  Poor old Randall has aged a lot, and is looking very tired. He says that life and some of the people at home have become very difficult. He has been overworked, and is inclined to be irritable and gloomy.

  He says that he will be very glad to have me back. And how much longer is the war going to last?

  I say, that with the Americans in full blast, we should be able to smash Germany in 1919.

  Randall lights his pipe.

  “Nearly another year. And, the afterwards? I hope to heaven we shan’t go like Russia.”

  “Our army isn’t at all Russian.”

  “It isn’t the army, Stephen, but these labour people at home. One hears many ugly rumours.”

  I say, “Oh, I think you are all rather tired and jumpy.”

  * * *

  As usual I run into that ass Rob Guthrie. He has married a second wife, a young woman of twenty-five, and he is feeling canine and youthful. His face and his moustache and his clothes are more flamboyant than ever. How can a young woman accept intimacies from a smelly old dog like Guthrie? The thing disgusts me.

  He slaps me on the shoulder.

  “Well, we’re winning the war now, Brent.”

  We, indeed! And then he goes on to say that we are making those damned Yanks look foolish, and that they may just as well get back into their ships and go home.

  I say, that but for the Americans, the Germans would have been in Paris, and he snorts at me.

  “Always a defeatist, Brent. Why do you always crab your own country?”

  I tell him that we people who have been at the front are less boastful and bellicose than the old men. This seems to annoy him considerably. He is a perfect Pooh Bah of a creature.

  “Well, tell me one thing that the Yanks have done.”

  I retort by saying that America has behaved with great magnanimity, and that if he had seen those thousands of big young men as I have seen them, he would not talk such guff. I suppose the war has made me intolerant of snobbery and humbug, and we part with mutual hostility.

  * * *

  My last day. I am conscious of a feeling of serenity and of hope. Mary and I take Joan Phyllis out in the car and picnic near High Toy. The Downs are like silver smoke. Joan Phyllis crawls about amid the heather, and we watch our small daughter and are content with the silence and the shadows of the tall trees. It seems to me that summer is playing on a harp that has strings of gold, and that the world will soon be listening to nature sounds instead of to the roar of aeroplanes and the thudding of guns.

  Mary says to me, “Stephen, I have a feeling that it will soon be over.”

  Dear God, I hope it will.

  She puts out a hand to me.

  “Do be careful. Don’t take risks—unless you need, I
mean.”

  I hold her hand.

  “I will crawl about under my tin-hat like a tortoise. No hero—this, my dear.”

  XXVI

  Flanders again, with Kemmel hill like the swell of a grey bubble on the horizon.

  It is an American world to which I return, and only after two days’ vagabondage do I find the Ambulance under canvas in a field which has for a hedge a quadrilateral of huge, white poplars. The whole countryside is crawling with U.S.A. in khaki. They are New Yorkers, and the timbre of their voices is a little more aggressive than that of my friends at Beauchamp. I find Fairfax and the whole unit feeling a little fed up and lost in this strange world, as though the war had ceased to be theirs, and Uncle Sam was straddling the horizon like a trousered colossus.

  Fairfax has been made responsible for planning a scheme of evacuation in case of a Boche attack. No one believes now that Prince Rupprecht will be able to attack, unless the German High Command might think it policy to try and smash an American division for the sake of depressing the U.S.A. morale. Fairfax has been experiencing diplomatic difficulties, for some of these New Yorkers appear to be an over-confident crowd. They are going to finish the war for us, “Yes-sir,” and they are going to do it quickly.

  “They rather resent our being here, Stephen.”

  I say that it is quite natural that they should want their own show.

  “Yes, my dear man, but I am getting rather old to be lectured. I have had it rubbed into me that we English have become such trench fogies that we have lost our aggressiveness. No imagination, Stephen, no offensive fancy.”