The Secret Battle Part 3

II

And by this time we had found each other out. We had discovered a true standard of right and wrong; we knew quite clearly now, some of us for the first time, what sort of action was 'dirty,' and we were fairly clear how likely each of us was to do such an action. We knew all our little weaknesses and most of our serious flaws; under that olive-tree they could not long be hid. In the pleasant life of London or Oxford we had had no occasion to do anything dishonourable or underhand; in our relations with other men we had not even wished to be guilty of anything worse than mild unkindnesses or consistent unpunctuality. But behind the footlights of Gallipoli we had found real burning temptations; and we had found our characters. D Company on the whole was lucky, and had stood the test well. We knew that Burnett was 'bogus'; but we knew that Williams of A Company was incalculably more 'bogus'; we had stood in the dark sap at night and reluctantly overheard the men of his company speak of him and his officers.

But little weaknesses beget great irritations in that life, and the intimate problems of communal feeding were enough to search out all our weaknesses. We knew that some of us, though courageous, were greedy; that others, though not greedy, were querulous about their food and had a nasty habit of 'sticking out for their rights': indeed, I think I developed this habit myself. We had had trouble about parcels. Parcels in theory were thrown into the common stock of the mess: but Egerton and Burnett never had parcels, and were by no means the most delicate eaters of other people's dainties. Harry and Hewett reserved some portion of each parcel, a cake or a slab of chocolate, which they ate furtively in their dug-outs, or shared with each other in the dusk; Burnett ostentatiously endowed the mess with his entire stock, but afterwards at every meal hinted sombrely at the rapacity of those who had devoured it.

Harry and Hewett each made contributions to the mess; but Harry objected to the excessive consumption of this food by Burnett, and Hewett, who gave ungrudgingly to the rest of us, had a similar reservation--never expressed--as against Egerton. So all this matter of food set in motion a number of antagonisms seldom or never articulate, but painfully perceptible at every meal.

The parcel question, I think, was one of the things which embittered the quarrel between Harry and Burnett. A parcel from home to schoolboys and soldiers and prisoners and sailors, and all homesick exiles, is the most powerful emblem of sentiment and affection. A man would willingly preserve its treasures for himself to gloat over alone, in no mere fleshly indulgence, but as a concrete expression of affection from the home for which he longs. This is not nonsense. He likes to undo the strings in the grubby hole which is his present home, and secretly become sentimental over the little fond packages and queer, loving thoughts which have composed it. And though in a generous impulse he may say to his companions, 'Come, and eat this cake,' and see it in a moment disappear, it is hard for him not to think, 'My sister (or wife, or mother) made this _for me_; they thought it would give _me_ pleasure for many days. Already it is gone--would they not be hurt if they knew?' He feels that he has betrayed the tenderness of his home; and though the giving of pleasure to companions he likes may overcome this feeling, the compulsory squandering of such precious pleasure on a man he despises calls up the worst bitterness of his heart. So was it between Harry and Burnett.

If, by the way, it be suggested that Burnett was ent.i.tled to feel the same sentimental jealousy about _his_ parcels, I answer that Burnett's parcels came on his own order from the soulless hand of Fortnum and Mason.

All of us were very touchy, very raw and irritable in that fevered atmosphere. Men who were always late in relieving another on watch, or unreasonably resented a minute's postponement of their relief, or never had any article of their own but for ever borrowed mess-tins and electric torches and note-books from more methodical people, or were overbearing to batmen, or shifted jobs on to other officers, or slunk off to bathe alone when they should have taken their sultry platoon--such men made enemies quickly. Between Eustace and Hewett, who had been good friends before and were to be good friends again, there grew up a slow animosity. Hewett was one of the methodical cla.s.s of officer, Eustace was one of the persistent borrowers. Moreover, as I have said, he was a cynic, and he _would_ argue. He had a contentious remark for every moment of the day; and though this tormented us all beyond bearing, Hewett was the only one with both the energy and the intellectual equipment to accept his challenges. So these two argued quietly and fiercely in the hot noon, or the blue dusk, till the rest of us were weary of them both, and the sound of Eustace's harsh tones was an agony to the nerves. They were both too consciously refined to lose their tempers healthily, and when they reached danger-point, Hewett would slink away like an injured animal to his burrow. In this conflict Harry took no speaking part, for while in spirit and affection he was on Hewett's side, he paid intellectual tribute to Eustace's conduct of the argument, and listened as a rule in puzzled silence. Eustace again was his cordial ally against Burnett, while Hewett had merely the indifference of contempt for that officer.

So it was all a strange tangle of friendship and animosity and good-nature and bitterness. Yet on the surface, you understand, we lived on terms of toleration and vague geniality; except for the disputations of Hewett and Eustace there was little open disagreement. In the confined s.p.a.ce of a company mess permanent hostilities would make life impossible; it is only generals who are allowed to find that they can no longer 'act with' each other, and resign: platoon commanders may come to the same conclusion, but they have to go on acting. And so openly we laughed and endured and bore with each other. Only there was always this undertone of irritations and animosities which, in the maddening conditions of our life, could never be altogether silenced, and might at any moment rise to a strangled scream.

Harry's appointment as Scout Officer was the first thing to set Burnett against Harry, though already many things had set Harry against Burnett.

It had been commonly a.s.sumed, in view of Burnett's 'backwoods'

reputation, that he would succeed Martin as Scout Officer. The Colonel's selection of Harry took us a little by surprise, though it only showed that the Colonel was a keener judge of character and ability than the rest of us. No one, I think, was more genuinely pleased that Burnett was not to be Scout Officer than Burnett himself; but in the interests of his 'dare-devil' pretensions he had to affect an air of disappointment, and let it be known by grunts and shrugs and sour looks that he considered the choice of Harry to be an injury to himself and the regiment. As far as Harry was concerned this resentment of Burnett's was more or less genuine, for his reluctance to take on the job did not prevent him being jealous of the man who did.

Then Burnett was one of the people who had nothing of his own, and seemed to regard Harry, as the youngest of us all, as the proper person to provide him with all the necessaries of life. In those days we had no plates or crockery, but ate and drank out of our scratched and greasy mess-tins. Harry's mess-tin disappeared, and for three days he was compelled to borrow from Hewett or myself--a tedious and, to him, hateful business. One day Burnett had finished his meal a long way ahead of any of us, and Harry, in the desperation of hungry waiting, asked him for the loan of his mess-tin. Automatically he looked at the bottom of the tin, and there found his initials inscribed. It was his own tin.

Further, some one had tried to scratch the initials out. Harry kept his temper with obvious difficulty. Burnett knew well that he had lost his mess-tin (we were all sick of hearing it), but he said he was quite ignorant of having it in his possession. When Harry argued with him, Burnett sent for his batman and cursed him for taking another officer's property. The wretched man mumbled that he had 'found' it, and withdrew; and we all sat in silence teeming with distrustful thoughts. We were sorry for the batman; we were sorry for Harry. Burnett may not have taken the mess-tin with his own hands, but morally he stood convicted of an action which was 'dirty.'

Then Burnett and Harry took a working-party together to dig in the gully. Burnett was the senior officer, but left Harry to work all night in the whispering rain of stray bullets, while he sat in an Engineers'

dug-out and drank whisky. Harry did not object to this, the absence of Burnett being always congenial to him. But next day there came a complimentary message from the Brigadier about the work of that working-party. Burnett was sent for and warmly praised by the Colonel.

Burnett stood smugly and said nothing. Harry, when he heard of it, was furious, and wanted, he said, to 'have a row' with him. What he expected Burnett to say, I don't know; the man could hardly stand before his Colonel and say, 'Sir, Penrose did all the work, I was in the Engineers'

dug-out nearly all the time with my friends, and had several drinks.' A row, in any case, would be intolerable in that cramped, intimate existence, and I dissuaded Harry, though I made Egerton have a few words with Burnett on the subject. Harry contented himself with ironic comments on Burnett's 'gallantry' and 'industry,' asking him blandly at meals if he expected to get his promotion over that working-party, and suggesting to Egerton that Burnett should take Harry's next turn of duty 'because he is so good at it.' This made Burnett beautifully angry. But it was bitter badinage, and did not improve the social atmosphere.

There were a number of such incidents between the two; they were very petty in themselves, some of them, like a fly, but in their c.u.mulative effect very large and distressing. In many cases there was no verbal engagement, or only an angry, inarticulate mutter. Public, unfettered angers were necessarily avoided. But this pent-up, suppressed condition of the quarrel made it more malignant, like a disease. And it got on Harry's nerves; indeed, it got on mine. It became an active element in that vast complex of irritation and decay which was eating into his young system; it was leagued with the flies, and the dust, and the smells, and the bad food, and the wind, and the hara.s.sing sh.e.l.ls of the Turks, and the disgustful torment of disease.

III

For Harry was a very sick man. He had endured through all the stages of dysentery, and now lived with that awful legacy of weakness of which I have spoken. And the disease had not wholly left him, but some days he lay faint with excruciating spasms of pain. Slightly built and const.i.tutionally fragile at the beginning, he was now a mere wasted wisp of a man. The flesh seemed to have melted from his face, and when he stood naked on the beach it seemed that the moving of his bones must soon tear holes in the unsubstantial skin. Standing in the trench with the two points of his collar-bone jutting out like promontories above his shirt, and a pale film of dust over his face, he looked like the wan ghost of some forgotten soldier. On the Western Front, where one case of dysentery created a panic among the authorities, and in the most urgent days they have never had to rely on skeletons to fight, he would long since have been bundled off. But in this orgy of disease, no officer could be sent away who was willing to stay and could still totter up the gully. And Harry would not go. When he went to the battalion doctor it was with an airy request for the impotent palliatives then provided for early dysentery, and with no suggestion of the soul-destroying sickness that was upon him. One day he would not come down to the rocks and bathe, so feeble he was. 'I know now,' he said, 'the meaning of that bit in the psalms, "My knees are like water and all my bones are out of joint."' 'Harry,' I said, 'you're not fit to stay here--why not go sick?' At which he smiled weakly, and said that he might be better in a day or two. Pathetic hope! all men had it. And so Hewett and I walked down, a little sadly, alone, marvelling at the boy's courage. For it seemed to us that he wanted to stay and see it through, and if indeed he might recover we could not afford to lose him. So we said no more.

But by degrees I gained a different impression. Harry still opened his mind to Hewett and myself more than to any one else, but it was by no direct speech, rather by the things he did not say, the sentences half finished, the look in his eyes, that the knowledge came--that Harry did want to go away. The romantic impulse had perished long since in that ruined trench; but now even the more mundane zest of doing his duty had lost its savour in the long ordeal of sickness and physical distress. He did want to go sick. He had only to speak a word; and still he would not go. When I knew this, I marvelled at his courage yet more.

For many days I watched him fighting this lonely conflict with himself, a conflict more terrible and exacting than any battle. Sometimes the doctor came and sat under our olive-tree, and some of us spoke jestingly of the universal sickness, and asked him how ill we must be before he would send us home. Harry alone sat silent; it was no joke to him.

'And how do _you_ feel now, Penrose?' said the doctor. 'Are you getting your arrow-root all right?' Harry opened his mouth--but for a moment said nothing. I think it had been in his mind to say what he did feel, but he only murmured, 'All right, thank you, doctor.' The doctor looked at him queerly. He knew well enough, but it was his task to keep men on the Peninsula, not to send them away.

Once I spent an afternoon in one of the hospital ships in the bay: when I came back and told them of the cool wards and pleasant nurses, and all the peace and cleanliness and comfort that was there, I caught Harry's wistful gaze upon me, and I stopped. It was well enough for the rest of us in comparative health to imagine luxuriously those unattainable amenities. None of us were ill enough then to go sick if we wished it.

Harry was. And I knew that such talk must be an intolerable temptation.

Then one day, on his way up to the line with a working-party, he nearly fainted. 'I felt it coming on,' he told me, 'in a block. I thought to myself, "This is the end of it all for me, anyhow." I actually did go off for a moment, I think, and then some one pushed me from behind--and as we moved on it wore off again. I did swear----' Harry stopped, realizing the confession he had made. I tried to feel for myself the awful bitterness of that awakening in the stifling trench, shuffling uphill with the flies.... But he had told me now everything I had only guessed before, and once more I urged him to go sick and have done with it.

'I would,' he said, 'only I'm not sure ... I know I'm jolly ill, and not fit for a thing ... but I'm not sure if it's only that ... I was pretty brave when I got here, I think' (I nodded), 'and I think I am still ...

but last time we were in the line I found I didn't like looking over the top nearly so much ... so I want to be sure that I'm quite all right ...

in that way ... before I go sick.... Besides, you know what everybody says....'

'n.o.body could say anything about you,' I told him; 'one's only got to look at you to see that you've got one foot in the grave.' 'Well, we go up again to-morrow,' he said, 'and if I'm not better after that, I'll think about it again.'

I had to be content with that, though I was not content. For my fears were fulfilled, since in the grip of this sickness he had begun at last to be doubtful of his own courage.

But that night Burnett went to the doctor and said that he was too ill to go on. So far as the rest of us knew, he had never had anything but the inevitable preliminary attack of dysentery, though it is only fair to say that most of us were so wrapped up in the exquisite contemplation of our own sufferings, that we had little time to study the condition of others. The doctor, however, had no doubts about Burnett; he sent him back to us with a flea in his ear and a dose of chlorodyne. The story leaked out quickly, and there was much comment adverse to Burnett. When Harry heard it, he led me away to his dug-out. It was an evening of heavy calm, like the inside of a cathedral. Only a few mules circling dustily at exercise in the velvet gloom, and the distant glimmer of the Scotsmen's fires, made any stir of movement. The men had gone early to their blankets, and now sang softly their most sentimental songs, reserved always for the night before another journey to the line. They sang them in a low croon of ecstatic melancholy, marvellously in tune with the purple hush of the evening. For all its aching regret it was a sound full of hope and gentle resolution. Harry whispered to me, 'You heard about Burnett? Thank G.o.d, n.o.body can say those things about me!

I'm not going off this Peninsula till I'm pushed off.'

I said nothing. It was a heroic sentiment, and this was the heroic hour.

It is what men say in the morning that matters....

In the morning we moved off as the sun came up. There had been heavy firing nearly all night, and over Achi Baba in the cloudless sky there hung a portent. It was as though some giant had been blowing smoke-rings, and with inhuman dexterity had twined and laced these rings together, without any of them losing their perfection of form.... As the sun came up these cloud-rings stood out a rosy pink against the blue distance, and while we marched through the sleeping camps turned gently through dull gold to pale pearl. I have never known what made this marvel, a few clouds forgotten by the wind, or the smoke of the night's battle; but I marched with my eyes upon it all the stumbling way to Achi Baba. And when I found Harry at a halt, he, too, was gazing at the wonder with all his men. 'It's an omen,' he said.

'Good or bad?'

'Good,' he said.

I have never understood omens; I suppose they are good or bad according to the mind of the man who sees them: and I was glad that Harry thought it was good.

VI

It was one of the Great Dates: one of those red dates which build up the calendar of a soldier's past, and dwell in his memory when the date of his own birth is almost forgotten. It is strange what definite sign-posts these dates of a man's battle--days become in his calculation of time--like the foundation of Rome. An old soldier will sigh and say, 'Yes, I know that was when Jim died--it was ten days after the Fourth of June,' or, 'I was promoted the day before the Twelfth of July.'

The years pile up, and zero after zero day is added for ever to his primitive calendar, and not one of them is thrust from his reverent memory; but at each anniversary he wakes and says, 'This is the 3rd of February, or the 1st of July,' and thinks of old companions who went down on that day; and though he has seen glorious successes since, he will ever think with a special tenderness of the black early failures when he first saw battle and his friends going under. And if in any place where soldiers gather and tell old tales, there are two men who can say to each other, 'I, too, was at h.e.l.les on such a date,' there is a great bond between them.

On one of these days we sat under the olive-tree and waited. Up the hill one of that long series of heroic, costly semi-successes was going through. We were in reserve. We had done six turns in the trenches without doing an attack. When we came out we were very ready to attack, very sure of ourselves. Now we were not so sure of ourselves; we were waiting, and there was a terrible noise. Very early the guns had begun, and everywhere, from the Straits to the sea, were the loud barkings of the French 'seventy-fives,' thinly a.s.sisted by the British artillery, which was scanty, and had almost no ammunition. But the big ships came out from Imbros and stood off and swelled the chorus, dropping their huge sh.e.l.ls on the very peak of the little sugar-loaf that tops Achi Baba, and covering his western slopes with monstrous eruptions of black and yellow.

Down in the thirsty wilderness of the rest-camps the few troops in reserve lay restless under occasional olive-trees, or huddled under the exiguous shelter of ground-sheets stretched over their scratchings in the earth. They looked up and saw the whole of the great hill swathed in smoke and dust and filthy fumes, and heard the ruthless crackle of the Turks' rifles, incredibly rapid and sustained; and they thought of their friends scrambling over in the bright sun, trying to get to those rifles. They themselves were thin and wasted with disease, and this uncertainty of waiting in readiness for they knew not what plucked at their nerves. They could not rest or sleep, for the flies crawled over their mouths and eyes and tormented them ceaselessly, and great storms of dust swept upon them as they lay. They were parched with thirst, but they must not drink, for their water-bottles were filled with the day's allowance, and none knew when they would be filled again. If a man took out of his haversack a chunk of bread, it was immediately black with flies, and he could not eat. Sometimes a sh.e.l.l came over the Straits from Asia with a quick, shrill shriek, and burst at the top of the cliffs near the staff officers who stood there and gazed up the hill with gla.s.ses. All morning the noise increased, and the sh.e.l.ls streamed up the hill with a sound like a hundred expresses vanishing into a hundred tunnels: and there was no news. But soon the wounded began to trickle down, and there were rumours of a great success with terrible losses. In the afternoon the news became uncertain and disturbing. Most of the morning's fruits had been lost. And by evening they knew that indeed it had been a terrible day.

Under our olive-tree we were very fidgety. There had been no mail for many days, and we had only month-old copies of the _Mail_ and the _Weekly Times_, which we pretended listlessly to read. Eustace had an ancient _Nation_, and Hewett a shilling edition of _Vanity Fair_. Harry in the morning kept climbing excitedly up the trees to gaze at the obscure haze of smoke on the hill, and trying vainly to divine what was going on; but after a little he too sat silent and brooding. We were no longer irritable with each other, but studiously considerate, as if each felt that to-morrow he might want to take back a spiteful word and the other be dead. All our valises and our spa.r.s.e mess-furniture had long been packed away, for we had now been standing by for twenty-four hours, and we lay uneasily on the hard ground, shifting continually from posture to posture to escape the unfriendly protuberances of the soil.

In the tree the crickets chirped on always, in strange indifference to the storm of noise about them. They were hateful, those crickets.... Now and then Egerton was summoned to Headquarters; and when he came back each man said to himself, 'He has got our orders.' And some would not look at him, but talked suddenly of something else. And some said to him with a painful cheeriness, 'Any orders?' and when he shook his head, cursed a little, but in their hearts wondered if they were glad. For the waiting was bad indeed, but who knew what tasks they would have when the orders came.... Often the Reserves had the worst of it in these affairs ... a forlorn hope of an attack without artillery ... digging a new line under fire ... beating off the counterattack....

But the waiting became intolerable, and all were glad, an hour before sunset, when we filed off slowly by half-platoons. Every gun was busy again, and all along the path to the hill batteries of 'seventy-fives'

barked suddenly from unsuspected holes, so close that a man's heart seemed to halt at the shock. The gully was full of confusion and wounded, and tired officers and odd groups of men bandying rumours and arguing in the sun. Half-way up the tale came mysteriously down the line that we were to attack a trench by ourselves; a whole brigade had tried and failed--there was a redoubt--there were endless machine-guns....

Some laughed--'a rumour'; but most men felt in their heart that there was something in it, and inwardly 'pulled themselves together.' At last they were to be in a real battle, and walk naked in the open through the rapid fire. And as they moved on, there came over them an overpowering sense of the irrevocable. They thought of that summer day in 1914 when they walked light-hearted into the recruiting office. It had seemed a small thing then, but that was what had done it; had brought them into this blazing gully, with the frogs croaking, and the men moaning in corners with their legs messed up.... If they had known about this gully then and these flies, and this battle they were going to, then, perhaps, they would have done something else in that August ... gone into a dockyard ... joined the A.S.C. like Jim Roberts.... Well, they hadn't, and they were not really sorry ... only let there be no more waiting ...

and let it be quick and merciful, no stomach wounds and nastiness ... no lying out in the scrub for a day with the sun, and the flies, and no water.

Look at that officer on the stretcher ... _he_ won't last long ...

remember his face ... his platoon relieved us somewhere ... where was it?... Hope I don't get one like him ... nasty mess ... would like one in the shoulder if it's got to be ... hospital ship ... get home, perhaps ... no, they send you to Egypt ... officer said so.... Hallo, halting here ... Merton trench ... old Reserve Line.... Getting dark ...

night-attack?... not wait till dawn, I hope ... can't stand much more waiting.... Pa.s.s the word, Company Commanders to see the Colonel ...

that's done it, there goes Egerton ... good man, thinks a lot of me ...

try not to let him down....

But what Egerton and the others heard from the Colonel made a vain thing of all this bracing of men's spirits. There was a muddle; the attack was cancelled ... no one knew where the Turks were, where anybody was ... we were to stay the night in this old reserve trench and relieve the front line in the morning....

When Egerton told his officers only Burnett spoke: he said 'd.a.m.n. _As_ usual. I wanted a go at the old Turks': and we knew that it was not true. The rest of us said nothing, for we were wondering if it were true of ourselves. I went with Harry to his platoon; they too said nothing, and their faces were expressionless.