The Secret Battle Part 6

Philpott's arrogance on the subject of Temporaries annoyed him intensely; it annoyed us all, and this I think it was that made him say a very unfortunate thing. He was up before the C.O. with some trifling request or other (I forget what), and somehow the question of his seniority and service came up. Incidentally, Harry remarked, quite mildly, that he believed he was nearly due for promotion. Colonel Philpott gave as close an imitation of a lively man as I ever saw him achieve; he nearly had a fit. I forget all he said--he thundered for a long time, banging his fist on the King's Regulations, and knocking everything off the rickety table--but this was the climax:

'Promotion, by G.o.d! and how old are you, young man? and how much service have you seen? Let me tell you this, Master Penrose, when I was your age I hadn't begun to _think_ about promotion, and I did fifteen years as a captain--fifteen solid years!'

'And I don't wonder,' said Harry.

It was very unfortunate.

III

When we went back to the line, Harry was detailed for many working-parties; and some of them, particularly the first, were very nasty. The days of comfortable walking in communication trenches were over. We were in captured ground churned up by our own fire, and all communication with the front was over the open, over the sh.e.l.l-holes.

Harry was told off to take a ration-party, carrying rations up to the battalion in the line, a hundred men. These were bad jobs to do. It meant three-quarters of a mile along an uphill road, heavily sh.e.l.led; then there was a mile over the sh.e.l.l-hole country, where there were no landmarks or duckboards, or anything to guide you. For a single man in daylight, with a map, navigation was difficult enough in this uniform wilderness until you had been over it a time or two; to go over it for the first time, in the dark, with a hundred men carrying heavy loads, was the kind of thing that makes men transfer to the Flying Corps. Harry got past the road with the loss of three men only; there, at any rate, you went straight ahead, however slowly. But when he left the road, his real troubles began. It was pitch dark and drizzling, and the way was still uphill. With those unhappy carrying-parties, where three-fourths of the men carried two heavy sacks of bread and tinned meat and other food, and the rest two petrol tins of water, or a jar of rum, or rifle oil, or whale oil, besides a rifle, and a bandolier, and two respirators, and a great-coat--you must move with exquisite slowness, or you will lose your whole party in a hundred yards. And even when you are just putting one foot in front of another, moving so slowly that it maddens you, there are halts and hitches every few yards: a man misses his footing and slides down into a crater with his awful load; the hole is full of foul green water, and he must be hauled out quickly lest he drown. Half-way down the line a man halts to ease his load, or shift his rifle, or scratch his nose; when he goes on he can see no one ahead of him, and the cry 'Not in touch' comes sullenly up to the front. Or you cross the path of another party, burdened as yours. In the dark, or against the flaring skyline, they look like yours, bent, murky shapes with b.u.mps upon them, and some of your men trail off with the other party. And though you pity your men more than yourself, it is difficult sometimes to be gentle with them, difficult not to yield to the intense exasperation of it all, and curse foolishly....

But Harry was good with his men, and they stumbled on, slipping, muttering, with a dull ache at the shoulders and a dogged rage in their hearts. He was trying to steer by the compa.s.s, and he was aiming for a point given him on the map, the rendezvous for the party he was to meet.

This point was the junction of three trenches, but as all trenches thereabouts had been so blotted out as to be almost indistinguishable from casual sh.e.l.l-holes, it was not so good a rendezvous as it had seemed to the Brigade. However, Harry managed to find it, or believed that he had found it--for in that murk and blackness nothing was certain; if he had found it, the other party had not, for there was no one there. They might be late, they might be lost, they might be waiting elsewhere. So Harry sent out a scout or two and waited, while the men lay down in the muddy ruins of the trench and dozed unhappily. And while they waited, the Boche, who had been flinging big sh.e.l.ls about at random since dusk, took it into his head to plaster these old trenches with 5-9's. Harry ran, or floundered along the line, telling the men to lie close where they were. There was indeed nothing else to do, but it gave the men confidence, and none of them melted away. As he ran, a big one burst very near and knocked him flat, but he was untouched; it is marvellous how local the effect of H.E. can be. For about ten minutes they had a bad time, and then it ceased, suddenly.

And now was one of those crucial moments which distinguish a good officer from a bad, or even an ordinary officer. It was easy to say, 'Here I am at the rendezvous' (by this time Harry had got his bearings a little by the lights, and knew he was in the right spot) 'with these something rations; the men are done and a bit shaken; so am I; the other people haven't turned up; if they want their rations they can d.a.m.ned well come here and get them; I've done my part, and I'm going home.' But a real good officer, with a conscience and an imagination, would say: 'Yes--but I've been sent up here to get these rations to the men in the line; my men will have a rest to-morrow, and some sleep, and some good food; the men in the line now will still be in the line, with no sleep, and little rest, and if these rations are left here in the mud and not found before dawn, they'll have no food either; and whatever other people may do or not do, it's up to me to get these rations up there somehow, if we have to walk all night and carry them right up to the Front Line ourselves, and I'm not going home till I've done it.' I don't know, but I think that that's the sort of thing Harry said to himself; and anyhow after the row with Philpott he was particularly anxious to make good. So he got his men out and told them about it all, and they floundered on. It was raining hard now, with a bitter wind when they pa.s.sed the crest of the hill. Harry had a vague idea of the direction of the line so long as they were on the slope; but on the flat, when they had dodged round a few hundred sh.e.l.l-holes, halting and going on and halting again, all sense of direction departed, and very soon they were hopelessly lost. The flares were no good, for the line curved, and there seemed to be lights all around, going up mistily through the rain in a wide circle. Once you were properly lost the compa.s.s was useless, for you might be in the Boche lines, you might be anywhere.... At such moments a kind of mad, desperate self-pity, born of misery and weariness and rage, takes hold of the infantryman, and if he carries a load, he is truly ready to fall down and sleep where he is--or die. And in the wretched youth in charge there is a sense of impotence and responsibility that makes his stomach sink within him. Some of the men began to growl a little, but Harry held on despairingly. And then by G.o.d's grace they ran into another party, a N.C.O. and a few men; these were the party--or some of them--that should have met them at the rendezvous; they too had been lost and were now wandering back to the line. Well, Harry handed over the rations and turned home, well pleased with himself. He was too sick of the whole affair, and it was too dark and beastly to think of getting a receipt. It was a pity; for while he trudged home, the N.C.O., as we afterwards heard, was making a mess of the whole business. Whether he had not enough men, or perhaps lost them, or miscalculated the amount of rations or what, is not clear, but half of all that precious food was found lying in the mud at noon the next day when it was too late, and half the battalion in the line went very short. Then the Colonel rang up Philpott, and complained bitterly about the conduct of the officer in charge of our ration-party. Philpott sent for Harry and accused him hotly of dumping the rations carelessly anywhere, of not finishing his job.

Harry gave his account of the affair quite simply, without enlarging on the bad time he had had, though that was clear enough to a man with any knowledge. _But he could not show a receipt._ Philpott was the kind of man who valued receipts more than righteousness. He refused to believe Harry's straightforward tale, cursed him for a lazy swine, and sent him to apologize to the Colonel of the Blanks. That officer did listen to Harry's story, believed it, and apologized to _him_. Harry was a little soothed, but from that day I know there was a great bitterness in his heart. For he had done a difficult job very well, and had come back justly proud of himself and his men. And to have the work wasted by a bungling N.C.O., and his word doubted by a Philpott....

And that I may call the beginning of the second stage.

IX

For after that Harry began to be in a bad way again. That sh.e.l.ling in the night and the near concussion of the sh.e.l.l that knocked him over had been one of those capital shocks of which I have spoken. From that time on, sh.e.l.l-fire in the open became a special terror, a new favourite fear; afterwards he told me so. And all that winter we had sh.e.l.l-fire in the open--even the 'lines' were not trenches, only a string of scattered sh.e.l.l-holes garrisoned by a few men. Everywhere, night and day, you had that naked feeling.

Yet in France, at the worst, given proper rest and variety, with a chance to nurse his courage and soothe his nerves, a resolute man could struggle on a long time after he began to crack. But Harry had no rest, no chance. The _affaire Philpott_ was having a rich harvest. For about three weeks in the February of that awful winter the battalion was employed solely on working-parties, all sorts of them, digging, carrying, behind the line, in the line, soft jobs, terrible jobs. Now as adjutant I used to take particular care that the safe jobs in the rear should be fairly shared among the companies in a rough rotation, and that no officers or men should have too many of the bad ones--the night carrying-parties to the front line. But about now Colonel Philpott began to exert himself about these parties; he actually issued orders about the arrangements, and whether by accident or design, his orders had this particular effect, that Harry took about three times as many of the dangerous parties as anybody else. We were in a country of rolling down with long trough-like valleys or ravines between. To get to the front line you had to cross two of these valleys, and in each of them the Boche put a terrific barrage all night, and every night. The second one--the Valley of Death--was about as near to Inferno as I wish to see, for it was enfiladed from both ends, and you had sh.e.l.l-fire from three directions. Well, for three weeks Harry took a party through this valley four or five nights a week.... Each party meant a double pa.s.sage through two corners of h.e.l.l, with a string of weary men to keep together, and encourage and command, with all that maddening acc.u.mulation of difficulties I have tried already to describe ... and at the end of that winter, after all he had done, it was too much. I protested to the Colonel, but it was no good. 'Master Penrose can go on with these parties,' he said, 'till he learns how to do them properly.'

After ten days of this Harry began to be afraid of himself; or, as he put it, 'I don't know if I can stand much more of this.' All his old distrust of himself, which lately I think he had very successfully kept away, came creeping back. But he made no complaint; he did not ask me to intercede with Philpott. The more he hated and feared these parties, the worse he felt, the keener became his determination to stick it out, to beat Philpott at his own game. Or so I imagine. For by the third week there was no doubt; what is called his 'nerve' was clean gone; or, as he put it to me in the soldier's tongue, 'I've got complete wind-up.' He would have given anything--except his pride--to have escaped one of those parties; he thought about them all day. I did manage, in sheer defiance of Philpott, to take him off one of them; but it was only sheer dogged will-power, and perhaps the knowledge that we were to be relieved the following week, which carried him through to the end of it....

If we had not gone out I don't know what would have happened. But I can guess.

II

And so Philpott finally broke his nerve. But he was still keen and resolute to go on, in spite of the bitterness in his heart.

Philpott--and other things--had still to break his spirit. And the 'other things' were many that winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless winter. Billets became more and more broken and windowless and lousy; firewood vanished, and there was little coal. On the high slopes there was a bitter wind, and men went sick in hundreds--pneumonia, fever, frost-bite. All dug-outs were damp and chilling and greasy with mud, or full of the acrid wood-smoke that tortured the eyes. There were night advances in the snow, where lightly wounded men perished of exposure before dawn. For a fortnight we lived in tents on a hill-top covered with snow.

And one day Harry discovered he was lousy....

Then, socially, though it seems a strange thing to say, these were dull days for Harry. Few people realize how much an infantryman's life is lightened if he has companions of his own kind--not necessarily of the same cla.s.s, though it usually comes to that--but of the same tastes and education and experience--men who make the same kind of jokes. In the line it matters little, a man is a man, as the Press will tell you. But in the evenings, out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with the Old Crowd and exchange old stories of Gallipoli and Oxford and London; even to argue with Eustace about the Public Schools; to be with men who liked the same songs, the same tunes on the gramophone, who did not always ask for 'My Dixie Bird' or 'The Green Woman' waltz.... And now there was none of the Old Crowd left, only Harry and myself, Harry with a company now, and myself very busy at Headquarters. And Harry's company were very dull men, promoted N.C.O.'s mostly, good fellows all--very good in the line--but they were not the Old Crowd. Now, instead of those great evenings we used to have, with the white wine, and the music, and old George dancing, evenings that have come down in the history of the battalion as our battles have done, evenings that kept the spirit strong in the blackest times--there were morose men with wooden faces sitting silently over some whisky and Battalion Orders....

And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable Hewett. That was the black heart of it. When a man becomes part of the great machine, he is generally supposed--I know not why--to surrender with his body his soul and his affections and all his human tendernesses. But it is not so.

We never talked of Hewett very much. Only there was for ever a great gap. And sometimes, when we tried to be cheerful in the evenings, as in the old times, and were not, we said to each other--Harry and I--'I wish to G.o.d that he was here.' Yet for long periods I forgot Hewett. Harry never forgot him.

Then there was something about which I may be wrong, for Harry never mentioned it, and I am only guessing from my own opinion. In two years of war he had won no kind of medal or distinction--except a 'mention' in despatches, which is about as satisfying as a caraway-seed to a starving man. In Gallipoli he had done things which in France in modern times would have earned an easy decoration. But they were scarce in those days; and in France he had done much dogged and difficult work, and a few very courageous, but in a military sense perfectly useless things, nothing dramatic, nothing to catch the eye of the Brigade. I don't know whether he minded much, but I felt it myself very keenly; for I knew that he had started with ambitions; and here were fellows with not half his service, or courage, or capacity, just ordinary men with luck, ablaze with ribbon.... Any one who says he cares nothing about medals is a hypocrite, though most of us care very little. But if you believe you have done well, and not only is there nothing to show for it, but nothing to show that other people believe it ... you can't help caring.

And then, on top of it, when you have a genuine sense of bitter injustice, when you know that your own most modest estimate of yourself is exalted compared with the estimate of the man who commands you--you begin to have black moods....

III

Harry had black moods. All these torments acc.u.mulated and broke his spirit. He lost his keenness, his cheerfulness, and his health. Once a man starts on that path, his past history finds him out, like an old wound. Some men take to drink and are disgraced. In Harry's case it was Gallipoli. No man who had a bad time in that place ever 'got over' it in body or soul. And when France or some other campaign began to work upon them, it was seen that there was something missing in their resisting power; they broke out with old diseases and old fears ... the legacies of Gallipoli.

Harry grew pale, and nervous, and hunted to look at; and he had a touch of dysentery. But the worst of the poison was in his mind and heart. For a long time, as I have said, since he felt the beginning of those old doubts, and saw himself starting downhill, he had striven anxiously to keep his name high in men's opinion; for all liked him and believed in him. He had been ready for anything, and done his work with a conscientious pride. But now this bitterness was on him, he seemed to have ceased to care what happened or what men thought of him. He had unreasonable fits of temper; he became distrustful and cynical. I thought then, sometimes, of the day when he had looked at Troy and wanted to be like Achilles. It was painful to me to hear him talking as Eustace used to talk, suspicious, intolerant, incredulous.... I thought how Harry had once hated that kind of talk, and it was most significant of the change that had come over the good companion I had known. Yet sometimes, when the sun shone, and once when we rode back into Albert and dined quietly alone, that mask of bitterness fell away; there were flashes of the old cheerful Harry, and I had hopes. I hoped Philpott would be killed....

IV

But he survived, for he was very careful. And though, as I have said, he stuck it for a long time, he was by no means the gallant fire-eater you would have imagined from his treatment of defaulters. Once round the line just before dawn was enough for him in that sort of country.

'Things are quiet then, and you can see what's going on.' He liked it best when 'things were quiet.' So did all of us, and I don't blame him for that.

But that winter there was a thick crop of S.I.W.'s. S.I.W. is the short t.i.tle for a man who has been evacuated with self-inflicted wounds--shot himself in the foot, or held a finger over the muzzle of his rifle, or dropped a great boulder on his foot--done himself any reckless injury to escape from the misery of it all. It was always a marvel to me that any man who could find courage to do such things could not find courage to go on; I suppose they felt it would bring them the certainty of a little respite, and beyond that they did not care, for it was the uncertainty of their life that had broken them. You could not help being sorry for these men, even though you despised them. It made you sick to think that any man who had come voluntarily to fight for his country could be brought so low, that humanity could be so degraded exactly where it was being so enn.o.bled.

But Philpott had no such qualms. He was ruthless, and necessarily so; but, beyond that, he was brutal, he bullied. When they came before him, healed of their wounds, haggard, miserable wisps of men, he kept them standing there while he told them at length exactly how low they had sunk (they knew that well enough, poor devils), and flung at them a rich vocabulary of abuse--words of cowardice and dishonour, which were strictly accurate but highly unnecessary. For these men were going back to duty now; they had done their punishment--though the worst of it was still to come; all they needed was a few quiet words of encouragement from a strong man to a weaker, a little human sympathy, and that appeal to a man's honour which so seldom fails if it is rightly made.

Well, this did not surprise me in Philpott; he had no surprises for me by now. What did surprise me was Harry's intolerant, even cruel, comments on the cases of the S.I.W.'s. He had always had a real sympathy with the men, he knew the strange workings of their minds, and all the wretchedness of their lives; he understood them. And yet here he was, as scornful, as Prussian, on the subject of S.I.W.'s as even Philpott. It was long before I understood this--I don't know that I ever did. But I thought it was this: that in these wrecks of men he recognized something of his own sufferings; and recognizing the disease he was the more appalled by the remedy they took. The kind of thing that had led them to it was the kind of thing he had been through, was going through. There the connection ceased. There was no such way out for him. But though it ceased, the connection was so close that it was degrading. And this scorn and anger was a kind of instinctive self-defence--put on to a.s.sure himself, to a.s.sure the world, that there was no connection--none at all.... But I don't know.

V

At the end of February I was wounded and went home. Without any conceit, without exaggerating our friendship, I may say that this was the final blow for Harry. I was the last of the Old Crowd; I was the one man who knew the truth of things as between him and Philpott.... And I went.

I was. .h.i.t by a big sh.e.l.l at Whizz-Bang Corner, and Harry saw me on the stretcher as we came past D Company on the Bapaume Road. He walked with me as far as the cookers, and was fall of concern for my wound, which was pretty painful just then. But he bucked me up and talked gaily of the good things I was going to. And he said nothing of himself. But when he left me there was a look about him--what is the word?--_wistful_--it is the only one, like a dog left behind.

While I was still in hospital I had two letters from the battalion. The first was from Harry, a long wail about Philpott and the dullness of everybody now that the Old Crowd were extinct, though he seemed to have made good friends of some of the dull ones. At the end of that endless winter, when it seemed as if the spring would never come, they had pulled out of the line and 'trekked' up north, so that there had been little fighting. They were now in sh.e.l.l-holes across the high ridge in front of Arras, preparing for an advance.

The other letter was from old Knight, the Quartermaster, dated two months after I left.

I will give you an extract:

_'Probably by now you will have seen or heard from young Penrose. He was. .h.i.t on the 16th, a nasty wound in the chest from a splinter.... It was rather funny--not funny, but you know what I mean--how he got it. I was there myself though I didn't see it. I had been up to H.Q. to see about the rations, and there were a lot of us, Johnson (he is now Adj. in your place) and Fellowes, and so on, standing outside H.Q. (which is on a hill--what you people call a forward slope, I believe), and watching our guns bombarding the village. It was a remarkable sight, etc. etc._ (a long digression).... _Then the Boche started sh.e.l.ling our hill; he dropped them in pairs, first of all at the other end of the hill, about 500 yards off, and then nearer and nearer, about 20 yards at a time ... the line they were on was pretty near to us, so we thought the dug-out would be a good place to go to.... Penrose was just starting to go back to his company when this began, and as we went down somebody told him he'd better wait a bit. But he said "No, he wanted to get back." I was the last down, and as I disappeared (pretty hurriedly) I told him not to be a fool. But all he said was, "This is nothing, old bird--you wait till you live up here; I'm going on." The next thing we heard was the h.e.l.l of an explosion on top. We ran up afterwards, and there he was, about thirty yards off.... The funny thing is that I understood he rather had the wind-up just now, and was anything but reckless ... in fact, some one said he had the Dug-out Disease.... Otherwise, you'd have said he wanted to be killed.

I don't know why he wasn't, asking for it like that.... Well, thank G.o.d I'm a Q.M., etc. etc.'_

I read it all very carefully, and wondered. '_You'd have said he wanted to be killed._' I wondered about that very much.

And there was a postscript which interested me:

'_By the way, I hear Burnett's got the M.C.--for Salvage, I believe!_'