Heart of War (89 page)

Lloyd George growled. ‘So you swallowed all the flattery, took all the soft soap … gave me no help at all … and you still expect me to give a peerage to that butcher of yours, Hoggin?'

‘Hoggin is in no way a protégé of mine,' Harry said stiffly. ‘Whether he receives a peerage is entirely up to you, in consideration of whatever services he may have performed for you … or the country … if any.'

Lloyd George looked up, suddenly smiling. He jumped to his feet, clapped Harry on the shoulder, and said, ‘He's a real hog, isn't he? But we need people like that… those H.U.S.L. shops are providing cheaper food,
and
making a lot of money.
He did a very good job for us in America … it takes a cockney barrow boy to keep ahead of Yankee commodity traders. And there are some jobs that only people like him can do … dirty jobs, but necessary for the survival of the country … or at least, of politicians.' He chuckled. ‘Thank you for going to France for me. I hope you saw some of your family out there … the grandson who's the flying ace? the one in the infantry … no it's a son and two grandsons, isn't it? … Good, good I didn't really expect you to bring back any different answer. If Churchill, Curzon, Wilson, and I can't find a handle to get rid of Haig, how can honest men like you hope to do so?'

The telephone rang and he picked it up with a curt, ‘Prime Minister.'

He listened, expressions chasing each other across his face like sunshine and storm over his Welsh mountains. Finally he said, ‘All right. In fifteen minutes at Number Ten.' He put the instrument down and looked up – ‘That was Bonar Law. The Italians have broken near Caporetto. They're in full flight on a front of a hundred miles. The Austrians – with half a dozen German divisions as the spearhead – have taken 200,000 prisoners … or that number of Italian soldiers have deserted.'

‘Good heavens,' Harry gasped. ‘What a terrible disaster!'

Lloyd George's eyes gleamed fiercely, as again he seized Harry's shoulder. ‘Disaster!' he hissed theatrically. ‘It's the best news of the war! Now we're going to
have
to send reinforcements there to keep Italy in the war. And they must come from the Western Front! Haig will have to stop his attacks at Passchendaele and Nollehoek!'

I wonder, Harry thought, remembering the determination and perfect confidence in his own rightness that he had felt emanating from the Field Marshal in the big room at G.H.Q. so few hours ago.

Really, Cate thought, one's allies are sometimes more trouble than they seem to be worth. Now British and French troops would be, or were being, sent to prevent an Italian collapse. The Russians were in just as bad a state, but nothing could be done about them. One could only hope that the American power would develop before it was too late. The battle in Flanders was grinding relentlessly on, but now surely Haig would have to halt it, what with the winter upon them, and the loss of troops he'd have to send to Italy. It would be an anxious winter, and Christmas … better not think about it, until it was here. It might not be a bit merry.

He put down the paper. This morning he must go and tell Mayhew that he was going to sell his land, and that the new landlord would not renew his lease when the war was over – as
he intended to build houses on it. He wished to God it could be avoided, if only on financial grounds: he'd get a much better price for those 124 acres after the war; but he could not wait: the tax collectors were at the door … to pay for the war. It was hard to imagine the swelling land of Upper Bohun, now covered with the marching ranks of hop poles, divided up into ‘gentlemen's estates' of two acres or so each, plus a large house, probably pseudo-Tudor in design, with stuccoed walls and false half timbering, standing up behind newly planted hedges … What would happen to the oast houses? Perhaps a way could be found to convert them into guest houses or garages … odd they'd look, but so would Walstone. What would happen to the village with such an influx? Mrs Warren would do a roaring trade at her shop; Miss Macaulay the postmistress would have much more exciting postcards to read and gossip to dispense … people who'd buy houses like that would probably have two cars, and their children would go driving round very fast and running over chickens and children … Mr Woodruff would do well, with more cars to mend, and sell petrol and oil for. The pub keepers wouldn't benefit much – that sort drank in their houses, or went to supper clubs in London. Old Mr Kirby would have opportunities for delivering some real blood-and-thunder sermons … but they wouldn't listen. They'd go to church on Sundays, because they'd know that that was part of being an English country gentleman. But their souls would be in London and they'd have no idea who was sitting in the pews opposite or behind or in front. The words ‘country gentleman' themselves would soon be meaningless: the country – turned into a dormitory for stockbrokers: and the gentlemen – taxed out of existence.

Oh well, must put the best face on it one can. Mayhew was the one to be comforted, now. And when he'd given Mayhew the bad news he must visit Stella. The poor girl didn't look well, and seemed to be withdrawing into herself. Losing the baby must have been a blow – it had been to him, so how much more for her? – but she must try to forget. She was young. Johnny would come home again to her one day, and … Dear God, Johnny might not come home again.

It was no use worrying about that. Every wife and son, every father and mother, all over Europe and America were facing that. If it came, it must be taken with courage, and self-respect. Meantime, there were closer, lesser wounds to be bound.

Lieutenant Fred Stratton sat in the front seat of the ambulance, beside the driver, lurching and sliding toward the smoking wreck of Ypres. A khaki bandage round his left hand covered the scar, still raw, where a German bullet had grazed the back of the hand, severing a tendon. It hurt, sometimes with a dull ache, sometimes with sharp stabs; and he had no strength in the middle finger of that hand. The R.A.M.C. captain at the C.C.S. had been willing to send him farther to the rear, to a base hospital, for a few more days' rest, and to allow the wound to heal, but Fred asked to go back to his battalion, and, with a shrug, as much as to say, ‘Well, I tried to help you,' the doctor had marked him ‘Fit for General Duty.'

There was a big push coming, another in the series that had started on the last day of July. It would be bloody horrible, like the rest of them. He was a fucking idiot not to have let the doctor send him back. He'd catch a packet this time, for sure. The hand wound hadn't been enough for a Blighty; if it had been, nothing would have made him come back until he'd wrung every last minute he could out of the doctors. If he got any sort of a real wound he'd fake it worse than it really was … but that would depend on what sort of a packet he caught. There wasn't much leads winging you could do if you'd really got six machine-gun bullets through the belly, or a shell splinter had taken one of your lungs out.

The guns were talking loudly now. Far away, they'd sounded from the C.C.S., but now he was getting closer, and their voices, like hounds baying threateningly at intruders beyond the town, made him wish he could stop his ears with cotton wool. The sodden fields, glazed in the shade of the woods with frost, were becoming more and more marked with rutted roads leading to barbed wire enclosures … To the
right, there was half a square mile of shells, mostly heavies; to the left, parked motor lorries of the Army Service Corps; beyond, rows and rows of wooden crates of rations, stacked high; more shells; deep dugouts, sentries at the entrance.

On to battle. They had skirted Ypres and were heading north-east, through Potijze. They were level with the guns now, seen near and far, in the woodland patches, at the edges of the copses, the barrels pointing skyward, jerking suddenly, the heavy wheels momentarily leaving the ground with the force of the recoil, thudding down again, the gunners trundling the next shell forward into the cradle. If the guns could reach the Boche from here, the Boche could …

A shell burst beside the road, a hundred yards off in a field. The ambulance driver said, ‘Only another quarter of a mile … We'd just as lief not have to do that bit … four times a day.'

The convoy of ambulances, empty except for a few men in Fred's position, and some soldiers returning from leave who had cadged rides, turned off into a big farmyard, at the outskirts of the shattered village of Zonnebeke. Fred got out and began to walk.

The road that had so far been passable with difficulty, for mules and men, slowly seemed to sink into the ground, and become indistinguishable from the mud. All signs of normal human life as slowly, and as steadily, vanished – no one moved above ground, there were no houses, no trees, no woods, only the undulating cratered wasteland. The trench system began, and Fred sank into it, moving slowly, with painful steps through deep, clinging mud, his hand aching, among a trickling stream of humanity, toward the front.

November the fifth. Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot! Penny for the guy, mister, penny for the guy … Guy Bloody Fawkes' Day, that's what it was. Well, he'd see some fireworks before the day was out, he could bet his bloody life on that.

He became aware, with increasing horror, that the same process which had progressively destroyed the civilized habitations of man, from the rear forward, had now almost completed its work on its own body, the nervous and arterial systems of war. The trenches had been damaged at the rear, where he had dropped down into them: and at every yard became more so – punctured, ruptured, torn apart – just like the houses and, here, the human bodies all around; until, in
the last four hundred yards, they had all but vanished. The war, having destroyed the works of man, and man himself, had here succeeded in destroying its own works: the trench system, the armour of barbed wire, no longer lived, there was now only a dead and decaying body of mud, covered with the festering pustules of shell holes, some loosely linked by veins of flowing mud, which might once themselves have been trenches.

God Almighty, Fred thought fearfully, this is the end.

Quentin Rowland waited in a forward shell hole, ten minutes before dawn, jammed in with scores of others ready for the attack. Shells howled and screamed overhead. The German artillery was deluging the whole area with counter-preparation fire. Like the men around him, and those huddled in the ditches just to the rear, Quentin waited, heads bowed uselessly against the storm, as though some giant steel umbrella was held over them by God, guarding them against the murderous thunder. It was raining lightly, but the drops stung cold on any exposed flesh, which was not much. The men were wearing greatcoats, and khaki scarves; the bulk of them, when full equipment, full ammunition pouches and gas mask cases had swollen them out, was enormous. Only their faces were bare, as there had been no gas alarm; and the tips of their fingers stuck out bare from the khaki mittens. The rain fell, the mud clung. Each soldier's clothing weighed 55 pounds, from the water and mud it had sucked up, or that was stuck to the boots and caked on the puttees. His arms, equipment and ammunition weighed another 35 pounds.

Quentin thought, this is a dream recurring. I have been here before, many times – standing in this trench, dim figures around, no one speaking, all waiting, in a hell of a noise. The faces would be different, if he could see them, but he couldn't, except now and then in the flaring descent of star shells.

He wrenched his mind away … Virginia wanted to marry a Battery Sergeant Major with only one arm. Fiona said the idea was ridiculous and of course they must not allow it. The girl was only eighteen, and would need their permission. The fellow had a D.C.M., she said … must have some guts, at least … but, a Battery Sergeant Major! He ought to see the man… Fiona should, but …

The dream returned, following its inescapable course. The whistles blew, the men climbed up as though held back by great weights, like those cinema shows where people's movements were slowed down … up the ladders, out of the mud below onto the mud above. The first light began to spread, revealing – the same dream, the same wire, rusty, thick, writhing, torn, whole, coiling and uncoiling … humps and bumps in the mud, some moving, the perpetual rattle and tearing of canvas in the tattered darkness above, to the side, all round, ripping the night to shreds, viscous plops, at immense speed, as bullets whipped the mud into a brown froth.