Pass Guard at Ypres (14 page)

He was rather sorry that he had to take this road. He had no particular
objection on other grounds to marching through the countryside of France at the head
of a hundred ill-assorted N.C.O.s and men, some raw recruits, some grizzling and
gloomy Regulars, some cowed or semi-mutinous conscripts. They had given him an
efficient enough sergeant-major in Sergeant-Major Masters, when they had entrained
him and his staff at Boulogne and told him to get them along to Bavinchove, and go
to Watten. Sergeant-Major Masters was marching along in a determined manner at the
rear, keeping them well together and taking no chances with the man lurching along
without rifle under close arrest in front of him. He'd got them along without
much trouble; not that, with Sergeant-Major Masters and his own experience, trouble
would have mattered much to him. When that Irishman played up at Abbeville it
hadn't taken more than a minute to get him fixed, and he didn't think
that anybody else would try it on.

Drafts usually moved about France in these days in some such way as this. They were sorted out at “The Bull Ring,” clapped into steel helmets, hung round with respirators and equipment and sent packing
by a business-like major to their destinations. They were bundled from R.T.O. to R.T.O., fed by reluctant quartermaster-sergeants on the way, and billeted in a countryside that went about its work and regarded them with complete indifference except as a source of a few extra francs in return for the outbuildings that they hired. The taking of the draft was nothing, but Freddy Mann wished that his way had lain along another road. It was on just such a day as this that they had marched two years ago through the Forêt d'Eperlecques to Watten; and it was to Watten that they were marching now. The forest, as then, was green and peaceful; kids were playing in the little street of Ganspette as they were playing on that day when he and Robbie had strolled out after the day's march and given them chocolates as an aid to a halting conversation.

In Watten, too, it seemed most likely, everything would be the same. He knew before he saw her that Madame Fouquière would be sitting before her door, watching a battered straw hat in the little plot in front of her and noting with approval that its owner was bent well down upon his work. He guessed that she would regard their approach with a large impassive stare, following them with her eyes as they marched towards the estaminet. He knew the barn that they would occupy; the worst barn into which, being junior, he had had to put his platoon when they first arrived. He almost hoped that it would remain at this, that he might stay his night there, sleeping where he could and pass, still a stranger, to the east. But
she called him as he stood with head averted upon the further side of the road.

“Come here,
mon Bébé.”

“How did you know that I am
Bébé?”

“Sit down, where you used to sit. I knew.”

Freddy Mann hesitated. The Sergeant-Major had gone on, and was entering the farmyard to the billet.

“He will arrange. Sit here. Are these your men?”

“Yes—no.”

“And yours are there?” She pointed to the east.

Freddy Mann nodded.

“They are not alive now?”

“Just one or two.”

Madame Fouquière continued her knitting, impassive and unmoved. “Sit as you used to sit. And you?”

“Oh I got knocked out last year: shoulder, you know. Lasted the devil of a time, but it's all right now. Just on my way back, you know.”

“Back there. Yes, I know. And those men?”

“Just men I'm taking up. A draft.”

Damn the
ennemies oreilles
and the warnings about spies. She was Madame Fouquière, and this was Watten. If she wished it he would sit and talk. But he wished he had not come. How the past was round them!

“Are they good soldiers?”

“Fair to average—not like ours. Wish I could have the old crowd here instead.”

“That does not happen, when once they go that way. You did not know that when you went?”

“No.”

“You know then, now. I wonder if this time you will return. Ypres may have to keep you.”

“Yes. It's got a good many. It'll probably get me, too.”

“And once you wanted so to go there. You knew so little,
mon bébé.
Let me see, you are older now. That girl?”

Freddy Mann shrugged his shoulders.

“Another?”

“Yes.”

“A
marrmine?”

“Yes.”

“Bonne chance.
What you can take of life, that take. You are still young; you may not have much more. Your friend?”

“He is there. He is a captain now.”

“He is not dead, then. Pierre is dead, and Rupert.
Que voulez-vous?
There are some that live. And France lives yet. Are you still glad to fight for France?”

Freddy Mann did not answer. Madame Fouquière would have known, if he had told a lie. He sat and watched the sun setting over the hills, and listened to the guns to the left. Oh God, the memories of this place! If only he could get away. Suddenly he threw away his cigarette and rose.

“Sorry, Madame. Afraid I must get along. I——”

“Stay here. You will go tomorrow. Sit quiet now and sleep tonight. Tomorrow you shall go to Ypres.”

“Damn Ypres. Why is it always Ypres? You were right, you know, about that. It's always Ypres.”

“For us, Verdun. For you—yes—it is always Ypres. Till God brings rest, it will be Ypres for you. Why curse,
mon bébé?
If you live, you live. If not, it is to Ypres that you will give your life.”

“That's all very well, but——”

“Why curse?”

She sat still knitting, while the shadows lengthened and flashes began to appear in the eastern sky. Finally she rose.

“Come in and rest. Why curse? You will not choose. Life or death, it will be for Ypres, not you, to choose.”

You do not usually feel a peace steal over you if you move from the quiet countryside of France, through Steenvoorde, Abeele, Watou and on past Poperinghe to Ypres, particularly if every step of the way is dogged by ghosts that walk beside you and speak to you, first one and then another, of broken hopes and dreams that have ended in awakening. You will not as a common rule walk lightly, when you pass the gaunt asylum where the shiver passes down your spine, greeting the towers that loom before you as sign-posts to point you on the way you needs must go. You may glory in the unceasing roar of guns, that pour forth their tons of charged metal from hidden places where once three doled-out rounds a day were fired. You may, if you are made of the soldier's fibre, exult in thought of what is coming, but whatever else it be, it will not be peace that speaks to you as you pass on through Ypres, to the root of a tree whose topmost branches you used to see, with the dead sniper in them, on the skyline, to a lake the capture of which once stood as the end of all achievement, and on through the scattered bricks of Hooge. But to one of a thousand who have trod that way to join as the smallest drop in the waters the tide that is setting east to victory there may have come
some knowledge that makes those other evils round, the insistent threat even, of that death with which a man is always juggling, seem of little import.

There may be little to live for, the smile that is half a sneer may be firmly set upon the lips, the long lines of those who toil up the hill and through the mud-drenched fields may appear but so many puppets drawn by invisible wires to a blind and senseless end, and you may laugh to think that the salvation of a few heaps of bricks, of what was once a city, could ever have appeared to you to be a thing worth while to achieve. There may be nothing else within your heart but some vague desire for a vengeance to be reaped before a bullet comes: yet, even so, you will walk your way more easily if you know that it is to your own that you return, that a friend of friends awaits you in some dust-strewn cellar, oozing dug-out or square of concrete in the middle of a wilderness of waste and ruin.

“I always thought you might come back to Wipers.” Robbie spoke with that slow unemotional voice that Freddy Mann knew so well. “But it's damned funny, coming back to us.”

“Damned good luck.”

“Vicke may have had something to do with it. They say he tries to work it with his officers. Anyway, here you are. Maisey shoved you in “C” Company as soon as he knew. Jolly lucky, too, that we've still got Bamford for you.”

“What's he been doing in the meantime?”

“Swinging it, doing damned good things in the trenches, getting promoted and broken, talking about South Africa and rum and you. And now he's where he was. So are we all, more or less—not quite.”

“No.”

Freddy Mann looked out of the door of the emplacement through the driving rain upon the hills to his right and an interminable expanse of mud upon either side of them.

“Shoved on a bit. Must have been odd, taking Bellewarde.”

“It was: just walked along through it, then got stuck up here by Clapham Junction. Lost a good many, but we got as far as this.”

“What's the game now?”

Freddy Mann helped himself to a whisky and tried to find a match sufficiently dry to light a cigarette.

“Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood. Lord knows after that. We've got to take over from the Lancs up there tomorrow. They've had the hell of a dusting today.”

“What's happening elsewhere?”

“Dunno.”

“Nor I. They say they've got on to Langemarck, but——” Robbie stopped.

“Nobody knows anything, you know—we're just stuck here in the mud. Know where ‘C' Company is, and that's about all I do know. Swimming somewhere, that's all we're doing. Still, I suppose it's all in the right direction. Ypres is further away, that's something.”

“Yes.”

“It's all right. It's still there. You needn't bother to go to look for it. Suppose you came that way today?”

“Yes—same old way, but I kept to the road at Hell Fire Corner. Rather jolly passing Hooge.”

“Remember our do at Hooge two years ago?”

Remember—Freddy Mann looked at Robbie. Was he man or more that he had not changed? That night of the flare attack had seemed the end of things: and he'd had the Somme since then, and La Bassée, and Messines, and this. Since August 1st, this——

“Fattened us up for this show pretty carefully. But it hasn't gone too well. This filthy weather——”

“What do the men make of it?”

“What do they say they make of it in England?”

“Oh, victorious troops—always cheerful—advance singing to the attack—driving all before them—you know the sort of thing.”

“So they still tell lies?”

“Wallow in 'em.”

“Mm. Like to come and see?”

“Yes.” Freddy Mann got up. He wanted to get out again. He had a platoon, as in the old days, men to work with, even if not those for whom he had learnt to care.

“Suppose there aren't many now that I know?”

“Damned few. Mitchell's here and Bartlett and good old Harris, but Bettson's gone, and Field, and——”

One by one, as Company Commander and subaltern wallowed along the line, Robbie poured out names of
men, some remembered, others forgotten. No, few enough were left.

“The Somme got those who got away from Ypres last year. Would have got anybody, the Somme. Damned bad show, the Somme.”

“Bad as this?”

“No, not as bad as this. Even the guns can't fire here—slip about in the mud. Mules and ration parties get drowned here if they leave the duck boards. There's a gun buried somewhere by Stirling Castle, and Lord knows how many Maltese carts and G.S. waggons. Nothing's ever been as bad as this. Here's your fellows. Come in. This way—back to the game again.”

Freddy Mann walked along the line of shell-holes, each fringed by a few sodden sandbags. He greeted one by one the little groups of men leaning as best they could against the sloping sides, mackintosh sheets over their shoulders and sacking and bits of rag round their rifles. In the twilight and the drifting mist and rain it was difficult to find one's way. From time to time Freddy Mann stumbled over dead horses, half-buried bodies, strands of wire and water-logged stretches of empty trenches. The reek that he remembered so well lay over the hillside like a miasma, a concrete thing that filled his eyes and throat. The bursts of shelling and machine-gun fire passed unnoticed. Once a heavy shell plunged harmlessly into the soft earth a few yards from them, half burying Robbie and himself; once, as he moved towards the top of the ridge, he felt the wind
of a sniper's bullet on his cheek; once he passed a group of stretcher bearers, sprawling over a few broken pieces of wood and canvas, head downwards in liquid mud. Before him, as he walked, loomed indistinctly the dark masses of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, with the starlights rising between the outer trees and the jets of fire spouting from their foot, to mark where the front line lay; and here, a few yards from where he stood, a road, marked by torn poplar trees, ran downhill through the darkness, to Hooge and Ypres. “Back to the old game”: yes, that was all that there was to it after all. They might be strangers, all but Robbie, with whom he had come to play it, but it was the old game that he was called to play, with the dancing lights around him in a circle, and behind him the shell of a city that had marked him for her own.

Nobody would question the importance of the cause for which Freddy Mann strove. Nobody would deny that if you have to go over the top in the morning, rum is the one thing that the men must have, that the bread ration doesn't matter in comparison to rum, that the post doesn't matter, or new respirators, or pork and beans, or any damned thing in the world but rum. It is obvious that if by a twister of a Q.M.S. like Boles your platoon has been deprived of rum it isn't your fault if the whole damned show breaks down, that it's only rum that will get the men out of their shell-holes and on to Glencorse Wood, that they've got to be pretty well tight before they'll move a yard, and they can only get tight on rum: that therefore if the Q.M.S. has bagged the platoon's rum, then he'd better damned well get down to it and bag some more, seeing that there're only two hours to zero and the one thing the men have got to have is rum. Nor, on the whole, can serious exception be taken to Freddy Mann's manner of pleading: vigorous, perhaps, but not unduly vigorous: it's no use talking as if you were at a Sunday-school treat at Edenhurst when you're dealing with swine like Boles. If you don't stand out for your platoon, he'll do the dirty on you again: five
days they've been here, lying in these shell-holes in front of the Wood, and they've done their whack as well as anybody else, and they've been crumped to glory pretty well all the time, and they're fed up to the teeth and you don't blame them. What's the use of smiling and looking pretty and nice about it when Boles has got the rum at headquarters all the time, lapping it up and then saying it's all been given out. If he hasn't got it then somebody else has—that knock-kneed puppy Briggs, probably, or Maisey and the Adjutant, or the Army Commander perhaps or——

“It's all right, Cherub, old chap.”

Robbie spoke quietly, but his voice could be heard clearly enough above the roar of the field guns a mile away.

“It's all right: it's only a little mistake, that's all.”

“Mistake be damned.”

Freddy Mann half wept as he snapped and snarled.

“Damned funny, isn't it, that it's always a mistake where my platoon's concerned? Suppose it was a mistake last Friday when——”

“It's all all right. Just take it quietly. It's the same for all. It's—”

“Same for all, is it? Why, Briggs and his crowd over there are just swimming in it. They've got ours as well, I tell you; and if that's all that that swine Boles can say——”

“It's quite all right.” Robbie came nearer, till his head almost touched Freddy Mann's.

“Steady, old chap, steady.”

“What's the use of saying 'Steady'? Suppose I'm allowed to ask for rum, aren't I? Or perhaps we're all to be teetotalers, our crowd? Perhaps we've got to go over the top on water. Plenty of water about, anyway.”

Freddy Mann laughed.

“Look here, Mann——”

“Anybody would think I was asking a bloody favour, from the way you all go on. It's 1 now, and we go over the top at 3, and just because my chaps want their rum——”

Robbie laid his hand on Freddy Mann's arm.

“You're with them, of course—I can see that. Just because you've got the blasted company——”

The grip tightened, but Freddy Mann took no notice.

“Orders are, rum was to be issued at midnight. It's 1 now, and what I want to know is, where's our rum?”

“It's all right, Mitchell—don't bother to wait.”

Robbie looked over his shoulder.

“Look here, Cherub, drop this. They're beginning to notice.”

“Oh, yes, pity that, great pity. It wouldn't do if they began to notice that I was trying to get their rum for them. Doesn't do, in polite society, to ask for rum. Sorry I've bothered you. Of course we'll be very glad to take water, since it's very good for us. Can't go wrong, if you stick to water. Come on, you——”

He turned roughly to Robbie.

“Go on, you're O.C. You get it. Boles has got it and I'm going to have it. Thought you could do it on me, between you—thought——”

“Cherub, you know what this means—if you go on like this——”

“Yes. Means that Boles has got out of his feather-bed, and that won't do”—in a high, mimicking, falsetto voice.

Robbie turned away.

“Damned well go myself and get it—that's what I'll do. Go to B.H.Q. and get it. Tell 'em there. That'll wake you up. Pity if Maisey knows. It's—hullo——”

“Got it, sir,” as Mitchell gave the accompanying salute. “Corporal Barnes, he had it. Got it up there, and it just so 'appened that we came across 'im. 'E's a goner. 'Ere's the rum.”

“Got the rum, anyway. Goner or not, doesn't matter long as we've got the rum. Let's get on with it. Come on, Harris, look after ourselves—we'll——”

He moved and found himself face to face with Robbie.

“We'll——”

Suddenly his head danced a little, and his hands began to shake. He stumbled a step forward, and felt for Robbie's hand.

“I say, Robbie, I——”

“That's all right, Cherub—all right—that's over. Glad it turned up—all right——”

“Robbie.”

“Have a drink—quickly. Drink this.”

Freddy Mann stood still, trembling.

“Oh God, Robbie. It happened to Bill in a different way. I didn't mean——”

“I know. It gets us all at times. Go on, drink it up. I know. No, I wouldn't start praying aloud. Bad sign, that. Just drink it up and cut along. I'll be round before—before we go.”

Anyway, he was praying pretty decently, that fellow in the shell-hole just to the left of him. There are all sorts of ways of calling upon God, ten minutes before an attack. Sergeant Sugger's way, for example—it seemed to have served Sergeant Sugger himself well enough, as a matter of fact, but it had never struck Freddy Mann as being particularly fitting or dignified. Then there was the whining, paling way, the sort of whipped-dog whimper; or the mixed assortment of oaths and blasphemies, mingled with confused appeals, which in the sight of the Almighty must surely leave the suppliant where he was. No, if one had to call on God at all, this on the whole was the way to do it. If God heard at all, he surely ought to listen when a man spoke steadily in a quiet voice, and just once told him about his little kid at home. “Oh God, oh God, help me”—yes, a very reasonable form of prayer. “Help me, help me,” the words came to Freddy Mann as he stood and waited, while a luminous hand crawled round an invisible watch upon his wrist. It might have been better if he himself had spoken once, quietly, just like that, instead of doing what he had done two hours ago. But now he hardly needed to.
Rather hard on the war gods that were abroad that night, that they couldn't rob him of that peace that had fallen so strangely once again upon him. They'd told him on church parade that the spirit of God brought peace. They hadn't told him that an old lead-swinging soldier could do it by standing by his side and grunting; that shells could swirl overhead, and burst around him, and leave him as unmoved as if he were a disembodied spirit, watching the issues from afar; that the pressure of Robbie's hand, as he came up to him now at the last, when Fate would so soon reveal her secrets, would bring that final touch of strength to knees that an hour ago had been as water; that now, when after twenty heart-beats more he would rise, and perhaps walk forward, perhaps stumble headlong, he would look behind him quickly to a mass of broken buildings that he imagined he could see, and step with a quiet smile, whistle in hand, to the front of the shell-hole, facing eastward to the jagged line of fire.

“Oh God, give me strength.”

“That's right, old chap. That's all you want.”

“Help me.”

“That's right. Come on now—come on, Bamford—we'll dodge your bullet—stout fellow—come on, all of you. Yes, it's all right, Robbie, we're all here, just behind. Come on, old chap—God's heard you—come along.”