And We Go On (35 page)

Rumours flew thick again. Another draft came and filled our ranks and I was made a corporal. We moved towards Cambrai and heard great stories of the Canal we were to cross. Tommy was not himself. There were days when he could not eat, and he was cynical and bitter in his conversation. Everyone, however, was more optimistic of the ending of the war. Surely we could keep the Hun on the retreat.

We marched part of one night and arrived at a place of old trenches. There were a few dugouts about and we explored two. The investigation induced a unanimous preference for the open. Dead Germans were in them. Eight bodies lay about the floor, all bandaged men who had died while waiting further attention. On one bunk, seated so that his back was against the wall, was an elderly fellow with a bushy beard, probably a flare man. Sims, a coarse fellow who had come with the last draft, but who had been in France before, leaned toward him and beckoned to a young lad also newly-joined. “Come here,” he said. “This old chap isn't really dead. He's just making believe.”

The lad looked uneasy and we could see that he was very nervous. “I'm going out of this place,” he said.

“But look,” said Sims. “Watch his face. Say, old man, if you're not dead, just open your eyes.”

The German's eyes sagged open, staring!

There was a fearful scream. The watching youth plunged up the stairway, yelling, mouthing hysteria. They caught him outside and tried to soothe him, and could not, and in an hour he was away down the line, still gibbering. Sims had placed his hand in a friendly fashion on the dead man's shoulder and had slyly worked his finger into the bushy beard. He tugged it and the skin of the cheeks pulled down so as to reveal the eyes. It was a ghastly thing to do and we booted Sims up the steps and away from our company.

Tommy and I saw the ruins of a village nearby and went over to it to find a place to spend the day. We were to move again the next night and go into battle. One of the new men was wandering that way and we spoke to him. His rejoinder made me ask him to come with us. He had a quiet, easy voice that suggested culture and accomplishment. Tommy looked around quickly. “Who are you?” he asked, in his abrupt fashion.

“I'm the Student,” came the answer. “I've got a name, Linder, but all the draft I came with called me ‘the Student.'”

“Why?” blurted Tommy.

“I suppose it was partly because I've been to college and partly because I read when there is opportunity.”

We reached the village and saw a flow of traffic that exuded portent of what the next few days would bring. There were columns of marching men, and lorries packed with soldiers; ammunition columns, side cars, and field batteries; field kitchens and more lorries, some loaded with plank and barbed wire. Two tractors ground past dragging big guns. Moonlight hovered over all, making dark alleys of narrow side streets and black voids of gutted doorways and windows. A shattered church was revealed in grim silhouette.

The first place we inspected was nauseating. There were smells that repelled us, the smell of broken, mouldy house plaster, of rotting wallpaper, of filth and debris a foot deep on the kitchen floor, and the reek of green slime in the cellar. Leaving it, we went on and found three ruins with blankets over the windows and the interiors fitted with bunks.

Men were there, men from the line, dirty, unshaven, listless creatures who had just arrived from the trenches. There were odours again, the
smell of mud and toil and unwashed weariness, the odour of the life they were living and the death that lurked about all wrecked places. Three men passed us without a glance, their faces set, white masks, in which only eyes moved; they had water bottles hung about them and were going in search of a pump or well before they slept.

Beyond the third ruin a stretcher leaned against the wall. The Student's flashlight revealed dark stains on its canvas, and then the beams flickered to a huddled figure on the ground. It was covered with a rubber sheet and a muddy steel helmet was on one corner to prevent the slight breeze from raising it. We could not find a place that was suitable and so went over in the field until we had found a soft hollow and there spread our bed and slept together.

It was noon when I awoke and the Student was sitting up beside me, smoking. He had fine, well-cut features, fair hair and eyes as soft as a girl's. Tommy was still sleeping and I could not help noticing how browned and hard and crease-lined his face had become; even in repose it seemed bitter, saddened. Beside him the Student looked as fresh and unsophisticated as a child just washed.

“Look,” he said softly, and pointed.

I raised up. Just a few yards from us an old trench zigzagged its way across the chalky slope, probably the front line of the year before. The parapets were crumbling, the sandbags rotting so that they had burst in many places and oozed their contents. In front the black-rusted wire was half-hidden by tall weeds and thistles, and just where the Student pointed, in a hollow, shredded remains of a uniform clung to the barbs and held to view a grinning skull that seemed to mock us. “That,” said the Student, “seems very fitting in this country.”

“It is – now,” I admitted, “but it should not be.”

“No?” he answered, quizzically. “They pointed you out to me as a grizzled oldtimer. I expected to hear you discourse on the glory of fighting for King and Country.”

“If you read you'll get that in the piffle of the war correspondents,” I said. “They tell you how happy we are to die in battle, how hard it is to restrain us in the big attacks.”

He smiled, and seemed more whimsical than before. “Don't you uphold the tartan and traditions of the famous Black Watch?” he mocked. “Doesn't the sound of the bagpipes set your blood on fire?”

“I like to hear them when we're coming back from the trenches,” I said confidently. The Student could say things without hurting one's feelings or rousing his temper. “We think we can't drag one foot after another and then they come and after the first squeal we're stepping on air and swing into camp like new men.”

“I know that,” he said, and sobered.

“What I like best,” I went on, “is the bugle blowing Last Post, or a trumpeter sounding an evening call. Something that is softening, restful.”

The Student looked at me, then at Tommy. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. “I've not met many I can talk with in the last few weeks.”

“I haven't for months,” I said. The fact had struck me. Not since the Professor had been with us, and Melville and little Mickey, had I talked and thought of things that did not belong to warfare and the trenches, and I told the Student so as we strolled in the sunlight. Up ahead the guns were clamouring with a new din and on the road many ambulances were coming and going.

I told him how inquisitive I had been when I arrived in France, yet bitter against the old men, and how our little band had talked long hours, of the 7th Battalion man I met in hospital, of Stewart, the stretcher bearer, in the moonlight by the old bridge; then I told myself as well as him that Passchendale had deadened all my senses, changed me, dulled me, that the long trip in the spring had maintained the stupor, a sort of unconscious acceptance of life as I met it. We talked about the men we had seen in the night, the battalion just out of the fighting, and I told him how lucky he had been to come to our “crowd,” and to our company in particular, explaining that our officers were humane in their management and did not sap the stamina of the men with fool drilling and spit-and-polish spectacles for gilded staffs, and that our captain was better than ordinary.

As we talked I heard a sudden whining roar and threw myself into the old trench. He jumped down beside me in a flustered way. Whamm! A mighty explosion that seemed to rock the ground. Clods showered about us. A cloud of fine dust drifted by mingled with acrid fumes. Some men of the resting battalion had been near the place where the shell landed, lousing their shirts. We got up slowly and heard a quiet moan, almost without complaint of pain, but quavering with infinite weariness.

We reached the fellow as his mates knelt over him. He was a small man, almost puny, and still clung to the grimy garment he had been searching.
Blood welled from a great wound in his chest and it was useless to try to bind it. He was dead before they could bandage him.

The Student was very white. He did not speak until we were away from the spot and then he said tensely.

“Fancy it, that poor little lad going through hell up front and escaping it, then to be killed back here. Do you think that God ever intended such things as that?”

“That's too big a question for me,” I said, “but one I'd like to have answered because it's been with me for a long time. I used to like a verse I remember, by Noyes:

In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,
In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the web of years.

“But I can't believe that man is not responsible for this, I don't mean the Kaiser and all that stuff, but Man, those who are the head of Empires and States. I don't think that God wanted it at all.”

“Then why did you come to give a hand if you think it's all wrong?” he asked.

“That,” I shot back, “is another question I can't answer.”

Tommy had been wakened by the shell. He had gone to the well, easily seen in daylight, and got water enough for us all to have a good wash, but he was surly. “Have a look at the guys in the lines back of the village,” he growled. “Transport chaps, fat, happy beggars who don't know what war is. Why couldn't that shell have gone in among them?”

We strolled over that way, after we had eaten, to appease him. A number of drivers were there, churning chains in sandbags to make them glitter. They were complacent fellows, chatting and smoking, contented looking, with comfortable waist lines.

“When this mess is over, if it ever is,” Tommy went on, “those well-fed bucks will get all the glory. We'll be a bunch of cripples, mental, and physical, tucked away in some institution, remembered at Christmas or some such times. They'll be the heroes the kiddies will look up to, and they'll tell tall tales of what they did in the Great War, them and the brass hats.”

The Student glanced at me. “Tommy,” I said, “is bitter towards all who wear red tabs and ribbons.”

“I am,” he snapped. “I hate ducking into ditches to let some pot-bellied old mucker shoot by in a cushioned car, and I hate this blah-blah they shoot us before they think we'll be killed, brass hats telling us what a name we've made and how nobly
we'll
carry on, and then some silly ass waving his arm and shouting for three cheers for General Dugout or Awayback. What … by the sweet breath of old Queen Anne – look over there.”

We looked. It was a French home that had escaped damage with the exception of losing one corner of its roof, and was now an officers' mess. They were having lunch. A table was spread with a white cloth. On it were real dishes, a bowl of roses, tall bottles with expensive labels. The officers were in slacks, clean clothed and their batmen hovered about arranging seats for them.

It was too much for us to watch. We went out front and saw the men lined up for their meal. They carried dirty mess-tins and were issued with a ladle-full of greasy mulligan in the tin tops, and weak-looking tea. They sat around the ruins and ate wherever they could squat, without speaking, hurriedly, as if they hated the business. Some emptied part of their issue on the ground and scrubbed their mess-tins with bits of sandbags as they shambled off to where they slept.

“Is that fair?” grated Tommy. “There are the boys who've done the work, who've held the trenches, who've met old Heinie and beat him back. Those la-dee-das having servants hand them their wines were probably in the dugouts, and when they did a couple of hours up in the line they had so much rum that they had to have their batmen with them. Roses on the table! Man, dear man, I could …” He almost sobbed, and I gripped his arm. “They'd hearten anyone more than barrels of rum,” he choked.

I looked at the Student. “Tommy sounds bitter,” I said, “but he doesn't mean it all. There are mighty good officers as well as men, and you can't blame them for having as good as they can get. Tommy's been out here a long time, and …”

The Student nodded. “I understand,” he said in his quiet way, and Tommy calmed at once.

We went on and looked around the ruins. It had once been a pretty village, with a little brook running through the back gardens, and with big, shady trees on the by-lanes. “I like France,” said the Student, “at least the
France that Hugo has described, and I saw his places as we came up here, quaint villages with the lime-washed cottage walls shining through the trees, blue shutters to match the whiteness, and elms and hedges all around as background, with the church near the centre like a hen watching over her brood. We stopped off near one of those places and I walked over the fields. The sky was bluer than blue, and there were buttercups and red clover in bloom as if it were the first of summer. At the brook I found old stone steps, mossed over, and kiddies were there playing in a pool. I could have stayed there for years, and I'd like to come here after the war and look around,” he said.

“I wouldn't,” said Tommy. “There'll be too many white crosses.”

We turned about at the end of the place and saw an old French couple pottering about a garden. They were living in a cellar and when the Student talked to them they told him proudly that they were in luck. Their piano had miraculously escaped destruction. We looked into the rooms above their cellar. Nearly all had been destroyed and part of the kitchen had been blown to powder, but in the inner room the furniture remained intact. Only the plaster had fallen from the walls. And in a corner was a piano.