The Power of the Dead (19 page)
Read The Power of the Dead Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
“I can just as well brush off the flaky bits, you know, if you’ll let me.”
He picked up his pen. The point of the nib was at right angles to the shoulders.
“I’m so sorry to break-in on you like this. I’ll fetch my pen, I won’t be a moment.”
When she returned he was contrite. “I’m sorry, Lucy. Don’t take any notice of what I say.”
“Well, you’ve got so much to think about. Now don’t worry any more about the rooms, leave them to me. I’m sure the walls don’t really matter, not for the moment, anyway. I’ve asked Mrs. Rigg to bring you a bacon sandwich, and a cup of coffee.”
After the many raids, to identify the regiments and therefore the
Divisionen
opposite the 4th Army front, only one report from all the infantry battalions taking part mentioned that the German dugouts had as many as 40 wooden steps leading down into the tunnels below and that the dugout rooms, with walls and ceilings similarly boarded, lay at a depth of 30 feet. In the battle of Loos in the preceding
September
the enemy shelters had been more or less open, with heavy timber baulks shoring up roofs of layers of sandbags filled with chalk. They were seldom more than 10 feet below ground level; and most of them in the front line had been wrecked by our 6-in. howitzer shells. Now, during the final rehearsal of our Division at Querrieu, my Commanding Officer, Lt.-Col. H. J. West, who had been wounded twice during the abortive attacks of early 1915, and again (badly) at Loos, protested to the 4th Army Commander, present as a guest of the Corps commander, that the plan was based on a fallacy: for the German dugouts were too deep for any shell of less than 9.2-inch to penetrate by a direct hit, he declared.
For this breach of military etiquette he was relieved of his command.
During the preliminary bombardments, and the final concentrated bombardment between 6.30 a.m. and 7.30 a.m. on July the First the enemy dugouts, deep in the chalk, were not smashed in. German machine-gunners, sheltering below in comparative safety, came up at 7.31 a.m., as they had rehearsed many times. Some carried parts of their
Maschinengewehre
into shell-holes in Noman’s-land, in some places before the tumble of their own wire, where they re-assembled these weapons, and awaited the slow advance of six waves of British infantry.
He put down the pen and walked about the room, trembling, while tears dripped from his eyes. Lucy returned very soon, it seemed.
“How is it going?” she asked, happily.
“It’s stopped, except on our left, where the Ulster division has got into the Schwaben redoubt. They had better
brigadier-generals
, who got them up out of Thiepval wood and across to the wire during the bombardment, and so into the enemy trenches, while the more amateur officers in the southern divisions obeyed orders. The machine-guns flanking Ovillers started firing before zero hour, and our lot has copped it. In a few minutes, or hours, I’ll be seeing Father Aloysius sliding down into my shell-hole holding his ‘little book’ in his hands, reading his ‘office’, while I can’t feel my legs at all.” Looking up, he went on quietly, “Not that I gave a damn for myself, but I wasn’t able to do anything to help my platoon. They were laid out almost in a row, among innumerable others looking as though they’d come away from a Cup-tie final, blind-drunk, and were sleeping it off.”
“I’ll bring you up a bowl of soup, and some toast, in a minute or two.”
In one part of the line, opposite Ovillers, a downland village among shattered trees, there was a gentle declension south to the
Albert-Bapaume
road. Lined by poplars, its metalling weed-grown, this road led direct through what had been corn and beet-sugar fields to the distant ridge. Within a few minutes all officers of our battalion which had gone over—25—were casualties. Mash Valley, as the declension was called on the trench-maps, looked to be filled by a Crystal Palace cup-tie crowd lying down to rest, some on their backs, others on their faces, after the long wait and excitement of the game.
Durhams, Green Howards, Staffordshires, Devons, Middlesex,
Gaultshires
—these and other county regiments had failed to reach their
first objective. Farther south the infantry had better luck, as the saying went, and took the fortified village of Mametz. But north of the straight Albert-Bapaume road, across the gently rolling downland to its decline into the Ancre Valley, over the marshes and up again to the rising ground to Beaumont Hamel and onwards to Gommecourt, the most northerly bastion or flank of the attack—a dozen miles or so of the 20-mile front—the assault was everywhere shattered. By evening nearly 60,000 British soldiers, most of them of the new keen Kitchener divisions, had gone down under the mort blast of Spandau rifles and machine-guns. When the sun’s rays were from the west the survivors were back again in their own trenches.
Opposite Mash Valley—lying north of Sausage Valley, where
Tynesider
troops lay almost as thickly as their comrades in Mash—the Germans lost about 150 men, most of them wounded. Their British opponents, belonging to the 8th and 34th divisions, lay outside the German wire, 12,000 of them. When the firing ceased German doctors and Red Gross orderlies came out and helped bind up some of our wounded; but there were so many that for the next three days khaki figures were still crawling, or being carried, back to the dressing station below the Golden Virgin of Albert.
Thus began the Battle of the Somme.
Hilary was on his way from Pembrokeshire, having left his caravan behind in a cove near Solva Bay before dawn. He had arranged to bring his sister Dora from Lynmouth, which meant a long, slow, out-of-the-way journey from Chepstow ferry down the southern coast of the Severn Sea from Bridgwater to
Lynmouth
, and back again to Bridgwater—an extra seventy-four miles.
He had insisted on fetching Dora by motor, although she had written to say that she would not find the journey by rail too much for her. The real reason for her not wanting him to come to the cottage was on account of her ‘Babies’, two small and aged spinster sisters, one blind, and the other suffering from delusions which sometimes made her suspect that her food was poisoned. When Hilary had last visited the cottage she had screamed and hurried upstairs to her blind sister, crying out that a strange man wanted to murder them.
That incident had led to an unhappy discussion between brother and sister; for in his ‘direct sailor’s manner’ Hilary had asked her how long would she insist on looking after those two idiots. She was wasting herself, he declared. What sort of life did she have? What they needed was a professional nurse, who would stand no
nonsense; but not in a small cottage. They should be in an institution.
Hilary knew the story of how a neighbour, soon after the war—a relation of the two old women who was in charge of them—had asked his sister to look after them for a week-end and had never returned. Good God, that was now nearly ten years ago. Something must be done about it. He couldn’t have his kidlet sister working herself prematurely into the grave.
This time Dora had arranged with the parish nurse to take over the care of her ‘Babies’ before Hilary was due to arrive; and a rendezvous in Lynton, at the top of the water-lift, she wrote, would save him a journey down the steep hill to Lynmouth and up again.
At first the motor-ride was enjoyable for Dora, the feeling of freedom brought back youthful memories, leading to keen
anticipation
at the thought of seeing Hetty again. Hilary remarked that she seemed to have found a new lease of life, and optimistically began to talk about a subject which, he declared, was very close to his heart.
“You ought not to continue having the responsibility for your two old ladies, Dora. Surely they’d be better off in a home? You’d find no trouble in getting them certified under the Lunacy Laws, you know.”
“Well, as I have said before, dear brother, I feel for them as though they really are my own.”
“Well, you know what I feel about it, Dora.”
After that the meadows and paddocks of Somerset, divided by rhines and planted with withies, held only fleeting interest for Dora. Over the Dorset border, when they stopped for lunch, she was not able to eat the lettuce sandwiches she had brought with her. More nervous energy was lost while she tried to persuade her brother that she would be happy to be left to sit in the shade of the field beside which they had stopped, instead of going into the hotel Hilary had chosen from his A.A. book.
After vain persuasion he went in to eat alone without
enjoyment
a full meal of pea soup, roast beef, baked potatoes, cabbage, and batter pudding, followed by apricot pie with cream, and bread and cheese. Dora was cracked; he gave her a generous allowance, and instead of enjoying what was left of her life she had made herself a slave to a couple of imbecile strangers, who repaid her by … etc., etc.
The journey was continued, both enduring one another and partly sustained by thoughts of Lucy’s face greeting them.
*
Ignoring the lunch awaiting him downstairs, Phillip blinded on the Norton to the railway junction and gave his envelope to the guard. It was to be collected at Paddington. Returning as the clock struck four he set about distempering the bedroom walls, which had been colour-washed by the builder before the new plaster had dried out, so that the distemper had powdered in patches. He worked fast, driven by the need to get the work done. Creamy drips fell on his jacket, trousers, and hair. Having done the walls, he thought to use up the remainder of the second tin by putting it on the ceilings, not knowing that the petrifying liquid would fail to key to the soft, porous whiting already there. As soon as the distemper had dried out, above the blue flames of the oil stove, it began first to crack, then to flake and hang down in small loose scales.
“Perhaps Uncle Hilary won’t notice,” said Lucy, hopefully.
“He notices everything. God knows what he’ll say when he sees how all my seeds failed on the arable. He’ll give me the sack, I hope. Why, when
one
brush mark showed under the varnish when he had his car repainted, he told me that he intended to make the painter take it all off and do it again. I bet the poor devil lost money on the job.”
Lucy said suddenly, “Here they are.”
Looking through the window, they saw two figures sitting still in the red car. Hastening down, Phillip opened the door and helped out his aunt, who said almost inaudibly, “Well, Boy—how are you?”
“I’m so glad you could come, Aunt Dora.”
He was going round to shake hands when Hilary said, “Take in your Aunt’s bag, will you? You’ll find it in the boot.”
Meanwhile
Dora was walking slowly towards Lucy, who with Billy was coming down the garden path.
Dora smiled wanly, and managed to say, “Lucy my dear, how well you look. And how your little boy has grown.”
While the two ladies were going into the house, Hilary turned to his nephew and asked if he had such a thing as a wheelbarrow. “I’ve got the very thing for a nursing mother,” he said
confidentially
. “The crate can go in the larder, on the slate floor.”
Surveying two dozen bottles of Dublin stout, Phillip said, “Well, Lucy isn’t exactly nursing the baby now.”
“It will help build her up, Phillip. Here she comes, not a word. Lucy, my dear,” as she came in. He kissed her. “And how is my godson? … That’s good news.” He drew a deep breath. “Well, it’s good to be back again.” They went into the parlour. Billy was hiding under the table. He came out only when Lucy held out her arms; and when his great-uncle approached to touch his cheek with a podgy finger, Billy retorted by pointing at him and saying, “Bug off, Nuncle.”
Hilary disregarded this remark together with the child, and said to Lucy, “What’s become of Dora?”
“She has a headache, Uncle, and is lying down in her room.”
“She’s not used to motorin’, that’s only part of her trouble. As nervous as a cat, and I came along at a steady thirty. It’s those two old women she insists on lookin’ after. They’re leeches. She ought to get them into a home. Have you seen them?”
“Phillip has told me about them. Are you ready for tea, or would you rather wait a bit?”
“Just as you wish, my dear. I don’t want you to vary your usual routine for me in any way.”
“I’ll get the tea trolley.”
When she had gone to the kitchen Hilary said to Phillip, “Where did Billy pick up that expression?”
“From me, I expect.”
“Oh.”
“He can’t talk properly yet.”
“So I observe. Now fetch me a glass, will you, like a good fellow.”
He opened the corkscrew on a multi-bladed knife, and having held up the glass to the light to see if it were clean, poured out some stout.
“I’ll leave it here, for the barm to settle. Lucy can drink it before her tea.”
Knowing how Lucy hated stout, Phillip said, “I’m forgetting my duties. Let me show you to your room, Uncle. Mind your head on that beam.”
“My dear chap, I knew that beam when I was a boy.”
“I thought you might have forgotten.”
“Why should I forget?”
He followed his nephew upstairs into the larger of the two
bedrooms. “Hullo, whatever’s happened to the ceiling? What? But why didn’t you find out before you attempted to do it? ‘No time’? What d’you mean, ‘no time’? You could have asked the oil colourman, he would have told you, surely? Well, you’ll have to take it all off. Rub it with a damp cloth until it’s smooth and clean—but don’t put on too much water, or you’ll have the plaster down, and heaven knows how many starlings’ nests as well.” He turned away. “I must go to the bathroom. I’ll join you
downstairs
.”
“Right ho.”
Phillip ran down to tell Lucy about the stout. “I took him upstairs to get him out of the way.”
“I can’t drink it. It makes me shudder. Won’t you drink it for me?”
“It’s a poor heart that never rejoices. Cheerio.”
*
After tea, Hilary walked to Fawley House, to see his eldest brother John, who was indoors with one of his attacks of bronchitis. Since the winter his breathing had been uneasy; the warm weather had not, as he had hoped, improved the inflammation; for the past three days he had remained in bed in order to be fit for the christening.