The Valley of Bones (11 page)

‘Are you
feeling all right, Sergeant?’

He looked at
me as if he did not understand.

‘All right,
sir?’

‘You got
something to eat with the others just now?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘Enough?’

‘Plenty there,
sir. Didn’t feel much like food, it was.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘Not too good,
sir.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Don’t know
just what, sir.’

‘But you must
know if you’re feeling ill.’

‘Had a bit of
a shock back home, it was.’

This was no
time to go into the home affairs of the platoon’s personnel, now that at last
we were ready and I wanted to give the driver the order to move off.

‘Have a word
with me when we get back to barracks.’

‘All
right, sir.’

I climbed into
the truck beside the driver. We travelled several miles as far as some
crossroads. There we left the truck, which returned to its base. Platoon HQ was
set up in a dilapidated cowshed, part of the buildings of a small farm that lay
not far away across the fields. When everything was pretty well established in
the cowshed, including the siting of the imaginary 2-inch mortar which
travelled round with us, I went off to look for the rope bridge over the canal.
This was found without much difficulty. A corporal was in charge. I explained
my mission, and enquired about the bridge’s capacity.

‘It do wobble
a fair trifle, sir.’

‘Stand by
while I cross.’

‘That I will,
sir.’

I started to
make the transit, falling in after about three or four yards. The water might
have been colder for the time of year. I swam the rest of the way, reaching the
far bank not greatly wetter than the rain had left me. There I wandered about
for a time, making notes of matters to be regarded as important in the
circumstances. After that, I came back to the canal, and, disillusioned as to
the potentialities of the rope bridge, swam across again. The canal banks were
fairly steep, but the corporal helped me out of the water. He did not seem in
the least surprised to find that I had chosen this method of return in
preference to his bridge.

‘Very shaky,
those rope bridges,’ was all he said.

By now it was
dark, rain still falling. I returned to the cowshed. There a wonderful surprise
was waiting. It appeared that Corporal Gwylt, accompanied by Williams, W. H.,
had visited the neighbouring farm and managed to wheedle from the owners a jug
of tea.

‘We saved a
mug for you, sir. Wet you are, by Christ, too.’

I could have
embraced him. The tea was of the kind Uncle Giles used to call ‘a good
sergeant-major’s brew’. It tasted like the best champagne. I felt immediately
ten years younger, hardly wet at all.

‘She was a big
woman that gave us that jug of tea, she was,’ said Corporal Gwylt.

He addressed
Williams, W. H.

‘Ah, she was,’
agreed Williams, W. H.

He looked
thoughtful. Good at running and singing, he was otherwise not greatly gifted.

‘She made me
afraid, she did,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘I would have been afraid of that big
woman in a little bed.’

‘Indeed,
I would
too that,’ said Williams, W. H., looking as if
he were sincere in the opinion.

‘Would
you not have been afraid of her, Sergeant Pendry, a
great big woman twice your size?’

‘Shut your
mouth,’ said Sergeant Pendry, with unexpected force. ‘Must you ever be talking
of women?’

Corporal Gwylt was not at all put out.

‘I would be
even more afeared of her in a
big
bed,’ he said reflectively.

We finished
our tea. A runner came in, brought by a sentry, with a message from Gwatkin. It
contained an order to report to him at a map reference in half an hour’s time.
The place of meeting turned out to be the crossroads not far from the cowshed.

‘Shall I take
the jug back, Corporal?’ asked Williams, W. H.

‘No, lad, I’ll
return that jug,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘If I have your permission, sir?’

‘Off you go,
but don’t stay all night.’

‘I won’t take
long, sir.’

Gwylt
disappeared with the jug. The weather was clearing up now. There was a moon.
The air was fresh. When the time came, I went off to meet Gwatkin. Water
dripped from the trees, but a little wetness, more or less, was by then a
matter of indifference. I stood just off the road while I waited, expecting
Gwatkin would be late. However, the truck appeared on time. The vehicle drew up
in the moonlight just beside me. Gwatkin stepped out. He gave the driver
instructions about a message he was to take and the time he was to return to
this same spot. The truck drove off. Gwatkin began to stride slowly up the
road. I walked beside him.

‘Everything
all right, Nick?’

I told him what
we had been doing, giving the results of the reconnaissance on the far side of
the canal

‘Why are you
so wet?’

‘Fell off the
rope bridge into the canal.’

‘And swam?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was
good,’ he said, as if it had been a brilliant idea to swim.

‘How are
things going in the battle?’

‘The fog of
war has descended.’

That was a
favourite phrase of Gwatkin’s. He seemed to derive support from it. There was a
pause. Gwatkin began to fumble in his haversack. After a moment he brought out
quite a sizeable bar of chocolate.

‘I brought
this for you,’ he said.

‘Thanks
awfully, Rowland.’

I broke off a
fairly large portion and handed the rest back to him.

‘No,’ he said.
‘It’s all for you.’

‘All this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you
really spare it?’

‘It’s meant
for you. I thought you might not have any chocolate with you.’

‘I hadn’t.’

He returned to
the subject of the exercise, explaining, so far as possible, the stage things
had reached, what our immediate movements were to be. I gnawed the chocolate. I
had forgotten how good chocolate could be, wondering why I had never eaten more
of it before the war. It was like a drug, entirely altering one’s point of
view. I felt suddenly almost as warmly towards Gwatkin as to Corporal Gwylt,
though nothing would ever beat that first sip of tea. Gwatkin and I had stopped
by the side of the road to look at his map in the moonlight. Now he closed the
case, buttoning down its flap.

‘I’m sorry I
sent you off like that without any lunch,’ he said.

‘That was the
order.’

‘No,’ said
Gwatkin. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘How do you
mean?’

‘There would
have been lots of time for you to have had something
to eat,’ he said.

I did not know
what to answer.

‘I had to work
off on someone that rocket the CO gave me,’ he said. ‘You were the only person
I could get at – anyway the first one I saw when I came back from the Colonel.
He absolutely took the hide off me. I’d have liked to order the men off, too,
right away, without their dinner, but I knew I’d only get another rocket – an
even bigger one – if it came out they’d missed a meal unnecessarily through an
order of mine.’

I felt this a
handsome apology, a confession that did Gwatkin credit. Even so, his words were
nothing to the chocolate. There were still a few remains clinging to my mouth.
I licked them from the back of my teeth.

‘Of course you’ve
got to go,’ said Gwatkin vehemently, ‘lunch or no lunch, if it’s an order. Go
and get caught up on a lot of barbed wire and be riddled by machine-gun fire,
stabbed to death with bayonets against a wall, walk into a cloud of poison gas
without a mask, face a flame-thrower in a narrow street. Anything. I don’t mean
that.’

I agreed, at
the same time feeling no immediate necessity to dwell at length on such
undoubtedly valid aspects of military duty. It seemed best to change the
subject. Gwatkin had made amends – one of the rarest things for anyone to
attempt in life – now he must be distracted from cataloguing further
disagreeable potentialities to be encountered in the course of a soldier’s
life.

‘Sergeant
Pendry hasn’t been very bright today,’ I said. ‘I think he must be sick.’

‘I wanted to
talk to you about Pendry,’ said Gwatkin.

‘You noticed
he was in poor shape?’

‘He came to me
last night. There wasn’t time to tell you before, with all the preparations
going on for the exercise – or at least I forgot to tell you.’

‘What’s wrong
with Pendry?’

‘His wife,
Nick.’

‘What about
her?’

‘Pendry had a
letter from a neighbour saying she was carrying on with another man.’

‘I see.’

‘You keep on
reading in the newspapers that the women of this country are making a splendid
war effort,’ said Gwatkin, speaking with all that passion which would well up
in him at certain moments. ‘If you ask me, I think they are making a splendid
effort to sleep with as many other men as possible while their husbands are away.’

Even if that
were an exaggeration, as expressed by Gwatkin, it had to be admitted letters of
this kind were common enough. I remembered my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell,
once saying: ‘The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed
adultery. One really can’t imagine a more snobbish assumption.’ Certainly no
one who administered the Company’s affairs for a week or two would make any
mistake on that score. I asked Gwatkin if details were known about Pendry’s
case. None seemed available.

‘It makes you
sick,’ Gwatkin said.

‘I suppose the
men have some fun too. It isn’t only the women. Not that any of us are given
much time for it here – except perhaps Corporal Gwylt.’

‘It’s
different for a man,’ said Gwatkin. ‘Unless he gets mixed up with a woman who
makes him forget his duty.’

These words
recalled a film Moreland and I had seen together in days before the war. A
Russian officer – the story had been set in Tsarist times – had reprimanded an
unpunctual subordinate with just that phrase: ‘A woman who causes a man to
neglect his duty is not worth a moment’s consideration.’ The young lieutenant
in the film, so far as I could remember, had arrived late on parade because he
had been spending the night with the Colonel’s mistress. Afterwards, Moreland
and I had often quoted to each other that stern conclusion.

‘It’s just the
way you look at it,’ Moreland had said. ‘I know Matilda, for instance, would
take the line that no woman was worth a moment’s consideration unless she were
capable of making a man neglect his duty. Barnby, on the other hand, would say
no duty was worth a moment’s consideration if it forced you to neglect women.
These things depend so much on the subjective approach.’

I wondered if
Gwatkin had seen the film too, and memorized that scrap of dialogue as a
sentiment which appealed to him. On the whole it was unlikely that the picture,
comparatively highbrow, had penetrated so deep in provincial distribution.
Probably Gwatkin had simply elaborated the idea for himself. It was a
high-minded, hut not specially original one. Widmerpool, for example, when
involved with Gypsy Jones, had spoken of never again committing himself with a
woman who took his mind from his work. Gwatkin rarely spoke of his own wife. He
had once mentioned that her father was in bad health, and, if he died, his
mother-in-law would have to come and live with them.

‘What are you
going to do about Pendry?’ I asked.

‘Arrange for
him to have some leave as soon as possible. I’m afraid that will deprive you of
a platoon sergeant.’

‘Pendry will
have to go on leave sooner or later in any case. Besides, he’s not much use in
his present state.’

‘The sooner
Pendry goes, the sooner he will bring all this trouble to a stop.’

‘If he can.’

Gwatkin looked
at me with surprise.

‘Everything
will come right when he gets back home,’ he said.

‘Let’s hope
so.’

‘Don’t you
think Pendry will be able to deal with his wife?’

‘I don’t know
anything about her.’

‘You mean she
might want to go off with this other man?’

‘Anything
might happen. Pendry might do her in. You can’t tell.’

Gwatkin
hesitated a moment.

‘You know that
Rudyard Kipling book the other night?’

‘Yes.’

‘There are
sort of poems at the beginning of the stories.’

‘Yes?’

‘One of them
always stuck in my head – at least bits of it. I can never remember all the
words of anything like that.’

Gwatkin
stopped again. I feared he thought he had already said too much, and was not
going to admit the verse of his preference.

‘Which one?’

‘It was about
– was it some Roman god?’

‘Oh, Mithras.’

‘You remember
it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Extraordinary.’

Gwatkin looked
as if he could scarcely credit such a mental feat.

‘As you said,
Rowland, it’s my profession to read a lot. But what about Mithras?’

‘Where it says
“Mithras also a soldier—”’

Gwatkin
seemed to think that sufficient clue, that I must be able to guess by now all
he hoped to convey. He did not finish the line.

‘Something
about helmets scorching the forehead and sandals
burning the feet. I
can’t imagine anything worse than marching in sandals, especially on those cobbled
Roman roads.’

Gwatkin
disregarded the logistic problem of sandal-shod infantry. He was very serious.

‘ “—keep us
pure till the dawn”,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What do you
make of that?’

‘Probably a
very necessary prayer for a Roman legionary.’

Again, Gwatkin
did not laugh.

‘Does that
mean women?’ he asked, as if the notion had only just struck him.

‘I suppose so.’

I controlled
temptation to make flippant suggestions about other, more recondite vices, for
which, with troops of such mixed origin as Rome’s legions, the god’s hasty
moral intervention might be required. That sort of banter did not at all fit in
with Gwatkin’s mood. Equally pointless, even hopelessly pedantic, would be a
brief exegesis explaining that the Roman occupation of Britain, historically
speaking, was rather different from the picture in the book. At best one would
end up in an appalling verbal tangle about the relationship of fact and poetry.