The Valley of Bones (12 page)

‘Those lines
make you think,’ said Gwatkin slowly.

‘About toeing
the line?’

‘Make you glad
you’re married,’ he said. ‘Don’t have to bother any more about women.’

He turned back
towards the place where we had first met. There was the sound of a car further
up the road. The truck came into sight again. Gwatkin abandoned further
speculations about Mithras. He became once more the Company Commander.

‘We’ve talked
so much I haven’t inspected your platoon position,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing
special I ought to see there?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Bring your
men right away to the place I showed you on the map. We’ve got some farm
buildings for a billet tonight. It’s not far from here. Everyone will have a
bit of a rest. Nothing much expected of us until midday tomorrow All right?’

‘All right.’

He climbed
into the truck. It drove off again. I returned to the platoon. Sergeant Pendry
came forward to report. He looked just as he had looked that morning; no
better, no worse.

‘Captain
Gwatkin just had a word with me about your leave, Sergeant. We’ll arrange that
as soon as the exercise is over.’

‘Thank you
very much, sir.’

He spoke
tonelessly, as if the question of leave did not interest him in the least.

‘Fall the
platoon in now. We’re billeted in a farm near here. There’s prospect of some
sleep.’

‘Right, sir.’

As usual, the
distance to march turned out further than expected. Rain came on again.
However, the farm buildings were pretty comfortable when we arrived. The
platoon was accommodated in a thatched barn where there was plenty of straw.
Corporal Gwylt, as always, was unwilling to believe that agricultural
surroundings could ever be tolerable.

‘Oh, what
nasty smells there are here,’ he said. ‘I do not like all these cows.’

I slept like a
log that night. It must have been soon after breakfast
the following morning, when I
was checking sentry duties with Sergeant Pendry, that Breeze hurried into the
barn to issue a warning.

‘A staff car
flying the Divisional Commander’s pennon has just stopped by the road,’ Breeze
said. ‘It must be a snap inspection by the General. Rowland says get all the
men cleaning weapons or otherwise usefully occupied forthwith.’

He rushed off
to warn Kedward. I set about generating activity in the barn. Some of the
platoon were at work removing mud from their equipment. Those not so obviously
engaged on a useful task were found other commendable occupations. All was in
order within a few minutes. This was not a moment too soon. There was the sound
of a party of people approaching the barn. I looked out, and saw the General,
his ADC and Gwatkin slopping through the mud of the farmyard.

‘They’re
coming, Sergeant Pendry.’

They entered
the barn. Sergeant Pendry called those assembled to attention. It was at once
obvious that General Liddament was not in the best of tempers. He was a serious
looking man, young for his rank, cleanshaven, with the air of a scholar rather
than a soldier. His recent taking over of the Division’s command was already to
be noticed in small matters of routine. Though regarded by regular soldiers as
something of a military pedant – so Maelgwyn-Jones had told Gwatkin – General
Liddament was said to be an officer with ideas of his own. Possibly in order to
counteract this reputation for an excessive precision in approach to his dudes,
an imperfection of which he was probably aware and hoped to correct, the
General allowed himself certain informalities of dress and turn-out. For
example, he carried a long stick, like the wand of a verger in a cathedral, and
wore a black-and-brown check scarf thrown carelessly about his neck. A hunting
horn was thrust between the buttons of his battle-dress blouse. Maelgwyn-Jones
also reported that two small dogs on a lead sometimes accompanied General
Liddament, causing great disturbance when they squabbled with each other. Today
must have been too serious an occasion for these animals to be with him. The presence
of dogs would have increased his air of being a shepherd or huntsman, timeless
in conception, depicted in the idealized pastoral scene of some engraving.
However, General Liddament’s manner of speaking had none of this mild, bucolic
tone.

‘Tell them to
carry on,’ he said, pointing his long stick at me. ‘What’s the name of this
officer?’

‘Second-lieutenant
Jenkins, sir,’ said Gwatkin, who was under great strain.

‘How long have
you been with this unit, Jenkins?’

I told the
General, who nodded. He asked some further questions. Then he turned away, as
if he had lost all interest in me, all interest in human beings at all, and
began rummaging furiously about the place with his stick. After exploring the
corners of the barn, he set about poking at the roof.

‘Have your men
been dry here?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There is a
leak in the thatch here.’

‘There is a
leak in that corner, sir, but the men slept the other end.’

The General,
deep in thought, continued his prodding for some seconds without visible
effect. Then, as he put renewed energy into the thrusts of his stick, which
penetrated far into the roofing, a large piece of under-thatch all at once
descended from above, narrowly missing General Liddament himself, completely
overwhelming his ADC with debris of dust, twigs and loam. At that, the General
abandoned his activities, as if at last satisfied. Neither he nor anyone else
made any comment, nor was any amusement expressed. The ADC, a pink-faced young
man, blushed hotly and set about cleaning
himself up. The General turned to me again.

‘What did your
men have for breakfast, Jenkins?’

‘Liver, sir.’

I was
impressed by his retention of my name.

‘What else?’

‘Jam, sir.’

‘What else?’

‘Bread, sir – and
margarine.’

‘Porridge?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘No issue,
sir.’

The General
turned savagely on Gwatkin, who had fallen into a kind of trance, but now
started agonisingly to life again.

‘No porridge?’

‘No porridge,
sir.’

General
Liddament pondered this assertion for some seconds in resentful silence. He
seemed to be considering porridge in all its aspects, bad as well as good. At
last he came out with an unequivocal moral judgment.

‘There ought
to be porridge,’ he said.

He glared
round at the platoon, hard at work with their polishing, oiling, pulling-through,
whatever they were doing. Suddenly he pointed his stick at Williams, W. H., the
platoon runner.

‘Would you
have liked porridge?’

Williams,
W.H., came to attention. As I have said, Williams, W.H., was good on his feet
and sang well. Otherwise, he was not particularly bright.

‘No, sir,’ he
said instantly, as if that must be the right answer.

The General
was taken aback. It would not be too much to say he was absolutely staggered.

‘Why not?’

General
Liddament spoke sharply, but seriously, as if some excuse like religious
scruple about eating porridge would certainly be accepted as valid.

‘Don’t like
it, sir.’

‘
You
don’t like porridge
?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then you’re a
foolish fellow – a very foolish fellow.’

After saying
that, the General stood in silence, as if in great distress of mind, holding
his long staff at arm’s length from him, while he ground it deep into the
earthy surface of the barnhouse floor. He appeared to be trying to contemplate
as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the
human family as to dislike porridge. His physical attitude suggested a holy man
doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care. All at
once he turned to the man next to Williams, W. H., who happened to be Sayce.

‘Do
you
like porridge?’ he almost shouted.

Sayce’s face,
obstinate, dishonest, covered with pock-marks showed determination to make
trouble if possible, at the same time uncertainty as how best to achieve that
object. For about half a minute Sayce turned over in his mind the pros and cons
of porridge eating, just as he might reflect on the particular excuse most
effective in extenuation of a dirty rifle barrel. Then he spoke.

‘Well, sir—’
he began.

General
Liddament abandoned Sayce immediately for Jones, D.

‘—and you?’

‘No sir,’ said
Jones, D., also speaking with absolute assurance that a negative answer was
expected of him.

‘—and you?’

‘No, sir,’
said Rees.

Moving the
long stick with feverish speed, as if he were smelling out witches, the General
pointed successively at Davies, J., Davies, E., Ellis, Clements, Williams, G.

No one had
time to answer. There was a long pause at the end
of the line. Corporal Gwylt stood there. He had been supervising the cleaning
of the bren. General Liddament, whose features had taken on an expression of
resignation, stood now leaning forward, resting his chin on the top of the
stick, his head looking like a strange, rather malignant totem at the apex of a
pole. He fixed his eyes on Gwylt’s cap badge, as if ruminating on the history
of the Regiment symbolized in the emblems of its design.

‘And you,
Corporal,’ he asked, this time quite quietly. ‘Do you like porridge?’

An enormous
smile spread over Corporal Gwylt’s face.

‘Oh, yes, yes,
sir,’ he said, ‘I do like porridge. I did just wish we had had porridge this
morning.’

Slowly General
Liddament straightened himself. He raised the stick so that its sharp metal
point almost touched the face of Corporal Gwylt.

‘Look,’ he
said, ‘look, all of you. He may not be the biggest man in the Division, but he
is a sturdy fellow, a good type. There is a man who eats porridge. Some of you
would do well to follow his example.’

With these
words, the Divisional Commander strode out of the barn. He was followed by
Gwatkin and the ADC, the last still covered from head to foot with thatch. They
picked their way through the mud towards the General’s car. A minute later, the
pennon disappeared from sight. The inspection was over.

‘The General
is a funny-looking chap,’ said Breeze afterwards. ‘But there’s not much he
misses. He asked where the latrines were constructed. When I showed him, he
told me dig them downwind next time.’

‘Just the same
with me,’ said Kedward. ‘He made some of the platoon turn up the soles of their
boots to see if they wanted mending. I was glad I had checked them last week.’

We returned
from the exercise to find Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark.

‘The war’s beginning
now,’ said Gwatkin. ‘It won’t be long before we’re in it.’

His depression
about failing to provide ‘support’ in the field was to some extent mitigated by
the Company tying for first place in a practice march across country. In fact,
at the time when Sergeant Pendry returned from his leave, Gwatkin certainly
felt his prestige as a Company Commander in the ascendant. Pendry on the other
hand – who had left for home almost immediately after the termination of the
thirty-six-hour exercise – came back looking almost as gloomy as before. He
returned, however, far more capable of carrying out his duties. No one knew
how, if at all, he had settled his domestic troubles. I had never seen a man so
greatly changed in the course of a few weeks. From being broad and heavily
built, Pendry had become thin and haggard, his formerly glittering blue eyes
sunken and glassy. All the same, he could be relied upon once more as Platoon
Sergeant. His energy was renewed, though now all the cheerfulness that had once
made him such a good NCO was gone. There was no more lateness on parade or
forgetting of orders: there was also no more good-natured bustling along of the
platoon. Pendry nowadays lost his temper easily, was morose when things went
wrong. In spite of this change, there was little to complain of in his work. I
told Gwatkin of this improvement.

‘I expect
Pendry put his foot down,’ Gwatkin said. ‘It’s the only way with women. There
should be no more difficulty with him now.’

I felt less
certain. However, Pendry’s troubles were forgotten. There were other things to
think about. He simply settled down as a different sort of person. That
happened long before the incident at the road-blocks, by which time everyone
was used to Pendry in his new character.

‘When
Cadwallader goes, which he’ll have to, sooner or later,’ Gwatkin said, ‘Pendry
will have to be considered for CSM.’

The
road-blocks were concrete pill-boxes constructed throughout the Command to
impede an enemy, should the Germans decide to invade this island in the first
instance. In addition to normal guard routines, road-blocks were manned after
dark, the Orderly Officer inspecting them in turn throughout the night. This
inspection continued, until dawn, when there was time for him to have a couple
of hours sleep before coming on parade. Breeze had been Orderly Officer that
day: Sergeant Pendry, NCO in charge of roadblocks. By one of the anomalies of
Battalion arrangements, Pendry had been on quarter-guard, followed by a Brigade
night exercise, so that ‘road-blocks’ made his third night running with little
or no sleep. It was bad luck, but for some reason – probably chronic shortage
of sergeants – there was no avoiding this situation. I spoke a word of
condolence on the subject.

‘Do not worry,
sir,’ Pendry said. ‘I do not seem to want much sleep now, it is.’

That was a
surprising answer. In the army, sleep is prized more than anything else; beyond
food, beyond even tea. I decided to speak again to Gwatkin about Pendry, find
out whether, as Company Commander, he thought all was
well. I felt guilty about having allowed
Pendry’s situation to slip from my mind. He might be on the verge of a
breakdown. Disregard for sleep certainly suggested something of the sort.
Trouble could be avoided by looking into matters. However, such precautions,
even if they had proved effective, were planned too late in the day. The rest
of the story came out at the Court of Inquiry. Its main outlines were fairly
clear. Breeze had made his inspection of the pill-box where Pendry was on duty,
found all correct, moved on in the Orderly Officer’s truck to the next post.
About ten minutes after Breeze’s departure, the sentry on duty in the pill-box
noticed suspicious movements by some tumbledown sheds and fences further up the
road. That is, the sentry thought he saw suspicious movements. This may have
been his imagination. The Deafy Morgan affair had shown the possibility of
hostility from other than German sources. What was going on in the shadows
might indicate preparations for some similar aggression. Sergeant Pendry said
he would investigate these activities himself. His rifle was loaded. He
approached the sheds, where he disappeared from sight. Nothing was seen in that
direction for some minutes; then a dog ran across the road. This dog, it was
said afterwards, could have been the cause of the original disturbance.
Sergeant Pendry could still not be seen. Then there was the echo of a shot;
some said two shots. Pendry did not return. After a while, two men from the
pill-box went to look for him. His body was found in a pit or ditch among the
shacks. Pendry was dead. His rifle had been fired. It was never cleared up for
certain whether an assailant caused his death; whether, in tripping and falling
into the pit, his own weapon killed him; whether, alone in that dark gloomy
place, oppressed with misery, strung up with lack of sleep, Pendry decided to
put an end to himself.