Chapter IV: Part 4

Dormer was as impressed as he ever was by any member of the Professional Army. They knew how to do it. He would never know. The army was their God and King, their family and business. In a neat circle they went, grinding out the necessary days to their pensions. The present state of Europe, while verbally regretted or wondered at, did not scratch the surface of their minds. How could it? It had been a golden opportunity for them. It made the difference to them and to any human wife or family they might have accreted, between retiring on Commissioned pay-scale, or taking a pub or caretaker’s place, as the ex-Sergeant-major they would otherwise have been. But there was charm in their utter simplicity. Nothing brutal, very little that was vain, and some nicely acquired manners.

The offensive of the French Army, in the machinery of which they had their places, moved them not at all. Chirnside casually mentioned that he gathered it had been a big failure. Dormer expected to hear him recite some devastating tale of misdirected barrage, horrible casualties or choked communications. Nothing so graphic reached him. The old man had simply attended to his job, and when he found that the troops were returning to the same billets, drew his own conclusions. That was all. Dormer was horrified, but no one could be horrified long with Chirnside. Of course, he didn’t mind how long the War went on.

Having completed his preparations, Dormer went up to his little room and was soon asleep. He was in fine condition and thoroughly comfortable, and was astonished after what appeared to be a very short interval, to find himself wide awake. There was no mistaking the reason. It was the row in the street. He pulled on his British Warm and went to look. It was quite dark, but he could make out a confused crowd surging from side to side of the little street, could see bayonets gleaming, and could hear a clamour of which he could not make out a word. It was like nothing he had ever heard in the War, it recalled only election time in his native city, the same aimless shuffling feet, the same confusion of tongues, the same effervescence, except that he had instinct enough to know from the tones of the voices that they were raised in lamentation, not triumph. He was extremely puzzled what to do, but clear that no initiative lay with him. For ten minutes he waited, but the situation did not change. He opened his door very quietly. Not a sound from the Major. From Chirnside, opposite, heavy regular breathing. Above, in the attics, the low cockney brevity of soldier servants discussing something with the detachment of their kind. Reassured, he closed the door, and got back into his blankets. The noise was irritating but monotonous. He fell asleep. He next awoke to the knocking of his servant bringing his morning tea, and clean boots.

“What was all that row in the night?”

“Niggers, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“French coloured troops, sir. They got it in the neck seemingly. They don’t half jabber.”

Major Bone was more fully informed. There was no doubt that the French had had a nasty knock. Black troops were coming back just anyhow, out of hand, not actually dangerous, the old soldier allowed it to be inferred, but a nuisance. What struck him most forcibly was the dislocation of the supply services. Defeat he accepted, but not unpunctuality.

“These Africans are besieging the station, trying to board the trains, and get taken back to Africa. I can’t get hold of an officer, but Madame says they’re all killed. She’s in an awful state. I don’t suppose you’ll get away to-day!”

He was right enough. Dormer’s servant shortly returned, humping the valise. The station was closed, the rolling stock had been removed. The black troops were swarming everywhere, collapsing for want of food and sleep, disorganized and incoherent. Dormer went out shortly after and verified the state of affairs. He was not molested, so far had the breakdown gone, but was the object of what appeared to him most uncomplimentary allusions, but all in pidgin-French, too colonial for his fair, but limited, knowledge of the language. There was clearly nothing to be done, so far as transport went, that day, and he resigned himself to spending his time in the little Mess.

The Doctor and Ordnance Officer appeared at dinner with reassuring news. The failure of the offensive had been bad, but the French had never really lost control and were getting their people in hand immediately. There was a rumour that a General who tried to restore order had been thrown into the river, but it might be only a tale. Major Bone was contemptuous of the whole thing. Do--what could they do, a lot of silly blacks? The French would cut off their rations and reduce them to order in no time. Thus the old soldier. But he did not prevent Dormer going to bed with a heavy heart. To him it was not so much a French offensive that had failed. It was another Allied effort, gone for nothing. His life training in apprehension made him paint the future in the gloomiest colours. Where would fresh men be obtained from? Whence would come the spirit--what they called morale in military circles--to make another attempt? If neither men nor morale were forthcoming, would the War drag out to a stalemate Peace? He had no extravagant theories for or against such an ending to it. To him it meant simply a bad bargain, with another war to make a better one looming close behind it. And his recent military training had also received an unaccustomed shock. A new army enlistment, he had seen nothing of the retreat from Mons, and was far from being able to picture March or April 1918, still twelve months in the future.

For the first time in his life he had seen panic, confusion, rout. True, it was already stopped, but that did not expunge from his mind the sight, the noise, the smell even, of that crowd of black soldiers who had suddenly ceased to be soldiers, numbers standing in line, and had so dramatically re-become men. The staring eyeballs, the physical collapse, the officer-less medley of uncertain movement were all new to him, and all most distressing. Of course, the fellows were mere blacks, not the best material, and had probably been mishandled. But under a more prolonged strain, might not the same thing happen to others? The Germans were the least susceptible he judged, the Russians most. What would he not see, some day, if the War dragged on?

Whatever narrow unimaginative future his unadventurous mind conjured up, his far stronger faculty for getting on with the matter in hand soon obliterated. He was no visionary. Contemplation was not in him. Directly the trains were running he left that cosy little Mess of Major Bone’s to rejoin. He left off thinking about the War, and took up his job where he had, for a moment, allowed it to lie, disregarded under the stress of new events and strange emotions.

As the train moved on and on through French lines of communication he was wondering again about the fellow who had done the trick at Vanderlynden’s, of how he was to be found, of how the whole thing would frame itself. These French chaps, whose transport he saw each side of him, Army Corps after Army Corps. Biggish men, several of them, in a round-shouldered fashion, due partly to their countrified occupation, partly to their uniform, with its overcoat and cross-straps. Browner skinned, darker of hair and eye than our men, they confirmed his long-established ideas about them, essentially a Southern people, whose minds and bodies were formed by Biscayan and Mediterranean influences. They would not be sentimental about mules, he would wager. On the other hand, they would not laugh at a Mayor. They did not laugh much as a rule, they frowned, stared, or talked rapidly with gestures, and then if they did laugh, it was uproariously, brutally, at some one’s misfortunes. Satire they understood. But they missed entirely the gentle nag, nag, nag of ridicule, that he used to hear from his own platoon or company, covering every unfamiliar object in that foreign land, because it was not up to the standard of the upper-middle-classes. To the French, life was a hard affair, diversified by the points at which one was less unfortunate than one’s neighbour.

To the English, life was the niceness of a small class, diversified by the nastiness of everything else, and the nastiness was endlessly diverting. For the French were mere men, in their own estimation. Not so the poorer English of the towns. They were gentlemen. If they lapsed (and naturally they lapsed most of the time) they were comic to each other, to themselves even. How well he remembered, on the march, when the battalion had just landed, passing through a village where certain humble articles of domestic use were standing outside the cottage doors, waiting to be emptied. A suppressed titter had run all along the column.

A Frenchman would never have thought them funny, unless they fell out of a first-floor window on to some head and hurt it. Again, to a Frenchman, Mayor and Priest, Garde Champêtre and Suisse were officials, men plus authority and therefore respectworthy. To Englishmen, they were officials, therefore not gentlemen, therefore ridiculous. If a big landowner, or member of Parliament, or railway director had walked into Vanderlynden’s pasture, just as 469 T.M.B. fell in for their weary march back to the line, would they have laughed? Not they. But then those members of England’s upper classes would not have worn tricolour sashes to enforce authority. So there you were. With this philosophic reflection he fell asleep.

Dormer returned to an army which was at its brightest. It had held the initiative in the matter of offensives for over a year and a half, and if no decision had been come to, a wide stretch of ground had been won, and hope on the whole was high. From time to time there were rumours of a queer state of things in Russia, but it was far off and uncertain. The matter of the moment was Messines, the famous ridge which had been lost at the very beginning of the War and which was now to be regained. In this affair Dormer found himself busily engaged. Here were no waste downs of the Somme, but some of the most fertile land in the world.

Among other matters confronting the Generals was the problem of how to keep civilians from rushing back to cultivate land of which they had been deprived for three years. The day came, the explosion of the great mines, so Dormer was told, was heard in London. If he did not hear it, it was because a well-directed long-range artillery bombardment, complicated by a bombing that was German and German only in its thoroughness, deafened and bewildered him, took his sleep, killed his servant, and stampeded the horses of all the divisional ammunition columns near him, so that his tent was trampled down, his belongings reduced to a state hardly distinguishable from the surrounding soil. However, the blow, such as it was, was successful. Irish and Scotch, Colonial and London divisions took that battered hillock that had defied them so long, and Dormer in spite of all his experience could not help thinking: “Oh, come, now we are really getting on.”

But nothing happened. Dormer heard various reasons given for this, and twice as many surmises made about it, but well aware how much importance to attach to the talk that floated round Divisional Offices and Messes, relied upon his own experience and arithmetic. According to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground. Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few miles more.

This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the “front” of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument that we went no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years.

For the only time in his life Dormer wished he were something other than Dormer. For a few moments after arriving at his conclusion, he desired to be a person of power and influence, some one who could say with weight that the thing ought to stop here and now. But this very unusual impulse did not last long with him.

All that remained of Belgium and wide tracts of French Flanders adjoining it, became one huge ant-heap. Never had there been such a concentration, Corps next to Corps, Services mosaiced between Services, twenty thousand men upon roads, no one could count how many handling munitions, as, from Ypres to the sea, the great offensive of 1917 slowly germinated.

Dormer was soon caught up and landed in the old familiar blackly-manured soil of the Salient. He was not disgusted or surprised. He was becoming increasingly conscious of a sensation of going round and round. Now, too, that troops were always pouring along a road before him, he had again the feeling that his head was an empty chamber, round which was painted a frieze, men, men, mules, men, limbers, guns, men, lorries, ambulances, men, men, men. It might be just worry and overwork, it might be that he was again forced to share his limited accommodation with Kavanagh. They were in a dug-out on the canal bank, just by one of those fatal causeways built to make the passage of the canal a certainty, instead of the gamble it had been in the days of the pontoon bridges. The passage became, like everything else in the War, a certainty for the Germans as much as for the Allies. The place was registered with the utmost precision and hit at all times of the day and night. It probably cost far more than the taking of any trench.

Amid the earth-shaking explosions that seldom ceased for long, in the twilight of that narrow cavern in the mud, Kavanagh was as unquenchable as he ever had been on the high and airy downs of the Somme. During the daylight, when nothing could be done outside, he bent over his map of cables while Dormer perfected his plan for getting first-line transport past that infernal canal. He purposed to send an N.C.O. a good two miles back, with small square pieces of card, on which were written 9.0 p.m., 9.5 p.m., and so on, the times being those at which the unit so instructed was to arrive beside his dug-out. He thought rather well of this idea, no jamming and confusion, and if the enemy made a lucky hit, there would be fewer casualties and less to clear away. In the middle of his calculations he heard

“Why, soldiers, why
Should we be melancholy,
Whose duty ’tis to die!”

He could not resist saying:

“If you must make that d----d noise, I wish you’d put some sense into it.”

“Sense. I was trying to cheer you up!”

“‘Duty ’tis to die’ is jolly cheering, and quite untrue.”

“Oh, is it? What is our duty then?”

“Our duty is to live if we possibly can. And I mean to do it. It’s the people who keep alive who will win the War.”

“According to that, all one has got to do is to get to Blighty, or preferably the United States, and stay there?”

“Not a bit. You exaggerate so. All I said was, that it is foolish to make it a duty to become a casualty.”

“Dormer, I shall never get you to see things in the proper light. You’re like a lamb trying to leap with joy, and never able to get its hind legs off the ground.”

“This is all rot. What connection is there between lambs and leaping, and our jobs? Mine is to see that various people and things are in the position where they will be wanted, at the moment at which they will have most effect in winning the War. Yours is to see that they can speak and be spoken to when required.”

“Lovely, lovely! What a teacher you would have made.”

“I had a better job.”

“There is no better job, except perhaps the one we are doing. I do admire your descriptions of them. All you want is to put in a personal allegorical note. You might condense the whole thing by saying that you will be Minerva if I will be Mercury. Yep?”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“Yours to see that all is in order. That is a matter of reason. You are the Goddess. I am merely a lesser God. Mercury was God of Communications. I wonder whether they’d let me design a cap badge for signallers. Mercury playing on a buzzer. You may have your Owl!”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I fear I must, the bugle calls, and I must follow, or my watch shows it is time I was looking after my chaps. But you’ve had a brilliant idea, Dormer.”

“I?”

“You’ve had the idea of fighting the War allegorically. Wisdom and Light we are. That would do away with half the horror. So long!”

Then queerly, instead of feeling relieved from an annoyance, Dormer felt more despondent than ever. What could it be? Was the fellow right? Surely not! All that nonsense! And yet--and yet what would not he, Dormer, conscious of his own probity, have given to be conscious instead, of Kavanagh’s lightness of heart? That very probity drove him out in the all-too-late summer dusk to see that everything was going right. Yes, here they were; details of transport, parties to dig, parties to carry, details of services, engineers of all their various grades. Punctual, incredibly docile, honest English in their gestureless manner of getting on with the job. They took care of their mules, look at these beasts pulling as though they were English too (instead of the Argentine crossbreds he knew them to be), not because it was a duty, although it was, and not because the mule was a miracle, like a tank or an aeroplane, but just because it was a mule, that meant, to English soldiers, and to English soldiers only, a fellow-creature, a human being. On they went, reporting to him, and pushing on, sometimes with a hurried question as to map square, or other crucial uncertain detail, sometimes with only a grunt. That endless procession had not been in progress many minutes before, amid the considerable and gently growing shell-fire, there came a bang that seemed to go right through his head. He knew from old trench experience what it was. Nothing but a gun pointing straight at you could make that particular hrrmph.

He set his feet, not a moment too soon. It was a five-nine, the sort the French called “_Grande Vitesse_.” A whirlwind, a small special whirlwind pointed like an arrow, hit the causeway so that it shook and then went up with a wheel of splintered bits. He was glad he had devised his patent card system. The units were not too close together. He had time to shout to the next, “Come on, you’ve two minutes to get over!” and over they went, as if the Devil were after them, instead of a lump of Krupp steel fitted with lethal chemicals. They were hardly over before the second came, whump! To say that Dormer was frightened, was to fail to describe the matter. He was stiffened all over, his hair stood up, his heart thumped so that it hurt him, his feet were stone cold, but he knew his job and did it.

The next lot to come was a whole field company to do some special duty, and although he hurried them, the tail of the brown column was still high and exposed when the shell came. They ducked and darted into any cover that was available, and he heard his voice, as the voice of some one far away speaking to a public meeting, like a voice on the wireless, saying:

“Come on. Get out of that and come on. If I can stand here, surely you can get out of it.”

They did so. Behind them came a special party to dig in the Meteorological Officer. What a menagerie it was! Every trade, every nation too, Chinese, Zulu, West Indian, Egyptian. He did not blame the Germans who had chalked in blue on the bare back of a Portuguese, whom they captured and stripped, “The Monkey House is full,” before they drove him back into English lines.

Even truer did Dormer find it when he had to go back for any reason, to Corps H.Q. or beyond. French and Belgians he knew, he had found them in the trenches beside him years before. Portuguese he had become accustomed to, Americans he looked forward to with anticipation. But farther back, he found Chinese, Africans of all descriptions, Indians, East and West, while the French, in addition to their black troops, had Spanish and Italian labour.

It did not please his parochial mind. He felt increasingly that there was something wrong when you had to drag in all these coloured people from every remote quarter of the globe, without even the excuse the French had, that they were “Colonials.” But no one could tell, least of all Dormer himself, whether his feelings were the result of a strong belief in the Colour Bar, or whether it were merely the futility of it all. For in spite of the omnium gatherum of race, tongue and religion, the offensive failed. As a matter of routine, the weather broke on Z day. Within forty-eight hours it was obvious that the affair had stuck. Apart from a feeling of the hand of Fate in it, a sinister feeling of great incomprehensible forces working out his destiny for him, without his having the least power to influence the matter for better, for worse, which was so desolating to his pre-War habit of mind, where a certain line of unostentatious virtue had always carried a reward that could be reckoned on with the greatest exactitude, there were other disturbing elements in the situation.

Of course the Bosche was ready. He was bound to be ready, couldn’t avoid it. He had immensely thickened his depth of defence, which was now composed not of the old obvious trenches full of men, all of which could be blown to pieces, but of small isolated turrets of ferro-concrete, where two or three machine gunners (and who made better machine gunners than the careful Germans) could hold an army at bay, until dislodged by a direct hit by a shell of six-inch calibre or over, or laboriously smoke-screened and bombed out, at the rate of perhaps a mile a day, on good days. He saw his computation of one hundred and eighty years altogether insufficient for getting to the Rhine. Moreover, for such work this medley of nations was of no good at all. It reminded him of a book by Anatole France he had been compelled by a friend to read, wherein a great conqueror enlisted in his army all the men of his nation, then all the men of the neighbouring nations, then all the savages at the end of the earth, and finally the baboons and other combatant animals. That was all very well. That was just story telling. But it horrified Dormer all the more to see such story telling coming true before his eyes. As coloured-labour company after coloured-labour company filed past his tent, guttural and straggling, he was able to pull himself together, and see that it was not true after all.

These people, little better than beasts, uglier in some cases and far more troublesome, were no good. They couldn’t fight. You couldn’t trust them to stand the shelling or to obey an order. Then just as he was feeling rather relieved, he saw the logical result of his conclusion. All the fighting would have to be done by those very men who had volunteered or been conscripted and who had been so generously wasted ever since. They were sticking it, and sticking it well, but this new offensive that had just opened promised to try them pretty high. Would they stick that? Would the day ever come when he would see them a mere mob, like those French black troops he had seen in May? Perhaps peace would be made. Such is the eternal hopefulness of men, that he even hoped, against all previous experience. That quenchless gleam common to all human souls, one of the basic things that makes war so long, and peace, where it is so much less necessary, just that much less attractive, added to work for fifteen hours a day, kept Dormer sane and healthy for weeks, in spite of worsening conditions, and the steady increase in enemy shelling. It was with a return of that uncanny feeling of being haunted that he found himself called up to Divisional Head-quarters. He knew quite well what it was, but he had relied on the difficulty of finding Andrews, on the tremendous strain of this most costly and urgent of all offensives, to keep the matter out of his path, or rather to keep him out of its path, for he had long dropped into the habit of feeling himself as in a nightmare, pursued by something he could not see or even imagine, but which was certainly sinister and personally fatal to him.

When he got to the office his feeling of nightmarishness was rather aggravated than allayed. Colonel Birchin was talking to the A.D.M.S. The fact was that the A.D.M.S. was a new one, patently a Doctor who had been fetched out from Doctoring, had been found capable of organization and had been shoved into the job vice some one else gone higher up. Beside him Colonel Birchin shone, as it were, with the glamour of another world. Dormer had seen him in camp and hut, and château and Mairie for a year and a half, just like that, handsome and sleek, filling his plain but choice khaki with a distinction that no foreign officer could gain from all the blues and reds and yellows and greens and blacks, varnished belts and metal ornaments of other armies. And in that moment of sharpened nerves and unusual power of vision Dormer seemed to see why. Colonel Birchin was not an officer of a national army in the sense that any French, German, Italian or Russian Colonel was. There was nothing of the brute and nothing of the strategian about those nice manners, that so easily and completely excluded everything that was--what? Unmilitary? Hardly. There was nothing consciously, offensively military about the Colonel, “regular” or professional soldier that he was. He would never have swaggered in Alsace, massacred in Tripoli, Dreyfused in France. He would never have found it necessary. For Colonel Birchin was not a state official. He was an officer of the Watch, the small band of paid soldiers that Stuart and subsequent kings kept to defend themselves from mobs, national armies and other inconvenients. Colonel Birchin might write himself as of “The Herefordshire Regiment,” but it made no difference. His chief, inherited, and most pronounced quality was that he was a courtier. He represented the King. Preferably, at home, of course, where one could live in all that thick middle-class comfort that had ousted the old land-owning seignorial dignity and semi-starvation. But upon occasion, Colonel Birchin could betake himself to Africa, India, and now even to this France, sure that even in this most tedious and unpleasant of wars, he would be properly fed and housed.

So here he was, representing the King even more exactly than before he was seconded from the King’s Own Herefordshire Regiment. He spoke and looked, in fact, rather as if he were the King. Ignorant and unused to the immense transport, the complicated lists of highly scientific equipment, he judged rightly enough that his one safe line was to represent authority, and see that these semi-civilians who did understand such things got on with the War. So he listened in a gentlemanly way to the A.D.M.S. (who wore beard and pince-nez) explaining at great length a difficult alternative as to the siting of Forward Dressing Stations, and contributed:

“You do what is best, Doctor, and we shall back you up!”

Then he turned to Dormer, hunted a moment among the papers on the table, and spoke:

“Look here, Dormer, about this affair of yours?”

It took all Dormer’s training to keep his mouth shut. He saw more clearly than ever how Colonel Birchin and all like him and all he represented, were divesting themselves of any connection with what looked like a nasty, awkward, tedious and probably discreditable business. But he had not grasped it.

“They’ve found Andrews--this--er--gunner, who will be able to give you information. And--look here, Dormer--this affair must be cleared up, do you understand? Andrews is in hospital. You can go by car to Boulogne, but we expect you to get it done this time. Corps are most annoyed. There’s been a nice how-d-y-do with the French.”

Dormer swallowed twice and only said:

“Really, sir.”

“Yes. Car starts at seven.”

Accordingly at seven, the big Vauxhall moved off from that little group of huts, in the meadow that was so regularly bombed every night. Dormer, sitting next to Major Stevenage, did not mind. As well Boulogne as anywhere, while this was going on. All the roads were full of transport, all the railways one long procession of troop and supply trains. It was about as possible to hide it all from the Germans, as to conceal London on a Bank Holiday. In fact it was rather like that. The population was about the same, if the area were rather larger, the effect of the crowd, the surly good humour, the air of eating one’s dinner out of one’s hand was the same.

There was very little sign of any consciousness of the shadow that hung over it all. Hospital trains and ambulances abounded, going in the opposite direction, but no one noticed them, so far as Dormer could see. The type of man who now came up to fight his country’s battles was little changed. The old regular was hardly to be found. The brisk volunteer was almost gone. Instead there had arisen a generation that had grown used to the War, had had it on their minds so long, had been threatened with it so often that it had lost all sharpness of appeal to their intellects.

Right back to St. Omer the crowd stretched. Beyond that it became more specialized. Air Force. Hospitals. Training grounds. Then, across high windy downs, nothing, twenty miles of nothing, until a long hill and the sea.

Up there on those downs where there was no one, never had been anybody ever since they were pushed up from the bed of some antediluvian ocean, and covered with short turf, Dormer had one of his rare respites from the War. Briefer perhaps, but more complete than that which he experienced on his rare leaves, he felt for a while the emancipation from his unwilling thraldom. It was the speed of the car that probably induced the feeling. Anyhow, on the level road that runs from Boulogne to Étaples--the ETAPPS of the Army in France--he lost it. Here there was no escaping the everlasting khaki and transport, that State of War into which he had been induced, and out of which he could see no very great possibility of ever emerging. He had no warning of what was to come, and was already well among the hospitals and dumps that extended for miles beside the railway, when a military policeman held up a warning hand.

“What’s the matter, Corporal?”

“I should not go into Etapps this morning, if I were you, sir.”

“Why not?”

The man shifted his glance. He did not like the job evidently.

“Funny goings-on, there, sir.”

“Goings-on, what does that mean?”

Dormer was capable of quite a good rasp of the throat, when required. He had learned it as a Corporal.

“The men are out of ’and, sir!”

“Are they? The A.P.M. will see to that, I suppose.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Drive on!”

Dormer didn’t like it, to tell the truth. But he was so used to bluffing things he didn’t like, and his own feelings, and other people’s awkwardness, that he could not do otherwise than go on. Also he didn’t realize what was on foot. A certain amount of daily work was being done in among the dumps and sidings where the population was of all sorts of non-combatant, Labour Corps units, medical formations, railway people, and others. But from the rise by the Reinforcement Officers’ hut, he began to see. The whole of the great infantry camp on the sandhill--and it was very full, he had heard people say that there were a hundred thousand men there--seemed to have emptied itself into the little town. Here they sauntered and talked, eddying a little round the station and some of the larger estaminets, in motion like an ant-hill, in sound like a hive of bees. The car was soon reduced to a walking pace, there were no police to be seen, and once entered there was no hope of backing out of that crowd, and no use in appearing to stop in it.

“Go slow,” Dormer ordered, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the wooden face of the chauffeur. Nothing to be seen. Either the man didn’t like it, or didn’t feel the necessary initiative to join in it, or perhaps considered himself too superior to these foot-sloggers to wish to be associated with them. Most probably he hadn’t digested the fact that this mob, through which he drove his officer, was Mutiny, the break-up of ordered force, and military cohesion. It might even be the end of the War and victory for the Germans. All this was apparent enough in a moment to Dormer, who was careful to look straight again to his front, unwinking and mute, until, with a beating heart, he saw that they were clear of the jam in the Market Place, and well down the little street that led to the bridge across which were the farther hospitals, and various sundry Base Offices, in the former of which he was to find Andrews. Now, therefore, he did permit himself to light a cigarette. But not a word did he say to his chauffeur. Now that it was behind him he had the detachment to reflect that it was a good-humoured crowd. He had heard a gibe or so that might have been meant for him or no, but in the main, not being hustled, all those tens of thousands that had broken camp, chased the police off the streets, and committed what depredations he did not know, were peaceful enough, much too numerous and leaderless to make any cohesive threat to an isolated officer, not of their own unit, and therefore not an object of any special hatred, any more than of any special devotion, just a member of another class in the hierarchy, uninteresting to simple minds, in which he caused no immediate commotion.

Here, on the road that ran through the woods to Paris Plage, there were little knots of men, strolling or lying on the grass. They became fewer and fewer. By the time he arrived at the palace, mobilized as a hospital, for which he was bound, there remained no sign of the tumult. Here, as on the other flank, by the Boulogne road, Medical and Base Units functioned unmoved. But the news had been brought by Supply and Signal services and the effect of it was most curious.

Dormer had to pass through the official routine, had to be announced, had to have search made for young Andrews, and finally was conducted to a bed in Ward C., on which was indicated Captain Andrews, R.G.A. Dormer of course wanted to begin at once upon his mission, but the other, a curly-haired boy, whose tan had given place to a patchy white under loss of blood from a nasty shrapnel wound in the leg, that kept on turning septic, had to be “scraped” or “looked at,” each of these meaning the operation table, and was only now gradually healing, would not let him.

Once away from the theatre and the knife, Andrews, like any other healthy youngster, soon accumulated any amount of animal spirit, lying there in bed, adored by the nursing sisters, admired by the men orderlies. He was not going to listen to Dormer’s serious questions. He began:

“Cheerio! Sit on the next bed, there’s no corpse in it, they’ve just taken it away. Anyhow, it isn’t catching. Have a cigarette, do for God’s sake. They keep on giving me the darned things, and they all end in smoke!”

“Sorry you got knocked out.”

“Only fair. Knocked out heaps of Fritzes. I gave ’em what for, and they gave me some back. I say, have you just come from the town?”

“I have just motored through.”

“Is it true that our chaps have broke loose?”

“There’s a certain amount of disorder, but no violence that I could see.”

Dormer was conscious of heads being popped up in all the surrounding beds. So that was how it took them! Of course, they were bored stiff.

“How topping. Is it true that they’ve killed all the red-caps?”

“I didn’t see any signs of it.”

“Cleared up the remains had they? Picked the bones, or fallen in proper burying parties.”

“I don’t think there was anything of that sort.”

“Oh, come now, first we heard they had set on a police-corporal that had shot a Jock.”

“What did he do that for?”

“Dunno. It isn’t the close season for Jocks, anyhow. Then it was ten police-corporals. The last rumour was that they’d stoned the A.P.M. to death----”

And so it went on. Lunch-time came. A Doctor Major, impressed by Dormer’s credentials, invited him into the Mess, and asked a lot of questions about the front, the offensive, and the state of Étaples. Dormer always liked those medical messes. It seemed so much more worth while to mend up people’s limbs, rather than to smash them to bits. The Doctors had their professional “side” no doubt, but they had a right to it.

After lunch Dormer made his way back to Ward C. He was met by a hush, and by a little procession. The Sergeant-major came first and after him bearers with a stretcher covered by the Union Jack. The hush in the ward was ominous. They were all so close to what had happened. It was not like the open field where the casualty is a casualty and the living man a different thing. Here the dead were only different in degree, not in kind. They were worse “cases”--the worst, that was all. So there were no high spirits after lunch. They had gibed about Death in the morning, but Death had come and they had ceased to gibe. In the silence, Dormer felt awkward, did not know how to begin. When he had made up his mind that he must, he looked up and found Andrews was asleep. So the day wore on to tea-time, and after tea he was not wanted in the ward, and was wanted in the Mess. He himself was not hurrying to return to any regularly bombed hut near Poperinghe. The Commanding Officer was even more emphatic. Étaples was not safe. Dormer let it go at that, and got a good game of bridge.

In the morning he found young Andrews as young as ever and got down to his job at once:

“Do you remember joining 469 T.M.B.?”

“Yes, sh’d think I do.”

“Do you remember the man you had as servant while you were with them?”

“I do. Topping feller. Gad, I was sorry when I had to leave him behind. Of course, I dropped him when I went to hospital. Never was so done!”

At last!

“You couldn’t give me his name and number, I suppose?”

“I must have got a note of it somewhere. I say, what’s all this about? Do you want to get hold of him?”

“I do. He’s wanted, over a question of damage in billets. They’ve sent me to find him out.”

“Then I’m damned if I’ll tell you. Because he was a topping chap!” rejoined Andrews, laughing.

“You’d better tell me, I think. The matter has gone rather high up, and it might be awkward if I had to report that the information was refused.”

“Lord, you aren’t going to make a Court of Inquiry affair of it, are you?”

“It may come to that, and they’ve got hold of your name.”

“Gee whizz! I don’t like landing the chap. I may not have got any particulars of him, now, my things have been so messed about.”

“Well, look and see!”

“All right.”

Andrews fumbled out from the night-table beside his bed, the usual bedside collection. Letters in female handwriting, some young, some old--from one or more sweethearts and a mother, thought Dormer. Paper-covered novels. The sort (English) that didn’t make you think. The sort (French) that make you feel, if you were clever at the language. Cigarettes, bills. One or two letters from brother officers.

“Blast. It’s in my Field Note Book, in my valise, in store here. I shall have to send to have it got out. Wait half a mo’ and I’ll get an orderly.”

As they waited, he went on:

“What’s he wanted for? Some dam’ Frenchman going to crime him for stealing hop-poles?”

“Something of that sort. You wouldn’t remember it, it happened before you joined the Battery.”

“Then it jolly well wasn’t my man Watson. He’d only just come up from Base!”

“Come, the man was of middle size and ordinary to look at, and had been servant to an officer of the name of Fairfield, who was killed!”

“Oh, that chap. I know who you mean now. I don’t call him my servant. I only had him for a day or two. His name was Smith, as far as I can recollect. We were in the line, and I never got his number. He disappeared, may have been wounded, or gone sick of course, we were strafed to Hell, as usual. I should have got rid of him in any case. He was a grouser!”

“Didn’t like the War?”

“I should say not.”

Hopeless, of course. When Andrews saw Dormer rise and close his notebook, he apologized:

“Beastly sorry. Afraid I’m no good.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to find the fellow, personally. It’s simply my job.”

“Fair wear and tear, so to speak?”

“Yes. Good morning.”

“Don’t go--I say, don’t. You’re just getting interesting!” Heads popped up in the surrounding beds. “Do tell us what it’s all about.”

“Merely a matter of damage in billets as I said.”

“Go on. There’s always damage in billets. You must ha’ done heaps, haven’t you? I have. There’s something more in it than that.”

“Well, there is. Perhaps it will be a lesson to you not to go too far with other people’s property.”

“I say, don’t get stuffy. What did the feller do?”

“He broke into a shrine.”

“I say, that’s a bit thick.”

“It was!”

“What did he do it for? Firewood?”

“No. He wanted to shelter a couple of mules!”

“Good man. Don’t blame him!”

“No!”

“But they can’t crime him for a thing like that?”

“They will if they can catch him.”

“Go on!”

“It didn’t stop at that.” Once more it seemed to Dormer that a good lesson might do no harm to the light-headed youth that Andrews represented, and several of whom were listening, anxiously from that corner of the ward.

“Did G.H.Q. take it up?”

“Yes. They had to. The Mayor of the village came to make an official inquiry and the Battery made fun of him.”

“Lumme! I bet they did!”

“They should not have done so. That made the French authorities take it up. Goodness knows where it will end!”

“End in our fighting the French,” said some one.

Dormer felt that it was high time to put his foot down. “You may be privileged to talk like that while you’re in hospital. But I don’t recommend you to do so outside. You ought to have the sense to know that we don’t want to fight anyone, we most certainly don’t want to fight some one else after Germans. In any case, we don’t want to do the fighting in England!”

There was a dead silence after he had spoken, and he rose, feeling that he had impressed them. He stumped out of the ward without another word, went to the Mess, rang and demanded his car. The Orderly Officer would have liked to detain him, insisted on the possible state of Étaples, but he would not hear of it. In those few hours he had had enough and more than enough of the Base--the place where people talked while others Did--the place where the pulse of the War beat so feebly. He felt he would go mad if he stayed there, without sufficient occupation for his mind. His car appeared and he soon left the palace and the birchwoods and was rattling over the bridge into Étaples. “Now for it!” he thought. But no policeman warned him off this time. He soon saw why. The streets had resumed their normal appearance. He might have known. That fancy of his, about the Headless Man, came back to him with its true meaning. What could they do, all those “Other Ranks,” as they were designated? Just meander about, fight the police, perhaps. But they had no organization, no means of rationing or transport. Of course, they had had to go back to their respective camps with their tails between their legs in order to get fed.

There was nothing to show for the whole business but a few panes of broken glass and some splintered palings. By the time he got to St. Omer and stopped for lunch, no one seemed to have heard of it. By tea-time, he was back at Divisional H.Q. And none too soon. A fresh attack was to be made the following day. He went straight up to the canal bank, where Kavanagh was as busy as ever, and dropped into his work where he had left it. There was just the same thing to do, only more of it. A desperate race against time was going on. It was evident enough that this most enormously costly of all offensives must get through before November finally rendered fighting impossible. There was still some faint chance of a week or two of fair weather in October. Fresh Corps were massed and flung into the struggle. Engineers, Labour Corps, anyone who could throw a bomb or fire a rifle must do so. What had been roads of stone _pavé_, had been so blown about with shell-fire that they were a honeycomb of gaping holes, repaired with planks. More and more searching were the barrages, denser the air fighting. Progress there undoubtedly was, but progress enough?

Through the sleepless nights and desperate days that followed, Dormer’s feelings toward Kavanagh were considerably modified. The fellow still talked, but Dormer was less sorry to hear him. He even recited, and Dormer got into the way of listening. They were now in an “Elephant” hut. No dug-out was possible in that sector, where eighteen inches below the surface you came to water. No tent could be set, even had they wished for one. Their frail house was covered with sandbags, of a sufficient thickness to keep off shrapnel, and presumably they were too insignificant to be the object of a direct hit, but in order to leave nothing to chance they had had the place covered with camouflage netting. Outside lay mile after mile of water-logged runnels that had been trenches, on the smashed and slippery parapets of which one staggered to some bit of roadway that was kept in repair at gigantic cost in lives and materials, guided by the lines of wire that either side had put up with such difficulty, and which were all now entirely useless, a mere hindrance to free movement. But they were “in” for a long spell, and could not get away--did not want to, they were less bombed here than farther back. Rations reached them, that was as much as they had time to care about. Otherwise, the night was well filled for the one with counting off the parties that filed past into this or that attack, for the other in picking up those signal lines that had been smashed by shell-fire during the day, and replacing them.

As that endless procession went past him once more, Dormer felt that he now knew of what its component parts were thinking. Australians, Canadians, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, English, they were thinking of nothing in particular. Like the mules that went with them, they went on because they couldn’t stop. Food and sleep each day was the goal. To stop would mean less food and sleep, mules and men knew that much, without use of the reasoning faculty. It had become an instinct. All the brilliant casuistry that had induced men to enlist was forgotten, useless, superseded. Even English soldiers were conscripts now, the War had won, had overcome any and every rival consideration, had made itself paramount, had become the end and the means as well.

A man like Dormer, accustomed to an ordered and reasoned existence, who could have explained his every act up to August, 1914, by some good and solid reason, was as helpless as any. Stop the War? You wanted to go back half a century and alter all the political and business cliques in which it had been hatching. To alter those you wanted to be able to alter the whole structure of society in European countries, which kept those cliques in power, was obliged to have recourse to them, to get itself governed and financed. To do that you wanted to change Human Nature. Here Dormer’s imagination stopped dead. He was no revolutionary. No one was farther than he from being one. He only hated Waste. He had been brought up and trained to business, in an atmosphere of methodical neatness, of carefully foreseen and forestalled risks. Rather than have recourse to revolution he would go on fighting the Bosche. It was so much more real.

Somewhere about the point at which he reached this conclusion, he heard, among the noise of the sporadic bombardment, Kavanagh’s voice:

“‘Now that we’ve pledged each eye of blue
And every maiden fair and true,
And our green Island Home, to you
The Ocean’s wave adorning,
Let’s give one hip, hip, hip hurrah!
And drink e’en to the coming day,
When squadron, square,
We’ll all be there,
To meet the French in the morning!’

That’s the stuff to give the troops, Dormer!”

But Dormer, although cheered, was not going to admit it. “You’d better go and sing it to the Seventy-Worst. They go in at dawn!”

“Good luck to them. Listen to this:

“‘May his bright laurels never fade
Who leads our fighting Fifth Brigade,
These lads so true in heart and blade,
And famed for danger scorning;
So join me in one hip hurrah!
And drink e’en to the coming day,
When squadron, square,
We’ll all be there,
To meet the French in the morning!’

How’s that for local colour. Is there a Fifth Brigade in to-morrow’s show? They’d like that.”

“I bet they wouldn’t. Anyhow, it’s silly to repeat things against the French.”

“Man, it’s a hundred years old.”

“Like my uncle’s brandy.”

“You and your uncle!”

“I had an uncle once who had some brandy. It was called ‘Napoleon,’ and was supposed to date from 1815. When he opened it, it was gone!”

“There you are. That’s your materialism. But you can sing a song a hundred years old and find it’s not gone!”

“It’s not a bad song. Only silly!”

“Well, try something older:

“‘We be
Soldiers three,
Lately come from the Low-Countree,
_Pardonnez moi, je vous en prie_;
We be
Soldiers three.’

That’s nearer three hundred years old. That’s what fellows used to sing coming back from Ypres in those days!”

“You talk as if we’d always been in and out of that mangey hole.”