Chapter VI: Part 6

The place was not much changed. It was soiled, impoverished, battered by War, but the German advance, which had stopped dead a few miles short of it, had been spent by the time it reached its limits in this sector, and had early been pushed back. Trenches had been dug and camouflage erected all round the place, but it had not suffered damage except by a few long-distance shots, the routine of trench warfare had never reached it. In the kitchen, darkened by the fact that the glass was gone from the windows, which were blinded with aeroplane fabric, stood the familiar figure of Mademoiselle Vanderlynden. He asked for the Colonel, and was civilly directed to the parlour on the other side of the door. Not a word of recognition, hardly a second glance. He did not know if he were sorry or glad. He would have felt some relief to hear that the claim that had caused all that trouble had been settled. But he did not know what he might bring down upon his head by inquiry and held his tongue. His business with the Colonel was the usual regimental routine, nominal and numerical rolls, reinforcements and indents, training and movements. It did not take long. On his way out he passed the kitchen door and said just:

“Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, M’sieu!” And then calmly: “They are going to pay us for the damage to _La Vierge_!”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I thought you would like to know. It has been a long time.”

“Yes, a long time. I hope it will soon be settled.”

“Ah, not yet. I know these offices at Boulogne! They have a good deal to pay for, no doubt.”

“No doubt. Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, _mon capitaine_.”

Walking back to his billet, he had once more that sensation of escape. Was he really going to get away from that business, this time, for ever? True, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden seemed little enough inclined to be vindictive. He could not help feeling that her view of the affair was after all reasonable and just. She bore no malice, she wanted things put right. Money would do it. She was going to get the money, or so she seemed to think. She had no animus against the man who had broken a piece of her property. She had neither animus against nor consideration for himself, the representative of the British Army, who had so signally failed to hasten the question of compensation. She took it all as part of the War, and she was seeing it correctly. It was the British Army that had done it. Her home, where she was working so peacefully in 1914, had become first a billet, then all but a battlefield. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more nor less. That was exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been done to any furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to get out of it with his body intact, and resume the broken thread of existence, where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago. True he had not been badly paid, but he had taken a considerable risk--it was much more dangerous to be an officer than a private, more dangerous to be a private than a civilian. She had gauged the whole thing correctly, right down to the necessarily slow and complicated process of getting it adjudicated by some set of fellows down by the coast, who ran these things off by the hundred and had a whole set of rules that had to be complied with. He turned at the end of the farm road and took a look back at the old place. There were worse billets than the Spanish Farm and people more awkward to deal with than the Vanderlyndens. In the Somme he had come across farms where they charged you for the water and people who removed everything right down to the bedsteads. Vanderlynden had only wanted to be paid for what was wantonly damaged. They were French, you couldn’t expect them to be sympathetic about other people’s mules. What a queer world it was, he would never have suspected all the crotchets that human nature could present, had he not been thrust nose-foremost into this infernal show.

All his philosophy forsook him, however, on entering the billet where his company was lodged. The woman had been selling not merely beer, which was connived at, but spirits, to the men. Two of them had got “tight” and had been arrested, and he would have them up before him in the morning. Then there would be the question as to where she got the spirits from, whether some Quartermaster-sergeant had been making away with the rum, or whether she had induced some one to buy it for her at the Expeditionary Force Canteen. It all came back to the same thing. Men kept under these conditions too long.

No one had been more surprised than Dormer, when the Allied Armies took up the initiative again in July, and appeared to keep it. With a lugubrious satisfaction he found himself retracing the advances in the Somme district of 1916. It was an ironical comment on his hard-earned War-wisdom, two years devoted to doing precisely the same thing at precisely the same place. Of course, he had learned some lessons, but his estimate of one hundred and eighty years was still too small. But when the movement became perpetual and he found himself on ground he no longer recognized, among villages that showed all the signs of methodical German occupation, he began to wonder. A slight wound in the forearm threw him out of touch for a week or two, and when he went back, he found himself in a more northern sector again, and for the first time found cavalry in front of him. It suited him all right, he didn’t want to have the job of bombing out little nests of machine gunners, that marked each step in the line of advance. His feelings were pretty generally shared. Men began to ask themselves whether there was any glory in being knocked out at the moment of victory. When his battalion was again obliged to move in advance of the cavalry, against obstacles which, although always evacuated, were out of the sphere of cavalry tactics, he found for the first time a definite unwillingness among his command to obey orders in any but the most perfunctory manner.

He had sufficient sense to see that it was very natural. In the early days the job had been to keep men under cover, to avoid useless and wasteful casualties. The lesson had been learned at length with a thoroughness that he could never have instilled. The old, old boast of the Territorial Colonel who had first enlisted him, and whose tradition was actually of pre-Territorial days, from the period of the Volunteers of before the Boer War, was far better founded than he had ever supposed. He had been inclined to scoff when he had heard the old boy talk: “Our motto was Defence not Defiance!” He did not scoff now. It was deeply, psychologically true. The army that had survived was an army that had been made to fight without much difficulty, while its back was to the sea, with the knowledge that trenches lost meant worse, if possible, conditions of existence, and it was moved by some rags of sentiment, as to holding what one had got; an army which displayed all the slowly aroused, almost passive pugnacity of the English working class, so docile, yet so difficult to drive out of a habit of mind, or an acquired way of living. They had no real imperialism in them, none of the high-faultin’ Deutschland über Alles, none of the French or Italian bitter revengefulness, nor peasant passion for acquisition. The Rhine had never figured in their primary school education. They had no relatives groaning under Austrian or German domination--no rancorous feelings bred from the attempt to force alien language or unassimilated religious forms down their throats.

He had always regarded the boast about an Englishman’s House being his Castle as so much claptrap. He knew by daily experience of business, that any Englishman was governed by economic conditions. Religious and racial tyranny were so far removed from the calculations of all his sort, and all above and below it, that the very terms had ceased to have any meaning. This War had no effect on the lightly borne if real tyranny of England, the inexorable need to get a permanent job if possible and keep it, with constant anxiety as to the tenure of one’s lodging, and the prospect of old age. These fellows who fell in with blank unmeaning faces, in which there was no emotion, and who marched with the same old morose jokes, and shyly imitated the class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools, had done what they had promised to do, or had (the late comers) been conscripted to do. They had engaged or been called up for duration. That was a typically English slogan for a European War. Their Anglia Irridenta lay in the football fields and factories, the music-halls and seaside excursions that they talked of, and now hoped to see once again. Their Alsace Lorraine lay in the skilled occupations or soft jobs that women or neutrals had invaded. When he listened to their talk in billets, and occasionally caught some real glimpse of them, between their mouth-organ concerts, and their everlasting gamble at cards, it was of the keen Trades Unionists who were already talking of purging this, that or the other skilled industry from all the non-union elements that had been allowed to flow into it, behind their backs, while they were chasing Fritz across this b---- country, where Belgium, France, or Luxembourg were simply “billets,” and the goal was “dear old Blighty”--behind them, over the Channel, not in front, still ringed about by German trenches.

There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at their farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their country without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built, hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the mechanical nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest proportion of regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting their one chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their command of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant ammunition. The machine gunners, containing some proportion of picked men, and able to feel that they could easily produce some noticeable effect with their weapon, were still game. But the mass of infantry, tired enough of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted by generations of peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were rapidly adopting the attitude, unexpressed as always with the humbler Englishman, of “Let the gunners go on if they like. We don’t mind!”

On a grey November morning, Dormer went to his billet in the suburb of a manufacturing town. It was the most English place he had set eyes on in all his three years. It was not really suburban, very nearly, not quite. There was no garden before the door, it was close to the factories and workshops where the wealth that had built it was made, instead of being removed a decent mile or so. In fact, it just lacked the proper pretentiousness. Its owner had made money and was not in the least ashamed of admitting it, was rather prone to display the fact and his house looked like it. It was a villa, not a château. It was the home of a successful manufacturer who did not want in the least to be taken for a country gentleman. He, poor fellow, had been called up and promptly killed, and his home, with its stained-glass windows, expensive draping and papering, clumsy if efficient sanitation, was inhabited only by his widow.

Dormer thought there could not be in the world any person so utterly beaten. Broken-hearted, exposed during four years to considerable bodily privation, being in the occupied area, she was no Mademoiselle Vanderlynden of the Army zone that Dormer knew, making a bold front against things. She was a delicate--had been probably a pretty woman--but it was not from any of her half-audible monosyllabic replies that Dormer was able to discover to what sort of a country he had come. A little farther down the street was the factory, long gutted by the Germans and used as a forage store, where his company were billeted. The old caretaker in the time-keeper’s cottage told Dormer all that was necessary, and left him astonished at the moderation of tone and statement, compared with the accounts of German occupation given by the Propagandist Press. Possibly, it was because he addressed the old man in French--or because he had never parted with his English middle-class manners--or because the old fellow was nearly wild with delight at being liberated. This was what Dormer heard:

“Enter, my Captain. It is a Captain, is it not, with three stars? The insignia of Charles Martell!” (Here wife and daughter joined in the laugh at what was obviously one of the best jokes in father’s repertory.) “You will find that the Bosches removed everything, but that makes less difficulty in the workshop. You have only to divide the floor space between your men. I know. I was a corporal in the War of ’Seventy. Ah! a bad business, that, but nothing to what we have now supported. You will do well to make a recommendation to your men not to drink the water of the cistern. The Bosches have made beastliness therein. Ah! You have your own watercart? That is well done, much better than we others used to have, in Algeria. It is always wise to provide against the simple soldier, his thoughts have no connection. You say you are accustomed to Germans and their mannerisms? I do not wonder. We too, as you may judge, have had cause to study them. I will tell you this, my Captain, the German is no worse than any other man, but he has this mania for Deutschland über Alles. It comes from having been a little people and weak, and so often conquered by us others. So that to give him some idea of himself, since he cannot invent a culture like us other French, he must go to put all above below, and make a glory of having a worse one. That shows itself in his three great faults--he has no sentiment of private property--what is others’, is his. He must be dirtier than a dog in his habits--witness our court-yard--and he has to make himself more brute than he really is. You see, therefore, he has stripped the factory, and even our little lodging, down to my daughter’s sewing-machine, and the conjugal bed of mother and myself. You see also, that we had our grandchildren, our dog Azor, our cat Titi. Now many of the Bosches who lodged here were certainly married and had their little ones and domestic animals. Yet if they found a child or a beast playing in the entry when they entered or left, they must give a kick of the foot, a cut with the riding-whip. Not from bad thoughts, I assure you. It is in their code, as it is in that of us others, English and French, to lift the hat, to make a salutation. The officers are the worst, because in them the code is stronger. For the German simple soldier, I have respect. They sang like angels!” (Here the old man quavered out the first bars of:

“Ein feste Bourg ist unser Gott.”)

Dormer wanted to get away, but could scarcely forbear to listen when the daughter broke in:

“But, Papa, recount to the officer the droll trick you played upon those who came to demolish the factory!”

“Ah, yes. Place yourself upon a chair, my officer, and I will tell you that. Figure to yourself that these Bosches, as I have explained, were not so bad as one says in the papers. They had orders to do it. I know what it is. I have had orders, in Algeria, to shoot Arabs. It was not my dream, but I did it. I will explain to you this.

“It was the day on which they lost the ridge. One heard the English guns, nearer and nearer. Already there were no troops in the factory, nothing but machine gunners, always retreating. A party of three came here with machinery in a box. One knew them slightly, since they also had billeted here. They were not dirty types; on the contrary, honest people. Sapper-miners, they were; but this time one saw well that they had something they did not wish to say. They deposit their box and proceed to render account of the place. They spoke low, and since we have found it better to avoid all appearance of wishing to know their affairs, we did not follow them. Only, my daughter had a presentiment. Woman, you know, my officer, it is sometimes very subtle. She put it in her head that these would blow up the factory. She was so sure that I lifted the cover of their box and looked in. It was an electric battery and some liquids in phials. I had no time to lose. I placed myself at the gate and ran as fast as I can to where they were, in the big workshop. I am already aged more than sixty. My days for the race are over. Given also that I was experiencing terrible sentiments--for you see, while we keep the factory there is some hope we may be able to work when the War is finished, but if it is blown up, what shall we others go and do--I was all in a palpitation, by the time I reached them. I cried: ‘There they go!’

“‘Who goes?’ they asked.

“‘The cavalry,’ I cried.

“They ran to the entry, and seeing no one, they feared that they were already surrounded. I saw them serpentine themselves from one doorway to another all down the street. The moment they were lost to sight I flung their box into the big sewer!”

* * * * *

Dormer billeted his company in the factory. He did not fear shell-fire that night. He himself slept in a bed at the villa. It was the first time he had left the night guard to a junior officer. In the morning, he paraded his company, and proceeded, according to plan, to await the order to move. The days were long gone by when a battalion was a recognizable entity, with a Mess at which all the officers saw each other once a day. Depleted to form Machine Gun Companies, the truncated battalions of the end of the War usually worked by separate companies, moving independently. There was some desultory firing in front, but his own posts had seen and heard nothing of the enemy. About nine he sent a runner to see if his orders had miscarried. Reply came, stand to, and await developments. He let his men sit on the pavement, and himself stood at the head of the column, talking with the two youngsters who commanded platoons under him. Nothing happened. He let the men smoke. At last came the order: “Cease fire.”

When he read out the pink slip to his subordinates, they almost groaned. Late products of the at last up-to-date O.T.C.’s of England, they had only been out a few months and although they had seen shell-fire and heavy casualties, yet there had always been a retreating enemy, and fresh ground won every week. The endless-seeming years of Trench Warfare they had missed entirely. The slow attrition that left one alone, with all one’s friends wounded or killed, dispersed to distant commands or remote jobs, meant nothing to them. They had been schoolboys when Paschendaele was being contested, Cadets when the Germans burst through the Fifth Army. They wanted a victorious march to Berlin.

Dormer read the message out to the company. The men received the news with ironical silence. He had the guards changed, and the parade dismissed, but confined to billets. He heard one of his N.C.O.’s say to another: “Cease fire! We’ve got the same amount of stuff on us as we had two days ago!”

It made him thoughtful. Ought he to crime the chap? Why should he? Had the Armistice come just in time? If it hadn’t come, would he have been faced with the spectacle of two armies making peace by themselves, without orders, against orders, sections and platoons and companies simply not reloading their rifles, machine gunners and Trench Mortars not unpacking their gear, finally even the artillery keeping teams by the guns, and the inertia gradually spreading upwards, until the few at the top who really wanted to go on, would have found the dead weight of unwillingness impossible to drag? The prospect, though curious, was not alarming. In a country so denuded and starved, one could keep discipline by the simple expedient of withholding rations. He had already seen, a year before at Étaples, the leaderless plight of all those millions of armed men, once they were unofficered. He was not stampeded by panic, and his inherited, inbred honesty bade him ask himself: “Why shouldn’t they make Peace themselves?” The object that had drawn all these men together was achieved. The invasion of France was at an end, that of Belgium a matter of evacuation only. “Cease fire.” It almost began to look like an attempt to save face. Was it the same on the German side too?

In the afternoon he proposed to walk over to Battalion H.Q. and have a word with the Colonel. He knew quite well he should find the other company commanders there. Naturally every one would want to get some idea of what was to be expected under these totally unprecedented circumstances. He was met at the door of his billet by a message from the youngster he had left in charge. He had got a hundred and forty prisoners.

Dormer went at once. He could see it all before he got there. All along the opposite side of the street, faultlessly aligned and properly “at ease” were men in field grey. At either end of the line stood a guard of his own company, and not all Dormer’s pride in the men he had led with very fair success, with whose training and appearance he had taken great pains, could prevent his admitting to himself that the only point at which his lot could claim superiority was in a sort of grumpy humour. The machinery of War had conquered them less entirely than it had conquered the Germans.

In the little time-keeper’s box, turned into the company office, he found a tall, good-looking man, who immediately addressed him in perfect English, giving the rank of Feld Webel, the quantity and regiment of his party and adding: “I surrender to you, sir.” Dormer gave instructions that the party should be marched to Brigade Head-quarters. He wanted to send some report as to the capture, but his subordinate replied: “We didn’t capture ’em. They just marched up the street. The post at the bridge let ’em through.” Dormer let it go at that, and having seen the street cleared, he walked over to see his Colonel, who was billeted in a big school in a public park. His story was heard with that sort of amusement that goes with the last bottle of whisky, and the doubt as to when any more will be obtainable. The Adjutant said: “Simply gave ’emselves up, did they?”

But the Captain commanding C Company, a man of about Dormer’s own sort and service, voiced Dormer’s thought.

“I believe, in another week, we’d have had both sides simply laying down their arms.”

“Oh, nonsense, soon stop that!” The Colonel spoke without real conviction. He had to say that officially.

With regard to the object for which he had come, Dormer found every one in his own difficulty. No one knew what was to happen, except that arrangements were already on foot for enormous demobilization camps. But the immediate steps were not even known at Brigade. Every one, of course, aired some pet idea, and were interrupted by noise outside, shouts and cries, the sound of marching, and orders given in German. The room emptied in a moment. The park was at one end of the town, and abutted on the smaller streets of artisans’ dwellings that, in every town of the sort, goes by the name of Le Nouveau Monde. This quarter had apparently emptied itself into the park, to the number of some hundreds, mostly people of over military age, or children, but one and all with those thin white faces that showed the long years of insufficient and unsuitable food, and the spiritual oppression that lay on “occupied” territory. They were shouting and shaking their fists round the compact formation of Dormer’s prisoners, who had just been halted, in front of the house. The N.C.O. in charge had been ordered by Brigade to bring them back. A chit explained the matter: “Prisoners taken after 11.0 a.m. to be sent back to their own units, on the line of retreat.”

The Feld Webel enlightened the Colonel’s mystification: “We refuse to obey the order, sir. Our regiment is twenty miles away. All the peasants have arms concealed. We shall just be shot down.”

It was a dilemma. Dormer could not help thinking how much better the Feld Webel showed up, than his own Colonel. The latter could not shoot the men where they stood. Nor could he leave them to the mercies of the natives. How difficult War became with the burden of civilization clogging its heels. The first thing to do was obviously to telephone to the A.P.M. for police. In the meantime a French Liaison Officer made a speech, and Dormer grinned to hear him. Fancying apologizing for the War. But what else could the fellow do. He did it well, considering. The crowd quieted, thinned, dispersed. The police arrived, and had a discussion with the Adjutant. Still no conclusion. The Feld Webel strode up and down in front of his men, master of the situation. At length, some one had an idea. Six lorries rolled up in the dark, an interpreter was put on board, and the party moved off in the November dusk. The Commander of C Company and Dormer left H.Q. together. Parting at the corner that separated their scattered companies, they both exclaimed together:

“What a War!” and burst out laughing.

* * * * *

It was perhaps, to a certain degree, Dormer’s fault, that during the remainder of November he became conscious of a dreary sense of anti-climax. No doubt he was that sort of person. The emergencies of the War had considerably overstrained his normal powers, which he had forced to meet the need. The need had ceased, and he had great difficulty in goading himself up to doing the bare necessary routine of Company office parades. He managed to avoid being sent up to the Rhine, and even secured a reasonable priority in demobilization, but beyond this there was nothing for it but to “continue the motion” of waiting for the next thing to happen.

His principal job was to extract from an unwilling peasantry, enough ground for football. How often did he go to this farm and that village shop, with his best manner, his most indirect approach, liberal orders for any of the many commodities that could be bought, and in the last resort, cheerful payment of ready money out of his own pocket in order to obtain a grudging leave to use this or that unsuitable meadow, not to the extent that the game of football demanded, but to the extent that the small proprietors considered to be the least they could make him accept for the most money that he could possibly be made to pay.

Then, in the long dark evenings, there was the job of keeping the men away from the worse sorts of estaminet. His own abilities, limited to singing correctly the baritone part of Mendelssohn’s Sacred Works, or Sullivan’s humorous ones, was not of any practical service. What was wanted was the real star comic, the red-nosed man with improbable umbrella, the stage clergyman with his stage double-life and voice that recalled with such unintentional faithfulness, the affected mock-culture of the closed and stereotyped mind. Any deformity was welcome, not, Dormer observed, that they wanted to laugh at the helplessness of the bandy leg or the stutterer, the dwarf or the feeble-minded. On the contrary, the sentimentality of the poorer English had never stood out in brighter relief than on the edge of those devastated battlefields, where in their useless khaki, the men who had perpetuated the social system that had so blindly and wantonly used so many of them, waited patiently enough for the order of release from the servitude that few of them had chosen or any of them deserved. No, they liked to see the cunning and prowess of the old lady, or the innocent boy, applauded the way in which all those characters portrayed as having been born with less than normal capabilities showed more than normal acquisitiveness or perspicacity.

Dormer could not help reflecting how different they were from the New Army in which he had enlisted. In the squad of which, at the end of three months’ violent training and keenly contested examinations, he had become the Corporal, there had been one or two labourers, several clerks from the humbler warehouses and railways, others in ascending scale from Insurance Offices and Banks, one gorgeous individual who signed himself a Civil Servant, three persons of private means, who drove up to the parade ground in motor-cars. He well remembered one of these latter going surreptitiously to the Colonel and applying for a commission, and being indignantly refused, on the grounds that the Colonel didn’t know who (socially) he (the applicant) was. But when the news got out, the section were even more disrespectful to that unfortunate individual because they considered he had committed a breach of some sort of unwritten code that they had undertaken to observe. So they went on together, the immense disparity of taste and outlook cloaked by shoddy blue uniforms and dummy rifles, equal rations and common fatigues.

But the first offensive of the spring of 1915 had brought new conditions. The loss in infantry officers had been nothing short of catastrophic. Very soon hints, and then public recommendation to take commissions reached them. The section meanwhile had altered. Two of the more skilled labourers had got themselves “asked for” by munition works. Of the remainder Dormer and four others applied and got commissions. He could see nothing like it now. There was more of a mix-up than ever. For some men had been exempted from the earlier “combings out” of the unenlisted for skill, and others for ill-health. There was now only one really common bond, the imperative necessity to forget the War and all that had to do with it. This was the general impetus that had replaced the volunteering spirit, and it was this that Dormer had to contend with. He mastered the business of amusing the men pretty well, and his subordinates helped him. A more serious difficulty was with the skilled mechanics. Fortunately, an infantry battalion demanded little skill, and except for a few miners who had been out no time at all, and were at present making no fuss, there was plenty of grumbling but no organized obstruction.

He found a more advanced state of affairs when he went at the appointed time, to supervise a football match between a team representing his own Brigade and that of a neighbouring Brigade of Heavy Artillery. Crossing the Grand’ Place of the village to call on the Gunner Mess he found a khaki crowd, but it took him some minutes to realize that a full-dress protest meeting was in progress. Senior N.C.O.’s were mounted upon a G.S. wagon. These, he gathered, were the Chairman and speakers. Another soldier, whose rank he could not see, was addressing the meeting. More shocked than he had ever been in his life, he hastily circled the square, and got to the Mess. He found most of the officers in; there was silence, they were all reading and writing. After the usual politenesses came a pause. He felt obliged to mention the object of his visit. Silence again. Eventually the Captain with whom he had arranged the preliminaries of the match said rather reluctantly:

“I’m afraid we shan’t be able to meet you this afternoon.”

Dormer forebore to ask the reason, but not knowing what else to do, rose and prepared to take his leave. Possibly he spoke brusquely, he was nervous in the atmosphere of constraint, but whatever may have prompted the Gunner Captain, what he said was a confession:

“Our fellows are airing their views about demob.”

“Really!”

“Yes, perhaps you noticed it, as you came along?”

“Well, I did see a bit of a crowd.”

“You didn’t hear the speeches?” The other smiled.

“I heard nothing definitely objectionable, but it’s rather out of order, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose so, but we get no help from up-atop!” The Captain nodded in the direction of the Local Command.

“No, I suppose not,” Dormer sympathized.

The young Colonel interposed. “It’s very difficult to deal with the matter. There’s a high percentage of skilled men in our formation. They want to be getting back to their jobs.”

“It’s really rather natural,” agreed the Captain.

Dormer tried to help him. “We all do, don’t we?”

There was a sympathetic murmur in the Mess which evidently displeased the Colonel.

“I’m not accustomed to all this going home after the battle. Time-expired men I understand, but the New Army enlistments----” He left it at that, and Dormer felt for him, probably, with the exception of a few servants and N.C.O.’s, the only pre-War soldier in the Mess, uncertain of himself and trying not to see the ill-suppressed sympathy if not envy with which most of the officers around him regarded the affair.

“Awfully sorry, Dormer,” the Captain concluded, “we simply can’t get our crowd together. You see how it is. When this has blown over I’ll come across and see you, and we will fix something up.”

Dormer went.

The Gunner Captain came that evening. In Dormer’s smaller Mess, it needed only a hint to the youngsters to clear out for a few minutes. Dormer admired the good humour with which the other approached him. It was obviously the only thing to do.

Over drinks he asked, modelling himself on the other’s attitude:

“So that business blew over, did it?”

“It did, thank goodness. Awfully decent of you to take it as you did. I hated letting you down.”

“Don’t mention it. I saw how you were placed.”

“The Colonel very much appreciated the way you spoke. I hope you had no trouble with your chaps?”

“They were all right. I pitched them a yarn. They didn’t believe it, of course. Some of them were at the--er----”

“The bloomin’ Parliament. Don’t mind saying it. It’s a dreadful shock to a regular like our old man.”

“Naturally.”

“He spoke the plain unvarnished truth when he said he was unused to all this demobbing.”

“Well, well, you can comfort him, I suppose, by pointing out that it isn’t likely to occur again.”

“He’s a good old tough ’un. Splendid man in action, that’s what makes one so sorry about it. Otherwise, of course, one knows what the men mean. It’s only natural.”

“Perfectly.”

“His trouble is not only the newness of it. It’s his utter helplessness.”

“Quite so. Absolutely nothing to be done. The--er--meeting was as orderly as possible. I walked right through it. They simply ignored me.”

“Oh yes, there’s no personal feeling. They all paraded this morning complete and regular.”

“That’s the end of it, I hope.”

“I think so. They came up to the Mess--three N.C.O.’s--a deputation, if you please. They brought a copy of the resolution that was passed.”

Neither could keep a straight face, but laughter did not matter because it was simultaneous. The Captain went on, finishing his drink:

“I believe the old man had a momentary feeling that he ought to crime some one--but our Adjutant--topping chap--met them in the passage and gave them a soft answer, and cooked up some sort of report, and sent it up. It pacified ’em.”

“Did they need it?”

“Not really. ’Pon me word, never saw anything more reasonable in my life, than what they had written out. It’s too bad, hanging ’em up for months and months, while other people get their jobs. They know what they want so much better than anyone else.”

“It’s impossible to please every one.”

“Yes. But when you think of what the men have done.”

Dormer did not reply. He was thinking of the Infantry, with their whole possessions on their backs, always in front in the advance, last in the retreat. The Gunner took his leave. Like everything else, either because of the incident, or more probably without any relation to it, the slow but steady progress of demobilization went on, those men who had the more real grievance, or the greater power of expression, got drafted off. The composition of units was always changing. Even where it did not, what could “other ranks” do? To the last Dormer felt his recurrent nightmare of the Headless Man to be the last word on the subject. But it was becoming fainter and fainter as the violence of the first impression dimmed, keeping pace with the actuality of the dispersal of that khaki nation that lay spread across France, Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and the East. The Headless Man was fading out.

* * * * *

It was mid-April, the first fine weather of the year, when his own turn came. Of course the Mess gave him a little dinner, for although nothing on earth, not even four years of War, could make him a soldier, his length of service, varied experience, and neat adaptability had made him invaluable; again no one had ever found it possible to quarrel with him; further, his preoccupation with games had made him perhaps the most sought-for person in the Brigade.

Had it not been for these reasons, there was little else to which he had a farewell to say; casualty, change, and now demobilization removed friends, then chance acquaintances, until there was no one with whom he was in the slightest degree intimate. He might almost have been some attached officer staying in the Mess, instead of its President, for all he knew of the officers composing it. There was nothing in the village that lay on the edge of the battlefield that he wanted to see again. It was not a place where he had trained or fought, it was not even the place at which the news of the Armistice had reached him. It was just a place where the Brigade of which his battalion had formed a part had been dumped, so as to be out of the way, but sufficiently within reach of rail, for the gradual attrition of demobilization to work smoothly. An unkind person might have wondered if the mild festival that took place in the estaminet of that obscure commune was not so much a farewell dinner to old Dormer, as an eagerly sought opportunity for a little extra food and drink that might help to pass the empty days. Slightly bleary-eyed in the morning, Dormer boarded the train, waved his hand to the little group of officers on the platform, and sat down to smoke until he might arrive at Dunkirk.

On a mild April evening, he paced the port side of the deck of the steamer that was taking him home. He was aware that he might have to spend a night in dispersal station, but it did not matter in the least. The real end of the business to such an essential Englishman as Dormer was here and now, watching the calm leaden sea-space widen between him and the pier-head of Calais. Prophets might talk about the obliteration of England’s island defences, but the sentiment that the Channel evoked was untouched. After years of effort and sacrifice, Dormer remained a stranger in France. He might know parts of it tolerably well, speak its language fairly, fight beside its soldiers, could feel a good deal of intelligent admiration for its people and institutions, but nothing would ever make him French. It would perhaps have been easier to assimilate him into Germany. But on the whole, in spite of his unprovocative manner, he was difficult to assimilate, a marked national type. Lengthier developments and slower, more permanent revolutions were in his inherited mental make-up, than in that of any of the other belligerents. In a Europe where such thrones as were left were tottering and crashing, nothing violent was in his mind, or in the minds of ninety per cent of those men who covered the lower deck, singing together, with precisely the same lugubrious humour, as in the days of defeat, of stalemate, or of victory:

“Old soldiers never die,
They only fade away.”

He turned to look at them, packed like sardines, so that even the sea breeze could hardly dissipate the clouds of cigarette smoke, just as no disaster and no triumph could alter their island characteristics, however much talk there might be about town life sapping the race. As he looked at them, herded and stalled like animals, but cheerful in their queer way as no animal can ever be, he remembered that somewhere among all those thousands that were being poured back into England day by day (unless of course he were buried in one of those graveyards that marked so clearly the hundred miles from Ypres to St. Quentin) was a private soldier, whom he had been told to discover and bring to justice for the Crime at Vanderlynden’s, as Kavanagh had called it. He had never even got the fellow’s name and number, and he did not care. He never wanted the job, nothing but his punctilious New Army spirit, that had made him take the War as seriously as if it had been business, had kept him at it. Now he had done with it, the man would never be found. But in Dormer’s mind would always remain that phantom that he had pursued for so many months--years even, over all those miles, in and out of so many units and formations. It had come to stand for all that mass whose minds were as drab as their uniform, so inarticulate, so decent and likable in their humility and good temper. Theirs was the true Republicanism, and no written constitution could add anything to it. He had not thought of that affair, during all these last months that had seen so many Empires fall, so many nations set upon their feet, but he thought of it now.

He turned once again and surveyed that coastline, somewhere behind which he had made that pilgrimage; there it lay, newly freed Belgium on the left, on the right the chalky downs that ran from Gris-Nez far out of sight, down to Arras. Between the two, on those marshes so like any of South-Eastern England, had taken place that Crime at Vanderlynden’s, that typified the whole War. There, on those flat valleys of the Yser and the Lys, the English army had come to rest after its first few weeks of romantic march and counter-march. There had the long struggle of endurance been the longest and least spectacular. It was there that the English Effort, as they called it, had played its real part, far more than on the greater battlefields farther south, or away on other continents. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s showed the whole thing in miniature. The English had been welcomed as Allies, resented as intruders, but never had they become homogeneous with the soil and its natives, nor could they ever leave any lasting mark on the body or spirit of the place. They were still incomprehensible to Vanderlynden’s, and Vanderlynden’s to them. Dormer was of all men most unwilling and perhaps unable to seek for ultimate results of the phenomena that passed before his eyes. To him, at that moment, it seemed that the English Effort was fading out, leaving nothing but graveyards. And when he found this moving him, his horror of the expression of any emotion asserted itself, and he elbowed his way down the companion, to get a drink.

When he came up again, that low shore had passed out of sight, but ahead was visible the moderately white cliffs of England, beyond which lay his occupation and his home, his true mental environment, and native aspiration. He experienced now in all its fullness the feeling that had been with him with such tragic brevity from time to time during those years. This last passage of the Channel was, this time, real escape. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was behind him. He had got away from it at last.

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.