PART THREE

_ADAGIO_

_ADAGIO_

[ I ]

The draft, under orders to proceed overseas on Active Service, without delay, paraded again, in full marching order, at three-thirty.

Number two in the front rank was 31819, Private Winterbourne, G.

They had been “sized” that morning, so each man knew his number and place. They fell in rapidly, without talking, and stood easy, waiting for the officers, on the bleak gravelled parade ground inside the bleak isolated citadel. Their view was rectangularly cut short either by the damp grey masonry of the fortress walls or by the dirty yellow brick frontals of the barracks built in under the ramparts.

They numbered one hundred and twenty, and had been under orders to proceed overseas for more than a week, during which period they had been forbidden to leave the citadel under threat of Court Martial. All sentry duties were performed by troops not in the draft, and five rounds of ball ammunition were issued to each sentry. These exceptional measures were the result of nervousness on the part of the Colonel, who had been censured for what was not his fault—two men had deserted on the eve of the departure of the last draft, and two others had to be substituted at the last moment. “Does the old mucker think we’re going to run away?” was the comment of the draft, wounded in their pride, when they accidentally found this out.

A stiff coldish wind was blowing soiled-looking ragged clouds and occasional gusts of chilly rain over a greyish winter sky. The men fidgeted in the ranks, some bending forward to ease the strain of straps, some throwing their packs a fraction higher with a jerk of their shoulders and loins; one or two had taken the regulation step forward and were adjusting their puttees or the fold in their trouser legs. Winterbourne stood with his weight on his right leg, holding the projecting barrel of his obsolete drill rifle loosely in his right hand; his head was bent slightly forward as he gazed at the gravel expressionlessly.

The draft had been parading for various purposes all through the day, when they thought they would be free to idle and write letters. The canteen had been put out of bounds to prevent a possible drunken departure. The parades had included two kit inspections and several visits to the Quartermaster’s Stores to draw new winter clothing and other objects for use overseas. Consequently, in their mood of restrained excitement, they had become rather irritated and impatient. The fidgeting increased under the reproving gaze of the N.C.O.’s, and the rather boiled-looking glare of the Regimental Sergeant-Major, a military pedant of exacting standards; nothing, however, was said, since movement is permitted at the “stand easy.”

The mood of the draft was not improved by a sudden flurry of cold rain, which swept across the parade-ground in a long moaning gust, at the moment when three or four officers came out of their Mess.

“Draft!” came the R.S.M.’s warning bellow.

The hundred and twenty hands slipped automatically down the rifles, and the men stood silent and motionless, looking to the front, and trying not to sway when the pressure of the rising gale suddenly increased or suddenly relaxed.

“Stand still there! Stand _Steady!_”

There was a slight bulge in the front of each of the short service-jackets, where two field dressings in a waterproof case and a phial of iodine had been thrust into the pocket provided for them, inside the right-hand flap.

“Draft!—Draft! ’Ten’shun!”

Two hundred and forty heels met smartly in one collective snap at the same time that the rifles were sharply brought to the sides. The draft stood to attention, gazing fixedly to the front. A man unconsciously turned his head slightly in trying to catch a glimpse of the approaching officers out of the corner of his eye.

“Stand still that man! Look to your front, can’t you?”

Silence, except for the moaning wind and the crunch of gravel under the officers’ boots. The Colonel and the Adjutant wore spurs, which jingled very slightly. The Colonel acknowledged the R.S.M.’s salute and his “All present and c’rect, Sir.”

“Rear rank—one pace step back—March!”

One—two. The hundred and twenty legs moved mechanically like one man’s.

“Rear rank—stand—at—ease!”

The Colonel inspected the front rank, and took a long time, fussing over various details. A man with cold fingers dropped his rifle.

“Ser’ant ’Icks, take that man’s name and number, and forward the charge with his Crime Sheet!”

“Very good, Sir.”

The front rank stood at ease while the Colonel inspected the rear rank less minutely. It was beginning to get dark, and he had to make a speech. He stood about thirty yards in front of the draft with the other officers behind him. The youthful Adjutant held his riding crop against his right thigh like a field-marshal’s baton. The Colonel, an eccentric but harmless half-wit who had been returned with thanks from France early in his first campaign, was speaking:

“N.C.O.’s and Men of the 8th Upshires! Er—you are—er—proceeding overseas on Active Service. Er. Er. I—er—trust you will do your—er—duty. We have wasted—er—spared no pains to make you efficient. Remember to keep yourselves smart and clean and—er—walk about in a soldierly way. You must always—er—maintain the honour of the Regiment which—er—er—which stands high in the records of the British Army. I—...”

A very faint murmur of “muckin’ old fool,” “silly old mucker,” “struth!” came from the draft, too faint to reach the officer’s ears, but the alert R.S.M. caught it, though without distinguishing the words; and cut short the Colonel’s peroration with his stentorian:

“Stand still there! Stand _Steady!_ Take their names, Ser’ant ’Icks!”

A short pause, and the R.S.M. shouted:

“P’rade again at four-fifteen outside the Armoury, in clean fatigue, to hand in rifles. Mind they’re properly clean and pulled-through. An’ no talking as you walk off p’rade.”

The Adjutant had been talking to the Colonel, and saluted as his superior departed. He walked over to the R.S.M.

“All right, Sergeant-Major, you and the other N.C.O.’s not in the draft may fall out. I’ll dismiss the men.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The Adjutant walked over to the draft, and stood with his right hand on his hip. He spoke slowly but without hesitation:

“Stand at ease. Stand easy. You can wash out what the R.S.M. just said. Leave your rifles in the racks, but try to leave ’em clean or I shall get strafed.... I’m afraid we’ve chased you about a bit under the new intensive scheme of training, but it’s all in the day’s work, you know. I’m sorry we’re not going out as a unit, but battalions are being broken up everywhere for drafts. When you get out, don’t forget to look after your feet—you get court-martialled for trench feet nowadays—and don’t be in a hurry to shove your heads over the top! I’m due to follow you myself soon, so I expect we’ll all be in the next push. Good-bye. And the very best of luck to you all.”

“Good-bye, Sir. Thank you, Sir. Same to you, Sir. Good-bye, Sir.”

“Good-bye. Draft, ’shun. Slope arms. Dis-miss.”

Simultaneously their hands tapped the rifle-butts in salute, as they turned right.

The draft confusedly moved over the darkened ground to the barrack room, chattering excitedly:

“What’s the next thing?”

“P’rade at eight-thirty to move off at nine.”

“Who said so?”

“It’s in B’tallion orders.”

“Silly ole mucker old Brandon is, give me the fair pip he did with ’is ‘walk about soldierly’—yes! up to yer arse in mud.”

“Bloody old _c_——”

“Yes, but the Adjutant was all right.”

“Oh, ’e’s a gentleman, ’e is.”

“Makes all the difference when they’ve bin in the ranks theirselves.”

“Wonder what it’ll be like in the line?”

“Wait till y’get there and see.”

“I reckon we’ll be there this time to-morrow night.” “Shut up, Larkin, and don’t get the wind up.”

“I ain’t got the wind up.”

“I say, Corporal, Corp’ral! What time do we p’rade to-night?”

“Ask the Ord’ly Sergeant.”

“Tea’s up, boys. Come on!”

* * * * *

They fell in again at eight-thirty. The night was very dark, with a cold damp gusty wind from the west. All the N.C.O.’s were on parade, carrying lighted hurricane lanterns which moved and flitted and stood still in the darkness like will-o’-the-wisps. The draft were in full marching order, without rifles and side-arms, wearing their greatcoats. Their excitement occasionally broke through the military restraint and rose from a whisper to a loud hum, which would cringe abruptly under the R.S.M.’s “Stop talking there!” It took a long time to read the roll-call by the flicker of the lantern. At the sound of his name each man clicked his heels, “Here, Sir.”

“31819, Winterbourne, G.”

“Here, Sir.”

“That’s the lot, Ser’ant-Major, isn’t it?”

“That’s the lot, Sir.”

“Move off in five minutes.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The draft stirred restlessly in the darkness. Winterbourne looked to his left and noticed how the line of shadowy figures disappeared into the night—he might have been at one end of a line stretching to infinity for all he could see.

“Draft! Draft! ’Ten’shun! Slope arms! Move to the right in column of fours—form fours! Form two deep! Form fours! Right! By the right—Quick March!”

They found themselves immediately behind the regimental band, which struck up one of the Mark III marches supplied to Army musicians. The draft knew it well—“How can I draw rations—if I’m not the ord’ly man?” They marched over the familiar parade ground, out through the postern, over the swaying draw-bridge, where the sentry presented arms.

“By the left. March at—ease. March easy.”

The band had ceased playing. They were descending the long winding hill road to the village and the station. As they went along they were joined by civilians, mostly girls, who were waiting in ones and twos. The girls called to their men in the ranks, and they, emboldened by excitement and this momentous change in their lives, dared to answer back. March discipline relaxed, and the draft was already marching raggedly as it passed the first houses of the village. After the dense blackness of the hillside, the light from the few gas-lamps was dazzling.

The band struck up again. Although it was past ten, the whole village was awake and in the street to watch them go by. The loud brass music reverberated from the house fronts. The draft were amazed to find themselves for a moment the centre of public interest; for so long they had learned to consider themselves fatally insignificant and subordinate. Voices came from all sides: “’Ullo, Bert! Good-bye, ’Arry! Hullo, Tom! Good-bye, Jack!” Winterbourne in the front rank, looked behind; he noticed that some of the girls had broken into the ranks and were marching with their men, clinging to their arms. They appeared to be enjoying themselves greatly. An exceedingly ragged company surged excitedly through the village, intoxicated by the sounding brass and the cheers and other attentions of the inhabitants.

The civilians were not allowed on the station platform. As the draft marched through the open gate, with a picket of military Police on either hand, there was another chorus of “Good-bye, Bert! Good-bye, ’Arry! Good-bye, Tom. Good-bye, Jack! Good luck. Come ’ome soon. Good-bye. Good luck. Good-bye.”

They piled into the waiting troop-train, which was to pick up other drafts on the way. Twelve to a carriage. Winterbourne managed to get the window-seat next the platform. The Adjutant came up.

“Winterbourne. Winterbourne.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, there you are. Looking for you. The R.T.O. says you go to Waterloo, and then proceed to Folkestone, he thinks.”

“Thanks very much, Sir. It’s so much less tedious when you know what you’re doing and why and where you’re going.”

“You ought to have a commission. You’ll easily get one in France.”

“Yes, but you know why I wanted to stay in the ranks, Sir.”

“Yes, I know, but men like you are needed as officers. The casualties among officers are terrifically high.”

“All right, I’ll think about it, Sir.”

“Well, good-bye, old man, the very best of luck to you.” “Thank you. And to you.”

They shook hands, to the impressed horror of the N.C.O.’s.

The crowd had gathered outside the railings by the forepart of the train, where they were not masked by the station buildings. The band was drawn up in front of them, on the platform. The train gave a warning whistle. The band struck up the Regimental March, and then Auld Lang Syne, as the train slowly steamed out of the station; they played their instruments with one hand, and ludicrously waved the other hand to the draft crowded in the moving windows. A long wavering cheer went up. The red faces of the soldiers on the platform were all turned slightly upwards, and their mouths were open. Their right arms were raised above their heads. In a blare of band music, cheering and shouting, the cheering draft drew out of the station.

Good-bye, Bert. Good-bye, Harry. Good-bye, Tom. Good-bye, Jack. Good-bye.

The last person Winterbourne saw was the little Colonel, standing at the extreme end of the platform under a gas-lamp, standing very erect, standing rather tense and emotional, standing with his right hand raised to his cap, standing to salute his men proceeding on Active Service.

He wasn’t a bad little man; he believed intensely in his Army.

[ II ]

In fifteen minutes the excited chatter over fags dwindled to the monotony of an ordinary railway journey. The men were tired, for it was already long after Last Post. They began to drowse. One man in the far corner from Winterbourne was already asleep. The racks were full of overcoats and equipment. Under the Anti-Aircraft Regulations the curtains of the train windows were closely drawn.

Winterbourne felt entirely unsleepy. He ceased talking to the man beside him, and drifted into a reverie. His mind slid backwards and forwards from one theme of thought to another. Already he found it difficult to read or to think consecutively. He had reached the first expressionless stage of the war soldier, which is followed by the period of acute strain; and that in turn gives place to the second expressionless stage—which is pretty hopeless.

The real test was beginning. Like everybody who had not been there, he was almost entirely ignorant of life in the trenches. Newspapers, illustrated periodicals, almost useless. He had heard a lot of tales from returned wounded soldiers. But many of them either blathered or were quite inarticulate. Here and there a revealing detail or memory. “And all the time I was delirious after I was wounded, I kep’ seein’ them aeryplanes goin’ round and round and then makin’ a dive at me.” And the little Cockney: “Struth! I got me tunic and me trowses all ’ung up in Fritz’s wire, an’ I couldn’t get orf. Got me pockets full o’ bombs, I ’ad, as well as them stick-bombs in paniers. One of the paniers was ’ung up too, an’ I ses to myself I ses: ‘If you drop them muckin’ bombs, Bert, you’ll blow yer muckin’ ’ead orf.’ And there was old Fritz’s machine gun bullets whizzin’ by, _zip_, _zip_. I could see ’em cuttin’ the wire—and me cursin’ and blindin’. Blimey! I wasn’t arf afraid. But I got me muckin’ blighty, anyway.”

Where did he meet that amusing little Cockney? Ah, yes, in the depot the day after he joined. There had been several soldiers just out of the hospital in the barrack room, all swopping yarns. Winterbourne’s mind reverted to himself, and the past dreary months. He had been unfortunate in the N.C.O.’s of his training battalion—old regulars, who had been bullied and driven in their time, and thought they’d escape being sent out to France by zealously bullying and driving the new drafts. No doubt they were paying off some of the old army grudge against civilian contempt for the mercenary soldier. They particularly hated any educated or well-bred man in the ranks, and delighted to impose painful or humiliating tasks on him. George remembered the man who “took particulars” of his religion.

“What are yer? C. of E., Methodist, R. C.?”

“I haven’t any official religion. You’d better put me down as a rationalist.”

“Garn! What’s a muckin’ rationalist? Yer in the Army now.”

“Well, I haven’t got one.”

“Bloody well find one then. Yer’ll want suthin’ over yer muckin’ grave in France, won’t yer? An’ yer’ll bloody well be in it in six months. No religion! Strike me muckin’ pink!”

An amiable hero. In his zeal for religion he got Winterbourne sent on all the dirtiest and longest Sunday fatigues, until in self-defence he had to put himself down Church of England. There was, of course, no religious compulsion in the Army; that was why Church Parade was a parade.

Winterbourne smiled as he thought of the ludicrous scene. It had been none the less painful. His gorge rose at the memory of the filth he had tried to remove from the Officers’ Mess Kitchen—filth which had been left there untouched by fifty less scrupulous “fatigues.” The kitchen was inspected every day.

He looked at his hands in the concentrated light of the railway carriage. They were coarsened and chapped, ingrained with dirt impossible to remove with ice-cold water. He thought of the delicate hands of Fanny and Elizabeth’s slender fingers.

On parade the officers never swore at the men, the N.C.O.’s rarely, whatever they might do off parade. It was an offence under King’s Regs. The Physical Training Instructors were, however, an exception. They sometimes displayed an uncouth humour in their objurgations. There were time-honoured pleasantries, such as “Yer may break yer muckin’ mother’s ’eart, but yer won’t break mine!” There was the Bayonet Instructor, a singularly rough diamond from Whitechapel, who in mimic bayonet fighting at the stuffed bags, loved to give the command:

“At ’is stummick an’ goolies, Point!”

This gentleman, offended at the awkward posture of a rather plump recruit doing the “double knee bend,” had apostrophized the unfortunate man:

“’Ere, you, Frost. Can’t yer get down like a muckin’ soldier, and not like a bloody great pross what’s bein’ blocked?”

Winterbourne smiled again to himself. The road to glory was undoubtedly devious in our fair island story.

From Reveille at five-thirty until Lights Out they had been driven and harassed and bullied for weeks to the strain of: “Look to yer front there!” “’Old yer ’eads _up_, can’t yer, all them tanners was picked up on first p’rade.” “Smith, yer got them straps crossed wrong—if yer do it again, I’ll crime yer.” And over the voices of the various sergeant-instructors shouting to their squads, boomed the R.S.M.’s inevitable: “Stand still, there! Stand _Steady_.” Just like the South Foreland light-ship in a fog. The fatigue of continual over-exercise and of the physical and mental strain was severe to men fresh from sedentary lives, or stiff from the plough and the workshop. For the first weeks especially they were sore all over, and sank into heavy unrefreshing sleep at night. Winterbourne bore it better than most. His long walks and love for swimming had kept him supple. He could not raise weights like the draymen or dig like the navvies, but he could out-march and out-run them all, learn every new movement in half the time, dismount a Lewis gun while they were wondering which way the handle came off, score four bulls out of five, and saw immediately why you made head-cover first when digging in. But he too felt the fatigue. He remembered one perfectly awful day. They had been drilled and marched and drilled and inspected from dawn to evening of a baking autumn day; then at seven there had been three hours of night operations. At twelve, they were all awakened by a false Fire Alarm, and had to turn out in trousers and boots. Winterbourne had taken over his shoulder the arm of a man who was too exhausted to run unassisted on the parade grounds. The N.C.O.’s yelped them on like sheep dogs.

It was not the physical fatigue Winterbourne minded, though he hated the inevitable physical degradation—the coarse, heavy clothes, too thick for summer; the hob-nailed boots; the plank bed; horribly cooked food. But he accepted and got used to them. He suffered mentally, suffered from the shock of the abrupt change from surroundings where the things of the mind chiefly were valued to surroundings where they were ignorantly despised. He had nobody to talk to. He suffered from the communal life of thirty men in one large hut, which meant that there was never a moment’s solitude. He suffered because he brooded over Elizabeth and Fanny, over the widening gulf he knew was dividing him from them, and suffered abominably as month after month of the war dragged on with its interminable holocausts and immeasurable degradation of mankind. The world of men seemed dropping to pieces, madly cast down by men in a delirium of homicide and destructiveness. The very apparatus of killing revolted him, took on a sort of sinister deadness. There was something in the very look of his rifle and equipment which filled him with depression. And then, in the imagination, he was already facing the existence for which this was but a preparation, already confronting the agony of his own death. Horrific tales—alas, only too true—were told of companies and battalions wiped out in a few instances. N.C.O. after N.C.O., as Winterbourne got to know them better, assured him that they were the only men—or almost the only men—left alive from their platoons or companies. And it was the truth. The proportion of casualties was undoubtedly high in infantry units. It was, perhaps, selfish of Winterbourne to worry about his own extinction when so many better men had already been obliterated. He felt rather ashamed and apologetic about it himself. But it is human to recoil from a violent death, even at twenty-two or -three....

The train began to slow down at a large junction, and he returned to his present surroundings with a start. The other men were asleep. Well, all the training and presenting arms and saluting by numbers were over and in the past. They were on Active Service. It was an immense relief. Now, henceforth, he would be facing dread realities, not Regular Army pedants and bullies. As Winterbourne once remarked, one of the horrors of the war was not fighting the Germans but living under the British.

* * * * *

After picking up more drafts, the train went on, grinding its way heavily through the silent darkness. The men were all asleep. He noticed the carriage was getting stuffy and headachey with foul air. Some one had shut the windows and ventilators while he was day-dreaming. That was the old bother—whether in huts or barracks they _would_ try to sleep in foul air. He softly slipped the window open a couple of inches—better already. Wonder why they like a fug? Mental and moral fug, too. Poor devils. All brought up to touch their hats to the gentry, do what they’re told, and work. Sort of helots. Yet they’re decent enough, got character, but no intelligence. That’s the real war, the only war worth fighting, the battle of the intelligence against inertia and stupidity and... Still, the intelligence is not always defeated, we’ve got here somehow. Yes! and look where we are!

His mind half-sleepily ran off along a familiar track. What’s really the cause of wars, of this War? Oh, you can’t say one cause, there are many. The Socialists are silly fanatics when they say it’s the wicked capitalists. I don’t believe the capitalists wanted a war—they stand to lose too much in the disturbance. And I don’t believe the wretched governments really wanted it—they were shoved on by great forces they’re too timid and too unintelligent to control. It’s the superstition of more babies and more bread, more bread and more babies. Of course, all wars haven’t been mere population wars. ’Course not—Greek city states, mediæval Italian republics, wars of petty jealousy; naval wars for commercial advantages—Pisa, Genoa, Venice, Holland, England; the sport of Kings, eighteenth-century diversion of the aristocracy; wars of fanaticism, Moslems, the Crusades; emigration wars like the irruption of the barbarians.... There may be commercial motives behind this war, jolly short-sighted ones—they’ve already lost more than they can possibly gain. No, this is fundamentally a population war—bread and babies, babies and bread. It’s all oddly mixed up with the sexual problem we were battling with so brightly when this little packet of trouble was dumped on us by our virtuous forebears. It’s the babies and bread superstition. You encourage, you force people to have babies, lots of babies, millions of babies. As they grow up, you’ve got to feed ’em. You need bread. We all live from the land. England, and the rest of the world after it, went crazy with the Industrial Revolution—thought you could eat steel and railways. You can’t. The world of men is an inverted pyramid based on the bowed shoulders of the ploughman—or the steel-tractor—on the land. It’s the hunger and death business again. “Increase and multiply.” Damned imbecility of applying to over-populated and huge nations the sexual taboos forced on a little crowd of unhygienic Semitic nomads by sheer force of circumstance. Think of their infantile death rate! Breed like rabbits or vanish. Doesn’t apply to us. We’re a sacrifice to over-breeding. Too many people in Europe. A damn sight too many babies. The people could be made to see, are beginning to see it—but the hurray-for-our-dear-Fatherland people, and the priests and the fanatics and the timid and the conservative, won’t see it. Go on, breed, you beauties—breed in column of fours, in battalions, brigades, divisions, army corps. Wait till the population of England is five hundred million and we’re all packed like herrings in a tub. Lovely. Wonderful. England über alles. But there comes a time when there isn’t enough bread for the growing babies. Colonize. Why? Either grow more food or produce more things to exchange for food. England’s got huge colonies. Germany very small ones. The Germans breed like tadpoles. The British breed like rather slower tadpoles. What are you going to do with them? Kill ’em off in a war? Kind. Humane. Kill ’em off, and grab land and commercial advantages from the defeated nation? Right. And what next? Oh, go on breeding. Must be a great and populous nation. And the defeated nation? Suppose they start breeding harder than ever? Oh, have another war, go on having ’em, get the habit. Europe’s decennial picnic of corpses....

Yes, but why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed? Thousands of people die weekly and somebody’s run over in London every day. Does that argument take you in? Well, the answer is that they’re not _murdered_. And your “thousands who die weekly” are the old and the diseased; here it’s the young and the strong and the healthy, the physical pick of the race. All men, too, and no women. That’ll set up a pretty nice resentment between the sexes—more sodomy and lesbianism. Loud cheers, we’re winning. Yes, but going back to murder—people are murdered all the time, look at Chicago. Look at Chicago! We’re always patting ourselves on the back and looking smugly at wicked Chicago. When there’s a shoot-up between gangs, do you approve of it, do you give the winning side medals for their gallantry, do you tell ’em to go to it and you’ll kiss them when they come back, do you march ’em by with a brass band and tell ’em what fine fellows they are? Do you take the gunman as the high ideal of humanity? I know all about military grandeur and devotion to duty—I’m a soljer meself, marm. Thanks for all you’ve done for us, marm. If violence and butchery are the natural state of man, then let’s have no more of your humbug. Violence and butchery beget violence and butchery. Isn’t that the theme of the great Greek tragedies of blood? Blood will have blood. All right, now we know. It doesn’t matter whether murder is individual or collective, whether committed on behalf of one man or a gang or a state. It’s murder. When you approve of murder you violate the right instincts of every human being. And a million murders egged on, lauded, exulted over, will raise a legion of Eumenides about your ears. The survivors will pay bitterly for it all their lives. Never mind, you’ll go on? More babies, soon make up the losses? Have another merry old war soon, sooner the better....

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Thank God I have no son, O Absalom, my son, my son!

* * * * *

Winterbourne nodded uneasily asleep. He started awake as the train slowed down at London Bridge, and not at Waterloo. Where am I? Railway station. Oh, of course, on a draft going out to France....

The draft were turned out at London Bridge, and collected in two ranks on the platform, yawning, stretching and adjusting their equipment. The draft conducting officer, a mild, brown-eyed young man on home service after being wounded, explained that they had nearly three hours to wait. Would they like to go to a Soldiers’ Canteen and get some food?

“Yes, Sir!”

They marched through the empty muddy streets. It was about midnight. Some one began to sing one of the inevitable marching songs. The officer turned round:

“Whistle, but don’t sing. People asleep.”

They began to whistle “Where are the lads of the village to-night?”

Winterbourne found himself crossing the Thames and looked once more at the familiar townscape. He noticed that the street-lamps had been dimmed further since he had left London, and that the once brilliantly-lighted capital now lay cowering in darkness. The dome of St. Paul’s was just faintly visible to an eye which knew exactly where to look for it. The man next to Winterbourne was a Worcestershire ploughman who had never been to London and was most anxious to see St. Paul’s. Winterbourne tried hard to show him where it was, but failed. The ploughman never did see St. Paul’s—he was killed two months later.

Curious to march through this unfamiliar London—everything the same, but everything so different. The dimmed street lights, the carefully blinded windows, the rather neglected streets, the comparative absence of traffic, the air of being closed down indefinitely, all gave him an uneasy feeling. It was as if a doom hung over the great city, as if it had passed its meridian of power and splendour, and was sinking back, back into the darkened past, back into the clay hills and marshes on which it stands. That New Zealander sketching the ruins from a broken pile of London Bridge seemed several centuries nearer.

_“Where are the lads of the village to-night? Where are the lads we knew? In Piccadilly or Leicester Square? No, not there! No, not there! They’re taking a trip on the Continong....”_

The foolish words ran in Winterbourne’s brain as the men whistled the tune with exasperating pertinacity. It was curious to be so near to Fanny and Elizabeth. He wondered vaguely what they were doing.

_“No, not there! No, not there!”_

He had sent Elizabeth a telegram from a station on the way up, but probably it had not reached her.

They crowded into the Canteen, and ate sandwiches and eggs and bacon, and drank ginger-beer. It was too late for beer. Our temperate troops didn’t need beer at that hour of the night.

* * * * *

About 2 A.M. they marched back to the station. To Winterbourne’s surprise and delight Elizabeth and Fanny were there. Elizabeth had received his telegram, although it was after hours. She had rung up Fanny, and they had gone to Waterloo together, only to find that the train with the Upshires draft was not there. Fanny had used her charms upon a susceptible R.T.O. and he had told them where to go, so there they were. All this Elizabeth poured out in a rapid, nervous, jerky way. While Fanny just clutched Winterbourne’s left hand and pressed it hard, saying nothing. They had about ten minutes before the train left. The draft-conducting officer noticed that Winterbourne was speaking to two women, “obviously ladies,” and came up:

“Get in anywhere you like, Winterbourne, only don’t miss the train.”

“Very good, Sir, thank you,” and saluted smartly.

“D’you always have to do that?” asked Elizabeth with a little giggle.

“Yes, it’s the custom. They seem to attach great importance to it.”

“How absurd.”

“Why absurd?” said Fanny, feeling that Winterbourne was somehow hurt by the contempt in her voice. “It’s only a convention.”

The whole train was filled with different drafts of soldiers who had been ordered into the carriages. Only Winterbourne and the two girls were left on the platform, except for the R.T.O. and one or two other officers. As often happens in railway partings they seemed embarrassed, with nothing to say to each other. Winterbourne simply felt dull and uneasy, tongue-tied. He was saying farewell perhaps for the last time to the only two human beings he had really loved, and found he had nothing to say. He just felt dull and uneasy, dully remote from them. He noticed they were both wearing new hats he hadn’t seen, and that skirts were being worn much shorter. He wished the train would go. Interminable waiting. What was Elizabeth saying? He interrupted her:

“Is that the new fashion?”

“What?”

“Shorter skirts?”

“Why, yes, of course, and not so very new. Where have your eyes been?”

“Oh, there were only village women where I’ve been. I haven’t seen a properly dressed woman since my firing leave.”

Tactless! He had spent those few days with Fanny. Dear Fanny. A good sort. She had thought it an awful lark to go on a week-end with a Tommy. She was dreadfully sick of the Staff. Only it was inconvenient that the only decent hotels and restaurants were out of bounds to Tommies. Fanny felt quite democratic about it. Elizabeth hadn’t cared. She lived with a kind of inner intensity which kept her from noticing such things.

They were silent for seconds which dragged like minutes. Then they all began to say something together, interrupted themselves, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” “What were you going to say?” “Oh, nothing, I forget.” And then relapsed into silence again.

Winterbourne found he was slightly intimidated by the presence of these two well-dressed ladies. What on earth were they doing at two o’clock in the morning, talking to a Tommy? He tried to hide his dirty hands.

Damn the train! Won’t it ever go? He felt uncomfortably hot in his great-coat and began to unbutton it. The engine whistled.

“All aboard!” shouted the R.T.O.

Winterbourne hastily kissed Fanny and then Elizabeth.

“Good-bye, good-bye, don’t forget to write. We’ll send you parcels.”

“Thanks, ever so. Good-bye.”

He made for the compartment where a door had been left open for him, but found it full. The luggage van piled with the men’s rations was next door. Winterbourne jumped in.

“You’ll have to stand!” exclaimed Fanny.

“Why, no. There’s plenty of room on the floor.”

The train moved.

“Good-bye.”

Winterbourne waved his hand. He felt no particular emotion, merely an intensifying of the general depressingness of things. He watched them receding, as they waved their hands. Beautiful girls both of them, and so smartly dressed.

“Be happy!” he shouted, as a valediction, in a sudden gust of disinterested affection for them. And then lost sight of them.

Fanny and Elizabeth were both crying.

“What did he shout?” asked Elizabeth through her sobs.

“‘Be happy!’”

“How curious of him! And how like him! Oh, I know I shall never see him again.”

Fanny tried to comfort her. But Elizabeth somehow felt it was all Fanny’s fault.

* * * * *

Winterbourne sat on his pack in the joggling van for about ten minutes. It was almost dark. The guard was trying to read a newspaper by the light of a dim oil lamp. The soldiers who had to see that the rations weren’t stolen were already lying on the floor. Winterbourne buttoned up his coat, turned up the collar, arranged a woollen scarf on his pack to make a pillow, and lay down on the dirty floor beside them. In five minutes he was asleep.

[ III ]

It was not nearly dawn when they reached Folkestone. The drafts from various units were now amalgamated, but still remained under their own officers. They were marched through the dull little town and bivouacked in a row of large empty houses, probably evacuated boarding-houses, fitted up with the usual inconveniences of small English hotels. They washed and had some breakfast. All rather dismal.

At seven they were marched to the quay, and then marched back. The officer had mistaken the word “eleven” for “seven.” So they had to wait again. It was their first introduction to the curious fact that much of the War consisted in waiting about and in undoing things which somebody had ordered in error or through mistaken zeal. The men, sitting on their packs in the empty room, were eagerly and vainly discussing their immediate future—which Base Camp would they go to, which unit would they be drafted to, what part of the line. Winterbourne went over to the uncurtained window and looked out. Drifting heavy clouds, a moderately rough, dirty-looking sea. The Esplanade was practically deserted. The shelters looked dilapidated; most of the glass in them was smashed. The unused gas lamps looked somehow desolate on their rusting standards. Another wounded town, dying perhaps. Depression, monotony, boredom. He looked at his wrist-watch. Still more than two hours to wait. Now that the inevitable had occurred, he was very impatient to get into the front line. The only interest he had left was a consuming curiosity to see what the War was really like.

Curse this hanging about! He drummed his fingers on the window-pane. The men in the room went on talking, aimlessly, foolishly, talking to no purpose. Winterbourne wondered at his own lack of emotion. All his past life seemed a dream, all his vital interests had become utterly indifferent, his ambitions were dissolved, his old friends seemed incredibly remote and unimportant, even Fanny and Elizabeth were unsubstantial, graceful ghosts. Depression, monotony, boredom—but a peculiar sort, a strained, worried exasperated sort. For God’s sake get a move on. It’ll never end, so for the love of Mike let’s get it over. Let’s catch our little packet. We know our numbers are up, so let’s get them quickly.

One of the men was whistling:

_“What’s the use of worry-ing?”_

What indeed? But can you help it? You, cheery idiot, are worrying just as much as any one else. Villiers’ torture by hope. If you were _quite_ certain that your number was up, you’d have at least the tranquillity of resignation. But you’re not quite certain. Even in the infantry men come back. With a really healthy wound you might be out of the line for six or nine months. That was called “getting a blighty one,” if you were lucky enough to get sent back to England—“Blighty.” The men were discussing blighties. Which was the most convenient blighty? Arm or leg? Most agreed that if you lost your left hand or a foot, you were damned lucky—you were out of the bloody War for good and you got a pension and a wound-gratuity. Winterbourne stood with his back to them, looking out of the window; the ghosts of past summer visitors thronged the Esplanade. Left hand or a foot. Live a cripple. No, not that, not that, my God. Come back whole, or not at all. But how those men love life, how blindly they cling to their poor existences! You wouldn’t think they’d much to live for. No beautiful and smartly dressed Fannies and Elizabeths. Oh, they have their “tarts,” they’ve all got a girl’s “photo” in their pay books—and what girls! Tarts for Tommies. Cream tarts for Tommies.

He turned away abruptly from the window and sat down to clean his buttons. Always keep yourself clean and smart, and walk about in a soldierly way....

* * * * *

His mood changed and his spirits rose as they marched down to the docks. Only twelve hours had passed since they left and yet it seemed a tremendously long time. Winterbourne realized that the monotony, the imbecile restrictions, the incredible nagging of military pedants, had been crushing him into a condition of utter stupidity. He regretted deeply that he had been kept in England so long. At least you were doing something real in France, and there was movement....

Troops were pouring along the quay, and mounting the gangways on to three black-painted troopships. Winterbourne recognized the ships as old friends—they were pre-war Channel packet-boats transformed. Huge notices were displayed on the quays: “No. 1 Ship, 33rd Div., 19th Div., 42nd Div., 118th Brigade.” An officer with a megaphone shouted: “Leave Men to the Right, Drafts to the Left.” Another megaphone shouted: “First Army Men, Number 1 Ship.” “Third and Fourth Armies, Number 3 Ship.” “Captain Swanson, 11th Seaforth Highlanders, report to R.T.O.’s office immediately.” It was rather stirring—animated and efficient as well as bustling.

The draft went on board, and were shepherded to one end of the upper deck. The whole ship was swarming with leave men returning to France. Winterbourne gazed at them fascinatedly—these were the real war soldiers, fragments of the first half million volunteers, the men who had believed in the War and wanted to fight. They made a kind of epitome of the whole army. Every arm of the service was represented—Field Artillery, Heavies, dismounted cavalry, gunners, sappers, R.E. Sigs, Army Service Corps, Army Medical Corps, and infantry everywhere. He recognized some of the infantry badges, the bursting grenade of the Northumberland Fusileers, the Tiger of the Leicesters, the Middlesex, the Bedfords, Seaforth Highlanders, Notts and Jocks, the Buffs. He was immediately struck by their motley and picturesque appearance. He and the other draft troops were all spick and span, buttons bright, puttees minutely adjusted, boots polished, peaked caps stiffened with wire, pack mathematically squared, overcoat buttoned up to the throat. The leave men were dressed anyhow. Some had leather equipment, some webbing. They put their equipment together as it suited them, and none of it had been shined or polished for months. Some wore overcoats, some shaggy goatskin or rough sheepskin jackets. The skirts of some overcoats had been roughly hacked off with jack-knives—not to trail in the deep mud, Winterbourne guessed. The equipment which still weighed so heavily on the shoulders of the draft seemed to give the real soldiers no concern at all—they either wore it unconcernedly or chucked it carelessly on the deck with their rifles. Winterbourne was charmed. He noticed with amused scandal that the bolts and muzzles of their rifles were generally tightly bound with oiled rags. Winterbourne looked more carefully at their faces. They were lean and still curiously drawn, although the men had been out of the line for a fortnight; the eyes had a peculiar look. They seemed strangely worn and mature, but filled with energy, a kind of slow enduring energy. In comparison the fresh faces of the new drafts seemed babyish—rounded and rather feminine.

For the first time since the declaration of War, Winterbourne felt almost happy. These men were men. There was something intensely masculine about them, something very pure and immensely friendly and stimulating. They had been where no woman and no half-man had ever been, could endure to be. There was something timeless and remote about them as if (so Winterbourne thought) they had been Roman legionaries or the men of Austerlitz or even the invaders of the Empire. They looked barbaric, but not brutal; determined, but not cruel. Under their grotesque wrappings their bodies looked lean and hard and tireless. They were Men. With a start Winterbourne realized that in two or three months, if he were not hit, he would be one of them, indistinguishable from them, whereas now in the ridiculous jackanapes get-up of the peace-time soldier he felt humiliated and ashamed beside them.

“By God!” he said to himself, “you’re men, not boudoir rabbits and lounge lizards. I don’t care a damn what your cause is—it’s almost certainly a foully rotten one. But I do know you’re the first real men I’ve looked upon. I swear you’re better than the women and the half-men, and by God, I swear I’ll die with you rather than live in a world without you.”

* * * * *

Winterbourne moved a short distance away from the draft and watched a small group of leave men. One, a Scotchman in the uniform of an English line regiment, was still wearing his full equipment. He was leaning on his rifle, talking to two other infantrymen, who were sitting on their packs. One of them, a Corporal with scandalously untrimmed hair and a dirty sheepskin jacket, was lighting a pipe.

“An’ wha’ y’ think?” said the Scot in his sharp-clipped speech, “when ah got hame, they wan’ed me ta gae and tak’ tea wi’ th’ Meenister and then gie a speech at a Bazaar for Warr Worrkers.”

“Ah!” said the Corporal, “did you tell ’em—puff—all about the wicked Huns—puff—and say that what we want in the line is more tiled bath-rooms and girls and not so many woollen mufflers and whizz-bangs?”

“Ah did not; ah said ‘gie me over that bottle o’ whiskey, wumman, and hauld y’ whist.’”

“What Division are you, Jock?” said the other man.

“Thirrty-thirrd. We’ve bin spendin’ a pleasant summer on th’ Somme, and we’re now winterrin’ at the Health-resorrts o’ Ypres.”

“We’re forty-first Division. Just on your left in the Salient. We came up there a month ago from Bullycourt.”

“Bullycourt’s a verry guid place to get away from....”

Winterbourne could not listen any further—a zealous N.C.O. herded him back to the draft. He went unwillingly. He had been waiting eagerly for the men to get away from their time-honoured jests and speak of their real experiences. He was disappointed that these men talked in such a trivial and uninteresting way. He felt they ought to be saying important things in Shakespearian blank verse. Something adequate to their experience, to the intensity of manhood he instinctively felt in them and admired so humbly. But, of course, that was ridiculous of him. He felt that at once. Part of their impressiveness was this very triviality, their complete unconsciousness that there was anything extraordinary or striking about them. They would have been offended at the suggestion. They were ignorant of their own qualities. As Winterbourne himself rapidly merged with these men and became one of them, he lost entirely this first sharp impression of meeting a new, curious race of men, the masculine men. It was then the other people who became curious to him. He found that the real soldiers, the front-line troops, had no more delusions about the War than he had. They hadn’t his feeling of protest and agony over it all, they hadn’t tried to think it out. They went on with the business, hating it, because they had been told it had to be done and believed what they had been told. They wanted the War to end, they wanted to get away from it, and they had no feeling of hatred for their enemies on the other side of No Man’s Land. In fact, they were almost sympathetic to them. They also were soldiers, men segregated from the world in this immense barbaric tumult. The fighting was so impersonal as a rule that it seemed rather a conflict with dreadful hostile forces of Nature than with other men. You did not see the men who fired the ceaseless hail of shells on you, nor the machine gunners who swept away twenty men to death in one zip of their murderous bullets, nor the hands which projected trench-mortars that shook the earth with awful detonations, nor even the invisible sniper who picked you off mysteriously with the sudden impersonal “ping!” of his bullet. Even in the perpetual trench raids you only caught a glimpse of a few differently shaped steel helmets a couple of traverses away; and either their bombs got you, or yours got them. Actual hand-to-hand fighting occurred, but it was comparatively rare. It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, not a war of hand-weapons. The sentry gazed at dawn over a desolate flat landscape, seamed with irregular trenches, and infinitely pitted and scarred with shell-holes, thorny with wire, littered with débris. Five to ten thousand enemies were within range of his vision, and not one would be visible. For days on end he might strain his eyes, and not see one of them. He would hear them at night—clink of shovels and picks, the scream of a wounded man, even their coughing if there happened to be a cessation of artillery and machine-gun fire—but not see them. In the two hours following dawn in “quiet” sectors there was sometimes a kind of truce after the feverish work and perpetual firing during the night. After morning Stand-down the front-line troops snatched a little sleep. At such a time the silence was eerie. Twenty thousand men within a mile, and not a sound. Or so it seemed. But that was by contrast. In fact, there was always some shelling going on—heavies firing on back areas—and generally in the distance the long rumble which meant a general engagement....

The soldiers, then, were not vindictive. Nor, in general, were they long duped by the war talk. They laughed at the newspapers. Any new-comer who tried to be a bit high-falutin’ was at once snubbed with “Fer Christ’s sake don’t talk patriotic!” They went on with a sort of stubborn despair, why they didn’t quite know. The authorities obviously mistrusted them, and forbade them to read the pacific “Nation” while allowing them to read the infamies of “John Bull.” The mistrust was unnecessary. They went on in their stubborn despair, with their sentimental songs and cynical talk and perpetual grousing; and it’s my belief that if they’d been asked to do so, they’d still be carrying on, now. They weren’t crushed by defeat or elated by victory—their stubborn despair had taken them far beyond that point. They carried on. People sneer at the war slang. I, myself, have heard intellectual “objectors” very witty at the expense of “carry on.” So like carrion, you know. All right, let them sneer.

* * * * *

The troopships crossing the Channel were escorted by four plunging little black torpedo-boats. Submarines in the Channel. A merchant ship had been sunk that morning. Winterbourne had thought he would be apprehensive—on the contrary, he found that he scarcely thought about it. Nobody bothered about a little risk like that. They made for Boulogne, and the soldiers cheered the torpedo boats as they turned back from the harbour entrance.

In his inexperience Winterbourne had assumed that they would at once entrain for the front, and that he would spend that night in the trenches. He had forgotten the element of waiting, the deliberation necessary in moving vast masses of men about, which made the slow ruthless movement of the huge War machine so inexorable. You hung about, but inevitably you moved, your tiny little cog was brought into action. And this, too, was strangely impersonal, confirmed the feeling of fatalism. It seemed insane to think that you had any individual importance.

The docks at Boulogne were crowded with materials of war, and the whole place seemed English. Notices all in English, the Union Jack, British officers and troops everywhere, even British engines for the trains. The leave men were roughly formed into columns and marched off to entrain. Every one wanted to know where his Division was. The R.T.O.’s dealt with them swiftly and efficiently. The drafts were also formed into a column and marched up the hill to the rest camp. They were in good spirits, and the inevitable Cockney humourist was in action. As they went up the hill, a poor old French woman came out of her cottage and began rheumatically and wearily to pump water. She did not even look at the passing troops—much too accustomed to them. The Cockney shouted to her:

“’Ere we are! War’ll soon be over now; keep yer pecker up, Ma!”

* * * * *

They spent the night under canvas at the Boulogne rest camp. From his tent Winterbourne had an excellent view of the Channel and the camp incinerator. His first duty on active service was picking up dirty paper and other rubbish, and dumping it in the incinerator. They were told nothing about their future, the Army theory being that your business is to obey orders, not to ask questions. Winterbourne fumed and fretted at the inaction. The other men speculated interminably as to where they were going.

The tents had wooden floors. The men drew a blanket and waterproof ground-sheet each, and slept twelve to a tent. It was a bit hard, but not impossible to sleep. Winterbourne lay awake for a long time, trying to get some order into his reflections. His attitude was plainly modified by that day’s experience. Was there a contradiction in it? Did it imply that he now supported the War and the War partisans? On the contrary, he hated the War as much as ever, hated all the blather about it, profoundly distrusted the motives of the War partisans, and hated the Army. But he liked the soldiers, the War soldiers, not as soldiers but as men. He respected them. If the German soldiers were like the men he had seen on the boat that morning, then he liked and respected them too. He was with them. With them, yes, but against whom and what? He reflected. With them, because they were men with fine qualities, because they had endured great hardships and dangers with simplicity, because they had parried those hardships and dangers not by hating the men who were supposed to be their enemies, but by developing a comradeship among themselves. They had every excuse for turning into brutes, and they hadn’t done it. True, they were degenerating in certain ways, they were getting coarse and rough and a bit animal, but with amazing simplicity and unpretentiousness they had retained and developed a certain essential humanity and manhood. With them then to the end, because of their manhood and humanity. With them, too, because that manhood and humanity existed in spite of the War and not because of it. They had saved something from a gigantic wreck, and what they had saved was immensely important—manhood and comradeship, their essential integrity as men, their essential brotherhood as men.

But what were they really against, who were their real enemies? He saw the answer with a flood of bitterness and clarity. Their enemies—the enemies of German and English alike—were the fools who had sent them to kill each other instead of help each other. Their enemies were the sneaks and the unscrupulous; the false ideals, the unintelligent ideas imposed on them, the humbug, the hypocrisy, the stupidity. If those men were typical, then there was nothing essentially wrong with common humanity, at least so far as the men were concerned. It was the leadership that was wrong—not the war leadership, but the peace leadership. The nations were governed by bunk and sacrificed to false ideals and stupid ideas. It was assumed that they had to be governed by bunk—but if they were never given anything else, how could you tell? De-bunk the World. Hopeless, hopeless....

He sighed deeply, and turned in his blanket wrapping. One man was snoring. Another moaned in his sleep. Like corpses they lay there, human rejects chucked into a bell tent on the hill above Boulogne. The pack made a hard pillow. Maybe he was all wrong, maybe it was “right” for men to be begotten only to murder each other in huge senseless combats. He wondered if he were not getting a little insane through this persistent brooding over the murders, by striving so desperately and earnestly to find out why it had happened, by agonizing over it all, by trying to think how it could be prevented from occurring again. After all, did it matter so much? Yes, did it matter? What were a few million human animals more or less? Why agonize about it? The most he could do was die. Well, die then. But O God, O God, is that all? To be born against your will, to feel that life might in its brief passing be so lovely and so divine, and yet to have nothing but opposition and betrayal and hatred and death forced upon you! To be born for the slaughter like a calf or a pig! To be violently cast back into nothing—for what? My God, for what? Is there nothing but despair and death? Is life vain, beauty vain, love vain, hope vain, happiness vain? “The war to end wars!” Is any one so asinine as to believe that? A war to breed wars, rather....

He sighed and turned again. It’s all useless, useless to flog one’s brain and nerves over it all, useless to waste the night hours in silent agonies when he might lie in the oblivion of sleep. Or the better oblivion of death. After all, there were plenty of children, plenty of war babies—why should one agonize for their future, any more than the Victorians thought about ours? The children will grow up, the war babies will grow up. Maybe they’ll have their war, maybe they won’t. In any case they won’t care a hang about us. Why should they? What do we care about the men of Albuera, except that the charge of the fusileers decorates a page of rhetorical prose? Four thousand dead—and the only permanent result a page of Napier’s prose. We have Bairnsfather....

He gave it up. Time after time he reverted to the whole gigantic tragedy, and time after time he gave it up. Two solutions. Just drift and let come what come may; or get yourself killed in the line. And much anyone would care whichever he did.

[ IV ]

They paraded at nine next morning, were casually inspected by an officer they did not know, and told to stand by. At eleven they drew bully beef and biscuits, and were ordered to parade again in half an hour, ready to move off. Winterbourne’s spirits rose. At last they were getting somewhere. He would be in the trenches that night and take his chance with the rest. No more fiddle-faddle.

He was mistaken. They entrained at Boulogne in a train which crawled interminably, and they de-trained at Calais. They were simply transferred to another Base.

The Base Camp at Calais was desperately over-crowded. It was filled with new drafts sent over to make up the losses on the Somme, and new columns of men kept pouring in daily from England, faster than the over-worked Staff could allot them to units. They were crowded into hastily erected bell-tents, twenty-two to a tent, which is closer than you can squeeze animals, and about as close as you can squeeze men. There was just room to lie down, and no more. Nothing to do after parade, except to moon about in the frosty darkness or lie down in one’s little slice of space, or play crown-and-anchor and drink coffee and rum while the estaminets were open. The town of Calais was out of bounds, except to men with passes. And not many passes were granted.

The weather grew daily colder. The misery of the interminable waiting and the over-crowded tents and the lack of anything to do, was not thereby alleviated. Every morning huge greyish columns of men undulated over the sandy soil, and were drawn up in long lines. An officer on horseback shouted orders through a megaphone. Nothing much happened, and they raggedly undulated back again. Yet they drew nearer to the mysterious “line.” They were given large jack-knives on lanyards. They were given gas masks and steel helmets. They were given service rifles and bayonets.

The gas masks were still the old flannel diving bell variety soaked in chemicals. They had a sharp, acrid, inhuman taste, and if worn too long had been known to produce skin eruptions. The drafts were given constant gas drill, and had to pass five minutes in a gas chamber, containing a concentration of the old chlorine gas sufficient to kill in five seconds. One man in Winterbourne’s lot lost his head and tried to tear off his mask. The instructor leapt at him, shouting curses through his own mask, and with the help of two of the men held him until the doors were opened. Winterbourne noticed that the gas had tarnished his bright brass buttons and the metal on his equipment. Their clothes reeked of the gas for a couple of hours.

They carefully cleaned the long steel bayonets, and examined the short wood-enclosed rifles. Winterbourne’s had a long groove cut by a bullet on the butt, and the bolt showed signs of considerable rust—obviously a rifle picked up on the battle-field and re-conditioned. Winterbourne wondered who was the man from whom he inherited it, and who would inherit it from him.

The days and nights grew colder and colder. Morning and evening rose and sank in blood-red mists, and at noon the sun was a cold bloody smear in a misty sky. Ice formed on the dykes, and the water taps froze. It became more and more difficult to wash, and shaving and washing in the ice-cold water became an agony. Their skins chapped as the light north wind breathed sharper and sharper cold. There appeared to be no baths, and they could not remove their clothes at night. To sleep, they took off their boots, wrapped themselves in an overcoat and blanket and shivered asleep, huddling together like sheep in a snowstorm. Most of them caught colds and began to cough; one man of the draft was taken to hospital with pleurisy.

And still day after day passed, and they were not sent to their units. Monotony, depression, boredom. By four it was dark, and there was nothing to do until dawn. The canteens and estaminets were thronged. Winterbourne luckily discovered that the pickets could be bribed, and several evenings went into Calais to dine. He bought a couple of French books and tried to read—in vain. He found he was unable to concentrate his mind, and fell into a deeper depression. There were few parades, and he had plenty of time for brooding.

They passed Christmas Day at the Base. The English newspapers, which they easily obtained a day or two late, were filled with glowing accounts of the efforts and expense made to give the troops a real hearty Christmas dinner. The men had looked forward to this. They ate their meals in huts which were decorated with holly for the occasion. The Christmas dinner turned out to be stewed bully beef and about two square inches of cold Christmas pudding per man. The other men in Winterbourne’s tent were furious. Their perpetual grumbling annoyed him, and he attacked them:

“Why fuss so much over a little charity? Why let them salve their consciences so easily? In any case, they probably meant well. Can’t you see that drafts at the Base are nobody’s children? The stuff’s gone to the men in the line, who deserve it far more than we do. We haven’t done anything yet. Or it’s been embezzled. Anyway what does it matter? You didn’t join the army for a bit of pudding and a Christmas cracker, did you?”

They were silent, unable to understand his contempt. Of course, he was unjust. They were simply grown children, angry at being defrauded of a promised treat. They could not understand his deeper rage. Any more than they could have understood his emotion each night when “Last Post” was blown. The bugler was an artist and produced the most wonderful effect of melancholy as he blew the call, which in the Army serves for sleep and death, over the immense silent camp. Forty thousand men lying down to sleep—and in six months how many would be alive? The bugler seemed to know it, and prolonged the shrill melancholy notes—“Last post! Last post!”—with an extraordinary effect of pathos. “Last post! Last post!” Winterbourne listened for it each night. Sometimes the melancholy was almost soothing, sometimes it was intolerable. He wrote to Elizabeth and Fanny about the bugler, as well as about the leave men he had seen on the boat. They felt he was getting hopelessly sentimental:

“Un peu gaga?” Elizabeth suggested.

Fanny shrugged her shoulders.

* * * * *

Two days after Christmas their orders came. They were taking off their equipment after morning parade when the Orderly Corporal pushed his head through the tent flap:

“You’ve clicked!”

“What? How? What y’ mean?” said several voices.

“Goin’ up the line. Parade at one-thirty ready to move off immediate. Over you go, an’ the best of luck!”

“What part of the line?”

“Dunno, you’ll find that when y’ get there.”

“What unit?”

“Dunno. Some o’ you’s clicked for a Pioneer Batt.”

“What’s that?”

“Muckin well find out. Don’t f’get I warned yer for p’rade.”

And he was off to the next tent. The men began talking excitedly, “wondering” this and “wondering” that futilely as usual. Winterbourne walked away from the tent lines, and stood looking over the desolate winter landscape. Half a mile away the tent lines of another huge camp began. Army lorries lumbered along a flat straight road in the distance. It was beginning to snow from a hard grey sky. He wondered vaguely how you slept in the line when there was snow. His breath formed little clouds of vapour in the freezing air. He pulled his muffler closer round his neck, and stamped on the ground to warm his icy feet. He felt as if his faculties were slowly running down, as if his whole mental power were concentrated upon mere physical endurance, a dull keeping alive. Time, like a torture, seemed infinitely prolonged. It seemed years since he left England, years of discomfort and depression and boredom. If the mere “cushy” beginning were like that, how endure the months, perhaps years of war to come?

He experienced a rapid fall of spirits to a depth of depression he had never before experienced. Hitherto, mere young vitality had buoyed him up, the _élan_ of his former life had carried him along through the days. In spite of his rages and his worryings and the complications and boredoms, he had really remained hopeful. He had wanted to go on living, because he had always unconsciously believed that life was good. Now something within him was just beginning to give way, now for the first time the last faint hues of the lovely iris of youth faded, and in horror he faced the grey realities. He was surprised and a little alarmed at his own listlessness and despair. He felt like a sheet of paper, dropping in jerks and waverings through grey air into an abyss.

The dinner bugle call sounded. He turned mechanically and joined the men thronging towards the eating huts. The snow was falling faster, and the men stamped their feet as they waited for the doors to open, cursing the cooks’ delay. There was the usual animal stampede for the best platefuls when the door opened. Winterbourne stood aside and let them struggle. The expressions on their faces were not pretty. He was practically the last in, and did not fare well. He ate the stewed bully, hunk of bread and soap-like cheese, with a sort of dog gratitude for the warmth, which was humiliating. He scarcely even resented the humiliation.

* * * * *

The train taking them to rail-head crawled interminably through a frozen landscape thinly sprinkled with snow. The light was beginning to wane. The skeleton outlines of dwarf trees, twisted by the wind, loomed faintly past the window. It was bitterly cold in the unwarmed third-class French carriage; one of the windows was smashed, and the bitter air and snow swept in. The men sat in silence, wrapped in their great-coats and stamping their feet rhythmically on the floor in vain efforts to keep warm. Winterbourne was cold to the knees, and yet felt feverish. His cough had grown worse, and he realized he had a temperature. He felt dirtily uncomfortable, because he had not taken his clothes off for days. The water at the camp had all frozen, and it had been impossible to get a bath.

Darkness slowly intensified. Slowly, more slowly the train crawled along. Winterbourne was in that section of the draft going to the Pioneer Battalion. He had asked the Sergeant what that meant:

“Oh, it’s cushy, much better than the ordinary infantry.”

“What do they do?”

“Workin’ parties in no man’s land,” said the Sergeant with a grin, “an’ go over the top when there’s a show.”

The train slightly increased its speed as they passed through a large junction. Somebody said it was St. Omer, somebody else said St. Pol, some one else suggested Béthune. They did not know where they were, or where they were going. About two miles outside the junction the train came to a stop. Winterbourne peered into the thick darkness. Nothing. He leaned out the glassless window and heard only the hissing steam from the stationary train, saw only the faint glow of the furnace. Suddenly, far away in front and to the left, a quick flash of light pierced the blackness and Winterbourne heard a faint boom. The guns! He waited, straining eyes and ears, in the freezing darkness. Silence. Then again—flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. Very distant, very faint, but unmistakable. The guns. They must be getting near the line.

Once again the train started and crawled interminably once more. For about half an hour they passed through a series of deep cuttings. Then, from the right this time, came a much nearer and brighter flash, followed almost at once by a deep boom audible above the noise of the train. The other men heard it this time:

“The guns!”

The train crept on stealthily for another couple of minutes through the gloom. The men were all crowded round the window. Flash. Boom. Another two minutes. Flash. Boom.

Three-quarters of an hour later they detrained at rail-head in complete darkness.

[ V ]

Winterbourne had an easy initiation into trench warfare. The cold was so intense that the troops on both sides were chiefly occupied in having pneumonia and trying to keep warm. He found himself in a quiet sector which had been fought over by the French in 1914 and had been the scene of a fierce and prolonged battle in 1915 after the British took over the sector. During 1916, when the main fighting shifted to the Somme, the sector had settled down to ordinary trench warfare. Trench raids had not then been much developed, but constant local attacks were made on battalion or brigade fronts. A little later the sector afterwards atoned for this calm.

To Winterbourne, as to so many others, the time element was of extreme importance during the war years. The hour goddesses who had danced along so gaily before and have fled from us since with such mocking swiftness, then paced by in a slow monotonous file as if intolerably burdened. People at a distance thought of the fighting as heroic and exciting, in terms of cheering bayonet charges or little knots of determined men holding out to the last Lewis Gun. That is rather like counting life by its champagne suppers, and forgetting all the rest. The qualities needed were determination and endurance, inhuman endurance. It would be much more practical to fight modern wars with mechanical robots than with men. But then, men are cheaper, although in a long war the initial outlay on the robots might be compensated by the fact that the quality of the men deteriorates, while they cost more in upkeep. But that is a question for the war departments. From the point of view of efficiency in war, the trouble is that men have feelings; to attain the perfect soldier, we must eliminate feelings. To the human robots of the last war, time seemed indefinitely and most unpleasantly prolonged. The dimension then measured as a “day” in its apparent duration approached what we now call a “month.” And the long series of violent stale-mates on the western front made any decision seem impossible. In 1916 it looked as if no line could be broken, because so long as enough new troops were hurried to threatened points the attacker was bound to be held up; and the supplies of hew troops seemed endless. It became a matter of which side could wear down the other’s man power and moral endurance. So there also was the interminable. The only alternatives seemed an indefinite prolongation of misery, or death or mutilation, or collapse of some sort. Even a wound was a doubtful blessing, a mere holiday, for wounded men had to be returned again and again to the line.

* * * * *

For the first six or eight “weeks,” Winterbourne, like all his companions, was occupied in fighting the cold. The Pioneer Company to which he was attached were digging a sap out into No Man’s Land and making trench mortar emplacements just behind the front line. They worked on these most of the night, and slept during the day. But the ground was frozen so hard that progress was tediously slow.

The Company was billeted in the ruins of a village behind the Reserve trenches, over a mile from the front line. The landscape was flat, almost treeless except for a few shell-blasted stumps, and covered with snow frozen hard. Every building in sight had been smashed, in many cases almost level with the ground. It was a mining country with great queer hills of slag and strange pit-head machinery of steel, reduced by shell-fire to huge masses of twisted rusting metal. They were in a salient, with the half-destroyed, evacuated town of M—— in the elbow-crook on the extreme right. The village churchyard was filled with graves of French soldiers; there were graves inside any of the houses which had no cellars, and graves flourished over the bare landscape. In all directions were crosses, little wooden crosses, in ones and twos and threes, emerging blackly from the frozen snow. Some were already askew; one just outside the ruined village had been snapped short by a shell-burst. The dead men’s caps, mouldering and falling to pieces, were hooked on to the tops of the crosses—the grey German round cap, the French blue and red kepi, the English khaki. There were also two large British cemeteries in sight—rectangular plantations of wooden crosses. It was like living in the graveyard of the world—dead trees, dead houses, dead mines, dead villages, dead men. Only the long steel guns and the transport wagons seemed alive. There were no civilians, but one of the mines was still worked about a mile and a half further from the line.

Behind Winterbourne’s billet were hidden two large howitzers. They fired with a reverberating crash which shook the ruined houses, and the diminishing scream of the departing shells was strangely melancholy in the frost-silent air. The Germans rarely returned the fire—they were saving their ammunition. Occasionally a shell screamed over and crashed sharply among the ruins; the huge detonation spouted up black earth or rattling bricks and tiles. Fragments of the burst shell case hummed through the air.

But it was the cold that mattered. In his efforts to defend himself against it, Winterbourne, like the other men, was strangely and wonderfully garbed. Round his belly, next the skin, he wore a flannel belt. Over that a thick woollen vest, grey flannel shirt, knitted cardigan jacket, long woollen under-pants and thick socks. Over that, service jacket, trousers, puttees and boots; then a sheepskin coat, two mufflers round his neck, two pairs of woollen gloves and over them trench gloves. In addition came equipment, box respirator on the chest, steel helmet, rifle and bayonet. The only clothes he took off at night were his boots. With his legs wrapped in a great-coat, his body in a grey blanket, a groundsheet underneath, pack for pillow, and a dixie of hot tea and rum inside him, he just got warm enough to fall asleep when very tired.

Through the broken roof of his billet, Winterbourne could see the frosty glitter of the stars and the white rime. In the morning when he awoke, he found his breath frozen on the pillow. In the line his short moustache formed icicles. The boots beside him froze hard, and it was agony to struggle into them. The bread in his haversack froze greyly; and the taste of frozen bread is horrid. Little spikes of ice formed in the cheese. The tins of jam froze and had to be thawed before they could be eaten. The bully beef froze in the tins and came out like chunks of reddish ice. Washing was a torment. They had three tubs of water between about forty of them each day. With this they shaved and washed—about ten or fifteen to a tub. Since Winterbourne was a late-comer to the battalion, he had to wait until the others had finished. The water was cold and utterly filthy. He plunged his dirty hands into it with disgust, and shut his eyes when he washed his face. This humiliation, too, he accepted.

* * * * *

He always remembered his first night in the line. They paraded in the ruined village street about four o’clock. The air seemed crackling with frost, and the now familiar bloody smear of red sunset was dying away in the southwest. The men were muffled up to the ears, and looked grotesquely bulky in their sheep- or goat-skin coats, with the hump of box respirators on their chests. Most of them had sacking covers on their steel helmets to prevent reflection, and sacks tied round their legs for warmth. The muffled officer came shivering from his billet, as the men stamped their feet on the hard frost-bound road. They drew picks and shovels from a dump, and filed silently through the ruined street behind the officer. Their bayonets were silhouetted against the cold sky. The man in front of Winterbourne turned abruptly left into a ruined house. Winterbourne followed, descended four rough steps and found himself in a trench. A notice said:

HINTON ALLEY ☞ To the Front Line

To be out of the piercing cold wind in the shelter of walls of earth was an immediate relief. Overhead shone the beautiful ironic stars.

A field gun behind them started to crash out shells. Winterbourne listened to the long-drawn wail as they sped away and finally crashed faintly in the distance. He followed the man ahead of him blindly. Word kept coming down: “Hole here, look out.” “Wire overhead.” “Mind your head—bridge.” He passed the messages on, after tripping in the holes, catching his bayonet in the field telephone wires, and knocking his helmet on the low bridge. They passed the Reserve line, then the Support, with the motionless sentries on the fire-step, and the peculiar smell of burnt wood and foul air coming from the dug-outs. A minute later came the sharp message: “Stop talking—don’t clink your shovels.” They were now only a few hundred yards from the German Front line. A few guns were firing in a desultory way. A shell crashed outside the parapet about five yards from Winterbourne’s head. It was only a whizz-bang, but to his unpractised ears it sounded like a heavy. The shells came in fours—crump, Crump, _crump_, CRRUMP—the Boche was bracketing. Every minute or so came a sharp “ping”—fixed rifles firing at a latrine or an unprotected piece of trench. The duck-boards were more broken. Winterbourne stumbled over an unexploded shell, then had to clamber over a heap of earth where the side of the trench had been smashed in, a few minutes earlier. The trench made another sharp turn, and he saw the bayonet and helmet of a sentry silhouetted against the sky. They were in the front line.

They turned sharp left. To their right were the fire-steps, with a sentry about every fifty yards. In between came traverses and dug-out entrances, with their rolled-up blanket gas-curtains. Winterbourne peered down them—there was a faint glow of light, a distant mutter of talk, and a heavy stench of wood smoke and foul air. The man in front stopped and turned to Winterbourne:

“Halt—password to-night’s ‘Lantern.’” Winterbourne halted, and passed the message on. They waited. He was standing almost immediately behind a sentry, and got on the fire-step beside the man to take his first look at No Man’s Land.

“’Oo are you?” asked the sentry in low tones.

“Pioneers.”

“Got a bit o’ candle to give us, chum?”

“Awfully, sorry, chum, I haven’t.”

“Them muckin R.E.’s gets ’em all.”

“I’ve got a packet of chocolate, if you’d like it.”

“Ah. Thanks, chum.”

The sentry broke a bit of chocolate and began to munch.

“Muckin cold up here, it is. Me feet’s fair froze. Muckin dreary, too. I can ’ear ole Fritz coughin’ over there in ’is listenin’ post—don’t ’arf sound ’ollow. Listen.”

Winterbourne listened, and heard a dull hollow sound of coughing.

“Fritz’s sentry,” whispered the men. “Pore ole bugger—needs some liquorice.”

“Move on,” came the word from the man in front. Winterbourne jumped down from the fire-step and passed on the word.

“Good-night, chum,” said the sentry.

“Good-night, chum.”

* * * * *

Winterbourne was put on the party digging the sap out into No Man’s Land. The officer stopped him as he was entering the sap.

“You’re one of the new draft, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The other men filed into the sap. The officer spoke in low tones:

“You can take sentry for the first hour. Come along, and don’t stand up.”

The young crescent moon had risen and poured down cold faint light. Every now and then a Verey light was fired from the German or English lines, brilliantly illuminating the desolate landscape of torn irregular wire and jagged shell-holes. They climbed over the parapet and crawled over the broken ground past the end of the sap. The officer made for a shell-hole just inside the English wire, and Winterbourne followed him.

“Lie here,” whispered the officer, “and keep a sharp lookout for German patrols. Fire if you see them and give the alarm. There’s a patrol of our own out on the right, so make sure before you fire. There’s a couple of bombs somewhere in the shell-hole. You’ll be relieved in an hour.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The officer crawled away, and Winterbourne remained alone in No Man’s Land, about twenty-five yards in front of the British line. He could hear the soft dull thuds of picks and shovels from the men working the sap and a very faint murmur as they talked in whispers. A Verey light hissed up from the English lines, and he strained his eyes for the possible enemy patrol. In the brief light he saw nothing but the irregular masses of German wire, the broken line of their parapet, shell-holes and débris, and the large stump of a dead tree. Just as the bright magnesium turned in its luminous parabola, a hidden machine-gun, not thirty yards from Winterbourne, went off with a loud crackle of bullets like the engine of a motor-bicycle. He started, and nearly pulled the trigger of his rifle. Then silence. A British sentry coughed with a deep hacking sound; then from the distance came the hollow coughing of a German sentry. Eerie sounds in the pallid moonlight. “Ping” went a sniper’s rifle. It was horribly cold. Winterbourne was shivering, partly from cold, partly from excitement.

Interminable minutes passed. He grew colder and colder. Occasionally a few shells from one side or the other went wailing overhead and crashed somewhere in the back areas. About four hundred yards away to his left began a series of loud shattering detonations. He strained his eyes, and could just see the flash of the explosion and the dark column of smoke and débris. These were German trench mortars, the dreaded “minnies,” although he did not know it.

Nothing different happened until about three-quarters of an hour had passed. Winterbourne got colder and colder, felt he had been out there at least three hours, and thought he must have been forgotten. He shivered with cold. Suddenly, he thought he saw something move to his right, just outside the wire. He gazed intently, all tense and alert. Yes, a dark something was moving. It stopped, and seemed to vanish. Then near it another dark figure moved and then a third. It was a patrol, making for the gap in the wire in front of Winterbourne. Were they Germans or British? He pointed his rifle towards them, got the bombs ready, and waited. They came nearer and nearer. Just before they got to the wire, Winterbourne challenged in a loud whisper:

“Halt, who are you?”

All three figures instantly disappeared.

“Halt, who are you?”

“Friend,” came a low answer.

“Give the word or I fire.”

“Lantern.”

“All right.”

One of the men crawled through the wire to Winterbourne, followed by the other two. They wore balaclava helmets, and carried revolvers.

“Are you the patrol?” whispered Winterbourne.

“Who the muckin hell d’you think we are? Father Christmas? What are you doin’ out here?”

“Pioneers digging a sap about fifteen yards behind.”

“Are you Pioneers?”

“Yes.”

“Got a bit o’ candle, chum?”

“Sorry, I haven’t, we don’t get them issued.”

The patrol crawled off, and Winterbourne heard an alarmed challenge from the men working in the sap, and the word “Lantern.” A Verey light went up from the German lines just as the patrol were crawling over the parapet. A German sentry fired his rifle and a machine-gun started up. The patrol dropped hastily into the trench. The machine-gun bullets whistled cruelly past Winterbourne’s head—Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. He crouched down in the hole. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Then silence. He lifted his head, and continued to watch. For two or three minutes there was complete silence. The men in the sap seemed to have knocked off work, and made no sound. Winterbourne listened intently. No sound. It was the most ghostly, desolate, deathly silence he had ever experienced. He had never imagined that death could be so deathly. The feeling of annihilation, of the end of existence, of a dead planet of the dead arrested in a dead time and space, penetrated his flesh along with the cold. He shuddered. So frozen, so desolate, so dead a world—everything smashed and lying inertly broken. Then “crack-ping” went a sniper’s rifle, and a battery of field-guns opened out with salvos about half a mile to his right. The machine-guns began again. The noise was a relief after that ghastly dead silence.

At last the N.C.O. came crawling out from the sap with another man to relieve him. A Verey light shot up from the German line in their direction, just as the two men reached him. All three crouched motionless, as the accurate German machine-gun fire swept the British trench parapet—zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, the flights of bullets went over them. Winterbourne saw a strand of wire just in front of him suddenly flip up in the air where a low bullet had struck it. Quite near enough—not six inches above his head.

They crawled back to the sap, and Winterbourne tumbled in. He found himself face to face with the platoon officer, Lieutenant Evans. Winterbourne was shivering uncontrollably; he felt utterly chilled. His whole body was numb, his hands stiff, his legs one ache of cold from the knees down. He realized the cogency of the Adjutant’s farewell hint about looking after feet, and decided to drop his indifference to goose grease and neat’s-foot oil.

“Cold?” asked the officer.

“It’s bitterly cold out there, Sir,” said Winterbourne through chattering teeth.

“Here, take a drink of this,” and Evans held out a small flask.

Winterbourne took the flask in his cold-shaken hand. It chinked roughly against his teeth as he took a gulp of the terrifically potent Army rum. The strong liquor half choked him, burned his throat, and made his eyes water. Almost immediately, he felt the deadly chill beginning to lessen. But he still shivered.

“Good Lord, man, you’re frozen,” said Evans. “I thought it was colder than ever to-night. It’s no weather for lying in No Man’s Land. Corporal, you’ll have to change that sentry every half hour—an hour’s too long in this frost.”

“Very good, Sir.”

“Have some more rum?” asked Evans.

“No, thanks, Sir,” replied Winterbourne, “I’m quite all right now. I can warm up with some digging.”

“No, get your rifle and come with me.”

Evans started off briskly down the trench to visit the other working parties. About a hundred yards from the sap he climbed out of the trench over the parados; Winterbourne scrambled after, more impeded by his chilled limbs, his rifle and heavier equipment. Evans gave him a hand up. They walked about another hundred yards over the top, and then reached the place where several parties were digging trench mortar emplacements. The N.C.O. saw them coming and climbed out of one of the holes to meet them.

“Getting on all right, Sergeant?”

“Ground’s very hard, Sir.”

“I know, but—”

Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, zwiss came a rush of bullets, following the rapid tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of a machine-gun. The Sergeant ducked double. Evans remained calmly standing. Seeing his unconcern, Winterbourne also remained upright.

“I know the ground’s hard,” said Evans, “but those emplacements are urgently needed. Headquarters were at us again to-day about them. I’ll see how you’re getting on.”

The Sergeant hastily scuttled into one of the deep emplacements, followed in a more leisurely way by the officer. Winterbourne remained standing on top, and listened to Evans as he urged the men to get a move on. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, very close this time. Winterbourne felt a slight creep in his spine, but since Evans had not moved before, he decided that the right thing was to stand still. Evans visited each of the four emplacements, and then made straight for the front line. He paused at the parados.

“We’re pretty close to the Boche front line here. He’s got a machine-gun post about a hundred and fifty yards over there.”

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss.

“Look! Over there.”

Winterbourne just caught a glimpse of the quick flashes.

“Damn!” said Evans, “I forgot to bring my prismatic compass to-night. We might have taken a bearing on them, and got the artillery to turf them out.”

He jumped carelessly into the trench, and Winterbourne dutifully followed. About fifty yards farther on, he stopped.

“I see from your pay-book that you’re an artist in civil life.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Paint pictures, and draw?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Why don’t you apply for a draughtsman’s job at Division? They need them.”

“Well, Sir, I don’t particularly covet a hero’s grave, but I feel very strongly I ought to take my chance in the line along with the rest.”

“Ah. Of course. Are you a pretty good walker?”

“I used to go on walking tours in peace time, Sir.”

“Well, there’s an order that every officer is to have a runner. Would you like the job of Platoon Runner? You’d have to accompany me, and you’re supposed to take my last dying orders! You’d have to learn the lie of the trenches, so as to act as guide; take my orders to N.C.O.’s; know enough about what’s going on to help them if I’m knocked out, and carry messages. It’s perhaps a bit more dangerous than the ordinary work, and you may have to turn out at odd hours, but it’ll get you off a certain amount of digging.”

“I’d like it very much, Sir.”

“All right, I’ll speak to the Major about it.”

“It’s very good of you, Sir.”

“Can you find your way back to the sap? It’s about two hundred yards along this trench.”

“I’m sure I can, Sir.”

“All right. Go back and report to the Corporal, and carry on.”

“Very good, Sir.”

“You haven’t forgotten the pass-word?”

“No, Sir, ‘Lantern.’”

* * * * *

About thirty yards along the trench, there was a rattle of equipment, and Winterbourne found a bayonet about two feet from his chest. It was a gas-sentry outside Company H.Q. Dugout.

“Halt! Who are yer?”

“Lantern.”

The sentry languidly lowered his rifle.

“Muckin cold to-night, mate.”

“Bloody cold.”

“What are you, Bedfords or Essex?”

“No, Pioneers.”

“Got a bit of candle to give us, mate, it’s muckin dark in them dugouts.”

“Very sorry, chum, I haven’t.”

Rather trying this constant demand for candle-ends from the Pioneers, who were popularly supposed by the infantry to receive immense “issues” of candles. But without candles the dugouts were merely black holes, even in the daytime, if they were any depth. They were deep on this front, since the line was a captured German trench reorganized. Hence the dugouts faced the enemy, instead of being turned away from them.

“Oh, all right, good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Winterbourne returned to the sap, and did two more half-hour turns as sentry, and for the rest of the time picked, or shovelled the hard clods of earth into sandbags. The sandbags were then carried back to the front line and piled there to raise the parapet. It was a slow business. The sap itself was camouflaged to avoid observation. Winterbourne hadn’t the slightest idea what its object was. He was very weary and sleepy when they finally knocked off work about one in the morning. An eight-hour shift, exclusive of time taken in getting to and from the work. The men filed wearily along the trench, rifles slung on the left shoulder, picks and shovels carried on the right. Winterbourne stumbled along half-asleep with the cold and the fatigue of unaccustomed labour. He felt he didn’t mind how dangerous it was—if it was dangerous—to be a runner, provided he got some change from the dreariness of digging, and filling and carrying sandbags.

After they passed the Support Line, the hitherto silent men began to talk occasionally. At Reserve they got permission to smoke. Each grabbed in his pockets for a fag, and lighted it as he stumbled along the uneven duckboards. After what seemed an endless journey to Winterbourne they reached the four steps, climbed up, and emerged into the now familiar ruined street. It was silent and rather ghostly in the very pale light of the new moon. They dumped their picks and shovels, went to the cook to draw their ration of hot tea, which was served from a large black dixie and tasted unpleasantly of stew. They filed past the officer who gave each of them a rum ration.

Winterbourne drank some of the tea in his billet, then took off his boots, wrapped himself up, and drank the rest. Some real warmth flushed into his chilled body. He was angry with himself for being so tired, after a cushy night on a cushy front. He wondered what Elizabeth and Fanny would say if they saw his animal gratitude for tea and rum. Fanny? Elizabeth? They had receded far from him, not so far as all the other people he knew, who had receded to several light years, but very far. “Elizabeth” and “Fanny” were now memories and names at the foot of sympathetic but rather remote letters. Drowsiness came rapidly upon him, and he fell asleep as he was thinking of the curious “zwiss, zwiss,” made by machine-gun bullets passing overhead. He did not hear the two howitzers when they fired a dozen rounds before dawn.

[ VI ]

Except for the episode with the officer, this specimen night may stand as a type of Winterbourne’s life in the next eight or ten days. They went up the line at dusk; they were shot at, worked, and shivered with cold: went down the line, slept, tried to clean themselves, and paraded again. Four or five times they passed corpses being carried down the trenches as they went up. There was, of course, nothing to report on the western front.

Then, just as the monotony was becoming almost as intolerable as drilling to the home-service R.S.M.’s “Stand still there, stand _steady!_” they had a night off, and were transferred to the day shift. But this was even more tedious. They paraded soon after dawn, and worked in Hinton Alley, about two hundred yards from the Front Line. Their job was to hack up the frozen mud—which was about as malleable as marble—extricate the worn duck-boards, dig “sump-holes,” and relay new duck boards. A job which in moist weather might have occupied two men for half an hour, in that frost occupied four men all day.

A Lieutenant-General came along while Winterbourne was laboriously jarring his wrists, trying to hack up the marble-like mud.

“Well, and what are you doing, my man?”

“Replacing duck-boards, Sir,” said Winterbourne, bringing his pick smartly to his side, and standing to attention, toes at an angle of forty-five degrees.

“Well, get on with it, my man, get on with it.”

Vive L’Empereur.

* * * * *

Diversions were few, but existed. There were, for instance, the rats. Winterbourne had been too much absorbed by other new experiences to pay much attention to them at first. And during the day they kept rather out of sight. One evening, just about sunset, as they were returning down Hinton Alley, there was a block in the trench. Winterbourne happened to be just at the corner of the Support line, with its damaged, revetted traverses, and piles of sandbags on the parapet. The Germans were sending up some rather fancy signal rockets from their Front line, and he was vaguely wondering what they meant, when a huge rat darted or rather scrambled impudently just past his head. Then he noticed that a legion of the fattest and longest rats he had ever seen were popping in and out the crevices between the sand-bags. As far as he could see down the trench in the dusk they were swarming over parapet and parados. Such well-fed rats! He shuddered, thinking of what they had probably fed upon.

In a very short time he had become perfectly accustomed to the very mild artillery fire, sniping and machine-gunning. No casualties had occurred in his own company, and he began to think that the dangers of the war had been exaggerated, while its physical discomforts and tedium had been greatly underestimated. The intense frost prevented his shaking off the heavy cold he had caught at Calais, and at the same time had given him a chill on the liver. The same thing had happened to half the men in the company, whether new-comers or old stagers; and all suffered from diarrhœa due to the cold. There was thus the added diversion of frequent visits to the latrine. Those in the line were primitive affairs of a couple of biscuit boxes and buckets, interesting from the fact that the Germans had fixed rifles trained on most of them and might get you if you happened to stand up inopportunely. If you had any sense you waited until the bullet ping-ed over, and then calmly walked out: for lack of which elementary precaution somebody occasionally was popped off. The Pioneers’ latrine, just behind their billet, was a more elaborate six-seater (without separate compartments) built over a deep trench and surrounded with sacking on posts. One of the posts had been damaged by a shell, and there were numerous rents in the sacking from shell splinters. Here Winterbourne was forced to spend a larger portion of his spare time than was pleasant in cold weather. One day when he entered he found another occupant, an artilleryman. This person was carefully examining his grey flannel shirt: and such portions of his body as were exposed to view were covered with small bloody blotches. Some horrid skin disease, Winterbourne surmised. He attended to his own urgent private affairs.

“Still terribly cold,” he ventured.

“Muckin cold,” said the artilleryman, continuing absorbedly the mysterious search in his shirt.

“Those are nasty skin eruptions you have.”

“It’s them muckin chats. Billet’s fair lousy with ’em.”

Chats? Lousy? Ah, of course, the artilleryman was lousy. So lousy that he had been bitten all over, and had scratched himself raw. Winterbourne felt uncomfortable. He detested the idea of vermin.

“How d’you get them? Can’t you get rid of them?”

“Get ’em? Everybody gets ’em. Ain’t you chatty? And there ain’t no gettin’ rid of ’em. The clothes they gives you at the baths is as chatty as those you ’ands in. Where there’s dug-outs and billets there’s chats, and where there’s chats, they cops yer.”

Winterbourne departed from the lousy artilleryman with a new pre-occupation in life—to remain one of the chatless as long as possible. It was not many weeks, however, before he too became resigned to the louse as an inevitable war comrade.

* * * * *

Like a good many recruits when first in the line he was rather inclined to be foolhardy than timorous. When a shell exploded near the trench, he popped his head up to have a look at it; and listened to the machine-gun bullets swishing past with great interest. The older hands reproved him:

“Don’t be so muckin anxious to look at whizz-bangs. You’ll get a damn sight too many pretty soon. And don’t keep shovin’ yer ’ead over the top. _We_ don’t care a muck if ole Fritz gets yer, but if he sees yer he might put his artillery on _us_.”

Winterbourne rather haughtily decided they were timorous, an impression confirmed by the manner in which they instantly ducked and crouched when a shell came whistling towards them. So many shells exploded harmlessly that he wondered at their inefficiency. Late one afternoon the Germans began firing on Hinton Alley—little salvos of four whizz-bangs at a time. The men went on with their work, but a little apprehensively. Winterbourne clambered partly up the side of the trench and watched the shells bursting—crump, Crump, _Crump_, CRRUMP. The splinters hummed harmoniously through the air. Suddenly he heard a loud whizz, and zip-phut, a large piece of metal hurtled just past his head and half-buried itself in the hard chalk of the trench. More surprised than scared he jumped down and levered the metal up with his pick. It was a brass nose-cap, still warm from the heat of the explosion. He held it in his hand, gazing with curiosity at the German lettering. The other men jeered and scolded him in a friendly way. He felt they exaggerated—his nerves were still so much fresher than theirs.

That night, just after he had got down into kip, the night silence was abruptly broken by a discharge of artillery. Gun after gun, whose existence he had never suspected, opened out all round, and in half a minute fifty or sixty were in action. From the line came the long rattle of a dozen or more machine-guns, with the funny little pops of distant hand grenades. He got up and went to the door. Ruins interrupted a direct view, but he saw the flashes of the guns, a sort of glow over a short part of the front line, and Verey lights and rockets flying up continually. A Corporal came unconcernedly into the billet.

“What is it?” asked Winterbourne, “an attack?”

“Attack be jiggered. Identification raid, I reckon.”

The German artillery had now opened up, and a shell dropped in the village street. Winterbourne retired to his earth-floor. In about three-quarters of an hour the firing quieted down; only one German battery of five-nines kept dropping shells in and about the village. Winterbourne began to reflect that shell-fire in gross might be more deadly than the few odd retail discharges he had hitherto experienced.

Next morning, the Corporal’s diagnosis proved correct. As they went up Hinton Alley soon after dawn, they met a British Tommy escorting six lugubrious personages in field grey, whose faces were almost concealed in large white bandages swathed all round their heads.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Fritzes. Prisoners.”

“I wonder why they are all wounded in the head.”

“Koshed on the napper with trench clubs. I reckon they’ve got narsty ’eadaches, pore old barstards.”

* * * * *

About a week after that, they had a day off, and were warned to parade at five P.M. to begin another night shift. (Each platoon in turn did a week’s day shift and three weeks’ night-work.) The Sergeant turned to Winterbourne:

“And you’re to report at the Officer’s Mess fifteen minutes before p’rade.”

Winterbourne duly reported, wondering uneasily what breach of military discipline he had committed. He was met on the door-step by Evans, who was just coming out, all muffled up.

“Ah, there you are, Winterbourne. Major Thorpe says you may act as my runner, so hereafter you’ll parade here fifteen minutes earlier than the rest each night.”

“Very good, Sir.”

* * * * *

All this time Winterbourne was rather wretchedly ill, and remained so for weeks. He had a permanent cough and cold, and was weakened by the prolonged diarrhœa. Every night he felt feverish, passing rapidly from a cold shivering to a high temperature. On the day after his arrival in the line, he had “gone sick” to get something to relieve his hard cough. Major Thorpe had chosen to consider this as an attempt to evade duty, and had promptly insulted him. Whereupon Winterbourne had decided that so long as he could stand he would never “go sick” again. So he carried on. The stretcher-bearer in his platoon had a clinical thermometer. One night just before going up the line Winterbourne got the man to take his temperature. It was 102.

“You didn’t ought to go up the line like that, mate,” said the man, with a sort of coarse kindness Winterbourne liked, “I’ll tell the orfficer you ain’t fit for service, an’ make it all right with the M.O. to-morrer.”

Winterbourne laughed:

“That’s decent of you, but I shan’t go sick. I only wanted to see if I were imagining things.”

“You’re a bloody fool. You c’d get a cushy night in kip.”

It was a relief therefore to act as Evans’s runner. On the nights when Evans was on duty Winterbourne did not carry a pick and shovel, and did no manual labour. He simply followed Evans about on his rounds, and carried messages to the N.C.O.’s for him. It was undoubtedly cushy. Almost an officer’s job.

* * * * *

Winterbourne was brought into much closer intimacy with Evans, and had some opportunity to observe him. The officer was distinctly friendly, and they talked a good deal in the long hours of hanging about in the Front line. Evans brought sandwiches and a flask of rum with him, and invariably shared them with his runner; a kindness which touched Winterbourne profoundly. Usually about ten o’clock they sat on a fire-step under the frosty stars, and ate and talked. Occasionally a few shells would go whining overhead, or a burst of machine-gun fire would interrupt them. Their low voices sounded strangely muffled in the cold dead silence.

Evans was the usual English public school boy, amazingly ignorant, amazingly inhibited, and yet “decent” and good-humoured. He had a strength of character which enabled him to carry out what he had been taught was his duty to do. He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Geoffrey Farnol, Elinor Glynn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glynn, as too “advanced.” He didn’t care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian Ballets, but liked to “see a good show.” He thought “Chu Chin Chow” was the greatest play ever produced, and the Indian Love Lyrics the most beautiful songs in the world. He thought that Parisians lived by keeping brothels and spent most of their time in them. He thought that all Chinamen took opium, then got drunk, and ravished white slaves abducted from England. He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire. He rather disapproved of “Society,” which he considered “fast,” but he held that Englishmen should never mention the fastness of Society, since it might “lower our prestige” in the eyes of “all these messy foreigners.” He was ineradicably convinced of his superiority to the “lower classes,” but where that superiority lay, Winterbourne failed to discover. Evans was an “educated” pre-war Public Schoolboy, which means that he remembered half a dozen Latin tags, could mumble a few ungrammatical phrases in French, knew a little of the history of England, and had a “correct” accent. He had been taught to respect all women as if they were his mother, would therefore have fallen an easy prey to the first tart who came along and probably have married her. He was a good runner, had played at stand-off half for his school and won his colours at cricket. He could play fives, squash rackets, golf, tennis, water-polo, bridge, and vingt-et-un, which he called “pontoon.” He disapproved of baccarat, roulette and_petits chevaux_, but always went in for the Derby sweepstake. He could ride a horse, drive a motor-car, and regretted that he had been rejected by the Flying Corps.

He had no doubts whatever about the War. What England did must be right, and England had declared war on Germany. Therefore, Germany must be wrong. Evans propounded this somewhat primitive argument to Winterbourne with a condescending air, as if he were imparting some irrefutable piece of knowledge to a regrettably ignorant inferior. Of course, after ten minutes’ conversation with Evans, Winterbourne saw the kind of man he was and realized that he must continue to dissimulate with him as with every one else in the Army. However, he could not resist the temptation to bewilder him a little sometimes. It was quite impossible to do anything more. Evans possessed that British rhinoceros equipment of mingled ignorance, self-confidence and complacency which is triple-armed against all the shafts of the mind. And yet Winterbourne could not help liking the man. He was exasperatingly stupid, but he was honest, he was kindly, he was conscientious, he could obey orders and command obedience in others, he took pains to look after his men. He could be implicitly relied upon to lead a hopeless attack and to maintain a desperate defence to the very end. There were thousands and tens of thousands like him.

* * * * *

Winterbourne noticed that when they were in the line at night, Evans made a point of walking over the top, instead of in the trenches, even when it was plainly far more inconvenient and slower to do so, on account of the wire and shell-holes and other obstacles. At the time, he paid little attention to this, thinking either that it was expected of an officer, or that Evans did it to encourage the men. Evans rather deliberately exposed himself, and always maintained complete calm. If the two men were exposed to shells or machine-gun fire, Evans walked more slowly, spoke more deliberately, seemed intentionally to linger. It was not until months afterward that Winterbourne suddenly realized from his own experience that Evans had been reassuring, not his men, but himself. He had been deliberately trying to prove to himself that he did not mind being under fire.

Any man who spent six months in the line (which almost inevitably meant taking part in a big battle) and then claimed that he had never felt fear, never received any shock to his nerves, never had his heart thumping and his throat dry with apprehension, was either super-human, subnormal or a liar. The newest troops were nearly always the least affected. They were not braver, they were merely fresher. There were very few—were there any?—who could resist week after week, month after month of the physical and mental strain. It is absurd to talk about men being brave or cowards. There were greater or less degrees of sensibility, more or less self-control. The longer the strain on the finer sensibility the greater the self-control needed. But this continual neurosis steadily became worse and required a greater effort of repression.

Winterbourne at this time was in the state when danger—and that was slight in these first weeks—was almost entirely a matter of curiosity, rather stimulating than otherwise. Evans, on the other hand, had been in two big battles, had spent eleven months in the line, and had reached the stage when conscious self-control was needed. When a shell exploded near them, both men appeared equally unmoved. Winterbourne was really so, because he was fresh, and had no months of war neurosis to control. Evans only appeared so, because he was awkwardly and with shame struggling to control a completely subconscious reflex action of terror. He thought it was his “fault,” that he was “getting windy,” and was desperately ashamed in consequence. And that, of course, made him worse. Winterbourne, on the other hand, was obviously a man who would develop the neurosis rapidly. He had a far more delicate sensibility. He had already reached a state of acute “worry” over Fanny and Elizabeth and the War and his own relation to it. And yet his pride would compel him to urge himself far beyond the point where another man would merely have collapsed. He endured a triple strain—that of his personal life, that of exasperation with Army routine, and that of battle.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was through the implicit if unexpressed attitude of the women that Winterbourne also endured the strain of feeling a degradation to mind and body in the hardships he endured in common, after all, with millions of other men. It was a fact that his mind degenerated; slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. This could scarcely have been otherwise. Long hours of manual labour under strict discipline must inevitably degrade a man’s intelligence. Winterbourne found that he was less and less able to enjoy subtleties of beauty and anything intellectually abstruse. He came to want common amusements in place of the intense joy he had felt in beauty and thought. He watched his mind degenerating with horror, wondering if one day it would suddenly crumble away like the body of Mr. Valdemar. He was bitterly humiliated to find that he could neither concentrate nor achieve as he had done in the past. The _élan_ of his former life had carried him through a good many months of the Army, but after about two months in the line, he saw that intellectually he was slowly slipping backwards. Slipping backwards, too, in the years which should have been the most energetic and formative and creative of his whole life. He saw that even if he escaped the War he would be hopelessly handicapped in comparison with those who had not served and the new generation which would be on his heels. It was rather bitter. He had been forced to smash through obstacles and to triumph over handicaps enough already. These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow from which he could not possibly recover.

And he felt a degradation, a humiliation, in the dirt, the lice, the communal life in holes and ruins, the innumerable deprivations and hardships. He suffered at feeling that his body had become worthless, condemned to a sort of kept tramp’s standard of living, and ruthlessly treated as cannon-fodder. He suffered for other men too, that they should be condemned to this; but since it was the common fate of the men of his generation he determined he must endure it. His face lost its fineness and took on the mask of “a red-faced Tommy,” as he was politely told later by a genial American friend. His hands seemed permanently coarsened, his feet deformed by heavy army boots. His body, which had been unblemished when he joined, was already infested with lice, and his back began to break out in little boils—a thing which had never happened to him—either from impure drinking water or because the clothes issued from the baths were infected.

No doubt, it was the painter’s sense of plastic beauty which made him feel this as something so humiliating and degrading. How else account for the feelings of shame and horror he felt at an occurrence which most men would have promptly forgotten? He had been in the line about a month, and his diarrhœa had got steadily worse. One night, when accompanying Evans on his rounds, Winterbourne felt a physical necessity, and asked permission to go to a latrine. They were about two hundred yards away, and before Winterbourne got there the contents of his bowels were irresistibly evacuated in spite of his desperate efforts to control them. It was one of the coldest nights of that long bitter winter—the thermometer was below zero Fahrenheit. Winterbourne halted in horror and disgust with himself. What on earth was he to do? How return to Evans? He listened. It was one of the quietest nights he ever experienced in the line, hardly a shot fired. Nobody was coming along the trench. He rapidly undressed, shivering with cold, stripped off his under-pants, cleaned himself as well as he could, and hurled the soiled clothes into No Man’s Land. He dressed again, and rushed back to meet Evans, who asked him a little sharply why he had been so long about it. The discomfort passed; but the humiliation remained.

* * * * *

January slowly disappeared; they were halfway through February, and still the frost held. It was a dreary experience. Each day was practically the replica of that before and after—up the line, down the line, sleep, attempt to get a little clean in the morning, inspection parade, dinner, an hour or two to write letters, then parade again for the line. Towards the end of February, the welcome news came that they were going out of the line for four days’ rest. On the last night before they went out, Evans and Winterbourne were watching the men working when they heard a series of rapid sharp explosions. They looked over and could see the dull red flashes of bombs or small trench mortars bursting about three hundred yards away. Simultaneously they exclaimed:

“It’s on our sap!”

Evans jumped into the trench and rushed towards the sap, followed by Winterbourne, who tore the bolt-cover from his rifle and stuffed it in his pocket as he ran. They could hear the crash, crash, crash-crash, crash of the small mortars, which abruptly ceased when they were about forty yards short. Verey lights were shooting up in all directions, and the British machine-guns were rattling away. Evans dashed round a traverse and went plump into two of his own men who were staggering away from the sap, half-dazed and silly with the shock of explosions.

“What’s happened?”

They were incoherent, and Evans and Winterbourne rushed on to the sap. Dimming down his torch with his left hand, Evans peered in; and Winterbourne behind him saw two bodies splashed with blood. The head of one man was smashed into his steel helmet and lay a sticky mess of blood and hair half-severed from his body. The other man, the Corporal, was badly wounded but still groaning. Obviously, one of the mortars had dropped plump in the sap. Another discharge came crashing on either side. Evans shoved his haversack under the Corporal’s head, and shouted to make himself heard over the explosions:

“Get the stretcher-bearer, and send those windy buggers back here.”

“What about the sentry?” bawled Winterbourne.

“I’ll get him in. Off with you.”

Evans began to unbutton the Corporal’s tunic, to bind his wounds, as Winterbourne left. The man was bleeding badly. Three hundred yards to the stretcher-bearer and three hundred yards back. Winterbourne raced, knowing that a matter of seconds may save the life of a man with a severed artery. He was too late, however. The Corporal was dead when he and the stretcher-bearer rushed panting into the sap.

They got the sentry’s body later.

[ VII ]

Next day they marched back about four miles to another village, half-destroyed but still partly inhabited. For the first time in two months Winterbourne sheathed his bayonet. It seemed symbolical of the four days’ rest they were promised. Four days! An immense respite. The men were cheery, and sang all the war songs as they marched off in platoons—“Where are the boys of the village to-night?” “It’s a long, long trail a-winding,” “I’m so happy, oh, so happy, don’t you envy me?” “Pack all your troubles in your old kit-bag,” “If you’re going back to Blighty,” “I want to go home,” “Rolling home.” But not “Tipperary.” So far as Winterbourne knew, none of the troops in France ever sang “Tipperary.”

He had not slept well, haunted by the vision of the dead man’s smashed, bloody head, and the groaning Corporal. Evans looked a little pale. But they said nothing to each other. And after all, they were going on rest, four days’ rest. Winterbourne tried to join in the singing. Major Thorpe trotted past them on his horse. They marched to attention, and ceremonially saluted. That also seemed peaceful.

In the village they were billeted in large barns. A thaw had set in, so rapid that they started out on frozen ground and arrived in a village street deep in slushy mud. The nights were still cold, and old broken-down barns and earthen floors made chilly bedrooms. There seemed to be no water supply in the village, and they had to wash in thawing flood-pools, breaking the new thin ice with tingling fingers. But they went to the baths and changed their underclothes. The baths were in a shell-smashed brewery. Thirty or forty men stripped in one room and then went into another which had rows of iron pipes running across it, about eight feet from the ground. Small holes were punched in the pipes at intervals of about six feet. A man stood under each hole, and then a little trickle of warm water began to fall on his head and body. They had about five minutes to soap themselves and get clean. Winterbourne went back there alone the next day. By judicious bribing he managed to get an officer’s bath and a new set of underclothes. It was delicious to be clean and deloused again.

The four days passed very quickly. They paraded in the morning, did a little drill, played football or ran in the afternoons, and went to the estaminets in the evening. Winterbourne treated his section to beer, and drank half a bottle of Barsac himself. The men, all beer and spirit drinkers, despised the finer flavour of French wines and called them “vinegar.” After dark, they sneaked out and stole sandbags of “boulets”—coal-dust made into large pellets with tar—and burned them in a brazier to warm the chilly barn. Winterbourne protested against this thievery. But since the others went anyhow and he benefited by the theft, he thought he might as well share the crime too. True, it was French government property; and nobody minds stealing from governments. But still, he hated to be a thief. The men called it “scrounging.” Under pressure of necessity, every man in the line became a more or less unscrupulous scrounger.

On the third night Winterbourne “clicked unlucky.” He was on Gas and Fire Picket. They sat all night round the Company Field Kitchen and drank tea, while one man was always on guard. The tin hat and the fixed bayonet were unwelcome reminders that they were soon returning to the line. The men talked of their homes in England, wished the war would end, hoped anyway they’d get leave or a blighty soon, and envied the officers sleeping in beds. One man grumbled because there was no “red lamp” in the village. Winterbourne felt glad there wasn’t. Not that he would have been tempted, for he was quite fiercely chaste unless in love, but he hated the thought of these men giving their lean, sinewy bodies to the miserable French whores in the war-area bawdy houses.

“It’s all right in Béthune,” said the grumbler. “You can see ’em lining up outside the red lamps after dark under a Sergeant. Soon’s the old woman gives the signal, the Ser’ant says: ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march,’ and in yer go. The ole woman ’as a short-arm inspection and gives yer Condy’s Fluid, and the tart ’as Condy’s Fluid too. She was a nice tart, she was, but she was in a ’ell of a ’urry. She kep’ sayin’ ‘’Urry, daypaychez.’ I ’adn’t got meself buttoned up afore I ’eard the Ser’ant shoutin’: ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march.’ But she was a nice tart, she was.”

Winterbourne got up and walked out to the muddy road. The stars were faint and dim and lovely in the soft misty night sky; there seemed to be a first quiver of Spring in the scentless pure air. O Andromeda, O Paphian!

At dawn the birds twittered and sang, a little hesitantly in the cold morning mist. The sun rose in a golden haze, behind rows of poplars, over the flat dark earth.

* * * * *

They went into the line again, three miles to the right of their former positions. Their billets were about a mile and a quarter behind the town of M——, right in the crook of the salient. They lived in cellars in a small mining village, badly smashed, and entirely evacuated of civilians. A long treeless road led straight up to M—— and Hill 91, one of the most fought-over places in the line, seamed with trenches, pitted with shell-holes, honeycombed with galleries, eviscerated with huge mine craters, blasted bare of all vegetation. At Hill 91, the German line turned sharply left and linked up with a long slag-hill, about five hundred yards from the Pioneers’ billets. Consequently, although they were a long way from Hill 91, their billets were under observation and within machine-gun range, while the road to M—— was constantly shelled, and enfiladed by machine-guns. It was a rotten position, and would have been evacuated but for the “prestige” of keeping M——. A costly bit of prestige. It was estimated that venereal disease held continually a division of troops immobilized at Base Hospitals, to keep up the prestige of British purity; and another Division must have been obliterated to retain that barren prestige of holding M——.

They arrived about eleven, and almost immediately Evans’s servant came and told Winterbourne to report at the Officers’ Mess cellar, in fighting order. Evans was waiting for him.

Hitherto the Company had been under strength, and officered by Major Thorpe and the two subalterns, Evans and Pemberton, who took duty alternately. While on rest, they had been made up to full strength, and were joined by three other subalterns, Franklin, Hume and Thompson. They thus went up the line one hundred and twenty strong, with six officers, one of whom was supernumerary. Evans had been made a sort of unofficial second-in-command, while continuing to act as Platoon officer. Since he was the most experienced of the subalterns, he was to overlook the new officers until they knew their jobs. He explained all this to Winterbourne as they went along.

“You must give me your word not to mention it to the other men, but there is almost certainly a show coming off on this front. Probably in about four weeks. You mustn’t let the men know.”

“Of course not, Sir.”

“We shall have twelve-hour shifts up here, I’m afraid. I’ve got to take three platoons up to Hill 91, over there, at five to-night; and I want to reconnoitre. We’ve got to repair and revet the front communication trenches, clear away some of our wire, and fill the gaps with knife-rests. We’ve also got to repair Southampton Row, the main communication trench to your left. Every time we go up, we’ve got to take Mills bombs or trench mortars or S.A.A. I think we’re going to have a lively time. I rode out about ten miles yesterday, and saw fifteen batteries of heavies and a lot of tanks camouflaged by the road. The officers said they were booked for this sector or a little south.”

They were walking up the narrow straight road to M——. About every minute a heavy shell—or a salvo of heavy shells—plonked into M——. There was a sudden spout of black smoke and débris, a heavy sullen reverberating CLAANG as the loud detonation shook the twisted steel mining machinery, and re-echoed from the chalky slopes of Hill 91. To their right was a long slag-hill, mangled with shell-holes. Evans pointed to it.

“The Boche Front line runs just in front of that, about four hundred yards away. At some points our own Front line is only twenty yards from theirs. It’s a rummy and awkward position. Most of the transport for M—— has to come up this road, and the poor devils are shelled and machine-gunned wickedly every night. All troops on foot have to use Southampton Row, the communication trench to your left. You see it’s got fire-steps and a parapet—it’s also a Reserve line which we have to man in case of necessity.”

They got into the ruined streets of M——, and were promptly lost. The town was blasted to about three feet of indistinguishable ruins. A wooden notice-board over a mass of broken stones, said: “CHURCH.” Another further on said: “POST OFFICE.” Evans got out his map, and they stood together trying to make out the direct way to the section of trench they wanted. ZwiiiNG, CRASH, CLAANG!—four heavy shells screamed towards them and detonated with awful force within a hundred yards. The nearest swished over their heads and exploded twenty yards away. Four great columns of black smoke leaped up like miniature volcanoes; broken bricks and fragments of shell case clattered in the empty street. The reverberating echoes seemed like a groan from the agonizing town. The explosions seemed to hit Winterbourne in the chest.

“Heavies,” said Evans very calmly, “eight inch, probably.”

ZwiiiNG, Crash, CRASH! CLAANG! Four more.

“Seems a bit unhealthy here. We’d better push on.”

Winterbourne was silent. For the first time he began to realize the terrific inhuman strength of heavy artillery. Whizz-bangs and even five-nines were one thing, but these eight or ten inch high explosive monsters were a very different matter.

ZwiiiNG, CRASH! CLAANG!

Minute after minute, hour after hour, day and night, week after week, those merciless heavies pounded the groaning town.

ZwiiiNG, CRASH! CRAAASH! CLAAANG!

It was too violent a thing to get accustomed to. The mere physical shock, the slap in the chest, of the great shells exploding close at hand, forbade that. They became a torment, an obsession, an exasperation, a nervous nightmare. Unintentionally, as a man walked through M——, he found himself tense and strained, waiting for that warning “zwiing” of the approaching shell, trying to determine by the sound whether it was coming straight at him or not. Winterbourne’s duties during the next two and a half months necessitated his walking through M——, often alone, twice or four times every twenty-four hours.

* * * * *

The real nightmare was only just beginning. There had been the torment of frost and cold; now came the torments of mud, of gas, of incessant artillery, of fatigue and lack of sleep.

Under the swift thaw the whole battered countryside seemed to turn from ice to mud. It was deep on the _pavé_ roads, deeper round the billets, deeper still on the unpaved tracks, and deepest of all in the trenches. In Winterbourne’s hallucinated memories, where images and episodes met and collided like superimposed films, that Spring was mud. He seemed to spend his time pledging through interminable muddy trenches, up to the ankles, up to the calves, up to the knees; shovelling mud frantically out of trenches on to the berm, and then by night from the berm over the parapets, while the shells crashed and the machine-gun bullets struck gold sparks from the road stones. When he was not doing that, he was scraping mud with a knife from his boots and clothes, trying to dry socks and puttees and to rub some warmth into his livid aching feet. He had not known that wet cold could keep one’s legs so achingly dead for so long. He had not known how wearisome it could be to drag tired legs and carry burdens through deep sticky chalk mud, where each step was an effort, where each leg stuck deep as the other was laboriously pulled from the sucking mud. He had not known that one could hate an inert thing so much. Overhead it might be sunny, with innumerable little fleecy puffs of exploded shrapnel pursuing a darting white airplane high in the misty blue March sky. Underfoot, it was mud. They had no time to look at the sky, as they dragged along, toiling their bent way along those muddy ditches.

* * * * *

He remembered a week of blessed respite which he spent in an underground gallery, squatting twelve hours a day by a winch and interminably winding sandbags of chalk to men in the trench. These galleries—which were never used—were being dug to conceal two or three divisions before a surprise attack. They seemed to extend for miles. The cutting and picking at the advancing end was done by R.E.’s, skilled miners who cut with astonishing rapidity and accuracy. The Pioneers filled the chalk into sacks, and dragged them along the galleries, where Winterbourne incessantly wound them to the top. The Engineers had better rations than the infantry and the Pioneers, whose lunch was bread and cheese. They had huge cold beefsteaks and bottles of strong tea and rum for their lunch. Winterbourne during his half hour’s midday rest one day wandered up to their end of the gallery, just as they were eating. He could not help glancing rather wolfishly at their meal. One of them noticed it, and pointing to his steak, said with his mouth full:

“Ah reckon tha doesn’t get groob the likes o’ this in thy lot, lad.”

“No, but the stew’s very good—only you get a bit tired of it every day.”

“Aye, that tha does. But we’re skilled men, we are, traade union. They’re got to feed oos well, they ’ave.”

Half kindly, half contemptuously, the miner cut off a hunk of his steak and held it out to Winterbourne in his large dirty hand.

“Here tha art, lad, take a bite at that.”

“Oh no, thanks, it’s very kind of you, but...”

“Nay lad, tha’s welcome; tak it, tak it. Tha looks fair famelled and wore out. Tha’s na workin’ chap, ah knows.”

Torn between his feeling of humiliation, his desire not to reject the man’s kindly-meant offer and his hungry belly, Winterbourne hesitated. He finally took it, with a rather ghastly feeling of animal humiliation. The cold tender meat tasted delicious. It was the first unsodden meat he had eaten for weeks. He gave them his last cigarettes, and returned to his winch.

* * * * *

Winterbourne detested “berming.” Hour after hour standing in wet chilly mud, shovelling the stuff away to prevent its sliding back into the trench from which it had been laboriously thrown, and widening the space between the top of the trench and the parapet. The machine-guns from the slag-hill constantly rattled away at them. One night Winterbourne and the man next him dug up the bones, tunic, equipment and rifle of a French soldier, who had been hastily buried in the parapet many months before. His cartridges fell from the mouldering pouches and still looked bright in the dim star-dusk. Winterbourne dug up the skull; it was large and dome-shaped, a typical Frenchman’s head. They tried to find his identity disc, but failed. Pemberton, who was on duty that night, made them rebury what was left in a shell-hole. They stuck a cross over it next day, marked UNKNOWN FRENCH SOLDIER.

The best nights were those when Evans was on duty, but often the urgency was so great that the officers’ runners and the officers themselves worked and carried burdens. The most awkward burdens were the long sheets of corrugated iron used for revetting. They had to carry these along the road, since they were too large to get round the traverses. It was impossible to keep the metal sheets from clanking against rifles or the sheet of the man in front in the darkness. The machine guns from the slag-hill opened out, and they could see the spurts of gold sparks on the road come towards them. Winterbourne felt his piece of corrugated iron violently hit and half wrenched from his hand; the man in front went down with a clatter. Somebody yelled “Stretcher-bearer!” The men dumped their burdens and cowered on the ground. It was an awful confusion. Only Evans and Winterbourne were left standing on the road. Evans cursed the N.C.O.’s, and made the men form up again behind Winterbourne. It took a long time to find all the sheets of metal in the darkness, and the machine-guns went on rattling pitilessly. They were hours late in getting back to billets.

* * * * *

As March dragged on, more and more heavy guns arrived, clattering up behind their tractors in the darkness. A Tank and its crew were hidden not far from the Pioneers’ billets, and there were others farther from the line. A new infantry Division was pushed in to the line on their right. Other Divisions were said to be in readiness close behind. The sector became more and more lively, but no big attack was made. Winterbourne questioned Evans, who said it had been postponed to give the mud a chance to dry. What hopes!

The Germans had excellent observation posts on Hill 91, and their aircraft were constantly over the British lines and back areas. They were perfectly aware that an attack was being prepared. Every night they shelled M——, shelled the cross-roads leading to M——, shelled any artillery positions they had spotted, shelled the wrecked village where the Pioneers were billeted. The cellars were good enough protection against shell splinters, but far too flimsy to resist a direct hit. Every day or night huge crumps were flung at them, exploding with concussions which shook the ground and made sleep impossible. In the day-time, Winterbourne sometimes crouched at his cellar-entrance and watched the explosions within his view. If one of these big shells hit a half-ruined house, almost every vestige disappeared in a cloud of black smoke and rosy brick dust.

And there was gas, a good deal of gas. It was the beginning of the intensive use of gas projectiles, which later became so greatly perfected. Their experience of it began one March night on Hill 91. A smart local attack had driven the Germans out of their advance positions and carried the British line forward—at a cost—about two hundred and fifty yards on a front of eight hundred. Evans explained to Winterbourne that these local attacks were being made all along the line to deceive the Germans as to the exact position of the coming offensive. Since the Germans would have needed to be blind or lunatic not to see where the guns and troops were being massed, Winterbourne thought this an over-subtle and over-costly bit of policy. However, his not to reason why.

The Pioneers—three platoons of them—under Evans, Pemberton and Hume, were to dig a new communication trench from the former British front line to their present Outpost line of hastily interlinked shell-holes. Evans told Winterbourne not to carry any tools:

“I expect it’ll be rather a sticky do. The old Boche is pooping off whizz-bangs all day and night up there. And I’m hanged if I can find out exactly where our new front line is supposed to be. It’s a network of Boche trenches up there, and we don’t want to go barging into their line.”

They struggled up Southampton Row and skirted M——, which was being shelled heavily and reverberantly. They got into another trench on the fringe of Hill 91. Whizz-bangs kept cracking all round them, in little masses of about a dozen—several batteries firing together. Evans and Winterbourne were leading. Winterbourne paused:

“There’s a curious smell about here, Sir” (sniff, sniff) “like pineapple or pear-drops.”

Evans sniffed the air.

“So there is.”

The smell rapidly became stronger after another salvo of whizz-bangs.

“By Jove, it’s tear-gas!” said Evans. “Pass the word along to put on gas goggles.”

The line halted, while the men fumbled in the darkness for their goggles; and then slowly stumbled on. Winterbourne found he was practically blinded by his goggles in the darkness; they kept going dim with perspiration. He took them off.

“We shall be here all night at this rate, Sir. May as well be blinded with tear-gas as goggles. I’ll keep mine off and reconnoitre.”

Evans pulled off his goggles, and the two went on ahead, telling the Sergeant to follow straight on until he came up with them. Tears poured from the two men’s eyes as they toiled up the muddy trench. They kept dabbing their eyes with pocket handkerchiefs, like a couple of mutes at their own funerals.

Crash, crash-crash, crash, crash-crash-crash-crash, came the whizz-bangs; and the pineapple smell became stronger than ever.

“It’ll be a jolly look-out for us,” said Evans, “if they poop over poison-gas too. We shan’t be able to smell it with all this stink of pear-drops. Peuh! It’s like being in a sweet factory.”

They laughed. And then dabbed their streaming eyes again.

In ten minutes they came up to the largest of the mine craters. The wind was fresh on the hill-crest and there was no gas. Their smarting eyes began to recover.

“Here we are,” said Evans, “and there’s the old No Man’s Land, but where in hell our Front line is, I don’t know. You stay here, Winterbourne, and tell Sergeant Perkins to halt until I come back. I’ll go and reconnoitre.”

“I’ll go back and fetch them, Sir, and bring them up.”

“All right,” and Evans vanished in the darkness. Winterbourne returned to the line of men, dismally groping their way through the gassy trench. They waited for Evans, who led them over the old No Man’s Land to a very deep trench. They turned to the left. Evans whispered to Winterbourne:

“There’s nothing here but a net-work of Boche trenches; look how deep they are. I couldn’t see a soul, and there are still Boche trench-notices up. I’m hanged if I know where we are. For all I know we’re in the Boche lines.”

Winterbourne unslung his rifle and bayonet, and walked in front of Evans. Verey lights went up occasionally, but most mysteriously seemed to come from all sides, behind them as well as in front and to the flanks. The trenches were immensely deep and dark, except when lit dimly by the glow of Verey lights, or the abrupt flashes of whizz-bangs. They went on and on, constantly passing cross-trenches, completely lost, probably returning on their footsteps. They could hear the men muttering and cursing behind them. At another cross-trench they halted in despair. Winterbourne stood on a large hummock in the middle of the wide trench, peering ahead through the gloom. Evans looked at his luminous wrist-watch.

“Good Lord! We’ve been wandering in these blasted trenches for nearly three hours. It’ll be too late to do any work unless we get there at once.”

Winterbourne grabbed his arm:

“Look!”

Several shadowy figures were silhouetted against the skyline, coming along the trench towards them. Too dark to distinguish the helmets. English or German?

“Challenge them,” whispered Evans. Winterbourne threw his rifle forward:

“Halt! Who are you!”

“Frontshires,” said a weary voice.

“Ask which company.”

“Which company?”

“A, B, C, D,—what’s left of ’em.”

They were now close enough for Evans and Winterbourne to see they were in British uniform. Evans passed down word to his men to stand to the left and let the out-going party pass. The Frontshires staggered rather than walked down the bumpy trench.

“We ’ung on until nearly all of us was killed, Sir,” said one man huskily to Evans, as if apologizing.

“When the Springshires was wiped out, we got enfiladed, Sir,” said another, “there’s on’y one of our officers left.”

About fifty men, the flotsam of the wrecked battalion, stumbled past them. Then came the Sergeant-Major and a young subaltern. Evans stopped him, and asked the way to the front line, explaining briefly their job. The subaltern seemed dazed with weariness. He kept swaying in the darkness.

“It’s up there... up there... somewhere....”

“But how far?”

“I don’t know... not far... I can’t stop... mustn’t leave the men.”

And he stumbled on again. Evans turned to Winterbourne.

“Well, Winterbourne, you might as well get off the body of that dead Boche you’re standing on, and we’ll push along.”

Winterbourne sprang away with a sensation of horror, and saw that he had indeed unconsciously been standing on a dead German.

They wandered about until nearly dawn, without finding the Front line. They came on a couple of wounded Germans, whom Evans put into stretchers. Just about dawn they found themselves back at the point where they had entered the old German trenches, and recrossed to familiar ground. The wounded Germans groaned as the stretcher-bearers stumbled and bumped them on the ground.

* * * * *

The remnant of the battalion of the Frontshires very slowly made their way into M——. Zwiing, CRASH! CLAANG! went the great crumps, but they hardly heard them. They were too tired. They went through the town in single file. On the straight road, the subaltern halted them, formed them roughly into fours, and took his place at their head. They shambled heavily along, not keeping step or attempting to, bent wearily forward under the weight of their equipment, their unseeing eyes turned to the muddy ground. They stumbled over inequalities; several times one or other of them fell, and had to be dragged laboriously to his feet. Others lagged hopelessly behind. Time and again the young subaltern and the R.S.M. paused to allow the little group to re-form. Hardly a word was spoken. They went very slowly, past the slag-hill, past the ruined village, past the Pioneers’ billets, past the soldiers’ cemetery, past the ruined château, past the closed Y.M.C.A. canteen; and just as the fresh clear Spring dawn lightened the sky, they came to the village where they had their rest billets. The firing had quieted down, and the larks were singing overhead in the pure exquisite sky. In the pale light the men’s unshaven faces looked grim and strangely old, grey-green, haggard, inexpressibly weary. They shambled on.

Outside of Divisional Headquarters a smart sentry was on duty. He saw the little party wearily stumbling down the village street, and thought they were walking wounded. The young subaltern stopped about thirty yards from the sentry, and once more re-formed his men. The sentry heard him say “Stick it, Frontshires.”

Already the news had reached the back areas that the Frontshires had been nearly wiped out in a desperate defence—fifty of them and one officer left, out of twenty officers and seven hundred and fifty men.

The sentry sprang to attention and took one pace forward. Sloped arms—one, two, three, as if on parade—and remained rigid. As the little group drew level, he sharply brought his rifle and fixed bayonet to the “Present Arms.”

The young officer wearily touched the brim of his steel helmet. The men scarcely saw, and did not comprehend, the gesture. The sentry watched them pass, with a lump in his throat.

There was still nothing to report on the western front.

[ VIII ]

After a few hours sleep and a hasty meal, Evans and Winterbourne started for the Front line again. Evans was very much ashamed at having lost his way the night before, and the Major had strafed him for incompetence. Evans had not replied, as he might have done, that since the Major knew so well where they ought to have gone, he might have taken the trouble to lead them there.

It was about two on a sunny cold afternoon. They skirted M—— with its everlasting, maddening Zwiiing, CRASH! CLAAAANG! In the trenches on the edge of Hill 91, they met two walking wounded, unshaved, muddy to the waist. One had his head bandaged and was carrying his steel helmet, the other had his tunic half off, and his left hand and arm were bandaged in several places. They were talking with great gravity and earnestness, and hardly saw Evans and his runner. Winterbourne heard one of them say:

“I told that muckin new orfficer twice that some mucker’d get hit if he muckin well took us up that muckin trench.”

“Ah,” said the other, “moock ’im.”

Evans and Winterbourne paused at the old Front line on the crest of the hill to take breath, and looked back. The blue sky was speckled all over with the little fleecy shrapnel bursts from Archies, pursuing three different enemy planes. The heavy shells fell reverberantly into M—— at their feet. They looked over a broad flat, grey-green plain, dotted with ruined villages, seamed with the long irregular lines of trenches. The wavering broad ribbon of No Man’s Land was clearly visible, blasted to the white chalk. They could see the flash of the heavies, and enemy shells bursting on cross-roads and round artillery emplacements. A Red Cross car of wounded bumping its way from the Advanced Dressing Station in M—— was shelled all down the road by field artillery. They watched it eagerly, hoping it would escape. Once or twice it disappeared in the smoke of the shell-burst and they felt certain it was done for; but the car bumpingly reappeared and finally vanished from sight in the direction of Rail Head.

“God! What a dirty trick! I’m glad they didn’t get it,” said Winterbourne, as they scrambled out of the trench.

“Ah, well,” said Evans, “Red Cross cars have been used as camouflage before now.”

* * * * *

They easily found the new Front Line in the daylight. Directions in English had been hastily scrawled on the old German trench notices, and they wondered how on earth they could have missed the way the night before. The Front line was full of infantry, some on sentry-duty, some sitting hunched up on the fire-steps, many lying in long narrow holes like graves, scooped in the side of the trench. They found an officer, who took them along to show them where the new communication trench was wanted. Winterbourne, turning to answer a question from Evans, struck the butt of his rifle sharply against a sleeping man in one of the holes. The man did not stir.

“Your fellows are sleeping soundly,” said Evans.

“Yes,” said the officer tonelessly, “but he may be dead for all I know. Stretcher-bearers too tired to take down all the bodies. Some of ’em are dead, and some asleep. We have to go round and kick ’em to find which is which.”

The new trench they were to dig had been roughly marked out, and ran from the old German Front line to the lip of Congreve’s Mine Crater, now used as an ammunition dump. A salvo of whizz-bangs greeted them as they went out to look at it.

“I don’t altogether envy you this job,” said the Infantry officer; “this is about the most unhealthy spot on Hill 91. The Boche shells it day and night. Your Colonel had a hell of a row about it with the Brigadier, but our fellows are too whacked to do any more digging.”

Over came another little bunch of whizz-bangs, in corroboration—crash, crash-crash, crash. The grey-green acrid smoke smelt foul.

“They’re going to call it Nero Trench,” he added, as they left him, “because the ground’s so black with coal dust and slag. Well, good-bye, best of luck. And, by the bye, look out for gas.”

* * * * *

The Nero Trench job was an intensified nightmare. The Germans had it “taped” with exactitude, and shelled it ruthlessly. Five minutes was the longest period that ever passed without salvos of whizz-bangs. Evans and Winterbourne, Hume and his runner, walked continually up and down the line of men, who toiled hastily and nervously in the darkness to make themselves a little cover. When the shells came crashing near them, they crouched down on the ground. It was found after the first night that each man had simply dug a hole for himself instead of regularly excavating his three yards of trench. On some nights the shelling was so intense that Evans withdrew the men for a time to the shelter of a trench. They had several casualties.

And then the Germans began a steady, systematic gas bombardment of all the ruined villages in the advanced area. It began on the second night of the Nero Trench job. They had noticed on Hill 91 that a pretty heavy bombardment was proceeding from the German lines, and all the way down from M——, they heard the shells continuously shrilling overhead. It puzzled them that they could not hear them exploding.

“Must be bombarding the back areas,” said Evans. “Let’s hope it gives ’em something to think about besides sending us up tons of silly papers.”

But as they came nearer their village they could tell by the sound in the air that the shells must be falling close ahead of them. Soon they heard them falling with the customary zwiiING, followed by a very unaccustomed soft PHUT.

“They can’t all be duds,” said Winterbourne.

A shell dropped short, just outside the parapet, with the same curious PHUT. Immediately a strange smell, rather like new-mown hay gone acrid, filled the air. They sniffed, and both men exclaimed simultaneously:

“Phosgene! Gas!”

They all fumblingly and hastily put on their gas masks, and stumbled on blindly down the trench. Winterbourne and Evans scrambled out on to the road, and got into the edge of the village. A rain of gas shells was falling on it and all around their billets—zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, PHUT PHUT PHUT PHUT. Each took off his mask a second and gave one sniff—the air reeked with phosgene.

Evans and Winterbourne stood at the end of the trench to help out the groping half-blinded men. As they filed by, grotesques with india-rubber faces, great dead-looking goggles, and long tubes from their mouths to the box respirators, Winterbourne thought they looked like lost souls, expiating some horrible sin in a new Inferno. The rolled gas blankets were pulled down tightly over the cellar entrances, but the gas leaked through. Two men were gassed and taken off in stretchers, foaming rather horribly at the mouth.

* * * * *

The gas bombardment went on until dawn, and then ceased. Winterbourne fell asleep, with his gas mask just off his face. Hitherto they had slept with the box respirator slung on a nail or piled with the other equipment; after the experience of this and the subsequent nights they always slept with the respirator on their chests and the mask ready to slip on immediately.

The heavies began again soon after it was light. Winterbourne was awakened by one which crashed just outside his cellar. He lay on the floor for a long time listening to the zwiiiING, CRASH, of the shells. He heard two ruined houses clatter to the ground under direct hits, and wondered if the cellars had held firm. They hadn’t. But fortunately, they happened to be unoccupied. Presently, the German batteries switched off and began bombarding some artillery about five hundred yards to the left. Winterbourne profited by the lull to wash. He ran out of the cellar in his shirtsleeves and gas mask, with the canvas bucket in which he washed; and found that a shell had smashed the pump outside his billet. He knew there was another about three hundred yards to the right, although he had never been there.

It was another cold but sunny morning, with the inevitable white shrapnel bursts all over the sky. He was now so accustomed to them that he scarcely noticed their existence. Occasionally a very faint rattle of machine-gun fire came from the war in the air, of which he was nearly as ignorant as people in England of the war on land.

He took off his mask and sniffed. A fresh wind was blowing, and although there was plenty of phosgene in the air, it was not in any deadly concentration. He decided to risk leaving the mask off. The ground was deeply delved with the conical holes made by the big shells thrown over, and pitted everywhere by the smaller holes of the gas shells. He found a dud, and examined it with interest. A brownish-looking shell, about the size of a five-nine.

The cottages were rather scattered, and unused as cellar-billets in this direction. The top storeys had gone from nearly all, but in several the ground floor was fairly intact. He looked into each as he passed. The wall-paper had long ago fallen and lay in mouldering heaps. The floors were covered with broken bricks, tiles, smashed beams, laths and disintegrating plaster. Odd pieces of broken furniture, twisted iron beds, large rags which had once been clothes and sheets, protruded from the mass. He poked about and found photographs, letters in faded ink on damp paper, broken toys, bits of smashed vases, a soiled satin wedding-gown with its veil and wreath of artificial orange blossom. He stood, with his head bent, looking at this pathetic débris of ruined lives, and absent-mindedly lit a cigarette which he immediately threw away—it tasted of phosgene. “La Gloire,” he murmured, “Deutschland über alles, God save the King.”

The next cottage was less damaged than the others, and its rough wooden shutters were still on their hinges. Winterbourne peered through and saw that the whole of the inside had been cleared of débris, and was stacked with quantities of wooden objects. He shaded his eyes more carefully, and saw they were ranks and ranks of wooden crosses. Those he could see had painted on them R.I.P.; then underneath was a blank space for the name; then came the name of one or other of the battalions in his Division, and then the present month and year, with a blank space for the day. Excellent forethought, he reflected as he filled his bucket and water-bottle; how well this War is organized!

* * * * *

About nine, Evans’s servant told him to report immediately in fighting order. Wearily and sleepily he threw on his equipment, re-tied the string of his box respirator, and slung his rifle and bayonet over his left shoulder. He waited with the officers’ servants, who gave him a piece of bread dipped in bacon grease to eat. Presently Evans came out and they started off.

“I’ve got to see an R.E. officer,” said Evans, “about a new job on Hill 91. It’s a bit farther to the left of where we’ve been working, and it’ll take us half an hour longer to get there.”

Winterbourne seized the opportunity to put forward one or two ideas he had been thinking over:

“I hope you won’t mind, Sir, if I say something—it’s not an official complaint at all, you understand, only what I’ve been personally thinking.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, Sir, I assume that the reason we are kept in billets instead of in the line is to give us more rest so that we come fresh to work. But here it doesn’t work out that way, especially in the past fortnight; and it’s likely to get worse instead of better. It seems to me that we should be much better off if we were in dug-outs in the Reserve line. We have that long walk through the mud twice a day; we get all the shells meant for the transport and ration parties; we get an all night strafing in the line; we’re shelled all the way down; we come back to gassy billets, which are shelled with heavies twenty hours out of twenty-four. The cellars are no real protection against a direct hit. They’re damper than dug-outs, and just as dark and ratty. There are far more whizz-bangs and light stuff in the line, but far fewer heavies; and if we had even fifteen-foot dug-outs, we’d get some sleep, instead of starting awake every ten minutes with a crump outside the cellar entrance. We’re getting a lot of useless casualties, Sir. I passed the cook house as I came along, and the cook told me one of his mates had just gone down with gas from last night. And the S.M. looks as green as grass. Can’t you get us put in the line, Sir?”

Evans cogitated a moment or two:

“Yes, I think you’re right. No, I can’t get us moved. I haven’t the authority. I wish I had. I’ll ask the Major to put it before the Colonel. It’s quite true what you say. In the past week we’ve had eight casualties in the line, and twelve here or going up and down. But with this show coming off I expect every trench and dug-out will be packed.”

Winterbourne felt enormously proud that Evans had not snubbed his suggestion. Evans went on, after a pause:

“By the way, Winterbourne, have you ever thought of taking a commission?”

“Why, yes, Sir, it was suggested by the Adjutant of my battalion in England. I believe my father wrote to him about it. He, my father, was very keen about it.”

“Well, why don’t you apply?”

It was now Winterbourne’s turn to cogitate:

“I find it rather hard to explain, Sir. For many reasons, which you might think far-fetched, I had and still have a feeling that I ought to spend the War in the ranks and in the line. I should prefer to be in the Infantry, but I think the Pioneers are quite near enough.”

“They often come round for volunteers, you know. If you like, I’ll put you down next time, and the Major will recommend you to the Colonel.”

“It’s kind of you, Sir. I’ll think about it.”

* * * * *

One night, two nights, three nights, four nights passed, and still there was no big battle. And they were not moved. Every night they were shelled up the line, shelled in the line, shelled on the way back, and arrived in a hail storm of gas shells. They had to wear their gas masks for hours every day. And sleep became more and more difficult and precarious.

Winterbourne’s intimacy with Evans and his own “education” put him in rather an ambiguous position. Evans trusted him more and more to do things which would normally have been done by an N.C.O. And Winterbourne’s feeling of responsibility led him to take on and conscientiously carry out everything of the kind. One night there was supposed to be a gas discharger attack by the British in retaliation for the heavy German gas bombardments. All the officers wanted to see it; and since it was staged for an hour before dawn, that meant either that one officer had to take the company down or that the men had to be kept up two hours longer, exposed to artillery retaliation. Evans solved the problem. He sent for Winterbourne:

“Winterbourne, we want to stop and see the fun up here. Now, you can take the company down, can’t you? I’ll tell Sergeant Perkins that you’re in charge; but of course you’ll give orders through him. Come back here and report after you get them back.”

“Very good, Sir.”

There was no British gas attack, but the Germans put up what was then a considerable gas bombardment. They sent over approximately thirty thousand gas shells that night, most of them in and around the village where the Pioneers were billeted. The Company had to wear gas masks over the last half mile, and Winterbourne had a very anxious time getting them along. He had discovered a disused but quite deep trench running through the village almost to their billets, and he took the men along there instead of through the village street. It was a little longer, but far safer. The shells were hailing all round them, and Winterbourne didn’t want any casualties. Sergeant Perkins and he managed to get the men safely into billets. Winterbourne turned and said:

“Well, good-night, Sergeant, I must go up the line again, and report to Mr. Evans.”

“You ain’t going up agen, are you?”

“Yes, Mr. Evans told me to.”

“Struth! Well, I’d rather it was you than me.”

Winterbourne fitted on his gas mask, and groped his way out of the Sergeant’s cellar. The night was muggy, a bit drizzly, windless and very dark—the ideal conditions for a gas bombardment. What little wind there was came from the German lines. He hesitated between taking the long muddy trench or the more open road, but since he was practically blinded in the darkness with his goggles, he decided to take the trench, for fear of losing his way. It was rather eerie, groping his way alone up the trench, with the legions of gas shells shrilling and phutting all round him. They fell with a terrific “flop” when they came within a few yards. He stumbled badly two or three times in holes they had made in the trench since he had come down. For nearly half a mile he had to go through the gas barrage, and it was slow work indeed, with the mud and the darkness and the groping and the stumbling. Interminable. He thought of nothing in the darkness but keeping his left hand on the side of the trench to guide him and holding his right hand raised in front to prevent his bumping into something.

At last he got clear of the falling gas shells, and ventured a peep outside his mask. One sniff showed him the air was deadly with phosgene. He groped on another two hundred yards and tried again. There was still a lot of gas, but he decided to risk it, and took off his mask. With the mask off he could see comparatively well, and traveled quite rapidly. About an hour before dawn he reported to Evans.

“There’s a devil of a gas bombardment going on round the billets and for half a mile round, Sir,” said Winterbourne; “that’s why I’m so late. The whole country reeks of gas.”

Evans whistled:

“Whew! As a matter of fact, we’ve been drinking a bit in the dug-out with some Infantry officers, and one or two are a bit groggy in consequence.”

“Better wait till dawn then, Sir. If you’ll come up into the trench you’ll hear the shells going over.”

“Oh, I’ll take your word for it. But the Major insists on going down at once. We’ve just heard that there isn’t going to be a gas attack. You’ll have to help me get them down.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The Major was entirely sober; Evans was perfectly self-controlled; but the other four were all a little too merry. It was a perfect nightmare getting them through the gas barrage. They would insist there was no danger, that the gas was all a wash-out; and kept taking off their masks. They disregarded the Major’s peremptory orders, and Evans and Winterbourne had constantly to take off their own masks to argue with the subalterns, and make them put on theirs. Winterbourne could feel the deadly phosgene at his lungs.

Just after dawn they reached the Officers’ Mess cellar, fortunately without a casualty. Winterbourne felt horribly sick with the gas he had swallowed. The Major took off his gas mask, and picked up a water jug.

“Those confounded servants have forgotten to leave any water,” exclaimed the Major angrily. “Winterbourne, take that tin jug and go and get some water from the cook-house.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The shells were still pitilessly hailing down through the dawn. It was a hundred yards to the cook-house, and Winterbourne three times just escaped being directly hit by one of the ceaselessly falling shells. He returned to the Mess, and left the water.

“Thanks very much,” said Evans; “you may go now, Winterbourne. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Sir.”

“Good-night,” said the Major, “thank you for getting that water, Winterbourne, I oughtn’t to have sent you.”

“Thank you, Sir; good-night, Sir.”

Outside the Major’s and Evans’s part of the cellar, the other officers were sitting round a deal table by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, which looked dim and ghastly. The place was practically gas-proof, with tightly drawn blankets over every crevice.

“Win’erbourne,” said one of them.

“Sir?”

“Run along to the Quar’master-Sergeant and bring us a bottle of whiskey.”

“Very good, Sir.”

Winterbourne climbed the cellar steps, lifted the outer gas curtain rapidly, and stepped out. There was such a stench of phosgene that he snapped his mask on at once. The shells were falling thicker than ever. One hit the wall of the house, and Winterbourne felt bricks and dust drop on his steel helmet and shoulders. He shrank against what was left of the wall. Two hundred yards to the Q.M.S.’s billet. That meant nearly a quarter of a mile through that deadly storm—for a half-drunken man to get a few more whiskies. Winterbourne hesitated. It was disobeying orders if he didn’t go. He turned resolutely and went to his own billet; nothing was ever said of this refusal to obey an officer’s orders in the face of the enemy.

* * * * *

Winterbourne stood outside the entrance to his cellar, took off his steel helmet and folded down the top part of his gas mask so that he could see, while still keeping the nose clip on and the large rubber mouthpiece in his teeth. The whitish morning light looked cold and misty, and the PHUT PHUT PHUT PHUT of the bursting gas shells continued with ruthless iteration. He watched them exploding; a little curling cloud of yellow gas rose from each shell-hole. The ground was pitted with these new shell-holes, and newly broken bricks and débris lay about everywhere. A dead rat lay in a gas shell-hole just outside the entrance—so the War caught even the rats! There had been a young slender ash-tree in what had once been the cottage garden. A heavy explosive had fallen just at its roots, splintered the slim stem, and dashed it prone with broken branches. The young leaves were still green, except on one side where they were curled and withered by gas. The grass, so tender a spring green a week before, was yellow, sickly and withered. As he turned to lift the gas-blanket he heard the whizz and crash of the first heavy of the day bombardment. But the gas shells continued.

Inside the cellar was complete darkness. He took off his mask and fumbled his way down the broken stairs, trying not to wake the other runners. It was important only to use one match, because matches were scarce and precious. The air inside was foul and heavy, but only slightly tainted with phosgene. Winterbourne half-smiled as he thought how furiously he had contended for “fresh air” in huts and barrack rooms, and how gladly he now welcomed any foul air which was not full of poison gas. He lighted his stub of candle, and slowly took off his equipment, replacing the box respirator immediately. His boots were thick with mud, his puttees and trousers torn with wire and stained with mud and grease. A bullet had torn a hole in his leather jerkin, and his steel helmet was marked by a long deep dint, where it had been struck by a flying splinter of shell. He felt amazingly weary, and rather sick. He had known the fatigue of long walks and strenuous Rugby football matches and cross-country runs, but nothing like this continual cumulative weariness. He moved with the slow, almost pottering movements of agricultural labourers and old men. The feeling of sickness became worse and he wanted to vomit out the smell of gas which seemed to permeate him. He heaved over his empty canvas bucket until the water started to his eyes, but vomited nothing. He noticed how filthy his hands were.

He was just going to sit down on his blanket and pack, covered by the neatly-folded groundsheet, when he saw a parcel and some letters for him lying on them. The other runners had brought them over for him. Decent of them. The parcel was from Elizabeth—how sweet of her to remember! And yes, she had sent all the things he had asked for and left out all the useless things people would send to the troops. He mustn’t touch anything except the candles, though, until to-morrow, when the parcel would be carefully divided among everybody in the cellar. It was one of the good unwritten rules—all parcels strictly divided between each section, so that every one got something, even and especially the men who were too poor or too lonely to receive anything from England. Dear Elizabeth—how sweet of her to remember!

He opened her envelope with hands which shook slightly with fatigue and the shock of explosions. Then he stopped, lighted a new candle from the stub of the old one, blew out the stub, and carefully put it away to give to one of the infantry. The letter was unexpectedly tender and charming. She had just been to Hampton Court to look at the flowers. The gardens were rather neglected, she said, and no flowers in the long border—the gardeners were at the war, and there was no money in England now for flowers. Did he remember how they had walked there in April five years ago? Yes, he remembered, and thought too with a pang of surprise that this was the first spring he had ever spent without seeing a flower, not even a primrose. The little yellow colts-foot he had liked so much were all dead with phosgene. Elizabeth went on:

“I saw Fanny last week. She looked more charming and delicate than ever—and such a marvelous hat! I hear she is _much_ attached to a brilliant young scientist, a chemist, who does the most _peculiar_ things. He mixes up all sorts of chemicals and then experiments with the fumes and kills dozens of poor little monkeys with them. Isn’t it wicked? But Fanny says it’s most _important_ war work.”

The sickness came on him again. He turned sideways and heaved silently, but could not vomit. He felt thirsty, and drank a little stale-tasting water from his water-bottle. Dear Elizabeth, how sweet of her to remember!

Fanny’s letter was very rattling and gay. She had been there, she had done this, she had seen so-and-so. How was darling George getting along? She was so glad to see that there had been no fighting yet on the western front. She added:

“I saw Elizabeth recently. She looked a little worried, but _very_ sweet. She was with such a charming young man—a young American who ran away from Yale to join our Flying Corps.”

The heavy shells outside were falling nearer and nearer. They came over in fours, each shell a little in front of the others—bracketing. Through the gas curtain he heard the remains of a ruined house collapse across the street under a direct hit. Each crash made the cellar tremble slightly, and the candle flame jumped.

Well, it was nice of Fanny to write. Very nice. She was a thoroughly decent sort. He picked up the other envelopes. One came from Paris and contained the _Bulletin des Ecrivains_—names of French writers and artists killed or wounded, and news of those in the armies. He was horrified to see how many of his friends in Paris had been killed. A passage had been marked in blue pencil—it contained the somewhat belated news that M. Georges Winterbourne, _le jeune peintre anglais_, was in camp in England.

Another letter, forwarded by Elizabeth, came from a London art dealer. It said that an American had bought one of Winterbourne’s sketches for £5, and that when he heard that Winterbourne was in the trenches he had insisted upon making it £25. The dealer therefore enclosed a cheque for £22.10.0, being £25 less commission at ten per centum. Winterbourne thought it rather cheek to take commission on the money which was a gift, but still, Business as Usual. But how generous of the American! How amazingly kind! His pay was five francs a week, so the money was most welcome. He must write and thank....

The last letter was from Mr. Upjohn, from whom Winterbourne had not heard for over a year. Elizabeth, it appeared, had asked him to write and send news. Mr. Upjohn wrote a chatty letter. He himself had a job in Whitehall, “of national importance.” Winterbourne rejoiced to think that Mr. Upjohn’s importance was now recognized by the nation. Mr. Shobbe had been in France, had stayed in the line three weeks, and was now permanently at the base. Comrade Bobbe had come out very strong as a conscientious objector. He had been put in prison for six weeks. His friends had “got at” somebody influential, who had “got at” the secretary of somebody in authority, and Mr. Bobbe had been released as an agricultural worker. He was now “working” on a farm, run by a philanthropic lady for conscientious objectors of the intellectual class. Mr. Waldo Tubbe had found his vocation in the Post Office Censorship Bureau, where he was very happy—if he could not force people to say what he wanted, he could at least prevent them from writing anything derogatory to his Adopted Empire....

George laughed silently to himself. Amusing chap Upjohn. He got out his jack-knife and scraped away the mud so that he could unlace his boots. Outside the shells crashed. One burst just behind the cellar. The roof seemed to give a jump, something seemed to smack Winterbourne on the top of the head, and the candle went out. He laboriously re-lit it. The other runners woke up.

“Anything up?”

“No, only a crump outside. I’m just getting into kip.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Up the line again, for the officers.”

“Get back all right?”

“Yes, nobody hit. But there’s a hell of a lot of gas about. Don’t go out without putting on your gas-bag.”

“Good-night, old man.”

“Good-night, old boy.”

[ IX ]

Three more nights passed rather more tranquilly. There was comparatively little gas, but the German heavies were persistent. They, too, quieted down on the third night, and Winterbourne got to bed fairly early and fell into a deep sleep.

* * * * *

Suddenly he was wide awake and sitting up. What on earth or hell was happening? From outside came a terrific rumble and roaring, as if three volcanoes and ten thunderstorms were in action simultaneously. The whole earth was shaking as if beaten by a multitude of flying hoofs, and the cellar walls vibrated. He seized his helmet, dashed past the other runners who were starting up and exclaiming, rushed through the gas curtain; and recoiled. It was still night, but the whole sky was brilliant with hundreds of flashing lights. Two thousand British guns were in action, and heaven and earth were filled with the roar and flame. From about half a mile to the north, southwards as far as he could see, the whole front was a dazzling flicker of gun-flashes. It was as if giant hands covered with huge rings set with search-lights were being shaken in the darkness, as if innumerable brilliant diamonds were flashing great rays of light. There was not a fraction of a second without its flash and roar. Only the great boom of a twelve- or fourteen-inch naval gun just behind them punctured the general pandemonium at regular intervals.

Winterbourne ran stumbling forwards to get a view clear of the ruins. He crouched by a piece of broken house and looked towards the German lines. They were a long irregular wall of smoke, torn everywhere with the dull red flashes of bursting shells. Behind their lines their artillery was flickering brighter and brighter as battery after battery came into action, making a crescendo of noise and flame when the limits of both seemed to have been reached. Winterbourne saw but could not hear the first of their shells as it exploded short of the village. The great clouds of smoke over the German trenches were darkly visible in the first very pallid light of dawn. It was the preliminary bombardment of the long-expected battle. Winterbourne felt his heart shake with the shaking earth and vibrating air.

The whole thing was indescribable—a terrific spectacle, a stupendous symphony of sound. The devil-artist who had staged it was a master, in comparison with whom all other artists of the sublime and terrible were babies. The roar of the guns was beyond clamour, it was an immense rhythmic harmony, a super-jazz of tremendous drums, a ride of the Walkyrie played by three thousand cannon. The intense rattle of the machine-guns played a minor motif of terror. It was too dark to see the attacking troops, but Winterbourne thought with agony how every one of those dreadful vibrations of sound meant death or mutilation. He thought of the ragged lines of British troops stumbling forward in smoke and flame and a chaos of sound, crumbling away before the German protective barrage and the reserve line machine-guns. He thought of the German Front lines, already obliterated under that ruthless tempest of explosions and flying metal. Nothing could live within the area of that storm except by a miraculous hazard. Already in this first half hour of bombardment hundreds upon hundreds of men would have been violently slain, smashed, torn, gouged, crushed, mutilated. The colossal harmony seemed to roar louder as the drum-fire barrage lifted from the Front line to the Reserve. The battle was begun. They would be mopping-up soon—throwing bombs and explosives down the dug-out entrances on the men cowering inside.

The German heavies were pounding M—— with their shells, smashing at the communication trenches and cross-roads, hurling masses of metal at their own ruined village. Winterbourne saw the half-ruined factory chimney totter and crash to the ground. Two shells pitched on either side of him, and flung earth, stones and broken bricks all round him. He turned and ran back to his cellar, stumbling over shell-holes. He saw an isolated house disappear in the united explosion of two huge shells.

He clutched his hands together as he ran, with tears in his eyes.

[ X ]

Winterbourne found the other runners buckling up their packs and fastening their equipment with that febrile haste which comes with great excitement. Even in the cellar the roar of the artillery made it necessary for them almost to shout to each other.

“What are the orders?”

“Stand by in fighting order, ready to move off at once. Dump packs outside billets.”

Winterbourne in his turn feverishly put on his equipment, buckled his pack, and cleaned his rifle. They stood, rifles and bayonets ready, in the low cellar, ready to spring up the broken stairs as soon as they were warned. In a moment such as this, a kind of paroxysm of humanity, the most difficult thing is to wait. They dreaded the awful storm thundering above them, but they were irresistibly hallucinated by it, eager to plunge in and be done with it. The German shells thudded continuously all round them, muted by the vaster clamour of the attacking artillery. No orders came. They fidgeted, exclaimed, and finally one by one sat silent on their packs, listening. A large rat ran down the cellar stairs and began to nibble something. The beast was exactly level with Winterbourne’s head. He shoved a cartridge into the breech of his rifle, murmuring “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and they no breath at all?” He aimed very carefully and pulled the trigger; there was a terrific bang in the confined cellar, and the rat was smashed dead in the air. Not ten seconds later a red, perspiring face under a steel helmet was anxiously poked through the cellar entrance. It was the Orderly Sergeant.

“What the muckin hell are you doing down there?”

“Having a spree—didn’t you hear the champagne cork?”

“Spree be mucked—one of you buggers fired his rifle and muckin near copped me. Mucked if I don’t report the muckin lot of yer.”

“Wow I Put a sock in it!”

“Muck off!”

“Ord’ly sergeants are cheap to-day!”

“Well, you muckers got to report to yer orfficers at once. ’Op it.”

They ran up the broken stairs, pretending to poke their bayonets at him, and laughing, perhaps a little hysterically. The fat good-natured little Sergeant went off, shaking his fist at them, shouting awful threats about the punishment awaiting them with a broad affectionate grin on his face.

* * * * *

For Winterbourne the battle was a timeless confusion, a chaos of noise, fatigue, anxiety, and horror. He did not know how many days and nights it lasted, lost completely the sequence of events, found great gaps in his conscious memory. He did know that he was profoundly affected by it, that it made a cut in his life and personality. You couldn’t say there was anything melodramatically startling, no hair going grey in a night, or never smiling again. He looked unaltered; he behaved in exactly the same way. But, in fact, he was a little mad. We talk of shell-shock, but who wasn’t shell-shocked more or less? The change in him was psychological, and showed itself in two ways. He was left with an anxiety complex, a sense of fear he had never experienced, the necessity to use great and greater efforts to force himself to face artillery, anything explosive. Curiously enough, he scarcely minded machine-gun fire, which was really more deadly, and completely disregarded rifle-fire. And he was also left with a profound and cynical discouragement, a shrinking horror of the human race....

* * * * *

A timeless confusion. The Runners scattered outside their billet and made for the Officers’ cellar through the falling shells, dodging from one broken house or shell-hole to another. Winterbourne, not yet unnerved, calmly walked straight across and arrived first. Evans took him aside:

“We’re going up as a Company, with orders to support and co-operate with the infantry. Try to nab me a rifle and bayonet before we go over.”

“Very good, Sir.”

Outside was an open box of S.A.A. and they each drew two extra bandoliers of cartridges, which they slung round their necks.

They moved off in sections, filing along the village street which was filled with fresh débris and ruins re-ruined. It was snowing. They came on two freshly killed horses. Their close-cropped necks were bent under them, with great glassy eyeballs starting with agony. A little farther on was a smashed limber with the driver dead beside it.

In the trench they passed a batch of about forty German prisoners, unarmed, in steel helmets. They looked green-pale, and were trembling. They shrank against the side of the trench as the English soldiers passed, but not a word was said to them.

The snowstorm and the smoke drifting back from the barrage made the air as murky as a November fog in London. They saw little, did not know where they were going, what they were doing or why. They lined a trench and waited. Nothing happened. They saw nothing but wire and snowflakes and drifting smoke, heard only the roar of the guns and the now sharper rattle of machine-guns. Shells dropped around them. Evans was looking through his glasses, and cursing the lack of visibility. Winterbourne stood beside him, with his rifle still slung on his left shoulder.

They waited. Then Major Thorpe’s Runner came with a message. Apparently, he had mistaken a map reference and brought them to the wrong place.

They plodged off through the mud, and lined another trench. They waited.

Winterbourne found himself following Evans across what had been No Man’s Land for months. He noticed a skeleton in British uniform, caught sprawling in the German wire. The skull still wore a sodden cap and not a steel helmet. They passed the bodies of British soldiers killed that morning. Their faces were strangely pale, their limbs oddly bulging with strange fractures. One had vomited blood.

They were in the German trenches, with many dead bodies in field grey. Winterbourne and Evans went down into a German dugout. Nobody was there, but it was littered with straw, torn paper, portable cookers, oddments of forgotten equipment and cigars. There were French tables and chairs with human excrement on them.

They went on. A little knot of Germans came towards them holding up their shaking hands. They took no notice of them, but let them pass through.

The barrage continued. Their first casualty was caused by their own shells dropping short.

* * * * *

Major Thorpe sent Winterbourne and another man with a written duplicate message to Battalion Headquarters. They went back over the top, trying to run. It was impossible. Their hearts beat too fast, and their throats were parched. They went blindly at a jog-trot, slower in fact than a brisk walk. They seemed to be tossed violently by the bursting shells. The acrid smoke was choking. A heavy roared down beside Winterbourne and made him stagger with its concussion. He could not control the resultant shaking of his flesh. His teeth chattered very slightly as he clenched them desperately. They got back to familiar land and finally to Southampton Row. It was a long way to Battalion Headquarters. The men in the orderly room eagerly questioned them about the battle but they knew less than they did.

Winterbourne asked for water and drank thirstily. He and the other Runner were dazed and incoherent. They were given another written message, and elaborate directions which they promptly forgot.

The drum-fire had died down to an ordinary heavy bombardment as they started back. Already it was late afternoon. They wandered for hours in unfamiliar trenches before they found the company.

* * * * *

They slept that night in a large German dug-out, swarming with rats. Winterbourne in his sleep felt them jump on his chest and face.

* * * * *

The drum-fire began again next morning. Again they lined a trench and advanced through smoke over torn wire and shell-tormented ground. Prisoners passed through. At night they struggled for hours, carrying down wounded men in stretchers through the mud and clamour. Major Thorpe was mortally wounded and his runner killed; Hume and his runner were killed; Franklin was wounded; Pemberton was killed; Sergeant Perkins was killed; the stretcher-bearers were killed. Men seemed to drop away continually.

* * * * *

Three days later Evans and Thompson led back forty-five men to the old billets in the ruined village. The attack on their part of the front had failed. Farther south a considerable advance had been made and several thousand prisoners taken, but the German line was unbroken and stronger than ever in its new positions. Therefore that also was a failure.

Winterbourne and Henderson were the only two Runners left, and since Evans was in command Winterbourne was now Company Runner. The two men sat on their packs in the cellar without a word. Both shook very slightly but continuously with fatigue and shock. Outside the vicious heavies crashed eternally. They started wildly to their feet as a terrific smash overhead brought down what was left of the house above them and crashed into the duplicate cellar next door. A moment later there was another enormous crash and one end of the cellar broke in with falling bricks and a cloud of dust. They rushed out by the steps at the other end and were sent reeling and choking by another huge black explosion.

They stumbled across to another cellar occupied by what was left of a section, and asked to sleep there since their own cellar was wrecked. Six of them and a corporal sat in silence by the light of a candle, dully listening to the crash of shells.

* * * * *

In a lull they heard a strange noise outside the cellar, first like wheels and then like a human voice calling for help. No one moved. The voice called again. The Corporal spoke:

“Who’s going up?”

“Mucked if I am,” said somebody, “I’ve ’ad enough.”

Winterbourne and Henderson simultaneously struggled to their feet. The change from candle-light to darkness blinded them as they peered out from the ruined doorway. They could just see a confused dark mass. The voice came again:

“Help, for Christ’s sake, come and help!”

A transport limber had been smashed by a shell. The wounded horses had dragged it along and fallen outside the cellar entrance. One man had both legs cut short at the knees. He was still alive, but evidently dying. They left him, lifted down the other man and carried him into the cellar. A large shell splinter had smashed his right knee. He was conscious, but weak. They got out his field-dressing and iodine and dripped iodine on the wound. At the pain of burning disinfectant the man turned deadly pale and nearly fainted. Winterbourne found that his hands and clothes were smeared with blood.

Then came the problem of getting the man away to a dressing station. The Corporal and the four men refused to budge. The shells were crashing continuously outside. Winterbourne started out to get a stretcher and the new stretcher-bearer, groping his way through the darkness. Outside their billet he tripped and fell into a deep shell hole, just as a heavy exploded with terrific force at his side. But for the fall he must have been blown to pieces. He scrambled to his feet, breathless and shaken, and tumbled down the cellar stairs. He noticed scared faces looking at him in the candle-light. He explained what had happened. The stretcher-bearer jumped up, got his stretcher and satchel of dressings, and they started back. Every shell which exploded near seemed to shake Winterbourne’s flesh from his bones. He was dazed and half-frantic with the physical shock of concussion after concussion. When he got back in the cellar he collapsed into a kind of stupor. The stretcher-bearer dressed the man’s wound, and then looked at Winterbourne, felt his pulse, gave him a sip of rum and told him to lie still. He tried to explain that he must help carry the wounded man, and struggled to get to his feet. The stretcher-bearer pushed him back:

“You lie still, mate, you’ve done enough for to-day.”

[ XI ]

The battle on their part of the Front died down into long snarling artillery duels, gas bombardments, fierce local attacks and counter-attacks. Farther south it flamed up again with intense preludes of drum-fire. What was left of the Pioneer Company returned to more normal occupations. So far as they were concerned, one great advantage of the battle was that the Germans had been driven from the long slag-hill, and from a large portion of Hill 91. By fierce counter-attacks the Germans regained much of the lost ground on Hill 91, but they never came anywhere near recovering the slag-hill. The ground they had lost farther south made that impossible. Consequently, some of the worst features of the salient were at last obliterated, and they were no longer under such close observation or enfiladed by machine-guns.

They had a day’s rest, and were then put on the cushy job of building a new track up to the southern fringe of Hill 91 across the old Front Lines and No Man’s Land. They were outside the range of vision of the German observation posts, and it was two days before the German airplanes discovered them—two days of comparative quiet. Then, of course, they got it hot and strong.

In clearing away the wire they made a number of gruesome discoveries, and examined with great interest the primitive hand grenades and other weapons of 1914-15 which were lying rusting there in great quantities. Winterbourne took an immense interest in building this track, an interest which puzzled and amused Evans, especially since this was the first time he had ever seen Winterbourne show any enthusiasm for their labours.

“I can’t see why you’re so keen on this bally old track, Winterbourne. It’s one of the dullest jobs we’ve ever had.”

“But surely you can see, Sir. We’re making something, not destroying things. We’re taking down wire, not putting it up; filling in shell-holes, not desecrating the earth.”

Evans frowned at the phrase “desecrating the earth.” He thought it pretentious, and with all his obtuseness he had an instinctive resentment against Winterbourne’s unspoken but unwavering and profound condemnation of War. Evans had a superstitious reverence for War. He believed in the Empire; the Empire was symbolized by the King-Emperor; and the King—poor man—is always having to dress up as an Admiral or a Field Marshal or a brass hat of some kind. Navydom and Armydom thereby acquired a mystic importance, and since armies and navies are obviously meant for War, it was plain that War was an integral part of Empire-Worship. More than once he clumsily tried to trap Winterbourne into expressing unorthodox opinions. But, of course, Winterbourne saw him coming miles away, and easily evaded his awkward bobby traps.

“I suppose you’re a _republican_,” he said to Winterbourne, who was innocently humming the Marseillaise. “I don’t believe in Republics. Why, Presidents wear evening dress in the middle of the morning.”

Winterbourne nearly burst into a cackle of laughter but managed to restrain himself. He denied that he was a republican, and admitted with mock gravity that Evans had put his finger on a serious flaw in Republican institutions.

But his joy in constructing the track was short-lived. As they were finishing their second day’s work he saw a battery of Field Artillery cross the old No Man’s Land by the road they had built, and then bump its way over shell-holes to a new position. So even this little bit of construction was only for further destruction.

* * * * *

They went on to night work again, and Winterbourne distinguished himself by pulling out of the ground a dud shell which the other men refused to touch, in case it went off. They crouched on the ground while Winterbourne tugged and strained to get it out, and Evans stood beside urging him to go easy. Suddenly Winterbourne went into a series of gasping chuckles, and in answer to Evans’ questions managed to jerk out that the alleged shell was a stump of wood with an iron ring round it. The men returned sheepishly to their work. In reward for his heroic conduct Winterbourne was allowed to join a gang who were pulling up real duds embedded in the _pavé_ of the main road, which had become available through the German retirement. They levered and tugged the shells up very gingerly, since the oldest duds are liable to explode if treated roughly. Winterbourne was glad when that little job was done.

The nightly gas bombardments became worse than ever, and Winterbourne sometimes spent twelve hours a day in his gas mask. They used their respirators so frequently that a new set had to be issued.

Since Evans was now temporarily in command and had only Thompson to help him and about forty men available for work, they did only one shift, which Evans and Thompson took on alternate nights. As Company Runner, Winterbourne carried all messages between the Company and Battalion H.Q. On the other hand, Evans always let him rest on the nights when he himself was not on duty. Winterbourne was profoundly thankful for these nights off. His winter cough, aided perhaps by microbes communicated by lice, had evolved into a sort of tertian ague. Every third night he had alternate fits of sweating and shivering. It was much pleasanter to lie down even in a damp cellar than to go up the line feeling utterly weak and feverish.

He was sleeping soundly alone in the Runner’s cellar, oblivious to the Zwiing, PHUT, of the gas shells outside when he was awakened by Henderson, the other surviving Runner, who came stumbling down the cellar stairs in the darkness. Winterbourne lit a candle for him. Henderson had just taken off his gas mask, and stood with rumpled hair and a pale scared look.

“What’s up?” said Winterbourne, “what’s the matter?”

“Thompson’s killed.”

“Good Lord! The only other officer! How?”

“Whizz-bang.”

“How did it happen?”

“The Boche put up an attack to-night. Thompson took us off work, and told us to line a trench. He was standing on top, and told me to get into the trench. A whizz-bang burst just beside him. He died in five minutes.”

“O God! Did he say anything?”

“Yes, he was perfectly conscious and calm. He told me how to get the men home. He sent best of luck to Evans and you and the S.M. And he made me take a couple of letters from his pocket to send to his wife and mother. He was horribly mangled—right arm and right leg smashed, ribs broken and a great tear in the side of his face. He made me promise to make Evans write home that he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously and painlessly.”

“Damn. He was a nice chap. One of the best officers we had.”

The inner gas curtain was lifted, and Evans’ servant stumbled in, taking off his mask.

“Report at once, fighting order, Winterbourne.”

Winterbourne hurriedly put on his boots and puttees, struggled into his equipment, snapped on his mask, and jog-trotted over to the officer’s cellar through the now familiar hail of gas-shells. He was amazed and distressed and ashamed to find how much his flesh instinctively shrank when a shell dropped close at hand, how great an effort he now needed to refrain from ducking or cowering. He raged at himself, called himself coward, poltroon, sissy, anything abusive he could think of. But still his body instinctively shrank. He had passed into the final period of War strain, when even an air-raid became a terror.

Evans was laboriously writing. The large cellar looked very cellar-like and empty, with one man in place of the six who had lived there less than a fortnight before.

“You know Mr. Thompson’s killed?”

“Yes, Sir. Henderson told me.”

“I can’t carry on as a Company by myself with less than forty available men.” Evans spoke bitterly. “There’s a chit from Division complaining that we are doing far less work than a month ago. They don’t seem to know there’s been a battle, and that we’re worn out and reduced to a third our strength.”

He was silent, re-read his despatch, folded it, and handed it to Winterbourne.

“Take this down to Battalion H.Q. I’ve marked it Special Urgency. Make them get the Colonel up if he’s asleep. If he questions you, tell him our position. I haven’t seen him for three weeks. And refuse to leave without an answer.”

“Very good, Sir.”

“And Winterbourne.”

“Sir?”

“There’s another chit here somewhere urging us to get two volunteers for Infantry commissions in each Company. Henderson’s going—he’s a stout little tyke. The other volunteers are that filthy cook’s mate and the sanitary man. Idiotic. I won’t recommend them. But I want you to volunteer. Will you?”

Winterbourne hesitated. He didn’t want the responsibility, it was contrary to his notion that he ought to stay in the ranks and in the line, take the worst and humblest jobs, share in the common fate of common men. But then he had consented to be a Runner. And then, he was sorely tempted. It meant several months in England, it meant seeing Fanny and Elizabeth again, it meant a respite. He was amazed to find that he didn’t want to leave Evans, and suddenly saw that what he had done in the past months had been chiefly done from personal attachment to a rather common and ignorant man of the kind he most despised, the grown-up Public Schoolboy.

“What are you hesitating about?”

“Well, Sir,” said Winterbourne whimsically, “I was wondering how you’d get on without me.”

“*****!” said Evans. “Besides at this rate, I shan’t last much longer. Now, shall I put your name down?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He afterwards regretted that “Yes.”

* * * * *

Evans’s sharp note brought an abrupt change in their lives. They exchanged places with one of the other Pioneer companies in a quieter section of the line. Evans marched his forty men down as one Platoon, and they passed successively the four Platoons of the relieving Company. The men exchanged ironical jibes as they passed.

Their new quarters were a great improvement. They were joined by a Captain, who took nominal command, and two subalterns. But no men. There appeared to be no men available. They lived in shelters and dug-outs in the Reserve Line. Winterbourne, Henderson and two other Runners lived in a two-foot shelter just outside the officers’ dug-out. Winterbourne was now officially Company Runner. He lived one fortnight in the line, and one at Battalion H.Q. The sacking bed at H.Q., the comparative absence of shelling, the better food, the rest, made it seem like paradise. He did not know that his application for a commission had been passed at once, and that he was being looked after.

Two days after they got to their new quarters, in the line, Evans’s servant poked his head excitedly into the Runners’ shelter.

“Winterbourne!”

“Yes.”

“You’re to come at once. Mr. Evans is sick.”

“Sick!”

Winterbourne found Evans leaning against the side of the trench, a ghastly green pallor on his face.

“Whatever’s the matter, Sir?”

“Gas. I’ve swallowed too much of the beastly stuff. I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to the Dressing Station.”

“Shall I get a stretcher, Sir?”

“No, damn it, I’ll walk down. I can still stand. Take my pack and come along.”

Every few yards Evans had to stop and lean against the trench wall. He heaved, but did not vomit. Winterbourne offered his arm, but he wouldn’t take it. They passed two corpses, rather horribly mutilated, lying on stretchers at the end of the communication trench. Neither said anything, but Evans was thinking, “Well, gas is better than that,” and Winterbourne thought, “How long will it be before some one puts me there?”

He finally got Evans to the Dressing Station, supporting him with his right arm. They shook hands outside.

“You’ll get your commission, Winterbourne.”

“Thanks. Are you all right, Sir? Shall I come down with you farther?”

“No, go back and report that you left me here.”

“Very good, Sir.”

They shook hands again.

“Well, good-bye, old man, best of luck to you.”

“Good-bye, Sir, good-bye.”

He never saw Evans again.

* * * * *

When Evans had gone, Winterbourne’s interest in the Company suddenly evaporated. He did not know the new officers, rather disliked the Captain, and, of course, was not on the same footing with them as he had been with Evans. Henderson left for England to be trained as an officer. Winterbourne felt lonelier than ever. And he realized with disgust and horror that his nerve was gone. His daily trips were really very easy—about a mile and a half, a few gusts of machine-gun bullets, and about thirty or forty crumps on the road each way. The Germans had discovered some tanks hidden behind a slag-hill round which he had to pass. They shelled it with heavies. Winterbourne now found that he had to force himself to walk forward to them and through the area where they were bursting. It was worse at night. One night he did what he had never done before when carrying a message—waited ten minutes for the shelling to quiet down.

That ten minutes, curiously enough, saved his life. He heard several shells fall in and around Company H.Q. just as he came along the trench. One of them had fallen plump on their fragile shelter and blown it to pieces, instantly killing the Runner, Jenkins, a boy of nineteen, who was lying there. If Winterbourne had not lingered that ten minutes on the road, he would inevitably have been killed, too. He felt very guilty about it. Perhaps if he had come back, the boy would have been sent back with a return message. But, no, if there had been a return message, it would have been his job.

He lost his blanket, groundsheet and pack. The Runners were transferred to a similar shelter twenty yards farther on. Winterbourne hated to pass the smashed shelter. He always thought of Jenkins, and his absurd boyish grin. Jenkins had been errand-boy and then assistant to a grocer in a small provincial town. A most undistinguished person. He had a solemn respect for “John Bull” and its opinions. Otherwise he wasn’t solemn at all, always cracking rather pointless jests, and grinning his boyish grin, and hardly ever grousing. Winterbourne regretted him.

* * * * *

At Battalion Headquarters, Winterbourne tried to read, and found it impossible. He discovered an old number of “The Spectator” with an article on Porson, written by a man he had known. He had to read the article before he remembered who Porson was, and found himself puzzling over quite ordinary sentences like a ploughman. He threw the paper down in despair, and got permission to go to an estaminet. They had no wine, and spirits were forbidden. He sat there drinking the infamous and harmless French beer, and droning out sentimental songs with the other Tommies. He got into the habit of bribing the Q.M.S.’s clerk to give him extra rum. Anything to forget.

* * * * *

At the end of one of his fortnightly periods at Battalion H.Q. Winterbourne went as usual to the R.S.M.:

“Winterbourne, D Company Runner, returning for service in the line, Sir.”

The R.S.M. turned over some papers, pursing up his lips:

“Let me see, let me _seeee_. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Here we are, 31819, Private Winterbourne, G. Yes. You’re returning to England on Friday for the purpose of proceeding to an Officer Cadet Corps. Report to the Orderly Room at four (pip emma) on Thursday for your papers, and draw iron rations from the Q.M.S. Will report to R.T.O. at Rail Head before eight (ack emma) on Friday, and will be struck off the strength. Got that?”

“Yes, Sir. Will you give me a chit to show them in the line, please.”

“No. To-day’s Wednesday. You’d better stay here, and I’ll send up the Runner who is taking your place.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The boy who was taking Winterbourne’s place was delighted to get the job. He was a quick-witted youth who had been trained as an Elementary School Teacher, and thanked Winterbourne as if the new job had been his gift. He was killed by a bullet as he climbed out of the communication trench with his first message. Winterbourne began to feel as if he had made a pact with the Devil, so that other men were always being killed in his stead.

For the remaining two days he was virtually excused duty. He was allowed to go to the baths each day, and got himself clean and free from lice. He received absolutely new underclothes, not the worn, soiled garments full of dead lice usually issued at the baths, was given new puttees and trousers in place of his soiled torn ones, and handed in his rent leather jerkin. He had a sacking bed, and slept twelve hours a night. Already he was a different being from the dazed and haggard man of the Hill 91 days.

He wanted very much to go to England, and yet his chief feeling was that of apathy. Now that his orders had come, he felt he would just as soon have stopped where he was. Why prolong the agony? If he stayed, he would either be hit sooner or later, or become a Battalion Runner, a much better and less anxious job than that of an Infantry subaltern. Still, it might be worth while, just to see Elizabeth and Fanny again....

It was hot midsummer weather. He wandered out along the straight French road, with its ceaseless up and down of mechanical transport and military traffic. The Military Police and armed pickets suspiciously turned him back. He found a little hedgeless field of poppies and yellow daisies, and sat down there. The heavies were firing with regular deliberation; overhead the white shrapnel bursts pursued an enemy plane; from the far distance came a very faint “claaang!” as a shell smashed into M——. It was so strange to have unmuddy boots, to sit on grass in the sun and look at wild flowers, to see one or two undamaged houses, not to be continually on the alert. He sat with his elbows on his knees, and his doubled fists under his chin, staring in front of him. His body was rested, but he felt such an apathetic weariness of mind that he would have been glad to die painlessly there and then, without ever going back to England, without ever seeing Elizabeth and Fanny again. His mind no longer wandered off in long coherent reveries, but was either vaguely empty or thronged with too vivid memories. It seemed incredible that only seven months or so had passed since he had left England—more like seven years. He felt, not so much self-contempt, as self-indifference. He did not despise George Winterbourne, he merely wasn’t interested in him. Once he had been extremely interested in himself and the things he wanted to do; now, he didn’t care, he didn’t want to do anything in particular. Directly the military yoke was lightened and he was left to himself for a few hours, he was aimless, apathetic, listless. If he had been told there and then that he was discharged from the Army and could go, he wouldn’t have known what to do except to stay there and stare at the poppies and daisies.

The night before he left, the Runners and officers’ servants got rum, and beer and champagne, and made him drink with them. They exhorted him not to forget his old pals, and not to be a swine to his men when he was an officer. He promised, regretting all the time the subtle difference which was already dividing him from them. “Fancy ’avin’ to salute old George,” said one of them. Fancy indeed! He wished so much he had stayed with them. He drank a good deal, and for the first time in his life went to bed tight.

* * * * *

He got to Rail Head just before eight, hot and perspiring from a rapid walk in full kit under a July sun. An immense drum-fire was thundering from the north. The Division was under orders to proceed there in two days. There was to be another great offensive at Ypres. He shuddered, thinking of the showers of bursting metal, flogging and churning the ground, shearing and rending human flesh, the immense concourse of detonations hammering on human nerves.

The R.T.O. gave him directions and he got into a waiting train. It was empty, except for a small group of leave men at the other end. He did not join them, glad of a little solitude.

The German heavies gave him a last amiable farewell. They began dropping shells on Rail Head. That sickening apprehension of the explosion came on him, and he felt sure that a shell would fall on his carriage before the train left. He fought the apprehension savagely, as if the only thing he wanted to do in life was to repress his fear reflex. The shells came over one at a time of regular intervals of a minute. He listened for them, sweating, and gripping his rifle. Either let the train start or get it over. The train waited interminably. ZwiiING, CRASH! to the right. ZwiiING, CRASH! to the left; ZwiiING, CRASH! to the right; ZwiiING, CRASH! to the left. He sat there alone for thirty-five minutes—thirty-five ZwiiING, CRASH! It was somehow more awful than drum-fire, a more penetrating torture.

At last the train started and puffed slowly out of the station. Winterbourne sat quite still, listening to the Crashes growing fainter and fainter as the train gathered speed. At last they disappeared altogether in the rattle of wheels. In place of the long slow crawl coming up, the train clattered along at great speed. He passed undamaged stations, thronged with French peasants, French soldiers on leave and British troops; he saw the lovely Corot poplars and willows shimmering in the sun as they wavered in the light breeze; there were cows in the fields, and he noticed yellow iris in the wet ditches and tall white hog’s parsley. A field of red clover and white daisies made him think of the old days at Martin’s Point. An immense effort of imagination was needed to link himself now with himself then. He looked almost with curiosity at his familiar khaki and rifle—so strange that ten years later that boy should be a soldier. Then he noticed that he had forgotten to sheath his bayonet. It had been fixed so long that he had to wrench it off. There was a little ring of rust round the bayonet boss. He got out his oily rag and anxiously cleaned it. The bayonet sheath was so full of dried mud that he had to clean that too.

At Boulogne he sent a telegram to Elizabeth. The R.T.O. told him to leave all his kit on the quay, and to take only his personal belongings. He slipped off his equipment and laid his rifle beside his dinted helmet, feeling as if he were carrying out some strange valedictory rite. He went on board ship, holding his razor, soap, tooth-brush, comb, and some letters, wrapped in a clean khaki handkerchief. He managed to scrounge a haversack and strap on board.

The troop train from Folkestone to London was filled with leave men and others returned from France. As the train puffed up to the Junction, the men crowded to the windows. Girls and women walking in the parallel street, standing in the doorways, leaning out the window, waved pocket handkerchiefs, cheered shrilly and threw them kisses. The excited men waved and shouted to them. Winterbourne was amazed at the beauty, the almost angelic beauty of women. He had not seen a woman for seven months.

It was dark when they got to Victoria, but the Station was brilliantly lighted. A long barrier separated a crowd from the soldiers, who thronged out at one end. Here and there a woman threw her arms about the neck of a soldier in a close embrace which at least at that moment was sincere. The women’s shoulders trembled with their sobs; the men stood very still, holding them close a moment, and then drew them away. At once the women made an effort, and seemed gay and unconcerned.

Many of the men were proceeding elsewhere, and were not met.

Winterbourne saw Elizabeth standing, in a wide-brimmed hat, at the end of the barrier. Again he was amazed at the beauty of women. Could it be that he knew, that he had dared to touch, so beautiful a creature? She looked so slender, so young, so exquisite. And so elegant. He was intimidated, and hung back in the crowd of passing soldiers, watching her. She was scanning the faces as they passed; twice she looked at him, and looked away. He made his way through the throng towards her. She looked at him again carefully, and once more began scanning the passing faces. He walked straight up to her and held out his hands:

“Elizabeth!”

She started violently, stared at him, and then kissed him with the barrier between them:

“Why, George! How you’ve altered! I didn’t recognize you!”

[ XII ]

Winterbourne had a fortnight’s leave before reporting to his Regimental Depot. He came in for two or three air raids, and lay awake listening to the familiar bark of Archies. The bombs crashed heavily. It was very mild—all over in half an hour. Still, the raids affected him unpleasantly; he had not expected them.

He spent his first morning wandering about London by himself. He was still amazed at the beauty of women, and was afraid they would be offended by his staring at them. Prostitutes twice spoke to him, offering him “Oriental attractions.” He saluted them, and passed on. The second girl muttered insults, which he scarcely heard. There seemed to be a great many more prostitutes in London.

The street paving was badly worn, but looked marvelously smooth and kempt to Winterbourne, accustomed to roads worn into deep ruts and reft with shell-holes. He was charmed to see so many houses—all unbroken. And busses going up and down. And people carrying umbrellas—of course, people had umbrellas. There was Khaki everywhere. Every third man was a soldier. He passed some American marines, the advance guard of the great armies being prepared across the Atlantic. They had wide shoulders and narrow hips, strong-looking men; each of them had picked up a girl. They walked in London with the same proprietory swagger that the English used in France.

A military policeman stopped and roughly asked him what he was doing. Winterbourne produced his pass.

“Sorry, thought you was a deserter, old man. Don’t go out without yer pass.”

The second night after his arrival Elizabeth took him to a Soho restaurant to dine with some of her friends. Fanny was not there, but the party included Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Waldo Tubbe and Reggie Burnside. There were several people Winterbourne had never met, including a man who had made a great hit by translating Armenian poetry from the French versions of Archag Tchobanian. He was extremely intellectual and weary in manner, and took Winterbourne’s hand in a very limp way, turning his head aside with an air of elegant contempt as he did so.

Winterbourne sat very silent through the meal, nervously rolling bread pills. He was amazed to find how remote he felt, how completely he had nothing to say. They talked about various topics he didn’t quite follow, and titteringly gossiped about people he didn’t know. Elizabeth got on wonderfully, chattered with every one, laughed and was a great success. He felt very uncomfortable, like a death’s head at a feast. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the restaurant mirrors, and thought he looked ludicrously solemn and distressed.

Over coffee they shifted seats, and one or two people came and talked to him. Mr. Upjohn dropped clumsily into the next chair, thrust out his chin, and coughed.

“Are you back in London for good now?”

“No. I’ve a fortnight’s leave, and then go to an Officer’s Training Corps.”

“And then will you be in London?”

“No, I shall have to go back to France again.”

Mr. Upjohn irritably clucked his tongue—tch, tch!

“I mildly supposed you’d finished soldiering. You look most grotesque in those clothes.”

“Yes, but they’re practical, you know.”

“What I mean to say is that the most important thing is that the processes of civilization shouldn’t be interrupted by all this war business.”

“I quite agree. I—...”

“What I mean to say is, if you get time come round to my studio and have a look at my new pictures. Are you still writing for periodicals?”

Winterbourne smiled.

“No. I’ve been rather busy, you know, and in the trenches one—”

“What I mean to say is, I’d like you to do an article on my Latest Development.”

“Suprematism?”

“Good Lord, NO! I finished with _that_ long ago. How extraordinarily ignorant you are, Winterbourne! No, no. I’m working at Concavism now. It’s by far the greatest contribution that’s been made to twentieth-century civilization. What I means is....”

Winterbourne ceased to listen and drank off a full glass of wine. Why hadn’t Evans written to him? Died of the effects of gas probably. He beckoned to the waiter.

“Bring me another bottle of wine.”

“Yessir.”

“George!” came Elizabeth’s voice, warning and slightly reproving. “Don’t drink too much!”

He made no answer, but sat looking heavily at his coffee cup. Blast her. Blast Upjohn. Blast the lot of them. He drank off another glass of wine, and felt the singing dazzle of intoxication, its comforting oblivion, stealing into him. Blast them.

Mr. Upjohn grew tired of improving the mind of a cretin who hadn’t even the wits to listen to him, and slid away. Presently Mr. Waldo Tubbe took his place.

“Well, my dear Winterbourne, I am very happy to see you again looking so well. The military life has set you up splendidly. And Mrs. Winterbourne tells me that at last you have received a commission. I congratulate you—better late than never.”

“Thanks. But I may not get it, you know. I’ve got to pass the training school.”

“Oh, that’ll do you a world of good, a world of good.”

“I hope so.”

“And how did you spend your leisure in France—still reading and painting?”

Winterbourne gave a little hard laugh.

“No, mostly lying about sleeping.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But, you know, if you will forgive my saying so, I always doubted whether your vocation were really towards the arts. I felt you were more fitted for an open-air life. Of course, you’re doing splendid work now, splendid. The Empire needs every man. When you come back after the victory, as I trust you will return safe and sound, why don’t you take up life in one of our colonies, Australia or Canada? There’s a great opening for men there.”

Winterbourne laughed again.

“Wait till I get back, and then we’ll see. Have a glass of wine?”

“No-oeh, thank you, no-oeh. By the way, what is that red ribbon on your arm? Vaccination?”

“No, Company Runner.”

“A Company Runner? What is that? Not runner away, I hope?”

And Mr. Tubbe laughed silently, nodding his head up and down in appreciation of his jest. Winterbourne did not smile.

“Well, it might be under some circumstances, if you knew which way to run.”

“Oh, but our men are so splendid, so splendid, so unlike the Germans, you know. Haven’t you found the Germans mean-spirited? They have to be chained to their machine-guns, you know.”

“I hadn’t observed it. In fact, they’re fighting with wonderful courage and persistence. It’s not much of a compliment to our men to suggest otherwise, is it? We haven’t managed to shift ’em far yet.”

“Ah, but you must not allow your own labours to distort your perspective. The Navy is the important arm in the War, that and the marvelous home organization, of which you, of course, can know nothing.”

“Of course, but still....”

Mr. Tubbe rose to move away:

“Delighted to have seen you, my dear Winterbourne. And thank you for all your interesting news from the Front. _Most_ stimulating. _Most_ stimulating.”

Winterbourne signed to his wife to go, but she ignored the signal, and went on talking earnestly and attentively with Reggie Burnside. He drank another glass of wine, and stretched his legs. His heavy hobnailed boots came in contact with the shins of the man opposite.

“Sorry. Hope I didn’t hurt you. Sorry to be so clumsy.”

“Oh, not at all, nothing, nothing,” said the man, rubbing his bruised shin with a look of furious anguish. Elizabeth frowned at Winterbourne, and leaned across to get the bottle. He grabbed it first, poured himself another glass, and then gave it to her. She looked angry at his rudeness. He felt pleasantly drunk, and cared not a damn for any one.

Coming home in the taxi she reproved him with gentle dignity for drinking too much.

“Remember, dear, you’re not with a lot of rough soldiers now. And, please forgive me for mentioning it, but your hands and fingers are terribly dirty—did you forget to wash them? And you were rather rude to everybody.”

He was silent, staring listlessly out the taxi-cab window. She sighed, and slightly shrugged her shoulders. They did not sleep together that night.

* * * * *

Next morning at breakfast they were both pre-occupied and silent. Suddenly George emerged from his reverie:

“I say, what’s happened to Fanny? She’s not out of town, is she?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why wasn’t she at dinner with us last night?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

“You didn’t ask her! Why ever not?”

Elizabeth looked annoyed at the question, but tried to pass it off lightly.

“I don’t see much of her now—Fanny’s so popular, you know.”

“But why don’t you see her?” Winterbourne pursued clumsily. “Is anything wrong?”

“I don’t see her because I don’t choose to,” replied Elizabeth tartly and decisively.

He made no reply. So, owing to him there was fixed enmity between Fanny and Elizabeth! His mood of depression deepened, and he went to his room. He picked a book from the shelves at random and opened it—De Quincey’s “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” He had entirely forgotten the existence of that piece of macabre irony, and gazed stupidly at the large-type title. Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. How damned appropriate. He put it down and began to look over his painting materials. Elizabeth had taken his sketching blocks and paper and all his unused canvases except one. The tubes of paint had gone hard and dry, and his palette was covered with shrunken hard blobs of paint just as he had left it fifteen months before. He carefully cleaned it, as if he might be sent before his Company officer under the charge of having a dirty palette.

He turned up some of his old sketches and looked through them. Could it be that he had composed them? They were undoubtedly signed “G. Winterbourne.” He looked at them critically, and then slowly tore them up, threw them in the empty fire-grate, struck a match and set fire to them. He watched the paper curl up under the creeping flame, glow dull red, and shrink to black fragile ash. Numbers of his canvases were stacked in little neat piles against the wall. He ran through them rapidly, letting them fall back into place as if they had been cards. He paused when he came upon a forgotten portrait of himself. Had he painted that? Yes, it was signed with his name. Now, when and where had he done it? He held the small canvas in his hands, gazing intently at it with a prodigious effort of memory, but simply could not remember anything about it. The picture was undated, and he could not even remember in which year he had done it. He deliberately put his foot through it, tore away the strips of canvas from the frame and burned them. It was the only portrait of him in existence, since he had always refused to be photographed.

In the line they had been forbidden to keep diaries or to make sketches, since either might be of use to the enemy if they got possession of them. He shut his eyes. In a flash he saw vividly the ruined village, the road leading to M——, the broken desecrated ground, the long slag-hill, and heard the “claaang” of the heavies dropping reverberantly into M——. He went to Elizabeth’s room to get a sheet of paper and a soft pencil to make a sketch of the scene. She had gone out. As he rummaged at her table, he turned over and could not help seeing the first lines of a letter in a handwriting unknown to him. The date was that of the day on which he had returned to England, and the words he could not help seeing were: “Darling, What a bore, as you say! Never mind, the visitation can’t last long and....” Winterbourne hastily covered the letter up to avoid reading any more.

He went back to his room with paper and pencil, and began to sketch. He was astonished to find that his hand, once as steady as the table itself, shook very slightly but perceptibly. The drink last night, or shell-shock? He persisted with his sketch, but the whole thing went wrong. He got tired of blocking lines in, and irritatedly rubbing them out. And yet that scene existed so vividly in his memory and he could see exactly how it could be formalized into an effective pattern. But his hand and brain failed him—he had even forgotten how to draw rapidly and accurately.

He dropped the pencil and rubber on the half-erased sketch and went back to Elizabeth’s room. She was still out. The room was very quiet and sunny. The old orange-striped curtains had gone and were replaced by long ample curtains of thick green serge, to comply with the regulations about lights. There were summer flowers in the large blue bowl, and fruit on the beautiful Spanish plate. He remembered how the wasp had come through the window like a tiny Fokker plane, almost exactly three years ago. To his surprise he felt a lump in his throat and tears coming to his eyes.

A church clock outside chimed three quarters. He looked at his wrist watch—a quarter to one. Better go somewhere and have lunch. He dropped into the first Lyons Restaurant he came to. The waitress asked if he would like cold corned beef—thanks, he’d had enough bully beef for the time being. After lunch, he rang up Fanny’s flat, but got no reply. He walked in her direction, strolling, to give her time to return home. She was not in. He scribbled a note, asking her to meet him as soon as she could, and then took a bus back to Chelsea, lay down on his bed and fell asleep. Elizabeth came into the room about six and tip-toed out. At seven she woke him. He started up, fully awake at once, mechanically grabbing for his rifle.

“What’s up?”

Elizabeth was startled by this sudden leap awake, and he had unconsciously jostled her roughly as she bent over him.

“I’m so sorry. How you started! I didn’t mean to _frighten_ you.”

“Oh, it’s all right. I wasn’t frightened—used to jumping up in a hurry, you know. What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Good Lord, I wonder what made me sleep that long!”

“I came to know if you’d dine with me and Reggie to-night.”

“Is he coming here afterwards?”

“Of course not.”

“I think I’ll have dinner with Fanny.”

“All right, just as you please.”

“Can I have the other key to the flat?”

Elizabeth lied:

“I’m afraid it’s lost. But I’ll leave the door unlocked as I did to-day.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“Au revoir.”

“Au revoir.”

* * * * *

Winterbourne washed, and worked desperately hard with a nail brush to get out the dirt deeply and apparently ineradicably engrained in his roughened hands. He got a little more off, but his fingers were still striated with lines of dirt which made them look coarse and horrible. He rang Fanny up from a call-box.

“Hullo. That you, Fanny? George speaking.”

“_Darling!_ How are you? When did you get back?”

“Two or three days ago. Didn’t you get my letter?”

Fanny lied:

“I’ve been away, and only found it when I got back just now.”

“It doesn’t matter. Listen, will you dine with me to-night?”

“Darling, I’m _so_ sorry, but I simply can’t. I’ve an appointment I simply must keep. _Such_ a bore!”

Such a bore, as you say! Never mind, the visitation can’t last long, and....

“It doesn’t matter, darling. When can we meet?”

“Just a moment, let me look at my memorandum book.”

A brief silence. He could hear a faint voice from another line crossing his: “My God, you say he’s killed! And he only went back last week!”

Fanny’s voice again.

“Hullo? Are you there, George.”

“Yes.”

“To-day’s Wednesday. I’m awfully busy for some reason this week. Can you see me on Saturday for dinner?”

“Must it be as late as Saturday? I’ve only a fortnight, you know.”

“Well, you can make it lunch on Friday, if you prefer. I’m lunching with somebody, but you can come along. It’d be nicer to dine alone together, though, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, of course. Saturday then. What time?”

“Seven-thirty, the usual place.”

“All right.”

“Good-bye, darling.”

“Good-bye, Fanny dear.”

* * * * *

He dined alone and then went to a Circassian Café, which he had been told was the new haunt of the intelligentsia. It was very crowded, but he knew nobody there. He found a seat, and sat by himself. Opposite him at a couple of tables was a brilliant bevy of elegant young homosexuals, two of them in Staff Officers’ uniforms. They paid no attention to him, after a first supercilious stare, followed by a sneer. He felt uneasy, and wondered if he ought to be there in his Tommy’s uniform. Perhaps the Café was out of bounds. He paid for his coffee and left. After wandering about the streets for a time, he dropped into a pub in the Charing Cross road, and stood beside a couple of Tommies drinking beer. They were home-service N.C.O.’s, instructors he gathered from their conversation, which was all about some petty way in which they had scored off an officer who did not know his drill. Winterbourne thought he would stand them a drink and get into talk with them, but his eye fell on a notice which forbade “Treating.” He paid and left.

He dropped into a music-hall. There were numbers of war songs, very patriotic, and patriotic war scenes with the women dressed in the flags of the Allied nations. All references to the superiority of the Allies and the inferiority of the Germans were heartily applauded. A particularly witty scene showed a Tommy capturing several Germans by attracting them with a sausage tied to the end of his bayonet. A chorus of girls in red pre-war military tunics sang a song about how all the girls love Tommy, kicking up their trousered legs in unison, and saluting very much out of unison. There was a Grand Finale of Victory to the tune of:

“When we’ve wound up the watch on the Rhine, Everything will be Potsdamn fine.”

At the end of the performance the orchestra played “God Save the King.” Winterbourne stood rigidly to attention with the other soldiers in the audience.

* * * * *

Eleven o’clock. He thought he would go and sleep at his Club. The place was dimly lighted and empty, except for three or four elderly men, who were earnestly discussing what ought to have been done in the hand of Bridge they had just played. There were notices everywhere urging Members to be economical with light. The servants were women except the Head Waiter, a pale little spectacled man of forty-five, who informed Winterbourne that no Club bedrooms were available. They had all been commandeered for War purposes. Winterbourne found it odd to be addressed as “Sir” again.

“I’ve got me papers too, Sir,” said the Waiter, “expect to be called up any day, Sir.”

“What category are you?”

“B1, Sir.”

“Oh, you’ll be all right. Keep telling ’em you’re a skilled Club Steward and you’ll get an Officers’ Mess job.”

“Do you really think so, Sir? My wife worries about me something dreadful, Sir. She says she’s sure I’ll catch my death of cold in the trenches. I’ve a very weak chest, Sir, if you’ll pardon me mentionin’ it, Sir.”

“I’m sure they won’t send you out.”

The little Waiter died of double pneumonia in a Base Hospital early in 1918. The Club Committee made a grant of ten pounds to his widow, and agreed that his name should appear on the Club War Memorial.

Winterbourne felt sleepless. He was so much accustomed to being alert and awake at night and sleeping by day, that he found a difficulty in breaking the habit. He spent the night aimlessly wandering about the streets and sitting on Embankment benches. He noticed that there were very few occupants of the benches—the War found work for every one. Odd, he reflected, that in War-time the country could spend five million pounds sterling a day in trying to kill Germans, and that in peace-time it couldn’t afford five million a year to attack its own destitution. Policemen spoke to him twice, quite decently, under the impression that he was a leave-man without a bed. He tried to explain. One of them was very fatherly:

“You take my advice, my boy, and go to the Y.M.C.A. They’ll give yer a bed cheap. I’ve got a boy your age in the trenches meself. Now, say you was my boy. I wouldn’t ’ave ’im goin’ with none of these London street women. ’E’s a good boy, ’e is. An’ they’ve treated ’im cruel, they ’ave. ’E’s been in France nearly two year, and never ’ad any leave.”

“No leave in nearly two years! How extraordinary!”

“No, not even after ’e was in Orspital.”

“What was he in Hospital with?”

“’E wrote us it was pneumonia, but we believe ’e was wounded and didn’t want to fret us, because he wrote afterwards it was pleurisy.”

“Do you happen to know the number of his Base Hospital?”

“Yes, Number XP.”

Winterbourne smiled sadly and cynically; he knew that was a Venereal Disease Hospital. Pay was stopped while a man was under treatment, and he lost his right to Leave for a year. Winterbourne determined not to undeceive the policeman.

“How long is it since he came out of hospital?”

“Ten months or more.”

“Oh, well, he’ll certainly get leave before Christmas.”

“D’you think so? Reely? ’E’s such a good boy, good-lookin’ and well set-up. P’raps you’ll see ’im when you go back. Tom Jones. Gunner Tom Jones.”

Winterbourne smiled again at the thought of looking for Tom Jones in the swarming and scattered thousands of the Artillery. But he said:

“If I meet him, I’ll tell him how much you’re looking forward to seeing him.”

He pressed half-a-crown in the policeman’s hand, to drink the health of Tom and himself. The policeman touched his helmet and called him “Sir.”

* * * * *

He had breakfast at a Lockhart’s—kippers and tea—and washed in an underground lavatory. He got back to the flat about ten. Unthinkingly he went into Elizabeth’s room. She and Reggie were having breakfast in dressing gowns. Winterbourne apologized almost abjectly, and went to his own room. He threw off the boots from his aching feet and lay down clothed. In ten minutes he was fast asleep.

* * * * *

The meeting with Fanny was somehow a failure. She was extremely gay and pretty and well-dressed and charming, and talked cheerily at first, and then valiantly against his awkward silences. Winterbourne did not know why he felt so awkward and silent. He seemed to have nothing to say to Fanny, and his mind appeared to have become sluggish—he missed half her witty sayings and clever allusions. It was like being up for oral examination, and continually making silly mistakes. Yet he was very fond of Fanny, very fond of her, just as he was very fond of Elizabeth. And yet he seemed to have so little to say to them, and found it so hard to follow their careless intellectual chatter. He had tried to tell Elizabeth some of his War experiences. Just as he was describing the gas bombardments and the awful look on the faces of men gassed, he noticed her delicate mouth was wried by a suppressed yawn. He stopped abruptly, and tried to talk of something else. Fanny was sympathetic, but he could see he was boring her, too. Of course, he was boring her. She and other people got more than enough of the war from the newspapers and everything about them; they wanted to forget it, of course, they wanted to forget it. And there was he, dumb and dreary and khakied, only awaking to any appearance of animation when he talked of the line after drinking a good deal.

He took Fanny home in a taxi, and held her hand, gazing silently in front of him. At the door of her flat, he kissed her:

“Good-night, Fanny dearest. Thank you so much for having dinner with me.”

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“Not to-night, dear. I’m dreadfully sleepy—bit tired, you know.”

“Oh, all right. Good-night.”

“Good-night, darl—”

The last syllable was cut off by the sharp closing of the flat door.

Winterbourne walked back to Chelsea. The street lamps were very dim. For the first time in his life he saw the stars plainly above Piccadilly. In the King’s Road he heard the warning bugles for an air raid. He got into bed, extinguished the light, and lay there listening, wide awake. To his shame he found the shell-fear came back as the Archies opened up, and he started each time he heard the thud of a bomb. They came closer and one crashed in the next street. He found he was sweating.

Elizabeth did not get back until three. Reggie and she had taken shelter in the Piccadilly Hotel. Winterbourne was still awake when she came in, but did not call to her.

* * * * *

His leave came to an end, and he spent five weeks of vague routine at his Depot. He hated coming back to barrack-room life, and did not like the men he was with. They were all Expeditionary men, but strangely different from what they were in the line. Most of the comradeship had gone; they were selfish, rather malicious to each other, and servilely flattered the N.C.O.’s who could get them passes. They seemed to think about nothing except getting passes out, so that they could meet girls or go to pubs. They grumbled ceaselessly. Some of them occasionally told hair-raising War stories, which Winterbourne thought quite probable, though he refused to accept their evidence as conclusive. He always remembered one story, or rather episode, related by a Sergeant in the Light Infantry:

“We ’ad a bloody awful time on the Somme. I shan’t forget some of the things I saw there.”

“What things?” asked Winterbourne.

“Well, one of our orfficers laid out there wounded, and we see a German run up with one of those stick bombs, pull the string and stick it under the orfficer’s head. ’E was wounded in both arms, and couldn’t move. So ’e ’ad five seconds waitin’ for his ’ead to be blowed off by that bomb sizzlin’ under ’is ear. We ’adn’t time to get to ’im. Some one shot the German and then some o’ our chaps picked up a wounded German orfficer and threw ’im alive into a burning ammunition dump. ’E screamed something ’orrible.”

* * * * *

From the depot he was sent to the Officers’ Training Camp with two days’ leave. He managed to get Fanny and Elizabeth to meet, and had lunch with them on the day he left. They both saw him off from Waterloo, and then parted outside the station.

The months of dreary Training in the cold dreary camp dragged by. He had two days’ Leave in the middle of the course, then “passed out” as an officer, and was sent on Leave again, with orders to wait until he received official notice of his appointment.

* * * * *

Elizabeth and Fanny both admired the cut and material of his cadet’s uniform, which was exactly like an officer’s except that it bore no badges of rank and that he did not wear the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt. He looked ever so much smarter in his new officer’s clothes, with the little blue chevron, marking service over seas, sewed on his left sleeve. They both quite took to him again, and during his month’s Leave gave him a good time. Fanny thought him still an excellent lover. Only, instead of gay and amusing talk “in between,” he sat heavily silent, or drank and talked about that boring awful War. It was such a pity—he used to be such a charming companion.

This Leave came to an end too. He was gazetted, and went to his new regimental Depot, situated in wooden huts on a desolate heath in the North of England, a place swept by rain and wind and deadeningly chill in the wet winter days. The other officers were sharply divided into two sections or sects. Wounded survivors from the early days of the War, now on Permanent Home Service; and the newly gazetted officers, with a sprinkling of wounded on Temporary Home Service. They ate in one large mess room, but had two common rooms, which seemed to be tacitly reserved for each of the two groups, who scarcely ever mingled. Only the cadets from Sandhurst were admitted into the more exclusive room.

There was very little to do—parading with the Company, inspection, a little drill, Orderly Officer occasionally. There were so many new officers waiting to go overseas that the quarters were uncomfortably crowded, and there seemed to be almost as many officers as men on parade. He got the impression that Infantry subalterns were cheap as stinking fish.

At last he got his orders to proceed overseas—France again, though he had hoped for Egypt or Salonika. He had two more days of Leave and a quarrel with Elizabeth, who found him writing a loving note to Fanny on the morning he arrived. He went off in dudgeon and spent the time with Fanny. He saw Elizabeth again on the afternoon of the day before he left and patched matters up with her. She was now furiously jealous of his spending nights with Fanny, but “forgave” him. She said that the War had affected his mind so much that he did not know what he was doing, and anyway as he was going out again at once, they might as well be friends. They kissed, and he went off to keep a dinner engagement with Fanny.

His train left at seven the next morning. He got up at five-thirty, and kissed Fanny, who woke up and sleepily offered to get him coffee. But he made her lie still, dressed hastily, made himself some coffee, found he could not eat anything, and went back to the bedroom. Fanny had fallen asleep again. He kissed her very tenderly and gently, not to wake her; and softly let himself out of the flat. He had difficulty in finding a taxi, and was horribly worried lest he should miss his train and be suspected of over-staying Leave. He got to the platform one minute before the train started. There was no porter to carry his large valise, but he managed to get into a carriage just as the train started. It was a Pullman, so crowded with officers that he hadn’t room to sit down, and had to stand all the way to Dover. Most of them had newspapers. The news of the crushing defeat of the Fifth Army was just coming through. They were being sent out to replace losses. He thought of something which had happened the night before....

* * * * *

Fanny had insisted on his coming with her for a couple of hours to a party of the intelligentsia given by some one with chambers near the Temple. As they passed Charing Cross station, Winterbourne bumped into a man from his own Company who had just arrived by the Leave train.

“Go on with the others, Fanny dear. I’ll catch you up. Anyway, I’ve got the address.”

He turned to Corporal Hobbs, and said:

“Are you still with the old lot?”

“No, I left ’em in November. Got trench feet at Ypres. I was supposed to be court-martialled, but that was washed out. I’ve got a job at the Base now.”

“You’re lucky.”

“You’ve heard the news, I s’pose?”

“No, what?”

“Well, we heard there’s a big surprise attack on the Somme. We’re retiring, and our old Division is s’posed to have copped it badly, smashed to pieces, the R.T.O. said.”

“Good God!”

“I think it must be true. All Leaves stopped. I just managed to get away before the order came. There were only about ten men on the boat. Lucky for me I went down early.”

“Well, so long, old man.”

“I see you’re an officer now.”

“Yes, I’m just going out again.”

“Best of luck to you.”

“Best of luck.”

He found the man’s chambers. There were about ten people present. Winterbourne knew some of them. They had also heard the news of the battle through a man in Whitehall and were discussing it.

“It’s a bad defeat,” he said. “I’m told that the highest authorities think it adds another year to the war and will cost at least three hundred thousand men.”

He said it carelessly, as if it were a matter of casual importance. Winterbourne heard them constantly using the phrase “three hundred thousand men,” as if they were cows or pence or radishes. He walked up and down the large room apart from the others, thinking, no longer listening to their chatter. The phrase “Division smashed to pieces” rang in his brain. He wanted to seize the people in the room, the people in authority, every one not directly in the war, and shout to them: “Division smashed to pieces! Do you know what that means? You must stop it, you’ve got to stop it! Division smashed to pieces!...”

[ XIII ]

Winterbourne listened intently. Yes, it was! He turned to his Runner:

“Did you hear that, Baker?”

“Hear what, Sir?”

“Listen.”

A plane droned gently and distantly in the still air, and then very faintly but distinctly:

_Claaang!_

“There! Did you hear it?”

“No, Sir.”

“It was one of the heavies falling into M——. You’ll hear them soon enough. But come on, we must hurry. We’ve a long way to go if we’re to get back before dark.”

* * * * *

A year, almost to the day, after he had gone into M—— for the first time, Winterbourne was returning to it as an officer in command of a Company.

From London he had proceeded direct to Etaples, where he remained for several days under canvas on the sandy slopes among the pines. Large numbers of officers were being sent out, and they had to sleep four to a tent. Winterbourne thought this a luxurious allotment of space, but the other three subalterns, who had never been to France before, complained that there was not enough room for their camp-beds and that they had to sleep in their flea-bags. Winterbourne had not troubled to bring a camp-bed, knowing how few opportunities there would be to use it.

There was very little to do in Etaples, even with the more extended opportunities of an officer. They messed in a large draughty marquee, but there was a camp cinema where he spent part of each evening. There were numbers of Waacs at the Base, and he noticed many of them were pregnant. Apparently there was no attempt at concealment; but then the birth-rate was declining rapidly in England, and babies were urgently needed for the Next War. He observed that the cemetery had doubled in size since he had last seen it from the train a few months before. That Ypres offensive must have been very costly. Such acres of wooden crosses, the old ones already battered and weather-stained, the new ones steadily gaining on the dunes. And now there was this smashing defeat on the Somme. Haig had issued his back to the wall Order, there was unity of Allied Command under Foch, and America had been frantically petitioned to send reinforcements immediately. And still the front daily yielded under the pressure of repeated German attacks. It looked like being a longer War than ever.

At Etaples he was allotted to the 2/9 Battalion of the Foddershires, and left to join them with about fifteen other subalterns, most of whom had never been in the line. He found the Battalion on rest in a small village about twenty miles behind M——. They belonged to one of the Divisions which had been smashed to pieces, and the battalion had suffered severely, losing most of its officers (including the Colonel) and the greater part of its effectives. The new Colonel was an ex-Regular Corporal who had obtained a commission early in the War, and by dexterity and martinet methods had risen to the rank of acting Lieutenant-Colonel. He was not a fighting soldier, but an expert trainer. He had the bullying manner of the barrack-square drill instructor, and his method of “training” was to harass every officer and man under his command from morning to night. After a week’s “rest” under this commander, Winterbourne felt nearly as tired as if he had been in the line. The subalterns who had never been under fire were exhausted and dismayed.

However, it must in justice be admitted that Colonel Straker was faced with appalling difficulties, and Winterbourne would have sympathized with the man if he had not so obviously been trying to push his own professional career in the Army at the expense of every one he commanded. The old battalion was a wreck. It had four of its officers left, one of whom was the Adjutant; a few of its old N.C.O.’s and a sprinkling of men were there; mostly signallers and headquarters men. Not a single one of the Lewis Gunners remained. Two Companies had been captured, and the remainder had fought a way out with terrific losses. The gaps had been filled chiefly by raw half-trained boys of eighteen and a half, many of whom were scared stiff by the mere thought of going into the trenches. To secure an adequate number of N.C.O.’s, the Colonel had to promote nearly every man who had any experience of the War, even transport drivers who could scarcely write their names.

Winterbourne had expected to go into the line at first as a supernumerary officer under instruction, and to pick up his duties by watching others and always going about with them. To his dismay, but also a certain amount of flattered vanity, he found himself immediately appointed as acting commander of B Company. But it was inevitable. Several of the new officers were mere boys, others volunteers from the Army Service Corps—perfectly competent at their own job but quite ignorant of trench warfare—and others again were “keymen” from business houses, reluctantly yielded to the “combings out” of 1917. Winterbourne had four subalterns under him, Hutchinson, Cobbold, Paine, and Rushton. They were all good fellows, but three of them had seen no service whatever and the fourth had been in Egypt only.

When Winterbourne inspected his company on the first day, his heart sank within him. He felt it was monstrous to send these scared-looking boys into the line without a proper stiffening of more experienced men. It would have been far better to spread them out. They cleaned their buttons perfectly, drilled very neatly, turned right or left with an imitation Guards stamp, and trembled when an officer spoke to them. But they were mighty raw stuff for the job ahead of them. Winterbourne thought of his own greenness when he had first gone into the line, and his heart sank lower as he thought of his own utter inexperience as an officer. He had a very sketchy idea of how a Company was run in the line. Of course, he had heard and carried orders, and had been roughly schooled in Company organization—on paper—at the Cadet School. But that was very different from assuming the responsibility for a hundred and more men, most of them frightened boys who had never seen any but practice trenches and never heard a shell burst. Well, the only thing was to carry on, and do his best....

* * * * *

The Division was to take over part of the M—— sector, from the Canadian Army. Winterbourne had to occupy part of the Reserve line just to the left of M——. The four Company commanders with their Runners were sent on ahead in a lorry to reconnoitre the positions and arrange details of “taking over.” The Colonel particularly impressed upon Winterbourne the necessity for obtaining and carefully reading the written instructions for defence which would be with the Officer he was relieving.

They were to have met Canadian guides at a given rendezvous, but the guides were not there. Winterbourne, who could have found his way to M—— in the blackest darkness, and who had twenty times passed up and down the trench he was to occupy, decided to push on. The other three, mistrusting him, stayed. He set out with Baker, his servant and runner. Owing to the shortage of men, the officers’ servants had to act as runners, with the result that they performed both jobs abominably. Baker had been allotted to Winterbourne by the despotic Colonel, who interfered in the minutest details and then held the Company commander responsible for everything which went wrong. Thus, he was in a position to take credit for every success and push off the responsibility for failure on some one else.

Winterbourne would certainly not have chosen Baker for himself, and wondered what possible caprice of the Colonel had forced the boy on him. He was a decent enough lad—a milliner’s delivery boy—but timid, unintelligent and lazy. Baker seemed to think that he had performed all his duties as a Runner if he followed Winterbourne so closely that he continually trod on his officer’s heels.

They passed many places familiar to Winterbourne—the cemetery (now much enlarged), the ruined village (now still more ruined), the long slag-hill, Southampton Row. Nothing had changed, except to become a little more desolate and smashed. He noticed that several large shells had fallen in the cemetery that morning or the night before, digging up the graves violently, scattering bones and torn blankets and broken crosses over the other graves. He turned in for five minutes, and walked down the long row containing the graves of his Pioneer companions. He stood a couple of minutes at Thompson’s grave. A shell splinter had knocked the cross crooked. He set it straight.

* * * * *

Winterbourne found the trench easily enough, and asked the first Canadian sentry for Company Headquarters. The man was leaning very negligently on the parapet, chewing gum. Winterbourne, accustomed to perpetual “Sirring” and heel-clicking and general servility, was almost shocked when the man very casually jerked his thumb over his left shoulder without saying a word, and returned thoughtfully to his gum-chewing. He found the Company commander, a Major, democratically sitting in the trench on a double-seated latrine, talking humorously to one of his men. The British always had separate latrines for officers.

Winterbourne enjoyed this hugely, and liked the Canadians. They at once invited him to whiskey high-balls and bridge. He managed to evade this, and then explained his own situation, asked for the written orders of defence and to see all the positions. The Canadian officer stared and said they had no written instructions.

“Well, what do you do if you’re attacked?”

“I guess you’d form a defensive flank—if they ever got past the machine-gunners in M——.”

The Canadian officer walked Winterbourne round the positions. He was bare-headed—strictly against orders—and his men greeted him as he passed with friendly nods and an occasional brief remark. Winterbourne noticed that they did not wait for him to speak first and did not call him “Sir.” He reflected with amusement that the Canadians were easily the crack troops of the British armies, and were sent into all the hardest fighting. And yet they didn’t even say “Sir” to an officer!

* * * * *

This meeting with the Canadians was probably the last piece of enjoyment or tranquillity that Winterbourne ever had. From the moment he went back to his own Battalion his life became one long harassed nightmare. He was deluged with all sorts of documents requiring information and statistics he was totally unable to furnish. The blunders, the mistakes, the negligences of his inexperienced men were legion, and all were visited upon him by the martinet Colonel. For days and weeks he got scarcely any sleep and never once even took his boots off. He had continually to be up and down the trench, especially during the periodic six days in the Front line, and even in Support. He spent hours a day answering idiotic written questions brought by weary Runners and trying to puzzle out minute and unnecessary orders. He was always being told to report to Battalion Headquarters, where he was savagely attacked and reprimanded for the most piffling and unimportant errors. He went on patrol himself, contrary to orders, to make sure that at least one patrol a night was properly done—and was severely reprimanded for that. The boys, suddenly released from button-polishing and saluting and drill (which they had been taught to consider all important) became deplorably slack in important matters. They lost portions of their equipment, dropped their ammunition, never knew their orders as sentries, went to sleep on sentry duty, shivered when ordered to go on patrol, cried when put in listening posts in No Man’s Land, littered up the trench with paper, bully beef tins and fragments of food, urinated in the trenches, and “forgot” perpetually everything they were told. While Winterbourne was at one end of his section of trench, desperately and sweatingly trying to get some sort of order and sense into them, others were committing all sorts of military abominations at the other end. It was useless to “take their names” for punishment, especially as there aren’t many punishments as bad as being in the line. One day he did exasperatedly make the Sergeant-Major “Take their names” and by nightfall found he had collected forty-two. Ludicrous. The N.C.O.’s gave the job up in despair and let things drift.

He found most of the recruits were hopelessly slow in getting on their gas masks, and appeared to be in such a state of hebetude that they did not realize that gas was dangerous. They did preposterous things. They would, for instance, entirely abandon a Lewis Gun post to get their dinners. It was ten days before Winterbourne discovered this. The subalterns had seen it, of course, but had not known that they ought to report it. Winterbourne “ran” the responsible N.C.O. as an example. He “ran” a boy for sleeping on sentry duty, and then washed out the charge when he reflected that the poor wretch might be shot for so serious a military crime. His Front line positions were an exhausting nightmare, too. His front was over five hundred yards. He had an outpost line of four listening and observation posts with a section in each. Three hundred yards farther back he had his main defence line and his own headquarters. Behind that he had various isolated Lewis Gun positions. All these were imposed upon him in spite of his protests. The defence scheme might be all very well on paper, and might have worked out with experienced troops, but it was hopeless under these peculiar circumstances. He realized after a couple of nights in the Front line that under any determined attack it would be impossible for him to hold his positions for ten minutes. He urged this on the Colonel, begging that the dispositions might be temporarily revised and the men brought more closely together under his own eyes. He was told that he was incompetent and not fit to be a Lance-Corporal. Winterbourne sarcastically replied that some people are born Corporals and some are not. He offered to resign his command, and was ordered to continue it under threat of immediate arrest and court-martial for negligence and disobeying orders in the face of the enemy. Knowing how easily a court-martial can be “cooked,” Winterbourne unwillingly carried on.

Most fortunately, he was not at first attacked, but he lost several men. Two were wounded on a ration party, having lost contact and wandered about half the night. One was shot through the neck by a fixed rifle, although Winterbourne had thrice ordered every N.C.O. to warn the men about it. At Stand-to one morning, the Germans bombarded them with mustard gas shells. Winterbourne had warned them of the gas until he was sick of doing so. Two mustard shells fell just outside the parapet of a fire-step with six men on it. They ducked down when the shells burst and then stood stupidly looking at the bright yellow shell-hole, wondering what the funny smell was. Three of them were gassed, and two died.

Winterbourne spent most of each night plodding up and down his immense area of trenches to see that every one was at his post. After dawn one morning, instead of trying to snatch an hour’s sleep, he went up to inspect his listening posts, feeling an uneasy intuition about them. There were four, about a hundred yards apart, isolated in what had once been the Front line. At the third listening post, he found six rifles leaning against the trench and no men. They had been captured by a silent raiding party in broad daylight! Probably all asleep. Winterbourne was furious, sent his Runner back for another section, and remained on guard himself. The Runner came back timidly after an interminable time, and said the Sergeant wouldn’t come. Winterbourne didn’t want the other posts to know that one had been captured, fearing a panic. It was useless to leave the Runner on guard; he would simply have waited until Winterbourne’s back was turned and have run to the other posts and spread an alarmist report. Winterbourne hurried back, and found that the Runner had delivered such a garbled and incoherent message that the Sergeant had been utterly unable to understand, and had sent him back for precise orders. Of course, the Colonel put all the responsibility upon Winterbourne, and threatened him again with a court-martial. Winterbourne protested and they had a furious row; after which the Colonel re-doubled his persecutions. When they went out for four days’ “rest” after their first three weeks in the line Winterbourne felt more exhausted and depressed than he would have believed possible. He saw that the men got into their billets, after infinite tramplings and shoutings in the darkness, and fell on to a sacking bed. He slept for fourteen hours.

* * * * *

Of course, Winterbourne had taken all this far too tragically and responsibly. The situation happened to be one which most disastrously fed his “worry” neurosis. A bitterly humorous destiny seemed intentionally to involve him in circumstances which rent his mind to pieces and exhausted his body—unnecessarily. It was a misfortune, due possibly to the fact that the initial of his name made him come towards the end of a list, that he was sent to a battalion so raggedly composed and so naggingly commanded. We passed out almost together at the Cadet School, but where everything ran comparatively easily and smoothly for me, all went wrong with him. He brooded incessantly and saw all things in terms of the bleakest despair—the collapse of his own life, his present situation, the continued retirement of the Allied Armies which seemed to promise an indefinite continuation of the War, his feeling that even if he came out alive he would never be able to re-build his life. It was unlucky to go straight back to M——, which had such tragic associations for him and made it doubly hard to repress shell-shocked nerves. His state of mind, what with sleeplessness and worry and shock and ague, which came back as soon as he was in the line again, and physical exhaustion and inhibited fear, almost fringed dementia, and he would have collapsed but for his strength of will and pride. But he was a wrecked man, swept along in the swirling cataracts of the War.

* * * * *

The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months. He moved through impressions like a man hallucinated. And every incident seemed to beat on his brain, Death, Death, Death. All the decay and death of battle fields entered his blood and seemed to poison him. He lived among smashed bodies and human remains in an infernal cemetery. If he scratched his stick idly and nervously in the side of a trench he pulled out human ribs. He ordered a new latrine to be dug out from the trench, and thrice the digging had to be abandoned because they came upon terrible black masses of decomposing bodies. At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91, where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-holes and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle, there a gaping decaying boot showed the thin knotty foot-bones. He came on a skeleton violently dismembered by a shell explosion; the skull was split open and the teeth lay scattered on the bare chalk; the force of the explosion had driven coins and a metal pencil right into the hip-bones and femurs. In a concrete pill-box three German skeletons lay across their machine-gun with its silent nozzle still pointing at the loop hole. They had been attacked from the rear with phosphorous grenades, which burn their way into the flesh and for which there is no possible remedy. A shrunken leather strap still held a battered wrist-watch on a fleshless wrist-bone. Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilized man.

* * * * *

A raiding party was sent out from his front. He watched the box barrage from the front line. The Germans filled the night with Verey lights and coloured rockets. Their artillery and trench-mortars and machine-guns retaliated fiercely. Smoke and gas drifted across. After interminable waiting the officer and three of the men staggered back, bleeding, blackened with smoke, their clothes torn to pieces on the wire. The raid had failed.

* * * * *

A Company of Gas Experts came up from the Base, and sent over some thousands of Stokes mortars loaded with a heavy concentration of poison gas. As soon as the last mortar was fired they were in a fearful hurry to get away. The German artillery retaliation smashed their trenches. Next morning, Winterbourne watched through glasses the Germans carrying out their dead on stretchers.

* * * * *

A British airplane fell in No Man’s Land. Winterbourne saw the pilot, who was still alive, struggle to get out from the wreckage. An enemy machine-gun was turned on him, and he fell limp across the side of the cock-pit. The plane was smashed to pieces by British heavies to prevent the Germans from obtaining the model.

* * * * *

They shifted to another part of the line. The Company was out in No Man’s Land in the darkness strengthening their shattered wire against a threatened attack. Suddenly from half a mile of German front leaped a line of flame. There was a whistling roar of projectiles, and a thousand gas containers crashed to the ground all about them. Men were killed outright by direct hits, and wounded by pieces of flying metal. Every man who took more than two breaths of the deadly concentration was doomed. All that night and far into the misty dawn the stretchers went down the communication trench carrying inert figures with horrible foam on their mouths.

* * * * *

The German attacks spent their force, and the huge Allied counter-attacks began. The starving German armies were hurled back to the Hindenburg Line, their impregnable defence. The Canadians miraculously stormed the Drocourt-Quéant switch line.

Winterbourne was back on the Somme, that incredible desert, pursuing the retreating enemy. They came up the Bapaume-Cambrai road by night, and bivouacked in holes scratched with entrenching tools in the side of a sandy bank. The wrecked country-side in the pale moonlight was a frigid and motionless image of Death. They spoke in whispers, awed by the immensity of desolation. By day the whole landscape was covered with the débris left by the broken German armies. Smashed tanks, guns with their wheels broken, stood out like fixed wrecks in the unmoving ocean of shell-holes. The whole earth seemed a litter of overcoats, shaggy leather packs, rifles, water-bottles, gas masks, steel helmets, bombs, entrenching tools, cast away in the panic of flight. By night, the sky glowed with the flames of burning Cambrai, with the black hump of Bourlon Hill silhouetted against them.

They drove the Germans from Cambrai, and pressed on from village to village, constantly shelled and harassed by machine-gun fire from their rear-guard. The German machine-gunners, fragments of the magnificent armies of the early War years, died at their posts. The demoralized German Infantry surrendered wholesale.

For three days in succession Winterbourne’s Company formed the advance guard, and he led it in the darkness over unknown ground by compass bearing in a kind of dazed delirium. Pressing on through falling shells in the blank night, with the ever present dread of falling into a machine-gun ambush, became an agony. They fought their way into inhabited villages which had been held by the Germans for over four years. The terrified people crouched in cellars or ran distractedly into the fields. They took the village of F——, after a brief but fierce bombardment, an hour after dawn. The roads leading in and out were encumbered with dead Germans, smashed transport, the contorted bodies of dead horses. Dead German soldiers lay about the village street, which was cluttered with fallen tiles and bricks. In a garden a war-demented peasant was digging a grave to bury his wife, who had been killed by a shell-burst. In the ruined village school Winterbourne picked up a book—it was Pascal’s “Thoughts on Christianity.”

* * * * *

Part of Cambrai had been levelled to the ground in 1914, and stood a melancholy monument of neatly-piled wreckage. Part of the remainder was burned. In the undestroyed streets many houses had been looted. The furniture had been smashed, pictures and photographs torn from the walls, cushions ripped open with bayonets, curtains slashed down, carpets gashed into rags. The whole mass of desecrated objects had been flung into the centre of the floor, after which the Germans had urinated and dropped their excrement upon it. Winterbourne gazed into a dozen houses which had been treated in this way. The villages beyond Cambrai had not been sacked, but were utterly filthy and swarming with buzzing legions of flies. Isolated cottages had sometimes been completely gutted of their contents. In one place Winterbourne found an emaciated French woman and two starved children living in a cottage with nothing but straw—literally nothing but straw in the place. He gave them his iron rations and twenty francs. The woman took them with a dull hopelessness.

* * * * *

They were approaching the Belgian border. On the evening of the 3rd of November Winterbourne with about twenty men rushed into the village of K——, just as the Germans hastily retreated from the other end. He had been ordered to occupy the place if possible, and to arrange billets. He lodged his Company, placed guards and pickets and then went through the cellars. The Germans were experts in placing booby-traps which would explode if carelessly moved, and Winterbourne did not know whether there might not be men concealed in the cellars to take them unawares. He went down into cellar after cellar with his electric torch, and was soon re-assured. The Germans had fled in such haste that they had left their rifles and equipment in several cellars. The floors were strewn with straw. On a table he found a half-finished letter, abandoned in the middle of a sentence. In another a large black dog lay dead—its owner had killed it with a bullet rather than leave it to possible ill-treatment.

* * * * *

The Colonel explained the dispositions for the coming battle over a map. The conference of officers took notes of the orders which were very elaborate, but precise and clear. It was nearly half-past three when they had finished, and zero hour was six-thirty. Winterbourne had been on foot since five the morning before. His eyes smarted with lack of sleep, and his mind was so dulled that he could scarcely comprehend and write down his orders. He misspelled words as he scrawled down notes in shaking deformed handwriting. He puzzled a long time over map-references, and irritated the Colonel by repeatedly asking questions.

They had an hour before they moved out to their battle positions. The other officers hurried away to snatch an hour’s sleep. Winterbourne felt utterly sleepy, but quite unable to sleep. The thought of another battle, even with the dispirited and defeated German rear-guard, filled him with shrinking dread. How face another barrage? He tried to write letters to Fanny and Elizabeth, but his mind kept wandering away and he could not collect his thoughts sufficiently to string together a few banal sentences. He sat on a chair brought him by his servant, with his head in his hands, staring at the straw and the dead black dog. He had only one thought—peace. He must at least have peace. He was at the very end of his endurance, had used up the last fraction of his energy and strength. He wished he was one of the skeletons lying on Hill 91, an anonymous body among the corpses lying outside in the street. He had not even the courage to shoot himself with his revolver; and added that last grain of self-contempt to his despair.

* * * * *

They assembled by platoons in the village street, and each officer marched off in silence to his allotted position. Winterbourne followed with his little knot of Company Headquarters, and saw that each platoon was in its proper place. He shook hands with each officer.

“Quite sure about your orders and objective?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye.”

“Oh, make it au revoir.”

“Good-bye.”

Winterbourne returned to his own position and waited. He looked at his luminous wrist-watch. Six twenty-five. Five minutes to zero hour. The cold November night was utterly silent. Thousands of men and hundreds of guns were facing each other on the verge of battle, and there seemed not a sound. He listened. Nothing. His Runner whispered something to a signaller, who whispered a reply. Three more minutes. Silence. He could feel the beating of his heart, more rapid than the tick of seconds as he held his watch to his ear.

CRASH! Like an orchestra at the signal of a baton the thousands of guns north and south opened up. The night sprang to flickering day-light with the gun-flashes, the earth trembled with the shock, the air roared and screamed with shells. Lights rushed up from the German line, and their artillery in turn flamed into action. Winterbourne could just see a couple of his sections advancing as he started off himself, and then everything was blotted out in a confusion of smoke and bursting shells. He saw his Runner stagger and fall as a shell burst between them; then his Corporal disappeared, blown to pieces by a direct hit. He came to a sunken road, and lay on the verge, trying to see what was happening in the faint light of dawn. He saw only smoke; and pushed on. Suddenly German helmets were all round him. He clutched at his revolver. Then he saw they were unarmed, holding shaking hands above their heads.

The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. He passed the bodies of several of his men. One section wiped out by a single heavy shell. Other men lay singly. There was Jameson dead; Halliwell dead; Sergeant Morton, Taylor and Fish, dead in a little group. He came to the main road, which was three hundred yards short of his objective. A deadly machine-gun fire was holding up his Company. The officers and men were lying down, the men firing rifles, and the Lewis Guns ripping off drums of bullets. Winterbourne’s second Runner was hit, and lay groaning: “O for God’s sake kill me, _kill_ me. I can’t stand it. The agony. _Kill_ me.”

Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.

RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

COMMANDEMENT EN CHEF DES ARMÉES ALLIÉES

_Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men of the Allied Armies._

After resolutely holding the enemy in check, for months you have repeatedly attacked with unwearied energy and confidence.

You have won the greatest battle in History and saved the most sacred of all causes: The liberty of the world.

You may well be proud.

You have wreathed your Colours with immortal fame.

Posterity is grateful to you.

(Signed) F. FOCH

MARSHAL OF FRANCE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE ALLIED ARMIES

EPILOGUE

_EPILOGUE_

Eleven years after the fall of Troy, We, the old men—some of us nearly forty— Met and talked on the sunny rampart Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.

Some bared their wounds; Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat, And the heart-beat, in the din of battle; Some spoke of intolerable sufferings, The brightness gone from their eyes And the grey already thick in their hair.

And I sat a little apart From the garrulous talk and old memories, And I heard a boy of twenty Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm: “Oh, come away, why do you stand there Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men? Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles? Why should they bore us for ever With an old quarrel and the names of dead men We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”

And he drew her away, And she looked back and laughed As he spoke more contempt of us, Being now out of hearing.

And I thought of the graves by desolate Troy And the beauty of many young men now dust, And the long agony, and how useless it all was. And the talk still clashed about me Like the meeting of blade and blade.

And as they two moved further away He put an arm about her, and kissed her; And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.

And I looked at the hollow cheeks And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads Of the old men—nearly forty—about me; And I too walked away In an agony of helpless grief and pity.

THE END