A Man Could Stand Up— · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (2/4)

It was different from sleep. Flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs.⁠ ⁠… Well, you can’t go on with a sentence like that.⁠ ⁠… But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall.⁠ ⁠… Probably because they⁠—the painters⁠—drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form.⁠ ⁠… But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi.⁠ ⁠… Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God! As if He had dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth.⁠ ⁠… Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered.⁠ ⁠…

Dawn on the battlefield.⁠ ⁠… Damn it all, why sneer? It was dawn on the battlefield.⁠ ⁠… The trouble was that this battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months and twenty-seven days of it still.⁠ ⁠… No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony of effort by numbers. Nor yet by saying “Endless monotony of effort”.⁠ ⁠… It was like bending down to look into darkness of corridors under dark curtains. Under clouds.⁠ ⁠… Mist.⁠ ⁠…

At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They mopped and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; drooping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying layings out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence but in accord they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black quiet nights, in dugouts where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners’ picks below you: tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening.⁠ ⁠… But not fear.

It was in effect the desire for privacy. What he dreaded at those normal times when fear visited him at lunch; whilst seeing that the men got their baths or when writing, in a trench, in support, a letter to his bank-manager, was finding himself unhurt, surrounded by figures like the brothers of the Misericordia, going unconcerned about their tasks, noticing him hardly at all.⁠ ⁠… Whole hillsides, whole stretches of territory, alive with myriads of whitish-grey, long cagoules, with slits for eyeholes. Occasionally one would look at him through the eye-slits in the hoods.⁠ ⁠… The prisoner!

He would be the prisoner: liable to physical contacts⁠—to being handled and being questioned. An invasion of his privacy!

As a matter of fact that wasn’t so far out; not so dotty as it sounded. If the Huns got him⁠—as they precious near had the night before last!⁠—they would be⁠—they had then been⁠—in gas-masks of various patterns. They must be short of these things: but they looked, certainly, like goblin pigs with sore eyes, the hood with the askew, blind-looking eyeholes and the mouthpiece or the other nose attachment going down into a box, astonishingly like snouts!⁠ ⁠… Mopping and mowing⁠—no doubt shouting through the masks!

They had appeared with startling suddenness and as if with a supernatural silence, beneath a din so overwhelming that you could not any longer bother to notice it. They were there, as it were, under a glass dome of silence that sheltered beneath that dark tumult, in the white illumination of Verey lights that went on. They were there, those of them that had already emerged from holes⁠—astonishingly alert hooded figures with the long rifles that always looked rather amateurish⁠—though, Hell, they weren’t. The hoods and the white light gave them the aspects of Canadian trappers in snow; made them no doubt look still more husky fellows as against our poor rats of Derby men. The heads of goblin pigs were emerging from shell-holes, from rifts in the torn earth, from old trenches.⁠ ⁠… This ground had been fought over again and again.⁠ ⁠… Then the counterattack had come through his, Tietjens’, own crowd. One disorderly mob, as you might think, going through a disordered crowd that was damn glad to let them through, realising slowly, in the midst of a general not knowing what was going to happen, that the fellows were reliefs. They shot past you clumsily in a darkness spangled with shafts of light coming from God knows where and appeared going forward, whilst you at least had the satisfaction that, by order, you were going back. In an atmosphere of questioning. What was happening? What was going to happen?⁠ ⁠… What the bloody hell.⁠ ⁠… What.⁠ ⁠…

Tidy-sized shells began to drop among them saying: “Wee⁠ ⁠… ee⁠ ⁠… ry.⁠ ⁠… Whack!” Some fellow showed Tietjens the way through an immense apron of wire that was beginning to fly about. He, Tietjens, was carrying a hell of a lot of paper folders and books. They ought to have evacuated an hour ago; or the Huns ought not to have got out of their holes for an hour.⁠ ⁠… But the Colonel had been too⁠ ⁠… too exalted. Call it too exalted. He was not going to evacuate for a pack of⁠ ⁠… Damn orders!⁠ ⁠… The fellow, Mckechnie, had at last had to beg Tietjens to give the order.⁠ ⁠… Not that the order mattered. The men could not have held ten minutes longer. The ghostly Huns would have been in the trenches. But the Company Commanders knew that there was a Divisional Order to retire, and no doubt they had passed it on to their subalterns before getting killed. Still, that Bn. H.Q. should have given the order made it better even if there was no one to take it to the companies. It turned a practical expulsion into an officially strategic retreat.⁠ ⁠… And damn good divisonal staff work at that. They had been fitted into beautiful, clean, new trenches, all ready for them⁠—like chessmen fitting into their boxes. Damn good for a beaten army that was being forced off the face of the earth. Into the English Channel.⁠ ⁠… What made them stick it? What the devil made the men stick it? They were unbelievable.

There was a stroking on his leg. A gentle, timid stroking! Well, he ought to get down: it was setting a bad example. The admirable trenches were perfectly efficiently fitted up with spy-holes. For himself he always disliked them. You thought of a rifle bullet coming smack through them and guided by the telescope into your right eye. Or perhaps you would not have a telescope. Anyhow you wouldn’t know.⁠ ⁠…

There were still the three wheels, atilt, attached to slanting axles: in a haze of disintegrated wire, that, bedewed, made profuse patterns like frost on a window. There was their own apron⁠—a perfect village!⁠—of wire over which he looked. Fairly intact. The Germans had put up some of their own in front of the lost trenches, a quarter of a mile off: over the reposing untidinesses. In between there was a perfect maze: their own of the night before last. How the deuce had it not been all mashed to pieces by the last Hun barrage? Yet there were three frosty erections⁠—like fairy sheds, halfway between the two lines. And, suspended in them, as there would have to be, three bundles of rags and what appeared to be a very large, squashed crow. How the devil had that fellow managed to get smashed into that shape? It was improbable. There was also⁠—suspended, too, a tall melodramatic object, the head cast back to the sky. One arm raised in the attitude of, say, a Walter Scott Highland officer waving his men on. Waving a sword that wasn’t there.⁠ ⁠… That was what wire did for you. Supported you in grotesque attitudes, even in death! The beastly stuff! The men said that was Lieutenant Constantine. It might well be. The night before last he, Tietjens, had looked round at all the officers that were in H.Q. dugout, come for a last moment conference. He had speculated on which of them would be killed. Ghostly! Well, they had all been killed: and more on to that. But his premonition hadn’t run to thinking that Constantine would get caught up in the wire. But perhaps it was not Constantine. Probably they would never know. The Huns would be where he stood by lunchtime. If the attack of which Brigade H.Q. had warned them came off. But it mightn’t.⁠ ⁠…

As a final salute to the, on the whole not thrilling landscape, he wetted his forefinger by inserting it in his mouth and held it in the air. It was comfortingly chilly on the exterior, towards his back. Light airs were going right in the other fellows’ faces. It might be only the dawn wind. But if it stiffened a very little or even held, those blessed Württemburgers would never that day get out of their trenches. They couldn’t come without gas. They were probably pretty well weakened, too.⁠ ⁠… You were not traditionally supposed to think much of Württemburgers. Mild, dull creatures they were supposed to be. With funny hats. Good Lord! Traditions were going by the board!

He dropped down into the trench. The rather reddish soil with flakes of flint and little, pinkish nodules of pebbles was a friendly thing to face closely.

That sergeant was saying:

“You hadn’t ought to do it, sir. Give me the creeps.” He added rather lachrymosely that they couldn’t do without superior officers altogether. Odd creatures these Derby N.C.O.’s! They tried to get the tone of the old, timeserving N.C.O. They couldn’t; all the same you couldn’t say they weren’t creditable achievements.

Yes, it was friendly, the trench face. And singularly unbellicose. When you looked at it you hardly believed that it was part of this affair.⁠ ⁠… Friendly! You felt at peace looking at its flints and pebbles. Like being in the butts up above Groby on the moor, waiting for the grouse to come over. The soil was not of course like those butts which were built of turfs.⁠ ⁠…

He asked, not so much for information, as to get the note of this fellow:

Why? What difference did it make whether there were senior officers or not? Anyone above eighteen would do, wouldn’t they? They would keep on going on. It was a young man’s war!

“It hasn’t got that comfortable feeling, sir!” the Sergeant expressed it. The young officers were very well for keeping you going through wire and barrages. But when you looked at them you didn’t feel they knew so well what you were doing it for, if he might put it that way.

Tietjens said:

“Why? What are you doing it for?”

It wanted thirty-two minutes to the crucial moment. He said:

“Where are those bloody bombs?”

A trench cut in gravel wasn’t, for all its friendly reddish-orange coloration, the ideal trench. Particularly against rifle-fire. There were rifts, presumably alongside flakes of flint that a rifle-bullet would get along. Still, the chances against a hit by a rifle-bullet were eighty thousand to one in a deep gravel trench like that. And he had had poor Jimmy Johns killed beside him by a bullet like that. So that gave him, say, 140,000 chances to one against. He wished his mind would not go on and on figuring. It did it whilst you weren’t looking. As a well-trained dog will do when you tell it to stay in one part of a room and it prefers another. It prefers to do figuring. Creeps from the rug by the door to the hearthrug, its eyes on your unconscious face.⁠ ⁠… That was what your mind was like. Like a dog!

The Sergeant said:

“They do say the first consignment of bombs was it not smashed. Hin a gully; well behind the line. Another was coming down.”

“Then you’d better whistle,” Tietjens said. “Whistle for all you’re worth.”

The Sergeant said:

“Fer a wind, sir? Keep the ’Uns’ beck, sir?”

Looking up at the whitewash cockscomb Tietjens lectured the sergeant on gas. He always had said, and he said now, that the Germans had ruined themselves with their gas.⁠ ⁠…

He went on lecturing that Sergeant on gas.⁠ ⁠…

He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread⁠—that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail. He was going to be hit behind the collarbone. He could feel the spot; not itching but the blood pulsing just a little warmer. Just as you can become conscious of the end of your nose if you think about it!

The Sergeant said that ’e wished ’e could feel the Germans ’ad ruined theirselves: they seemed to be drivin’ us into the Channel. Tietjens gave his reasons. They were driving us. But not fast enough. Not fast enough. It was a race between our disappearance and their endurance. They had been hung up yesterday by the wind: they were as like as not going to be held up today.⁠ ⁠… They were not going fast enough. They could not keep it up.

The Sergeant said ’e wished, sir, you’d tell the men that. That was what the men ought to be told: not the stuff that was hin Divisional Comic Cuts and the ’ome pipers.⁠ ⁠…

A key-bugle of singular sweetness⁠—at least Tietjens supposed it to be a key-bugle, for he knew the identities of practically no wind-instruments; it was certainly not a cavalry bugle, for there were no cavalry and even no Army Service Corps at all near⁠—a bugle, then, of astounding sweetness made some remarks to the cool, wet dawn. It induced an astonishingly melting mood. He remarked:

“Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are!”

He said “your men,” instead of “our” or even “the” men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command⁠—and was likely to be tomorrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a ragtime collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.

The Sergeant flushed with pleasure. “Hit was,” he said, “good to ’ave prise from Regular officers.” Tietjens said that he was not a Regular. The Sergeant stammered:

“Hain’t you, sir, a Ranker. The men all thinks you are a promoted Ranker.”

No, Tietjens said, he was not a promoted Ranker. He added, after consideration, that he was a militiaman. The men would have, by the will of chance, to put up with his leadership for at least that day. They might as well feel as good about it as they could⁠—as settled in their stomachs! It certainly made a difference that the men should feel assured about their officers: what exact difference there was no knowing. This crowd was not going to get any satisfaction out of being led by a “gentleman.” They did not know what a gentleman was: a quite un-feudal crowd. Mostly Derby men. Small drapers, rate-collectors’ clerks; gas-inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen.

It was another tradition that was gone. Still, they desired the companionship of elder, heavier men who had certain knowledges. A militiaman probably filled the bill! Well, he was that, officially!

He glanced aside and upwards at the whitewash cockscomb. He regarded it carefully. And with amusement. He knew what it was that had made his mind take the particular turn it had insisted on taking.⁠ ⁠… The picks going in the dark under the H.Q. dugout in the Cassenoisette section. The men called it Crackerjack.

He had been all his life familiar with the idea of picks going in the dark, underground. There is no North Country man who is not. All through that country, if you awake at night you hear the sound, and always it appears supernatural. You know it is the miners, at the pit-face, hundreds and hundreds of feet down.