IV

IV

October brought an extension of my sick-leave and some mornings with the hounds. By the time I received another letter from Dottrell, Delville Wood had more or less buried its dead, in my mind if not altogether in reality. The old Quartermaster let off steam in a good grumble from which I quote a specimen.

“Well, we have been out at rest about 10 kilos from the place we were at last Xmas. We expected to be there three weeks but after 8 days have had sudden orders to move to the old old spot with a Why. Kinjack left us to take command of a Brigade; a great loss to the Batt. They all come and go; stay in the Batt. long enough to get something out of it, and then disappear and will hardly give a thought to the men and officers who were the means of getting them higher rank. It’s a selfish world, my friend. All successive C.O.s beg me to stay with the old Battalion they love so well. I do. So do they, till they get a better job. They neither know nor care what happens to me (who at their special request have stuck to ‘the dear old Corps’) when I leave the Service on a pension of 30s. a week.”

I am afraid I wasn’t worrying overmuch about “the dear old Corps” myself, while out with the Ringwell Hounds on Colonel Hesmon’s horses. In spite of the War, hunting was being carried on comfortably, though few people came out. “The game was being kept alive for the sake of the boys at the Front,” who certainly enjoyed the idea (if they happened to be keen fox-hunters and were still alive to appreciate the effort made on their behalf). As for me, I was armed with my uniform and the protective colouring of my Military Cross, and no one could do enough for me. I stayed as long as I liked with Moffat, the genial man who now combined the offices of Master and Secretary, and for a few weeks the prewar past appeared to have been conjured up for my special benefit. It was difficult to believe that the misty autumn mornings, which made me free of those well-known woods and farms and downs, were simultaneously shedding an irrelevant brightness on the Ypres Salient and on Joe Dottrell riding wearily back with the ration-party somewhere near Plug Street Wood. I don’t think I could see it quite like that at the time. What I am writing now is the result of a bird’s-eye view of the past, and the cub-hunting subaltern I see there is part of the “selfish world” to which his attention had been drawn. He is listening to Colonel Hesmon while the hounds are being blown out of a big wood⁠—hearing how well young Winchell has done with his Brigade (without wondering how many of them have been “blown out” of their trenches) and being assured by the loquacious old Colonel that the German Count who used to live at Puxford Park was undoubtedly a spy and only hunted with the Ringwell for that reason; the Colonel now regretted that he didn’t ride over to Puxford Park and break all the windows before war was declared. He also declared that any man under forty who wasn’t wearing the King’s uniform was nothing but a damned shirker. I remarked to Moffat afterwards that the Colonel seemed to be overdoing it a bit about the War. Moffat told me that the old boy was known to have practised revolver-shooting in his garden, addressing insults to individual tree trunks and thus ventilating his opinion of Germany as a whole. He had been much the same about vulpicides and socialists in peacetime. “It’s very odd; for Hesmon’s an extraordinarily kindhearted man,” said Moffat, who himself regarded the War as an unmitigated nuisance, but didn’t waste his energy abusing it or anybody else. He had enough to do already, for he found it far from easy to keep the Hunt on its legs, and what the hounds would get to eat next year he really didn’t know. He added that “the Missus’s dachshunds only just escaped being interned as enemy aliens.”

Sport in Sussex was only a makeshift exhilaration, and early in November I went to London for a final Medical Board. At the Caxton Hall in Westminster I spent a few minutes gazing funereally round an empty waiting-room. Above the fireplace (there was no fire) hung a neatly-framed notice for the benefit of all whom it might concern. It stated the scale of prices for artificial limbs, with instructions as to how officers could obtain them free of cost. The room contained no other ornament. While I was adjusting my mind to what a journalist might have called “the grim humour” of this footnote to Army life, a Girl Guide stepped in to say that Colonel Crossbones (or whatever his cognomen was) would see me now. A few formalities put paid to my period of freedom, and I pretended to be feeling pleased as I walked away from Westminster, though wondering whether the politicians had any expectation that hostilities would be concluded by Christmas, and eyeing the Admiralty with a notion that it must be rather nice to be in the Navy.

Goodbyes began all over again. A last day with the Ringwell ended at the crossroads by the old Harcombe point-to-point course. I went one way and the hounds went another. Jogging down the lane, they disappeared in the drizzling dusk. Moffat’s “Best of luck, old boy!” left me to ride on, alone with the creak of the saddle. I was due back at the Depot next day, but we’d had a good woodland hunt with one quite nice bit in the open, and I’d jumped a lot of timber and thoroughly enjoyed my day. Staring at the dim brown landscape I decided that the War was worth while if it was being carried on to safeguard this sort of thing. Was it? I wondered; and if a doubt arose it was dismissed before it had been formulated. Riding into Downfield where I was leaving the horse which had been lent me, I remembered how I’d slept on the floor of the Town Hall on the day war was declared. Two years and three months ago I had enlisted for “three years or the duration.” It was beginning to look as if I had enlisted for a lifetime (though the word was one which had seen better days). Under the looming shadow of the hills the lights of the town twinkled cosily. But a distant bugle-call from some camp seemed to be summoning the last reluctant farm labourer. “You’ll all have to go in the end,” it seemed to say, and the comfortless call was being sounded far across Europe.⁠ ⁠…

On my way home in the train I read about Romania in the paper. Everyone, Aunt Evelyn included, had been delighted when Romania came in on our side in August. But the results had not been reassuring. I couldn’t help feeling annoyed with the Romanian Army for allowing their country to be overrun by the Germans. They really might have put up a better show than that!