I

I

Clitherland Camp had acquired a look of coercive stability; but this was only natural, since for more than eighteen months it had been manufacturing Flintshire Fusiliers, many of whom it was now sending back to the Front for the second and third time. The Camp was as much an essential cooperator in the national effort as Brotherhood & Co.’s explosive factory, which flared and seethed and reeked with poisonous vapours a few hundred yards away. The third winter of the war had settled down on the lines of huts with calamitous drabness; fog-bleared sunsets were succeeded by cavernous and dispiriting nights when there was nothing to do and nowhere to do it.

Crouching as close as I could to the smoky stove in my hut I heard the wind moaning around the roof, feet clumping cheerlessly along the boards of the passage, and all the systematized noises and clatterings and bugle-blowings of the Camp. Factory-hooters and ships’ foghorns out on the Mersey sometimes combined in huge unhappy dissonances; their sound seemed one with the smoke-drifted munition-works, the rubble of industrial suburbs, and the canal that crawled squalidly out into blighted and forbidding farmlands which were only waiting to be built over.

Except for the permanent staff, there weren’t many officers I had known before this winter. But I shared my hut with David Cromlech, who was well enough to be able to play an energetic game of football, in spite of having had a bit of shell through his right lung. Bill Eaves, the Cambridge scholar, had also returned and was quietly making the most of his few remaining months. (He was killed in February while leading a little local attack.) And there was young Ormand, too, pulling wry faces about his next Medical Board, which would be sure to pass him for General Service. I could talk to these three about “old times with the First Battalion,” and those times had already acquired a delusive unobnoxiousness, compared with what was in store for us; for the “Big Push” of last summer and autumn had now found a successor in “the Spring Offensive” (which was, of course, going to “get the Boches on the run”).

Mess, at eight o’clock, was a function which could be used for filling up an hour and a half. While Ormand was making his periodic remark⁠—that his only reason for wanting to go out again was that it would enable him to pay off his overdraft at Cox’s Bank⁠—my eyes would wander up to the top table where the Colonel sat among those good-natured easygoing Majors who might well have adopted as their motto the ditty sung by the troops: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” At nine-thirty the Colonel went to the anteroom for his game of Bridge. But the second-in-command, Major Macartney, would sit on long afterwards, listening to one or two of his cronies and slowly imbibing port with a hand that trembled nervously. Probably his mind was often back in Ireland, snipe-shooting and salmon-fishing. There was nothing grim about the Major, though his features had a certain severity, slightly reminiscent of the late Lord Kitchener. He was a reserved and dignified man, much more so than the other Majors. These convivial characters were ostensibly directing the interior economy of the Camp, and as the troops were well fed and looked after they must be given credit for it. The training of recruits was left mainly to sergeant-instructors, most of whom were Regular N.C.O.s of the best pattern, hard-worked men who were on their legs from morning to night, and strict because they had to be strict. The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable. The war had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman. What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims. I was just beginning to be aware of this.

But Clitherland had accessible compensations. One of them was the Golf Course at Formby. The electric train took only twenty minutes to get there, and Formby was famous for its bracing air, comfortable Club House, and superlatively good wartime food. I went there at least one afternoon a week; usually I played alone, and often I had the links to myself, which was no disadvantage, since I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.

My main purpose, however, was a day with the hounds. For this I was readily given leave off Saturday morning duties, since an officer who wanted to go out hunting was rightly regarded as an upholder of prewar regimental traditions. The Saturday Meets of the Cheshire Hounds were a long way off, but nothing short of impossibility deterred me, and the working out of my plans was an effective antidote to war-weariness. It was, in fact, very like achieving the impossible, when I sat in my hut of an evening, cogitating with luxurious deliberation, consulting a map and calculating how my hireling could meet me at such and such a station, measuring the distance from there to the meet, and so on in the manner known to enthusiastic young sportsmen. On such Saturdays I would get up in the dark with joyful alacrity. Leaving Liverpool by an early train, I would eagerly observe the disconsolate beginnings of a dull December day, encouraging as far as I could the illusion that I was escaping from everything associated with the uniform which I wore, and eyeing my brown Craxwell field-boots affectionately.

Under such conditions no day could be a bad one, and although more than one Saturday’s hunting was stopped by frost, I derived singular consolation from the few hunts I had. My consolations included a heavy fall over some high timber which I ought to have had more sense than to tackle, since my hireling was a moderate though willing performer. Anyhow, the contrast between Clitherland Camp and the Cheshire Saturday country was like the difference between War and Peace⁠—especially when⁠—at the end of a good day⁠—I jogged a few miles homeward with the hounds, conversing with the cheery huntsman in my best prewar style.

Apart from these compensations I had the companionship of David who was now quite the “old soldier” and as argumentative as ever. In fact, while I pored over my one-inch-to-the-mile map of Cheshire after dinner, he was usually sitting on in the Mess and taking an active part in the wordy warfare of other “old soldiers,” among whom he was now listened to as one having authority. It was something to have been in the Battle of the Somme; but to have been at the Battle of Loos as well made him feel quite a big gun. In our hut, however, we sought fresher subjects than bygone battles and obliterated trenches. I enjoyed talking about English literature, and listened to him as to an oracle which I could, now and then, venture to contradict. Although he was nine years younger than I was, I often found myself reversing our ages, since he knew so much more than I did about almost everything except foxhunting. He made short work of most books which I had hitherto venerated, for David was a person who consumed his enthusiasms quickly, and he once fairly took my breath away by pooh-poohing Paradise Lost as “that moribund academic concoction.” I hadn’t realized that it was possible to speak disrespectfully about Milton. Anyhow, John Milton was consigned to perdition, and John Skelton was put forward as “one of the few really good poets.” But somehow I could never quite accept his supremacy over Milton as an established fact. At that period Samuel Butler was the source of much of David’s ingenuity at knocking highly-respected names and notions off their perches.

Anyhow, I was always ready to lose another literary illusion, for many of my friend’s quiddities were as nicely rounded, and as evanescent, as the double smoke rings he was so adroit at blowing. He was full of such entertaining little tricks, and I never tired of hearing him imitate the talk of excitable Welshmen. He was fond of music, too; but it was a failure when we went to an orchestral concert in Liverpool. David said that it “upset him psychologically.” It was no good as music either. No music was really any good except the Northern Folk-Ballad tunes which he was fond of singing at odd moments. “The Bonny Earl of Murray” was one of his favourites, and he sang it in agreeably melancholy style. But much though I admired these plaintive ditties I could not believe that they abolished Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which we’d heard at the Concert. I realize now that what I ought to have said was “Oh rats, David!” Instead of which I clumsily tried to explain the merits of various composers other than the inventors of The Minstrelsy of the Border, which was exactly what he wanted me to do. Sometimes he made me quite angry. I remember one morning when he was shaving with one hand and reading Robinson Crusoe in the other. Crusoe was a real man, he remarked; foxhunting was the sport of snobs and half-wits. Since it was too early in the day for having one’s leg pulled, I answered huffily that I supposed Crusoe was all right, but a lot of people who hunted were jolly good sorts, and even great men in their own way. I tried to think of someone to support my argument, and after a moment exclaimed; “Anthony Trollope, for instance! He used to hunt a lot, and you can’t say he was a half-wit.” “No, but he was probably a snob!” I nearly lost my temper while refuting the slur on Trollope’s character, and David made things worse by saying that I had no idea how funny I was when I reverted to my peacetime self. “I had an overdose of the hunting dope when I was with the Second Battalion in ’15,” he added. “If I’d been able to gas about Jorrocks and say I’d hunted with the Bedfordshire Hounds all my life, the Colonel and the Adjutant would have behaved quite decently to me.” “You can’t be certain of that,” I replied, “and anyway, there’s no such thing as ‘the Bedfordshire Hounds.’ Bedfordshire’s mostly the Oakley, and that isn’t a first-class country either. You might as well get the names right when you’re talking through your hat about things you don’t understand.” What did it matter to David whether the Oakley was bordered by the Grafton, Fitzwilliam, and Whaddon Chase⁠—none of which I’d ever hunted with, but I knew they were good countries and I didn’t pretend that I wasn’t interested in them, and I strongly objected to them being sneered at by a crank⁠—yes, a fad-ridden crank⁠—like David. “You’re a fad-ridden crank,” I remarked aloud. But as he always took my admonitions for what they were worth, the matter ended amicably, and a minute later I was able to remind him that he was going on parade without a tie.

I have already said that, as a rule, we avoided war-talk. Outwardly our opinions did not noticeably differ, though his sense of “the regimental tradition” was stronger than mine, and he “had no use for anti-war idealism.” But each of us had his own attitude toward the War. My attitude (which had not always been easy to sustain) was that I wanted to have fine feelings about it. I wanted the War to be an impressive experience⁠—terrible, but not Horrible enough to interfere with my heroic emotions. David, on the other hand, distrusted sublimation and seemed to want the War to be even uglier than it really was. His mind loathed and yet attached itself to rank smells and squalid details. Like his face (which had a twist to it, as though seen in a slightly distorting mirror) his mental war-pictures were a little uncouth and out of focus. Though in some ways more easily shocked than I was, he had, as I once informed him, “a first-rate nose for anything nasty.” It is only fair to add that this was when he’d been discoursing about the ubiquity of certain establishments in France. His information was all secondhand; but to hear him talk⁠—round-eyed but quite the man of experience⁠—one might have imagined that Amiens, Abbeville, Bethune, and Armentières were mainly illuminated by “Blue Lamps” and “Red Lamps,” and that for a good young man to go through Havre or Rouen was a sort of Puritan’s Progress from this world to the next.