The Impregnable Women, page 5
‘I’ve earned it, and I’ve got a right to spend it,’ said the profiteer, and began to explain the nature of his business. ‘Hogpool’s Barbed Wire, that’s who I am. The war would be over in a week if it wasn’t for me and my wire.’
The officer wished he would go away, but did not care to draw attention to himself by telling him so. His wife was with him, and her young brother, who, till recently a medical student at Edinburgh University, was now a Surgeon-probationer in the Navy. They were not accustomed to dining in expensive hotels, but this was a special occasion. His battalion was leaving for Germany on the morrow. He would probably be in the trenches within a week. Well, he had escaped death in the last war, and he might survive this one, though active service would be harder on him than in 1918. Even the saying good-bye would be immeasurably harder now. He had been married for ten years – happily married – and to live apart from his wife was like being in prison. It deadened him. He seemed to have no faculty of enjoyment unless she was beside him. But he was no weakling. For several years after the last war he had played Rugby football, and after giving that up he had become a golfer of very respectable achievement. No one had ever thought of impugning his manhood. But his wife had the stronger mind and the stronger spirit, and though he had never been aware of domination, she had ruled his life from the day he married her to the day when, as an officer in the Territorial Army Reserve, he had been mobilized for the war against France. She was twelve years younger than he, and handsome in a hardy Scots fashion. Now, he could see, she was getting very impatient with the fat blethering stranger who had interrupted their dinnerparty; and he nerved himself to say some polite but decisive word of dismissal.
Before he could think of a suitable phrase, however, the fat man declared, with the force of what was meant to be a conclusive argument, ‘Money’s money the whole world over, and that you can’t deny.’ He held out a red thick-fingered hand. ‘Hogpool’s my name,’ he said. ‘Torn Hogpool,’ he repeated.
‘And mine is Graham,’ said the officer weakly.
‘Him and his five-pound notes!’ said Mrs Graham disdainfully, when the fat man had gone.
‘I could do with a few of them,’ said her brother.
‘Wait till you’ve earned them, and then you’ll know their value. Aren’t you going to finish your pudding, Charlie? You won’t be getting anything as good as that for a long time to come.’
Her voice faltered, and the shadows of fear and separation darkened her eyes. She caught his hand and whispered roughly, ‘Oh, Charlie, Charlie, I don’t think I can bear it!’
Tom Hogpool, slowly returning to his table, stopped beside Eliot and Lady Lysistrata, and showed them the crumpled note.
‘I suppose you saw what happened?’ he said. ‘If you ask me, this war’s going to be the ruin of some people. It’s gone to their heads, that’s what it’s done. Did you see what Rose Armour did? Behaving like a duchess when I offered her a five-pound note? She’s nothing but a little tart, either.’
Lysistrata paid no attention to him, but Eliot in a harsh intolerant voice told him to go away and get back to his own table.
The fair-haired girl beckoned to him again. Unwillingly he returned. ‘It’s showing people up in their true colours, this bloody war is,’ he grumbled. ‘You never saw such a pack of dirty snobs in the whole of your life. Rose Armour and all. Would you say my money’s as good as anyone else’s, or wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course it is,’ she answered in a comforting voice, and taking the five-pound note put it in her bag. She half-filled a claret glass with Chartreuse, and pushed it towards him. ‘Have some more of this stuff, and forget about it. What does it matter to you what soldiers think?’
Eliot looked at his watch. ‘It’s time I was getting back to camp,’ he said wearily, and called a waiter.
There were no taxis, for lack of petrol had immobilized them all, but a few ancient cabs and victorias with moth-eaten blue cushions had reappeared on the streets. Lysistrata offered to see Eliot off at the station, and they sat together in the stale darkness of an old four-wheeler. She took his hand and said, ‘Eliot, will you believe me if I tell you that I have only two wishes in my heart; and one is for Tony’s safety, the other for yours. If I hadn’t been so worried – but no, I don’t think that would have made any difference. The whole world has changed, and I’ve changed with it. I keep thinking of Tony – and now I shall think of you too.’
He lifted her hand and kissed it. He tried to speak more cheerfully. ‘And remember, when you think of me, that I added myself to the war for the most nonsensical reason under the sun. I became a soldier to fight against France because all my life I have been in love with France. If I am killed, France must be acquitted. It will be a crime passionel.’
III
Lysistrata lay awake for much of the night, because she could not forget the sight of Eliot, his head and shoulders framed in the dark window of a dingy little local train. He had regained his self-control, but at the expense, in the end, of some human quality. His face was lifeless, as though, to spoil it of satisfaction, he had already anticipated death. But the deadness of his expression was hard, not yielding. The outer part of him was a kind of shell, or a suit of armour, in which the real Eliot, shrunk in size, hid from view. If I took him by the shoulders and shook him, she thought, I would hear him rattle like a dried-up hazel-nut. Never had she seen anyone suffer so great a change . . .
Not even in the wards of your hospital, he had asked, where youth comes home without its limbs, all broken and drained of its bright blood? But that was not Eliot talking. That was the bitterness which had shrivelled his soul and distorted his good sense. There was a war, and wounds and death were part of it. There was a war, and the only way to end it was to win it, and it did no good to think of wounds. She had no fear for Tony. In the last battle, she knew, he had gone forward every day to an artillery observation post to see for himself how his battalions we faring. He had been in danger like any subaltern. But he would never be hurt. She knew that. It was not his destiny to be maimed or killed in battle. It could not be. She must not think of wounds and death, or be afraid for Tony.
But Eliot was different. She was afraid for him because she could see his peril so clearly. Was that because his life no longer meant much to her? But it did, it meant a whole world of memory. He had been her gay lover and most witty friend, and all their time together had been like the morning and the evening of a fine day, the morning sun and the bright darkness of a starry night. He had loved her, and his wit had made of their two minds an instrument on which to play the sweet absurdities, the dappled beauty of the world. He had said this and that. He had made her laugh, and made her see the little cause and enormous consequence of something passing by.
But what had it been, and what had he said? She could not remember. The tune had gone, and was now only an echo in her mind, because her mind was too thickly crowded with thoughts of Tony to have room for much else. Tony was in the front of war. The most brilliant of our generals, the people said. He is marked for promotion. He is in the line of great soldiers – Marlborough, Clive, and the young Wellesley – and perhaps not the least of them. His conduct of the operations extending from 14 to 26 October showed a perfect grasp of the situation and outstanding ability to exploit to the fullest its succeeding phases. Scrymgeour’s division, the Fighting Fifth, is again the spear-head of our attack. Scrymgeour’s Division. Tony’s men were the heroes of the war, and Tony was her husband.
She felt her love like a receding wave that leaves a smooth rock all naked to the sky. Like a wind that bows down the corn and shows it quivering to the sun . . .
‘Young Set on went on leave, met a girl whose looks he liked, and married her within the week. He has probably been foolish. But I can’t blame him, because I would have done the same had I been in his place, and you the girl. My only complaint against the war is that it keeps me away from you. Seton himself, with the unction of his wedding still on him, is no more devoted or desirous than I am. But the war. . .’ He had written that after a long day’s work, after endless planning, poring over maps, gathering information, talking with his Brigadiers, with German Staff Officers, making grave decisions. The war had given him fame and the happiness of liberating his talent for war. But he complained because it kept him away from her. His love was still bridegroom-strong, and hers was no longer changeful and capricious, but hot and faithful. The war had made it so, and now the estranging war denied what it had taught her to desire. But not for long. It would only be for a little while. It would not, dared not do more, do worse. It could not do that.
She slept for a few hours, and woke to the cold prospect of another day. But habit had given her discipline. She got up at once, without more than a moment’s return to the troubled and luxurious thoughts with which she had fallen asleep. She had promised – not Eliot, but herself – to go to the station and see the passing of the troop-train that would take his battalion on the first stage of its journey to the front.
There was a long mirror in the room, and she looked at her tall reflection. Her beauty had always given her a deep and satisfying delight. But is beauty, she wondered, anything more than a refinement of utility? A yacht and the Ionic column are serviceable things. Passionately, with sudden conviction, she thought: I must have children. I have been foolish, and blind and selfish, but when Tony comes home I shall tell him that I am wiser now. I cannot live childless and die a barren stock....
Though rain was falling, and the grey of early morning was still laggard in the slow-rising light, there was a huge and murmurous crowd at the station to see the troop-trains pass. A whole brigade was moving. The most of the crowd were women, and many in a state of strong excitement. Here and there was a mother’s uncontainable misery, tear-stained, and clinging without shame to an embarrassed husband or unavailing daughter. Grimly intent on reaching and keeping a place in the front of the crowd were women who, by the preternatural severity of their expression, showed clearly the bitterness of their feelings and the strain of controlling them. But far more numerous were girls and shrill young women whose emotion was quite simply that of animals in heat. The passing trains were full of men. They were men more positively male than dull mechanics, pale docile clerks, and tradesmen busy with their prices and their profits. They had been segregated and trained to kill. They had been hardened and fed for a primal function. And as the trains went slowly through the station – a myriad faces at the glancing windows, the noise of brave shouting, the smell of khaki and leather – the hundreds of waiting girls, pressing against the barricades and shrieking as the fly stung deeper, cheered their lovers to their death.
Lysistrata was in uniform, and a policeman, after making way for her through the crowd, had let her on to the platform in front of the barricades. It was cold and draughty. A Railway Transport Officer stood talking to an elderly Quartermaster who was indignant about the non-arrival of four thousand blankets. A couple of red-capped Military Policemen walked stiffly up and down, and two St John Ambulance men, elderly volunteers, shivered in the doorway of the Refreshment Room. There was another woman on the platform. She was good-looking in a hardy Scots way, and she wore an oddly defiant expression on her high-coloured face. She was manifestly ill-at-ease when Lysistrata spoke to her, and a moment or two later, with a nervous laugh, she said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve no business to be here, but I simply had to get a last look at my husband. I told a lie to the policeman at the gate, and just walked on.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said Charlie – my husband, I mean – was the Colonel of the 9th Royal Scots, though he’s a Captain really: Captain Graham. But I looked the policeman right in the eye when I said it, and I spoke in the sort of way you English do. That did it. I just walked past, and he gave me a salute as I went.’
Lysistrata laughed. ‘You earned it, I’m sure, and I hope you manage to see your husband. But none of the trains will stop, you know. You will only be able to wave to him.’
‘I know that. We said good-bye last night, but I couldn’t miss the chance of seeing him again, though it’s only for a second.’
With a brazen whistle and a harsh escape of steam another train came in and passed slowly through the station. Heads thrust from the windows wore tufted Balmoral bonnets, and in the corridors could be seen the paler khaki of kilt-aprons. ‘It’s them!’ exclaimed Mrs Graham, and watched with painful apprehension the passing of close-crowded, cheering soldiers fearful lest she miss the quieter carriages where their officers sat. Then loudly she cried ‘Charlie!’ and lost her voice in a sob. With quick ungainly movements she began to run along the platform. But in a moment she stopped, for Charlie’s brother officers were in the carriage with him, and he would not like them to see her behaving in this indecorous fashion, and looking dishevelled in consequence. So she stood as still as she could, with a dignified demeanour, and waved in a friendly, almost casual fashion to her solemn and swiftly vanishing husband. But in her heart she was thinking, ‘I may never see him again,’ and her breast rose and fell with the violence of her fear.
Presently, with urgency in the iron sound of its wheels, another train came in. There was more cheering, more shrieking at the barricades. Soldiers wearing the black buttons of the Rifle Brigade leaned from the passing windows and shouted to the hoarse excited girls. There was a burst of laughter, the fragment of a joke, a few words of a song. Then the wheels grew louder and more urgent. The blind walls of a luggage-van went by, and nothing more could be seen of the soldiers but a few small and backward-looking heads that still protruded from the windows. Swiftly they were drawn out of sight, and the last of them vanished.
‘Did you see your friend?’ asked Mrs Graham dully. It was politeness, not curiosity, that prompted the inquiry.
‘No,’ said Lysistrata. ‘I hadn’t told him I would be here, so he wasn’t looking out for me.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
They walked slowly from the platform and through the now rapidly dispersing crowd of spectators. ‘From the way that some of them behave,’ said Mrs Graham bitterly, ‘you’d think that a war was a fine thing for women. But they’ll find their mistake out when there’s no one left in the country but old done men, and weaklings, and those that were clever enough to dodge the fighting. It’ll be a wintry world to live in then, for that kind’s no use to women, and never will be.’
IV
There was hard frost in December, and the whole of northern France listened in a chill white silence to the sounds of war. The ploughed and furrowed mud of the battlefields was powdered with snow, and every shell-hole, every hoof-mark, was sharp-edged with ice. In the morning a brownish fog obscured the desolate landscape, and at midday and in the early afternoon a thin blue sky looked down at the soldiers in their bitter trenches, and a distant sun as pale as guinea-gold made redly to glisten the twisted acres of barbed and rusty wire. When shells burst in the frozen trenches they threw out lumps of earth as hard as shrapnel, and at night the sentries on the fire-step, peering into the cold and haunted darkness, felt their elbows freezing to the parapet. The battle had been renewed, and the British were again advancing with a stiff and sullen vehemence.
On the eastern front their German and Polish allies had been heavily defeated. The Russians had taken Vilna and Lida in the north, and Lemberg was threatened on three sides by the coordinated advance of Soviet troops and the armies of the Little Entente. Czechoslovakia, though hindered in the first few weeks of war by internal dissension, was now showing unsuspected strength, and after furious fighting along the Böhmer Wald had on the whole front pushed forward its front line into Bavarian territory. The German High Command, having already sent troops to stiffen their half-hearted Polish allies, had now to withdraw many divisions from the western front to meet the menace to Bavaria. Their whole position in Lorraine – where, in August, they had advanced with astonishing rapidity after the French fortifications had been destroyed from the air – was now seriously weakened by these withdrawals; and the British Command had been urgently requested to do all it could to keep France busy in the north.
The Fifth Division, hurriedly reconstituted after its losses in the last battle, was again in the line. It was, however, no longer directly commanded by Antony Scrymgeour, who had again been promoted when Lieutenant-General Sir Hugh Kew-Godleigh, an elderly gentleman commanding the IInd Corps, had succumbed to war strain and been invalided home with shingles. But the Division was lucky in its new general. He was an Indian Cavalryman called Brannigan, whose promotion Scrymgeour had been diligent to secure. He was brave to the point of recklessness, the sort of man who inspired devotion wherever he went, and a brilliant soldier.
Two battalions of the Division had been so badly punished in the October advance that their remnants had been withdrawn and sent home as training cadres for New Army units of their regiments. In their place the Division received two Territorial battalions, the 9th Royal Scots and the 24th City of London Royal Fusiliers. It was in the latter battalion, which had already seen active service, that Julian Brown was a Company Commander.
The heaviest fighting was again in the neighbourhood of Ypres, and though by the second day of the battle appreciable gains were reported all along the line – in one or two places the troops had gone forward about half a mile – the British losses had been severe. The Fusiliers had reached their objective, a low mound south of the village of Voormezeele, at the cost of their Colonel, nine officers, and nearly three hundred other ranks killed or wounded. But the French still occupied part of the village, which was wholly in ruins, and on their left flank the Fusiliers were dangerously unprotected. To the right the line ran in front of Hill 60 to Sanctuary Wood, but to the left, where the attack had been less successful, it leaned backward towards Wytschaete. The attainment of this rather perilous but otherwise satisfactory position had been largely due to the gallant and soldierly behaviour of Captain Julian Brown....
