The Impregnable Women, page 7
They stumbled into the communication trench, and in that long slow progress many lost all sense of direction. Then at last they found themselves in a deeper and more warlike ditch, where men stood silently waiting for their coming.
The officers commanding the relieving companies were shown the extent of their front, and formally took over the responsibility for its defence. But for nearly an hour the trench was doubly manned, because the Fusiliers, to avoid congestion in the rear, had to wait till an appointed hour before they went out. This last hour seemed the longest they had ever known.
In a small dug-out, miserably lighted by a couple of candles, Julian sat talking to a captain of the Royal Scots, a tallish heavily built man with a red square face and short red hair. He was old for his rank, but he had been quick to appreciate the position, and his manner showed the mild confidence of experience. He took the mug of tea that Julian offered him, and drank gingerly from its hot rim. ‘I never thought to see Voormezeele again,’ he said.
‘When were you here before?’
‘Twenty-six years ago.’
‘You mean in the last war?’
‘Yes,’ said Graham, ‘the last war. And that’s what we thought it was going to be. We were innocent then. I spent my eighteenth birthday a couple of hundred yards from here, and got wounded two days later. That was in April 1918. I was a private in the Black Watch.’
His deep-toned slow Scots voice showed no trace of emotion, but he was in fact excited by the coincidence of returning to war in the very place where, as a boy, he had been seriously wounded, and his excitement was making him talkative. Twenty-six years ago he had fought among the ruins of Voormezeele, and now it was again in ruins, and after a quarter of a century he was once more a soldier. The intervening years had been earnest and busy, filled with arduous endeavour and laudable experiment. Inventors and mechanics had innumerably multiplied the comforts of life; poets and scientists had enlarged the store of humanity’s self-knowledge; mankind had grown a little, here and there, in beauty and wisdom and in charity. And now the world was at war again, and again the western Powers were fighting for the ruins of Voormezeele. Progress had stopped and their objective had shrunk to that. This shattered village was now the goal and scope of all their effort.
Julian, with not much interest, said, ‘You were facing the other way, then, of course.’
‘We were facing all ways, for the war had got rather out of hand about that time, and the Germans were everywhere. It’s an odd feeling to be fighting on their side now, for I’ve always had a sort of liking for the French.’
Julian answered with unnecessary vehemence: ‘It’s their fault we’re fighting them. They started the war. I was in London when they bombed it, and I saw the old women and children they killed.’
‘Yes, that was a bad business. But I can’t believe they did it wantonly, and if we knew the whole story we’d likely find that our Government was a bit to blame in some way or another.’
‘Perhaps it was, but nothing can excuse the bombing of London.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
Julian had again spoken in the loud and dogmatic voice of one who must convince not only his audience but himself. The discovery, on the morrow of that Sunday in July, that France was the enemy, had been a dreadful blow to him, and the bruise was still tender. Like other Francophiles – but he had been immoderate in his romantic regard – he had turned against France with the blind anger of a lover betrayed. Like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale he thought: ‘Say that she were gone, given to the fire, a moiety of my rest might come to me again . . .’ But this feeling had to be preserved, and he would not willingly hear a word in defence of his former love.
‘They asked for trouble,’ he said stubbornly, ‘and by God they’re going to get it. Look here, have a drink instead of that filthy chlorinated tea.’
Graham refused the whisky. For a minute or two neither of them spoke. Then Graham, untidily filling his pipe, said, ‘There’s another difference between this war and the old one. In the old one we thought we were fighting for the rights of small nations. We were going to put a stop to war, and make the world safe for democracy. Well, we didn’t, of course. We didn’t do any of those things. But we had good intentions. The ordinary people, like you and me, had righteous hopes. But there’s none of that feeling nowadays. We’re simply fighting for survival and the ruins of Voormezeele. There’s no suggestion of anything else, and though you may say that that’s a sufficient purpose, it seems a pity to have lost the larger motive.’
‘We’re at war because we were wantonly attacked, and we’re fighting to win.’
‘But what’s going to happen after we have won? Are we going to waste our victory and all the men who’ve been killed, as we wasted them before? I’m not given to crying over spilt milk, but I come near to it when I think of the opportunities that Britain had and lost in 1919. We could have led the world to better things. We had the strength and the prestige – we and the United States – and we could have taught peace and justice. But we shirked our responsibilities. We took the narrow view, and America was narrower still, and we thought only of our own profits, not seeing that we took our profits from everyone else, and their welfare was just as important as ours. Security was what we wanted in the first place, being international traders; but we didn’t like the notion of collective security, which was the only kind possible, because we thought that other people might get some of the benefits. We were selfish and stupid, and I’m afraid that we and America are much to blame for the misery and confusion in the world today.’
Julian took another drink. He had begun to find Graham a little tedious, and now he felt a sudden spurt of anger. He did not wish to be reminded of misery. For thirty-six hours he had been trying to thrust out of memory his humiliating fear at the moment of attack; and the word misery was a mnemonic of his shame. He wanted to shout it down, but with an effort he controlled his voice, and leaning over the ramshackle table – tapping the rough wood with irritable fingers – he said, ‘I don’t agree that the war has brought only misery, or even that misery is what it has chiefly brought. To many people, and I’m one of them, it has meant life as well as death. I used to be a schoolmaster, teaching English Literature to cretinous small boys. Do you think that was life, or had any flavour of it? To know life you’ve got to know love and poverty and war, and I’ve learnt two of them in the last six months. “The fighting man shall from the sun take warmth and life from the glowing earth” – but perhaps you don’t believe in poetry?’
‘I’ve always had the impression that most of it was meant more for pleasure than instruction,’ said Graham cautiously. ‘And I don’t think much of a soldier’s life unless he’s fighting for something. I’m not a pacifist, or I wouldn’t be here, but I think a soldier ought to have a peaceful end in view. And what end do we envisage now? That’s what puzzles me. Is the war going to teach humanity anything of sense and understanding? That would be a proper sort of victory. Teaching is what we need, because the great weakness of the world is the ignorance and sheer feeble-mindedness of humanity at large. We still need a great deal of elementary instruction.’
Julian looked at his watch. Then he got up and put on his helmet. ‘You sound like a schoolmaster yourself.’
‘No, I’m in Insurance, or was,’ said Graham with a sigh.
‘Well, it’s time I was going.’
They passed through the double doorway of the dug-out – a greasy blanket at the foot of the steps, canvas at the top – and came into the cool darkness of the trench. ‘It’s milder tonight,’ said Julian. ‘I hope you get out before the thaw comes.’
After the Fusiliers had gone, Graham visited his sentries and for a long time stood looking into the hostile night while memory returned, more vividly than for many years, of that other war in which he had fought, and of his last days in the ruins of Voormezeele. He remembered the faces and the rough voices of men whose existence he had long forgotten, and the morning mist, and the huge grotesquely helmeted shapes of Prussian infantry coming suddenly out of the mask of whiteness. He remembered the halt and the fall of a man he had shot in the belly, and the friendliness of a sergeant when he had behaved with unrealized gallantry, and the post-corporal coming with a bag of letters, nearly all for men who were dead. His battalion, after desperate fighting on the Somme, had been reduced to something less than the strength of a company, and they had formed a composite battalion with – the Cambridgeshires and Cheshires, wasn’t it? He could not quite remember – but he heard, as an echo in his mind, the pipers playing The Flowers of the Forest in the square at Poperinghe, and with a shock he remembered how young they had been, those boys in the black kilts and the red-hackled bonnets, who had fought a wasted war for freedom and justice and decency. As young as these other soldiers, in the trench beside him, who were fighting for no one knew what, except the ruins of Voormezeele....
A couple of miles away, marching wearily with the remaining half of his battalion, Eliot Greene was also seeing visions; but of the enemy. In his fevered brain rose the figures of the two Frenchmen whose drained and mutilated bodies had laid beside him in the shell-hole, and now he thought someone told him that the one had been a painter, the other a poet. Their trade had been the creation of beauty in the colours of the sunflower and the sky, and in words that pealed like smitten bronze. Their pale dead faces were lilies in the dusk of his mind, a whiteness whose eyes were darkly brilliant, a pallor that framed eloquent young mouths. They were the beauty of mankind, and they had died to make a desolation with smiths and ploughmen, with little men from suburban streets, and tall drum-majors with enormous plumes. They who were artists, and the sons of a land that lauded intelligence and beauty, had created a hideous desert and died in the battle for its possession.
He stumbled in a rut in the road, and his body yearned for rest; but keener than that desire was the wish of his mind for sanity.
The soldiers, verminous and cold, marched heavily with sunken heads and empty brain. They came to a group of low-roofed huts, a shabby hamlet of corrugated iron, and found their billets, and fell asleep. But Eliot could not rest, for his mind was still haunted by the vision of a monstrous destruction, and he thirsted for sanity like a fever-patient crying for water. In the darkness before morning he heard the guns again. For a minute or two his heart raced, and then, utterly exhausted, he slept....
But the bombardment continued. The battle for the ruins had begun again, and Graham, head down, went to and fro among his men and saw that they were calm and ready. The earth shook and the paling sky was filled with fury. Tight-lipped and grimly patient, the young soldiers waited. They were the Royal Scots – they were the Right of the Line, they were Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard, their colours bore the honours of Blenheim and Alma, Waterloo, Mons, and the Hindenburg Line – and they would fight like veterans and die like heroes though it were only for the broken stones of a Flemish village.
The shells were all falling behind the trench. The sky grew lighter. A sergeant, stocky, square-shouldered and square of jaw, looked through a little embrasure in the parapet, and saw a grey-blue line of men rise menacing from the earth. Their individual movement was jerky and irregular, but the line came steadily nearer. Athwart their forward-stooping bodies they carried, up-pointed, their long rifles, and above their heads their bayonets were like a long fence of steel. Then, as the fierce faces grew more distinct, the long steel points came down.
Half-turning from the embrasure, the sergeant shouted to Graham: ‘Here they come, sir!’
VI
The Right Honourable Percy Small, P.C., Minister for Munitions, came down the steps of the Palace of Fun in Blackpool, and stood for a few seconds arm-in-arm with Tom Hogpool while half a dozen press photographers trained their cameras on the Man of the Moment and his faithful friend.
The fidelity of the faithful friend was, as a matter of fact, a source of considerable annoyance to Mr Small. It often robbed him of the luxury of reminiscence. He delighted to describe, in his own way, his humble origin and the rigours of his early life; but his narration of that heroic struggle was never quite confident when Hogpool was there to hear it, for Tom had been born in the same street, and gone to the same Elementary School, and he remembered many details of their formative years – their having been runners to a street bookie, for example, and their skilful manipulation of the funds of a working-men’s Christmas and Holiday Club – which the Minister had tactfully forgotten. It was Hogpool’s belief, moreover, that friendship had its obligations, and that he was therefore entitled to a higher price for his barbed wire than that established in open market. For these and other reasons Mr Small entertained a lively hatred for him; but as his practice had always been to mix an air of hail-fellow-well-met with a profession of Christian charity to the meanest of mankind, he concealed his feelings and took what compensation he could from his reputation for never forgetting an old friend.
The photographers liked him because he was patient, friendly, and obliging. His photographs always showed him in a manly attitude, either broadly smiling or impressively serious. He was smiling now, and so was Hogpool, though the latter’s expression was too frankly porcine to make a favourable impression on anyone but a pig-fancier. They had good reason to be pleased, for Mr Small had just succeeded, by alternate rhetoric, tears, and cunning proposal, in settling a serious strike of munition-workers.
The munition-workers, perceiving the ever-increasing wealth of their employers, had got the idea that they were entitled to some share in their profits, and demanded a fifty per cent increase in wages. The community at large, however, had been quick to see the impropriety of this demand, for munition-workers were already paid twice as much as employees in the pacific industries, while soldiers in the line, who were drawn from the same social strata as both, seemed perfectly content with a mere fraction of the latter’s earnings. The greed and selfishness of the malcontents were obvious to everyone except themselves, but they, with wilful obtuseness, declined to see any difference between their position and that of their employers, whose profit, as any reasonable person could readily perceive, was the unavoidable increment of patriotic endeavour; and when their demands were refused they went on strike.
The strike almost immediately had the most unfortunate effects. At the front the supply of shells was interrupted and many additional lives were lost through the artillery’s failure to protect the infantry with a proper sort of barrage; while at home the profits of heavy industry alarmingly declined. The strike, it was clear, had to be settled with the minimum of delay. But the strikers were stubborn and their employers with adamantine logic declared that it was impossible to raise wages without diminishing profits and thereby throwing suspicion on their patriotism – unless, of course, the Government was prepared to pay fifty per cent more for the products of their labour. But this the Government was unwilling to do, and the situation was then aggravated by a virulent campaign in the popular press against the octogenarian Prime Minister, Lord Pippin. He, however, when the crisis appeared to be threatening the life of his Cabinet, if not of the country as a whole, emerged from his characteristic quiescence to settle it with customary ease. He gave Mr Small carte blanche to deal with the dilemma as he thought best.
The war, like the boiling of a pot, had thrown to the top of affairs a number of men more suited than the older politicians to the peculiar difficulties of the time. These newcomers, by the vigour of their constitution and the business-like quality of their minds, had impressed the public and secured some excellent jobs. Two or three had attained Cabinet rank, of whom Mr Small was one; and even his political opponents found it difficult not to admire the manner in which, without loss of time, he now proceeded to negotiate a settlement of the dispute.
He summoned a meeting, in the Palace of Fun at Blackpool, of employers and the strikers’ leaders, and laid before them an initial proposal for a general increase in wages of twenty-five per cent. He also intimated that in all the affected industries there would have to be a comb-out of men of military age up to a figure representing forty per cent of the whole number employed. These on being drafted into the army would be replaced by women, and boys under the age of eighteen, whose wages would be fixed at five-eighths of the existing standard wage. There might be, he admitted, some disorganization as a result of this large displacement of labour, but in return for a guaranteed output he proposed for the compensation of employers the derating of all premises used in the production of munitions. These offers, which at first were doubtfully received, he supported by a display of oratory that greatly impressed the employers; by tears that gradually melted the resistance of the strikers; and by a private request, to the wealthiest of the employers and the leader of the strikers, that they would accept a Barony of the United Kingdom and a Knighthood of the British Empire respectively. It was then discovered that the proposals were characterized by the triune spirit of Christianity, fair play, and British statesmanship; and the strike was called off. The men who escaped conscription returned to work, and their employers to counting their profits; and Mr Small, after receiving the congratulations of everyone, went smiling out of the Palace of Fun to be photographed by the united press of Great Britain. The only flaw in his happiness was the adhesive presence of Tom Hogpool.
But it was Hogpool who suggested a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion, and Mr Small, who was always glad to eat or drink at anyone else’s expense, accepted the invitation and together they walked among audibly admiring passers-by to the New Carlton Hotel.
‘There’ll be another friend of mine there,’ said Hogpool complacently. ‘A young lady, as a matter of fact, and she’ll be glad to meet you, Perce. She’s of good family herself, and she likes to meet people that’s well up in the world like you. Though she might think different if she knew as much about you as I do. Eh, lad?’
