IV
Morlancourt was tucked away among the fold of long slopes and bare ridges of ploughland. Five roads entered the village and each road, in its friendly convergence with the others, had its little crop of houses. There was a church with a slated tower and a gilt vane, round which birds wheeled and clacked. In the hollow ground in the middle, where the five roads met, there was a congregation of farm buildings round an open space with a pond on one side of it. It seemed a comfortable village when one looked down on its red and grey roofs and its drab and ochre walls.
The long lines of the high ground hid the rest of the world: on the ridge one saw a few straggling trees, a team of greys ploughing or dredging, and some horsemen or a hooded farm-cart moving along the white edge of the skyline. The wind piped across the open, combing the thorn bushes which grew under high banks, and soughing in isolated plane trees and aspens. It was a spacious landscape of distant objects delicately defined under an immense sky. The light swept across it in a noble progress of wind and cloud, and evening brought it mystery and sadness. At night the whole region became a dusk of looming slopes with lights of village and bivouac picked out here and there, little sparks in the loneliness of time. And always the guns boomed a few miles away, and the droning aeroplanes looked down on the white seams of the reserve trench lines with their tangle of wires and posts.
Here, while the battalion began its “tours of trenches” (six days in and four days out), I had my meals comfortably with mild M. René Perrineau and Joe Dottrell. I slept in a canvas hut close to the transport lines, falling asleep to the roar and rattle of trench warfare four miles away, and waking to see, on sunny mornings, the shadows of birds flitting across my canvas room, and to hear the whistling of starlings from the fruit trees and gables of the farm near by. After breakfast I would sit for a while reading a book by the fire in Dottrell’s billet, while the soldier cook sang “I want to go to Michigan” at the top of his voice about three yards away. But however much he wanted to go to Michigan, he was lucky not to be in the trenches, and so was I; and I knew it as I toddled down to the transport lines to confer with Sergeant Hoskins about getting some carrots and greenstuff for the horses and indenting for some new nosebags and neckpieces for the limber harness. Some of the horses were looking hidebound, and I promised the sergeant that I’d buy a couple of hundredweight of linseed for them when I went on leave. Linseed was a cosy idea; it reminded me of peacetime conditions.
Our serious activities began after lunch. At half-past two I mounted the black mare, and old Joe soused himself into the saddle of his pony Susan (a veteran who had sustained a shrapnel wound on the near hip at the first battle of Ypres), and the transport moved off along the Bray road with the rations for the battalion. As the days lengthened the expedition started later, for we couldn’t go beyond Bray until after dusk. It was a roundabout journey of seven miles, and if we started at three we were never home before ten. But home we came, to find Monsieur Perrineau solacing himself with Ormand’s gramophone: “But when I told them how wonderful you were” or “Just a little love, a little kiss”: (Perrineau was hoping to go on leave soon, and his wife was waiting for him at Pau).
There were times when I felt that I ought to be somewhere else; I always went up to see my company, and when they were in the front line I was reluctant to leave them. One night (during the second time they were in) I arrived while our batteries were busily retaliating after a heavy afternoon bombardment by the Germans. I had some difficulty in getting up to the front line as the communication trenches were badly knocked about. But I found the five C company officers none the worse for having been “strafed” with trench-mortars, and my visit seemed to cheer them. I came home across the open country that night (which saved three miles), and it was a relief to leave it all behind me—the waterlogged trenches, and men peering grimly at me from under their round helmets: riding home there was friendly gloom around me, while the rockets soared beyond the ridge and the machine-guns rattled out their mirthless laughter. I left the mare to find her way to the gap in the reserve trench line: (she never hesitated, though she had only been up that way once by daylight). I was seeing the War as a looker-on, it seemed.
I had written to Dixon, telling him all about my new job, and I now received a reply. We were, apparently, in the same army corps, so he couldn’t be so very many miles away.
“I have been wondering, sir,” he wrote, “whether it might possibly be fixed up for me to exchange into your battalion as transport-sergeant. You say your sergeant has been in France since the beginning, so he’s done his bit all right! It would be quite like old times for me to be your transport-sergeant. That was a rotten business about Mr. Colwood being killed, sir. We shall all miss him very much when this War is over.”
Dixon’s letter sent me off into pleasant imaginings; to have him near me would make all the difference, I thought. Everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering away and falling to pieces. Denis seldom wrote to me, and he was trying to get a job on the Staff; but with Dixon to talk to I should still feel that the past was holding its own with the War; and I wanted the past to survive and to begin again; the idea was like daylight on the other side of this bad weather in which life and death had come so close to one another. I couldn’t get used to the idea of Stephen being dead. And Denis had become so remote that I seldom remembered him, though I couldn’t say why it was.
So, by the time I was showing Dottrell the letter, I had made up my mind that Dixon’s exchange was as good as settled. Joe read the letter through twice. “Your old groom must be a good sport,” he remarked pouring himself out a couple of inches of O.V.H. and adding a similar amount of water. “But it would take a deal of wangling to work his exchange. And if you want my private opinion, young George, he’d far better stay where he is. We’ll find ourselves in much less cushy places than this, and you say he’s turned forty-five. …” He handed me the letter. “And you might find yourself back with C company again if we had some casualties. Things change pretty quick nowadays. And I don’t mind betting there’ll be a few changes when Kinjack rolls up to take command of the battalion!”
I nodded wisely. For everyone now knew that Winchell had got his brigade, and Major Kinjack was expected (from the Second Battalion) in a week or two. And Kinjack had a somewhat alarming reputation as a disciplinarian. He was, according to Dottrell, who had known him since he was a subaltern, “a bloody fine soldier but an absolute pig if you got the wrong side of him.” Old man Barton was in a twitter about the new C.O., his only hope being, he said, that Kinjack would send him home as incompetent. Barton came in at this moment, for the battalion had returned from the trenches the day before.
“Why, Barton,” exclaimed Dottrell, “you look as if you’d just come out of quod!”
Barton’s hair had been cut by an ex-barber (servant to the medical officer), who had borrowed a pair of horse-clippers to supplement his scissors. Barton giggled and rubbed his cropped cranium. He said it made him feel more efficient, and began to chaff Dick (who had come in to ask if he might go for a ride with me that afternoon) about his beautifully brushed hair. “Kinjack’ll soon have the horse-clippers on your track, young man!” he said. Dick smiled and said nothing.
We arranged to go for a ride, and he went off to inspect the company’s dinners. When he had gone Barton remarked that he wished he could get Dick to take more care of himself up in the Line. “I sent him out on a short patrol two nights ago, but he stayed out there nearly an hour and a half and went right up to the Boche wire.” Old Joe agreed that he was a rare good lad; no cold feet about him; the country couldn’t afford to lose many more like that. …
And he got on to his favourite subject—“The Classes and the Masses.” For Joe had been brought up in the darkest part of Manchester, and he prided himself on being an old-fashioned socialist. But his Socialism was complicated by his fair-minded cognizance of the good qualities of the best type of the officer class, with whom he had been in close contact ever since he enlisted. He clenched a knotted fist. “This war,” he exclaimed in his husky voice, “is being carried on by the highest and the lowest in land—the blue-blooded upper ten and the poor unfortunate people that some silly bastard called ‘the Submerged Tenth.’ All the others are making what they can out of it and shirking the dirty work. Selfish hogs! And the politicians are no better.”
“That’s right, Joe. That’s the stuff to give ’em!” said Barton.
And they both drank damnation to the (enigmatic) part of the population which was leaving all the dirty work to the infantry. Their generalizations, perhaps, were not altogether fair. There was quite a lot of blue blood at G.H.Q. and Army Headquarters. And Mansfield and Durley, to name only two of our own officers, were undoubtedly members of “the middle class,” whatever that may be.
My ride with Dick was a great success. Over the rolling uplands and through an occasional strip of woodland, with the sun shining and big clouds moving prosperously on a boisterous northwest wind, we rode to a village six or seven miles away, and had tea at an unbelievable shop where the cakes were as good as anything in Amiens. I wouldn’t like to say how many we ate, but the evening star shone benevolently down on us from among a drift of rosy clouds while we were cantering home to Morlancourt. But about a fortnight later, when Dick was up in the trenches, I received a letter in reply to the one I had sent Dixon. Someone informed me that Sergeant Dixon had died of pneumonia. Major Kinjack arrived to take command a day or two afterwards.