A Test to Destruction (25 page)

After
petit
dejeuner
they went to the Y.M.C.A. in the Place Amiral Courbet. She thought the canteen women’s uniforms very neat, grey skirt, coat, and triangular badge. It was surprising to see English newspapers on sale there. One had heavy black headlines—METEREN IN FLAMES. The Germans claimed thousands of prisoners, but the Americans were pouring into France.

“It will be a race against time, I fancy,” remarked Thomas Turney.

There was an hour before the ’bus would take them to the hospital, so they walked into the town, seeing the collegiate church of St. Wulfrum partly destroyed by bombs, its window spaces filled by wire frames supporting mica sheets. A notice on the door proclaimed that
bougies
were
interdit,
obviously lest they show light at night to the Gothas.

It was a sad visit to the South African hospital. The D.I.
Ward sister, in her pale buff and navy blue uniform, told them that Corporal Turney was very ill indeed. Both his thighs had been removed almost to the pelvis. He was unconscious.

“Gas gangrene develops so quickly. A stick bomb went off beside him as he was firing his rifle, and his legs were badly torn, with compound bone fractures. They were removed above the knee in a clearing station, but sepsis had already set in.”

He lay with mouth open, and eyes closed, his face a greenish-grey. Hetty only just recognised in that face a trace of the boy who had played with Phillip, and once, had taken all Phillip’s birds’ eggs to bed with him, hiding them under his pillow. Phillip had been very kind, she remembered; he was heart-broken, but he had not said much to Tommy, four years younger than himself.

“I’m afraid we may lose him,” said the nurse.

The next day they went to the funeral in the cemetery outside the town. There were other coffins in the G.S. wagons drawn by black horses, with soldier drivers on the seats. Almost white coffins, of deal. The yellow mounds of clay recalled Randiswell cemetery, the graves of Mamma and Hughie. It was all the same world, of course, and God still watched over it, with Mary and Jesus and all the saints, whose beauty of spirit was born of suffering, she thought as she and Papa followed the coffin up stone steps past the cypresses of the civilian cemetery. How it all came back to her, the childhood dread of French cemeteries—the iron frames above graves adorned with black and white silver crucifixes on mauve wreaths made of beads.

Beyond was the military burial ground. There they waited. Something seemed to be not right among the chaplains in uniform: apparently some of the coffins had got mixed up, and as two were Nonconformist, one Roman Catholic, one orthodox Jew, and the remainder Church of England, it took time to determine which was which; and when this was done, the order of burial had to be arranged in accordance with procedure laid down by G.R.O.—first C. of E., then Nonconformist, Catholic, and Hebrew. She wept, she could not help it, it was all so sad, the bewildered mourners, the open distress of some, the voiceless grief of others.

After a rest in the little château in the Rue Duchesne de Lamotte, containing so much elegance within, while in the gutter outside its sewer moved with grey deadness, she went for a walk with her father. They came to a river, and looking down from
the bridge she saw the water flowing swiftly cold on its way to the sea, and heard, with a shock, Papa saying that this was the river Somme.

Richard had good news for Hetty when she returned. Doris had loyally kept the secret of the telegram; and now he had a letter to show her as well, written by Phillip, the sentences rather like a jig-saw puzzle, but obviously he was in good heart and spirits.

“Oh, and he was at Boulogne when we were there! If only I’d known! Papa and I could have seen him!”

“He’ll be home before very long, I’ll be bound. Well, tell me all about it.”

He listened in wonderment, asking many questions. It had never occurred to him that, except for war-time conditions, life was going on ordinarily in France and Belgium.

“Now tell me how
you
have been getting on, dear.”

“Oh, I’ve managed, thank you.”

Richard had enjoyed his little holiday, as he thought of it. The two girls had breakfasted next door with Miss Turney, and also supped there; his breakfast had been prepared for him on a tray, and he ate ‘in solitary splendour’ in the sitting-room, with the eastern sun shining through the open french windows, and birds singing outside. An oasis in his life; he had worked at his allotment for an hour every evening, and returned to listen to Elgar, Wagner, and his favourite records of Frank Bridge’s
The
Sea
in the sitting-room; and there had been the May number of
Nash’s
Magazine,
as well as
The
Daily
Trident,
The news was better from France, too: the Germans had been stopped.

“I see by the paper,” he said, sipping his cup of hot water before going to bed, “that I’ve lost my chance of joining the Labour Corps as a Volunteer. From now on it’s to be conscription, and I’m out of it by one year. This Military Service Act has been rushed through both Houses and the Royal Assent has been given by Commission in the King’s absence. Listen to this, Hetty, ‘Every male British subject … who has attained the age of eighteen years and has not attained the age of fifty-one … shall be deemed to have been duly enlisted in His Majesty’s Forces for general service with the Colours or in the Reserve for the period of the war …’ Yes, I’ve missed my chance at having a go at the Germans, just as I missed the chance of becoming a fruit farmer in Australia as a young fellow. Now it is too late. I am a half and half creature, a mere cog in a machine. Still, I suppose the Army is composed mainly of cogs.” The idea appealed to him, and thinking of himself in uniform, with hair dyed (he had bought a bottle of hair restorer) and moustache like that of Sir Douglas Haig, he went on, “I should have liked to have been a sniper. What are you laughing at?”

Her sense of fun had upset the picture of himself; he closed up at once behind his paper. She was laughing at him, because he was old and done-for.

“I wasn’t laughing at you, Dickie——”

But she was, and he knew it. “I am glad you find me amusing, that’s something in my favour.”

“I know you would be a very good sniper.”

“Well, I won’t go so far as to say I will be, but I might have been. After all, I have my first-class marksman’s certificate, you know.”

“Yes, dear, of course, naturally.”

He retired hurt behind his newspaper.

She felt like crying. If only he could sometimes laugh
with
her, how much easier life would be. The idea of Dickie as a sniper had been funny, for the poor man had been just that all his life—sniping at this and that from behind the entrenchment of his newspaper—Lloyd George and his ‘ninepence for fourpence’, Churchill, Ramsay Macdonald, the Suffragettes, George Bernard Shaw, Free Trade. She smiled from her cross, feeling suddenly exhausted, and going up to the kitchen, stumbled on the stairs, and with a slight whimper stood still in the unlighted scullery, her place of retreat where she could think her own generally sad thoughts.

The smell of burning toast drew her back to the kitchen, to draw the curtains and open the bottom of the window, for across the top of the window ran the hot pipes from the boiler to the hot tank in the bathroom, and Dickie said that the cold air coming in cooled the pipe. She saw a star shining above the arch of jasmine between the two houses, and thought that the same star was shining in France upon the yellow heap which was the grave of Charley’s boy; she heard again the shivering boom of guns ‘up the line’, she saw the cold clear waters of the Somme which had come down from the battlefield; and closing her eyes, prayed without words to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, while tears moved in silence down her face.

“I suppose,” said Richard, when she returned to the sitting-room with a tray of toast (scraped brown) and a boiled egg, “we shall be having Phillip back in England before long. I heard in the City that many men of the Fifth Army have come back, and all tell the same terrible story of the way things were mismanaged over there by General Sir Hubert Gough.”

*

The Major of the American hospital at Etrêtat was about to come round the ward with the Colonel from Paris. The Major, with Senior Sister, the young ‘loo-tenant’ doctor, and the nurses had all been busy seeing that the ward was one hundred per cent freshened up.

Phillip stood by his bed, in felt slippers and dressing-gown, awaiting their coming. The bed had a large white bow tied on the head rail, denoting milk diet. He felt like a pouter pigeon, eyes lost under feathers of lint and cotton, throat and
chest big with bandages. The water-blisters had gone down, the raw flesh itched. At night gloves were tied over his hands, lest he scratch, and develop septicaemia. He was not a pouter pigeon, he was a dodo, misshapen with blobbed wings and reptilian clawed feet, for his toe-nails needed cutting. He tried to curl in his toes when being washed in bed by the ward nurse (who was the very blonde who came from Sweden,
via
the United States) lest she see them, and he fell in respect in her eyes. He could not see her face, but from what others in the ward said, she was very beautiful; another Lily, her voice low and gentle.

Senior Sister came into the ward for a final look round. “Don’t you want to be in bed to meet the Colonel, young man?” Her question was the equivalent of the English veiled request, “Don’t you think you ought to be in bed——” but Phillip did not know this.

“No, thank you, Sister,” he replied with a little bow. He wanted the Colonel to see that he was now quite fit to leave the ward. He must get to ‘Spectre’, by hook or by crook.

Senior Sister went away, with what a story-writer in
The
Saturday
Evening
Post
would have called ‘a little
moue
’
at Ward Sister. Such high-toned British dignity! The young British colonel insisting that he stand in the presence of a United States colonel! Admiration, amusement, mingled with her wish for symmetry—beds aligned, drapes seventy five per cent drawn back, pillows at forty-five degrees to lines of necks, arms parallel above coverlets, Old Glory and Union Jack crossed above the chimney piece at the correct angle of forty-five degrees, while below on the shelf lithographs of President Wilson and King George of Britain stood together, divided only by a framed Manifesto on Moral and Ethical Principles issued by the Daughters of the Revolution.

The moment came. He waited, pulsating more, right arm sweat glands unexpectedly closed.

“Glad to know you, young man. How goes it, as the British say?”

“I am quite fit, thank you, sir. I was wondering if I might be transferred to the ward where General West is, now that there is a vacancy.”

“So you’ve found that out, have you?”

“Yes, sir. My orderly, that is my striker, told me. Of course
I don’t want to cause any trouble, but the General is my best friend.”

“Wale, what do you think, Major?”

The Major looked at the Senior Sister, then at the chart in the Ward Sister’s hands. Temperature 102 the night before, 99 that morning. Pulse 92. Respiration 70. He saw pus encrustation on the eye bandage removed for his inspection, he touched the livid swollen lids, noting that hyalin was already running down one cheek. The raw blistered flesh on neck and chest was weeping, too. He listened with his stethoscope. Heart intermittent, mucus in respiratory passages, probably incipient bronchitis. Against that, no pneumococcal trace in the stained colloidal smear revealed under microscopic examination.

“Wale, I guess I’ve got some noos for you, Colonel,” he said, his pronunciation similar to that of 17th century English. “You are doo for embarkation to Britain on the boat this afternoon. We have to lose all of you. Do not thank me, sir. We require every bed for a convoy doo in tomorrow, I guess, as our common enemy now appears to be making his all-in effort. Meantime you sure must keep those eyes occluded. I think we have gotten rid of streptococcus, but conjunctivitis remains.”

“Is mustard gas made from mustard, doctor?”

“Mustard gas is a compound called dichlorodiethyl sulphide, sir. The Germans call it Yperite, maybe with the hope that by its aid they will capture Ypres, or as they call that old town, Yper, which some of their cartoonists, I observe, are delineating in the shape of a skull, which has to my mind a pathological fear-fulfilment. Yes sir, dichlorodiethyl sulphide is no simple compound. At this moment of so-called prog-ress our chemistry research men find it indestructible, that is, they cannot yet provide an antidote for use upon damaged tissue. But they will, we may be sure. Goodbye, Colonel, give my regards to London, England.”