A Test to Destruction (35 page)

He went back after only four days of his leave to Landguard. To his relief, Denis Sisley was in the orderly room.

“You’re entitled to put up the cherry ripe riband with the blue bars, you know. Oh yes, rather! No need to wait until you go to Buck House. By the way, on Wednesday the Colonel is taking a bunch of the old sweats to Husborne for Minden Day. He’s away in London at the moment, but you’re to attend the party, so let me see that manly breast properly adorned.”

“Minden Day?”

“First of August. You’ll have to eat your rose in the evening, washed down by bubbly. It’s an old custom, and apparently not done to ask why.”

On arrival with other senior officers of the Regiment at the Abbey Phillip was led to a large bedroom with a four-poster bed, a thick blue carpet which muffled his footfalls, and, among other furniture, a writing desk inlaid with lighter woods in an intricate pattern of flowers, above which was a level top behind a gilt trellis. Here stood a large gold bowl of red and yellow roses, flanked by candlesticks of the same metal, each nearly two feet tall and fluted above stepped-up bases. His room was behind the red-baize door preserve. Wonder at his position possessed him; how had it happened? With no belief in his own powers, he thought of himself as evasive of all real life, unlike other men, who got to and held their positions by deliberate force of will. Everything so far in his life had happened in spite of himself, all was due to a series of flukes. He had known that when having lunch with Mr. Howlett during which the idea of going back to the Moon Fire Office after the war had been unthinkable.

A double knock on the door. “Come in!” The door opened, and Colonel Vallum entered.

“Hullo, Maddison. I’ve come to offer my congratulations.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“Vallum to you. How are you feeling? All the gas effects
cleared up? Good. What wonderful roses. I’ve got some in my room. That’s an old moss rose, you don’t see many of them today. Good to see you again.”

“When do we wear our roses? Tonight?”

“Tomorrow. One of each colour, on the left side of the service cap. They’ve been practising Trooping the Colour all this afternoon. A bit ragged, inevitably, but these boys are coming on nicely.”

Phillip wanted to ask what the origin of the roses was, but forebore: he imagined that it was an incident similar to that when the Cherrypickers got their nickname, after eating cherries on their way up to some old battle. Perhaps it was Minden? He did not like to ask, so powerful a personality was Colonel Vallum to him, with that rock-like steadiness behind massive imperturbability; before which Phillip’s inner core of diffidence revealed itself in the sudden remark, “You know, sir, I feel a complete fraud to be here. I did nothing, really, it was all a tremendous fluke—Albert, I mean.”

“I think we all feel like that when we think about ourselves.” Behind the held-back glance of grey eyes was friendliness. “These things are after all a tribute to the Regiment.” The speaker noticed Phillip’s glance at the maroon riband, with its miniature bronze cross: the ten-thousandth glance he had had to endure with equanimity. “After all, nothing is ever done without one’s men. Otherwise such things would have no justification, as I see it, in modern war. And talking about flukes,” went on Vallum, “Minden was a classic example of a battle won almost by chance. As you know, in the Seven Years War, Austria, France, Russia, Sweden and Saxony combined to knock out Prussia under Frederick the Great. In the end we went to help Prussia, sending the equivalent of a small expeditionary force of infantry and cavalry. There was a gale blowing on August the First, 1759, and our infantry advanced through a mistake in delivering an order against the French flank. We went up through some rose gardens, and helped ourselves, whence these”—he pointed to the blooms in the silver gilt bowl—“and caught the French on the hop. The cavalry under Sackville didn’t follow through, so the infantry went on to victory by themselves. So here we are!”

“Have you read, by any chance, the poems called
Counter
Attack,
sir?”

“Oh yes. I read them in course of duty. I’m Intelligence at the War House, for my sins.”

“What do you think of them, sir?”

“Oh, I think we’ve all felt like that, at one time or another. I’m no judge of poetry, but I heard Winston Churchill at White’s talkin’ about them the other day. ‘Cries of pain wrung from soldiers during a test to destruction’, were his words. Well, I must bathe, and dress for dinner. See you downstairs. By the way, Maddison, I asked you to call me Vallum.”

*

August the First opened calm and clear. Phillip was awake, and reading Joseph Conrad’s
Heart
of
Darkness
when bugles sounded Reveille. Almost at once came the sound of drums; he went to his open window; the band was approaching the Abbey from the park. Entering under the Gate House, they marched round the courtyard upon which his windows looked. Under the sun, now burnishing the sloping roofs and chimney stacks of the far side of the Abbey and casting shadows on the cobblestones behind the Drum Major twirling his gold stick, the walls resounded with the crash and blare of the Minden March. The side drummers wore white leather aprons, the bass drummer a leopard skin. All wore roses in caps and upon the cords of the drums. He saw heads leaning out of windows to left and right, some above pyjama coats, like himself.

When the band had marched away under the arch of the Gate House he flung on burberry and made for the bathroom, where he quickly shaved while water gushed from a massive silver tap into the deep and narrow bath, set on a lead base to trap and lead away splashings. The bath, enclosed in mahogany, was deep enough to drown two people at once. He filled it a third full, over a foot deep, and got in, to lie down, pull himself up and soap himself quickly, then dipping again, stood up and dried in a huge towel while the water gurgled away down the trap. Others would be wanting the bathroom; he was out within three minutes of entering, to see Vallum walking down in bathrobe and red Algerian slippers without heels, like those brought back by Grandpa and Mr. Newman from their travels years ago.

The Trooping the Colour took place at the other end of the park, on the parade ground of the Command Depôt. The G.O.C. Eastern Command took the salute on a dais, the senior officers standing behind the Colonel of the Regiment; behind them
were other officers from the hospital. Everything looked new—the pressed tunics and trousers of the troops taking part, roses in their service cap bands, rifle butts gleaming with oil, the Colour adorned with roses. He quivered, near to tears; shook back his feelings, while his mind burned within ancient sunlight of Somme and Bullecourt, Poperinghe, the Bull Ring at Etaples, the white chalk parapets of the Bird Cage, the brown desolation of the Messines Ridge.
Posterity,
posterity!
—a sentence from Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley ran in his head with the beat of the drums—
posterity
which
goes
to
Rome,
and
weeps
large-sized
tears,
carves
beautiful
inscriptions,
over
the
tomb
of
Keats
;
and
the
worm
must
wriggle
her
curtsey
to
it
all,
since
the
dead
boy,
wherever
he
be,
has
quite
other
gear
to
tend.
Never
a
bone
the
less
dry
for
all
the
tears
!

And now it was ending; and he wanted it to go on, for ever and for ever, in the sunlight which was shining on the dead, in the spirit which carried all who had walked away from love at home and found a greater love in friendship of men like Father Aloysius in the land of pain and destruction; but it was over; and the battalion of Young Soldiers was marching away, the column getting smaller against the dark hutments of military servitude.

The officers and sergeants waited on the men’s dinners, the tables set with vases of roses and pint glasses of ale, roast pork, baked potatoes, batter pudding with chopped sage and onions, and then plum duff with dates instead of currants. Then to a cold luncheon in the sergeants’ mess, after which the Colonel of the Regiment proposed the King, and the Duke made a speech, congratulating the Regimental Sergeant-major, one of the original Mons sergeants of the First battalion, with his Military Cross and Distinguished Conduct Medal ribands, and five wound stripes.

To rest; and at night a dinner in the Great Hall at Husborne, over a hundred officers, Phillip at one end of the high table, eating a rose petal by petal and washing it down with champagne which (Lord Satchville told him afterwards) was cider, matured in bottle for twelve years in the cellars, and ‘indistinguishable from all but the best vintages in the caves of Rheims, where expert cellarman turn the bottles, with a special flick of the wrist, every so often, with inherited skill’.

Landguard was anti-climax, but for a few hours only. Soon he was at home in his old billet in Manor Terrace. There was
bathing from the shingle bank, tennis on the courts of Felixstowe, and bridge in the ante-room after parades. He was now second-in-command of a company, with the acting rank and pay of a captain.

There was to be a tennis tournament at Felixstowe in the third week of August. There were dances at night in the Felix Hotel—to waltzes, fox-trots, and one-steps on the gramophone; a string quartet played for tea every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. By now the actualities of war had passed beyond memory, as day followed day as hot and bright as that almost forgotten summer of 1914.

For the war was going well at last. On the 8th of that month had come the British counter-push, with tanks, a brilliant victory for the Australians, New Zealanders, and British divisions. In the first step, tanks and infantry had penetrated beyond divisional to corps headquarters, taking many prisoners, including German generals, and guns. Monash, who from being a civilian in 1914 in Sydney was now a Lieutenant-General, had planned the attack, with Haig’s approval. He was now spoken of as ‘the finest General produced by the War’. This was John Monash, a Jew, who could have taken Passchendaele a month earlier than it was taken, according to ‘Spectre’, Phillip remembered. Ah, if he had lived, and not been knocked out, where would Westy not have got to?

The Yanks were no longer coming (on the piano). They had come. The submarines were mastered, the last Zeppelin had fallen in flames, the Gothas had done, and had, their worst. Every dinner in the mess was a party. The morning sea was warm, glittering under the sun of 7 a.m. Even Sprat had learned to swim.

Young officers arrived from the Command Depôt in dozens. Their faces were hardly observed, their names unknown—except on the company rolls—a brief moment, and they were gone—and new fresh respectful young figures were herding quietly in the ante-room, rising to their feet whenever Phillip entered. He wished they wouldn’t.

It was not the same war any longer: the names in the casualty lists no longer dismayed one. Movements forward were in miles where they had been in yards—the same yards, forward and back, a dead man in every other four square yards. And if the old Hun—almost a term of affection—if the old Hun wasn’t
beaten by the end of the year, he was done for anyway. Germany could no longer win. So eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow this life will be over: and then——

“You do shoot, don’t you, Maddison?” said the Colonel, as Phillip left for a week’s leave on the Friday before the Investiture. “My cousin the Duke has asked me to bring two guns for a partridge drive at Husborne on Saturday week. Very well, I shall accept for you, and expect to see you at the Abbey at six o’clock next Friday evening.”

*

Phillip travelled to London with several other officers, including the handsome Colin Keith-Thomson, an actor before the war, who had returned to the regiment after being seconded to the R.F.C. for two years. After 350 flying hours in scout machines Colin had gone to hospital with ‘flying sickness debility’, and a Military Cross for shooting down 5½ E.A. or Huns as enemy aircraft were called. Now, a footslogger again, he was a little
blasé,
and slept through most of the journey. He was also going to Buck House.

It was agreed, after the ‘show’, to have luncheon together at the Café Royal, and then go on for drinks to the Joystick Club, a furnished house rented from a peer by some officers of the R.F.C. Colin was a member; there were no rules, he said, except that fighting drunks were scragged. Apparently it was a wilder Flossie Flowers’; the peer’s butler had locked up all the glass, china, plate,
objets
d’art,
etc., and rolled away the Aubusson carpets. Otherwise the house was as in pre-war days.

“You’ll be most welcome,” said Colin, awakening as the train drew into Liverpool Street station, to Phillip. “Bring some pumps, we’ll probably end up at the Grafton Galleries. There’s always a shake-down afterwards. Do come along, and bring a girl if you like, we can put her up, too.”