A Test to Destruction (6 page)

Moggers was yawning widely, with no attempt to cover a mouth revealing stumps of teeth about as irregular and broken as the tree stumps in the Bois Carré of long ago. Poor old Moggers, a farm labourer’s son who had started life as a crowstarver for 6d. a week; dear old Moggers: but where was the original boy of clay, dragging thin young legs behind the seed-harrow strokes, or twirling his rattle to scare the rooks? Since then he had dragged his feet all over the Empire, and now wanted only to rest them before his own hearth—the bully-beef face home at last, roses round the door, and the old women along the street on sunny days working at the lace pillows. How queer—crowstarver Moggy to Lt.-Col. Moggerhanger, D.S.O.

“What yer laughin’ like that at me for, young Lampers?”

“I’m beginning to rumble you,
mein
prächtige
kerl
!”

Moggerhanger obviously took this to be a compliment. His mouth became frog-like as he drew in breath, extended two arms, and started to sing
Nellie
Dean
in a surprisingly thin little voice. Then after another drink he was bellowing

“Them’s my sentiments, Lampo! One of the Fireside Lancers, no bloody good to the army no more! That’s a bloody fact! Me, who was so’jerin’ when your mother’s milk was still in you! Khyber Pass, Omdurman, Rorke’s Drift, Blennum, Battle of Bloody Hastings, Moggers was in the thick of the bloody lot, and no jam on it like there is today! I began my so’jering with the wildest lot of sods whatever broke their mother’s ’earts, let me tell you, old cock!” His head dropped. In a little voice he murmured, “I’m popped,” and without further word staggered up on his size-thirteen issue boots and zigzagged from the hut.

“Dear old Moggers,” said Pluggy. “Where would we be without him. Don’t take any notice of his remarks. He’s had a long war, and wants to go home. By the way, the battalion is being relieved tomorrow, I think we should all turn out to welcome them. I’m sending up the drums. Well, I’m for bed. You know your quarters, do you?”

“I think I’ll write a letter first, major, before turning in.”

“Righty-ho.”

He wanted to write up his diary, an act forbidden by General Routine Orders. But there seemed nothing to say when he was alone. He began to feel depressed, his head felt to be swelled, his skin dry and tight. Was he going to spew? He hadn’t drunk very much. The yellow-hot coke in the stove was now giving out blue flames when the wind blew down the chimney pipe. He felt sleepy, with no desire to sleep: a feeling of irritability, kept down by leaden hopelessness, held him in faint complaint that the room was thick with the insidious smell of black twist tobacco. A brutal imprint of himself trying to smoke twist in a clay pipe in the Cheshire convalescent home in February 1915 pressed
upon him, while his stomach hardened unbearably, so that he got up and made for the door, vainly clutching air for support while feeling himself helplessly to be the centre of a leaning gyroscope. He was scarcely aware of falling backwards, and then the sense of desperately crawling to the door faded.

When he recovered he heard remote voices and was conscious of his chattering teeth and of arms bearing him away. He awoke into candle light, Allen offering him a cup of tea. Recalling something of the night before, he told himself that he was weak, weak, weak; so much for his good resolutions. What would Westy say? His head was aching, tea made it feel less pressed upon. “Who got me here? I suppose I was blotto?”

“You were poisoned by the fumes of that stove. Colonel Moggerhanger found you lying on the floor, he went back when he realized that his own stove had filled his hut with carbon-monoxide fumes.”

“Then I owe the old boy my life! And I wasn’t blotto after all!”

“No. The M.O. said it was a case of poisoning.”

“Thank God!”

“I thought you’d want to be up to see the battalion arrive. They’re on the way down.”

Phillip was soon shaved, washed, and dressed. Then to breakfast, which he had to forsake half-way through; but returning with emptied belly to the mess room, found that the headache was gone and his appetite, after a bite of bread and butter, keen. Afterwards a visit to the tailor’s shop, to have the regimental and divisional flashes—colour patterns—sewn on shoulders and behind tunic collar; and then to join the cadre officers, including the new draft, who were walking out along the track down which the battalion would come.

The sky was beginning to turn pink; flights of scout planes were climbing overhead, already golden in the rays of the sun invisible from below. “Quiet morning,” said Phillip. “What do they say, ‘Red at dawning, shepherd’s warning’?” The wind was from the north-west, already the sky behind them was dull for another day. Sleet wandered down the sky. Then a cyclist was seen through the low haze, coming towards them. He drew up, leapt off, stood to attention, “Battalion just passing Bluet Field Ambulance, sir!”

As they stood under a sky now rising gold in the east but still louring dark over their shoulders Phillip heard the faint throb of
drums. After the night of almost continuous gun-fire, the slight sound was strangely moving. Looking back the way they had come, he saw other figures along the track; transport drivers, who had been going up when the box-barrage was put round the Bird Gage and the raid started, had come along to find out what had happened to their chums.

The thin almost feeble wail of the pipes was heard above the throb of side-drums, but still nothing was visible in the frozen mist. The sound died away, then came again; now it was only the drums—
rataplan,
rataplan,
ratapattaplan
—swelling and diminishing as though with the contours of the ground.

The head of the battalion appeared suddenly, and he thought the drum-skins must have been damp. In front walked the sergeant drummer: behind the band came an uneven column of khaki figures. When about a hundred yards distant from the camp entrance, upon the area of ground worn bare of grass, now faintly speckled with sleet, drum-sticks were raised, polished brass instruments held to mouths, long silver stick of drum-major held aloft as the band wheeled to a flank. Down came the silver stick, drums broke into roll, and from brass instruments, now brazed, soldered, and patched, came the regimental march,
Colonel
Bogey.

Past the stationary band came the battalion, led by ‘Spectre’ on foot, his one eye staring ahead under the rim of his helmet. He took the salute, his face white and set. Behind him walked an officer Phillip remembered at Landguard, Denis Sisley, looking haggard and ill. Rows of bloodshot eyes followed, boots and puttees clogged with mud thrust desperately against drag, puffy faces smeared, trousers ripped by barbed wire and bomb splinter, helmets askew, rifles slung, greatcoats gashed, tunics showing dried blood. Was this all the battalion—under four hundred?

In the rear came a limping captain, knitted scarf round neck and covering the lower part of his face, thus emphasising a long nose and dark staring eyes. Phillip saw that a mouth-organ was tucked into one shoulder-strap of his tommy’s tunic.

*

Hetty, going in the back way to play her nightly game of piquet with Thomas Turney, brought a letter from Phillip. “It has just come!” she said, with her gay little laugh. “But neither Dickie nor I can fathom the first part. What do you think, Papa?”

Thomas Turney put on his spectacles, and began to read aloud.

He paused. “What’s the next word? It’s either ‘farm’ or ‘farmy’. H’m. We need a Sherlock Holmes to decipher this——” He read on:

Thomas Turney stared at the letter, while Hetty and Aunt Marian sat very still. At last he chuckled. “I think I see through it now! Phillip told me when he was last home that if we took the first letters of every word at the beginning of the first sentence, it would indicate where he was. Now where are we——” He began to spell, “P-E-R-R-O-N-E. That’s it, Peronne! But misspelled. There’s a map in the
Star
tonight.” He showed them. “There you are! And now for Vulpine Farm. Didn’t he say that the sign of the Army he served in all last year was a fox?”

“Yes, Papa, the Fifth Army!”

“That’s right. Gough’s Fifth Army, in a quiet part of the line, right away from Ypres, there it is, Peronne, on the map. So you have nothing to worry about, my girl!”

“I’ll just slip back and tell Dickie, Papa. He doesn’t say much, but I know he is greatly concerned about Phillip. I won’t be long.”

Richard was playing
The
Sea,
by Frank Bridge, one of his favourite records. He stopped the motor as soon as she entered, believing that she had no feeling for such beauty, and the thought dulled him.

“Peronne, is that the place where Master Phillip is now? Why, it was given up by the Germans a year ago, when they had
their ‘landslide in the West’, as the
Trident
called it. They destroyed a large tract of country, blowing up all buildings, poisoning wells, and cutting down trees, so they won’t exactly want it back, will they?” he said cheerfully. “Now that your best boy has found himself a quiet part of the line, take my advice, and enjoy your gambling, Hetty!” He was happy, and yet, somehow, the music did not sound quite the same when he started the turntable once again.

*

During intervals between his duties Phillip rode a young spirited chestnut gelding 15.3 hands high, lent to him by the transport officer. Away from the incinerated and chloride smells of camp there lay a country of rolling downland little touched by war, except that all trees had been cut down, and long ago become firewood, so that only dead stumps lined the roads. There were no villages, only an occasional heap of rubble.

It was now the second week of March. Despite drafts, the battalion was more than three hundred men under strength. He had been surprised to find that the regular battalion was little different from a service battalion: his mental picture had to be re-made, from one of
sahib
officers, to chaps like himself. A few new second-lieutenants from Sandhurst; others from Cadet centres and the disbanded 8th battalion of Kitchener’s Army, or what was left of it after Somme, Hindenburg Line, and Third Ypres.

The Colonel, now that the battalion was out of the line, had the officers dining in mess together every night. The Divisional General was keen on sports for the men—football, cross-country runs, potato-and-spoon races, sack races, riding school for the officers, anything to take their minds for a brief while off their work. On the last of the four days out, a football match was arranged with a north country battalion. This was one of the many return matches between the Mediators and the Pork and Beans, a rivalry in sport going back before the war. One of the company commanders, Bill Kidd, was the Mediators’ goalee; he was very fly, flinging himself in extended attitudes at the ball, usually shot at the goal by an ex-pro of a famous Northern cup-tie team. Again and again Captain Kidd managed to frustrate the thick-necked hero of the Pork and Beans, by proving, in various directions across the rectangle of the goal, that a straight line to the ball was the shortest distance between the point of his
toes extended through a taut body to his fists diverting the ball. Towards the end of the game more than a hundred Lancastrians were booing Bill Kidd from behind the net, as their own hero, at centre forward, who had a habit of falling on one knee and sticking out a leg to trip an opponent, failed to score. The booing was intense towards the end; no goals were scored on either side; and the Mediator goalee remarked to Phillip as they were walking back, “Good lads, those Pork and Beans, they’re all Boche eaters!”

“What about their centre-forward? He played a dirty game.”

“Him? He’s no Boche eater! He’s dodging the column at Corps School, teaches bayonet-fighting and all the milksop stuff of those other highly-paid bastards.”

Back into reserve, work-and-carry parties were resumed, twelve hours on and twelve off. For those not on night duty the cinemas clicked every night, and the concert party put on its double bill. By now Phillip had made friends with some of the officers, whose cheery greetings added to life. With surprise he realised that he was the senior subaltern, a bogus old sweat, the riband of the 1914 Star had done the trick.