A Test to Destruction (9 page)

When there was no reply to this question he went on, “It is my affair to ask about this, as your Colonel, Phillip. For what a Commanding Officer has to determine above all is, how far are his officers to be relied upon.”

The spectre of his own weakness, dismissed from his mind innumerable times, with accompanying uneasy thought that one day he would be found out to be bogus, possessed Phillip. Now it had happened: he was seen for what he really was, a liar and ashamed of his parents and his birth-place.

“You’ve met my parents, haven’t you, Phillip?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Oh, drop the ‘colonel’ when we are alone. I am Westy to you. As you know, my people keep a pub in the City. My father, before that, was a soldier in the ranks. He joined the Army because he could not find work. His three sons went in due course to the Board School. One of his sons, through scholarships, reached the University. There he met other men belonging to a class above his own. One day this diffident undergraduate overheard, by accident, one of those young gentlemen say to another, ‘One cannot possibly ask West to join us, he isn’t a gentleman.’ Now I’d like to ask you this: Would you say that remark was snobbish?”

“No, Westy, because it was based on the facts of living as they were then.”

“In what way?”

“Different classes have different interests, and different perspectives. Just as the ordinary soldier in the ranks can’t really enter into the world of the regimental officer, or the ordinary regimental officer enter the world of the staff, anyway at Corps or Army level.”

“Good! Did you think that out for yourself?”

“No, Westy. You told me when we were walking up to Broodseinde last October!”

“Good! Now the true Phillip is speaking. Tell me, do you think that remark I overheard about my not being a gentleman had any affect on my home life?”

“No, I don’t think it would have had any effect on you.”

“Well, it did. From that moment I became conscious of myself as others saw me. I watched myself. I tried to listen to my voice. Once I even went to have a gramophone record made of it, privately, but funked it when I got to the place. I became critically conscious of my parents, in my mind at least. But I loved them, and so would not have had them different from what they were. Do you understand?”

Phillip nodded, unable to face the other man. He dismissed a thought to look piteous, or contrite. If he was going to be sent to a company, as a platoon commander, well, that was that. If he were killed, he was killed. But he wasn’t ashamed of Father, really; only of his ways, and his——. He could not face his thoughts, which were beyond the thought of death.

“Fear,” said ‘Spectre’, “can take many forms. Imposture, including braggart bravery on occasion. Then there is fear of not being good enough, which leads to
hybris,
the building up of a false self-showing. The war was brought about, one might almost say, by the massed falseness of the European nations. The truth, of course, is that of Christ. ‘Thy neighbour as thyself’, not to be scorned for one’s own faults showing in him, but to be helped, through one’s self-understanding, which is love, or God.”

Phillip still sat with averted head. ‘Spectre’ knew what he was feeling.

“Don’t look so unhappy, Phillip. The fact that you have adopted Gaultshire is in itself an indication that you felt more at home there in the formative years of your childhood.”

Phillip looked up gratefully. “It was a wonderful place, Westy! Like a story book. The country, I mean, and the brook, and the
Duke’s moors. My Mother, too, was so happy there. She came from the county,” he added.

“Phillip, I’ve been damnably clumsy, do forgive me. I think I ‘see Shelley plain’. That is all I wanted to see, only I approached with a boss shot.” He crossed the trench to put a hand upon the younger man’s shoulder. “Now tell me, how do you feel about being with the infantry, after your long spell as a transport officer?”

“I think I shall be all right, Colonel Westy!”

“I’m scared stiff sometimes, I don’t mind telling you, Phil. It’s only the thought of the men that keeps one going.” He sat down and clasped his hands under his chin, shutting his eyes as though praying.

The tenor voice had ceased its plaintive singing of
Roses
of
Picardy,
to ‘Spectre’ an ironic longing for a land of myth: did the singer realise that he was in Picardy? Gossamers were now glinting red and blue as they twisted and drew out.

“Hundreds of thousands of money spiders crossing the Bird Cage, Phillip, all trying to get their money out while the going is good.”

He remembered his father telling them as children, on one of the Sunday walks to Cutler’s Pond, about the gossamer spider, which he called Linyphia. Father had used Latin names for butterflies, too, which he had collected as a young man. He saw himself on a chair taking Father’s butterflies from their wooden boxes. What an awful boy he had been to poor old Father. Father telling them on that Sunday walk how each Linyphia rose up on a silken kite, first having climbed to the top of a grass bent or dead thistle, and the warm air took him up, up, up, away, away, hundreds of feet up in the silent singing wind from the south, now drifting across Picardy and Artois into Flanders and away, away, to the chalk cliffs of the coast, and over the sea to England. But millions would die on the journey. How strange everything was when you thought about it, strange and almost terrifying; but if one could only see it glass-clear, one could also sense beyond the gossamers, to the spirit of eternal beauty.

“I never thanked you for what you did for me on the Passchendaele crest last October, Phillip.”

They sat peacefully in the warm sun, three yards of intensely white chalk between them. How quiet it was, no sound of gunfire.
The last day of winter, tomorrow it would be Spring, the twenty-first of March, the sun climbing higher every day, and giving everything a smaller shadow until noon: and ‘the first minute after noon is night’. Who wrote that? It was startling; it was like the stroke of death. Had he read it in
The
Oxford
Book
?
Ah—

Uncle Hugh used to say that everything had its shadow, and your shadow went everywhere with you; it stayed with you, it foreshortened when you were asleep, it arose with you, but when you were dead it did not last long, but broke up with you. Yes, it remained your shadow until leaving you it was given back to the earth of your genesis, and then your earth-bound self drifted on like a gossamer, beyond the wooden crosses of the dead.

*

When they got back to the quarry ‘Spectre’ said, ‘Will you put yourself in Part Two Orders tonight to be adjutant with the rank of acting Captain, Phillip.”

That was the last entry Phillip made in his personal diary while he remained in France. The Brigadier brought one of his new colonels, recently sent up from the Pool, who seemed very anxious to hear every word spoken by so experienced a soldier as ‘Spectre’ West. It was his first battalion command. Also among the guests was the colonel commander of the brigade of 18-pounder field-guns which covered the right flank of the Bird Cage, and the Brigade padre who, since he wore the riband of the Military Medal, had served in the ranks. Towards i o p.m., as they were playing bridge, the clerk on duty in the adjoining office came in with a message marked
Urgent.
Phillip, asking to be excused, unfolded it while the other three at his table put down the cards. His heart raced as he stared at the
single code-word RAINBOW. Should he interrupt the game, now that
Prepare
for
Attack
had come over the wire? Better wait. He took up his cards, hardly knowing what he was playing. The game came to an end without his revoking.

“Ha, they went to bed with that ace, partner! That’s four spades to us. Game. Honours, partner?”

“Oh, queen and knave, partner.”

Scores had hardly been jotted down when the clerk returned. “Brigade major on the telephone, sir, asking for the Brigadier.”

Probably the same message, he thought; let the old boy announce it.

“Well, it looks as though it’s coming at last,” said the Brigadier, quietly. “Division reports that two companies of Warwicks raided the Boche trenches beyond Fayet, and brought back a mixed bag of prisoners from nine battalions of three Regiments, just come into a sector held this morning by one Landsturm Regiment. They all said the balloon goes up tomorrow, bombardment to open 3.30 a.m. Berlin time. Confirms what the Hun pilot said when he was brought down two days ago, and also those Alsatians from the trench mortar battery. Still, you never know—per’aps they were all told to say it. I have an idea that the real push is coming up north, in Flanders. Much shorter to the coast up there.”

The guests stood up. “Well, it’s been a jolly evening, most good of you to ask us, Colonel. Good night, and good luck!”

When they had gone ‘Spectre’ said, “Warn all companies, and don’t forget to clean your teeth. It may be your last chance for a week or more.”

The night was starry and still. Mist lay in thin strata over fields dim under the moon just past its first quarter. He rang up to warn the company commanders in Brigade reserve at Corunna; all transport waggons to be loaded with spare kits on returning from the ration dumps. The Maltese cart must arrive in the morning for the officers’ mess boxes. Then he wrote up the War Diary. Afterwards he sat unmoving at the table so long that ‘Spectre’ told him to get down to it.

With the telephone on the floor beside him he got into his blanket bag, but not to sleep. Thoughts chased through his head until he fixed his mind with the idea that Spring was coming, warm dry weather, it would not be so bad as First Ypres. But supposing it was the main push, with forty fresh
divisionen
against
a half-prepared zone … but there was the Green Line, some miles in rear. It would mean a withdrawal, similar to that of the Germans in March ’17, when they went back to the
Siegfried
Stellung.
Then, there was practically no fighting. Still, forty
divisionen
packing the rear areas wasn’t exactly like the mud-balled Fifth Army in the valley of the Ancre. Perhaps the idea was after all to lure the Germans across the derelict areas of the old Somme battlefields, with their inefficient roads, lack of water-points and shelter, and cut them off there.

His mind dwelled upon scenes in the Bird Cage. Westy had said that he did not want his parents to change in any way. Would he himself have been any different if he had loved Father? He tried to imagine loving Father, but at once the picture faded out, like a broken bioscope film. Sudden darkness. Another picture, of Father in his armchair, long-bearded narrow lion-face reading bits out of
The
Daily
Trident
to Mother about the Hun Hordes massing in France. The film broke again; he could not get near Father. There was always the distance between them, a vacuum. He could never remember when it had been otherwise. Father had never kissed him, or held him warm. There had never been a warm Father. He tried to think of Father as a man, with bare legs and arms and stomach; but all that would come was Father bathing in the sea at Hayling Island, in a blue-white ringed costume to his knees.

Mother’s face was approachable, but it would not come really near. It hovered with insistent thoughts about him, so that he found himself struggling to dismiss the face, to get clear to think apart from entangled feelings. Suddenly he imagined himself shouting
Mother
leave
me
alone!
He began to feel hopeless, irritated, remorseful, and hollow. He struggled against dissolution, while darkness seemed to be drawing him down, whence other thoughts arose, dangerous weak thoughts because he might yield to the blue eyes and fair soft hair of the blonde who came from Sweden offering peace in her soft, warm beauty. He must get up; but he lay there, in weak indecision, longing to blend, to be merged into her floating spirit body; and was saved from further rumination by a spot of light dancing towards him, while a leaden weight of apprehension settled upon his solar plexus.

“Are you awake, sir? Urgent message from Brigade has just come through.”

The circle of light was held as he unfolded the paper.

BUSTLE.

His heart gave a thump. Sergeant Tonks was saying, “With your permission, sir, I’ll repeat to CAB, CART, and WAIN.”

“Right, sergeant.”

“Will you tell the Commanding Officer, sir?”

“I think I’ll let him sleep. He can’t do anything now, and God knows what sleep he’ll be able to get in the next few days. Let me know when the three companies report from Corunna. Better put in a relief telephonist, and get some kip yourself. Oh, just to check this. CAB, CART, and WAIN are to report here at the quarry before going into the rear zone of The Aviary. No. 4, TUMBRIL, will of course remain at Corunna, prepared to move at five minutes’ notice.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And you’ll be informing Brigade as soon as the three companies leave here for The Aviary?”

“Right, sir, I’ll tell the signaller.”

“No, I’ll telephone the B-m myself, of course. I’m going to get
up now. I can’t sleep anyway.”

He went out into the chill of the night. Stars overhead were still visible as he walked up the road beyond the quarry, and down again. He returned to talk to the sentry, then up and down the road interminably until voices and marching feet edged the night against the tinny notes of a mouth-organ. Mist made the figures blurred upon the road. It was CAB, led by Bill Kidd. The Brigade padre was with him. Bill had apparently decided to be very regimental. His words were exhaled with whiffs of rum.