The Valley of Bones (6 page)

‘March your men ashore promptly when
the order comes, platoon commanders,’ said Gwatkin. ‘Show initiative. Don’t
hang about. Get cracking.’

He looked rather green in the face, as
if, like Jones, D., he too had been sick during the crossing, himself far from
the condition required for ‘getting cracking’. The companies filed down the
gangway, one by one, forming up later by a railway line. There were the usual
delays. The rain, borne towards us on a driving wind, was increasing in volume.
The Battalion stood easy, waiting for word from the Embarkation Staff. Girls
with shawls over their heads were on their way to work. Disregarding the rain,
they stopped and watched us from the side of the road, standing huddled
together, talking and laughing.

‘Aigh-o, Mary,’ shouted Corporal
Gwylt. ‘Have you come to see the foreigners?’

The girls began to giggle
purposefully.

‘It’s no brave day ye’ve brought with
ye,’ one of them called back.

‘What was that you said, Mary, my
love?’

‘Why did ye not bring a braver day
with ye, I’m asking. ‘Tis that we’ve been wanting since Sunday, sure.’

‘What kind of a day, Mary, my own?’

‘Why a brave day. ‘Tis prosperous
weather we’re needing.’

Corporal Gwylt turned to Sergeant
Pendry and made a gesture with his hand to convey absolute incredulity at such
misuse of language.

‘Brave
day?’ he
said. ‘Did you hear what she called it, Sergeant Pendry?’

‘I did that, Corporal Gwylt.’

‘So that’s a funny way to talk.’

‘That it is.’

‘Now you can tell the way people speak
we’re far from home.’

‘You’ll be getting many surprises in
this country, my lad,’ said Sergeant Pendry. ‘You may be sure of that.’

‘Will some of them be nice surprises,
Sergeant?’

‘Ask not that of me.’

‘Oh, don’t you think I’ll be getting
some nice surprises, Sergeant Pendry,’ said Corporal Gwylt in a soft wheedling
tone, ‘like a plump little girl to keep me warm at night.’

CSM Cadwallader was pottering about
nearby, like a conscientious matron at a boys’ school determined to make sure
all was well. He had the compact professional feeling of the miner, which he
combined with a rather unusual taste for responsibility, so that any company
commander was lucky to claim his services.

‘We’ll be keeping you warm, Corporal
Gwylt,’ he said. ‘Make no mistake. There’ll be plenty of work for you, I’ll
tell you straight. Do not worry about the night-time. Then you will want your
rest, not little girls, nor big ones neither.’

‘But a plump little girl,
Sergeant-Major? Do not yourself wish to meet a plump little girl?’

‘Put not such ideas into the
Sergeant-Major’s head, Corporal Gwylt,’ said Sergeant Pendry. ‘He does not wish
your dirty things.’

‘Nor me, the
dirty
girls,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘I never said the dirty ones.’

‘Nor then the clean ones, understand.’

‘Oh, does he not?’ said Corporal
Gwylt, in feigned astonishment. ‘Not even the clean ones? Do you think that
indeed, Sergeant Pendry?’

‘I do think that, I tell you.’

‘And why, whatever?’

‘The Sergeant-Major is a married man,
you must know.’

‘So you think girls are just for young
lads like me, Sergeant-Major? That is good for me, I’m sure.’

‘Never mind what I think, Corporal.’

‘He is a lucky man, the Sergeant
Major,’ said Sergeant Pendry sententiously. ‘You will be glad when you reach his
age, no longer foolish and running after girls.’

‘Oh, dear me, is it true what Sergeant
Pendry says, Sergeant-Major, that girls are for you no longer? I am that sorry
to hear.’

CSM Cadwallader allowed himself a dry
smile.

‘Have you never heard, Corporal Gwylt,
there’s those to find many a good tune played on old fiddles?’ he said
benevolently.

The Embarkation Staff Officer turned
up at that moment with a sheaf of papers. The Battalion was on the move again. Corporal Gwylt had
just time to blow a kiss to the girls, who waved frantically,
redoubling their gigglings. The Company tramped off towards the train in a
siding.

‘Now then, there,’ shouted the
Sergeant-Major, ‘pick up the step in the rear files. Left – left – left, right,
left …’

We steamed through bare, dismal
country, wide fields, white cabins, low walls of piled stones, stretches of
heather, more mountains far away on the horizon.

‘This will give us better training
areas than back home,’ said Gwatkin.

He had recovered from his sea sickness
and the tension brought on by the move. Now he was relatively calm.

‘We shall be more like soldiers here,’
he said with satisfaction.

‘What happens when we arrive, Rowland?’
Breeze asked. ‘I hope there’ll be something to eat.’

Breeze’s questions were usually aimed
to score the textbook answer from Gwatkin.

‘The second echelon of the supply
column will have preceded us,’ said Gwatkin sharply.

‘And what do they do?’

‘They will have broken bulk and be
ready to issue to units. You should spend more time on your
Field Service Pocket Book,
Yanto.’

We arrived at a small, unalluring
industrial town. Once more the Battalion formed up. By now the men were tired. Singing was sombre as
we marched in:

‘My lips smile no more, my heart loses
its lightness,
No dream of the future my spirit can cheer,
I only would brood on the past and its brightness,
The dead I have mourned are again gathered here.
From every dark nook they press forward to meet me,
I lift up my eyes to the broad leafy dome.
And others are there looking downward to greet me,
The ashgrove, the ashgrove, alone is my home . .

Gwatkin was right about being more
like soldiers in these new surroundings. Barracks had been created from a
disused linen factory, the long narrow sheds in which the flax had formerly
been treated offering barrack-rooms stark as a Foreign Legion film set.
Officers were billeted in a forlorn villa on the outskirts of the town, a house
that had no doubt once belonged to some successful local businessman. It was a
mile or more away from the barracks. There, I still shared a room with Kedward,
Breeze and Pumphrey, the last of whom had not yet achieved his RAF transfer.
Another subaltern, Craddock, was in with us too, brother of the girl to whom
Kedward was engaged. Craddock, fat and energetic, was Messing Officer, which
meant he returned to billets in the middle of the night several times a week,
when he would either turn on the light, or blunder about the room in the dark,
falling over other people’s camp-beds in a fruitless effort to find his own.
Both methods were disturbing. There was, in any case, not much room to
manoeuvre round the beds, even when the light was on. Craddock’s midnight
arrivals were not the only inconvenience. Breeze left old razor blades about in
profusion, causing Pumphrey to cut his foot one morning. Kedward talked in his
sleep throughout the night, shouting commands, as if he were drilling a
company: ‘At the halt – on the left – form close column of – platoons …’

Pumphrey, inclined to bicker, would
throw towels about and sponges. A window pane was broken, which no one ever
seemed responsible for mending, through which the night wind whistled, while
cold struck up insistently from the floor, penetrating the canvas of a
camp-bed. Snow had returned. I record these conditions not as particularly formidable in the
circumstances, but to indicate they were sufficiently far from
ideal to encourage a change, when, as it happened, opportunity
arose. This came about through Gwatkin in an
unexpected manner. During the weeks that followed our arrival
in these new surroundings, I began to know him better. He
was nearer my own age than the other subalterns, except Bithel. Even the
captains tended to be younger than
Gwatkin and myself, as time went on, some of the older ones
being gradually shifted, as insufficiently proficient at
their job, to Holding Battalions or the Infantry Training Centre.

‘We’re getting rid of the dead wood,’
said Gwatkin. ‘Just as well.’

His own abrupt manner of speaking
continued, and he loved to find fault for its own sake. At the same time, he evidently
wanted to be friendly, while fearing that too easy a relationship with a
subordinate, even one of similar age, might be unmilitary. There were
unexpected sides to Gwatkin, sudden displays of uncertainty under a façade meant
to be very certain. Some of his duties he carried out very well; for others, he
had little or no natural talent.

‘A company commander,’ said Dicky
Umfraville, when we met later that year, ‘needs the qualifications of a
ringmaster in a first-class circus, and a nanny in a large family.’

Gwatkin aspired to this dazzling
combination of gifts – to become (as Pennistone later said) a military saint.
Somehow he always fell short of that coveted status. His imperfections never
derived from any willingness to spare himself. On the contrary, inability to
delegate authority, insistence that he must do everything himself, important or
unimportant, was one of Gwatkin’s chief handicaps in achieving his high aim.
For example, he instituted a ‘Company Officer of the Day’, one of whose duties
was to make sure all was well at the men’s dinners. This job, on the whole
redundant, since the Orderly Officer of necessity visited all Mess Rooms to
investigate ‘any complaints’, was made additionally superfluous by Gwatkin
himself appearing as often as not at dinners, in order to make sure the Company
Officer of the Day was not shirking his rounds. In fact, he scarcely allowed
himself any time off at all. He seemed half aware that this intense keenness
was not, in final result, what was required; at least not without more
understanding on his own part. Besides, Gwatkin had none of that faculty, so
necessary in the army, of accepting rebuke – even unjust rebuke – and carrying
on as if nothing had happened. Criticism from above left him dreadfully
depressed.

‘It’s no good letting the army get you
down,’ the Adjutant, Maelgwyn-Jones, used to say. ‘Just remember, when you’re
worrying about the Brigadier’s inspection, that day will pass, as other days in
the army pass.’

Maelgwyn-Jones himself did not always
act upon this teaching. He was an efficient, short-tempered Regular, whose
slight impediment of speech became a positive stutter when he grew enraged. He
wanted to get back to the battalion he came from, where there was more hope of
immediate action and consequent promotion. Thoroughly reliable as an officer,
hard working as an adjutant, Maelgwyn-Jones did not share – indeed was totally
unapprehending of – Gwatkin’s resplendent vision of army life. When he pulled
up Gwatkin for some such lapse as unpunctual disposal of the Company’s swill,
Gwatkin would behave as if his personal honour had been called into question;
then concentrate feverishly on more energetic training, smarter turn-out. In a
sense, of course, that was correct enough, but the original cause of complaint
was not always put right in the most expeditious manner. The fact was Gwatkin lacked in his
own nature that grasp of ‘system’ for which he possessed
such admiration. This deficiency was perhaps
connected in some way with a kind of poetry within him, a poetry
which had somehow become a handicap in its
efforts to find an outlet. Romantic ideas about the way
life is
lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly
coarse-grained. This was to some extent true of Gwatkin. His
coarseness of texture took the form of having to find a
scapegoat after he himself had been in trouble. The scapegoat was usually
Breeze, though any of the rest of the Company
might suffer. Bithel, usually in hot water of some
kind,
would have offered an ever available target for these punitive visitations of
Gwatkin’s, but Bithel was in another company. All the same, although no concern
of his in the direct
sense, Bithel’s appearance and demeanour greatly irked Gwatkin
in a general way. He spoke of this one afternoon,
when Bithel, wearing one of his gaiters improperly adjusted, crossed our path
on the way back from afternoon training.

‘Did you ever see such an unsoldierly
type?’ Gwatkin said. ‘And his brother a VC too.’

‘Is it certain they’re brothers, not
just fairly distant relations?’

I was not sure whether Bithel’s words
to me on that earlier occasion had been spoken in confidence. The tone he had
adopted suggested something of the sort. Besides, Bithel might suddenly decide
to return to the earlier cycle of legends he had apparently disseminated about
himself to facilitate his Reserve call-up; or at least he might not wish to
have them specifically denied on his own authority. However, Gwatkin showed no
wish to verify the truth, or otherwise, of Bithel’s alleged kinships.

‘Even if they are not brothers, Bithel
is a disgrace for a man with a VC in the family,’ Gwatkin said severely. ‘He
should be ashamed. That VC ought to give him a pride in himself. I wish a
relative of mine had won the VC, won an MC even. And it is my belief, I am
telling you, Nick, that all about Bithel’s rugger is tommy-rot.’

That last conviction was unanswerable
by this time. No one who had seen Bithel proceeding at the double could
possibly suppose his abilities in the football field had ever been more than
moderate.

‘Do you know when Idwal was Orderly
Officer last week,’ said Gwatkin, ‘he found Bithel in his dressing-gown
listening to the gramophone with the Mess waiters. Bithel said he was looking
for Daniels, that servant of his I don’t much like either. And then we are
expected to keep discipline in the unit.’

‘That bloody gramophone makes a
frightful row at all hours.’

‘So it does, too, and I’m not going to
stay in those billets any longer. I have had enough. My camp-bed was taken down
to the Company Office this morning. That is the place for a company commander
to be. Half the day is lost in this place walking backwards and forwards from
billets to barracks. We are lucky enough to have an office next door to the
Company Store. The bed can be folded up and go into the store for the day.’