When Blackbirds Sing (15 page)

Now authority in its nervousness sent out orders that officers were to give their men lectures on the physical pleasures of fighting, of the orgasm of killing, of which Dominic had dreamed in the train. Each subaltern was told to take his platoon into a barn and give them this harangue. It was rather like giving them a talk on “the facts of life”. Everyone was embarrassed. Even Raife, with this opportunity to elaborate the theme of his three F’s, could only say: “Well we’re here to fight and we’ve jolly well got to do it. Anyone who doesn’t know how had better ask the sergeant-major.” Frost recited Kipling’s “If” to his platoon.

To Dominic alone this instruction was poison. If authority endorsed the evil that was in him, at last he would be obedient. He could, as it were, say “evil be thou my good” with a clear conscience. Returning from exhaustion, with an empty heart and mind he took violence as his god, and in this spirit he addressed his men. He was also the son of artists and was able to recreate his feelings in his imagination. When he spoke of the pleasure of killing another man, his words had the strength and impact of a work
of art. He did not merely give them a few facts to which they could listen in half-hearted boredom. He touched their imagination. Their fundamental decency was disturbed. They came out of the barn silent, not knowing what to say to each other. Even the bloody-minded sergeant thought he had gone too far, as an extremely sensual man may object to smutty stories. Dominic himself looked haggard and haunted. Before this address, whatever the attitude of his fellow-officers, he had been popular with his men. Now they watched him with misgiving.

He felt his new isolation, but he was, with less self-consciousness, like the preposterous hero of Henley’s song, ready to take all the bludgeoning of chance. Yet at times he longed for human contact, if only physical.

He set off one evening for Béthune. Raife, who in spite of his preoccupation with the three F’s was the only one of the company officers with universal goodwill, wanted to come with him, but Dominic put him off. He liked Raife well enough, as much as he was capable of liking anyone at this time, but Raife treated lightly those things of which Dominic now thought with grim seriousness. The three F’s for him were not merely an amusing alliteration.

When he had parted from Helena his agonized sense of loss had numbed his physical desires, and this condition had remained until the first night he had spent at Catherine Street. But that interlude had been too short to disturb his condition, which his immediate departure to the front had restored. Now the prolonged and passionate indulgence of his ten days’ leave had dissolved that curious static chastity. It had also destroyed his instinct of physical fidelity
to Helena, which her last letter had done nothing to revive. When something stimulated his physical desires he no longer had any reason to repress them. Authority endorsed them, equally with his violence. The men were allowed to queue up at the red lamp.

He dined alone in the restaurant where, a month or two earlier, he had dined with Hollis. Tonight he drank the whole bottle of Volnay himself, and he thought about Hollis, almost the only person of whom he could think without confusion, without that kind of jam in his brain. He wished Hollis was there with him, that they could repeat the evening of two months earlier. He thought of the visit to the prostitute, and now that authority was his conscience, he decided to visit her after dinner. His body wanted a woman, but also in some way he felt that in going to this woman he was affirming his friendship with Hollis.

He found her alone, and she received him with her cheerful hostess’s manner. But he hardly treated her as another sentient human being. When he left her he also, for the time being, had lost the feeling for Hollis which had taken him there. On the way back he passed the orchard where they had walked together in innocence. It no longer meant anything to him, no more than if he passed a shop where he had once bought some apples.

The battalion returned to the line to take part in the attack. Before they left the village at dusk the officers dined early in their separate messes. In the cottage room which was A company’s mess, and probably in the others, there fell a dreadful Gethsemane depression. It was almost impossible that one of the men sitting there would not be dead in a
week. It was certain that one or more of them would be wounded, perhaps with some hideous affliction, blindness or amputated legs. It was easily possible that they would all be dead. It often happened in an attack.

They could hardly speak. Finch and the other soldier-servant waiting at the table emanated the same gloom. Even Raife had nothing to say. His three F’s were only a bright idea in his head. He had not yet experienced any of them, except a little fox-hunting when staying with some cousins in Ireland. Now that the first F was to become a reality, he felt the blood not racing happy and scarlet in his veins, but like lead.

Dominic alone was calm, enclosed in his dedication to violence. Now at last he was going to fulfil the purpose for which he had left his home, to achieve the greatest orgasm, that of killing his enemy. He now accepted the enemy given him by authority. “Who dies fighting hath increase.” He did not know what this meant, but Julian Grenfell’s beautiful senseless poem ran in his head.

When his platoon paraded in the dusk, he saw that one of his men was drunk, for which he could be shot. In spite of Dominic’s new resolution of violence, the instincts of his life hitherto continued to function, and he tried to conceal the man’s condition from the sergeant. When they were in the communication trench he carried his pack. All the way into the line there was a conflict between his will to save the man, and the sergeant’s will to send him back to be court-martialled and shot. Dominic although he was in a kind of mystical exaltation at the approaching fight, spent his time on the way to battle in saving a life. Technically he
was a commissioned officer, above the sergeant. In practice, if a temporary or territorial subaltern, one of those easily acquired, plentiful thousands with the milk on their mouths, had overridden a valuable, long-trained, regular army sergeant in a matter of this kind, he would have been in trouble with his colonel. Dominic knew this, and he showed unusual subtlety and ingenuity in helping the man outside the sergeant’s observation.

The attack was planned for sunrise on an early September morning. The night before was a long vigil of depression until the rum was given out just before zero hour. Afterwards Dominic could not remember much about all this. It was like some mad dream, from which he only awoke in the moment of losing consciousness. Harrison was white-faced and nervous, nearly unfit to command the company. Frost was correct and dutiful, and calm through absence of imagination. Raife met Dominic once or twice during the night. He grinned and said: “My bowels are like water.”

Suddenly in the stillness of the dawn, the serene empty heavens rained down hell. The men climbed out of the trenches and stumbled across under the protection of the barrage. It was as on the evening of the raid. A section would be blotted out by a shell. A man would fall over like a doll. The noise produced an intense exhilaration in Dominic, as loud explosions do in Mediterranean people. In this daze of excitement he went forward, approaching the final orgasm. This only was fixed in his mind. He carried a revolver in his hand and a Mills bomb in each of his side pockets. He would kill the enemy who faced him. At last
in all the row and confusion, when he hardly knew what was happening, when from his limited view the battle had no order or design, he found himself face to face with a German soldier, and he lifted his revolver to fire.

As he did so he looked in the German’s eyes. He was a boy of about the age of Hollis, to whom he had an odd resemblance. In the half second while he lifted his revolver, he gave a faint glance of recognition, to which the boy made an involuntary response. But Dominic did not stay the instinctive movement of the hand, and in that instant of mutual human recognition, with eye open to eye, he shot the boy, who fell dead a yard in front of him, rolling over and over as Hollis had rolled in the dew. He stood for a moment, bewildered, and another German soldier stepped over his dead companion and plunged a bayonet into Dominic’s body. His part in the orgasm had become passive.

Dominic was not killed. The bayonet missed his heart and his stomach, but he lost four pints of blood to nourish those Flanders poppies which had become the symbol of the devouring jaws, making it all sound pastoral. He was sent to a hospital at the base, where his wound was given time to heal. After that he was taken to England, to another hospital for semi-convalescent officers in Hertfordshire, which turned out to be the converted house of Sylvia’s friend Hermione Maine. She lived in a house in the village but was the commandant of the hospital.

Although Sylvia made use of her as a “Bunbury” she did not always tell her why, and Hermione had never heard of Dominic except vaguely as someone to whom Sylvia had been engaged before she knew her, and she had forgotten his surname. When she heard that a lieutenant called Langton was coming, the name conveyed nothing to her, and she
asked: “Can he walk?” When she was told that he was very weak and had better be downstairs, she said: “Put him in Ward IV,” which was her former dining-room.

This was a large room with white plaster decorations, a domed and coffered ceiling, round arches over symmetrically placed doors and twin white columns. It was on the east side of the house, and opened on to a terrace above the park. On a sunny morning it appeared cheerful enough, but in the afternoons it was cold and bleak. Its classical austerity had formerly been relieved by the warm colours of eighteenth-century portraits, rich stuffs and red faces; but when a young officer in the returning high spirits of recovery had flung a fork and lodged it in one of these faces, the portraits had been removed.

In the afternoon Dominic lay in this cold hollow, look ing across to where beyond the park an autumn wood glowed in the afternoon sun. In a dim half-conscious way he was affected by the design of the room, cold and bare and traditional, the life-giving colour removed. He felt now that his life somehow corresponded with the room, that it was an empty arbitrary inheritance, from which he could see, but because of his weakness, never reach the green and golden woods where natural life throbbed in its free rhythm. He thought of the wild berries and the hazel nuts, and the plumage of pheasants. He was empty as the room, as cold and as static. There was no warmth in the atmosphere of his mind. Again the air had become thin, and the law of gravity had changed. His mind had become a traditional room which had lost its natural use and its meaning.

Yet in the room of his mind one picture remained, one from which he could never escape; whether his eyes were open or closed; whether the morning sun made the columns an echo of Greece and Rome, or whether towards evening it became a dead eighteenth-century hollow. As we are said to see all the scenes of our life at the moment of death, so he, conversely, was to see the scene of what could have been his death, for the remainder of his life. He still lived in the half-second in which he exchanged with the German boy that glance of human recognition, and at the same time shot him dead. As he lay weakly returning to life that face was before him. The stronger he became the stronger grew the image. As he went into the attack one of his ideas, a traditional picture in his mind, was that he would avenge Hollis. But he had shot Hollis in the moment of recognition. Now his mind was like the hollow room without the sun, and in it the only picture was that of the German boy, with his open friendly eyes at the moment of death.

Hermione Maine went daily round the wards. She smiled at Dominic but did not speak to him at first as he looked so weak and withdrawn. She was interested in his haggard-handsome face with its Mediterranean look of sorrow, a deep sorrow of being, rather than grief at external misfortune. One day when he seemed stronger she stopped by his bed and asked automatically: “Have you everything you want?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Dominic, though he had nothing he wanted. Everything he had wanted had vanished, like the pictures from the walls.

“No one has come to see you. And the sister says that you have no letters.”

“I’m an Australian. My letters are forwarded from the bank. They don’t know I’m here yet.”

“Oh, they must be told at once,” said Hermione, with a commandant’s efficiency. “I’ll write myself. Which is your bank?”

He told her and she asked: “Haven’t you any friends in England?”

“I have a cousin in London, but she’s very old. She couldn’t come here.”

“Haven’t you any friends?”

“I have some friends at Dilton near Frome. But they are fairly old, too. I couldn’t ask them to come all this way.”

“Dilton?” Hermione paused and then asked: “What is your Christian name?”

“Dominic.”

“Oh, you are
that
man! How extraordinary!” she exclaimed.

“Why?”

“You were engaged to Sylvia. She is one of my greatest friends. She must come to see you. She often comes down. Have you made it up? After the broken engagement, I mean.”

“Yes, we did. Her father is my colonel,” said Dominic.

His face became haggard with weariness. To think of Sylvia was an effort for him. His passive look of sorrow became one of active pain. She saw that she had tired him and said: “You had better sleep now.” As she went out she said to the nurse: “Mr Langton is a friend of Mrs Wesley-Maude’s. See that he has everything he wants.”

As a result of Hermione’s writing to the bank, there arrived a few mornings later a batch of letters for him, mostly
from Australia, but also two or three others, including one from Raife and one from Sylvia. He opened Raife’s first. It dealt with the life closest to him and so would be the least effort to read. In the base hospital he had heard rumours of the fate of the battalion, and this letter confirmed them. Harrison came through all right. Frost had been killed. Finch had been wounded. Raife himself was wounded. He described with ribald indelicacy the nature of his wounds, and also wrote that Dominic was likely to get the Military Cross. Dominic wondered why.