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Title: The crime at Vanderlynden's

Author: R. H. Mottram

Release date: December 17, 2023 [eBook #72444]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Chatto & Windus, 1926

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIME AT VANDERLYNDEN'S ***





  The Crime
  at Vanderlynden’s


  ‘Oh, my, I don’t want to die,
    I want to go home!’

            _Song of Kitchener’s Army._




  THE SPANISH FARM was
  awarded the Hawthornden Prize
  for 1924




  THE CRIME
  AT VANDERLYNDEN’S

  _By_
  R. H. MOTTRAM

  _Author of_ THE SPANISH FARM
  _and_
  SIXTY-FOUR, NINETY-FOUR!

  LONDON
  CHATTO AND WINDUS
  1926




  Printed in Great Britain

  All rights reserved




                        THE CRIME

                    AT VANDERLYNDEN’S

                            *


High up in the pale Flemish sky aeroplanes were wheeling and darting
like bright-coloured insects, catching from one moment to another the
glint of sun on metallic body or translucent wing. To any pilot or
observer who had opportunity or gift for mere speculation, the sight
that lay spread out below might have appeared wonderful. From far away
on the seaboard with its coming and going of ships, there led rail,
road, and wire, and by these three came material, human material, and
human thought, up to that point just behind the battle-line where
in dumps, camps (dumps of men) and Head-quarters (dumps of brains)
they eddied a little, before streaming forward again, more slowly
and covertly, by night, or below ground, up to the battle itself.
There they were lost in that gap in life--that barren lane where the
Irresistible Force dashing against the Immovable Post ground such a
fine powder, that of material, very little, of men, very few, and of
thought, nothing came splashing back.

But pilots and observers were too busy, adding to the Black Carnival,
or saving their own skins from those puffs of Death that kept following
them up and down the sky, to take any such a remote view; and even
had they been interested in it, they could not have lifted the roof
off the Mairie of the village--almost town--of Haagedoorne, and have
seen, sitting in the Mayor’s parlour, a man of middle size and middle
class, a phenomenon in that place, that had been shocked in its
village dignity so many times in those few months. For first it had
been turned from one of those haunts of Peace, of small slow-moving
officialdom, into the “Q.” office of Divisional Head-quarters. It had
become inhabited by two or three English Staff Officers, their maps
and papers, their orderlies and clerks, policemen and servants; and
now, last of all, there was added to them this quiet, absorbed young
man--whose face and hair, figure and clothes had all those half-tones
of moderate appropriateness of men who work indoors and do not expect
too much. A young man who had neither red tabs nor long boots about
him--and who seemed to have so much to do.

The old walls stared. The Mairie of Haagedoorne, half wine-shop, half
beadle’s office, had seen soldiers in its four hundred years, had been
built for Spanish ones, and had seen them replaced by French and Dutch,
English and Hessians, in bright uniforms and with a certain soldierly
idleness and noise. This fellow had none of it. Sat there with his
nose well down, applying himself to maps and papers, occasionally
speaking deferentially to Colonel Birchin, who, a proper soldier, his
left breast bright with medals, his face blank and slightly bored with
breeding, would nod or shake his head. This was all part of the fact
that this War was not as other wars. It was too wide and deep, as if
the foundations of life had come adrift on some subterranean sea, and
the whole fabric were swaying; it had none of the decent intervals, and
proper limits, allowing men to shut up for the winter and to carry on
their trade all the time.

The dun-coloured person attached to Divisional Staff, whose name was
Stephen Doughty Dormer, indulged in none of these reflections. He just
got on with it. He was deep in his job when an exclamation from his
temporary Chief made him look up. The Colonel was sitting back in his
chair (iron-bottomed, officers, for the use of), his beautiful legs in
their faultless casings stretched out beneath his army table. He was
holding at arm’s-length a blue printed form, filled up in pen and ink.

Dormer knew it well. It was the official form on which Belgian or
French civilians were instructed to make their claim for damages caused
by the troops billeted on them.

The Colonel’s mouth hung open, his eyeglass had dropped down.

“You speak this--er--language?”

“Yessah!” (with a prayer it might not be Portuguese). “What language,
sir?”

“This is--er--French.”

Yes, he could speak French, and hastened to look. Dormer was a clerk in
a bank. Like so many of that species, he had had a grandmother with
views as to the improvement of his position in the world, and she had
insisted that he should learn the French language. Why she desired this
was never discovered, unless it was that she considered it a genteel
accomplishment, for she dated from the days when society was composed
of two sorts of people, gentle and simple. She belonged to the former
category and was in no danger of allowing any of her descendants to
lapse. As she paid for the extra tuition involved, her arguments were
irrefutable, and the boy intended for no more romantic a career than
is afforded by a branch office in a market town, had, in 1900, a fair
knowledge of the tongue of Voltaire and Hugo.

He hardly reflected upon the matter again until, in the midst of a
European War, he found that that War was being conducted in a country
where French was the chief language, and that familiar-sounding words
and phrases assailed his ear on every side. This was of considerable
service to him, enabled him to add to his own and his brother officers’
comfort; but he never boasted of it, having a profound uncertainty,
after years of clerkdom, about anything so foreign and out of office
hours. The legend of his peculiar ability persisted, however; and when
after more than a year of incredible fatigues and nastiness, his neat
methods and perfect amenity to orders were rewarded by the unofficial
job of helping in the A. and Q. office of a division, he found his
legend there before him. It was therefore with a sigh, and a mental
ejaculation equivalent to “Spare me these useless laurels,” that he got
up and went over to his Chief’s table, to be confronted by the sentence:

“_Esquinté une vierge chez moi!_”

“What’s _Esquinté_? It’s not in Cassells’ Dictionary!”

“I should say--knocked asquint, sir! Spoiled, ruined; they often say
it, if the troops go into the crops.”

“Well, how does it read, then? Knock asquint; no, that won’t do;
ruined, you say. Ruined a Virgin in my house. This sounds like a nice
business, with the French in their present mood!”

Dormer simply could not believe it and asked:

“May I see the claim?”

“Certainly. Come here. Stop me wherever I go wrong.”

He knew more French than Dormer gave him credit for. He read the blue
form, printed question and pen-and-ink reply to the end. It went like
this:

Q. When was the damage committed?

A. Last Thursday.

Q. What troops were responsible? Give the number and name of the
English detachment.

A. A soldier of the 469 Trench Mortar Battery (T.M.B.).

Q. Were you present and did you see the damage done?

A. No, but my daughter knows all about it.

Q. In what conditions was the damage done?

A. He broke the window (_vitrage_). She called out to him, but he
replied with oaths.

Q. Can you prove responsibility (_a_) by witness?

A. My daughter.

Q. (_b_) By _procès-verbal_.

A. They insulted the Mayor when he came to do it!

Q. (_c_) By admission of the culprits.

A. Not necessary. It is visible.

Q. Did you complain to the officer commanding troops?

A. He would not listen.

And so on.

Deposed and sealed at the Mairie of Hondebecq, Nord, as the claim for
compensation of Mr. Vanderlynden, cultivator, 64 years old, by us
Swingadow, Achille, Mayor.

“What do you say to that?” asked the Chief.

Dormer had a good deal to say, but kept it down. “I can’t believe it,
sir. I know the billet. I remember Miss Vanderlynden. She’s as strong
as a man and much more determined than most. It’s a mistake of some
sort!”

“Pretty circumstantial mistake, isn’t it? Look at this covering letter
received with it.”

He held out a memorandum headed: “Grand Quartier General,” in French,
to the effect that one desired it might be given appropriate attention.
And another from a department of English General Head-quarters with
“Passed to you, please.”

“The French have had their knife into us for some time. This’ll be
a nice case for them to take up. We must make an arrest at once.
Sergeant!”

That Sergeant was a famous London Architect. He came to the door of the
ante-room in which he worked.

“In what Corps Area is Hondebecq?”

The Sergeant spotted it in a moment, on the big map pinned up on the
wall.

“Very well, wire them to take this up, and make an arrest.”

“There is just one point I should like to put, sir!”

As Dormer said it, he felt it to be “cheek.” His Chief turned upon him
the eyeglass of a regular officer who found it rather difficult to
imagine how a junior temporary officer could put a point. But Dormer
had seen two Courts-Martial, and the thought of some poor brute hauled
out of a trench, and marched about for no better purpose than that,
kept him firm.

“If an arrest is made, you will have to go on with the proceedings.”

“Naturally.”

“Then you will need a statement from the victim. If we had that first,
we should know the truth!”

“Well, you’d better go and get it, as you know the people. You can see
Corps and insist on an arrest. But, most important of all, try what a
little money can do. He says a thousand francs. Well, you must see what
he will come down to.”

Outside Divisional Head-quarters, Dormer turned to the right, to go to
his billet, but a military policeman, stepping out from the shelter of
the buildings, saluted.

“They’re shelling that way, sir!”

It gave Dormer a queer familiar feeling in the pit of the stomach.
Shelling, the daily routine of that War. But being a very punctilious
temporary officer, and taking his almost non-existent position in
Divisional Staff very seriously, he pulled himself together.

“Oh, well, they’d have hit me long ago, if they could!” He passed on,
followed by a smile. He said those things because he felt them to be
good for the morale of the troops. Sure enough, he had not gone many
yards before the air was rent by a familiar tearing sound, followed by
the usual bump and roar. It was well in front of him, and to the left,
and he went on reassured. A few yards farther on, close to the side
street where he was billeted over a pork-butcher’s shop, he noticed
people coming out of their houses and shops to stare, while one
elderly woman, rounder than any artist would dare to portray, asked him:

“O Monsieur, is the bombard finished?” in the Anglo-Flemish which years
of billeting were beginning to teach the inhabitants of the town. But
the centre of excitement was farther on, where the little street of
houses petered out between small, highly cultivated fields. Here the
first shell had fallen right upon one of those limbers that were to be
found being driven up some obscure street at any hour of the day or
night. Two dazed drivers had succeeded in cutting loose and quieting
the mules. A horse lay dead in the gutter. Against the bank leaned the
Corporal, his face out of sight, as if in the midst of a hearty laugh.
It needed only a glance, however, to see that there was no head upon
the shoulders. It was just one of those daily disagreeable scenes which
to Dormer had been so utterly strange all his life, and so familiar
for the last year. Dormer made no fuss, but took charge. He knew well
enough that the drivers would stand and look at each other. He sent
one of them for a burial party from the nearest Field Ambulance,
saw that the other tied up the mules and made a bundle of the dead
man’s effects--paybook, knife, money, letters--the pitiful little
handkerchief-ful of all that remains for a soldier’s loved ones--while
he himself pushed his way into the orderly room of the nearest
formation, that showed any signs of telephone wires. He had not many
yards to go, for the camps lay along each side of that Flemish lane, as
close as houses in a street.

He was soon inside an Armstrong hut, with the field telephone at
his disposal, and while waiting to be given the orderly room of the
Brigade Transport to which the casualty belonged, he happened to close
his eyes. The effect was so striking that he immediately opened them
again. There, on the underside of his eyelids, was the headless body he
had just left. Curiously enough, it did not lie against the bank, as
he had seen it, but seemed to swim towards him, arms above his head,
gesticulating. Once his eyes were open again, of course it disappeared.

About him was nothing more wonderful than the interior of an Armstrong
hut Orderly Room, an army table, an army chair. Some one’s bed and bath
shoved in a corner. Outside, trampled mud, mule-lines, cinder tracks,
Holland elms, flat, stodgy Flanders all desecrated with War. He got
the number he wanted, told the Brigade to fetch their broken limber,
gave his rank and job, and put up the telephone. The impression he had
had was so strong, however, that walking back along the cinder path,
he closed his eyes again. Yes, it was still there, quite plain, the
details of the khaki uniform all correct and clear cut, spurred boots
and bandolier, but no head, and the arms raised aloft, exhorting or
threatening.

If he went on like this he would have to see a Medical Officer, and
they would send him down to the Base, and he would find his job filled
up, and have to go elsewhere and start all over fresh, trying to do
something that was not desperately boring or wholly useless. He had
been doing too much, going up at night for “stunts,” and working in Q.
office all day. He would have to slack off a bit.

By the time he got back to Divisional H.Q. the car stood ready. The
feelings of one who, having been hauled out of the infantry, had then
to return to the Forward Areas, were curiously mixed. Of course no one
wanted to be shelled or bombed, to live where the comforts of life were
unpurchasable, and the ordinary means of locomotion out of use. And
yet--and yet--there was a curious feeling of going home. That great
rowdy wood and canvas and corrugated iron town, miles deep and nearly a
hundred miles long, was where one belonged. That atmosphere of obvious
jokes and equally obvious death, disinfectant, tobacco, mules, and wood
smoke had become one’s life, one’s right and natural environment.

His companion on this joyless ride was Major Stevenage, the A.P.M. of
the Division, an ex-cavalry officer of the regular army, in appearance
and mentality a darker and grimmer edition of Colonel Birchin.

Dormer showed him the Vanderlynden dossier as they bowled along. He
surveyed it with the weariness of a professional to whom an amateur
exhibits a “masterpiece.”

“Colonel Birchin thinks it’s rape, does he?”

“Yes!”

“He’s wrong, of course. Q. office always are! What do you think it is
yourself?”

“A nasty snag. What happened doesn’t matter. You and I could settle
it for forty francs. But the French have got hold of it. It’s become
official.”

“What do you suggest?” Major Stevenage put in his monocle.

“We must go and see the Maire, and get it withdrawn. Let’s see.
Hondebecq? It’s the Communal Secretary Blanquart we must see. Shrewd
fellow and all on our side. These schoolmasters hate the peasants.”

Dormer knew the area well. Hondebecq was the typical village of
French Flanders. That is to say, it was a cluster of cottages in
which _rentiers_--peasants who had scraped a few savings out of the
surrounding fields--lived on about forty pounds a year English; in
its centre, a paved _grand’ place_ held a few modest shops, a huge
high-shouldered church, carefully refaced with red brick, and a big,
rambling “Estaminet de la Mairie,” next to the village school.

It was here that they found Blanquart, Communal Secretary,
schoolmaster, land surveyor, poor man’s lawyer, Heaven only knows
what other functions he used to combine. He was the only man in the
Commune handy with pen and paper, and this fact must have substantially
added to his income. But, like all his kind, he could not forget that
he came from Dunkirk or Lille; he had moments when his loneliness got
the better of his pride and he would complain bitterly of the “sacred
peasants.”

They found him seated in his little front parlour--he only functioned
in the official room at the Estaminet on State occasions--busy with
those innumerable forms by which the food of France was rationed, her
Army conscripted, her prices kept in check and her civil administration
facilitated. In the corner between the window and the clock sat an old
peasant who said only, “_Bonjour._”

Blanquart greeted them effusively, as who should say: “We others, we
are men of the world.” He made polite inquiries about the officers’
health and the weather and the War, leading up to the introduction:
“Allow me to present you to Mister our Mayor! And now what can I do for
you?”

Major Stevenage, a little lost in the mixed stream of good French and
bad English, left it to Dormer.

“It is with reference to the claim of Vanderlynden! Can one arrange it?”

Blanquart had only time to put in: “Everything arranges itself,” before
the Mayor cut him short.

“You have some nice ideas, you others. Arrange it, I believe you. You
will arrange it with our Deputy.”

Blanquart put in: “Mister the Mayor was insulted by the troops. We
wrote to our Deputy!”

Major Stevenage fidgeted. He had found it most difficult to go through
this sort of thing, day after day, for years. He had been trained to
deal with Asiatics. He turned on Blanquart:

“Why didn’t you write to me first?” but the Mayor cut in again. His
general outlook on life was about that of an English agricultural
labourer plus the dignity of Beadledom. This latter had been injured,
and the man, who seldom spoke a dozen sentences a day, now was voluble.
He understood more English than one gave him credit for.

“Why write to you, officer, you are all of the same colour!” (By this
time not a German attack could have stopped him.) “My Garde Champêtre
comes to tell me that there is a crime of violence at Vanderlynden’s.
They demand that I go to make _procès-verbal_. I put on my tricolour
sash. I take my official notebook. I arrive. I demand the officer. _Il
s’est foutu de moi!_ (Untranslatable.) He says he has orders to march
to the trenches. His troops hold me in derision. They sing laughable
songs of me in my official capacity----”

“It is very well, Monsieur the Maire,” Dormer broke in. “We go to make
an arrestation. Can you indicate the culpable?”

“But I believe you, I can indicate him,” cried the old man.

Dormer waited breathlessly for some fatal name or number which would
drag a poor wretch through the slow exasperation of Court-Martial
proceedings.

“It was a small brown man!”

“That does not lead us very far!” said Dormer icily.

“Wait!” The old man raised his voice. “Achille!” The door opened, and
Achille Quaghebeur, the Garde Champêtre, in attendance on the Maire,
stepped in and closed it behind him. He had, in his dark green and
sulphur-coloured uniform, with his assumption of importance, the air
of a comic soldier out of “Madame Angot.” “Produce the corroborative
article!”

Achille found in his tail pocket surely the oldest and most faded of
leather pocket-books. From this in turn he produced a piece of A.S.C.
sacking, on which the word OATS was plainly printed in black.

“Voila!” said the Maire.

“Totally useless!” growled the Major, turning red.

This made the Maire furious; he grasped the intonation and expression
if not the words.

“You others, you are enough to send one to sleep standing up. One
produces the _corroborative_ pieces and you treat them as useless.” And
there followed a tirade during which Dormer drew the Major outside,
with profuse _Bonjours!_ He thought that Blanquart was trying to sign
to him that he wanted to say something to him privately. But the
Major was upset, his dignity was hurt. A soldier by profession, he
had reduced the settlement of claims to a fine art. He was said to
have settled three thousand between the time he was made A.P.M. to the
division on the Aisne to the day of his death at Bailleul. He told the
chauffeur to drive to Vanderlynden’s. The man seemed to know the way,
and had probably been to the place many times. As the car jolted and
ground over the cobbles into the yard, Dormer said:

“I shall ask for the daughter, Madeleine.”

“Just so!”

“I don’t believe----”

“Nor do I,” said the Major stoutly.

Neither of them could pronounce the word “rape.”

They got out, knocked at the door and knocked again. The place
seemed not so much empty and deserted as enveloped in one of those
encompassing noises that only sort themselves out on investigation.
Too deep for a separator, too near for an aeroplane, Dormer diagnosed
it: “They’ve got the Government thrasher in the back pasture, next the
rye!” (He had a good memory and could tell pretty well how most of the
people distributed crops and work.)

They recrossed the bridge of the moat and skirting the latter
entered the back pasture. There against the gate that gave on to the
arable “plain,” as it was called in those parts, was the Government
thrasher, the women labourers, and right on the top of the stack, old
Vanderlynden.

Dormer shouted! Vanderlynden paid not the slightest heed. Perhaps he
was deaf, no doubt the thrasher buzzed loud enough; but above all he
was one of those old peasants whose only reply to this unheard-of War
in which all had been plunged was to work harder and more continuously,
and to show less and less consciousness of what went on round about
them. There he stood, black against that shy and tender blue of Flemish
sky, the motions of his body mechanical, his face between collarless
shirt and high-crowned, peaked cap, expressionless. Finally, Dormer
took one of the short stout girls that were employed in raking the
straw away from the travelling band, and shook her roughly by the arm.

She was, of course, a refugee Belgian. No one else would work like
that, not even a Chinese woman. Like a clockwork figure, she began to
speak in “English”:

“No bon offizer billet all full you go Mairie!” without stopping for
one moment her raking.

Dormer held her forearm rigid, and stopped her.

“_Saagte patron heer t’kom!_”

That reached her consciousness. Throwing down her implement, she put
both hands to her mouth and began shouting “Hoi!” at old Vanderlynden,
and might have gone on shouting indefinitely if Dormer had not gone
round to the French Army mechanic who drove the machine and given him
an English canteen cigarette. That would have stopped an offensive. It
soon stopped the thrasher and Vanderlynden looked down at his visitors.

“Good day, Patron!” called Dormer; “can we see Mademoiselle?”

The old man got down with unexpected agility. “Good day, my officer,
what is it that there is?”

Dormer held out the blue claim form. At the sight of it, there came
into Vanderlynden’s face the look that a mule gives its feed, when,
expecting and even enjoying bits of wood, leather, and nails, it comes
across a piece of tin: not so much protest as long and malevolent
calculation of the unknown. As a matter of fact he could not read
more of it than his signature. He muttered once or twice, “_myn
reclamorsche_,” but got no further.

“Can we see Mademoiselle?” repeated Dormer.

The old man stared at him with the incredulity of a villager who finds
a stranger ignorant of village news: “But, my officer, my young lady is
gone!”

At that moment the French mechanic, who had lighted his cigarette and
now only wanted to be done with the job, put his lever over, and set
the thrasher buzzing again. As if spell-bound, old Vanderlynden gave
one leap and regained his place on the stack. The Belgians fell to
at their several jobs. The corn flew, the wheels whizzed, the grain
rattled in the hopper, the straw swished in long swathes beneath the
rakes. Dormer and the Major were left standing, idle and forgotten,
with their War, while the real business of the farm went steadily
forward, only a little hastened because the thrasher had to be at
Watten next day.

They walked back to the car, in a black frame of mind. Neither spoke,
from war habit of not mentioning the omnipresent perversity of things.
But Madeleine Vanderlynden’s departure from the farm, coming after the
wording of the claim, was ominous indeed.

Travelling by motor has many disadvantages, but against all these it
has one crowning advantage: to those who are weary and overspent,
it provides more immediately and completely than any other physical
sensation the feeling of escape. What magic lies behind that word! To
get into the car and go, no matter whither, and to leave at any rate
one incomprehensible muddle behind him: that was the illusion while the
chauffeur was starting.

No farther off than the gate of the pasture, swaying at slowest speed
over the unevenness of the entry, the car stopped. A motor-cyclist
slithered up beside it, saluted the A.P.M. and produced one of those
scores of messages that fluttered about just beyond the end of the
field telephone. Dormer might have passed unknown, but the A.P.M. was
unmistakable. Having handed over the flimsy envelope, the pocket Hermes
threw his leg over the saddle of the gibbering machine that carried
him, and was away up the lane and out on to the _pavé_ road, out of
sight before the A.P.M. could get out the words “No answer.”

The A.P.M. sat frowning at the pink Army message form. The chauffeur
sat frowning, one hand on the wheel, his foot keeping the engine going
by light continual touches on the accelerator, his face screwed round
to catch the order to proceed. The Sergeant of police sat perfectly
still and impassive, looking before him, the sunlight glinting on the
tiny fair hairs of his clipped moustache. The cyclist had gone, the
chauffeur wanted to go, and, after a moment, quietly slipped into
first gear and let the car gently gather way. The policeman did not
have to want. He had simply to sit still and his morning would pass
as his other mornings did, in passively guarding law and order in the
organization of the British Armies in France and Flanders. It was not
until the car was already moving at more than walking pace that the
A.P.M. spoke, and Dormer got the queerest sensation from the sequence
of such small events. For the first time it seemed to him that the
A.P.M. was not in possession of the initiative. It was these private
soldiers, waiting, coming and going, that forced him to give an order.
The impression lasted only a moment, but it was disturbing. Decidedly,
Dormer felt, he was not well, having such notions. Then he had no more
time to think, for the A.P.M. was holding out the pink wire for him to
read. He read:

“Corps requires signed statement of withdrawn claim.” The illusion of
escape was gone. The botheration was not behind, it was ahead of them.

“No use saying she isn’t there. We shall have to concoct something.” He
was obviously waiting for Dormer to suggest.

“I think, sir, we might go back to Blanquart, and find out the girl’s
whereabouts. The Maire will be gone by now!”

“Thank goodness. To Hondebecq Mairie.” The car flew from second to top
speed.

Back at the Grand’ Place of the village, the car stopped, the chauffeur
folded his hands, at the order to wait, the A.P.M. and Dormer entered
the Estaminet. It was empty, as Dormer had foreseen. The Maire and his
Secretary were not people who had time to waste, and were both gone
about their jobs--the Maire to his farm, the clerk to his school, the
classes of which were plainly audible through the wall, grinding out
some lesson by heart, in unison, like some gigantic gramophone with a
perpetual spring. It was the hour at which all France prepares for its
substantial meal.

Outside, the Grand’ Place was empty, save for the sunshine, not here an
enemy, as farther south, but the kindly friend that visits the coasts
of the North Sea all too rarely, wasting its pale and tepid gold on
the worn stones, on the green-shuttered, biscuit-coloured façades of
substantial two-storied houses, with steep roofs and tall chimneys,
behind which protruded the summits of ancient Holland elms. For a long
while there was no movement, save the flutter of a straw caught in the
cobbles. The A.P.M. fidgeted. There was no sound but the classes next
door, the wind in the street, the faint tremor of the window-panes, in
response to some distant inaudible shelling.

“You wouldn’t think there was a war going on within twenty miles?”

“Twenty kilometres, sir!”

“Is it possible? Are we going to wait all day, Dormer?”

“No, sir, only a moment; the people of the house can’t be far off, but
the door behind the bar is locked. I don’t want to go into the school
myself, Blanquart won’t like it, and one wants to keep on the right
side of him.”

“Why won’t he like it? He’ll have to.”

“The children get out of hand, sir, at the sight of a uniform. I’ve
noticed it when I’ve been billeting.”

“Do they?”

“Yes, sir; it’s all fun to them still.”

“Is it?” The A.P.M. grimaced and began reading the signs over the
little shops: “_Charcuterie_--what’s that?”

“Baked-meat shop. Pork-butcher’s we should call it, sir!”

“_Quincaillerie._”

“Hardware!”

“Who’s this, coming across the square?”

“Belgian refugee, sir!”

Dormer had no doubt about it. The heavy round-shouldered figure, the
mouth hanging loosely open, the bundle carried under the arm, the
clumsy boots, the clothes apparently suspended round the waist by a
string. Her story was written all over her: turned out of some Walloon
or Flemish farm or town, at the approach of the Germans--tramping along
a road with a retreating army all mixed up with a nation on the move,
she had lost home, parents, occupation, all in a few hours, and was
glad to get board and bed and any odd job that she could do.

“Is this the sort of person we have to interview?”

“Oh no, sir. Different type!”

The woman showed some mild interest at the sight of the car, and
exchanged banter in pidgin English with the chauffeur and policeman.
The invitation from the latter “promenade,” and the smiling, flattered
refusal “promenade no bon!” could be heard. Then she entered and stood
before them.

“_Bonjour_, offizer, what you want?”

“Will you kindly tell the Maire’s Secretary one waits to see him.”

“You want billets?” in English. “Billets na poo!”

“No!” Dormer was always piqued when his French was disregarded or
misunderstood. “We want M. Blanquart!”

“All right.” She returned with him in a moment.

“M. Blanquart, we have been to the farm and seen Vanderlynden. He’s
very busy, and we didn’t get much out of him, but we gather his
daughter has left home. Do you know her address?”

A look of incredulity visited the face of the schoolmaster. He pointed
across the square. “There. She has taken the ‘Lion of Flanders.’ She
gives lunch to officers!”

When this was conveyed to the A.P.M. he was considerably annoyed. “Why
couldn’t that old fool Vander what’s-his-name say so?”

Blanquart understood perfectly, not only the words, but the feeling.
“Ah, Monsieur, there you have the peasant. I have lived among them all
my life. I am not of them, I am from St. Omer, but I know them well.
They are like that. They are thrashing. They are sowing. They cannot
attend to anything else, even if it be their own business. You and I
shall be treated like the weather, something to be used or avoided....”

But the A.P.M. had stepped out of the Estaminet de la Mairie. Dormer
lingered, just sufficiently to say:

“We are much obliged, M. Blanquart, we will attend to the affair.” For
he had been brought up to behave as a little gentleman and knew that
politeness cost nothing and that he might require the Secretary of the
Mairie again.

Outside, the chauffeur was busy underneath the car, the policeman stood
beside it, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, face expressing
absolutely nothing. In a few strides Dormer caught up to the A.P.M.

“This lady speaks good English, sir. No doubt you will conduct the
inquiry yourself?”

“I hope so, if we really have found the person at last. We’ve wasted
nearly the whole morning.”

Dormer was relieved; his mind, always inclined to run a little in
advance, had already arrived at the point at which some one would have
to ask this woman:

“Are you the victim of this shocking crime?” He didn’t want to do it,
for he felt that it was the A.P.M.’s business.

The two officers entered the Café-Restaurant of the “Lion of Flanders.”
The whole of the ground floor, a long, low room looking out into the
Grand’ Place, had been cleared and set with little tables. Round the
desk from which the Patronne supervised the business, one or two
officers from neighbouring billets were drinking mixed vermouth. The
air was redolent of preparation, and it was only because they remained
standing that the A.P.M. and Dormer attracted attention. Finally,
a rough middle-aged woman in an apron asked what she could do for
these gentlemen. Feeling the subject to be increasingly delicate,
Dormer ordered two mixed vermouths and then asked if they might speak
to Mademoiselle Vanderlynden upon business. The drinks were served,
and behind them came the person required. No sooner had she come and
inquired what was wanted, than Dormer wished to goodness she had not.
He realized more than ever how difficult it would be to say to such a
person, “Are you the victim of the unmentionable crime?” But there she
stood, quite good looking, imperturbable, a little impatient perhaps,
obviously wanting to know without delay why she had been sent for in
the middle of a busy morning. This was comforting in a sense; it showed
there was something wrong with the whole atrocious story. On the other
hand it was awkward, one had to go on and explain. So he pulled out the
blue printed claim: the A.P.M. in spite of what had been said, left it
to him.

“It is about this claim of your father’s.”

She took it, scrutinized it a moment, and handed it back:

“Ah, that.” She was not helpful.

“You are of course familiar with the whole story?”

“Yes, I remember it all.”

The A.P.M. was listening attentively, impressed by her glib, adequate
English, and even more so by her personality. Dormer, on the other
hand, was occupied with his own feelings.

“There is some mistake, is there not?”

“No, there is no mistake.”

“The Major has come to see the--er--the damage!”

“I shall be pleased to go with you to the farm, after lunch.”

“That’s a jolly good idea,” the A.P.M. broke in. “We’ll have lunch
here, and go and look at the damage afterwards.”

“Very good. Will you take a chair, sir?” and she was gone.

“You see, it wasn’t what you thought,” the A.P.M. went on, finishing
his drink at a gulp, and making Dormer feel, for the twentieth time,
what a grossly unfair War it was.

The lunch was long, far more of the Flemish midday dinner than the
French déjeuner. The A.P.M. took the lot, commented freely, enjoyed
himself immensely. There were _hors d’œuvres_ (sardines, beans in
oil, some sort of sausage, a kind of horse-radish, “Wonder where the
devil she gets ’em?” said the A.P.M.), soup (ordinary, but enlivened
by parsley and bits or toast fried in fat and something, third cousin
to a piece of garlic, “scrumptious”), veal and spinach (very good, but
“no fish, pity!”). In a moment, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden stood over
them. “I am sorry, we have only sardines, they will not let the fish
come by train!” Chicken and salad (“Excellent. Ah, they understand oil,
the French”), little biscuits, coffee that dripped through a strainer
into glasses, rum (“That’s English, I bet!”), and Dormer, shy in such
matters, and without social code, began wondering whether he could
offer to pay.

He had learned during bitter years, one rule: “Always treat an A.P.M.
if you can!” This had not been his preoccupation during the meal.
He had been haunted by a tag of verse--from the “Ingoldsby Legends”
which he certainly hadn’t read for twenty years. He was not one
to read “poetry.” But neither had he a regular soldier’s trained
indifference. He knew where it was going to end, this quest on which
they were engaged. Some poor brute who had volunteered to come to
this blessed country to fight the Germans, would be hauled out of
some ghastly apology for a “rest” camp--if he were lucky--more likely
out of some dug-out or cellar, or even from Hospital--placed under
arrest--frightened dumb, if by any chance he had any speech in him, and
finally tried by a court to whom he was a “Tommy” (the sort of person
who enlisted in the regular army because he was out of work), and
sentenced to some penalty. And here was the A.P.M. eating and drinking
with gusto. It reminded Dormer of:

  Send for Trefooze, and Lieutenant Tregooze,
  Send for Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues.
  How much must I fork out, my trump,
  For the whole first floor of the Magpie and Stump?

the rhyme of the drunken swells who couldn’t even keep awake to see a
man hanged. It was, however, the ideal state of mind for making war.

The A.P.M. was saying to Mademoiselle Vanderlynden: “The bill please,
Madam,” and when he got it, “By Gad, did we drink all that? Well, I
don’t grudge it.”

So he was going to pay. The room was emptying now, there were no
troops in the village, and most of the officers lunching there (with
shy propitiatory looks toward the A.P.M.) had some way to ride to get
back to their units. Here was Mademoiselle ready to go and show them
the damage. She wore no hat, but her clothes were good of their kind
and she carried the day’s takings clasped to her breast, in a solid
little leather dolly-bag, far from new. The A.P.M. allowed her the rare
privilege of a lift in the car. They went back over the same road that
the two officers had followed in the morning. Once more Dormer had
his queer feelings. There was something wrong about this. Three times
over the same road and nothing done. As they turned into the by-road,
Mademoiselle Vanderlynden held up her hand. “Stop here, please!”

They were at the corner of the big pasture before the house. There was
an ordinary hedge, like an English one, thickened at this angle into a
tiny copse, with a dozen young poplars. Mademoiselle soon found a gap
in the fence and led them through, remarking, “The troops made this
short cut!”

They found themselves in Vanderlynden’s pasture, like hundreds of
others over a hundred miles of country. There were no troops in it at
the moment, but it had the air of being continuously occupied. In long
regular lines the grass had been trampled away. Posts and wire, and a
great bank of manure marked the site of horse-lines. Nearer the house,
tents had been set up from time to time, and circles, dotted with peg
and post holes, appeared half obliterated. At the corners of the field
were latrines, and at one spot the cookers had blackened everything.

“Billets for the troops!” reflected Dormer, to whom the idea of lodging
in the open had never ceased to be a thoroughly bad joke. “Stables for
horses, stables for men!” Obviously enough the machinery of War had
been here in full swing. Dormer (a man of no imagination) could almost
see before him the khaki-clad figures, the sullen mules, the primitive
vehicles filing into the place, tarrying ever so briefly and filing out
again to be destroyed. But Mademoiselle Vanderlynden was occupied with
the matter in hand, and led to the other side of the coppice, where
there had been built by some previous generation of pious Vanderlyndens
a little shrine. It was perhaps eight feet high, six feet thick, and
had its glazed recess towards the main road. But the glazing was all
broken, the altar torn down, and all those small wax or plaster figures
or flowers, vases, and other objects of the trade in “votive offerings”
and _objets de piété_ which a Vanderlynden would revere so much more
because he bought them at a _fournitures ecclésiastiques_, rather than
made them with his own hands, were missing. Army wire had been used to
fasten up the gaping aperture.

“There you are,” said Mademoiselle. She added, as if there might be
some doubt as to ownership: “You can see that it is ours. Here is our
name, not our proprietors!”

Sure enough, on a flat plaster panel was a partially effaced
inscription: “Marie Bienheureuse--prie pour--de Benoit Vanderl--femme
Marthe--Juin 187----”

The A.P.M. lighted a cigar, and surveyed the ruins. He was feeling
extremely well, and was able to take a detached unofficial attitude.
“Oh, so that’s the Virgin, is it?”

“No. That is the place for the image. The image is broken, as I told
you, and we removed the pieces.”

“Very good. Then I understand you claim a thousand francs for the
damage to the brick-work and the--er--altar furniture which was--ah,
broken--it seems too much, you know!”

“Perhaps, sir, you are not well ack-vainted with the price of building
materials!” (Ah, thought Dormer, she speaks pretty good English, but
that word did her.)

“Oh, I think so, I’m a bit of a farmer myself, you know. I have a place
in Hampshire, where I breed cattle.”

Mademoiselle’s voice seemed to rise and harden:

“Yes, sir; but if you are rich, that is not a reason that you should
deny justice to us, who are poor. I do not know if I can get this
altar repaired, and even if I can there is also the question of the
_effraction_----”

“The what?”

“Legal damages for breaking in--trespass, sir,” put in Dormer, alarmed
by the use of French. He could see she was getting annoyed, and wished
the A.P.M., the lunch, the claim, the farm and the War, all the blessed
caboodle, were with the devil.

“Oh, I see.”

“Et puis, and then there are _dédommagements_--what would you say if I
were to knock down your Mother’s tomb?”

“What’s that. Oh, I can’t say, I’m sure. I really can’t go into all
this. Captain Dormer, there is obviously no arrest to be made. It is
purely a claim for compensation. I will leave it to you. I must be
getting back. _Comprenez_, Mademoiselle, this officer will hear what
you have to say and will settle the whole matter with you. Famous lunch
you gave us. Au revoir. If you care for a game of bridge this evening,
Dormer, come round to B Mess!”

Dormer took out his field notebook and conducted the inquiry partly in
English, partly in French.

They sat in the cavernous old tiled kitchen, half-filled with the stove
and its stupefying heat, half with the table, scrubbed until the grain
of the wood stood out in ribs.

Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had dismissed the A.P.M. from her mind
with the remark that he was a droll type, and gave Dormer her full
attention, rather as if he had been a dull boy in the lowest class, and
she his teacher.

“When did this occur?”

“Why, in April. It was wet, or he would not have done it!”

“Did you see it done?”

“Yes. I even tried to stop it!”

“Where were you?”

“Why naturally I was at that hole in the fence. One cannot always hire
a boy to keep the cattle from straying.”

“Well?”

“Well, then the troops came in. They were not pretty to see!”

“What troops were they?”

She turned over a dirty dog-eared memorandum book.

“469 Trench Mortar Battery.”

“So they had had a bad time?”

“One gathered that. They were very few, and some of their material was
missing. At the last came this man with his two mules. One was sick,
one was wounded. Most of the men, as soon as they had put up their
animals, fell down and slept, but this one kept walking about. It was
almost dark and it was beginning to rain. I asked him what he wanted.”

“What did he say?”

“‘To Hell with the Pope!’”

The shibboleth sounded so queer on her lips that Dormer glanced at her
face. It was blank. She had merely memorized the words in case they
might be of use to her. She went on:

“He did not like the images on the altar! Then he began to break the
glass, and pull down the woodwork. One saw what he wanted. It was
shelter for his mules.”

“You cautioned him that he was doing wrong?”

“I believe you. I even held him by the arm.”

“That was wrong of you, Mademoiselle. You should have informed his
officer.”

“Oh, you must understand that his officer was asleep on the kitchen
floor. But so asleep. He lay where he had fallen, he had not let go
the mug from which he drank his whisky. So much--(she held up four
graphic fingers)--ah, but whisky you know!”

“I see. You were unable to report to the officer in charge of the
party. But still, you should never touch a soldier. He might do you an
injury, and then, at a court of inquiry, it would be said against you
that you laid hands on him.”

“Oh, you understand, one is not afraid, one has seen so many soldiers
these years. And as for the court of inquiry, we have had four here,
about various matters. They all ended in nothing.”

“Well, well, you endeavoured to prevent the damage, and being unable
to report to the proper authority, you made your claim for damage in
due course. But when the officer woke up, you informed him that you had
done so?”

“Why necessarily, since we had the Maire to make a _procès-verbal_!”

“So I hear, from the Maire himself. But apparently the Maire did not do
so, for the procès-verbal is not included with the other papers.”

“No, the Maire was prevented by the troops. (A grim smile broke for
a moment the calculated business indifference on the face of one who
excluded emotion, because it was a bad way of obtaining money.) Oh,
la-la! There was a _contretemps_!”

“Do you mind telling me what occurred?” She seemed to regret that brief
smile, and apologized to herself.

“All the same, it was shameful. Our Maire is no better than any other,
but he is our Maire. One ought to respect those in power, ought not
one, sir?”

“In what way were the troops lacking in respect?”

“They sang. They sang--_casse-tête_--enough to split your head, all the
way to the village!”

“Oh, they were on the move, were they?”

“It was pitiable, I assure you, sir, it was shameful to see. _Ces
pauvres êtres._ They hardly had any sleep. Only a few hours. Then
it seems the Bosche made a counter-attack, and paff! here comes a
motor-cyclist, and they were obliged to wake up and fall in. Some of
them could only stand up with difficulty. But at length, they were
ready; then the Maire came. We had sent for him _d’urgence_, when we
saw the troops were going, because you can’t make a _procès-verbal_ of
a person who is no longer there!”

“No, quite right. But why did they sing?”

“Ah, _ça tombait d’accord_. Just as the officer gives the word, the
Maire arrives. We had informed him it was a crime of violence, and
he had taken it very serious. He is old, our Maire. He had put on
his--_écharpe_.”

“What is that?”

She made a vivid gesture with her hands.

“It goes so! It is tricolour. It is the Maire’s official dress!”

“Ah, his official scarf!”

“That is it. Also, he had mounted his hat!”

“How did he do that?”

“The usual way. But it was a long hat, a hat of _grande tenue_--like a
pot of confiture.”

“Mademoiselle, this will not do. I cannot settle this matter here
and now, I must pass on all the papers to my superior officer, who
will place them with the proper authority. They will ask ‘Is there no
_procès-verbal_?’ Am I to say: ‘The Maire went to make one. He put on
his hat and the troops began to sing.’ It sounds like a joke.”

“Ah, you others, you are always the ones to laugh. It was just exactly
as I have said. They sang!”

“But you told me just now that they were tired out!”

“Quite true!”

“It will never sound so. What did they sing?”

“Old Hindenburg has bought a hat!”

In a moment Dormer was convinced. The words painted, framed and hung
the picture for him. He had just been beginning to hope that the whole
thing would break down from sheer improbability. He now saw it stamped
and certified with eternal truth. There was no need for her to add:
“They were not gay, you understand, they were _exalté_!”

“Excited!”

“Ah! Excited, like one is after no sleep and no food and then something
very strange. They were excited. They called the Maire ‘Maréchal
Hindenburg,’ and ‘Bosche,’ and ‘Spy.’ Those are words that ought not to
be used between allies!”

“No, Mademoiselle, they ought not.”

But for a moment, the hardness left her face, she became almost
impersonal.

“It was curious. They sang that--_sur une aire de psaume_, to a church
tune.”

“Yes, yes!” agreed Dormer. Out of the depth of his experience as a
churchwarden welled up the strains of Whitfield, No. 671, and out of
the depths of his experiences as a platoon commander came a sigh: “They
will do it.”

He went through his notes to see if there were anything more he wanted
to know, but from business habit he had already possessed himself of
the essentials. He did not like the way the thing was shaping. He
knew only too well what happened in the army. Some individual being,
besides a number on a pay roll, a human creature, would do something
quite natural, perhaps rather useful, something which a mile or two
farther on, in the trenches, would be worth, and might occasionally
gain, the Military Medal. This business of breaking down a bit of wood
and plaster, to shelter mules, had it occurred a little farther on, had
it been a matter of making a machine-gun emplacement in an emergency,
would have earned praise. It showed just that sort of initiative one
wanted in War-time, and which was none too easy to get from an army
of respectable civilians. But at the same time, in billets, there
was another set of rules just as important, which in their essence
discouraged initiative and reduced the soldier to a mere automaton. The
otherwise excellent thing which he did broke those rules. That again
did not matter much, unless it was brought into accidental prominence
by colliding with some other event or function--this Maire and his
dignity for instance, would play the very devil, make a mountain out of
a molehill, such was the perversity of things. Fascinated against his
better judgment which told him “The less you know about the business,
the better,” he found himself asking:

“What was this man like, Mademoiselle?”

There was no answer, and he looked up. She had left him, gone into the
back kitchen to some job of her own. She had left him as though the War
were some expensive hobby of his that she really could not be bothered
with any longer. On hearing his voice she returned and he repeated his
question. He never forgot the answer.

“Like--but he was like all the others!”

“You couldn’t pick him out in a crowd?”

“Perhaps. But it would be difficult. He was about as big as you, not
very fat, he had eyes and hair like you or anyone else.”

“You didn’t, of course, hear his name or number?”

“They called him ‘Nobby.’ It was his name, but they call every one
‘Nobby.’ His number was 6494. I saw it on his valise.”

“On his pack?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You have told me all I want.” In his heart
he feared she had told him much too much, but she had gone on with her
work. He rose to go, but passing the dark entry of the back kitchen,
he stopped, as though to avoid a shell. He thought he saw a headless
figure, but it was only a shirt which Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had
flung over a line before putting it through the wringer. He went out.
She did not accompany him. She was busy, no doubt.

He had to walk to the main road, but once there, found no difficulty in
“jumping” a lorry that took him back to Divisional Head-quarters. On
the steps of the Town Hall he crossed the A.P.M. It was very late for
that functionary to be about. He had not even changed into “slacks.”

“Hello, young feller, you got back then?”

“Yes, sir.” Dormer rather wanted to say, “No, sir, I’m not here, I’m at
the farm where you left me.”

The A.P.M. passed on, but turned to call out: “No bridge to-night.
We’re on the move!”

So it seemed. The interior of the old building was in confusion. The
Quartermaster-Sergeant was burning orders, schedules, rolls and parade
states of the Corps they were leaving. Signallers were packing their
apparatus, batmen were folding beds and stuffing valises. Policemen
were galvanized into a momentary activity.

To Dormer it was the old, old lesson of the War. Never do anything,
it is always too late. He had been bound, by a careful civilian
conscience, to try to get to the bottom of the matter. He might just as
well have torn it up and let it take its chance. No, the Vanderlyndens
would never let it rest until they got some sort of satisfaction. The
Mayor and the French Mission and Heaven knows who else would have
something to say. He wrote a brief but careful report, and sent the
thing off to an authority at Boulogne who dealt with such matters.

       *       *       *       *       *

The weeks that followed were full of education for Dormer’s detached,
civilian mind. Accustomed to be part of a battalion, almost a close
family circle of known faces and habits, then associated with the
staff of a division that stuck in one place, he had never before seen
an army, and that army almost a nation, on the move. Under his eyes,
partly by his effort, fifteen thousand English-speaking males, with
the proper number of animals and vehicles, impedimenta, movable or
fixed, had got into trains, and got out of them again, and marched
or been conveyed to a place where Dormer had to take leave of all
preconceived notions of life.

No-Man’s-Land, with trenches beside it, he was familiar with, but here
were miles of had-been No-Man’s-Land, grassless, houseless, ploughed
into brown undulations like waves of the sea by the barrages that had
fallen upon it; covered with tents and huts, divided by wandering
rivers of mud or dust, which had been at some distant time, weeks
before, roads. Into this had poured, like the division to which he was
attached, forty other divisions, always in motion, always flowing from
the railhead behind, up to the guns in front, shedding half the human
material of which they were composed, and ebbing back to railhead to go
elsewhere.

He came to rest in a tiny dug-out on a hillside of loose chalk, which
he shared with a signal officer, and past which, at all hours of the
day and night, there passed men, men, men, mules, men, guns, men,
mules, limbers, men, men, men.

At least this is how they appeared to him. Forced by Nature to sleep
for some of the hours of darkness, and forced by the Germans to be
still for all the clearest of the daylight, it was at the spells of
dusk and dawn that he became busiest, and that infernal procession was
ever before his eyes. It was endless. It was hopeless. By no means
could his prim middle-class mind get to like or admire anything so far
from the defined comfort and unvarying security to which he belonged
and to which he longed to return. It was useless. With the precision
of a machine, that procession was duplicated by another moving in the
opposite direction. Lorries, ambulances, stretchers, men, men, guns,
limbers, men, men, men. The raw material went up. The finished article
came back. Dormer and his companion and their like, over twenty miles
of line, sorted and sifted and kept the stream in motion.

That companion of his was not the least of his grievances. The fellow
was no Dormer, he was opposite by name and nature. His name was
Kavanagh, and one of the meagre comforts Dormer got was by thinking
of him as a d----d Irishman. He was, or had been going to be, a
schoolmaster, and next to nature (or nationality), the worst thing
about him was he would talk. And he would _not_ keep his hands still.
Two things that Dormer most gravely disapproved of, and which he
attributed in equal shares to lack of experience of the world, and too
much signalling.

His talk was such tripe, too! He never lost a moment. He started first
thing in the morning. All the traffic that was going up forward was
gone. The earth was empty, save for anti-aircraft guns pop-popping at
planes high in the Italian blue. Dormer had shaved and breakfasted and
hoped to catch up some of the sleep he had lost during the night. But
would that fellow allow that? No. Listen to him now, under the tiny
lean-to they had contrived, by the dug-out steps, for washing purposes.
He was--reciting--would one call it?

  “The last tattoo is beating, boys,
  The pickets are fast retreating, boys,
  Let every man
  Fill up his can
  And drink to our next merry meeting, boys!”

“Do you call that poetry?”

“No.”

This was rather awkward. Dormer had intended a snub. Not caring for
poetry himself, he had tried to take a high line. He went on lamely:

“Oh! What do you call it then?”

“A most amazing picture of the mentality of 1815. Compare it with that
of 1915. In that old war of ours against the French, we swore, we
drank, we conquered. What do you think that same fellow would have to
write about us to-day?”

“He wouldn’t,” put in Dormer, without avail.

“Something like this:

  “‘’Z day is fast approaching, boys,
  In gas-drill we want coaching, boys,
  Our iron ration
  Will soon be in fashion.’

What rhymes to coaching?”

“How should I know?”

“Joking apart, Dormer!” (As if Dormer had been joking.) “Do you catch
the impulse of the slogan? Of course, iron rations and gas helmets make
a much more efficient soldier than drums and bayonets and rum, but the
zest is all gone!”

Dormer did not reply; a belated party of engineers of some special
service were passing up the road, and from where he lay in the dug-out
he could see khaki-covered bodies upon dusty legs, but no heads, the
beam of the entrance was too low. Suddenly he said:

“Did you ever dream that the army was like a giant without a head?”

“What did you say?”

Good gracious, what had he said? He replied, “Oh, nothing,” and bit his
lips. It must be want of sleep. Fortunately Kavanagh did not hear. He
was going on with his poetry.

  “The Colonel, so gaily prancing, boys,
  Has a wonderful way of advancing, boys,
  Sings out so large
  Fix bayonets and cha-a-a-rge,
  It sets all the Frenchmen a-dancing, boys!

“What days they must have been, Dormer! You ought to have been a
Colonel. Can’t you see yourself on a big brown horse, gaily prancing?
There ought to be a school for gaiety, just as there is for bayonet
fighting and bombing. Can’t you imagine yourself in a shako, like
a top hat, with the brim in front only, glazed, with whacking great
numerals?”

Dormer wanted to say: “You’ve got a marvellous imagination!” which
would have been intended as an unfavourable criticism. But the words
stuck on his lips. Instead he said:

“It’s all very well. You don’t seem to see the serious part of all
this--waste!”

“Waste, my dear fellow!” And to Dormer the harsh, cheerful voice had
all the officious familiarity of a starling, gibing at one from an
apple tree. “Waste is not serious. It is nature’s oldest joke. It used
to be called Chaos. From it we came. Back to it we shall go. It will
be called Immortality. The Graves Commission will give it a number, a
signboard, and a place on the map, but it will be Immortality none the
less. From Titans to tight ’uns, ‘each in his narrow grave.’”

“Oh, chuck it,” said Dormer, disgusted and having no memories of that
quotation. “You’ve evidently never been in charge of a burying party!”

“I have. I did twelve months in the line, as a platoon commander. How
long did you do that?”

“Twelve months about!”

“I believe you, where thousands wouldn’t. Twelve months was about the
limit. In twelve months, the average Infantry subaltern got a job, or
got a blighty! I know all about it!”

“Then you ought to know better than to speak so. It’s not a joke!”

“My dear Dormer, if it were not a grim joke it would be utterly
unbearable.”

“I disagree entirely. It’s that point of view that we are suffering
from so much. You don’t seem to see that this army is not an army
of soldiers. It is an army of civilians enlisted under a definite
contract. They aren’t here for fun.”

“Oh, come, Dormer, don’t you believe in enjoying the War?”

“I believe in getting it done.”

“You never will, in that frame of mind.”

“Oh, shan’t I? What would happen if I didn’t see that the right people
get to the right place, with the right orders and right supplies,
including you and your blessed flagwaggers?”

“Nothing to what will happen if the troops once begin to regard the
show as a matter of business! You haven’t got a shako and a big brown
horse, but you must play up, as if you had!”

“What rot you talk. I have a tin hat because it will stand shrapnel
better than a shako. I have mules because they stand the life better
than a horse?”

“Yes, but do you admire your tin hat? Do you really care for mules!”

Something made Dormer say in spite of himself:

“I did once come across a man who cared!”

“There, what did I tell you. He was winning the War!”

(“Whatever did I tell him that for?” Dormer asked himself vexedly. “A
nice song he’ll make of it.”) But he only said:

“You’re all wrong, as usual. He did nothing of the sort. He just made a
row in billets!”

“Quite right too. Most of ’em deserve a row!”

“Possibly, but he went the wrong way to work!”

“Ah, that depends!”

(Irritating brute!)

“No, it doesn’t. Were you ever at Ypres?”

“Was I not. I was hit at Hooge stables, and had to walk nearly a couple
of miles to get to a dressing station!”

“Well, then, you remember, in the back billets, a place called the
‘Spanish Farm’?”

“Don’t I just. Great big old house, with a moat, and pasture fore and
aft.”

What a way to put it!

“Well, this chap I’m telling you of, was billeted there. He was
attached to a Trench Mortar Battery. He was in charge of the mules. He
didn’t talk a lot of rot about it, as you suggest he should. One of his
mules was wounded and the other sick. He broke down the front of the
shrine at the corner of the pasture to get a bit of shelter for them!”

The effect of this recital was not what Dormer expected.

“That was an unspeakably shocking thing to do, worse than losing any
number of mules!”

“I suppose you’re a Catholic?”

“Yes, I am!”

“I thought as much. Well, I’m not, nor was this driver I’m telling you
about. He just hated the waste and destruction of it all.”

“So he destroyed something more precious and permanent.”

“He thought a live mule was better than a dead saint.”

“He was wrong!”

And then the fellow shut up, got quite sulky. Dormer was delighted
with his prowess in argument, waited a moment, turned on his side, and
slept, as only men can who live in the open air, in continual danger of
their lives, and who lose the greater portion of the night in ceaseless
activity.

       *       *       *       *       *

When his servant woke him, with tea and orders and the nightly
lists of traffic and stores, it was a wonderful golden and green
sunset, tremulous with the evening “hate.” The purple shadows were
just sufficiently long to admit of getting the wounded back, and
the road was filled with ambulances, whirring and grinding as they
stopped, backed, and restarted, while a steady punctual crash, once a
minute, showed that the Bosche were shelling the road or one of the
innumerable camps or dumps along it, in the neighbourhood. Amid all
this clamour, Kavanagh was not silenced, but recited at the top of
his voice, and Dormer had a suspicion that the real reason was that
it helped to keep down the nervousness that grew on men, as the years
of the War rolled on, and the probability of being hit increased.
Especially as, far overhead, the planes that circled and swooped like
a swarm of gleaming flies, were attracting considerable anti-aircraft
fire, and all round, big jagged bits were coming to earth with a noise
almost echoing that of the ambulances.

Dormer’s tidy mind was soon called into action. Some wounded who had
died on the way to the dressing station, had been laid out beside the
road as the ambulances had enough to do without carrying corpses ten
miles. He went to make sure the M.O. had arranged for a burial party,
as he had the strongest belief that casualties lying about were bad for
the morale of the troops. When he got back to the dug-out, Kavanagh was
“going on,” as he bent over a map of the extensions of the divisional
cable lines, like a crow on a gate.

“See those chaps, Dormer?”

  “Quis procul hinc--the legends writ
  The--er--Picard grave is far away,
  Quis ante diem periit
  Sed miles, sed pro patria.”

“Do you believe in pronouncing Latin like Julius Cæsar or like Jones
Minor?”

“I don’t believe in it at all. Pure waste of time!”

“Dormer, you are a Utilitarian!”

“Have it your own way so long as you get that cable line of yours
sited. I’ve got parties coming up to-morrow to dig it in!”

“I shall be ready for them. Think of all that language, and language is
only codified thought, buried in the ground, Dormer!”

“I have all the thinking I want over all the men buried in the ground.
We’re losing far too many!”

The “victory” of the Somme had been a saddening experience for Dormer.

“That shows how wrong you are. We are mortal. We perish. But our words
will live.”

“Rot! Do you mean to say that ‘825 Brigade relieve you to-morrow Nth.
Div. Ack, ack, ack’ will live! Why should it? It’ll be superseded in
four days. Who wants to perpetuate it?”

“I disagree with you, Dormer, I really do. Here we are at the great
crisis of our lives, of the life of European Civilization perhaps. Some
trumpery order you or I transmit may mean in reality ‘Civilization is
defeated, Barbarism has won!’ or it may mean, I hope, ‘Lift up your
eyes unto the hills from whence----’”

“I wish you wouldn’t joke about the Bible!”

“I’m not joking, and you’ll find it out before long. Men will fight so
long as they’ve got something to fight about!”

“Well, they have. They want to get home. They’ll fight fast enough
about that.”

“Not they. That isn’t the thing to make ’em fight. It’s more likely to
make ’em run away. They want an idea.”

“They’ve had enough ideas, I should think. I seem to remember the walls
covered with posters, with an idea a-piece.”

“Those ideas were much too superficial and temporary. They want to feel
that they are something, or that they do something so important that it
doesn’t matter whether they live or die!”

“That’s all wrong. It does matter. This War will be won by the side
that has most men and most stuff left.”

“Nonsense. It will be won by the side that has the most faith.”

“Oh, well, you go and have faith in your cable line. I’ve got to have
it in these working parties.”

It was now dusk enough for the main body of troops to get on the
move. The broad valley below was in ultramarine shadow, the round
shoulders of the down touched with lemon-coloured afterglow. Up the
drift of chalk dust that represented where the road had once been,
an insignificant parish road from one little village to another, but
now the main traffic artery of an Army Corps, there came pouring the
ceaseless stream, men, men, men, limbers, men, mules, guns, men.

The longer he looked at them, the more certain he became that he was
right. Not merely the specialists in mechanics, engineers, ordnance,
signals, gunners, but the mere infantry had taken months to train, and
could be knocked out in a moment. The problem, of course, was to save
them up until the moment at which they could produce the maximum effect.

How docile they were. Platoon for this, platoon for that, section of
engineers, then a machine-gun company. Then rations, then limbers,
wagons, hand-carts full of every conceivable kind of implement or
material. Very soon he was obliged to stand in the middle of the
road, with the stream of traffic going up, before him, and the stream
of traffic coming back, behind, so that in addition to checking and
directing one lot he had to keep an eye on the other to see that they
did not begin to smoke until they were well down the side of the
hill. Gradually the darkness thickened, and the crowd thinned, and
the thunder of the front died down. At length he was left with only a
belated hurrying limber or two, or ambulance, sent back for the third
or fourth time to clear the accumulation of casualties. At last he felt
justified in getting into his bunk and shutting his eyes.

Thank goodness that fellow wasn’t back. He, Dormer, would be asleep,
and would not hear him. He counted the khaki shoulders and dusty wheels
that went round and round beneath his eyelids, until he went off.

Unfortunately for that particular _malaise_ which the War occasioned to
his precise and town-bred spirit, that was not his last sleep that he
slept that night. Many a one never woke again to hear the earth-shaking
clamour of the barrage, to see that eternal procession of men, men,
mules, limbers, men, guns, ambulances, men, lorries, going on and on
like some gigantic frieze. But Dormer did. He was one of those who, had
he been born in the Middle Ages, would have been described as under a
curse, or pictured as working out an atonement for his own or some one
else’s misdeeds. He had to go on doing his very best, and the more he
disliked the whole business the harder he worked. The harder he worked
the longer it seemed to that desired day when he might return to the
quiet niceties of a branch bank in a provincial town. And all the time
Kavanagh kept up that ceaseless argument as to one’s mental attitude.
Dormer didn’t really believe in having such a thing, for he felt bound
to join issue with the absurd ramblings of the other, and he could not
escape, because their jobs naturally threw them together and because he
secretly admired the way that Kavanagh did his work.

So the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the casualty
lists grew longer and longer, the visible fruits of the immense effort
grew smaller and smaller, and as the year wore on, the weather broke,
and the only conditions that make life in the open tolerable, light and
drought, disappeared, and they dwelt in the sodden twilight of tent or
hut, while what had been the white powdery dust, became the cement-like
mud that no scraping could remove. Sitting dejectedly over some returns
he heard

  “Still, be still, my soul, the arms you bear are brittle!”

“It’s all very well to sit there and sing. This offensive is a failure,
we shall never get through.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Dormer. I told you how it would be. I hope we
shall learn the lesson.”

“It means another winter in the trenches.”

“Evidently.”

“It’s very bad for the men. They’ve nothing to show for all that’s been
done.”

“That’s nothing new.

  “‘I’m sick of parading,
  Through cold and wet wading,
  Or standing all day to be shot in a trench!
  I’m tired of marching,
  Pipe-claying and starching,
  How neat we must be to be shot by the French.’

That’s what the men thought of it a hundred years ago. Then, they
had to pipeclay their belts, two whacking great chest-constricting
cross-belts. And their officers didn’t arrange for them to play
football, every time they went out to rest. In fact they didn’t go out
to rest. They just stayed in the line.”

“It wasn’t very dangerous, was it?”

“There wasn’t the shell-fire, of course, but what about disease?”

“They were regulars.”

“My dear fellow, when is a soldier not a soldier?”

“I don’t like riddles.”

“This is a serious question. How long will the War last?”

“Oh,” cried Dormer bitterly, “another two years, I suppose.”

“You’re about twenty wrong. We shall have conscription shortly, then
the real strength will be put into the fight and will compensate for
the losses of France and the inertia of Russia. We shall then settle
down to the real struggle between England and Germany for the markets
of the world.”

Dormer frowned. “You’re a Socialist,” he said.

“Never mind my opinions. It won’t matter by the time we get back into
civvys what we are!”

Something rose up in Dormer. He said with certainty:

“You’re wrong. The men’ll never stand it. Two years at most.”

“The men stood it very well in the Peninsular for six years, and most
of them had been fighting somewhere or other for the previous quarter
of a century.”

“Once again, they were regulars.”

“Once again, so are you.

  “‘For gold the sailor ploughs the main,
    The farmer ploughs the manor,
  The brave poor soldier ne’er disdain,
    That keeps his country’s honour!’

That’s you to the life, Dormer. Twenty years hence you’ll be a bronzed
veteran, in a dirty uniform, with a quarter of a century’s polish on
your Sam Browne. You have already had more iron whizz past your head
than any regular soldier gets in a lifetime, or even the lifetime of
two or three generations. You’ve had a practical experience of war that
any general might envy. The only complaint I have to make against you
is that you’re conducting the whole business as if you were back in
your beastly bank, instead of, as the song says, behaving as one ‘That
keeps his country’s honour!’”

“That’s all nonsense. I’ve just sent the 561 Brigade to occupy the new
line that was taken up after the stunt last Thursday. You know what
it’s like. It’s the remains of a German trench turned round, so that
they have all the observation. They’ve strafed it to Hell, and we are
firing on photographs of trenches that are probably empty. It’s all
nonsense to say the defending side loses more men than the attacking.
That’s true while the attack is in progress, but an attack in its very
nature cannot last long, and then the defenders get their own back.”

As he said the words they were enveloped in an explosion that shook the
wet out of the canvas upon them, and whose aftermath of falling débris
was echoed by stampeded traffic in the road.

“The Bosche seem set on proving you right,” laughed Kavanagh. “They
forget, as you do, that, sooner or later, an attack gets through and
ends the War.”

“Not this one. Nothing but no more reserves will end this. And that may
happen to both sides at once. It may all end in stalemate!”

“If it does, we shall fight again. We represent Right. The enemy
represents Wrong. Don’t you ever forget that for a moment.”

“I don’t. I believe we are in the right, or I should never have joined
up.” When really moved, there came into Dormer’s grey inexpressive face
a queer light, that might have made the Germans pause, had they seen
it. He was a man of few theories, but he was literally ready to die
for those few, when they were attacked. He went on shyly: “But I don’t
believe in war as a permanent means of settling ‘disputes.’”

“Bravo!” cried Kavanagh. “I like you when you speak out. I only wish
you did more of it. You’re quite right, but what you don’t see is that
modern society is so rotten that it can only be kept alive by violent
purges, credit cycles, strikes, and wars. If it were not for such
drastic remedies people of the twentieth century would perish of ease
and comfort.”

“Come, ease and comfort never killed anyone.”

“Spiritually!”

“Oh, I don’t go in for spiritualism!” Dormer was saying, when his
servant brought him his tea. There was bread, that had rolled on the
floor of a lorry until it tasted of dust, oil, blood, and coal. There
was butter. There was marmalade. There was some cake they had sent him
from home. Leaning his elbows on the board on which they wrote, he
held his enamel mug in both hands and swilled his chlorinated-water,
condensed-milk tasting tea. For the first time, as he clasped the
mug and filled his gullet he was warm, hands, mouth, neck, stomach,
gradually all his being. He put the mug down nearly empty and shoved
the cake over to Kavanagh. “Have some?” he mumbled.

       *       *       *       *       *

They found themselves in a village of the Somme country, hardly
recognizable for the division that had come there for the offensive,
five months before. Just infantry, with the necessary services, without
artillery, or cavalry, they were billeted in barns and cottages up and
down a narrow valley, with cliff-like downs rising each side and a
shallow, rapid stream flowing between poplars and osier beds at the
bottom. Dormer was entrusted with the critical military operation of
organizing Football, Boxing and entertainment, and spent his time to
his great satisfaction, up and down the three miles of road that ran
through the Divisional Area, notebook in hand, listing the battalions
or companies as entering for one or another of these sports. He liked
it and it suited him.

Mildly interested in sport as such, what he liked about his job was
that it kept his feet warm and his mind employed, and he arranged so
that his daily journey ended sufficiently far from Head-quarters for
some hospitable unit to say, “Oh, stop and have lunch!” It would then
be a nice walk back, a quiet hour or so, getting the correspondence
into shape before the Colonel returned from the afternoon ride, by
which he shook down his lunch and made a place for his dinner. After
that would be tea, orders to sign and circulate, mess, a game of cards,
and another day would be done. He had long found out that the great art
of war lay not in killing Germans, but in killing time.

Over and over again, every day and all day, as he moved up and down
those wintry roads, he looked at the faces of the men who knew now
that the great offensive had resulted in infinitesimal gains, enormous
losses, and only approached the end of the War by so many weeks. He
failed entirely to make out what was going on in their minds. Officers
were always officially pleased to see him because he was attached to
Divisional Head-quarters, because he came to talk about games, not
about work, because he was, as he was perfectly conscious, one of the
most difficult fellows in the world to quarrel with. He had never had
any great bitterness in life, and was so averse to official “side”
that he made an effort to appear as informal as possible. Sometimes
N.C.O.’s would be produced, consulted as to whether a team could be got
together, what amount of special training could be allowed intending
pugilists, without interfering with necessary drills and fatigues, what
histrionic, (or to put it frankly), what music-hall talent could be
found. The N.C.O.’s were (of course) keen, smart, attentive, full of
suggestions and information. They had to be. They kept their jobs by
so being, and their jobs gave them just the opportunity to live about
as well as lumbermen in the remote parts of North America, instead of
existing like beasts in barns, not pet animals, not marketable produce,
but just beasts, herded and disposed of, counted and controlled, for
such was the fate of the average infantryman, and war being what it is,
there came a gradual acquiescence in it. It could be no other.

But all those plain soldiers, of whom only one or two per cent had even
a voice in their entertainment, of what they thought, who knows? Dormer
wondered. He wondered even more at himself. Why on earth, in the midst
of a European War that had changed his whole existence so dramatically,
he should want to go bothering his head about what was happening to
other people he couldn’t think, but he went on doing it. Otherwise the
life suited him rather well, and with every fresh week that separated
him from the offensive, a sort of balance so natural to the thoroughly
balanced sort of person that he was, went on adjusting itself, and he
found himself thinking that perhaps in the new year there might be a
new chance, the French, the Russians, the Italians might do something,
so might we. Then it would be over, and one could go home.

It was then that the inevitable happened. He knew it as soon as he got
into the room at the Mairie that served for Q. office. He was so sure
that he stood turning over the correspondence on his desk, the usual
pile of returns, orders, claims and indents, without reading them,
certain that the Colonel was going to speak to him. At last the Colonel
did speak:

“Look here, Dormer, I thought we settled this?”

There it was, the blue questionnaire form, the other memorandums,
Divisional, Corps, Army French Mission, Base Authority, all saying
“Passed to you please, for necessary action.” With an absurd feeling
that it did not matter what he said, or did, and that the whole thing
was arranging itself without him, he got out:

“What is that, sir?”

“This--er--civilian claim for compensation. Something about a girl in a
hayfield. What did you do, when we were up in Flanders?”

He rebelled so against the unfairness of it.

“Major Stevenage had the matter in hand. I went with him to the spot.”

“What did you find?”

“It was not what I--you--we thought, sir. The words ‘_La Vierge_’ were
intended to convey that a shrine had been damaged.”

“A shrine? Really. How odd the French are? It was accidental, was it?
Bad driving?”

“No, sir, not exactly. A driver wanted shelter for his mules----”

“Quite right, quite right.”

“So he broke into the shrine----”

“Ah, that was a mistake, of course. Whatever were his unit about to let
him?”

“The matter was not reported until later.”

“Then they placed him under arrest and stoppages?”

“They were moved immediately, sir. But I didn’t gather that any action
was taken.”

“But when Major Stevenage found it out?”

“It had happened so long before that he thought it was impossible
to pursue the matter. So I made a report and sent it to the proper
authority, to see if an ex. gratia payment could be made.”

“And they have done nothing, of course. So the French Mission have dug
it up again.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Yes. Oh, I can’t wade through all this. But I tell you what, young
Dormer. You’ve got yourself involved in this correspondence, and I
shouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t ever get out. I shouldn’t
really.”

“I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong, sir.”

“Can’t you? Well, it’s no good your telling the French Mission that,
I’m afraid. You might go and try to persuade them that there’s a
mistake, or an exaggeration, and get them to drop it. You’d better go
and see them anyhow. They’re at Flan! Take what’s-his-name with you.”

From this, Dormer, by long experience, understood that he was to go to
Army Head-quarters and to take the Divisional French Liaison Officer
with him. He neither liked nor disliked the job. It was the sort of
thing one had to do in war-time and he was used to it. So he went
down the little stony street to the pork-butcher’s, where, upon the
swing-gate that admitted one to the dank, greasy, appetizing interior,
where every sort of out-of-the-way portion of the pig lay cooked and
smelling “sentimental,” hung the placard “French Liaison Officer,” with
the number of the Division carefully smudged out. Here, blue-coated,
booted and spurred, sat the French Liaison Officer, innumerable small
printed sheets of instructions before him, carefully arranged on this
pile or on that, while in between lay the cardboard-covered _dossiers_.

Dormer’s immediate impression was: “Not enough to do. Passing the time
away,” but he had too much sympathy with such an attitude to say so. He
was greeted with effusion:

“My dear Dormer, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Dormer never liked effusion. He replied briefly:

“This,” and threw the papers on the table.

It amused him to watch the change in the other’s face from purely
official politeness to perfectly genuine determination to keep out of
it.

“Well, Dormer, you’ve heard of System D?”

He had to think whether it was Swedish gymnastics or a patent medicine.

“It means ‘_Debrouillez vous_,’ or ‘Don’t get mixed up with it.’ That
is my advice to you. In any case I shall leave it alone. It is a matter
of discipline purely.”

“Quite so.” Dormer did not care whether the sarcasm was obvious. “But
I have received orders to go and see your Chief at Army Head-quarters,
and to take you with me. I suppose you don’t mind going. It’ll be a
ride.”

“I shall be delighted. I will go and tell my servant to have my horse
round. I will introduce you to Colonel Lepage. He is a man of excellent
family.”

“I thought you would,” said Dormer to himself.

Accordingly, they rode together. The Frenchman rode with style, being
bound to show that he was of the class of officer who could ride, a
sharp demarcation in his army. Dormer rode as he did everything else.
He had learned it as part of his training, without enthusiasm, knowing
that a motor-byke was a far better way of getting about. But he was
careful of a horse as of anything else. They arrived at Flan. It was
another little stone-built village. The only difference he could see
between it and Louches, which they had just left, was that it stood on
the top of a hill, the other along the bottom of a valley.

Its present temporary occupants, however, he could soon see to be a
vastly different category. Every little house was placarded with the
signs or marks of the offices or messes it contained. Very-well-groomed
orderlies and signallers strolled or waited. Big cars and impeccable
riding horses were being held or standing. They found the French
Mission, got their horses held (instead of turning off the petrol, and
kicking down a stand, thought Dormer) and entered.

It was the little Picard parlour of some small _rentier_, who, having
sold beetroot to advantage during fifty years, found himself able at
last to fold his shirt-sleeved arms, and from his window, or often from
his doorway, to watch other people doing what he had done in the little
paved Place.

He, of course, had gone to Brittany, Bordeaux, the Riviera, to be out
of the sound of the guns that had killed his son, and his vacant place
had been scheduled by a careful Maire as available for billeting.
The French army, more impressed by orders, better trained, more
experienced, had carefully removed every picture, book, or cushion and
stored them in safety--where a British Mess would have left them--at
least until they were broken or disappeared. At small tables sat two
or three officers in azure, with three or more bars on the cuff.
Dendrecourt halted before one of these, clicked his heels, and saluted,
and asked if he might present the Captain Dormer, of the English Army.
Colonel Lepage rose with effusion, excessively English:

“My dear Dormer, charmed to meet you. Sit down. What can we do for you?”

“I have been sent to see you about a civilian claim for compensation.”

“_L’affaire Vanderlynde!_” put in Dendrecourt.

“Aha!” The Colonel tapped his blotting-pad with a paper knife, and
knitted his brows. “What have you to propose?”

“My General”--Dormer was sufficiently practised to avail himself of
that fiction--“wished me to explain that this matter has been fully
investigated.”

“Ah! so we may shortly expect to hear that the guilty individual has
been arrested?”

“Well, not exactly an arrest, sir. The whole affair rests upon a
mistake.”

“What sort of mistake?” The other officers gave up whatever they were
doing, and gathered round at the tone of the last question.

“Upon investigation, it appears that the claim is not for--er--personal
violence.”

“I should be obliged if you would define personal violence.”

“That would take us rather far afield, sir. All I want to point out
is that the expression ‘_La Vierge_’ does not refer to Mademoiselle
Vanderlynden, but to an image in a shrine.”

There was some beginnings of a titter and Dormer was conscious that
he was blushing violently. But Colonel Lepage quelled the others with
a look. He had the matter so well in hand that Dormer began slowly to
feel that he must be one of those political soldiers, whose every act
and speech is dictated by the necessities of some policy, hatched high
up among Foreign Offices and their ante-rooms, and worked out in detail
by underlings dealing with underlings. Moreover, Dormer was perfectly
conscious that he was a junior officer, and therefore a splendid
target. Colonel Lepage would not meet him that evening at Mess. He
resigned himself, and the Colonel drew a long breath, and let himself
go.

“Upon my word, it is all very fine for you others. We are much obliged
for the information as to the meaning of the word _Vierge_. And also
for being told that no arrest has been made and that no compensation
has been offered. Unfortunately the matter has gone a good deal
further than you suppose, and we have to furnish a report to a higher
authority, to the French War Office in fact. The matter is a most
serious one. The claim is for trespass upon private property not
demarcated for billeting under the law of 1873. You follow?”

Dormer held his peace. With the exception of the word demarcated, the
Colonel’s English was as good as his own and many times more voluble.
He contented himself with thinking “Cock--cock--cock--cock pheasant!”

“Then there is the actual damage to the fabric. You may not be aware
that such an object is held in great veneration by the owners, more
particularly in Flanders where they are very devout. But the most
serious thing of all was the treatment accorded to the Mayor when he
was--with the most perfect legality--called in by the claimant to take
official note of the damage. This functionary was grossly insulted
by the English troops and I regret to say that these occurrences are
far too frequent. Only last Easter at Bertezeele, the procession of
the Religious Festival was the object of laughter of the troops, who
may not be aware that the inhabitants attach great importance to such
matters, but who should be so instructed by their officers. And at
Leders-cappell only last week, the Mayor of that Commune also was
insulted in the middle of his official duties. These incidents are very
regrettable and must be checked. Therefore I regret to say that your
explanation is valueless. Perhaps you will be so good as to convey this
to your General?”

Dormer had a feeling that whatever he said would make no earthly
difference, so he merely muttered:

“Very good, sir,” and turned on his heel.

Walking their horses down the hill from Flan, Dendrecourt said:

“My word, he was in a state of mind, wasn’t he? our Colonel.”

Dormer had the clearest possible presentiment that the moment the door
closed upon them, the Colonel had said ‘Pan’ in imitation of a cork
being snapped into a bottle, and that all the rest of the officers had
laughed. So he said:

“What on earth is behind all this, Dendrecourt?”

“Why, nothing, except the dignity of France.”

“The whole job is only worth a pound or two. I’d have paid it out of my
own pocket rather than have all this about it.”

“Well, of course, you may have enough money to do it, but, my dear
Dormer, a few pounds in England is a good many francs in France, not
only in exchange value, but in sentiment. Then, no one likes having his
grandmother’s tomb broken into----”

“I suppose they will get over it, if they are paid enough money,”
rejoined Dormer, bitterly, for it was exactly what he had heard before.

“Certainly!” replied Dendrecourt, without noticing, “but it is most
unfortunate at this moment. There is a religious revival in France.
A new Commander-in-Chief and a new spirit, and these insults to the
religious sentiment are very trying. Then there is the insult to the
Mayor.”

“Oh, devil take the Mayor!”

The Frenchman shrugged. “The devil has taken all of us, my friend. We
are a sacrificed generation. You find the Mayor of Hondebecq annoying.
So do I. But not more than everything else. You would not like it if
French soldiers laughed at an English Mayor!”

“My dear Dendrecourt, in England a Mayor is somebody. Not an old
peasant dressed up in a top hat and an apron, all stars and stripes.”

“Well, here is lunch!” (He called it lernch.) “I will not join with
you, Dormer, in the game of slanging each other’s nationality.”

Dormer dismounted and handed over his horse, and went in to lunch,
walking wide in the legs and feeling a fool. The only pleasure he had
had was the male-game-bird appearance of Colonel Lepage.

Of course he said nothing about his morning’s work, and of course
Colonel Birchin had forgotten it. At the end of the week the Division
moved into the line and he had to go forward with that fellow Kavanagh
to check the workings of communications. They were “in” four weeks,
and came out in the great cold of January, 1917, and were moved up
near to Doullens. They had not been out a week before the Colonel sent
for him. He knew what it would be about, but the whole of his mind
being occupied with keeping warm, he did not care. They were in huts,
on a high plateau. White snow obliterated every colour, softened every
outline as far as the eye could reach, except where the road to Arras
lay black with its solid ice, the snow that the traffic had trodden
into water, refrozen into a long black band, scattered with cinders,
gravel, chalk, anything that made it negotiable.

Dormer looked at the collection of huts, with the obvious pathways
between, the obvious, inevitable collection of traffic, lorries
and limbers, motor-cycles and horses, that accumulated round any
Head-quarters. He wondered how long it would take the Bosche to
discover it in some air-photo and bomb it all to blazes. Inside Q.
office, in spite of two big stoves in the tiny box of a place, it
was so cold that every one breathed clouds of steam, and the three
officers, and the clerks, sat in their coats.

“Look here, Dormer!”--the Colonel sounded as though he had a personal
grievance--“just look what I’ve got from the army.”

It was an official memorandum, emanating from Army Head-quarters
and duly passed through the Corps to whom they had belonged, and by
Corps to the Division, inquiring what results had been arrived at in
the Vanderlynden affair, and whether it could not be reported to the
Minister of War that the matter had reached a satisfactory conclusion.

“I thought you settled all that, while we were at Louches?”

“Well, sir, I went to see them at Army Head-quarters and explained, or
tried to.”

“You don’t seem to have done any good at all. In fact it looks as
though you and Dendrecourt had a nice morning ride for nothing.”

“I couldn’t get a word in. It suited somebody’s politics to blackguard
us just then, and I left it at that. It didn’t seem any use arguing,
sir.”

“Well, this must be stopped somehow. We shall have the French War
Minister taking the matter up with Whitehall, directly, and a nice
figure we shall all cut. I’ve known men sent to Salonika or Mespot, as
company commanders, for less than this.”

“Very good, sir. What shall I do?”

“Get on with it. Find out who did the beastly damage, and straf him.
Straf somebody, anyhow, and bring the remains here in a bag. We can
show it to Corps, and they can write a sermon on the efficiency of the
Adjutant-General’s Department.”

“Yessir. If you refer to the correspondence you will see that the name
of the unit is mentioned.”

Dormer stood perfectly still, while his superior officer turned over
the closely written, printed or typed sheets. His face was carefully
veiled in official blankness. He had an idea.

“Well, here you are,” the Colonel was saying, “469 Trench Mortar
Battery. You’ll have to go and see ’em. You ought to have done so long
before!”

Dormer could not help adding, maliciously:

“Wouldn’t it be sufficient if I were to send ’em a chit, sir?”

“No, it wouldn’t. We’ve had quite enough of this procrastination. It’ll
land us all in a nice hole, if we’re not careful. You go and see them
and insist on getting to the bottom of it.”

“Yes, sir. The order of battle will give their position.”

“I’ll see to that. I’ll have it looked up and let you know in the
morning.”

“Yes, sir.” He went back to his hut, delighted.

Escape. Escape. Even the illusion of escape for a few hours, it must be
at least that, for if the 469 Trench Mortar Battery were in the same
Division, the same Corps even, he would have heard of them. They must
be at least a day’s journey away, and he would be able to get away from
the blasting and withering boredom for at least that. Colonel Birchin,
a regular, who had been on various Staff appointments since the very
early days, had no conception how personnel changed and units shifted,
and unless he (Dormer) were very much mistaken, it would be a jolly old
hunt. So much the better. He would have his mind off the War for a bit.

The reply came from Corps that, according to the order of battle, 469
Trench Mortar Battery was not in existence, but try Trench Mortar
School at Bertezeele. It was all one to Dormer. He might simply be
exchanging one cold hut for another, he might travel by rail and lorry
instead of on horse or foot. But at any rate it would be a different
hut that he was cold in and a different mode of conveyance that
jolted him, and that was something, one must not be too particular in
war-time. So he jumped on a lorry that took him into Doullens and at
Doullens he took train and went through Abbeville and the endless dumps
and camps by the sea, up to Étaples, where the dumps and camps, the
enormous reinforcement depôts and mile-long hospitals stretched beside
the line almost into Boulogne, where was a little pocket, as it were,
of French civilian life, going on undisturbed amid the general swamping
of French by English, on that coast, and of civilian life by military.
Here he got a meal and changed and went off again up the hill, past
Marquise, and down a long hill to Calais, in the dark, and then on,
in the flat, where the country smelled different from the Somme, and
where the people spoke differently and the names of the stations
sounded English, and where there were French and Belgian police on the
platforms.

He slept and woke at St. Omer, and slept again and woke to find all
the lights out and a general scurry and scatteration, with the drone
of aeroplanes and the continual pop-popping of anti-aircraft fire.
Then came the shrieking whirr and sharp crash of the first bomb, with
its echo of tinkling glass, barking of dogs, and rumour of frightened
humanity.

Like most people accustomed to the line, Dormer regarded the bombing of
back billets as a spectacle rather than as one of the serious parts of
warfare, and got out to stroll about the platform with officers going
up as reinforcements. They exchanged cigarettes and news and hardly
stopped to laugh at the horrified whisper of the R.T.O., “Don’t light
matches here!” It was soon over, like all bombing. If you were hit
you were hit, but if you weren’t hit in the first minute or two, you
wouldn’t be, because no plane could stay circling up there for very
long, and the bomber was always more frightened than you were. Then
the train moved on, and Dormer could feel on each side of him again
the real camp life of units just behind the line, mule standings, gun
parks, and tents and huts of infantry, and services. It was midnight
before he got out at Bailleul. He had left the camp on the Arras road
in the morning, had made a great loop on the map and reached a railhead
as near the line as he had been twenty-four hours before. He stumbled
up the stony street to the Officers’ Rest House, drank some cocoa out
of a mug and fell asleep, his head on his valise.

In the morning he got a lift out to Bertezeele, and found the Trench
Mortar School. He reflected that it would really be more correct to
say that he took a lift to the Trench Mortar School, and incidentally
touched the village of Bertezeele. For the fact was that the English
population of the parish exceeded the French native one. Men of all
sorts and conditions from every unit known to the Army List (and a
good many that had never graced the pages of that swollen periodical)
were drawn into this new device for improved killing. Dormer himself,
one of those who, since the elementary home camp training of 1915,
had been in or just behind the trenches, wondered at the complicated
ramifications with which the War was running. Apparently those curious
little brass instruments, the bane of his life as an infantry platoon
commander, which used to come up behind his line and there, while
totally ineffective in the vital matter of beating the Germans, were
just sufficiently annoying to make those methodical enemies take great
pains to rob him of his food and sleep for many ensuing days, were all
done away with.

Stokes, whoever he was, but he was certainly a genius, had effected a
revolution. Owing to him, neat tubes, like enlarged pencil-guards, with
a nail inside the blind end, upon which the cap-end of the cartridge
automatically fell, were being used, as a hosier might say, in all
sizes from youths’ to large men’s. Stokes was branded with genius,
because his invention combined the two essentials--simplicity with
certainty. He had brought the blunderbuss up to date.

What else were these short-range, muzzle-loading, old-iron scattering
devices? Just blunderbusses. History was not merely repeating itself.
As the War went on it was moving backwards. Tin helmets of the days of
Cromwell, bludgeons such as Cœur de Lion used upon Saladin, and for
mere modernity, grenades like the original British Grenadiers of the
song. He had never had any head for poetry, but he could remember some
of the stuff Kavanagh had sung in the dug-out. Not tow-row-row. That
was the chorus. Ah! he remembered.

  “Our leaders march with fusees,
  And we with hand-grenades,
  We throw them from the glacis
  About the enemy’s ears.
  With a tow-row-row,” etc.

Well, now we didn’t. If we had grenades we carried them in aprons,
like a market woman, with a skirt full of apples. And if we had
a blunderbuss, like the guard of the coach in the “Pickwick
Papers,” we kept it, and all the ironmongery that belonged to it,
on a hand-barrow, and pushed it in front of us like fish-hawkers
on a Saturday night. What a War! Kavanagh was quite right of
course. There was neither decency nor dignity left in it.
Wouldn’t do to admit that though! And putting on his very best
“Good-mornin’-Sah-I-have-been-sent-by-Divisional-Head-quarters”
expression, he asked his way to the “office” as they were beginning
to call the orderly room in most detachments, and inquired for 469
Battery. Yes. They were to be seen. Orderly room, as a Corps formation,
was distant and slightly patronizing, but the information was correct.
He could see the Officer commanding the battery. Certainly he could,
as soon as morning practice was over. That would do. He made himself
as inconspicuous as possible until he saw the various parties being
“fallen in” on the range, and heard the uncanny ear-tickling silence
that succeeded the ceaseless pop-pop of practice and then drifted
casually into the wooden-chair-and-table furnished ante-room, where the
month-old English magazines gave one a tremulous home-sickness, and
men who had been mildly occupied all the morning were drinking all the
vermouth or whisky they could, in the fear of being bored to the point
of mutiny in the afternoon.

There was, of course, the usual springtime curiosity as to what the
year might bring forth, for every one always hoped against hope that
the next offensive would really be the last. An orderly wandering
among the tables appeared to be looking for him, and he found himself
summoned before the Officer commanding the School.

Although his appointment was new, Colonel Burgess was of the oldest
type of soldier, the sort who tell the other fellows how to do it.
The particular sort of war in which he found himself suited him
exactly. He had the true Indian view of life, drill, breakfast, less
drill, lunch, siesta, sport, dinner, cards. So he ruled the mess
cook with a rod of iron, took disciplinary action if the stones that
lined the path leading to the door of the ante-room and office were
not properly white, and left the technical side of the business to
Sergeant-instructors who, having recently escaped from the trenches,
were really keen on it.

He received Dormer with that mixture of flattery due to anyone from
Divisional Head-quarters and suspicion naturally aroused as to what
he (Dormer) might be after. He was annoyed that he had not heard of
Dormer’s arrival, and hastened to add:

“Not a very full parade this morning, units come and go, y’know. We can
never be quite sure what we are going to get! What did you think of our
show?”

Dormer realized that the old gentleman was under the impression he was
being spied on:

“I really didn’t notice, sir. I have been sent to see the Officer
commanding 469 Trench Mortar Battery. Matter of discipline arising out
of a claim for compensation.”

“Oh, ah! Yes indeed. Certainly. See him now. Sergeant Innes!”

The efficient Scotch Sergeant to be found in all such places appeared
from the outer office.

“Have we anyone here from 469 T.M.B.?”

The officer required was duly produced, and the Colonel retired to the
Mess, leaving them together. Dormer sized up this fellow with whom
he was thus brought into momentary contact. This became by necessity
almost a fine art, during years of war. Dormer was fairly proficient.
The fellow opposite to him was of the same sort as himself. Probably in
insurance or stockbroking, not quite the examination look of the Civil
Service, not the dead certainty of banking. He had obviously enlisted,
been gradually squeezed up to the point of a Commission, had had his
months in the line and had taken to Trench Mortars because they offered
the feeling of really doing something, together with slightly improved
conditions (hand-carts could be made to hold more food, drink and
blankets than mere packs) and was getting along as well as he could. He
heard what Dormer wanted and his face cleared.

“Why, that’s last April. I couldn’t tell you anything about that. I was
in Egypt!”

“You don’t know of any officer in your unit who could give some
information about the occurrence?”

“No. There’s only young Sands, beside myself. He couldn’t have been
there.”

“Some N.C.O. then?”

“Heavens, man, where d’you think we’ve been? All the N.C.O.’s are new
since I was with the crowd!”

“But surely there must be some record of men who were with your unit?”

“Well, of course, the pay rolls go back to Base somewhere. But I
suppose you can pick the name and number up from the conduct sheet.”

“You see, I don’t know the man’s name. His number was given as 6494.”

“That’s a joke, of course. It’s the number that the cooks sing out,
when we hold the last Sick Parade, before going up the line.”

“Of course it is. You’re right. I ought to have remembered that, but
I’ve been away from my regiment for some time.” Dormer pondered a
moment, relieved. Then the thought of going back to the Q. office with
nothing settled, and the queries of the French Mission and the whole
beastly affair hanging over his head, drove him on again. He made his
air a little heavier, more Divisional, less friendly.

“Well, I’m afraid this won’t do, you know. This matter has got to be
cleared up. It will be very awkward if I have to go back and inform
Head-quarters that you can’t furnish any information. In fact, they
will probably think it’s a case of not wanting to know, and make a
regular Court of Inquiry of it.”

He watched the face of the other, and saw in a moment how well he had
calculated. The fellow was frightened. A mere unit commander, and a
small unit at that! To such a one, of course, Divisional Head-quarters
were something pretty near omniscient, certainly omnipotent. Dormer
watched the fellow shift in the chair without a qualm. Let some one
else be worried too. He himself had had worry enough. The face before
him darkened, smirked deferentially, and then brightened.

“Oh, there was old Chirnside. He might know.”

“Who was he?”

“Chirnside? He was a sort of a quarter bloke. It was before we were
properly formed, and he used to look after all our stores and orderly
room business. He had been with the battery since its formation. We
were just anybody, got together anyhow, chiefly from the infantry, you
remember?”

Dormer saw the other glance at his shoulder straps and just refrain
from calling him sir, poor wretch. He took down the information and
thanked his friend. Chirnside had apparently gone to some stunt Corps,
to do something about equipment. That was all right. He wouldn’t be
killed.

Having got thus far, Dormer felt that he had done a good deal, and
went to take his leave of Colonel Burgess. But he soon found that he
was not to be allowed to get away like that. He was bidden to stay to
lunch. There was no train from Bailleul until the evening and he was
willing enough. The lunch was good. Food remained one of the things in
which one could take an interest. He did so. After lunch the Colonel
took him for a walk over the golf course. This was the margin of
land around the range, on which no cultivation was allowed, and from
which civilians were rigidly excluded, for safety’s sake. At least
during range practice, which took place every day more or less, in
the morning. After that, of course, they could be without difficulty
excluded for the remainder of the day for a different, if not for so
laudable a purpose.

The Colonel was a fine example of those qualities which have made
an island Empire what it is. Having spent most of his life from
sixteen years old at Sandhurst, then in India or Egypt, and finally
at Eastbourne, he knew better than most men how to impose those
institutions which he and his sort considered the only ones that
made civilization possible, in the most unlikely places and upon the
most disinclined of people. Dormer had seen it being done before,
but marvelled more and more. Just as the Colonel, backed of course
by a sufficient number of his like, and the right sort of faithful
underling, had introduced tennis into India, duck-shooting into Egypt,
and exclusiveness into Eastbourne, against every condition of climate
or geographical position, native religion or custom, so now he had
introduced golf into Flanders, and that in the height of a European War.

At the topmost point of the golf course, the Colonel stopped, and began
to point out the beauties of the spot to Dormer. They were standing on
one of those low gravelly hills that separate the valley of the Yser
from that of the Lys. Northward, beyond Poperinghe, was a yet lower
and greener ridge that shelved away out of sight toward Dunkirk. East
lay Ypres, in an endless rumour of war. Southward, the Spanish towers
of Bailleul showed where the road wound towards Lille, by Armentières.
Westward, Cassel rose above those hillocks and plains, among the most
fertile in the world. But the Colonel was most concerned with a big
square old farmhouse, that lay amid its barns and meadows, at a crook
in the Bailleul road.

The Colonel’s eyes took on a brighter blue and his moustache puffed out
like fine white smoke.

“I had a lot of trouble with that fellow.” He pointed to the farm.
“Wanted to come and cultivate the range. I had to get an interpreter to
see him. Said he could grow--er--vegetables in between the shell-holes.
At last we had to order afternoon practice to keep him off. Then he
wanted this part of the land. Had to move the guns up and make some new
bunkers. Four rounds makes a bunker, y’know. Come and have tea?”

It was very nice weather for walking, dry and clear. The Mess had
seemed tolerable at lunch, but Dormer had not been long at tea before
he recollected what he seldom forgot for more than an hour or so,
that it was not tea, one of the fixed occasions of his safe and
comfortable life. It was a meal taken under all the exigencies of a
campaign--chlorinated water, condensed milk, army chair, boots and
puttees on one, and on this particular afternoon a temperature below
zero, in an army hut.

The Colonel, of course, occupied the place of warmth next the stove.
The remainder of the Mess got as near to it as they could. The result
was, that when the Colonel began to question him as to the object of
his visit, and how he had progressed towards attaining it, everybody
necessarily heard the whole of the conversation. He now realized
that he was telling the tale for the fourth time. He had told it to
Kavanagh, then to Colonel Birchin. Now he had told it to the Officer
commanding 469 T.M.B. and finally here he was going over it again.
He resented it as a mere nuisance, but was far from seeing at that
moment the true implication of what he was doing. The matter was not a
State secret. It was an ordinary piece of routine discipline, slightly
swollen by its reactions in the French Mission, and by the enormous
size and length of the War.

If he had refused to say why he was there the Colonel would certainly
have put him down as having been sent by the Division, or some one
even higher, to spy on the activities of the School. He didn’t want to
be labelled as that, so told what he knew glibly enough. The Colonel
waxed very voluble over it, gave good advice that was no earthly use,
and dwelt at length on various aspects of the case. The French were
grasping and difficult and superstitious, but on the other hand,
drivers were a rough lot and must be kept in check. They were always
doing damage. The fellow was quite right of course to look after his
mules. The animals were in a shocking state, etc., etc., but quite
wrong, of course, to damage civilian property, tradition of the British
Army, since Wellington all the other way, the French naturally expected
proper treatment, etc., etc.

Dormer had heard it all before, from Colonel Birchin, Major Stevenage
and others, with exactly the same well-meant condescension, and the
same grotesque ineffectiveness. This old Colonel, like all his sort,
couldn’t solve the difficulty nor shut the French up, nor appease G.H.Q.

Presently, the old man went off to the orderly room to sign the day’s
correspondence, the Mess thinned and Dormer dozed discreetly, he had
had a poor night and was desperately sleepy. Some one came to wake him
up and offered him a wash, and he was glad to move, stiff with cold,
and only anxious to pass the time until he could get the midnight train
from Bailleul. They were very hospitable, made much of him at dinner,
and he ate and drank all he could get, being ravenous and hoping to
sleep through the discomforts of the long train journey in the dark. He
was getting fairly cheerful by the time the Colonel left the hut, and
only became conscious, in the intervals of a learned and interesting
discussion of the relative theories of wire-cutting, that a “rag” was
in progress at the other end of the room.

A gunner officer, a young and happy boy who was still in the stage of
thinking the War the greatest fun out, was holding a mock Court of
Inquiry. Gradually, the “rag” got the better of the argument and Dormer
found himself being addressed as “Gentlemen of the jury.” A target
frame was brought in by some one to act as a witness-box, but the
gunner genius who presided, soon had it erected into a sort of Punch
and Judy Proscenium. Then only did it dawn on Dormer that the play was
not Punch and Judy. It was the Mayor of Hondebecq being derided by
the troops, with a Scotch officer in a kilt impersonating Madeleine
Vanderlynden, and receiving with the greatest equanimity, various
suggestions that ranged from the feebly funny to the strongly obscene.
O.C. 469 T.M.B. found a willing column formed behind him which he had
to lead round the table, an infantryman brought a wastepaper basket to
make the Mayor’s top hat, and in the midst of other improvisations,
Dormer discovered the gunner standing in front of him with a mock
salute.

“Do you mind coming out of the Jury and taking your proper part?”

It was cheek, of course, but Dormer was not wearing red tabs, and
beside, what was the use of standing on one’s dignity. He asked:

“What part do I play?”

“You’re Jack Ketch. You come on in the fourth Act, and land Nobby one
on the nob!”

“I see. What are you?”

“Me? I’m the Devil. Watch me devilling,” and with a long map-roller he
caught the players in turn resounding cracks upon their several heads.

They turned on him with common consent, and in the resulting struggle,
the table broke and subsided with the whole company in an ignominious
mass. The dust rose between the grey canvas-covered walls and the tin
suspension lamp rocked like that of a ship at sea. Everybody picked
themselves up, slightly sobered, and began to discuss how to get the
damage repaired before the Colonel saw it in the morning.

O.C. 469 T.M.B. stood at Dormer’s elbow:

“We’ve just got time to catch your train.”

“Come on.” Dormer had no intention of being marooned in this place
another day. Outside a cycle and side-car stood panting. Dormer did
wonder as they whizzed down the rutted road how long such a vehicle had
been upon the strength of a Trench Mortar School, but after all, could
you blame fellows? They were existing under War conditions, what more
could one ask?

       *       *       *       *       *

He woke to the slow jolting of the train as it slowed up in smoky
twilight at Boulogne. He bought some food, and sitting with it in his
hands and his thermos between his knees, he watched the grey Picard
day strengthen over those endless camps and hospitals, dumps and
training grounds.

He was retracing his steps of the day before, but he was a step farther
on. As he looked at the hundreds of thousands of khaki-clad figures,
he realized something of what he had to do. With no name or number he
had to find one of them, who could be proved to have been at a certain
place a year ago. He didn’t want to, but if he didn’t, would he ever
get rid of the business?

The “rag” of the previous evening stuck in his head. How true it
was. The man who did the thing was “Nobby” with the number 6494 that
was beginning to be folk-lore. Of course he was. He was any or every
soldier. Madeleine Vanderlynden was the heroine. O.C. 469 T.M.B. was
the hero. The Mayor of Hondebecq was the comic relief, and he, Dormer,
was the villain. He was indeed Jack Ketch, the spoiler of the fun,
the impotent figure-head of detested “Justice,” or “Law and Order.”
And finally, as in all properly conducted Punch and Judy shows, the
Devil came and took the lot. What had Dendrecourt said: “The Devil had
taken the whole generation.” Well, it was all in the play. And when he
realized this, as he slid on from Étaples down to Abbeville, he began
to feel it was not he who was pursuing some unknown soldier in all that
nation-in-arms that had grown from the British Expeditionary Force,
but the Army--no, the War--that was pursuing him.

When he got out at Doullens, and scrounged a lift from a passing car,
he found himself looking at the driver, at the endless transport on
either side of the road, at the sentry on guard over the parked heavies
in the yard of the jam factory, at the military policeman at the
cross-roads. One or other of all these hundreds of thousands knew all
about the beastly business that was engaging more and more of his mind.
One or other of them could point to the man who was wanted.

He found himself furtively examining their faces, prepared for covert
ridicule and suspicion, open ignorance or stupidity. He had, by now,
travelled a long way from the first feelings he had about the affair,
when he had thought of the perpetrator of the damage at Vanderlynden’s
as a poor devil to be screened if possible. He wouldn’t screen him now.
This was the effect of the new possibility that had arisen. He, Dormer,
did not intend to be ridiculous.

On reaching the Head-quarters of the Division, he found the War in full
progress. That is to say, every one was standing about, waiting to do
something. Dormer had long discovered that this was war. Enlisting as
he had done at the outbreak of hostilities, with no actual experience
of what such a set of conditions could possibly be like, he had then
assumed that he was in for a brief and bitter period of physical
discomfort and danger, culminating quite possibly in death, but quite
certainly in a decisive victory for the Allies within a few months.
He had graduated in long pedestrian progress of Home Training, always
expecting it to cease one fine morning. It did. He and others were
ordered to France. With incredible slowness and difficulty they found
the battalion to which they were posted. Now for it, he had thought,
and soon found himself involved in a routine, dirtier and more
dangerous, but as unmistakably a routine as that in which he had been
involved at home.

He actually distinguished himself at it, by his thoroughness and
care, and came to be the person to whom jobs were given! Thus had he
eventually, after a twelvemonth, found another false end to the endless
waiting. He was sent to help the Q. office of Divisional Staff. He had
felt himself to be of considerable importance, a person who really was
winning the War. But in a few weeks he was as disabused as ever. It was
only the same thing. Clerking in uniform, with no definite hours, a few
privileges of food and housing, but no nearer sight of the end of it.
The Somme had found him bitterly disillusioned. And yet even now, after
being two days away from the Head-quarters where his lot was cast, he
was dumbfounded afresh to find everything going on just as he had left
it.

They were all waiting now for orders to go into a back area and be
trained. For, as sure as the snowdrop appeared, there sprang up in the
hearts of men a pathetic eternal hopefulness. Perhaps nothing more than
a vernal effusion, yet there it was, and as Dormer reported to Colonel
Birchin, in came the messenger they had all been expecting, ordering
them, not forward into the line, but backward to Authun, for training.
It was some time before he could get attention, and when he did, it
seemed both to him and to the Colonel that the affair had lessened in
importance.

“You’ve asked 3rd Eccleton to give you the posting of this Chirnside?”

“Yessir!”

“Very well. That’s all you can do for the moment. Now I want you to see
that everything is cleared up in the three Infantry Brigade camps, and
don’t let us have the sort of chits afterwards that we got at Lumbres,
etc.”

So the Vanderlynden affair receded into the background, and Dormer
found before his eyes once more that everlasting mud-coloured
procession, men, men, limbers, cookers, men, lorries, guns, limbers,
men.

He looked at it this time with different eyes. His Division was
one-fiftieth part of the British Army in France. It took over a day
to get on the move, it occupied miles of road, absorbed train-loads
of supplies, and would take two days to go thirty miles. The whole
affair was so huge, that the individual man was reduced and reduced
in importance until he went clean out of sight. This fellow he was
pursuing, or Chirnside, or anyone who could have given any useful
information about the Vanderlynden claim, might be in any one of those
cigarette-smoking, slow-moving columns, on any of those springless
vehicles, or beside any of those mules.

He gazed at the faces of the men as they streamed past him, every
county badge on their caps, every dialect known to England on their
lips, probably the best natured and easiest to manage of any of the
dozen or so national armies engaged in the War. He was realizing deeply
the difficulty of discovering that particular “Nobby” who had broken
the front of the shrine at Vanderlynden’s. It was just the thing any of
them would do. How many times had he noticed their curious tenderness
for uncouth animals, stray dogs or cats, even moles or hedgehogs, and
above all the brazen, malevolent army mule. He was no fancier of any
sort of beast, and the mule as used in France he had long realized to
have two virtues and two only--cheapness and durability. You couldn’t
kill them, but if you did, it was easy to get more. He had been, for
a long while now, a harassed officer, busy shifting quantities of war
material, human, animal, or inanimate, from one place to another, and
had come to regard mules as so much movable war stores. Added to the
fact that he was no fancier, this had prevented him from feeling any
affection for the motive power of first-line transport. But he was
conscious enough that it was not so with the men--the “other ranks”
as they were denominated in all those innumerable parade states and
nominal rolls with which he spent his days in dealing.

No, what the fellow had done was what most drivers would do. That queer
feeling about animals was the primary cause of the whole affair. Then,
balancing it, was the natural carelessness about such an object as a
shrine--this same brown-clothed nation that defiled before him, he knew
them well. As a churchwarden, he knew that not ten per cent of them
went inside a place of worship more than three or four times in the
whole of their lives. Baptism for some, marriage for a good proportion,
an occasional assistance at the first or last rite of some relative,
finally, the cemetery chapel, that was the extent of their church-going.

A small number, chiefly from the North or from Ireland, might be
Catholics, but also from the north of Ireland was an equal number of
violent anti-Catholics, and it was to this latter section that he
judged the perpetrator of the outrage to belong. No, they would see
nothing, or at best something to despise, in that little memorial
altar, hardly more than an enlarged tombstone, in the corner of a
Flemish pasture. It was strange if not detestable, it was foreign; they
never saw their own gravestones, seldom those of any relative. He
sympathized with them in that ultra-English sentimentality, that cannot
bear to admit frankly the frail briefness of human life. And so the
thing had happened, any of them might have done it, most of them would
do it, under similar circumstances.

The tail of the last column wound out of B camp, the N.C.O. he took
with him on these occasions was reporting all clear, and might he hand
over to the advance party of the incoming Division. Dormer gave him
exact orders as to what to hand over and obtain a signature for, and
where to find him next, for he did not believe in allowing an N.C.O.
any scope for imagination, if by any possibility such a faculty might
have survived in him.

The weather had broken, and he jogged along in the mud to C camp and
found it already vacated, but no advance party ready to take over, and
resigned himself to the usual wait. He waited and he waited. Of course,
he wasn’t absolutely forced to do so. He might have left his N.C.O.
and party to hand over. He might have cleared them off and left the
incoming Division to shift for itself. That had been done many a time
in his experience. How often, as a platoon commander, had he marched
and marched, glancing over his shoulder at tired men only too ready to
drop out, marched and marched until at length by map square and horse
sense, and general oh-let’s-get-in-here-and-keep-any-one-else-out, he
had found such a camp, a few tents subsiding in the mud, a desolate hut
or two, abandoned and unswept, places which disgusted him more than any
mere trench or dug-out, because they were places that people had lived
in and left unclean.

He had never experienced such a thing before he came into the army.
His nice middle-class upbringing had never allowed him to suspect that
such places existed. And now that he was Captain Dormer, attached H.Q.
Nth Division, he endeavoured to see that they did not. So he hung about
intending to see the thing done properly. He got no encouragement. He
knew that when he got back to the Division Colonel Birchin would simply
find him something else to do, and the fact that no complaints followed
them, and that the incoming Division had a better time than they would
otherwise have had, would be swallowed up in the hasty expedience of
the War. Still, he did it, because he liked to feel that the job was
being properly done. To this he had been brought up, and he was not
going to change in war-time.

As he hung about the empty hut, he had plenty of time for reflection.
His feet were cold. When would he get leave? What a nuisance if these
d----d people who were relieving him didn’t turn up until it was dark.
The February day was waning. Ah, here they were. He roused himself from
the despondent quiescence of a moment ago, into a crisp authoritative
person from Divisional Head-quarters. Never was a camp handed over more
promptly. He let his N.C.O. and men rattle off in the limber they had
provided themselves with. He waited for a car. There was bound to be
no difficulty in getting a lift into Doullens, and if he did not find
one immediately there, he would soon get a railway voucher. As he stood
in the gathering dusk his ruminations went on. If it were not for the
War, he would be going home to tea, real proper tea, no chlorine in
the water, milk out of a cow, not out of a tin, tea-cakes, some small
savoury if he fancied it, his sister with whom he lived believing in
the doctrine. “Feed the beast!” After that, he would have the choice of
the Choral Society or generally some lecture or other. At times there
was something on at the local theatre, at others he had Vestry or Trust
meetings to attend. Such employments made a fitting termination to a
day which he had always felt to be well filled at a good, safe, and
continuous job, that would go on until he reached a certain age, when
it culminated in a pension, a job that was worth doing, that he could
do, and that the public appreciated.

Instead of all this, here he was, standing beside a desolate Picard
highway, hoping that he might find his allotted hut in time to wash
in a canvas bucket, eat at a trestle table and finally, having taken
as much whisky as would wash down the food, and help him to become
superior to his immediate circumstances, to play bridge with those
other people whom he was polite to, because he had to be, but towards
whom he felt no great inclination, and whom he would drop without a
sigh the moment he was demobbed.

Ah! Here was the sort of car. He stepped into the road and held up his
hand. The car stopped with a crunch and a splutter. They were going
as far as Bernaville. That would suit him well. He jammed into the
back seat between two other people, mackintoshed and goggled, and the
car got under way again. Then he made the usual remarks and answered
the usual inquiries, taking care to admit nothing, and to let his
Divisional weight be felt. Finally he got down at a place where he
could get a lorry lift to H.Q.

His servant had laid out some clean clothes in the Armstrong hut. For
that he was thankful.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Division now proceeded to train for the coming offensive.
“Cultivators” had been warned off a large tract of land, which was
partly devoted to “Schools,” at which were taught various superlative
methods of slaughter, partly to full-dress manœuvres over country which
resembled in physical features the portion of the German line to be
attacked. The natural result was that if any area larger than a tennis
court was left vacant, the “cultivators” rushed back and began to
cultivate it. Hence arose disputes between the peasants and the troops,
and the General commanding the 556 Brigade had his bridle seized by an
infuriated female who wanted to know, in English, why he couldn’t keep
off her beans.

The matter was reported to G. office of Divisional Head-quarters,
who told the A.P.M., who told the French Liaison Officer, who told
an Interpreter, who told the “cultivators” to keep off the ground
altogether, whether it were in use or not. In revenge for which
conduct the “cultivators” fetched the nearest gendarme, and had the
Interpreter arrested as a spy, and tilled the land so that the C.R.A.
Corps couldn’t find the dummy trenches he was supposed to have been
bombarding, because they had all been filled up and planted. So
that he reported the matter to Corps, who sat heavily on Divisional
Head-quarters, G. office, for not keeping the ground clear. The A.P.M.
and French Mission having been tried and failed, Q. office had the
brilliant idea of “lending” Dormer to G., upon the well-tried army
principle that a man does a job, not because he is fit, but because he
is not required elsewhere.

So Dormer patrolled the manœuvre area, mounted on the horses of senior
officers, who were too busy to ride them. He did not object. It kept
him from thinking. He was, by now, well acquainted with manœuvre areas,
from near Dunkirk to below Amiens. It was the same old tale. First the
various schools. The Bombing Instructor began with a short speech:

“It is now generally admitted that the hand-grenade is the weapon with
which you are going to win this War!”

The following day in the bayonet-fighting pitch, the instructor in that
arm began:

“This is the most historic weapon in the hands of the British Army. It
still remains the decisive factor on the field!”

And the day following, on the range, the Musketry expert informed the
squad:

“Statistics show that the largest proportion of the casualties
inflicted on the enemy are bullet wounds.”

Dormer was not unkind enough to interrupt. He did not blame those
instructors. Having, by desperately hard work, obtained their
positions, they were naturally anxious to keep them. But his new
insight and preoccupation, born of the Vanderlynden affair, made him
study the faces of the listening squads intently. No psychologist, he
could make nothing of them. Blank, utterly bored in the main, here and
there he caught sight of one horrified, or one peculiarly vindictive.
The main impression he received was of the sheer number of those
passive listening faces, compared with the fewness of the N.C.O.’s and
instructors. So long as they were quiescent, all very well. But if that
dormant mass came to life, some day, if that immense immobility once
moved, got under way, where would it stop?

It was the same with the full-dress manœuvres. Dormer had never been
taken up with the honour and glory of war. He was going through with
this soldiering, which had been rather thrust upon him, for the plain
reason that he wanted to get to the end of it. He considered that he
had contracted to defeat the Germans just as, if he had been an iron
firm, he might have contracted to make girders, or if he had been the
Post Office, he would have contracted to deliver letters. And now that
he watched the final processes of the job, he became more than ever
aware that the goods would not be up to sample. How could they be? Here
were men being taught to attack, with the principal condition of attack
wanting. The principal condition of an attack was that the other fellow
hit you back as hard as he could. Here there was no one hitting you
back. He wondered if all these silent and extraordinarily docile human
beings in the ranks would see that some day. He looked keenly at their
faces. Mask, mask; mule-like stupidity, too simple to need a mask;
mask and mask again; one with blank horror written on it, one with a
devilish lurking cunning, as if there might be something to be made out
of all this some day; then more masks.

He wondered, but he did not wonder too unhappily. He was beginning
to feel very well. Away from the line, the hours were more regular,
the food somewhat better, the horse exercise did him good. There was
another reason which Dormer, no reader of poetry, failed altogether
to appreciate. Spring had come. Furtive and slow, the Spring of the
shores of the grey North Sea came stealing across those hard-featured
downs and rich valleys. Tree and bush, blackened and wind-bitten, were
suddenly visited with a slender effusion of green, almost transparent,
looking stiff and ill-assorted, as though Nature were experimenting.

Along all those ways where men marched to slaughter, the magic
footsteps preceded them, as though they had been engaged in some
beneficent work, or some joyful festival. To Dormer the moment was
poignant but for other reasons. It was the moment when the culminating
point of the Football Season marked the impending truce in that game.
He did not play cricket. It was too expensive and too slow. In summer
he sailed a small boat on his native waters. Instead, he was going to
be involved in another offensive.

The Division left the manœuvre area and went up through Arras. Of
course, the weather broke on the very eve of the “show.” That had
become almost a matter of routine, like the shelling, the stupendous
activities of railways and aeroplanes, the everlasting telephoning.
Again Dormer saw going past him endlessly, that stream of men and
mules, mules and men, sandwiched in between every conceivable vehicle,
from tanks to stretchers. When, after what communiqués described as
“continued progress” and “considerable artillery activity,” it had to
be admitted that this offensive, like all other offensives, had come to
a dead stop, Dormer was not astonished. For one thing, he knew, what
no communiqué told, what had stopped it. The Germans? No, capable and
determined as they were. The thing which stopped it was Mud. Nothing
else. The shell-fire had been so perfect, that the equally perfect and
necessarily complicated preparations for going a few hundred yards
farther, could not be made. The first advance was miles. The next
hundreds of yards. The next a hundred yards.

Then the Bosche got some back. Then everything had to be moved up to
make quite certain of advancing miles again. And it couldn’t be done.
There was no longer sufficient firm ground to bear the tons of iron
that alone could help frail humanity to surmount such efforts.

For another thing, he could not be astonished. For weeks he worked
eighteen hours a day, ate what he could, slept when he couldn’t
help it. Astonishment was no longer in him. But one bit of his mind
remained, untrammelled by the great machine of which he formed an
insignificant part. It was a bit of subconsciousness that was always
listening for something, just as, under long-range, heavy-calibre
bombardment, one listened and listened for the next shell. But the
particular detached bit of Dormer was listening and listening for
something else. Watching and watching, too, all those faces under tin
helmets, and just above gas-mask wallets, all so alike under those
conditions that it seemed as difficult to pick out one man from another
as one mule from another. Listening for one man to say “I am the one!”
to be able to see him, and know that at last he had got rid of that job
at Vanderlynden’s. But nothing happened. It was always just going to
happen.

At length the Division moved right up into the coal-fields and sat down
by a slag heap near Béthune. Then Colonel Birchin called to him one
morning across the office: “I say, Dormer, I’ve got the whereabouts of
that fellow Chirnside. He’s near Rheims. You’ll have to go.”

Dormer went. For two whole days he travelled across civilian France.
France of the small farm, the small town, and the small villa. Far
beyond the zone of the English Army, far beyond the zone of any army,
he passed by Creil to Paris, and from Paris on again into a country of
vine-clad hills above a river. He was in a part where he had never been
as a soldier, never gone for one of those brief holidays to Switzerland
he had sometimes taken. It caused him much amusement to think of the
regular Calais--Bâle express of pre-War days. If they would only run
that train now, how it would have to zig-zag over trenches, and lines
of communication.

He entered the zone of a French Army. On all sides, in the towns and
villages, in the camps and manœuvre areas, he saw blue-coated men, and
stared at them, with the same fascinated interest as he now felt, in
spite of himself, in spite of any habit or tradition or inclination,
in his own khaki variety. These fellows carried more on their backs,
had far less transport. His general impression was of something
grimmer, more like purgatory, than that which English troops gave
him. The physical effort of the individual was greater, his food,
pay and accommodation less. And there was none of that extraordinary
volunteering spirit of the Kitchener Armies, the spirit which said:
“Lumme, boys, here’s a war. Let’s have a go at it!” The French had most
of them been conscripted, had known that such a thing might, probably
would happen to them, had been prepared for it for years. They had not
the advantage of being able to say to themselves: “Well, I jolly well
asked for it. Now I’ve got it!”

A saturnine fate brooded over them. He noticed it in the railway and
other officials he met. They were so much more official. R.T.O.’s and
A.P.M.’s--or the equivalent of them, he supposed--who surveyed his
credentials, and passed him on to the place where he was going, did so
with the cynical ghost of amusement, as who should say: “Aha! This is
you. You’re going there, are you? You might as well go anywhere else.”

Eventually, in a stony village, beneath a pine-clad ridge, he found
the familiar khaki and brass, the good nature and amateurishness of
his own sort. He stepped out of the train and across a platform and
with a curious pang, almost of home-sickness, found himself in England.
Here was the superior corporal in slacks from the orderly room. Here
were the faultless riding horses, being exercised. There was nothing
like them in all the blue-coated armies through which he had passed.
The Commandant to whom he reported, treated him partly as an officer
reporting, partly as a nephew, asked amused questions about billets in
Flanders, who was doing such-and-such a job with Corps, what were the
prospects of leave, and above all, did Dormer play bridge? He did. Ah!
Then the main necessities of modern warfare were satisfied.

And as he found his billet and changed his clothes, Dormer reflected
how right it all was. What was the good of being officious and
ill-tempered? What was the good of being energetic even? Here we all
were, mixed up in this inferno. The most sensible, probably the most
efficient thing to do, was to forget it every night for a couple of
hours, and start fresh in the morning. Chirnside was away with his
detachment, but would be back shortly. In the meantime the Commandant
hoped Dormer would join his Mess. The billet was comfortable and
Dormer made no objection. On the contrary, he settled down for a day
or two with perfect equanimity. It was always a day or two nearer the
inevitable end of the War, which must come sometime, a day or two
without risk, and actually without discomfort. What more could one ask?

The Commandant, Major Bone, was a fine-looking man, past middle age,
with beautiful grey hair and blue eyes with a twinkle. His height and
carriage, a certain hard-wearing and inexpensive precision about his
uniform, suggested an ex-guards Sergeant-major. It was obvious that he
had spent all his life in the army, took little notice of anything that
went on outside it, and felt no qualms as to a future which would be
provided for by it. He was one of those men with whom it was impossible
to quarrel, and Dormer pleased him in the matter of blankets. The Major
offered some of those necessities to Dormer, who was obliged to reply
that he had six and feared his valise would hold no more. He had won
the old man’s heart.

The Major had fixed his billet in a little house belonging to the
representative of some firm auxiliary to the wine trade. The little
office had become his office. Orders, nominal rolls, lists of billets
and maps hung over the advertisements of champagne, and photographs of
Ay and Epernay. On the other side of the hall, the little dining-room
suited the Major admirably, as his Mess. It had just that substantial
stuffiness that he considered good taste. The chairs and table were
heavy, the former upholstered in hot crimson, as was the settee. Upon
the mantelpiece, and upon pedestals disposed wherever there was room
and sometimes where there was not, were bronze female figures named
upon their bases “Peace,” “Chastity,” “The Spirit of the Air.” Dormer
did not admire them. They were nude. As if this were not enough they
had their arms either before them or behind them, never at their
sides, which seemed to him to aggravate the matter. Together with a
capacious sideboard, full of glass and china, _couronnes de noces_ and
plated ware, all securely locked in, these decorations made it almost
impossible to move, once the company was seated at table.

Indeed, during the winter, the Major complained he had been in the
position of having one place frozen at the door, and one roasted next
the Salamander anthracite stove. But with the milder weather, things
were better, for the two big casement windows could be opened, and
filled the room with sweet country air in a moment; they gave on to the
street which was merely a village street, and across the road, over the
wall was a vineyard. The Mess consisted of the Major, Doctor, Ordnance
Officer, and Chirnside, whose place Dormer temporarily took. There they
were a happy little family, removed far from the vexations attending
larger and smaller formations, isolated, with their own privileges,
leave list, and railway vouchers, as pretty a corner as could be found
in all that slow-moving mass of discomfort and ill-ease that was the
War.

On the third day, Dormer’s conscience made him inquire how long
Chirnside would be. “Not long,” was the reply. “You can hear what’s
going on?” He could indeed. For two days the earth and air had been
atremble with the bombardment. French people in the village, and the
French soldiers about the place had a sort of cocksure way of saying
“_Ça chauffe?_” Indeed, the offensive had been widely advertised and
great things were expected of it.

Then finally Chirnside did return. Dormer had been doing small jobs
for the Major all day, because idleness irked him, and on coming back
to change, found a grizzled oldish man, thin and quiet, a slightly
different edition of the Major, the same seniority, the same ranker
traditions, but memories of India and Egypt instead of Kensington and
Windsor. Dormer listened quietly while the two old soldiers discussed
the offensive. There was no doubt that it was an enormous and costly
failure. That hardly impressed him. He was used to and expected it.
But he had never before seen an offensive from outside. He had always
been in them, and too tired and short of sleep, by the time they
failed, to consider the matter deeply. But this time he listened to
the conversation of the two old men with wonder mixed with a curious
repulsion. They were hard working, hospitable, but they had the
trained indifference of the regular soldier that seemed to him to be
so ominous. In the regular army, where every one shared it, where it
was part of a philosophy of life derived from the actual conditions,
and deliberately adopted like a uniform, all very well. But no one
knew better than Dormer that none of the armies of 1917 contained
any appreciable percentage of regulars, but were, on the other hand,
composed of people who had all sorts of feelings to be considered and
who had not the slightest intention of spending their lives in the
army. Not for the first time did he wonder how long they would stand it.

The Doctor and Ordnance Officer being busy sorting casualties and
replacing stores, there was no bridge that evening and he was able to
approach Chirnside as to the object of his journey. The old man heard
him with a sort of quizzical interest, but was evidently inclined to
be helpful, twisted his grey moustache points and let his ivory-yellow
eyelids droop over his rather prominent eyes.

“Spanish Farm. April 1916. Oh, aye!”

“Could you recall an incident that occurred there. Damage to a little
chapel in the corner of the pasture where the roads met. A driver
wanted to shelter his mules and broke into the place?”

Chirnside thought hard, looking straight at Dormer. It was obvious to
Dormer that the old man was thinking, with army instinct, “Here, what’s
this I’m getting involved in? No you don’t,” and hastened to reassure
him.

“It’s like this. The case has become unfortunately notorious. The
French have taken it up very strongly. You know what these things are,
once they become official test cases. We’ve got to make an arrest and
probably pay compensation as well, but at present our people at Base
are sticking out for treating it as a matter of discipline. The unit
was the 469 T.M.B., but there have been so many casualties that no one
can tell me the name of the driver who did it.”

Dormer was thinking: “There, that’s the umpteenth time I’ve told the
yarn, and what good is it?” When suddenly he had a stroke of genius:

“Of course, they’ve got hold of your name.”

It succeeded remarkably well. A sort of habitual stiffening was obvious
in the Army-worn old face in front of him. Chirnside shifted his legs.

“I can’t tell y’much about it. I don’t know the chap’s name or number,
and I expect all the rolls are destroyed. Anyway he might not be on
them, for he wasna’ a driver!”

Chirnside was relapsing into his native Scotch, but Dormer didn’t
notice. He had got a clue.

“What was he then?”

“He had been servant to young Fairfield, who was killed.”

“You don’t remember Fairfield’s regiment. That might help us?”

“No, I don’t, and it wouldn’t help you, for he came out to Trench
Mortars, and not with his own crowd. This servant of his he picked up
at Base, or from some employment company.”

“What on earth was he doing with those mules?”

“What could you do with ’em? The driver was killed and the limber
smashed to matchwood. The feller had nothing to do, so he did that!”

“You don’t remember what happened to him after that?”

“Um--I think he went as young Andrews’ servant.”

“Ah! What did he come from?”

“Andrews? Gunner, he was!”

“Thanks. That may help. You saw the row when the Mayor of the village
came to certify the damage?”

“Aye, there was some blethers about the business. You couldna’ wonder.
The old feller was got up like a Tattie Bogle. The men had had no rest,
and were going straight back to the line. They marched all right, but
you couldn’t keep them from calling names at such a Guy--young troops
like that!”

“You couldn’t describe Andrews’ servant to me?”

“No. He looked ordinary!”

A mistake, of course, no use to ask old Chirnside things like that. A
third of a century in the army had long ago drilled out of him any sort
of imagination he might ever have had. He was just doing a handsome
thing by a brother officer in remembering at all. His instinct was
obviously to know nothing about it. But, piqued by the novelty of
Commissioned rank, he went on: “Yes, I can tell you something. That
feller had a grievance. I remember something turning up in one of his
letters, when we censored ’em. Lucky spot when you think how most of
the censoring was done.”

“I should think so. What was it?”

“Couldn’t say now. Grievance of some sort. Didn’t like the army, or the
War, or something.”

Dormer sat down and wrote out the information obtained and made his
preparations to rejoin the Division. The Major said: “Oh, no hurry,
stop another day, now you’re here!” And all that evening, as he thought
and wrote, and tried to believe this fatal business a step nearer
completion, he heard the two old soldiers, like two good-natured old
women, gossiping. Each expected the other to know every camp or barrack
in which he had lain, each named this or that chance acquaintance,
made any time those thirty years, anywhere in the world, as though the
other must know him also. Often this was the case, in which they both
exclaimed together, “Ah, nice feller, wasn’t he?” Or, if it were not
the case, the other would rejoin, “No, but I knew So-and-so, of the
sappers,” and probably the second shot would hit the mark. It could
hardly fail to do so in the old close borough of the Regular Army. And
then they would exclaim in unison again.

Dormer was as impressed as he ever was by any member of the
Professional Army. They knew how to do it. He would never know. The
army was their God and King, their family and business. In a neat
circle they went, grinding out the necessary days to their pensions.
The present state of Europe, while verbally regretted or wondered at,
did not scratch the surface of their minds. How could it? It had been
a golden opportunity for them. It made the difference to them and to
any human wife or family they might have accreted, between retiring on
Commissioned pay-scale, or taking a pub or caretaker’s place, as the
ex-Sergeant-major they would otherwise have been. But there was charm
in their utter simplicity. Nothing brutal, very little that was vain,
and some nicely acquired manners.

The offensive of the French Army, in the machinery of which they had
their places, moved them not at all. Chirnside casually mentioned
that he gathered it had been a big failure. Dormer expected to hear
him recite some devastating tale of misdirected barrage, horrible
casualties or choked communications. Nothing so graphic reached him.
The old man had simply attended to his job, and when he found that the
troops were returning to the same billets, drew his own conclusions.
That was all. Dormer was horrified, but no one could be horrified long
with Chirnside. Of course, he didn’t mind how long the War went on.

Having completed his preparations, Dormer went up to his little
room and was soon asleep. He was in fine condition and thoroughly
comfortable, and was astonished after what appeared to be a very short
interval, to find himself wide awake. There was no mistaking the
reason. It was the row in the street. He pulled on his British Warm and
went to look. It was quite dark, but he could make out a confused crowd
surging from side to side of the little street, could see bayonets
gleaming, and could hear a clamour of which he could not make out a
word. It was like nothing he had ever heard in the War, it recalled
only election time in his native city, the same aimless shuffling
feet, the same confusion of tongues, the same effervescence, except
that he had instinct enough to know from the tones of the voices that
they were raised in lamentation, not triumph. He was extremely puzzled
what to do, but clear that no initiative lay with him. For ten minutes
he waited, but the situation did not change. He opened his door very
quietly. Not a sound from the Major. From Chirnside, opposite, heavy
regular breathing. Above, in the attics, the low cockney brevity of
soldier servants discussing something with the detachment of their
kind. Reassured, he closed the door, and got back into his blankets.
The noise was irritating but monotonous. He fell asleep. He next awoke
to the knocking of his servant bringing his morning tea, and clean
boots.

“What was all that row in the night?”

“Niggers, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“French coloured troops, sir. They got it in the neck seemingly. They
don’t half jabber.”

Major Bone was more fully informed. There was no doubt that the
French had had a nasty knock. Black troops were coming back just
anyhow, out of hand, not actually dangerous, the old soldier allowed
it to be inferred, but a nuisance. What struck him most forcibly was
the dislocation of the supply services. Defeat he accepted, but not
unpunctuality.

“These Africans are besieging the station, trying to board the trains,
and get taken back to Africa. I can’t get hold of an officer, but
Madame says they’re all killed. She’s in an awful state. I don’t
suppose you’ll get away to-day!”

He was right enough. Dormer’s servant shortly returned, humping the
valise. The station was closed, the rolling stock had been removed.
The black troops were swarming everywhere, collapsing for want of
food and sleep, disorganized and incoherent. Dormer went out shortly
after and verified the state of affairs. He was not molested, so far
had the breakdown gone, but was the object of what appeared to him most
uncomplimentary allusions, but all in pidgin-French, too colonial for
his fair, but limited, knowledge of the language. There was clearly
nothing to be done, so far as transport went, that day, and he resigned
himself to spending his time in the little Mess.

The Doctor and Ordnance Officer appeared at dinner with reassuring
news. The failure of the offensive had been bad, but the French had
never really lost control and were getting their people in hand
immediately. There was a rumour that a General who tried to restore
order had been thrown into the river, but it might be only a tale.
Major Bone was contemptuous of the whole thing. Do--what could they
do, a lot of silly blacks? The French would cut off their rations and
reduce them to order in no time. Thus the old soldier. But he did not
prevent Dormer going to bed with a heavy heart. To him it was not
so much a French offensive that had failed. It was another Allied
effort, gone for nothing. His life training in apprehension made him
paint the future in the gloomiest colours. Where would fresh men be
obtained from? Whence would come the spirit--what they called morale
in military circles--to make another attempt? If neither men nor
morale were forthcoming, would the War drag out to a stalemate Peace?
He had no extravagant theories for or against such an ending to it. To
him it meant simply a bad bargain, with another war to make a better
one looming close behind it. And his recent military training had
also received an unaccustomed shock. A new army enlistment, he had
seen nothing of the retreat from Mons, and was far from being able to
picture March or April 1918, still twelve months in the future.

For the first time in his life he had seen panic, confusion, rout.
True, it was already stopped, but that did not expunge from his mind
the sight, the noise, the smell even, of that crowd of black soldiers
who had suddenly ceased to be soldiers, numbers standing in line, and
had so dramatically re-become men. The staring eyeballs, the physical
collapse, the officer-less medley of uncertain movement were all new to
him, and all most distressing. Of course, the fellows were mere blacks,
not the best material, and had probably been mishandled. But under a
more prolonged strain, might not the same thing happen to others? The
Germans were the least susceptible he judged, the Russians most. What
would he not see, some day, if the War dragged on?

Whatever narrow unimaginative future his unadventurous mind conjured
up, his far stronger faculty for getting on with the matter in hand
soon obliterated. He was no visionary. Contemplation was not in him.
Directly the trains were running he left that cosy little Mess of Major
Bone’s to rejoin. He left off thinking about the War, and took up his
job where he had, for a moment, allowed it to lie, disregarded under
the stress of new events and strange emotions.

As the train moved on and on through French lines of communication
he was wondering again about the fellow who had done the trick at
Vanderlynden’s, of how he was to be found, of how the whole thing would
frame itself. These French chaps, whose transport he saw each side of
him, Army Corps after Army Corps. Biggish men, several of them, in a
round-shouldered fashion, due partly to their countrified occupation,
partly to their uniform, with its overcoat and cross-straps. Browner
skinned, darker of hair and eye than our men, they confirmed his
long-established ideas about them, essentially a Southern people,
whose minds and bodies were formed by Biscayan and Mediterranean
influences. They would not be sentimental about mules, he would
wager. On the other hand, they would not laugh at a Mayor. They did
not laugh much as a rule, they frowned, stared, or talked rapidly
with gestures, and then if they did laugh, it was uproariously,
brutally, at some one’s misfortunes. Satire they understood. But they
missed entirely the gentle nag, nag, nag of ridicule, that he used
to hear from his own platoon or company, covering every unfamiliar
object in that foreign land, because it was not up to the standard
of the upper-middle-classes. To the French, life was a hard affair,
diversified by the points at which one was less unfortunate than one’s
neighbour.

To the English, life was the niceness of a small class, diversified
by the nastiness of everything else, and the nastiness was endlessly
diverting. For the French were mere men, in their own estimation. Not
so the poorer English of the towns. They were gentlemen. If they lapsed
(and naturally they lapsed most of the time) they were comic to each
other, to themselves even. How well he remembered, on the march, when
the battalion had just landed, passing through a village where certain
humble articles of domestic use were standing outside the cottage
doors, waiting to be emptied. A suppressed titter had run all along the
column.

A Frenchman would never have thought them funny, unless they fell
out of a first-floor window on to some head and hurt it. Again, to a
Frenchman, Mayor and Priest, Garde Champêtre and Suisse were officials,
men plus authority and therefore respectworthy. To Englishmen, they
were officials, therefore not gentlemen, therefore ridiculous. If a
big landowner, or member of Parliament, or railway director had walked
into Vanderlynden’s pasture, just as 469 T.M.B. fell in for their weary
march back to the line, would they have laughed? Not they. But then
those members of England’s upper classes would not have worn tricolour
sashes to enforce authority. So there you were. With this philosophic
reflection he fell asleep.

Dormer returned to an army which was at its brightest. It had held the
initiative in the matter of offensives for over a year and a half, and
if no decision had been come to, a wide stretch of ground had been won,
and hope on the whole was high. From time to time there were rumours of
a queer state of things in Russia, but it was far off and uncertain.
The matter of the moment was Messines, the famous ridge which had been
lost at the very beginning of the War and which was now to be regained.
In this affair Dormer found himself busily engaged. Here were no waste
downs of the Somme, but some of the most fertile land in the world.

Among other matters confronting the Generals was the problem of how to
keep civilians from rushing back to cultivate land of which they had
been deprived for three years. The day came, the explosion of the great
mines, so Dormer was told, was heard in London. If he did not hear
it, it was because a well-directed long-range artillery bombardment,
complicated by a bombing that was German and German only in its
thoroughness, deafened and bewildered him, took his sleep, killed his
servant, and stampeded the horses of all the divisional ammunition
columns near him, so that his tent was trampled down, his belongings
reduced to a state hardly distinguishable from the surrounding soil.
However, the blow, such as it was, was successful. Irish and Scotch,
Colonial and London divisions took that battered hillock that had
defied them so long, and Dormer in spite of all his experience could
not help thinking: “Oh, come, now we are really getting on.”

But nothing happened. Dormer heard various reasons given for this,
and twice as many surmises made about it, but well aware how much
importance to attach to the talk that floated round Divisional Offices
and Messes, relied upon his own experience and arithmetic. According
to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months
of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of
activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground.
Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to
every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to
prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few
miles more.

This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by
fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the
neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of
reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the
“front” of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument
that we went no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an
average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by
the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again.
The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the
pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred
and eighty years.

For the only time in his life Dormer wished he were something other
than Dormer. For a few moments after arriving at his conclusion, he
desired to be a person of power and influence, some one who could say
with weight that the thing ought to stop here and now. But this very
unusual impulse did not last long with him.

All that remained of Belgium and wide tracts of French Flanders
adjoining it, became one huge ant-heap. Never had there been such a
concentration, Corps next to Corps, Services mosaiced between Services,
twenty thousand men upon roads, no one could count how many handling
munitions, as, from Ypres to the sea, the great offensive of 1917
slowly germinated.

Dormer was soon caught up and landed in the old familiar
blackly-manured soil of the Salient. He was not disgusted or surprised.
He was becoming increasingly conscious of a sensation of going round
and round. Now, too, that troops were always pouring along a road
before him, he had again the feeling that his head was an empty
chamber, round which was painted a frieze, men, men, mules, men,
limbers, guns, men, lorries, ambulances, men, men, men. It might be
just worry and overwork, it might be that he was again forced to share
his limited accommodation with Kavanagh. They were in a dug-out on the
canal bank, just by one of those fatal causeways built to make the
passage of the canal a certainty, instead of the gamble it had been in
the days of the pontoon bridges. The passage became, like everything
else in the War, a certainty for the Germans as much as for the Allies.
The place was registered with the utmost precision and hit at all times
of the day and night. It probably cost far more than the taking of any
trench.

Amid the earth-shaking explosions that seldom ceased for long, in the
twilight of that narrow cavern in the mud, Kavanagh was as unquenchable
as he ever had been on the high and airy downs of the Somme. During the
daylight, when nothing could be done outside, he bent over his map of
cables while Dormer perfected his plan for getting first-line transport
past that infernal canal. He purposed to send an N.C.O. a good two
miles back, with small square pieces of card, on which were written
9.0 p.m., 9.5 p.m., and so on, the times being those at which the unit
so instructed was to arrive beside his dug-out. He thought rather well
of this idea, no jamming and confusion, and if the enemy made a lucky
hit, there would be fewer casualties and less to clear away. In the
middle of his calculations he heard

  “Why, soldiers, why
  Should we be melancholy,
  Whose duty ’tis to die!”

He could not resist saying:

“If you must make that d----d noise, I wish you’d put some sense into
it.”

“Sense. I was trying to cheer you up!”

“‘Duty ’tis to die’ is jolly cheering, and quite untrue.”

“Oh, is it? What is our duty then?”

“Our duty is to live if we possibly can. And I mean to do it. It’s the
people who keep alive who will win the War.”

“According to that, all one has got to do is to get to Blighty, or
preferably the United States, and stay there?”

“Not a bit. You exaggerate so. All I said was, that it is foolish to
make it a duty to become a casualty.”

“Dormer, I shall never get you to see things in the proper light.
You’re like a lamb trying to leap with joy, and never able to get its
hind legs off the ground.”

“This is all rot. What connection is there between lambs and leaping,
and our jobs? Mine is to see that various people and things are in the
position where they will be wanted, at the moment at which they will
have most effect in winning the War. Yours is to see that they can
speak and be spoken to when required.”

“Lovely, lovely! What a teacher you would have made.”

“I had a better job.”

“There is no better job, except perhaps the one we are doing. I do
admire your descriptions of them. All you want is to put in a personal
allegorical note. You might condense the whole thing by saying that you
will be Minerva if I will be Mercury. Yep?”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“Yours to see that all is in order. That is a matter of reason.
You are the Goddess. I am merely a lesser God. Mercury was God of
Communications. I wonder whether they’d let me design a cap badge for
signallers. Mercury playing on a buzzer. You may have your Owl!”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I fear I must, the bugle calls, and I must follow, or my watch shows
it is time I was looking after my chaps. But you’ve had a brilliant
idea, Dormer.”

“I?”

“You’ve had the idea of fighting the War allegorically. Wisdom and
Light we are. That would do away with half the horror. So long!”

Then queerly, instead of feeling relieved from an annoyance, Dormer
felt more despondent than ever. What could it be? Was the fellow
right? Surely not! All that nonsense! And yet--and yet what would not
he, Dormer, conscious of his own probity, have given to be conscious
instead, of Kavanagh’s lightness of heart? That very probity drove
him out in the all-too-late summer dusk to see that everything was
going right. Yes, here they were; details of transport, parties to
dig, parties to carry, details of services, engineers of all their
various grades. Punctual, incredibly docile, honest English in their
gestureless manner of getting on with the job. They took care of
their mules, look at these beasts pulling as though they were English
too (instead of the Argentine crossbreds he knew them to be), not
because it was a duty, although it was, and not because the mule was
a miracle, like a tank or an aeroplane, but just because it was a
mule, that meant, to English soldiers, and to English soldiers only,
a fellow-creature, a human being. On they went, reporting to him,
and pushing on, sometimes with a hurried question as to map square,
or other crucial uncertain detail, sometimes with only a grunt. That
endless procession had not been in progress many minutes before, amid
the considerable and gently growing shell-fire, there came a bang that
seemed to go right through his head. He knew from old trench experience
what it was. Nothing but a gun pointing straight at you could make that
particular hrrmph.

He set his feet, not a moment too soon. It was a five-nine, the sort
the French called “_Grande Vitesse_.” A whirlwind, a small special
whirlwind pointed like an arrow, hit the causeway so that it shook
and then went up with a wheel of splintered bits. He was glad he had
devised his patent card system. The units were not too close together.
He had time to shout to the next, “Come on, you’ve two minutes to get
over!” and over they went, as if the Devil were after them, instead of
a lump of Krupp steel fitted with lethal chemicals. They were hardly
over before the second came, whump! To say that Dormer was frightened,
was to fail to describe the matter. He was stiffened all over, his hair
stood up, his heart thumped so that it hurt him, his feet were stone
cold, but he knew his job and did it.

The next lot to come was a whole field company to do some special duty,
and although he hurried them, the tail of the brown column was still
high and exposed when the shell came. They ducked and darted into any
cover that was available, and he heard his voice, as the voice of
some one far away speaking to a public meeting, like a voice on the
wireless, saying:

“Come on. Get out of that and come on. If I can stand here, surely you
can get out of it.”

They did so. Behind them came a special party to dig in the
Meteorological Officer. What a menagerie it was! Every trade, every
nation too, Chinese, Zulu, West Indian, Egyptian. He did not blame the
Germans who had chalked in blue on the bare back of a Portuguese, whom
they captured and stripped, “The Monkey House is full,” before they
drove him back into English lines.

Even truer did Dormer find it when he had to go back for any reason,
to Corps H.Q. or beyond. French and Belgians he knew, he had found
them in the trenches beside him years before. Portuguese he had become
accustomed to, Americans he looked forward to with anticipation. But
farther back, he found Chinese, Africans of all descriptions, Indians,
East and West, while the French, in addition to their black troops, had
Spanish and Italian labour.

It did not please his parochial mind. He felt increasingly that there
was something wrong when you had to drag in all these coloured people
from every remote quarter of the globe, without even the excuse the
French had, that they were “Colonials.” But no one could tell, least of
all Dormer himself, whether his feelings were the result of a strong
belief in the Colour Bar, or whether it were merely the futility of it
all. For in spite of the omnium gatherum of race, tongue and religion,
the offensive failed. As a matter of routine, the weather broke on Z
day. Within forty-eight hours it was obvious that the affair had stuck.
Apart from a feeling of the hand of Fate in it, a sinister feeling of
great incomprehensible forces working out his destiny for him, without
his having the least power to influence the matter for better, for
worse, which was so desolating to his pre-War habit of mind, where a
certain line of unostentatious virtue had always carried a reward that
could be reckoned on with the greatest exactitude, there were other
disturbing elements in the situation.

Of course the Bosche was ready. He was bound to be ready, couldn’t
avoid it. He had immensely thickened his depth of defence, which
was now composed not of the old obvious trenches full of men, all
of which could be blown to pieces, but of small isolated turrets of
ferro-concrete, where two or three machine gunners (and who made better
machine gunners than the careful Germans) could hold an army at bay,
until dislodged by a direct hit by a shell of six-inch calibre or over,
or laboriously smoke-screened and bombed out, at the rate of perhaps
a mile a day, on good days. He saw his computation of one hundred
and eighty years altogether insufficient for getting to the Rhine.
Moreover, for such work this medley of nations was of no good at all.
It reminded him of a book by Anatole France he had been compelled by
a friend to read, wherein a great conqueror enlisted in his army all
the men of his nation, then all the men of the neighbouring nations,
then all the savages at the end of the earth, and finally the baboons
and other combatant animals. That was all very well. That was just
story telling. But it horrified Dormer all the more to see such story
telling coming true before his eyes. As coloured-labour company after
coloured-labour company filed past his tent, guttural and straggling,
he was able to pull himself together, and see that it was not true
after all.

These people, little better than beasts, uglier in some cases and far
more troublesome, were no good. They couldn’t fight. You couldn’t trust
them to stand the shelling or to obey an order. Then just as he was
feeling rather relieved, he saw the logical result of his conclusion.
All the fighting would have to be done by those very men who had
volunteered or been conscripted and who had been so generously wasted
ever since. They were sticking it, and sticking it well, but this new
offensive that had just opened promised to try them pretty high. Would
they stick that? Would the day ever come when he would see them a
mere mob, like those French black troops he had seen in May? Perhaps
peace would be made. Such is the eternal hopefulness of men, that he
even hoped, against all previous experience. That quenchless gleam
common to all human souls, one of the basic things that makes war so
long, and peace, where it is so much less necessary, just that much
less attractive, added to work for fifteen hours a day, kept Dormer
sane and healthy for weeks, in spite of worsening conditions, and
the steady increase in enemy shelling. It was with a return of that
uncanny feeling of being haunted that he found himself called up to
Divisional Head-quarters. He knew quite well what it was, but he had
relied on the difficulty of finding Andrews, on the tremendous strain
of this most costly and urgent of all offensives, to keep the matter
out of his path, or rather to keep him out of its path, for he had long
dropped into the habit of feeling himself as in a nightmare, pursued
by something he could not see or even imagine, but which was certainly
sinister and personally fatal to him.

When he got to the office his feeling of nightmarishness was rather
aggravated than allayed. Colonel Birchin was talking to the A.D.M.S.
The fact was that the A.D.M.S. was a new one, patently a Doctor who had
been fetched out from Doctoring, had been found capable of organization
and had been shoved into the job vice some one else gone higher up.
Beside him Colonel Birchin shone, as it were, with the glamour of
another world. Dormer had seen him in camp and hut, and château and
Mairie for a year and a half, just like that, handsome and sleek,
filling his plain but choice khaki with a distinction that no foreign
officer could gain from all the blues and reds and yellows and greens
and blacks, varnished belts and metal ornaments of other armies. And
in that moment of sharpened nerves and unusual power of vision Dormer
seemed to see why. Colonel Birchin was not an officer of a national
army in the sense that any French, German, Italian or Russian Colonel
was. There was nothing of the brute and nothing of the strategian about
those nice manners, that so easily and completely excluded everything
that was--what? Unmilitary? Hardly. There was nothing consciously,
offensively military about the Colonel, “regular” or professional
soldier that he was. He would never have swaggered in Alsace,
massacred in Tripoli, Dreyfused in France. He would never have found
it necessary. For Colonel Birchin was not a state official. He was an
officer of the Watch, the small band of paid soldiers that Stuart and
subsequent kings kept to defend themselves from mobs, national armies
and other inconvenients. Colonel Birchin might write himself as of
“The Herefordshire Regiment,” but it made no difference. His chief,
inherited, and most pronounced quality was that he was a courtier. He
represented the King. Preferably, at home, of course, where one could
live in all that thick middle-class comfort that had ousted the old
land-owning seignorial dignity and semi-starvation. But upon occasion,
Colonel Birchin could betake himself to Africa, India, and now even
to this France, sure that even in this most tedious and unpleasant of
wars, he would be properly fed and housed.

So here he was, representing the King even more exactly than before
he was seconded from the King’s Own Herefordshire Regiment. He spoke
and looked, in fact, rather as if he were the King. Ignorant and
unused to the immense transport, the complicated lists of highly
scientific equipment, he judged rightly enough that his one safe
line was to represent authority, and see that these semi-civilians
who did understand such things got on with the War. So he listened
in a gentlemanly way to the A.D.M.S. (who wore beard and pince-nez)
explaining at great length a difficult alternative as to the siting of
Forward Dressing Stations, and contributed:

“You do what is best, Doctor, and we shall back you up!”

Then he turned to Dormer, hunted a moment among the papers on the
table, and spoke:

“Look here, Dormer, about this affair of yours?”

It took all Dormer’s training to keep his mouth shut. He saw more
clearly than ever how Colonel Birchin and all like him and all he
represented, were divesting themselves of any connection with what
looked like a nasty, awkward, tedious and probably discreditable
business. But he had not grasped it.

“They’ve found Andrews--this--er--gunner, who will be able to give you
information. And--look here, Dormer--this affair must be cleared up, do
you understand? Andrews is in hospital. You can go by car to Boulogne,
but we expect you to get it done this time. Corps are most annoyed.
There’s been a nice how-d-y-do with the French.”

Dormer swallowed twice and only said:

“Really, sir.”

“Yes. Car starts at seven.”

Accordingly at seven, the big Vauxhall moved off from that little
group of huts, in the meadow that was so regularly bombed every night.
Dormer, sitting next to Major Stevenage, did not mind. As well Boulogne
as anywhere, while this was going on. All the roads were full of
transport, all the railways one long procession of troop and supply
trains. It was about as possible to hide it all from the Germans, as
to conceal London on a Bank Holiday. In fact it was rather like that.
The population was about the same, if the area were rather larger, the
effect of the crowd, the surly good humour, the air of eating one’s
dinner out of one’s hand was the same.

There was very little sign of any consciousness of the shadow that hung
over it all. Hospital trains and ambulances abounded, going in the
opposite direction, but no one noticed them, so far as Dormer could
see. The type of man who now came up to fight his country’s battles
was little changed. The old regular was hardly to be found. The brisk
volunteer was almost gone. Instead there had arisen a generation that
had grown used to the War, had had it on their minds so long, had been
threatened with it so often that it had lost all sharpness of appeal to
their intellects.

Right back to St. Omer the crowd stretched. Beyond that it became more
specialized. Air Force. Hospitals. Training grounds. Then, across high
windy downs, nothing, twenty miles of nothing, until a long hill and
the sea.

Up there on those downs where there was no one, never had been anybody
ever since they were pushed up from the bed of some antediluvian ocean,
and covered with short turf, Dormer had one of his rare respites
from the War. Briefer perhaps, but more complete than that which he
experienced on his rare leaves, he felt for a while the emancipation
from his unwilling thraldom. It was the speed of the car that probably
induced the feeling. Anyhow, on the level road that runs from Boulogne
to Étaples--the ETAPPS of the Army in France--he lost it. Here there
was no escaping the everlasting khaki and transport, that State of War
into which he had been induced, and out of which he could see no very
great possibility of ever emerging. He had no warning of what was to
come, and was already well among the hospitals and dumps that extended
for miles beside the railway, when a military policeman held up a
warning hand.

“What’s the matter, Corporal?”

“I should not go into Etapps this morning, if I were you, sir.”

“Why not?”

The man shifted his glance. He did not like the job evidently.

“Funny goings-on, there, sir.”

“Goings-on, what does that mean?”

Dormer was capable of quite a good rasp of the throat, when required.
He had learned it as a Corporal.

“The men are out of ’and, sir!”

“Are they? The A.P.M. will see to that, I suppose.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Drive on!”

Dormer didn’t like it, to tell the truth. But he was so used to
bluffing things he didn’t like, and his own feelings, and other
people’s awkwardness, that he could not do otherwise than go on. Also
he didn’t realize what was on foot. A certain amount of daily work was
being done in among the dumps and sidings where the population was of
all sorts of non-combatant, Labour Corps units, medical formations,
railway people, and others. But from the rise by the Reinforcement
Officers’ hut, he began to see. The whole of the great infantry camp
on the sandhill--and it was very full, he had heard people say that
there were a hundred thousand men there--seemed to have emptied itself
into the little town. Here they sauntered and talked, eddying a little
round the station and some of the larger estaminets, in motion like an
ant-hill, in sound like a hive of bees. The car was soon reduced to a
walking pace, there were no police to be seen, and once entered there
was no hope of backing out of that crowd, and no use in appearing to
stop in it.

“Go slow,” Dormer ordered, glancing out of the corner of his eye at
the wooden face of the chauffeur. Nothing to be seen. Either the man
didn’t like it, or didn’t feel the necessary initiative to join in it,
or perhaps considered himself too superior to these foot-sloggers to
wish to be associated with them. Most probably he hadn’t digested the
fact that this mob, through which he drove his officer, was Mutiny,
the break-up of ordered force, and military cohesion. It might even be
the end of the War and victory for the Germans. All this was apparent
enough in a moment to Dormer, who was careful to look straight again
to his front, unwinking and mute, until, with a beating heart, he saw
that they were clear of the jam in the Market Place, and well down the
little street that led to the bridge across which were the farther
hospitals, and various sundry Base Offices, in the former of which he
was to find Andrews. Now, therefore, he did permit himself to light a
cigarette. But not a word did he say to his chauffeur. Now that it was
behind him he had the detachment to reflect that it was a good-humoured
crowd. He had heard a gibe or so that might have been meant for him or
no, but in the main, not being hustled, all those tens of thousands
that had broken camp, chased the police off the streets, and committed
what depredations he did not know, were peaceful enough, much too
numerous and leaderless to make any cohesive threat to an isolated
officer, not of their own unit, and therefore not an object of any
special hatred, any more than of any special devotion, just a member
of another class in the hierarchy, uninteresting to simple minds, in
which he caused no immediate commotion.

Here, on the road that ran through the woods to Paris Plage, there
were little knots of men, strolling or lying on the grass. They became
fewer and fewer. By the time he arrived at the palace, mobilized as a
hospital, for which he was bound, there remained no sign of the tumult.
Here, as on the other flank, by the Boulogne road, Medical and Base
Units functioned unmoved. But the news had been brought by Supply and
Signal services and the effect of it was most curious.

Dormer had to pass through the official routine, had to be announced,
had to have search made for young Andrews, and finally was conducted
to a bed in Ward C., on which was indicated Captain Andrews, R.G.A.
Dormer of course wanted to begin at once upon his mission, but the
other, a curly-haired boy, whose tan had given place to a patchy white
under loss of blood from a nasty shrapnel wound in the leg, that kept
on turning septic, had to be “scraped” or “looked at,” each of these
meaning the operation table, and was only now gradually healing, would
not let him.

Once away from the theatre and the knife, Andrews, like any other
healthy youngster, soon accumulated any amount of animal spirit,
lying there in bed, adored by the nursing sisters, admired by the men
orderlies. He was not going to listen to Dormer’s serious questions.
He began:

“Cheerio! Sit on the next bed, there’s no corpse in it, they’ve just
taken it away. Anyhow, it isn’t catching. Have a cigarette, do for
God’s sake. They keep on giving me the darned things, and they all end
in smoke!”

“Sorry you got knocked out.”

“Only fair. Knocked out heaps of Fritzes. I gave ’em what for, and they
gave me some back. I say, have you just come from the town?”

“I have just motored through.”

“Is it true that our chaps have broke loose?”

“There’s a certain amount of disorder, but no violence that I could
see.”

Dormer was conscious of heads being popped up in all the surrounding
beds. So that was how it took them! Of course, they were bored stiff.

“How topping. Is it true that they’ve killed all the red-caps?”

“I didn’t see any signs of it.”

“Cleared up the remains had they? Picked the bones, or fallen in proper
burying parties.”

“I don’t think there was anything of that sort.”

“Oh, come now, first we heard they had set on a police-corporal that
had shot a Jock.”

“What did he do that for?”

“Dunno. It isn’t the close season for Jocks, anyhow. Then it was ten
police-corporals. The last rumour was that they’d stoned the A.P.M. to
death----”

And so it went on. Lunch-time came. A Doctor Major, impressed by
Dormer’s credentials, invited him into the Mess, and asked a lot of
questions about the front, the offensive, and the state of Étaples.
Dormer always liked those medical messes. It seemed so much more worth
while to mend up people’s limbs, rather than to smash them to bits. The
Doctors had their professional “side” no doubt, but they had a right to
it.

After lunch Dormer made his way back to Ward C. He was met by a hush,
and by a little procession. The Sergeant-major came first and after
him bearers with a stretcher covered by the Union Jack. The hush in
the ward was ominous. They were all so close to what had happened. It
was not like the open field where the casualty is a casualty and the
living man a different thing. Here the dead were only different in
degree, not in kind. They were worse “cases”--the worst, that was all.
So there were no high spirits after lunch. They had gibed about Death
in the morning, but Death had come and they had ceased to gibe. In
the silence, Dormer felt awkward, did not know how to begin. When he
had made up his mind that he must, he looked up and found Andrews was
asleep. So the day wore on to tea-time, and after tea he was not wanted
in the ward, and was wanted in the Mess. He himself was not hurrying
to return to any regularly bombed hut near Poperinghe. The Commanding
Officer was even more emphatic. Étaples was not safe. Dormer let it go
at that, and got a good game of bridge.

In the morning he found young Andrews as young as ever and got down to
his job at once:

“Do you remember joining 469 T.M.B.?”

“Yes, sh’d think I do.”

“Do you remember the man you had as servant while you were with them?”

“I do. Topping feller. Gad, I was sorry when I had to leave him behind.
Of course, I dropped him when I went to hospital. Never was so done!”

At last!

“You couldn’t give me his name and number, I suppose?”

“I must have got a note of it somewhere. I say, what’s all this about?
Do you want to get hold of him?”

“I do. He’s wanted, over a question of damage in billets. They’ve sent
me to find him out.”

“Then I’m damned if I’ll tell you. Because he was a topping chap!”
rejoined Andrews, laughing.

“You’d better tell me, I think. The matter has gone rather high up,
and it might be awkward if I had to report that the information was
refused.”

“Lord, you aren’t going to make a Court of Inquiry affair of it, are
you?”

“It may come to that, and they’ve got hold of your name.”

“Gee whizz! I don’t like landing the chap. I may not have got any
particulars of him, now, my things have been so messed about.”

“Well, look and see!”

“All right.”

Andrews fumbled out from the night-table beside his bed, the usual
bedside collection. Letters in female handwriting, some young, some
old--from one or more sweethearts and a mother, thought Dormer.
Paper-covered novels. The sort (English) that didn’t make you think.
The sort (French) that make you feel, if you were clever at the
language. Cigarettes, bills. One or two letters from brother officers.

“Blast. It’s in my Field Note Book, in my valise, in store here. I
shall have to send to have it got out. Wait half a mo’ and I’ll get an
orderly.”

As they waited, he went on:

“What’s he wanted for? Some dam’ Frenchman going to crime him for
stealing hop-poles?”

“Something of that sort. You wouldn’t remember it, it happened before
you joined the Battery.”

“Then it jolly well wasn’t my man Watson. He’d only just come up from
Base!”

“Come, the man was of middle size and ordinary to look at, and had been
servant to an officer of the name of Fairfield, who was killed!”

“Oh, that chap. I know who you mean now. I don’t call him my servant.
I only had him for a day or two. His name was Smith, as far as I
can recollect. We were in the line, and I never got his number. He
disappeared, may have been wounded, or gone sick of course, we were
strafed to Hell, as usual. I should have got rid of him in any case. He
was a grouser!”

“Didn’t like the War?”

“I should say not.”

Hopeless, of course. When Andrews saw Dormer rise and close his
notebook, he apologized:

“Beastly sorry. Afraid I’m no good.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to find the fellow, personally. It’s
simply my job.”

“Fair wear and tear, so to speak?”

“Yes. Good morning.”

“Don’t go--I say, don’t. You’re just getting interesting!” Heads popped
up in the surrounding beds. “Do tell us what it’s all about.”

“Merely a matter of damage in billets as I said.”

“Go on. There’s always damage in billets. You must ha’ done heaps,
haven’t you? I have. There’s something more in it than that.”

“Well, there is. Perhaps it will be a lesson to you not to go too far
with other people’s property.”

“I say, don’t get stuffy. What did the feller do?”

“He broke into a shrine.”

“I say, that’s a bit thick.”

“It was!”

“What did he do it for? Firewood?”

“No. He wanted to shelter a couple of mules!”

“Good man. Don’t blame him!”

“No!”

“But they can’t crime him for a thing like that?”

“They will if they can catch him.”

“Go on!”

“It didn’t stop at that.” Once more it seemed to Dormer that a good
lesson might do no harm to the light-headed youth that Andrews
represented, and several of whom were listening, anxiously from that
corner of the ward.

“Did G.H.Q. take it up?”

“Yes. They had to. The Mayor of the village came to make an official
inquiry and the Battery made fun of him.”

“Lumme! I bet they did!”

“They should not have done so. That made the French authorities take it
up. Goodness knows where it will end!”

“End in our fighting the French,” said some one.

Dormer felt that it was high time to put his foot down. “You may be
privileged to talk like that while you’re in hospital. But I don’t
recommend you to do so outside. You ought to have the sense to know
that we don’t want to fight anyone, we most certainly don’t want to
fight some one else after Germans. In any case, we don’t want to do the
fighting in England!”

There was a dead silence after he had spoken, and he rose, feeling that
he had impressed them. He stumped out of the ward without another word,
went to the Mess, rang and demanded his car. The Orderly Officer would
have liked to detain him, insisted on the possible state of Étaples,
but he would not hear of it. In those few hours he had had enough and
more than enough of the Base--the place where people talked while
others Did--the place where the pulse of the War beat so feebly. He
felt he would go mad if he stayed there, without sufficient occupation
for his mind. His car appeared and he soon left the palace and the
birchwoods and was rattling over the bridge into Étaples. “Now for it!”
he thought. But no policeman warned him off this time. He soon saw why.
The streets had resumed their normal appearance. He might have known.
That fancy of his, about the Headless Man, came back to him with its
true meaning. What could they do, all those “Other Ranks,” as they were
designated? Just meander about, fight the police, perhaps. But they had
no organization, no means of rationing or transport. Of course, they
had had to go back to their respective camps with their tails between
their legs in order to get fed.

There was nothing to show for the whole business but a few panes of
broken glass and some splintered palings. By the time he got to St.
Omer and stopped for lunch, no one seemed to have heard of it. By
tea-time, he was back at Divisional H.Q. And none too soon. A fresh
attack was to be made the following day. He went straight up to the
canal bank, where Kavanagh was as busy as ever, and dropped into his
work where he had left it. There was just the same thing to do, only
more of it. A desperate race against time was going on. It was evident
enough that this most enormously costly of all offensives must get
through before November finally rendered fighting impossible. There was
still some faint chance of a week or two of fair weather in October.
Fresh Corps were massed and flung into the struggle. Engineers, Labour
Corps, anyone who could throw a bomb or fire a rifle must do so. What
had been roads of stone _pavé_, had been so blown about with shell-fire
that they were a honeycomb of gaping holes, repaired with planks. More
and more searching were the barrages, denser the air fighting. Progress
there undoubtedly was, but progress enough?

Through the sleepless nights and desperate days that followed, Dormer’s
feelings toward Kavanagh were considerably modified. The fellow still
talked, but Dormer was less sorry to hear him. He even recited, and
Dormer got into the way of listening. They were now in an “Elephant”
hut. No dug-out was possible in that sector, where eighteen inches
below the surface you came to water. No tent could be set, even had
they wished for one. Their frail house was covered with sandbags, of
a sufficient thickness to keep off shrapnel, and presumably they were
too insignificant to be the object of a direct hit, but in order to
leave nothing to chance they had had the place covered with camouflage
netting. Outside lay mile after mile of water-logged runnels that
had been trenches, on the smashed and slippery parapets of which one
staggered to some bit of roadway that was kept in repair at gigantic
cost in lives and materials, guided by the lines of wire that either
side had put up with such difficulty, and which were all now entirely
useless, a mere hindrance to free movement. But they were “in” for a
long spell, and could not get away--did not want to, they were less
bombed here than farther back. Rations reached them, that was as much
as they had time to care about. Otherwise, the night was well filled
for the one with counting off the parties that filed past into this or
that attack, for the other in picking up those signal lines that had
been smashed by shell-fire during the day, and replacing them.

As that endless procession went past him once more, Dormer felt that
he now knew of what its component parts were thinking. Australians,
Canadians, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, English, they were thinking of
nothing in particular. Like the mules that went with them, they went
on because they couldn’t stop. Food and sleep each day was the goal.
To stop would mean less food and sleep, mules and men knew that much,
without use of the reasoning faculty. It had become an instinct. All
the brilliant casuistry that had induced men to enlist was forgotten,
useless, superseded. Even English soldiers were conscripts now, the
War had won, had overcome any and every rival consideration, had made
itself paramount, had become the end and the means as well.

A man like Dormer, accustomed to an ordered and reasoned existence, who
could have explained his every act up to August, 1914, by some good
and solid reason, was as helpless as any. Stop the War? You wanted
to go back half a century and alter all the political and business
cliques in which it had been hatching. To alter those you wanted to be
able to alter the whole structure of society in European countries,
which kept those cliques in power, was obliged to have recourse to
them, to get itself governed and financed. To do that you wanted to
change Human Nature. Here Dormer’s imagination stopped dead. He was no
revolutionary. No one was farther than he from being one. He only hated
Waste. He had been brought up and trained to business, in an atmosphere
of methodical neatness, of carefully foreseen and forestalled risks.
Rather than have recourse to revolution he would go on fighting the
Bosche. It was so much more real.

Somewhere about the point at which he reached this conclusion, he
heard, among the noise of the sporadic bombardment, Kavanagh’s voice:

  “‘Now that we’ve pledged each eye of blue
  And every maiden fair and true,
  And our green Island Home, to you
  The Ocean’s wave adorning,
  Let’s give one hip, hip, hip hurrah!
  And drink e’en to the coming day,
  When squadron, square,
  We’ll all be there,
  To meet the French in the morning!’

That’s the stuff to give the troops, Dormer!”

But Dormer, although cheered, was not going to admit it. “You’d better
go and sing it to the Seventy-Worst. They go in at dawn!”

“Good luck to them. Listen to this:

  “‘May his bright laurels never fade
  Who leads our fighting Fifth Brigade,
  These lads so true in heart and blade,
  And famed for danger scorning;
  So join me in one hip hurrah!
  And drink e’en to the coming day,
  When squadron, square,
  We’ll all be there,
  To meet the French in the morning!’

How’s that for local colour. Is there a Fifth Brigade in to-morrow’s
show? They’d like that.”

“I bet they wouldn’t. Anyhow, it’s silly to repeat things against the
French.”

“Man, it’s a hundred years old.”

“Like my uncle’s brandy.”

“You and your uncle!”

“I had an uncle once who had some brandy. It was called ‘Napoleon,’ and
was supposed to date from 1815. When he opened it, it was gone!”

“There you are. That’s your materialism. But you can sing a song a
hundred years old and find it’s not gone!”

“It’s not a bad song. Only silly!”

“Well, try something older:

  “‘We be
  Soldiers three,
  Lately come from the Low-Countree,
  _Pardonnez moi, je vous en prie_;
  We be
  Soldiers three.’

That’s nearer three hundred years old. That’s what fellows used to sing
coming back from Ypres in those days!”

“You talk as if we’d always been in and out of that mangey hole.”

They both leaned on their elbows and gazed out of the tiny aperture,
under the sacking, away over the sea-like ridges of pulverized mud,
into the autumn evening. Between the rain-clouds, torn and shredded
as if by the shell-fire, watery gleams were pouring, as though the
heavens were wounded and bled. They spilled all over the jagged
stonework of that little old medieval walled town, compact within its
ramparts, for the third time in its history garrisoned by an English
army. Kavanagh told him of it, but Dormer remained unimpressed. The
history of the world that mattered began after the battle of Waterloo,
with Commerce and Banking, Railway and Telegraph, the Education and
Ballot Acts. Previous events were all very well, as scenery for
Shakespeare’s plays or Wagner’s Operas. But otherwise, negligible. Yet
the interlude did him good. He felt he had brought Kavanagh up short,
in an argument, and he went to his night’s work with a lighter heart,
and a strengthened confidence in himself.

Of course, a few weeks later, the offensive was over, with the results
he had foreseen, and with another result he was also not alone in
foreseeing. Once back in rest, near Watten, he heard people talking in
this strain, in G. office:

“I suppose, sir, we shall go on fighting next year?”

“Um--I suppose we shall. But perhaps some arrangement may be come to,
first. There’s been a good deal of talk about Peace!”

That was the mood of Divisional Head-quarters. A growing scepticism as
to the continuance of the War. At the moment, Dormer missed the motive
at the back of it. Away from H.Q. while the Division was in action, he
had lost a good deal of ominous news. The talk about the transference
of German Divisions from one front to another was old talk. He had
heard it for years. He did not at the moment grasp that it had now a
new significance. Then something happened that put everything else out
of his head. He was not feeling too well, though he had nothing to
complain of worse than the usual effects of damp and loss of sleep.
Colonel Birchin had got himself transferred to a better appointment,
and his place was taken by a much younger officer, glad to take it as
a “step” up from a dangerous and difficult staff-captaincy. They had
been out at rest less than a week and Dormer had assumed as a matter
of course that he would be put in charge of organized sports for the
winter, as usual. But he was only just becoming sensible of the change
that had come over H.Q. Colonel Birchin used to have a certain pre-War
regular soldier’s stiffness and want of imagination (which Dormer had
privately deplored), but he had kept the Q. office well in hand. This
new man, Vinyolles, very amicable and pleasant, and much nearer to
Dormer’s new army view of the War (he was in fact younger than Dormer,
and than most of the clerical N.C.O.’s in the office), had nothing
like the standoff power of his predecessor. Also, the office, like
everything else, had grown, half a dozen odd-job officers were now
attached, and without wearing red, sat and worked with Dormer. So that
when Dormer went to show his Football Competition Time Table and his
schedule for use of the Boxing Stadium, he found that he had to explain
how these things were usually done. Colonel Vinyolles had no idea.
Dormer ought to have been warned. But his head was not working at its
very best. He had a temperature, he thought, and wanted to go and lie
down at his billet for a bit and take some aconite, a remedy he had
carried with him throughout the War. Colonel Vinyolles was quite nice
about the Sports, and just as Dormer was turning to go, said to him:

“Perhaps you can help me in this matter. I see your name occurs in the
correspondence!”

Of course, he might have known. It was the familiar _dossier_, as the
French called it, the sheaf of papers, clipped together, at the bottom
the original blue Questionnaire form that old Jerome Vanderlynden had
signed. At the top a fresh layer of official correspondence, “Passed
to you please, for necessary action.” “This does not appear to concern
this office.” “Kindly refer to A.Q.M.G.’s minute dated July 1916.”
And so on. Dormer knew quite a lot of it by heart and the remainder
he could have “reconstructed” with no difficulty. The only fresh
thing that had happened was a minute from the new chief of the French
Mission enclosing a cutting from a newspaper--a French newspaper of all
conceivable rags--from which it appeared that some deputy or other had
“interpellated” a minister about the matter, asked a question in the
“House” would be the English of it, Dormer supposed.

“What am I to tell the Mission?” Colonel Vinyolles was asking.

Dormer was not a violent man by habit, but he felt that he was
getting to his limit with this affair. He thought a moment, wanting
to say: “Tell them to go to the Devil!” but held it in reserve, and
substituted: “Tell them the matter has attention!”

“Thanks very much!”

Dormer went and rested.

The following day he felt no better and did not do much. He had the
Sports well in hand, and there was no movement of troops. The day
following that he felt queerer than ever, and jibbed at his breakfast.
He went along to see the D.A.D.M.S., always a friend of his, who put a
thermometer under his tongue, looked at it, shook it, looked at Dormer,
gave him an aspirin, and advised him to go and lie down for a bit. On
his way to his billet Dormer put his head into Q. office to tell the
Sergeant-major where he was to be found if wanted. He was called by
Colonel Vinyolles from the farther room. It was again full of people
he considered (as rank counted for less than experience) to be his
juniors. He could see something was “up.” They were all highly amused
except Vinyolles.

“I say, Dormer, I consider you let me down on this.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Trouble! I’ve got a nice chit back, in reply to my saying ‘the matter
has attention.’ They say that any further delay is ‘inadmissible’ and
that they will be obliged to carry the matter higher.”

“Let ’em!”

“Oh, that won’t do at all. The General has seen this, and he wants to
know what you mean by it.”

“He ought to know by this time!”

“Captain Dormer!”

Of course he was wrong, but he felt rotten. It wasn’t Vinyolles’ fault.
He pulled himself together.

“Sorry, sir. I mean that the case has been going on for nearly two
years, and has certainly not been neglected. I think every one who
counts is familiar with it.”

He meant it for a snub for some of those chaps who were sitting there
grinning. He saw his mistake in a moment. Vinyolles was as new as any
of them, and naturally replied: “I’m afraid I have no knowledge of it.
Perhaps you will enlighten me?”

“It must have been June, 1916, when we first received the claim. The
late A.P.M., Major Stevenage, took it up as a matter of discipline,
but on investigation considered that it was rather a case for
compensation, as damage in billets. The French Mission insisted that
an arrest must be made, and I have made every possible effort to trace
the soldier responsible. But formations change so quickly, during
offensives especially, that it is impossible.”

“I see. What exactly did he do, to cause such a rumpus?”

At the prospect of having to retell the whole story, Dormer got an
impression that something was after him, exactly like the feeling of
trying to get cover in a barrage, and wondering which moment would be
the last. He put his hand to his head and found some one had pushed
a chair against his knees. He sat down vaguely conscious of the
D.A.D.M.S. standing near by.

“An officer of 469 T.M.B. was wounded and his servant was given two
mules, sick or wounded, to lead. He got to the billet mentioned and
seems to have taken a dislike to the horse-lines. He found one of
those little memorial chapels that you often see, in the corner of the
pasture, and knocked in the front of it to shelter the beasts. The
farmer didn’t like it and sent for the Mayor to make a _procès-verbal_.
By the time the Mayor got there, the Battery was on the move again.
It was about the time of one of those awkward little shows the Bosche
put up to contain us during Verdun. The Battery had been badly knocked
about, and the men were excited and made some sort of a scene! The
Mayor told his Deputy and his Deputy told some one at French G.H.Q.
It all keeps going round in my head. I don’t want to find the chap who
did it. He’s no worse than you or I. He was just making the best of the
War, and I don’t blame him. I blame it. You might as well crime the
whole British Army.”

What had he said? He fancied he had given the facts concisely, but was
not sure of himself, his head felt so funny, and he was aware that
people--he could no longer be sure who they were--Q. office seemed
crowded--were tittering!--Some one else was talking now, but he was not
interested. He rested his head on his hand and heard Vinyolles: “Well,
Dormer, you go along to your billet, and we’ll see what can be done!”

He got up and walked out. The D.A.D.M.S. was at his elbow, saying to
him:

“Get into this ambulance, I’ll run you across!” but he never got to
his billet. He got into a train. He did not take much notice, but
refused the stuff they wanted him to eat. After that he must have gone
to sleep, but woke up, under a starlit sky, with an unmistakable smell
of the sea. They were lifting him under a canvas roof. Now, from the
motion, he perceived he was at sea, but it did not seem greatly to
matter. He was out of it, he had cut the whole disgusting show. He had
done his bit, now let some one else take a turn.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dormer had not been home on leave since early spring, and the leave
that he got for convalescence gave him not only some idea of the vast
changes going on in England, while he, in France, had been engaged in
the same old War, but a notion of changes that had gone on in that old
War without his having perceived them. He was let loose from Hospital
just before Christmas, at that unfortunate period when the public at
home were still feeling the reaction from the Bell-ringing of Cambrai,
were just learning the lengths to which the collapse of Russia had
gone and were to be confronted with the probable repercussion of that
collapse upon the prospects of the campaign in the West. There was no
escaping these conclusions because his own home circumstances had so
changed as to throw him back completely on himself. His father having
died while he was in France, his mother had taken a post under one of
the semi-official War organizations that abounded. The old home in
which he had grown up had been dispersed, and he found his only near
relative in his native town was his sister, a teacher by profession,
who had moved the remnants of the old furniture and his and her own
small belongings to a new house in one of the high, healthy suburbs
that surrounded the old town. She was, however, busy all day, and he
fell into the habit, so natural to anyone who has lived in a Mess for
years, of dropping in at one of the better-class bars, before lunch,
for an _apéritif_, and a glance at the papers. Here he would also
pickup some one for a round of golf, which would keep him employed
until tea-time, for he could not rid himself of the War-time habit of
looking upon each day as something to be got through somehow, in the
hopes that the morrow might be better.

These ante-prandial excursions were by far the closest contact he
had had with anything like a normal, representative selection of his
fellow-countrymen, since they and he had become so vitally altered
from the easy-going, sport-loving England of pre-War, and he had to
readjust his conception considerably. He soon grasped that there was
a lot of money being made, and a lot of khaki being worn as a cover
for that process. There was plenty of energy, a good deal of fairly
stubborn intention to go on and win, but a clear enough understanding
that the War was not going to be won in the trenches. And when he had
got over some little spite at this, his level habit of mind obliged him
to confess that there was a good deal in it. There were many signs that
those who held that view were right.

Sipping his drink, smoking and keeping his nose carefully in his
newspaper, in those bars lighted by electric light, in the middle of
the dark Christmas days, he listened and reflected. The offensives he
had seen? How had they all ended? How did he say himself they always
must end? Exactly as these chaps had made up their minds! Would he
not see if there did not remain some relative who could get him one
of these jobs at home, connected with supplying some one else with
munitions? No, he would not. He understood and agreed with the point
of view, but some very old loyalty in him would keep him in France,
close up to the guns, that was the place for him. He had no illusions
as to that to which he was returning. He knew that he had never been
appointed to Divisional Staff, had merely been attached. There was no
“establishment” for him, and directly he had been sent down as sick,
his place had been filled, some one else was doing “head housemaid”
as he had been called, to young Vinyolles, and he, Dormer, would go
shortly to the depôt of his regiment, from thence to reinforcement
camp, and thus would be posted to any odd battalion that happened to
want him. The prospect did not worry him so much as might have been
supposed. He felt himself pretty adept at wangling his way along, and
scrounging what he wanted, having had a fine first-hand experience
of how the machinery worked. He did not want to go into the next
offensive, it was true, but neither did he want the sort of job he had
had, and even less did he want to be at Base, or in England. Boredom he
feared almost as much as physical danger. Accustomed to having his day
well filled, if he must go to War he wanted to be doing something, not
nothing, which was apparently a soldier’s usual occupation. But he did
not feel his participation in the next offensive very imminent. He had
heard them all talking about “Not fighting any more,” and now here was
Russia out of it and America not yet in, and Peace might be patched up.

The most striking thing therefore that he learned was this new idea
of the Bosche taking the initiative, and attacking again. A new army
officer, his knowledge of the Western Front dated from Loos, and was
of allied offensives only. He had never seen the earlier battles of
Ypres, the retreat from Mons was just so much history to him. When he
heard heated arguments as to which particular point the Bosche would
select for their offensive, in France, or (so nervous were these people
at home) in England even, he was astonished, and then incredulous. The
level balance of his mind saved him. He had no superfluous imagination.
He had never seen a German offensive, didn’t want to, and therefore
didn’t think he would. As usual, the bar-parlour oracles knew all about
it, gave chapter and verse, could tick off on their fingers how many
German Divisions could be spared from the Eastern Front. He had heard
it all before. He remembered how nearly the cavalry got through after
Vimy, how Moorslede Ridge was to give us command of the country up
to Courtrai, how Palestine or Mespot were to open an offensive right
in the Bosche rear, not to mention all the things these Russians had
always been said to be going to do. This might be another of what the
French so well called “Canards”--Wild Ducks. He would wait and see.

He was impressed in a different way by the accounts that now began
to filter through, of what had been happening in Russia. Officers
shot, and regiments giving their own views on the campaign. That was
what happened when the Headless Man got loose! No doubt the Russians,
from all he had heard, had suffered most, so far as individual
human suffering went. And then, Russians were, to him, one of these
over-brainy people. Had anyone acquainted with his ruminations taxed
him to say if English people were under-brainy, he would have said
no, not necessarily, but brainy in a different way. Left to himself
he felt that all the opinions he had ever formed of the Russians
were justified. Look at their Music. Some of it was pretty good, he
admitted, but it was--awkward--beyond the reach of amateurs, in the
main. This appeared to him, quite sincerely, to be a grave defect. He
was conscious--more, he was proud--of being an amateur soldier, and
knowing himself to be modest, he did not fear any comparison between
the actual results obtained by English amateurs like himself, and the
far more largely professional armies of other countries. And now these
over-brainy ones had gone and done it. He knew as well as anyone the
hardships and dangers of soldiering, had experienced them, shared them
with the ranks, in the trenches. Why even in this beastly Vanderlynden
affair, it would have puzzled him to say if he were more sorry than
glad that the private soldier had never been brought to Justice. But
English--and even Frenchmen--as he had seen with his own eyes, if
they mutinied, got over it, and went on. It was only people like the
Russians that went and pushed things to their logical conclusion.

He had a hatred of that, being subconsciously aware that the logical
conclusion of Life is Death. Naturally, from his upbringing and mental
outlook, he had no sympathy with the alleged objects and achievements
of the Russian Revolution. He could not see what anyone wanted with
a new social order, and as for the domination of Europe by the
Proletariat, if he understood it, he was all against it in principle.
He was against it because it was Domination. That was precisely the
thing that had made him feel increasingly antagonistic to Germany and
German ideas. It had begun long ago, during brief continental holidays.
He had met Germans on trains and steamers, in hotels and on excursions.
He had grudged them their efficient way of sight-seeing, feeding and
everything else. But he had grudged them most their size and their way
of getting there first. If it had not been for that, he had a good
deal more sympathy with them, in most ways, than with the French.
Subsequently he had found Germans infringing on the business of his
native town, selling cheaper, better-tanned hides than its tanners,
more scientifically compounded manures than its merchants. Then they
invaded politics and became a scare at election times. And after the
false start of 1911, in 1914 they had finally kicked over the tea-table
of the old quiet comfortable life. He did not argue about this. He had
felt it simply, truly, directly. Under all the hot-air patriotism and
real self-sacrifice of August, 1914, it had been this basic instinct
which had made him and all his sort enlist. The Germans had asked for
it, and they should darn-well have it. If they didn’t they would go on
asking. They were after Domination.

That craze had started something that would be difficult now to stop.
Dormer saw very well that other people besides Russians might find
grievances and the same wrong-headed way of venting them. The Russians
would probably go on with their propaganda, all over the world. The
Germans, on the other hand, had probably set the Japanese off. And so
we should go on, all the aristocratic classes calling for Domination
by their sort, all the ultra-brainy democracies calling for their
particular brand.

So when he was passed as fit and told to rejoin the depôt of his
regiment, at a seaport town, he went without any panic fear of the
future, German or otherwise. He went with a deep conviction that
whatever happened, life had been cheapened and vulgarized. It was not
by any means mere theory. He had seen what sort of a home he might
hope to make after the Peace, with his mother or sisters, or if,
conceivably, he married. Not a bad home, his job would always be there,
and certain remnants of that bourgeois comfort that had grown up in
all the old quiet streets of the provincial towns of England during
the nineteenth century, privileged, aloof from the troubles of the
“continent,” self-contained. But remnants only, not nearly enough. He
and all his sort had been let down several pegs in the social scale.
Without any narrow spite, or personal grievance, he felt that the
Germans had caused this upset and the Russians had put the finishing
stroke to it, made it permanent, as it were. He happened to be opposite
the Germans in the particular encounter that was not yet ended, and
he was able to draw upon an almost inexhaustible supply of obstinate
ill-will.

He went to the depôt in its huts on a sandy estuary. It was commanded
by a Major of the usual type, and no one knew better than Dormer how
to keep on the right side of such a one. He was, of course, a Godsend
to the Major. He had all the practical experience and none of the
fussiness. He merely wanted the job finished. That suited the Major
exactly, who didn’t want it to finish in a hurry, but wanted even less
to have to find ideas for training troops. Dormer, with his two and a
half years in France, was the very man. He looked trustworthy. He was
set to instructing the raw material, of which the camp was full. He
disliked it intensely, but, as always, took what was given him in his
sober fashion and did his limited best with it. He was amazed to find
such reserves of men still untouched. His own recollections of early
1915 were of camps filled with an eager volunteer crowd of all ages
and conditions, who were astounded when it was suggested to them that
certain of them ought to take a commission. Now he found that his sort
went a different way, direct to O.T.C. or Cadet Corps. There was a
permanence about the camp staff that he had never seen in the old days.
But most of all he was impressed with the worn appearance of the camp.
Thousand after thousand had passed through it, been drafted overseas,
and disappeared. Thousand after thousand had followed. In the town and
at the railway, there were no longer smiles and encouragement. People
had got painfully used to soldiers, and from treating them as heroes,
and then as an unavoidable, and profitable incident, had come to regard
them chiefly as a nuisance. He forgot how he had wondered if the men
would stand it, he forgot how often he had heard the possibility of an
early Peace discussed. He began to wonder now if people at home would
stand it--the lightless winter nights, the summer full of bombing,
the growing scarcity of comforts, the queues for this, that, and the
other, the pinch that every gradually depleted family was beginning
to feel, as one after another of its members had to go. He had been so
long out of all this, up against the actual warfare, glad enough of
small privileges and of the experience that enabled him to avoid the
more onerous duties, the worst sorts of want, that he only now began
to realize what he had never grasped, in his few short leaves, that
there was still quite a considerable, probably the greater portion of
the nation, who did not share his view of the necessity of going on.
Another avenue of speculation was opened to him. What if all the people
at home made Peace behind the backs of the Armies. Yet, being Dormer,
he did not submit to this home-grown philosophy. He just went on and
did the next thing that his hand found to do.

Of one thing he became pretty certain. All these people at home had
“got the wind up.” He didn’t know which were the worst, the lower
middle class, who were beginning to fear invasion, as a form of damage
to their shops and houses. He thought of those ten departments of
France that were either occupied by, or shot over, by the Germans. Or
again the newspapers, with their scare-lines, their everlasting attempt
to bring off this or that political coup. Or again the people in power,
who were keeping this enormous number of troops in England, presumably
to defend the beaches of the island from an armed landing. He had
become during the three years that had contained for him an education
that he could not otherwise have got in thirty, a more instructed
person.

An offensive was an offensive, could be nothing more or less. Every
offensive had been a failure except for some local or temporary
object, and in his opinion, always must be a failure. The idea of an
offensive conducted across a hundred leagues of sea made him smile.
It was hard enough to get a mile forward on dry land, but fancy the
job of maintaining communications across the water! He attended enough
drills to fill in the time, organized the football of the Brigade to
his liking and let it go at that. At moments he was tempted to apply
to be sent to France, at others to try and join one of these Eastern
expeditions, Salonika, Palestine or Mespot. But the certainty of being
more bored and of being farther than ever from the only life he cared
for, made him hesitate. He hesitated for two long months.

Then on the 21st March he was ordered by telegram to proceed to France.
He felt, if anything, a not unpleasant thrill. With all his care, he
had not been able to dodge boredom altogether. The depôt camp had also
been much too near the scenes of his pre-War life. He had gone home,
as a matter of duty, for several week-ends and had always returned
finely exasperated, it was so near to and yet so far from home as he
had pictured it, in his dreams. Now, here was an end to this Peace-time
soldiering. The news, according to the papers, seemed pretty bad, but
he remembered so well the awful scurry there was for reinforcements on
the morning that the nature of the Second Battle of Ypres became known.
This could not be so desperate as that was. Practically the whole of
the rank and file in the depôt were under orders. He took jolly good
care not to get saddled with a draft, and spent the night in London.
People were in a rare stew there. He had a bath and a good dinner and
left it all behind. He took a little more note of the traffic at the
port of embarkation. On the other side, he found lorries waiting and
went jolting and jamming away up to Frecourt, forty miles. He rather
approved. It looked as though our people were waking up.

At Corps reinforcement camp--a new dodge evidently--he got posted
to a North Country battalion; and proceeded to try and find their
whereabouts. He was told that they were going to Bray, but it took him
some time to understand that they were falling back on that place.
When, by chance, he hit upon the Division to which they belonged, they
were on the road, looking very small, but intact and singing. He soon
found plenty to do, for he grasped that practically the whole battalion
was composed of reinforcements, and had only been together two or
three days. They set to work at once to strengthen some half-completed
entrenchments, but after two days were moved back again.

It was during those two days that he saw what he had never to that
moment beheld, an army in retreat. The stream of infantry, artillery
and transport was continuous--here in good formation, there a mere
mass of walking wounded mixed up with civilians, as the big hospitals
and the small villages of the district turned out before the oncoming
enemy. He thought it rotten luck on those people, many of whom had been
in German hands until February, 1917, and had only had a twelvemonth
in their small farms, living in huts, and had now to turn out before
a further invasion. The bombardment was distinctly nasty, he never
remembered a nastier, but as usual, the pace of the advance soon
outdistanced the slow-moving heavy artillery, whose fire was already
lessening. He had no feelings of sharp despair, for as he had foreseen,
a modern army could not be crumpled up and disposed of. What he did now
anticipate, was any amount of inconvenience.

Amiens, he gathered, was uninhabitable, that meant many good
restaurants out of reach. New lines of rail, new lateral communications
would be necessary, that meant marching. Just when they had begun
to get the trenches fairly reliable, they were entrained and sent
wandering all round the coast. The wonderful spring weather broke with
the end of March, as the weather always did, when it had ceased to be
of any use to the Bosche, and had he been superstitious, he might have
thought a good deal of that. It was in a cold and rainy April that he
found himself landed on the edge of the coal-fields, behind a canal,
with a slag heap on one side of him, and a little wood on the other,
amid an ominous quiet.

The company of which he had been given command was now about a
hundred and fifty strong and he had done what little he could to
equalize the four platoons. He had one officer with him, a middle-aged
Lieutenant called Merfin, of no distinguishable social status, or
local characteristics. The day when a battalion came from one town
or corner of a county, under officers that were local personages in
the civil life of its district, was long past. Dormer placed his
second-in-command socially as music-hall, or pawnbroking, but the chap
had been out before and had been wounded, and probably knew something
of the job. The men were satisfactory enough, short, stumpy fellows
with poor teeth, but exactly that sort of plainness of mind that Dormer
appreciated. They would do all right. Perhaps a quarter of them had
been out before, and the remainder seemed fairly efficient in their
musketry and bombing, and talked pigeons and dogs in their spare time,
when not gambling.

The bit of line they held was Reserve, a bridge-head over the canal, a
strong point round a half-demolished château in the wood, and some wet
trenches to the right, where the next battalion joined on. Battalion
Head-quarters was in a farm half a mile back. Dormer and Merfin
improvised a Mess in the cellar of the Château, saw that the cooker
in the stables was distributing tea, and let all except the necessary
guards turn in. He had some machine gunners at the strong point, and
across the canal were two guns, whose wagons had just been up with
rations and ammunition. His own lot of rations came soon after and he
told Merfin to take the first half of the night, and rolled himself in
his coat to sleep.

As he lay there, listening to the scatter of machine-gun fire, and
the mutter of officers’ servants in the adjoining coal-hole, watching
the candle shadows flicker on the walls that had been whitewashed, as
the draught stirred the sacking over the doorway, his main thought
was how little anything changed. Two and a half years ago he had been
doing exactly the same thing, a few miles away, in the same sort of
cellar, in front of an enemy with the same sort of advantage in ground
and initiative, machine guns and heavy artillery. He was as far from
beating the Germans as ever he had been. He supposed that practically
all the gains of 1916 and 1917 south of Arras had been lost. On the
other hand, the Germans, so far as he could see, were equally far from
winning. What he now feared was, either by prolonged War or premature
Peace, a continuance of this sort of thing. And slowly, for he was as
mild and quiet-mannered a man as one could find, his gorge began to
rise. He began to want to get at these Germans. It was no longer a
matter of principle, a feeling that it was his duty as it had been in
the days when he enlisted, took a commission, and had come to France.
He was no longer worrying about the injustice of the attack on Belgium
or the danger of a Germany paramount in Europe. He had now a perfectly
plain and personal feeling. But being Dormer, this did not make him cry
out for a _sortie en masse_ like a Frenchman, nor evolve a complicated
and highly scientific theory as to how his desire was to be realized.
The French and Portuguese who fought beside him would have found him
quite incomprehensible. The Germans actually invented a logical Dormer
whom they had to beat, who was completely unlike him. If he had any
ideas as to what he was going to do, they amounted to a quiet certainty
that once the enemy came away from his heavy and machine guns, he,
Dormer, could do him in.

So he went on with the next thing, which was to turn over and sleep.
He woke, sitting bolt upright, to the sound of two terrific crashes.
One was right over his head. The candle had been blown out, and as he
struggled out of the cellar, barking his shins and elbows, he was aware
that the faint light of the sky was obscured by a dense cloud all round
him. Instinctively he pulled up his gas mask, but the sound of falling
masonry and the grit he could taste between his lips, reassured him.
It was a cloud of brick dust. Across the canal, the barrage was falling
on the front lines with the thunder of a waterfall. The Bosche had hit
the Château, and if he were not mistaken, had put in another salvo,
somewhere near by. At the gate of the little park-like garden he ran
into a figure he recognized for Merfin, by the red light of the battle,
just across the canal.

“What is it?”

“Aw--they’ve knocked in the bridge!”

“Every one standing-to?”

“Can’t help ’emselves.”

They went to look at the damage. The bridge was a small, one vehicle
affair, with steel lattice sides, and an asphalt roadway. The bridge
piers at the near end had been blown away, and the whole had settled
down some four or five feet, on to the mud of the tow-path.

“Can you get across?”

“Aw--yes--easy!”

“Better get across and wait a bit!”

He himself went back to find up his stretcher bearers, who, he had
always noticed, wanted an order to get them in motion. The guard on
the bridge was dead so far as he could see, but some one was shouting,
behind, at the Château.

He found the C.S.M with two men digging out the servants whose
coal-cellar had been blocked. One of them was badly crushed, but his
own man only shaken. Then there were horses on the road. Gunners,
trying to get their teams up to the advanced guns. Hopeless, of
course. Then came a runner from battalion. Send Merfin with two
platoons. He saw to that, and rearranged his depleted company. It took
some time. The barrage appeared to be creeping nearer. The ground shook
with the continuous concussion and whiffs of gas were more and more
noticeable, but the heavier stuff was already falling farther to the
rear. Then came a runner from across the bridge. There was a crowd
on the road. Dormer went and found just what he expected. Walking
wounded and those who wanted to be treated as such. He sorted them
out, directing the former down the road to the dressing station, and
setting the others to dig. If he had got to hang on to this place, and
he supposed he had, he meant to have some cover. The stream of people
across the broken bridge increased. Trench mortars and machine gunners,
platoons of his own regiment. The Bosche was “through” on the left,
and they were to come back behind the canal. The barrage died out, to
confirm this. The machine-gun fire came nearer and nearer.

In the cold grey light of a wet April dawn, a tin-helmeted figure
dashed up on a borrowed motor-cycle. It was the Brigade Major. What had
Dormer got? He heard and saw, and took a platoon and all the sundries.
His last words were: “Hang on here, whatever you do!” Dormer heard
the words without emotion. He realized that it meant that he was
expected to gain time. He got hold of his Sergeant, and overhauled the
rations and ammunition. They were not too badly off, and the cooker lay
stranded in the stable yard. That meant hot water, at least. He took a
turn round the place. The Château grounds had once been wired as part
of some forgotten scheme of defence of 1915 or early 1916. That was all
right. On the other hand, the “bridge-head”--a precious half-boiled
concoction--was full of gas and the barrier on the road blown away.

He got his few men out of it, with their several casualties, and
started them carting brick rubble from the dilapidations of the Château
to make an emplacement for a machine-gun on the near side of the
bridge. He stood looking at the road by which the Bosche must come--a
mere lane that led from one of the neighbouring coal-pits, and was
used, he imagined, for transport of coal that was required locally. It
meandered out of sight, among low fenceless fields, until the shallow
undulations of the ground hid it. In the distance was the steamy reek
of last night’s battle, but nothing that moved, amid the silence broken
only by long-distance shots, and fusillade somewhere on the left. Then,
down that road he saw a party advancing, led by an officer. There was
no doubt that they wore khaki. He waited by the bridge for them, and
shouted directions to them how to cross. He got an answer:

“Hallo, you old devil, what are you doing?”

It was that Kavanagh. There had been an advanced signal exchange,
and he had gone to bring his men in. They were tired, hungry and
disgusted, but Kavanagh had the jauntiness of old. He wasn’t going back
to Division, he was going to stay with dear old Dormer, and see this
through. Dormer thought a moment, then said: “All right.”

“All right. I should think so. I don’t suppose I could catch Division,
even on a motor-byke. They must be nearly at Calais. It’s all rot. The
Bosche are done!”

“Are they?”

“Sure. What are they waiting for now?”

“Bringing up their artillery?”

“That won’t blow the water out of the canal.”

“Possibly not. But we may as well have some food while it’s possible.”

“You old guts. Always eating!”

“Yes, when I can. Aren’t you?”

“Now, Dormer. You know me better than that. Glory is my manna.”

“Will you take cold bully and tea with it?” asked Dormer as they
dropped into the cellar.

Kavanagh made no objection, and they ate in silence, fast, for ten
minutes. Then they saw the men were being fed, and relapsed, in their
hiding-place, into pipes, and whisky out of Kavanagh’s flask.

“How did you get into this show?” Dormer asked.

“The Division--your old Division, my boy, left me here to hand over!
They might have spared themselves the trouble. But I’d got a most
lovely scheme of lateral communication. Corps gave me a lot of sweet
words about it. I suppose I shall get the M.C. Now the silly old Hun
has gone and blown it all to bits. What about you?”

“You know I got wrong and was sent home sick.”

“I heard all that. It was about that Vanderlynden affair, wasn’t it?”

“It was!”

“Well, you’ve no idea what a sensation you created. Vinyolles got
simply wet behind the ears with it. Some French Deputy said, after
the Somme show, that English troops did more damage to France than to
Germany. Of course every one on Divisional H.Q. has changed in the
last few months. They all established an alibi or Habeas Corpus or
something. It was one of the things that made the French Press go for
unity of command! You were a boon to them!”

“I wish them joy of the business. I don’t know why you mix me up with
it.”

“Why, it was your pet show, wasn’t it?”

“It got fathered on to me because I could understand what it was about.”

“Yes, you told Vinyolles, didn’t you?”

“The ignorant brute asked me.”

“I know. He’s all fresh. I find him trying also. Well, he knows all
about it now.”

“Tell you the truth, I’ve no idea what I said, Kavanagh! I was feeling
queer!”

“Vinyolles thought you’d gone potty.”

“He wasn’t far wrong.”

“He said you told him the whole British Army was guilty of the Kerrime
at Vanderlynden’s!”

It was the first time Dormer had heard it called that.

“Well, in a sense, so they are.”

“In a sense, War is a foolish business!”

“I thought you liked it?”

“I was trying to talk like you----”

Before Dormer could reply, the sacking over the door was lifted, by
Dormer’s Sergeant.

“Cop’l Arbone is back, sir!”

“Very good. Did he get in touch with the Major?”

“He only found a Lewis-gun section, sir. The Major moved most of the
men along the canal, where there’s more trouble!”

“All right!”

“Well, I suppose I may as well go and have a look at my lot,” Kavanagh
stretched himself.

“I told ’em to hunt round and see if they could get this place wired
up!”

“Umpteenth Corps ought to have thought of that, long ago!”

“Did you ever know Corps think of anything.”

While Kavanagh was so engaged, Dormer took a turn round the various
guards and posts he had established. There appeared to be fair cover
from view, and even from small-arm and field-gun fire. Of course
when the Bosche really wanted to get the place, nothing Dormer and
Kavanagh and some forty men could do would stop it. In coming round
to the stables behind the Château he found his Sergeant with two men,
laboriously trundling on a hand cart what he soon verified to be slabs
of marble. What would they think of next? The explanation was, “There
was a champion bathroom, sir, an’ I thought we could set up our Lewis
better with these!”

When Kavanagh saw what was going on, he laughed.

“More damage in billets, Dormer!”

“Well, the stuff will be smashed up anyhow, won’t it?”

“Two blacks don’t make a white. I understand why you told Vinyolles the
whole army was guilty. You’re doing just what your friend did about his
mules.”

“Why will you drag in that beastly business? This has nothing in common
with it.”

“To the common all things are common. You tell the owner of the Château
that when he finds out.”

Dormer was going to say “He won’t find out!” but refrained. He disliked
arguing. This seemed a particularly bad argument. Also, at that moment,
a Lewis gun began, just below. Then another. He went to the garden
wall, and peered out. Nothing visible, as usual. He thought of all
the battle pictures he had ever seen. The prancing horses, the gay
uniforms, the engrossing action of figures that pointed muzzle or
bayonet at each other, that wielded sword or lance. Here he was, an
incident in one of the biggest battles in the world. All he could see
was neglected arable, smashed buildings, a broken bridge and a blocked
by-road, all shrouded in steamy vapour. He made out that it was the
Lewis opposite the end of the bridge that was firing. He crawled along
the gully that had been dug from the Château gate to the roadway, and
so to the emplacement by the step-off of the bridge. The Corporal in
charge of the section turned to him.

“Got ’im, sir!”

“What is it?”

“Bosche in the ditch, under them bushes!”

Dormer waited a moment, but nothing happened. He crawled back, and sent
his Sergeant round to see that every one was under cover. Back in the
cellar he found Kavanagh, and told him.

“I know. Once more into the breach!”

“It’s not poetry, Kavanagh. This is the start. Once they find we’re
stopping them here, they’ll shift us, you may bet!”

“I shouldn’t wonder. My lot are trying to get into touch with Brigade.
They’re running a line back behind the wood. There’s no one on our
left, as far as can be found.”

“Must be some one.”

“Why should there be? Brigade have probably moved by this time.”

“Ah, well, can’t be helped.”

No use telling the chap that it was all useless. He just sat down
and lit his pipe. He perceived clearly enough that they were being
sacrificed--just left there to hold the Bosche up for a few hours,
while the Division went back.

During the day there was sporadic machine gunning. The Bosche was
feeling his way for crossing the canal, but had found it far less easy
than in the sectors farther north. Tolerably certain that the main
attack would come at dawn, Dormer and Kavanagh got what rest they
could, though proper sleep was out of the question. Their servants had
found a well-upholstered sofa, and a superior brass bedstead, which now
adorned the cellar, causing Kavanagh to gibe about damage in billets.
Their vigil was lightened by the sounds of song from the stables where
such men as they had set apart as reserves were lodged.

  “Old soldiers never die,
  They only fade away.”

to a well-known hymn tune, made Dormer home-sick, but delighted
Kavanagh.

“Listen to that!”

“I can’t help it, unless I send and stop them.”

“Never, man, never stop men who can sing at such a moment. It means
philosophy and courage!”

“It means foolishness and rum!”

“Dormer, I fear you are no born leader!”

“No, of course I wasn’t.”

“But you’ve got to lead men now, and lead ’em to victory.”

“I don’t mind much so long as I lead ’em to Peace!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, mere Peace will mean Revolution!”

“I don’t believe it. I saw that affair at Étaples. I saw the trouble
among the French troops in May. Those chaps prefer to take orders from
you and me rather than from their own sort.”

“How do you account for Russia, then?”

“I can’t. But it’s an object lesson rather than an example, I should
say.”

“You used not to talk like that. You used to say that the men wouldn’t
stand it.”

“I’ve lived and learned!”

“Both, I am sure.”

“You needn’t be so superior. No one knew what any of this would be like
until it was tried. We’ve something to go by, now! This War depends
on turning a crank. The side that goes on turning it efficiently the
longer will win. Our chaps look like lasting!”

“So do the Bosche. No, Dormer, you’re all wrong----”

At that moment a fresh burst of song came from the stables. A Cockney
voice to a waltz tune:

  “Orl that I wawnt is larve,
    Orl that I need is yew----”

“There,” cried Kavanagh, his voice rising into his excited croak.
“That’s what we want!”

Dormer did not reply. With dusk came a few long-range shots, gradually
broadening and deepening into a bombardment towards dawn. Both of them
had to be out and about all night. They had several casualties, and the
whole place reeked with gas. As the grey light of another day began
to change the texture of the shadows, movement was discernible about
the road. It was their chance and with a higher heart and the feeling
of relief, they were able to let loose the Lewis guns, which they had
managed to save intact. For more than an hour, Dormer crawled from one
to the other, seeing that they did not overheat or jam, for the fact
that they were killing Germans pleased him. Then there was a slackening
of fire on both sides.

They waited and the suspense from being irksome, became tolerable.
There was a good deal of noise each side of them, and Dormer began
to wonder if his detachment were surrounded, especially as the
servants whom he had sent back to get into touch with Brigade, had
not returned. It was a dull rainy afternoon prematurely dark, and
the rain as it increased, seemed to beat down the gunning, as water
quenches a fire. He must have been in that half-waking state that often
superimposed on sleeplessness and the awful din, when he was thoroughly
roused by trampling in the trees round the Château. He called to
Kavanagh but got no reply. Then there was a pushing and scrambling at
the wall behind the stable, and English cavalrymen came swinging over
it. Dormer and Kavanagh were relieved, and were shortly able to hand
over and prepare to march their command back to rejoin their Division,
which, depleted by four weeks of continual mauling, was being taken out
of the line.

The battle was by no means over. They next went in farther north, and
Dormer had the queer experience of going into trenches where Corps
H.Q. had been, of billeting in rooms where Major-Generals had slept.
Gradually he became aware of lessening tension, reduced shelling, and
slackened machine-gun fire, but it was the end of May before he found,
when sent to raid an enemy post, that there was no one there. He had
been right after all. The German offensive also had failed. Anticlimax
was the rule of the War. He was glad that he had parted from Kavanagh,
who had gone back to his proper job with his Division, goodness knew
where. He felt that the fellow would remind him that for several hours
while they lay together in those scratched-out trenches round that
little Château by the canal, he had given up hope. He need not have
bothered. If the Bosche could not win on that day, he never would.
Slowly now the British lines were creeping forward. Then he found
American troops behind him.

It was during this phase of things that he found himself upon familiar
ground. Except on Kavanagh’s lips, he had not heard of the crime at
Vanderlynden’s since before Christmas. It was now September. Here he
was, detrained and told to march to Hondebecq. He passed what had
been Divisional Head-quarters in 1916 and noticed the shell-holes,
the open, looted, evacuated houses. He passed along the road which he
and Major Stevenage had traversed all those years ago. The Brigade
were in Divisional Reserve, and were quartered in a string of farms
just outside the village. He looked at the map squares attentively,
but on the larger scale map he found it actually marked Ferme
l’Espagnole. Being Dormer, he just saw to the billeting of his company
and then learned that the Battalion Head-quarters were located at the
Vanderlyndens’, and had no difficulty in finding good reason to walk
over there, after tea.

The place was not much changed. It was soiled, impoverished, battered
by War, but the German advance, which had stopped dead a few miles
short of it, had been spent by the time it reached its limits in this
sector, and had early been pushed back. Trenches had been dug and
camouflage erected all round the place, but it had not suffered damage
except by a few long-distance shots, the routine of trench warfare had
never reached it. In the kitchen, darkened by the fact that the glass
was gone from the windows, which were blinded with aeroplane fabric,
stood the familiar figure of Mademoiselle Vanderlynden. He asked for
the Colonel, and was civilly directed to the parlour on the other side
of the door. Not a word of recognition, hardly a second glance. He did
not know if he were sorry or glad. He would have felt some relief to
hear that the claim that had caused all that trouble had been settled.
But he did not know what he might bring down upon his head by inquiry
and held his tongue. His business with the Colonel was the usual
regimental routine, nominal and numerical rolls, reinforcements and
indents, training and movements. It did not take long. On his way out
he passed the kitchen door and said just:

“Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, M’sieu!” And then calmly: “They are going to pay us for
the damage to _La Vierge_!”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I thought you would like to know. It has been a long time.”

“Yes, a long time. I hope it will soon be settled.”

“Ah, not yet. I know these offices at Boulogne! They have a good deal
to pay for, no doubt.”

“No doubt. Good night, Mademoiselle!”

“Good night, _mon capitaine_.”

Walking back to his billet, he had once more that sensation of escape.
Was he really going to get away from that business, this time, for
ever? True, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden seemed little enough inclined to
be vindictive. He could not help feeling that her view of the affair
was after all reasonable and just. She bore no malice, she wanted
things put right. Money would do it. She was going to get the money,
or so she seemed to think. She had no animus against the man who had
broken a piece of her property. She had neither animus against nor
consideration for himself, the representative of the British Army,
who had so signally failed to hasten the question of compensation.
She took it all as part of the War, and she was seeing it correctly.
It was the British Army that had done it. Her home, where she was
working so peacefully in 1914, had become first a billet, then all but
a battlefield. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more
nor less. That was exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been
done to any furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to
get out of it with his body intact, and resume the broken thread of
existence, where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago.
True he had not been badly paid, but he had taken a considerable
risk--it was much more dangerous to be an officer than a private, more
dangerous to be a private than a civilian. She had gauged the whole
thing correctly, right down to the necessarily slow and complicated
process of getting it adjudicated by some set of fellows down by the
coast, who ran these things off by the hundred and had a whole set of
rules that had to be complied with. He turned at the end of the farm
road and took a look back at the old place. There were worse billets
than the Spanish Farm and people more awkward to deal with than the
Vanderlyndens. In the Somme he had come across farms where they charged
you for the water and people who removed everything right down to
the bedsteads. Vanderlynden had only wanted to be paid for what was
wantonly damaged. They were French, you couldn’t expect them to be
sympathetic about other people’s mules. What a queer world it was, he
would never have suspected all the crotchets that human nature could
present, had he not been thrust nose-foremost into this infernal show.

All his philosophy forsook him, however, on entering the billet where
his company was lodged. The woman had been selling not merely beer,
which was connived at, but spirits, to the men. Two of them had got
“tight” and had been arrested, and he would have them up before him in
the morning. Then there would be the question as to where she got the
spirits from, whether some Quartermaster-sergeant had been making away
with the rum, or whether she had induced some one to buy it for her at
the Expeditionary Force Canteen. It all came back to the same thing.
Men kept under these conditions too long.

No one had been more surprised than Dormer, when the Allied Armies
took up the initiative again in July, and appeared to keep it. With a
lugubrious satisfaction he found himself retracing the advances in the
Somme district of 1916. It was an ironical comment on his hard-earned
War-wisdom, two years devoted to doing precisely the same thing at
precisely the same place. Of course, he had learned some lessons, but
his estimate of one hundred and eighty years was still too small. But
when the movement became perpetual and he found himself on ground he
no longer recognized, among villages that showed all the signs of
methodical German occupation, he began to wonder. A slight wound in
the forearm threw him out of touch for a week or two, and when he went
back, he found himself in a more northern sector again, and for the
first time found cavalry in front of him. It suited him all right, he
didn’t want to have the job of bombing out little nests of machine
gunners, that marked each step in the line of advance. His feelings
were pretty generally shared. Men began to ask themselves whether there
was any glory in being knocked out at the moment of victory. When his
battalion was again obliged to move in advance of the cavalry, against
obstacles which, although always evacuated, were out of the sphere of
cavalry tactics, he found for the first time a definite unwillingness
among his command to obey orders in any but the most perfunctory manner.

He had sufficient sense to see that it was very natural. In the early
days the job had been to keep men under cover, to avoid useless and
wasteful casualties. The lesson had been learned at length with a
thoroughness that he could never have instilled. The old, old boast
of the Territorial Colonel who had first enlisted him, and whose
tradition was actually of pre-Territorial days, from the period of the
Volunteers of before the Boer War, was far better founded than he had
ever supposed. He had been inclined to scoff when he had heard the old
boy talk: “Our motto was Defence not Defiance!” He did not scoff now.
It was deeply, psychologically true. The army that had survived was an
army that had been made to fight without much difficulty, while its
back was to the sea, with the knowledge that trenches lost meant worse,
if possible, conditions of existence, and it was moved by some rags of
sentiment, as to holding what one had got; an army which displayed all
the slowly aroused, almost passive pugnacity of the English working
class, so docile, yet so difficult to drive out of a habit of mind,
or an acquired way of living. They had no real imperialism in them,
none of the high-faultin’ Deutschland über Alles, none of the French or
Italian bitter revengefulness, nor peasant passion for acquisition. The
Rhine had never figured in their primary school education. They had no
relatives groaning under Austrian or German domination--no rancorous
feelings bred from the attempt to force alien language or unassimilated
religious forms down their throats.

He had always regarded the boast about an Englishman’s House being his
Castle as so much claptrap. He knew by daily experience of business,
that any Englishman was governed by economic conditions. Religious
and racial tyranny were so far removed from the calculations of all
his sort, and all above and below it, that the very terms had ceased
to have any meaning. This War had no effect on the lightly borne if
real tyranny of England, the inexorable need to get a permanent job
if possible and keep it, with constant anxiety as to the tenure of
one’s lodging, and the prospect of old age. These fellows who fell
in with blank unmeaning faces, in which there was no emotion, and
who marched with the same old morose jokes, and shyly imitated the
class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from
the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools, had
done what they had promised to do, or had (the late comers) been
conscripted to do. They had engaged or been called up for duration.
That was a typically English slogan for a European War. Their Anglia
Irridenta lay in the football fields and factories, the music-halls
and seaside excursions that they talked of, and now hoped to see once
again. Their Alsace Lorraine lay in the skilled occupations or soft
jobs that women or neutrals had invaded. When he listened to their
talk in billets, and occasionally caught some real glimpse of them,
between their mouth-organ concerts, and their everlasting gamble at
cards, it was of the keen Trades Unionists who were already talking of
purging this, that or the other skilled industry from all the non-union
elements that had been allowed to flow into it, behind their backs,
while they were chasing Fritz across this b---- country, where Belgium,
France, or Luxembourg were simply “billets,” and the goal was “dear old
Blighty”--behind them, over the Channel, not in front, still ringed
about by German trenches.

There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The
French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at their
farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their country
without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built,
hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable
sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the mechanical
nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest proportion of
regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting their one
chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their command
of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant ammunition.
The machine gunners, containing some proportion of picked men, and able
to feel that they could easily produce some noticeable effect with
their weapon, were still game. But the mass of infantry, tired enough
of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted by generations of
peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were rapidly adopting the
attitude, unexpressed as always with the humbler Englishman, of “Let
the gunners go on if they like. We don’t mind!”

On a grey November morning, Dormer went to his billet in the suburb of
a manufacturing town. It was the most English place he had set eyes
on in all his three years. It was not really suburban, very nearly,
not quite. There was no garden before the door, it was close to the
factories and workshops where the wealth that had built it was made,
instead of being removed a decent mile or so. In fact, it just lacked
the proper pretentiousness. Its owner had made money and was not in the
least ashamed of admitting it, was rather prone to display the fact
and his house looked like it. It was a villa, not a château. It was
the home of a successful manufacturer who did not want in the least
to be taken for a country gentleman. He, poor fellow, had been called
up and promptly killed, and his home, with its stained-glass windows,
expensive draping and papering, clumsy if efficient sanitation, was
inhabited only by his widow.

Dormer thought there could not be in the world any person so utterly
beaten. Broken-hearted, exposed during four years to considerable
bodily privation, being in the occupied area, she was no Mademoiselle
Vanderlynden of the Army zone that Dormer knew, making a bold front
against things. She was a delicate--had been probably a pretty
woman--but it was not from any of her half-audible monosyllabic replies
that Dormer was able to discover to what sort of a country he had come.
A little farther down the street was the factory, long gutted by the
Germans and used as a forage store, where his company were billeted.
The old caretaker in the time-keeper’s cottage told Dormer all that
was necessary, and left him astonished at the moderation of tone and
statement, compared with the accounts of German occupation given by the
Propagandist Press. Possibly, it was because he addressed the old man
in French--or because he had never parted with his English middle-class
manners--or because the old fellow was nearly wild with delight at
being liberated. This was what Dormer heard:

“Enter, my Captain. It is a Captain, is it not, with three stars?
The insignia of Charles Martell!” (Here wife and daughter joined in
the laugh at what was obviously one of the best jokes in father’s
repertory.) “You will find that the Bosches removed everything, but
that makes less difficulty in the workshop. You have only to divide
the floor space between your men. I know. I was a corporal in the War
of ’Seventy. Ah! a bad business, that, but nothing to what we have now
supported. You will do well to make a recommendation to your men not
to drink the water of the cistern. The Bosches have made beastliness
therein. Ah! You have your own watercart? That is well done, much
better than we others used to have, in Algeria. It is always wise to
provide against the simple soldier, his thoughts have no connection.
You say you are accustomed to Germans and their mannerisms? I do not
wonder. We too, as you may judge, have had cause to study them. I will
tell you this, my Captain, the German is no worse than any other man,
but he has this mania for Deutschland über Alles. It comes from having
been a little people and weak, and so often conquered by us others.
So that to give him some idea of himself, since he cannot invent a
culture like us other French, he must go to put all above below, and
make a glory of having a worse one. That shows itself in his three
great faults--he has no sentiment of private property--what is others’,
is his. He must be dirtier than a dog in his habits--witness our
court-yard--and he has to make himself more brute than he really is.
You see, therefore, he has stripped the factory, and even our little
lodging, down to my daughter’s sewing-machine, and the conjugal bed
of mother and myself. You see also, that we had our grandchildren, our
dog Azor, our cat Titi. Now many of the Bosches who lodged here were
certainly married and had their little ones and domestic animals. Yet
if they found a child or a beast playing in the entry when they entered
or left, they must give a kick of the foot, a cut with the riding-whip.
Not from bad thoughts, I assure you. It is in their code, as it is
in that of us others, English and French, to lift the hat, to make a
salutation. The officers are the worst, because in them the code is
stronger. For the German simple soldier, I have respect. They sang like
angels!” (Here the old man quavered out the first bars of:

  “Ein feste Bourg ist unser Gott.”)

Dormer wanted to get away, but could scarcely forbear to listen when
the daughter broke in:

“But, Papa, recount to the officer the droll trick you played upon
those who came to demolish the factory!”

“Ah, yes. Place yourself upon a chair, my officer, and I will tell you
that. Figure to yourself that these Bosches, as I have explained, were
not so bad as one says in the papers. They had orders to do it. I know
what it is. I have had orders, in Algeria, to shoot Arabs. It was not
my dream, but I did it. I will explain to you this.

“It was the day on which they lost the ridge. One heard the English
guns, nearer and nearer. Already there were no troops in the factory,
nothing but machine gunners, always retreating. A party of three came
here with machinery in a box. One knew them slightly, since they also
had billeted here. They were not dirty types; on the contrary, honest
people. Sapper-miners, they were; but this time one saw well that they
had something they did not wish to say. They deposit their box and
proceed to render account of the place. They spoke low, and since we
have found it better to avoid all appearance of wishing to know their
affairs, we did not follow them. Only, my daughter had a presentiment.
Woman, you know, my officer, it is sometimes very subtle. She put it
in her head that these would blow up the factory. She was so sure that
I lifted the cover of their box and looked in. It was an electric
battery and some liquids in phials. I had no time to lose. I placed
myself at the gate and ran as fast as I can to where they were, in the
big workshop. I am already aged more than sixty. My days for the race
are over. Given also that I was experiencing terrible sentiments--for
you see, while we keep the factory there is some hope we may be able
to work when the War is finished, but if it is blown up, what shall we
others go and do--I was all in a palpitation, by the time I reached
them. I cried: ‘There they go!’

“‘Who goes?’ they asked.

“‘The cavalry,’ I cried.

“They ran to the entry, and seeing no one, they feared that they were
already surrounded. I saw them serpentine themselves from one doorway
to another all down the street. The moment they were lost to sight I
flung their box into the big sewer!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Dormer billeted his company in the factory. He did not fear shell-fire
that night. He himself slept in a bed at the villa. It was the first
time he had left the night guard to a junior officer. In the morning,
he paraded his company, and proceeded, according to plan, to await
the order to move. The days were long gone by when a battalion was a
recognizable entity, with a Mess at which all the officers saw each
other once a day. Depleted to form Machine Gun Companies, the truncated
battalions of the end of the War usually worked by separate companies,
moving independently. There was some desultory firing in front, but his
own posts had seen and heard nothing of the enemy. About nine he sent a
runner to see if his orders had miscarried. Reply came, stand to, and
await developments. He let his men sit on the pavement, and himself
stood at the head of the column, talking with the two youngsters who
commanded platoons under him. Nothing happened. He let the men smoke.
At last came the order: “Cease fire.”

When he read out the pink slip to his subordinates, they almost
groaned. Late products of the at last up-to-date O.T.C.’s of England,
they had only been out a few months and although they had seen
shell-fire and heavy casualties, yet there had always been a retreating
enemy, and fresh ground won every week. The endless-seeming years
of Trench Warfare they had missed entirely. The slow attrition that
left one alone, with all one’s friends wounded or killed, dispersed
to distant commands or remote jobs, meant nothing to them. They had
been schoolboys when Paschendaele was being contested, Cadets when the
Germans burst through the Fifth Army. They wanted a victorious march to
Berlin.

Dormer read the message out to the company. The men received the news
with ironical silence. He had the guards changed, and the parade
dismissed, but confined to billets. He heard one of his N.C.O.’s say to
another: “Cease fire! We’ve got the same amount of stuff on us as we
had two days ago!”

It made him thoughtful. Ought he to crime the chap? Why should he? Had
the Armistice come just in time? If it hadn’t come, would he have been
faced with the spectacle of two armies making peace by themselves,
without orders, against orders, sections and platoons and companies
simply not reloading their rifles, machine gunners and Trench Mortars
not unpacking their gear, finally even the artillery keeping teams
by the guns, and the inertia gradually spreading upwards, until the
few at the top who really wanted to go on, would have found the dead
weight of unwillingness impossible to drag? The prospect, though
curious, was not alarming. In a country so denuded and starved, one
could keep discipline by the simple expedient of withholding rations.
He had already seen, a year before at Étaples, the leaderless plight
of all those millions of armed men, once they were unofficered. He was
not stampeded by panic, and his inherited, inbred honesty bade him ask
himself: “Why shouldn’t they make Peace themselves?” The object that
had drawn all these men together was achieved. The invasion of France
was at an end, that of Belgium a matter of evacuation only. “Cease
fire.” It almost began to look like an attempt to save face. Was it the
same on the German side too?

In the afternoon he proposed to walk over to Battalion H.Q. and have
a word with the Colonel. He knew quite well he should find the other
company commanders there. Naturally every one would want to get some
idea of what was to be expected under these totally unprecedented
circumstances. He was met at the door of his billet by a message from
the youngster he had left in charge. He had got a hundred and forty
prisoners.

Dormer went at once. He could see it all before he got there. All along
the opposite side of the street, faultlessly aligned and properly
“at ease” were men in field grey. At either end of the line stood a
guard of his own company, and not all Dormer’s pride in the men he had
led with very fair success, with whose training and appearance he had
taken great pains, could prevent his admitting to himself that the only
point at which his lot could claim superiority was in a sort of grumpy
humour. The machinery of War had conquered them less entirely than it
had conquered the Germans.

In the little time-keeper’s box, turned into the company office,
he found a tall, good-looking man, who immediately addressed him
in perfect English, giving the rank of Feld Webel, the quantity
and regiment of his party and adding: “I surrender to you, sir.”
Dormer gave instructions that the party should be marched to Brigade
Head-quarters. He wanted to send some report as to the capture, but
his subordinate replied: “We didn’t capture ’em. They just marched up
the street. The post at the bridge let ’em through.” Dormer let it go
at that, and having seen the street cleared, he walked over to see his
Colonel, who was billeted in a big school in a public park. His story
was heard with that sort of amusement that goes with the last bottle
of whisky, and the doubt as to when any more will be obtainable. The
Adjutant said: “Simply gave ’emselves up, did they?”

But the Captain commanding C Company, a man of about Dormer’s own sort
and service, voiced Dormer’s thought.

“I believe, in another week, we’d have had both sides simply laying
down their arms.”

“Oh, nonsense, soon stop that!” The Colonel spoke without real
conviction. He had to say that officially.

With regard to the object for which he had come, Dormer found every
one in his own difficulty. No one knew what was to happen, except that
arrangements were already on foot for enormous demobilization camps.
But the immediate steps were not even known at Brigade. Every one, of
course, aired some pet idea, and were interrupted by noise outside,
shouts and cries, the sound of marching, and orders given in German.
The room emptied in a moment. The park was at one end of the town,
and abutted on the smaller streets of artisans’ dwellings that, in
every town of the sort, goes by the name of Le Nouveau Monde. This
quarter had apparently emptied itself into the park, to the number of
some hundreds, mostly people of over military age, or children, but
one and all with those thin white faces that showed the long years of
insufficient and unsuitable food, and the spiritual oppression that lay
on “occupied” territory. They were shouting and shaking their fists
round the compact formation of Dormer’s prisoners, who had just been
halted, in front of the house. The N.C.O. in charge had been ordered
by Brigade to bring them back. A chit explained the matter: “Prisoners
taken after 11.0 a.m. to be sent back to their own units, on the line
of retreat.”

The Feld Webel enlightened the Colonel’s mystification: “We refuse
to obey the order, sir. Our regiment is twenty miles away. All the
peasants have arms concealed. We shall just be shot down.”

It was a dilemma. Dormer could not help thinking how much better the
Feld Webel showed up, than his own Colonel. The latter could not shoot
the men where they stood. Nor could he leave them to the mercies of
the natives. How difficult War became with the burden of civilization
clogging its heels. The first thing to do was obviously to telephone to
the A.P.M. for police. In the meantime a French Liaison Officer made a
speech, and Dormer grinned to hear him. Fancying apologizing for the
War. But what else could the fellow do. He did it well, considering.
The crowd quieted, thinned, dispersed. The police arrived, and had
a discussion with the Adjutant. Still no conclusion. The Feld Webel
strode up and down in front of his men, master of the situation. At
length, some one had an idea. Six lorries rolled up in the dark, an
interpreter was put on board, and the party moved off in the November
dusk. The Commander of C Company and Dormer left H.Q. together. Parting
at the corner that separated their scattered companies, they both
exclaimed together:

“What a War!” and burst out laughing.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was perhaps, to a certain degree, Dormer’s fault, that during
the remainder of November he became conscious of a dreary sense of
anti-climax. No doubt he was that sort of person. The emergencies of
the War had considerably overstrained his normal powers, which he
had forced to meet the need. The need had ceased, and he had great
difficulty in goading himself up to doing the bare necessary routine of
Company office parades. He managed to avoid being sent up to the Rhine,
and even secured a reasonable priority in demobilization, but beyond
this there was nothing for it but to “continue the motion” of waiting
for the next thing to happen.

His principal job was to extract from an unwilling peasantry, enough
ground for football. How often did he go to this farm and that village
shop, with his best manner, his most indirect approach, liberal orders
for any of the many commodities that could be bought, and in the last
resort, cheerful payment of ready money out of his own pocket in order
to obtain a grudging leave to use this or that unsuitable meadow, not
to the extent that the game of football demanded, but to the extent
that the small proprietors considered to be the least they could make
him accept for the most money that he could possibly be made to pay.

Then, in the long dark evenings, there was the job of keeping the men
away from the worse sorts of estaminet. His own abilities, limited to
singing correctly the baritone part of Mendelssohn’s Sacred Works,
or Sullivan’s humorous ones, was not of any practical service. What
was wanted was the real star comic, the red-nosed man with improbable
umbrella, the stage clergyman with his stage double-life and voice
that recalled with such unintentional faithfulness, the affected
mock-culture of the closed and stereotyped mind. Any deformity was
welcome, not, Dormer observed, that they wanted to laugh at the
helplessness of the bandy leg or the stutterer, the dwarf or the
feeble-minded. On the contrary, the sentimentality of the poorer
English had never stood out in brighter relief than on the edge of
those devastated battlefields, where in their useless khaki, the men
who had perpetuated the social system that had so blindly and wantonly
used so many of them, waited patiently enough for the order of release
from the servitude that few of them had chosen or any of them deserved.
No, they liked to see the cunning and prowess of the old lady, or the
innocent boy, applauded the way in which all those characters portrayed
as having been born with less than normal capabilities showed more than
normal acquisitiveness or perspicacity.

Dormer could not help reflecting how different they were from the New
Army in which he had enlisted. In the squad of which, at the end of
three months’ violent training and keenly contested examinations, he
had become the Corporal, there had been one or two labourers, several
clerks from the humbler warehouses and railways, others in ascending
scale from Insurance Offices and Banks, one gorgeous individual who
signed himself a Civil Servant, three persons of private means, who
drove up to the parade ground in motor-cars. He well remembered one
of these latter going surreptitiously to the Colonel and applying
for a commission, and being indignantly refused, on the grounds that
the Colonel didn’t know who (socially) he (the applicant) was. But
when the news got out, the section were even more disrespectful to
that unfortunate individual because they considered he had committed
a breach of some sort of unwritten code that they had undertaken to
observe. So they went on together, the immense disparity of taste and
outlook cloaked by shoddy blue uniforms and dummy rifles, equal rations
and common fatigues.

But the first offensive of the spring of 1915 had brought new
conditions. The loss in infantry officers had been nothing short of
catastrophic. Very soon hints, and then public recommendation to
take commissions reached them. The section meanwhile had altered.
Two of the more skilled labourers had got themselves “asked for” by
munition works. Of the remainder Dormer and four others applied and
got commissions. He could see nothing like it now. There was more of
a mix-up than ever. For some men had been exempted from the earlier
“combings out” of the unenlisted for skill, and others for ill-health.
There was now only one really common bond, the imperative necessity to
forget the War and all that had to do with it. This was the general
impetus that had replaced the volunteering spirit, and it was this that
Dormer had to contend with. He mastered the business of amusing the men
pretty well, and his subordinates helped him. A more serious difficulty
was with the skilled mechanics. Fortunately, an infantry battalion
demanded little skill, and except for a few miners who had been out no
time at all, and were at present making no fuss, there was plenty of
grumbling but no organized obstruction.

He found a more advanced state of affairs when he went at the appointed
time, to supervise a football match between a team representing his own
Brigade and that of a neighbouring Brigade of Heavy Artillery. Crossing
the Grand’ Place of the village to call on the Gunner Mess he found a
khaki crowd, but it took him some minutes to realize that a full-dress
protest meeting was in progress. Senior N.C.O.’s were mounted upon a
G.S. wagon. These, he gathered, were the Chairman and speakers. Another
soldier, whose rank he could not see, was addressing the meeting.
More shocked than he had ever been in his life, he hastily circled
the square, and got to the Mess. He found most of the officers in;
there was silence, they were all reading and writing. After the usual
politenesses came a pause. He felt obliged to mention the object of his
visit. Silence again. Eventually the Captain with whom he had arranged
the preliminaries of the match said rather reluctantly:

“I’m afraid we shan’t be able to meet you this afternoon.”

Dormer forebore to ask the reason, but not knowing what else to do,
rose and prepared to take his leave. Possibly he spoke brusquely, he
was nervous in the atmosphere of constraint, but whatever may have
prompted the Gunner Captain, what he said was a confession:

“Our fellows are airing their views about demob.”

“Really!”

“Yes, perhaps you noticed it, as you came along?”

“Well, I did see a bit of a crowd.”

“You didn’t hear the speeches?” The other smiled.

“I heard nothing definitely objectionable, but it’s rather out of
order, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose so, but we get no help from up-atop!” The Captain
nodded in the direction of the Local Command.

“No, I suppose not,” Dormer sympathized.

The young Colonel interposed. “It’s very difficult to deal with the
matter. There’s a high percentage of skilled men in our formation. They
want to be getting back to their jobs.”

“It’s really rather natural,” agreed the Captain.

Dormer tried to help him. “We all do, don’t we?”

There was a sympathetic murmur in the Mess which evidently displeased
the Colonel.

“I’m not accustomed to all this going home after the battle.
Time-expired men I understand, but the New Army enlistments----” He
left it at that, and Dormer felt for him, probably, with the exception
of a few servants and N.C.O.’s, the only pre-War soldier in the Mess,
uncertain of himself and trying not to see the ill-suppressed sympathy
if not envy with which most of the officers around him regarded the
affair.

“Awfully sorry, Dormer,” the Captain concluded, “we simply can’t get
our crowd together. You see how it is. When this has blown over I’ll
come across and see you, and we will fix something up.”

Dormer went.

The Gunner Captain came that evening. In Dormer’s smaller Mess, it
needed only a hint to the youngsters to clear out for a few minutes.
Dormer admired the good humour with which the other approached him. It
was obviously the only thing to do.

Over drinks he asked, modelling himself on the other’s attitude:

“So that business blew over, did it?”

“It did, thank goodness. Awfully decent of you to take it as you did. I
hated letting you down.”

“Don’t mention it. I saw how you were placed.”

“The Colonel very much appreciated the way you spoke. I hope you had no
trouble with your chaps?”

“They were all right. I pitched them a yarn. They didn’t believe it, of
course. Some of them were at the--er----”

“The bloomin’ Parliament. Don’t mind saying it. It’s a dreadful shock
to a regular like our old man.”

“Naturally.”

“He spoke the plain unvarnished truth when he said he was unused to all
this demobbing.”

“Well, well, you can comfort him, I suppose, by pointing out that it
isn’t likely to occur again.”

“He’s a good old tough ’un. Splendid man in action, that’s what makes
one so sorry about it. Otherwise, of course, one knows what the men
mean. It’s only natural.”

“Perfectly.”

“His trouble is not only the newness of it. It’s his utter
helplessness.”

“Quite so. Absolutely nothing to be done. The--er--meeting was as
orderly as possible. I walked right through it. They simply ignored me.”

“Oh yes, there’s no personal feeling. They all paraded this morning
complete and regular.”

“That’s the end of it, I hope.”

“I think so. They came up to the Mess--three N.C.O.’s--a deputation, if
you please. They brought a copy of the resolution that was passed.”

Neither could keep a straight face, but laughter did not matter because
it was simultaneous. The Captain went on, finishing his drink:

“I believe the old man had a momentary feeling that he ought to crime
some one--but our Adjutant--topping chap--met them in the passage and
gave them a soft answer, and cooked up some sort of report, and sent it
up. It pacified ’em.”

“Did they need it?”

“Not really. ’Pon me word, never saw anything more reasonable in my
life, than what they had written out. It’s too bad, hanging ’em up for
months and months, while other people get their jobs. They know what
they want so much better than anyone else.”

“It’s impossible to please every one.”

“Yes. But when you think of what the men have done.”

Dormer did not reply. He was thinking of the Infantry, with their whole
possessions on their backs, always in front in the advance, last in
the retreat. The Gunner took his leave. Like everything else, either
because of the incident, or more probably without any relation to it,
the slow but steady progress of demobilization went on, those men who
had the more real grievance, or the greater power of expression, got
drafted off. The composition of units was always changing. Even where
it did not, what could “other ranks” do? To the last Dormer felt his
recurrent nightmare of the Headless Man to be the last word on the
subject. But it was becoming fainter and fainter as the violence of
the first impression dimmed, keeping pace with the actuality of the
dispersal of that khaki nation that lay spread across France, Germany,
Italy, the Balkans, and the East. The Headless Man was fading out.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was mid-April, the first fine weather of the year, when his own turn
came. Of course the Mess gave him a little dinner, for although nothing
on earth, not even four years of War, could make him a soldier, his
length of service, varied experience, and neat adaptability had made
him invaluable; again no one had ever found it possible to quarrel with
him; further, his preoccupation with games had made him perhaps the
most sought-for person in the Brigade.

Had it not been for these reasons, there was little else to which
he had a farewell to say; casualty, change, and now demobilization
removed friends, then chance acquaintances, until there was no one with
whom he was in the slightest degree intimate. He might almost have been
some attached officer staying in the Mess, instead of its President,
for all he knew of the officers composing it. There was nothing in the
village that lay on the edge of the battlefield that he wanted to see
again. It was not a place where he had trained or fought, it was not
even the place at which the news of the Armistice had reached him. It
was just a place where the Brigade of which his battalion had formed
a part had been dumped, so as to be out of the way, but sufficiently
within reach of rail, for the gradual attrition of demobilization
to work smoothly. An unkind person might have wondered if the mild
festival that took place in the estaminet of that obscure commune was
not so much a farewell dinner to old Dormer, as an eagerly sought
opportunity for a little extra food and drink that might help to pass
the empty days. Slightly bleary-eyed in the morning, Dormer boarded the
train, waved his hand to the little group of officers on the platform,
and sat down to smoke until he might arrive at Dunkirk.

On a mild April evening, he paced the port side of the deck of the
steamer that was taking him home. He was aware that he might have to
spend a night in dispersal station, but it did not matter in the
least. The real end of the business to such an essential Englishman
as Dormer was here and now, watching the calm leaden sea-space widen
between him and the pier-head of Calais. Prophets might talk about the
obliteration of England’s island defences, but the sentiment that the
Channel evoked was untouched. After years of effort and sacrifice,
Dormer remained a stranger in France. He might know parts of it
tolerably well, speak its language fairly, fight beside its soldiers,
could feel a good deal of intelligent admiration for its people and
institutions, but nothing would ever make him French. It would perhaps
have been easier to assimilate him into Germany. But on the whole, in
spite of his unprovocative manner, he was difficult to assimilate, a
marked national type. Lengthier developments and slower, more permanent
revolutions were in his inherited mental make-up, than in that of any
of the other belligerents. In a Europe where such thrones as were left
were tottering and crashing, nothing violent was in his mind, or in
the minds of ninety per cent of those men who covered the lower deck,
singing together, with precisely the same lugubrious humour, as in the
days of defeat, of stalemate, or of victory:

  “Old soldiers never die,
  They only fade away.”

He turned to look at them, packed like sardines, so that even the sea
breeze could hardly dissipate the clouds of cigarette smoke, just as
no disaster and no triumph could alter their island characteristics,
however much talk there might be about town life sapping the race. As
he looked at them, herded and stalled like animals, but cheerful in
their queer way as no animal can ever be, he remembered that somewhere
among all those thousands that were being poured back into England day
by day (unless of course he were buried in one of those graveyards
that marked so clearly the hundred miles from Ypres to St. Quentin)
was a private soldier, whom he had been told to discover and bring to
justice for the Crime at Vanderlynden’s, as Kavanagh had called it. He
had never even got the fellow’s name and number, and he did not care.
He never wanted the job, nothing but his punctilious New Army spirit,
that had made him take the War as seriously as if it had been business,
had kept him at it. Now he had done with it, the man would never be
found. But in Dormer’s mind would always remain that phantom that he
had pursued for so many months--years even, over all those miles, in
and out of so many units and formations. It had come to stand for all
that mass whose minds were as drab as their uniform, so inarticulate,
so decent and likable in their humility and good temper. Theirs was the
true Republicanism, and no written constitution could add anything to
it. He had not thought of that affair, during all these last months
that had seen so many Empires fall, so many nations set upon their
feet, but he thought of it now.

He turned once again and surveyed that coastline, somewhere behind
which he had made that pilgrimage; there it lay, newly freed Belgium on
the left, on the right the chalky downs that ran from Gris-Nez far out
of sight, down to Arras. Between the two, on those marshes so like any
of South-Eastern England, had taken place that Crime at Vanderlynden’s,
that typified the whole War. There, on those flat valleys of the
Yser and the Lys, the English army had come to rest after its first
few weeks of romantic march and counter-march. There had the long
struggle of endurance been the longest and least spectacular. It was
there that the English Effort, as they called it, had played its
real part, far more than on the greater battlefields farther south,
or away on other continents. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s showed the
whole thing in miniature. The English had been welcomed as Allies,
resented as intruders, but never had they become homogeneous with
the soil and its natives, nor could they ever leave any lasting mark
on the body or spirit of the place. They were still incomprehensible
to Vanderlynden’s, and Vanderlynden’s to them. Dormer was of all men
most unwilling and perhaps unable to seek for ultimate results of
the phenomena that passed before his eyes. To him, at that moment,
it seemed that the English Effort was fading out, leaving nothing
but graveyards. And when he found this moving him, his horror of the
expression of any emotion asserted itself, and he elbowed his way down
the companion, to get a drink.

When he came up again, that low shore had passed out of sight, but
ahead was visible the moderately white cliffs of England, beyond which
lay his occupation and his home, his true mental environment, and
native aspiration. He experienced now in all its fullness the feeling
that had been with him with such tragic brevity from time to time
during those years. This last passage of the Channel was, this time,
real escape. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was behind him. He had got
away from it at last.


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