“Competition for what, Shanks?”
“The slow valse, sir. We’ve practiced together three years now. We won at Salford last year. We’ll win at Blackpool, sir. I know we will. And I’ll be back in the two days, honest, sir.”
“Shanks, do you realize that France has fallen? That there is every likelihood of the invasion of England? That the whole railway system of the country is disorganized for the Dunkirk men? That our brigade is on two hours’ notice for active service? Do you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then how can you come to me with this absurd application?”
“But, sir, we’ve been practicing three years. We got a first at Salford last year. I can’t give up now, sir.”
“Request dismissed, sergeant-major.”
In accordance with custom C.S.M. Rawkes had been waiting within view in case the applicant for a private interview attempted personal violence on his officer. He now took over.
“Request dismissed. About turn, quick march.”
And Guy remained to wonder: was this the already advertised “spirit of Dunkirk”? He rather thought it was.
The days “in the hulks,” as de Souza called them, were few in number but they formed a distinct period of Guy’s life in the Halberdiers; real discomfort for the first time, beastly food, responsibility in its most irksome form, claustrophobia, all these oppressed him; but he was free of all sense of national disaster. The rising and falling in the tides in the harbor, the greater or smaller number of daily sick, the men up on charges, the indications more or fewer, of failing temper—these were the concerns of the day. Sarum-Smith was appointed “Entertainments Officer” and organized a concert at which three senior non-commissioned officers performed a strange piece of mummery traditional in the Halberdiers and derived, de Souza said, from a remote folk ceremony, dressed in blankets, carrying on a ritual dialogue under the names of “Silly Bean,” “Black Bean” and “Awful Bean.”
He organized a debate on the question: “Any man who marries under thirty is a fool” which soon became a series of testimonies. “All I can say is my father married at twenty-two and I never wish to see a happier homier house or a better mother nor I’ve had.”
He organized boxing matches.
Apthorpe was asked to lecture on Africa. He chose, instead, an unexpected subject: “The Jurisdiction of Lyon King of Arms compared with that of Garter King of Arms.”
“But, uncle, do you think it will interest the men?”
“Not all of them, perhaps. Those that are interested will be very much interested indeed.”
“I believe they would greatly prefer something about elephants or cannibals.”
“Take it or leave it, Sarum-Smith.”
Sarum-Smith left it.
Guy lectured on the Art of Wine Making and had a surprising success. The men relished information on any technical subject.
Extraneous figures came to add to the congestion. An odd, old captain like a cockatoo in the gaudy service dress of a defunct regiment of Irish cavalry. He said he was the cipher officer and was roped in to lecture on “Court Life at St. Petersburg.”
Dunn and his men turned up. They had got to France and traveled in a great arc of insecurity behind the breaking lines from Boulogne to Bordeaux, without once leaving their railway coach. This experience of foreign travel, within sound of the guns, under fire once when an agitated English airman passed their way, added perceptibly to Dunn’s self-confidence. Sarum-Smith tried to induce him to give a lecture on “the lessons learned in combat” but Dunn explained that he had spent the journey in holding a Court of Inquiry under the authority of the senior officer in the train, to examine the case of the carved boot. The verdict had been one of deliberate damage but since he had parted company with the convening officer he was not sure where the papers should be sent. He was reading the matter up in his Manual of Military Law.
A sinister super-cargo labeled “Chemical Warfare (Offensive)” was delivered to the quay and left there for all to see.
Guy got a second-in-command, a dull young regular named Brent, and a third subaltern. So the days passed. Suddenly there was a warning order and another move. They disembarked. The Dutch gunners waved them farewell as their train steamed away into the unknown. The maps of County Limerick were collected. They jolted slowly for ten hours, with many stops at sidings and many altercations with transport officers. They detrained at night, a magnificent, moonlit, scented night, and bivouacked in the woods surrounding a park, where all the paths glowed underfoot with phosphorescent deadwood. They were put into buses and dispersed along the sounding coast. It was there that Guy received the news of his nephew Tony.
He had two miles of cliff to defend against invasion. When de Souza was shown his platoon front he said: “But, uncle, it doesn’t make sense. The Germans are mad as hatters but not in quite this way. They aren’t going to land here.”
“They might put agents ashore. Or some of their landing craft might drift off course.”
“I think we’ve been sent here because we aren’t fit for the likely beaches.”
After two days an inspecting general arrived with several staff officers and Ritchie-Hook, sulking: three car-loads of them. Guy showed them his gun pits, which were sited to cover every bather’s path from the shore. The general stood with his back to the sea and gazed inland.
“Not much field of fire,” he said.
“No, sir. We expect the enemy from the other direction.”
“Must have all-round defense.”
“Don’t you think they’re a bit thin on the ground for that?” said Ritchie-Hook. “They’re covering a battalion front.”
“Parachutes,” said the general, “are the very devil. Well, remember. The positions are to be held to the last man and the last round.”
“Yes, sir,” said Guy.
“Do your men understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And remember, you must never speak of ‘If the enemy comes’ but ‘When they come.’ They are coming, here, this month. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, I think we’ve seen everything.”
“May I say a word?” asked a neat young staff officer.
“Carry on, I.O.”
“Fifth columnists,” said the Intelligence Officer, “will be your special concern. You know what they did on the Continent. They’ll do the same here. Suspect everyone—the vicar, the village grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here a hundred years, all the most unlikely people. Look out for signaling at night—lights, short-wave transmitters. And here’s a bit of information for your ears alone. It mustn’t go below platoon-commander level. We happen to know that the telegraph posts have been marked to lead the invading units to their rendezvous. Little metal numbers. I’ve seen them myself. Remove them and report to headquarters when you find them.”
“Very good, sir.”
The three cars drove on. Guy had been with de Souza’s platoon when the final words of encouragement were spoken. Here the high road ran almost on the edge of the cliff. He and Brent walked to the next platoon position. On the way they counted a dozen telegraph poles, each marked with a metal number.
“All telegraph poles are,” Brent said, “by the Post Office.”
“Sure?”
“Perfectly.”
Local Defense Volunteers helped patrol the area at night and reported frequent lamp-signals from fifth columnists. One story was so well told that Guy spent a night alone with Halberdier Glass, armed to the teeth, on the sands of a little cove; a boat was said to beach there often in darkness. But no one came their way that night. The only incident was a single tremendous flash which momentarily lit the whole coast. Guy remembered afterwards that in the momentary stillness he foolishly said: “Here they come.” Then from far away came the thump and tremor of an explosion.
“Land-mine,” said Glass. “Plymouth probably.”
In his vigils Guy thought often of Tony, with three, fou
r, perhaps five years cut clean out of his young life just as those eight had been cut from his own.
Once on an evening of dense sea-mist a message came that the enemy were attacking with arsenical smoke. That was Apthorpe, momentarily left in charge at Headquarters. Guy took no action. An hour later a message came canceling the alarm. That was Colonel Tickeridge, back at his post.
III
Another series of jolts, buffer on buffer down the train.
The brigade assembled and went under canvas at Brook Park. “Dispersal” was the prevailing fashion now. Instead of the dressed lines which had given Penkirk the airs and some of the graces of a Victorian color-print, there was now a haphazard litter of tents, haunting the shadows round the solitary oaks of the park, or shrinking in the immature surrounding coverts. A great taboo fell on the making of tracks. Special sentries were posted to shout at men approaching Brigade Headquarters across the lawn, directing them to creep through the shrubberies.
In the first two days at Brook Park the Halberdiers paraded company by company and were issued with sun helmets and ill-fitting khaki drill. Few looked anything but absurd. The garments were then put away and nothing was said about them. They aroused little curiosity. In the past months they had moved so suddenly, so often and so purposelessly, they had been alternately provided with, deprived of, and reprovided with so many different military objects, that speculation about their future had become purely facetious.
“I suppose we’re going to reconquer Somaliland” (which had just been precipitately abandoned), said de Souza.
“It’s just part of a fully equipped Halberdier’s normal kit,” said Brent.
However it produced one climax in the process which de Souza called “the Languishing of Leonard.”
During their defense of the Cornish cliffs the Second Battalion had seen very little of one another. Now they were reunited and Guy found a sad change evident in Leonard. Mrs. Leonard had planted herself and her baby in lodgings near him and she had worked hard on his divided loyalty. Bombs were beginning to fall in appreciable numbers. An invasion was confidently predicted for the middle of September. Mrs. Leonard wanted a man about the house. When Leonard moved from the coast with his company, Mrs. Leonard came too and settled in the village inn.
She asked Guy to dinner and explained her predicament.
“It’s all right for you,” she said. “You’re an old bachelor. You’ll make yourself very comfortable, I daresay, in India with native servants and all you want to eat. What’s going to happen to me, that’s what I’d like to know?”
“I don’t think there’s any prospect of our going to India,” said Guy.
“Then what’s Jim’s new hat for then?” asked Mrs. Leonard. “That’s an Indian hat, isn’t it? Don’t you tell me they’ve given him that hat and those size six shorts to wear here in the winter.”
“It’s just part of a fully equipped Halberdier’s normal kit,” said Guy.
“Do you believe that?”
“No,” said Guy. “Frankly, I don’t.”
“Well then?” said Mrs. Leonard triumphantly.
“Daisy won’t understand it’s what a soldier’s wife has to put up with,” said Leonard. He had said this often obviously.
“I didn’t marry a soldier,” said Mrs. Leonard. “If I’d known you were going to be a soldier I’d have married into the R.A.F. Their wives live comfortable and what’s more they’re the people who are winning the war. It says so on the wireless, doesn’t it? It isn’t as though it was only me: there’s baby to think of.”
“I don’t think that in case of invasion, you could expect to have Jim expressly detailed for the defense of your baby, you know, Mrs. Leonard.”
“I’d see he stayed around; anyway, he wouldn’t go surf-bathing and lying about under palm trees and playing the ukulele.”
“I don’t think those would be his duties if we went abroad.”
“Oh, come off the perch,” said Mrs. Leonard. “I’ve asked you here to help. You’re in with the high-ups.”
“Lots of the men have young babies too.”
“But not my baby.”
“Daisy, you’re being unreasonable. Do make her see sense, uncle.”
“It isn’t as though the whole army was going abroad. Why should they pick on Jim?”
“I suppose you could apply for transfer to barrack duties,” said Guy at last. “There must be a lot of chaps there who’d be eager to come with us.”
“I bet there would,” said Mrs. Leonard. “It’s just evacuation, that’s what it is, sending you off thousands of miles from the war, with bearers and sahibs and chota pegs.”
It was a sad little party. As Leonard walked back to camp with Guy he said: “It’s getting me down. I can’t leave Daisy in the state she’s in. Isn’t it true women sometimes go off their heads for a bit just after having a baby?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Perhaps that’s the trouble with Daisy.”
Meanwhile the sun-helmets were laid aside and long, hot days were spent in biffing Brook House from every possible direction.
Some days later Leonard met Guy and said gloomily: “I went to see the colonel this morning.”
“Yes.”
“About what Daisy has been saying.”
“Yes.”
“He was awfully sporting about it.”
“He’s an awfully sporting man.”
“He’s going to send my name in for transfer to the Training Depot. It may take some time, but he thinks it’ll go through.”
“I hope your wife will feel relieved.”
“Uncle, do you think I’m behaving pretty poorly?”
“It’s not my business.”
“I can see you do. Well, so do I.”
But he had not long in which to face whatever shame attached to his decision. That night, a warning order arrived and everyone was sent on forty-eight hours’ embarkation leave.
IV
Guy went for a day to Matchet. It was summer holidays for the school. He found his father busy with a pale blue Xenophon “brushing up” for the coming term.
“I can’t read a word of it unseen,” said Mr. Crouchback almost gleefully. “I bet the little blighters will catch me out. They did last term again and again, but they were very decent about it.”
Guy returned a day early to see that everything was well with his company’s arrangements. Walking through the almost empty camp at dusk, he met the brigadier.
“Crouchback,” he said, peering. “Not a captain yet?”
“No, sir.”
“But you’ve got your company.”
They walked together some way.
“You’ve got the best command there is,” said the brigadier. “There’s nothing in life like leading a company in action. Next best thing is doing a job on your own. Everything else is just bumf and telephones.” Under the trees, in the failing light, he was barely visible. “It’s not much of a show we’re going to. I’m not supposed to tell you where, so I shall. Place called Dakar. I’d never heard of it till they started sending me ‘Most Secret’ intelligence reports, mostly about ground-nuts. A French town in West Africa. Probably all boulevards and brothels if I know the French colonies. We’re in support. Worse really—we’re in support of the supporting brigade. They’re putting the Marines in before us, blast them. Anyway it’s all froggy business. They think they’ll get in without opposition. But it’ll help training. Sorry I told you. They’d court martial me if they found out. I’m getting too old for courts martial.”
He turned away abruptly and disappeared into the woodland.
Next day the move order was issued to entrain for Liverpool. Leonard was left behind with the rear-party “pending posting.” No one except Guy and the colonel knew why. Most supposed him ill. He had been looking like a ghost for some time.
Guy had no shame about the defection of Leonard. It seemed, rather, as their train moved spasmodically towards Liverpool, that it was they w
ho were deserting him. Their destination was not the Honolulu-Algiers-Quetta station of Mrs. Leonard’s film-clouded imagination, but it was a warm, highly colored, well-found place far from bombs and gas, famine and enemy occupation; far from the lightless concentration-camp which all Europe had suddenly become.
*
Chaos in Liverpool. Quays and ships in absolute darkness. Bombs falling somewhere not far distant. Embarkation staff officers scanning nominal-rolls with dimmed torches. Guy and his company were ordered into one ship, ordered out again, stood-to on the dockside for an hour. An all-clear siren sounded and a few lamps glowed here and there. Embarkation officers who had gone to earth emerged and resumed their duties. At last, at dawn they numbly climbed on board and found their proper quarters. Guy saw them bedded down and went in search of his cabin.
This was in the first-class part of the ship, unchanged from peace time when it had been filled with affluent tourists. This was a chartered ship with the Merchant Marine crew. Already Goanese stewards were up and about in their freshly laundered white and red livery. They padded silently about their work, arranging ashtrays symmetrically in the lounges, drawing the curtains for another day. They were quite at peace. No one had told them about submarines and torpedoes.
But not all were at peace. Turning a corner in search of his cabin Guy found a kind of pugnacious dance being performed in and out of his cabin by Halberdier Glass and a Goanese of distinguished appearance—thin, elderly, with magnificent white mustaches spanning his tear-wet nut-brown face.
“Caught this black bastard in the very act, sir. Mucking about with your kit, sir.”
“Please, sir, I am the cabin boy, sir. I do not know this rude soldier.”
“That’s all right, Glass. He’s just doing his job. Now clear out both of you. I want to turn in.”
“You aren’t surely going to have this native creeping round your quarters, sir?”
“I am no native, sir. I am a Christian Portuguese boy. Christian mama. Christian papa, six Christian children, sir.”
He produced from his starched blouse a gold medal, strung round his neck, much worn with the long swing and plunge of the ship rubbing it year by year to and fro on his hairless dark chest.