The Rough Road

Peggy laughed. “Oh, Goliath is perfectly assured of his position. He has got it rammed into his mind that he drives the two-seater.” She returned to the attack. “Do you intend always to remain a private?”

“I do,” said he. “Not even a corporal. You see, I’ve learned to be a private of sorts, and that satisfies my ambition.”

“Well, I give it up,” said Peggy. “Though why you wouldn’t let dad get you a nice cushy job is a thing I can’t understand. For the life of me I can’t.”

“I’ve made my bed, and I must lie on it,” he said quietly.

“I don’t believe you’ve got such a thing as a bed.”

Doggie smiled. “Oh yes, a bed of a sort.” Then noting her puzzled face, he said consolingly: “It’ll all come right when the war’s over.”

“But when will that be? And who knows, my dear man, what may happen to you?”

“If I’m knocked out, I’m knocked out, and there’s an end of it,” replied Doggie philosophically.

She put her hand on his. “But what’s to become of me?”

“We needn’t cry over my corpse yet,” said Doggie.

The Dean, after awhile, returned with his bottle of medicine, which he displayed with conscientious ostentation. They dined. Peggy again went over the ground of the possible commission.

“I’m afraid she has set her heart on it, my boy,” said the Dean.

Peggy cried a little on parting. This time Doggie was going, not to the fringe, but to the heart of the Great Adventure. Into the thick of the carnage. A year ago, she said, through her tears, she would have thought herself much more fitted for it than Marmaduke.

“Perhaps you are still, dear,” said Doggie, with his patient smile.

He saw them to the taxi which was to take them to the familiar Sturrocks’s. Before getting in, Peggy embraced him.

“Keep out of the way of shells and bullets as much as you can.”

The Dean blew his nose, God-blessed him, and murmured something incoherent about fighting for the glory of old England.

“Good luck,” cried Peggy from the window.

She blew him a kiss. The taxi drove off, and Doggie went back into the house with leaden feet. The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded, had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her cause for resentment and reproach, her attitude was nothing less than angelic. He sat down moodily in an arm-chair, his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his legs stretched out. The fault lay in himself, he argued. What was the matter with him? He seemed to have lost all human feeling, like the man with the stone heart in the old legend. Otherwise, why had he felt no prick of jealousy at Peggy’s admiring comprehension of Oliver? Of course he loved her. Of course he wanted to marry her when this nightmare was over. That went without saying. But why couldn’t he look to the glowing future? A poet had called a lover’s mistress “the lode-star of his one desire.” That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction.

Doggie was no psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a glass darkly, mystified by unknown change.

He rose, sighed, shook himself.

“I give it up,” said he, and went to bed.

Doggie went to France; a France hitherto undreamed of, either by him or by any young Englishman; a France clean swept and garnished for war; a France, save for the ubiquitous English soldiery, of silent towns and empty villages and deserted roads; a France of smiling fields and sorrowful faces of women and drawn patient faces of old men – and even then the women and old men were rarely met by day, for they were at work on the land, solitary figures on the landscape, with vast spaces between them. In the quiet townships, English street signs and placards conflicted with the sense of being in friendly provincial France, and gave the impression of foreign domination. For beyond that long grim line of eternal thunder, away over there in the distance, which was called the Front, street signs and placards in yet another alien tongue also outraged the serene genius of French urban life. Yet our signs were a symbol of a mighty Empire’s brotherhood, and the dimmed eyes that beheld the Place de la Fontaine transformed into “Holborn Circus,” and the Grande Rue into “Piccadilly,” smiled, and the owners, with eager courtesy, directed the stray Tommy to “Regent Street,” which they had known all their life as the Rue Feuillemaisnil– a word which Tommy could not pronounce, still less remember. It was as much as Tommy could do to get hold of an approximation to the name of the town. And besides these renamings, other inscriptions flamed about the streets; alphabetical hieroglyphs, in which the mystic letters H.Q. most often appeared; “This way to the Y.M.C.A. hut”; in many humble windows the startling announcement, “Washing done here.” British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little place and aligned along the avenues. British faces, British voices, everywhere. The blue uniform and blue helmet of a French soldier seemed as incongruous though as welcome as in London.

And the straight endless roads, so French with their infinite border of poplars, their patient little stones marking every hundred metres until the tenth rose into the proud kilometre stone proclaiming the distance to the next stately town, rang too with the sound of British voices, and the tramp of British feet, and the clatter of British transport, and the screech and whir of cars, revealing as they passed the flash of red and gold of the British staff. Yet the finely cultivated land remained to show that it was France; and the little whitewashed villages; the curé, in shovel-hat and rusty cassock; the children in blue or black blouses, who stared as the British troops went by; the patient, elderly French Territorials in their old pre-war uniforms, guarding unthreatened culverts or repairing the roads; the helpful signs set up in happier days by the Touring Club of France.

Into this strange anomaly of a land came Doggie with his draft, still half stupefied by the remorselessness of the stupendous machine in which he had been caught, in spite of his many months of training in England. He had loathed the East Coast camp. When he landed at Boulogne in the dark and the pouring rain and hunched his pack with the others who went off singing to the rest camp, he regretted East Anglia.

“Give us a turn on the whistle, Doggie,” said a corporal.

“I was sea-sick into it and threw it overboard,” he growled, stumbling over the rails of the quay.

“Oh, you holy young liar!” said the man next him.

But Doggie did not trouble to reply, his neighbour being only a private like himself.

Then the draft joined its unit. In his youth Doggie had often wondered at the meaning of the familiar inscription on every goods van in France: “40 Hommes. 8 Chevaux.” Now he ceased to wonder. He was one of the forty men… At the rail-head he began to march, and at last joined the remnant of his battalion. They had been through hard fighting, and were now in billets. Until he joined them he had not realized the drain there had been on the reserves at home. Very many familiar faces of officers were missing. New men had taken their place. And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty, some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the eyes of children who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

McPhail and Mo Shendish had passed through unscathed. In the reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them found themselves in the same platoon of A Company. Doggie almost embraced them when they met.

“Laddie,” said McPhail to him, as he was drinking a mahogany-coloured liquid that was known by the name of tea, out of a tin mug, and eating a hunk of bread and jam, “I don’t know whether or not I’m pleased to see you. You were safer in England. Once I misspent many months of my life in shielding you from the dangers of France. But France is a much more dangerous place nowadays, and I can’t help you. You’ve come right into the thick of it. Just listen to the hell’s delight that’s going on over yonder.”

The easterly wind brought them the roar streaked with stridence of the artillery duel in progress on the nearest sector of the Front.

They were sitting in the cellar entrance to a house in a little town which had already been somewhat mauled. Just opposite was a shuttered house on the ground floor of which had been a hatter and hosier’s shop, and there still swung bravely on an iron rod the red brim of what once had been a monstrous red hat. Next door, the façade of the upper stories had been shelled away and the naked interiors gave the impression of a pathetic doll’s house. Women’s garments still hung on pegs. A cottage piano lurched forward drunkenly on three legs, with the keyboard ripped open, the treble notes on the ground, the bass incongruously in the air. In the attic, ironically secure, hung a cheap German print of blowsy children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like the wind and the rain.

But to Doggie it was new – just as the sight of the wrecked house opposite, with its sturdy crownless hat-brim of a sign, was new. He listened, as McPhail had bidden him, to the artillery duel with an odd little spasm of his heart.

“What do you think of that, now?” asked McPhail grandly, as if it was The Greatest Show on Earth run by him, the Proprietor.

“It’s rather noisy,” said Doggie, with a little ironical twist of his lips that was growing habitual. “Do they keep it up at night?”

“They do.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to interfere with one’s sleep like that,” said Doggie.

“You’ve got to adapt yourself to it,” said McPhail sagely. “No doubt you’ll be remembering my theory of adaptability. Through that I’ve made myself into a very brave man. When I wanted to run away – a very natural desire, considering the scrupulous attention I’ve always paid to my bodily well-being – I reflected on the preposterous obstacles put in the way of flight by a bowelless military system, and adapted myself to the static and dynamic conditions of the trenches.”

“Gorblime!” said Mo Shendish, stretched out by his side, “just listen to him!”

“I suppose you’ll say you sucked honey out of the shells,” remarked Doggie.

“I’m no great hand at mixing metaphors – ”

“What about drinks?” asked Mo.

“Nor drinks either,” replied McPhail. “Both are bad for the brain. But as to what you were saying, laddie, I’ll not deny that I’ve derived considerable interest and amusement from a bombardment. Yet it has its sad aspect.” He paused for a moment or two. “Man,” he continued, “what an awful waste of money!”

“I don’t know what old Mac is jawing about,” said Mo Shendish, “but you can take it from me he’s a holy terror with the bayonet. One moment he’s talking to a Boche through his hat and the next the Boche is wriggling like a worm on a bent pin.”

Mo winked at Phineas. The temptation to “tell the tale” to the new-comer was too strong.

Doggie grew very serious. “You’ve been killing men – like that?”

“Thousands, laddie,” replied Phineas, the picture of unboastful veracity. “And so has Mo.”

Mo Shendish, helmeted, browned, dried, toughened, a very different Mo from the pallid ferret whom Aggie had driven into the ranks of war, hunched himself up, his hands clasping his knees.

“I don’t mind doing it, when you’re so excited you don’t know where you are,” said he, “but I don’t like thinking of it afterwards.”

As a matter of fact, he had only once got home with the bayonet and the memory was unpleasant.

“But you’ve just thought of it,” said Phineas.

“It was you, not me,” said Mo. “That makes all the difference.”

“It’s astonishing,” Phineas remarked sententiously, “how many people not only refuse to catch pleasure as it flies, but spurn it when it sits up and begs at them. Laddie,” he turned to Doggie, “the more one wallows in hedonism, the more one realizes its unplumbed depths.”

A little girl of ten, neatly pigtailed but piteously shod, came near and cast a child’s envious eye on Doggie’s bread and jam.

“Approach, my little one,” Phineas cried in French words but with the accent of Sauchiehall Street. “If I gave you a franc, what would you do with it?”

“I should buy nourishment (de la nourriture) for maman.”

“Lend me a franc, laddie,” said McPhail, and when Doggie had slipped the coin into his palm, he addressed the child in unintelligible grandiloquence and sent her on her way mystified but rejoicing. Ces bons drôles d’Anglais!

“Ah, laddie!” cried Phineas, stretching himself out comfortably by the jamb of the door, “you’ve got to learn to savour the exquisite pleasure of a genuinely kindly act.”

“Hold on!” cried Mo. “It was Doggie’s money you were flinging about.”

McPhail withered him with a glance.

“You’re an unphilosophical ignoramus,” said he.

CHAPTER XII

Perhaps one of the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means of revealing the disgrace which bit like an acid into his soul. His undisguisable air of superior breeding could not fail to attract notice. Often his officers asked him what he was in civil life. His reply, “A clerk, sir,” had to satisfy them. He had developed a curious self-protective faculty of shutting himself up like a hedgehog at the approach of danger. Once a breezy subaltern had selected him as his batman; but Doggie’s agonized, “It would be awfully good of you, sir, if you wouldn’t mind not thinking of it,” and the appeal in his eyes, established the freemasonry of caste and saved him from dreaded intimate relations.

“All right, if you’d rather not, Trevor,” said the subaltern. “But why doesn’t a chap like you try for a commission?”

“I’m much happier as I am, sir,” replied Doggie, and that was the end of the matter.

But Phineas, when he heard of it – it was on the East Coast – began: “If you still consider yourself too fine to clean another man’s boots – ”

Doggie, in one of his quick fits of anger, interrupted: “If you think I’m just a dirty little snob, if you don’t understand why I begged to be let off, you’re the thickest-headed fool in creation!”

“I’m nae that, laddie,” replied Phineas, with his usual ironic submissiveness. “Haven’t I kept your secret all this time?”

Thus it was Doggie’s fixed idea to lose himself in the locust swarm, to be prominent neither for good nor evil, even in the little clot of fifty, outwardly, almost identical locusts that formed his platoon. It braced him to the performance of hideous tasks; it restrained him from display of superior intellectual power or artistic capability. The world upheaval had thrown him from his peacock and ivory room, with its finest collection on earth of little china dogs, into a horrible fetid hole in the ground in Northern France. It had thrown not the average young Englishman of comfortable position, who had toyed with æsthetic superficialities as an amusement, but a poor little by-product of cloistered life who had been brought up from babyhood to regard these things as the nervous texture of his very existence. He was wrapped from head to heel in fine net, to every tiny mesh of which he was acutely sensitive.

A hole in the ground in Northern France. The regiment, after its rest, moved on and took its turn in the trenches. Four days on; four days off. Four days on of misery inconceivable. Four days on, during which the officers watched the men with the unwavering vigilance of kindly cats:

“How are you getting along, Trevor?”

“Nicely, thank you, sir.”

“Feet all right?”

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

“Sure? If you want to grouse, grouse away. That’s what I’m talking to you for.”

“I’m perfectly happy, sir.”

“Darn sight more than I am!” laughed the subaltern, and with a cheery nod in acknowledgment of Doggie’s salute, splashed down the muddy trench.

But Doggie was chilled to the bone, and he had no feeling in his feet, which were under six inches of water, and his woollen gloves being wet through were useless, and prevented his numbed hands from feeling the sandbags with which he and the rest of the platoon were repairing the parapet; for the Germans had just consecrated an hour’s general hate to the vicinity of the trench, and its exquisite symmetry, the pride of the platoon commander, had been disturbed. There had also been a few ghastly casualties. A shell had fallen and burst in the traverse at the far end of the trench. Something that looked like half a man’s head and a bit of shoulder had dropped just in front of the dug-out where Doggie and his section was sheltering. Doggie staring at it was violently sick. In a stupefied way he found himself mingling with others who were engaged in clearing up the horror. A murmur reached him that it was Taffy Jones who had thus been dismembered… The bombardment over, he had taken his place with the rest in the reparation of the parapet; and as he happened to be at an end of the line, the officer had spoken to him. If he had been suffering tortures unknown to Attila, and unimagined by his successors, he would have answered just the same.

But he lamented Taffy’s death to Phineas, who listened sympathetically. Such a cheery comrade, such a smart soldier, such a kindly soul.

“Not a black spot in him,” said Doggie.

“A year ago, laddie,” said McPhail, “what would have been your opinion of a bookmaker’s clerk?”

“I know,” replied Doggie. “But this isn’t a year ago. Just look round.”

He laughed somewhat hysterically, for the fate of Taffy had unstrung him for the time. Phineas contemplated the length of deep narrow ditch, with its planks half swimming on filthy liquid, its wire revetment holding up the oozing sides, the dingy parapet above which it was death to put one’s head, the grey free sky, the only thing free along that awful row of parallel ditches that stretched from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, the clay-covered, shapeless figures of men, their fellows, almost undistinguishable even by features from themselves.

“It has been borne upon me lately,” said Phineas, “that patriotism is an amazing virtue.”

Doggie drew a foot out of the mud so as to find a less precarious purchase higher up the slope.

“And I’ve been thinking, Phineas, whether it’s really patriotism that has brought you and me into this – what can we call it? Dante’s Inferno is child’s play to it.”

“Dante had no more imagination,” said Phineas, “than a Free Kirk precentor in Kirkcudbright.”

“But is it patriotism?” Doggie persisted. “If I thought it was, I should be happier. If we had orders to go over the top and attack and I could shout ‘England for ever!’ and lose myself just in the thick of it – ”

“There’s a brass hat coming down the trench,” said Phineas, “and brass hats have no use for rhapsodical privates.”

They stood to attention as the staff officer passed by. Then Doggie broke in impatiently:

“I wish to goodness you could understand what I’m trying to get at.”

A smile illuminated the gaunt, unshaven, mud-caked face of Phineas McPhail.

“Laddie,” said he, “let England, as an abstraction, fend for itself. But you’ve a bonny English soul within you, and for that you are fighting. And so had poor Taffy Jones. And I have a bonny Scottish thirst, the poignancy of which both of you have been happily spared. I will leave you, laddie, to seek in slumber a surcease from martyrdom.”

Doggie had been out a long time. He had seen many places, much fighting and endured manifold miseries. After one of the spells in the trenches, the worst he had experienced, A Company was marched into new billets some miles behind the lines, in the once prosperous village of Frélus. They had slouched along dead tired, drooping under their packs, sodden with mud and sleeplessness, silent, with not a note of a song among them – but at the entrance to the village, quickened by a word or two of exhortation from officers and sergeants, they pulled themselves together and marched in, heads up, forward, in faultless step. The C.O. was jealous of the honour of his men. He assumed that his predecessors in the village had been a “rotten lot,” and was determined to show the inhabitants of Frélus what a crack English regiment was really like. Frélus was an unimportant, unheard-of village; but the opinion of a thousand Fréluses made up France’s opinion of the British Army. Doggie, although half stupefied with fatigue, responded to the sentiment, like the rest. He was conscious of making part of a gallant show. It was only when they halted and stood easy that he lost count of things. The wide main street of the village swam characterless before his eyes. He followed, not directions, but directed men, with a sheep-like instinct, and found himself stumbling through an archway down a narrow path. He had a dim consciousness of lurching sideways and confusedly apologizing to a woman who supported him back to equilibrium. Then the next thing he saw was a barn full of fresh straw, and when somebody pointed to a vacant strip, he fell down, with many others, and went to sleep.

The réveillé sounded a minute afterwards, though a whole night had passed; and there was the blessed clean water to wash in – he had long since ceased to be fastidious in his ablutions – and there was breakfast, sizzling bacon and bread and jam. And there in front of the kitchen, aiding with the hot water for the tea, moved a slim girl, with dark, and as Doggie thought, tragic eyes.

Kit inspection, feet inspection, all the duties of the day and dinner were over. Most of the men returned to their billets to sleep. Some, including Doggie, wandered about the village, taking the air, and visiting the little modest cafés and talking with indifferent success, so far as the interchange of articulate ideas was concerned, with shy children. McPhail and Mo Shendish being among the sleepers, Doggie mooned about by himself in his usual self-effacing way. There was little to interest him in the long straggling village. He had passed through a hundred such. Low whitewashed houses, interspersed with perky balconied buildings given over to little shops on the ground floor, with here and there a discreet iron gate shutting off the doctor’s or the attorney’s villa, and bearing the oval plate indicating the name and pursuit of the tenant; here and there, too, long whitewashed walls enclosing a dairy or a timber-yard stretched on each side of the great high road, and the village gradually dwindled away at each end into the gently undulating country. There were just a by-lane or two, one leading up to the little grey church and presbytery and another to the little cemetery with its trim paths and black and white wooden crosses and wirework pious offerings. At open doors the British soldiers lounged at ease, and in the dim interiors behind them the forms of the women of the house, blue-aproned, moved to and fro. The early afternoon was warm, a westerly breeze deadened the sound of the distant bombardment to an unheeded drone, and a holy peace settled over the place.