Читать книгу The Secret Battle (Historical Novel) - A. P. Herbert - Страница 7

Those first three days were for many of us, who did not know the mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we won had already become in great part a wilderness; the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had fallen and died in April, had long been trodden to death, and there were wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and the foot-hills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, on the slopes of the bridge, was our camp fortunately set. The word 'camp' contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning's 'searching,' we were far from imagining that what we dug would be our Peninsular 'home' and haven of rest from the firing-line for many months to come. And so we made what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a quite temporary emergency—long, straight, untraversed ditches, running parallel to and with but a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling-place could conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out of his narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling parapet on to his sleeping neighbour in the next ditch; and three large German shells could have destroyed half the regiment. Yet there were many such camps, most of them lacking the grateful concealment of our trees. Such targets even the Turkish artillery must sometimes hit, There were no dug-outs in the accepted sense of the Western Front, no deep, elaborate, stair-cased chambers, hollowed out by miners with miners' material. Our dug-outs were dug-outs in truth, shallow excavations scooped in the surface of the earth. The only roof for a man against sun and shells was a waterproof sheet stretched precariously over his hole. It is sufficient testimony to the indifference of the Turkish artillery that with such naked concentrations of men scattered about the Peninsula, casualties in the rest-camps were so few.

Each officer had his own private hole, set democratically among the men's; and an officers' mess was simply made by digging a larger hole, and roofing it with two waterproof sheets instead of one. There was no luxury among the infantry there, and the gulf which yawns between the lives of officer and man in France as regards material comfort was barely discernible in Gallipoli. Food was dull and monotonous: for weeks we had only bully-beef and biscuits, and a little coarse bacon and tea, but it was the same for all, one honourable equality of discomfort. At first there were no canteen facilities, and when some newcomer came from one of the islands with a bottle of champagne and another of chartreuse, we drank it with 'bully' and cast-iron biscuit. Drinking water was as precious as the elixir of life, and almost as unobtainable, but officer and man had the same ration to eke out through the thirsty day. Wells were sunk, and sometimes immediately condemned, and when we knew the water was clear and sweet to taste, it was hard to have it corrupted with the metallic flavour of chemicals by the medical staff. Then indeed did a man learn to love water; then did he learn discipline, when he filled his water-bottle in the morning with the exiguous ration of the day, and fought with the intolerable craving to put it to his lips and there and then gurgle down his fill.

In the spring nights it was very cold, and men shivered in their single blanket under the unimaginable stars; but very early the sun came up, and by five o'clock all the camp were singing; and there were three hours of fresh coolness when it was very good to wash in a canvas bucket, and smoke in the sun before the torrid time came on; and again at seven, when the sun sat perched on the great rock of Samothrace, and Imbros was set in a fleecy marvel of pink and saffron clouds, there were two hours of pure physical content; but these, I think, were more nearly perfect than the morning because they succeeded the irritable fevers of the day. Then the crickets in the branches sang less tediously, and the flies melted away, and all over the Peninsula the wood fires began to twinkle in the dusk, as the men cooked over a few sticks the little delicacies which were preserved for this hour of respite. When we had done we sat under our olive-tree in the clear twilight, and watched the last aeroplanes sail home to Rabbit Islands, and talked and argued till the glow-worms glimmering in the scrub, and up the hill the long roll of the Turks' rapid fire, told us that darkness was at hand, and the chill dew sent us into our crannies to sleep.

So we were not sorry for three days of quiet in the camp before we went up the hill; Harry alone was all eagerness to reach the firing-line with the least possible delay. But then Harry was like none of us; indeed, none of us were like each other. It would have been strange if we had been. War-chroniclers have noted with an accent of astonishment the strange diversity of persons to be found in units of the New Army, and the essential sameness of their attitude to the war. As though a man were to go into the Haymarket and be surprised if the first twelve pedestrians there were not of the same profession; were then to summon them to the assistance of a woman in the hands of a rough, and be still surprised at the similarity of their methods.

We were, in truth, a motley crowd, gathered from everywhere; but when we sat under that olive-tree we were very much alike—with the single exception of Harry.

Egerton, our company commander, a man of about thirty, with a round face and a large head, was a stockbroker by profession, and rather improbably, an old Territorial by pastime. He was an excellent company commander, but would have made a still more admirable second-in-command, for his training in figures and his meticulous habits in such things as the keeping of accounts were just what is required of a second-in-command, and were lamentably deficient in myself. The intricacies of Acquittance Rolls and Imprest Accounts, and page 3 of the Soldier's Pay-Book, were meat and drink to him, and in general I must confess that I shamefully surrendered such delicacies to him.

Harry Penrose had the 14th Platoon. Of the other three subalterns perhaps the most interesting was Hewett. He, like Harry, had been at Oxford before the war, though they had never come together there. He was a fair, dreamy person, of remarkably good looks. Alone of all the 'young Apollos' I have known did he at all deserve that title. Most of these have been men of surpassing stupidity and material tastes, but Hewett added to his physical qualifications something of the mental refinement which presumably one should expect of even a modern Apollo. Intensely fastidious, he frankly detested the war, and all the dirt and disgust he must personally encounter. Like Harry, he was an idealist—but more so; for he could not idealize the war. But the shrinking of his spirit had no effect on his conduct: he was no less courageous than Harry or any one else, and no less keen to see the thing through. Only, at that time, he was a little less blind. A year senior to Harry, he had taken Greats in 1914, and though his degree had been disappointingly low he had not yet lost the passionate attachment of the 'Greats' man to philosophy and thoughts of the Ultimate Truths. Sometimes he would try to induce one of us to talk with him of his religious and philosophical doubts; but in that feverish place it was too difficult for us, and usually he brooded over his problems alone.

Eustace, of the 16th Platoon, was a journalist by repute, though it was never discovered to what journal, if any, he was specially attached. His character was more attractive than his appearance, which was long, awkward, and angular; and if he had ever been to school, he would have been quite undeservedly unpopular for not playing games: undeservedly—because one could not conceive of him as playing any game. Physically, indeed, he was one of Nature's gawks; intellectually he was nimble, not to say athletic, with an acute and deeply logical mind. As a companion, more especially a companion in war, he was made tedious by a habit of cynicism and a passion for argument. The cynicism, I think, had developed originally from some early grievance against Society, had been adopted as an effective pose, and had now become part of his nature. Whatever its origin it was wearing to us, for in the actual scenes of war one likes to cling to one's illusions while any shred of them remains, and would rather they faded honourably under the gentle influence of time than be torn to fragments in a moment by reasoned mockery. But Eustace was never tired of exhibiting the frailty and subterfuge of all men, particularly in their relations to the war; the Nation arrived for him as regularly as the German submarines would allow, and all his views were in that sense distinctly 'National.' If any of us were rash enough to read that paper ourselves, we were inevitably provoked to some comment which led to a hot wrangle on the Public Schools, or Kitchener, or the rights of the war, and the pleasant calm of the dusk was marred. For Eustace could always meet us with a powerfully logical case, and while in spirit we revolted against his heresies, we were distressed by the appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. Harry, the most ingenuous of us all and the most devoted to his illusions, was particularly worried by this conflict. It seemed very wrong to him that a man so loyal and gallant in his personal relations with others should trample so ruthlessly on their dearest opinions.

Burnett was of a very different type. Tall and muscular, with reddish hair and vivid blue eyes, he looked (as he wanted to look) a 'man of action' by nature and practice. He had 'knocked about' for some years in Africa and Australia (a process which had failed equally to establish his fortunes or soften his rough edges), and from the first he affected the patronizing attitude of the experienced campaigner. The little discomforts of camp life were nothing to him, for were they not part of his normal life? And when I emerged from my dug-out pursued by a centipede of incredible ferocity, he held forth for a long time on the best method of dispatching rattlesnakes in the Umgoga, or some such locality. By degrees, however, as life became more unbearable, the conviction dawned upon us that he was no less sensible to heat and hunger and thirst than mere 'temporary' campaigners, and rather more ready to utter his complaints. Finally, the weight of evidence became overwhelming, and it was whispered at the end of our first week at Gallipoli that 'Burnett was bogus.' The quality of being 'bogus' was in those days the last word in military condemnation; and in Burnett's case events showed the verdict to be lamentably correct.

So we were a strangely assorted crowd, only alike, as I have said, in that we were keen on the winning of this war and resolved to do our personal best towards that end. Of the five of us, Hewett and Eustace had the most influence on Harry. Me he regarded as a solid kind of wall that would never let him down, or be guilty of any startling deviations from the normal. By Hewett he was personally and spiritually attracted; by Eustace alternately fascinated and disturbed. And it was a very bad day for Harry when Hewett's death removed that gentle, comfortable influence.