Читать книгу The Test of Scarlet - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 5

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The larks are singing above the melting mists and there’s a sense of peace in the air. One by one the signallers tumble up the dug-out stairs; they stand in the trench yawning, stretching themselves and breathing in the golden coolness. Very lazily they set to work preparing breakfast. They have to be careful lest any smoke escapes and gives away our post to the enemy. If once the Hun suspected we were here, it wouldn’t take him long to knock us out. They’ll be bringing me in some stewed tea presently; I can hear the bacon sizzling. I wish there was some water to wash with; but we gave must of ours to the wounded last night.

I was in England this spring when the big Hun drive against Paris started. I’d just recovered from being wounded and directly I heard the news, commenced moving heaven and earth to get back. Heaven and earth didn’t require much moving—men were too badly needed. I reported back to my reserve depot on a Wednesday and within the hour was told that I could proceed on the next draft leaving for France. I was given a two days’ leave to collect my kit, and permission to join the draft at the London station.

That London leave is curiously blurred in my memory. It was only my body that was in England; my soul was in France. I rushed from tailors to bankers, from bankers to bootmakers, from bootmakers to lunches and theatres; I met people and laughed with people and said “Good-bye” to people, but there was nothing real in anything that I saw or did. In imagination I saw myself on the Amiens road fighting. “Our backs are to the wall,” Sir Douglas Haig had told us. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe”—that was how my Corps Commander’s special order had run. Every moment that I was not there with the chaps seemed shameful. If we were beaten back it seemed that it would be my fault—one more man in the line might make all the difference.

How little I was noticing the world about me was emphasized by one small incident. I had been taxi riding all over the map in a frenzied effort to collect my gear. In these war-days London taxi-drivers have developed short tempers, especially for fares who keep them waiting. My man had been extraordinarily docile. At the end of two hours, when I had deposited some of my baggage at Victoria, I said to him, “I suppose I’d better pay you off now. I’ve got to go to Battersea; you won’t want to go there, so I’ll have to go by train.”

“My time’s yours,” said the man. “We can’t get any jobs since this offensive started; all the officers have left for France.”

It was true, and I hadn’t noticed it. The restaurants were empty, except for a few civilians. You could get seats for any theatre and as many as you wanted. Almost over night the soldier-men had departed.

I remember with peculiar vividness the attitude of my friends towards me. They treated me as a person who tomorrow would be dead—the way we treated men in khaki in 1914, before we had learnt that not every man who goes into battle stays there a corpse. My two brothers got leave from the Navy and came to see me off. I left them to do the booking of rooms at the hotel: when we went up to bed the night before I started, I found that instead of booking three rooms, they had booked one room with two beds. I didn’t comment on it.

It was dark when we rose. While we dressed, we talked emptily with a feverish jocularity. In the midst of a hurried breakfast four friends appeared, who had given me no previous warning of their intentions. They were people who liked their comfort; they must have travelled by workmen’s trains to get there. Chatting with a spurious gaiety, we walked over to the station through the damp raw half-light. I wasn’t allowed to carry anything. As though their minds were clocks ticking, I could hear them repeating over and over, “The Canadians will advance, or fall with their faces to the foe. Our backs are to the wall—He’ll fall,” they kept repeating; “he’ll fall.”

The platform was dense with khaki. Here and there one saw a frail old lady seeing her son off; there was a sprinkling of girls, who clung to their men’s arms and made a brave attempt to laugh. Then, before anything sincere had been done or said, everyone was taking his seat and the doors were being locked. There was no khaki on the platform now—only the drab of civilian costume, which made its wearers look like mourners. I leant out of the window. Suddenly one of my women friends, who had never done such a thing before, drew herself up by my hand and kissed me. The wheels began to revolve. “When you get there, keep your heads down,” the men on the platform called “Cheerio, old things,” we answered. The girls tried to say something, put their hands to their throats and choked. Their smiles became masks. Then we were out of the station, speeding past housetops, with the wheels singing triumphantly, “The Canadians will advance—advance—advance.”

We were all Canadians in my carriage. We had all been wounded—some once, some oftener. “Well, we can’t get there too soon,” one said. To parade our assumed indifference, we began to play cards. Farther down the train, above the roar of our going, we could hear the cheery voices of the “other ranks” singing,

“Good-bye-ee

Don’t cry-ee

Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee”

We were trying to bluff it out to all the sleeping country that we didn’t care and rather liked dying.

The base-port across the Channel at which we landed was in strange contrast to London’s haggard smiling. It not only did not care, but it totally ignored the fact that “our backs were to the wall.” Nothing had changed since we had seen it last. People were no cheerier, no duller. They had the same bored air of carrying on with what they obviously regarded as “a hell of a job". The dug-out Colonels and Majors, who handed us our transportation, were just as fussily convinced as ever that they alone were conducting the war. On the journey up the line the only signs of menace were trench-systems hastily thrown up far back of where any had been before, a rather unusual amount of new ordnance on trucks and the greater frequence of hospital trains, hurrying towards the Channel. The idea that we were soon to be corpses began to fade; we played cards more assiduously that we might keep normal. Now and then, as we passed towns, we looked out of the window. We began to recognise the names of stations and to guess at the part of the Front to which we were going. We ceased guessing; we knew at last.

“So he’s attacking the Viny Ridge,” we thought.

It was a year since our Corps had captured it: if the capturing of it had been a bloody affair, the defending of it against overwhelming odds would be twice as bloody. In imagination I could smell the horror of the unburied dead of Farbus and see the galloping of the shells, like the hoofs of invisible cavalry, up the road from Willerval. The fallen victors of last year’s fight would be stirring in their shallow graves and pushing their bones above the ground in protest.

All this I saw as I journeyed and played cards.... And when I got here I found that it was to this I was returning—to this intolerable inertia of watching. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe". Brave words! But we have neither advanced, nor fallen. In utter weariness, but with purpose unbroken, other men are crawling into battle on their hand and knees before Amiens, while we sit still, with the indignity of not dying upon us.