Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 6

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The little grey Austin service car stopped at the gate of the forest of the dead. A good-looking, bronzed young airman of twenty, unwound his folded legs out of it, emerged head last and straightened up, his blue forage cap at a rakish angle.

The gate stood away from the tall tree-lined Arras Road that swept to the north. Amid the watchful multitude of white crosses he strode cautiously, with his sketch map open in his hands. He was appalled at the countless numbers of them, each a gleaming sentry in the neat graveyard. Here lay the flower of regiments. Here were the hopes and dreams of mothers and fathers, and their prayers as well, from those dim years that were gone beyond recall. Here thousands upon thousands of young men like himself lay in their unwaking sleep under endless rows of white crosses among the poppy fields. These were the boisterous young of another generation, an earlier and maybe simpler generation than his—the singing, grousing, noble company of those who were there when his Dad and Uncle Hal were boys.

Carefully he followed the chart, and came at last and stood, as he had known he would stand, before the grave among all the graves, the little rectangle of earth where the name-plate read:

Sergeant Harold John Battle. Killed in

Action, December Sixth, 1916.

An overwhelming gust of pity swept him where he stood. A mere twenty-three—and had he lived that gap from war to war he would now be forty-six. A foot slogger up there in the filthy mud. Great tales his Dad had told him of this debonair young god from the temple of his memory. But what a small place now, where he finally lay for all eternity under the timeless vigil of a brother's hero worship. The young man stood sobered and abashed before the miniature mausoleum of sod, out here in a far and lonely field amid the imploring silence of the dead.

It was there, in the estaminet near this place, that Dad remembered, the estaminet where Uncle Hal had left him and gone singing off into the night, full of wine and full of the devil. Perhaps it was his last night in any estaminet anywhere before the strafe when he died. You could see now why Dad's memories were long, and why they clustered around that buoyant brother who had gone singing, singing, singing down the long road that had no end.

That was how they had gone, these gallant hosts of the past. It was the way they wanted to go if go they must, on the red flagstones of the estaminet and off toward the star-shelled horizon where the road led into the duck-walks, and the duck-walks led into the valley of the shadow of death.

There, too, had been Dad, little better off in the muddy trenches around his gun pit, fumbling with the shells that were to fire right over Uncle Hal's head up there in the front line. Dad at the guns, Dad shooting at the Huns while the Huns were shooting down his brother Hal.

"God rest you, Uncle," said the young flier reverently. "I'll tell Dad I saw you again, over here. I'll tell him you haven't changed, that you're the same young good-looking kid he knew."

Words came into his mind, a stray wisp of verse flying on the breeze that rustled through the leafless forest of crosses:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn—

A great company gathered swiftly about him then, and voices filled the air. Whispers they were that rose from the earth and grew in volume till they became a chorus and a tumult. Voices of young men like those he had left in the scramble shack, wise ahead of their years, men who got the wind up but were never dismayed, and took the war in their stride. Pals of Dad and Uncle Hal, all come back now through the open door of the years to tell him about the war that was a war.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,

We will remember them—

He wished now that he had wrenched no secrets from his Dad. There was only that one, a grinning confession that he had once thought he'd lost his heart in an estaminet. The Coq d'Or, on the Arras Road, Dad said, and told him how to get there. Well, thought young Hal, he had gone and found a Coq d'Or, and found, too, a faded, dumpy woman of middle age, with only the tell-tale flash of her eyes to hint of her bygone glory. He'd had no heart to speak to her. There were many Coq d'Or estaminets, many dumpy women with faded faces who had been sensuous little French girls when Dad and Uncle Hal were there.

What of it! Here, where he stood, lay the real memory that Dad had left in France, here beneath the avalanche of blood and death. It was a short time they'd had to live their adventure. Life must have been hard in those days. He flushed at his impulsive condescension to that last, lost generation for their brief enjoyment, their little amours. How futile they had been!

Here lie more than memories, he thought, his eyes on the ground where the unblinking vigil of the dead was kept. Here lie the ideals they fought for—assaulted, ravished and forgotten. And now the rebirth of them has come again. They, too, will be mauled and beaten, and lie under the white crosses.

What could have been more natural if Dad had really stopped by the road to be with a French girl? There was little enough fun to be had. He of all the soldiers might—just might—have been the one she wanted to draw to her, that girl of the first Great War in the drab little estaminet with its manure pile outside the door. And what French sweetheart at the French front had she forgotten when she behaved after the manner in which she felt?

But maybe it had not happened at all. Perhaps a little petting, a little wistful, wishful thinking that somehow grew its own halo, and borrowed from time and a tricky conscience a status in deviltry that never belonged. Yes, that was it, or Dad would never have told Mother. And yet told her he had, about the French girl called Andree by the Arras Road.

Fathers did that, Hal reflected. Fathers impelled by pride for a bygone day; sometimes they dug into the musty storehouses of their youth and brought out the little peccadilloes they found there, just as they found and polished again their medals and their regimental badges. It was more than a mere nostalgic impulse toward the romance of other days. It was a re-asserting of primordial things, a going back from the days when love had become complacent, coaxed and spoon-fed, to the days when it came unbidden and imperative.

That was it; that was always it! Young men borrowed their self-appraisal from the years of maturity to come; older men borrowed vanity from the insatiated yearnings that had gone.

And then this Andree—perhaps she, too, had clung to her morsel of romance and enshrined it for a while after the last war. Dad had gone away with the guns, and there was the end of it.

"Now suppose he did have an adventure like that—and I'd be surprised if he didn't. I'll probably have one myself. When his leave came, what a struggle! Should it be the little estaminet girl or Blighty? And Blighty won, of course, because the estaminet was a busman's holiday.

"We owe Dad a debt, Alma and I. Suppose he'd chosen this French girl—let's call her Andree. Married her and brought her home after the war, and then she turned out to be this shapeless woman I saw today. But no, he kept his head. He went to London, the lucky old dog, and met his Joy. My beautiful mother."

He roused himself in self-reproach at his thoughts.

Sergeant Harold John Battle. Killed in Action.

He bent and touched the cold, ageless epitaph with his hands. "They named me after you," he murmured, then stood erect and saluted.

He turned to go, and as he went he felt the tug of them on his sleeve, and heard the whispers of a multitude of them. The vast escort, the legion of the dead, divided to let him pass and fell in silently behind him. They formed a ghostly guard of honour to the gate of their hallowed lawn, their unseen hands at the salute, the soundless clamour of their voices dying away in the distance as he, too, went on down the long road that had no end.