Читать книгу All Else Is Folly - Peregrine Acland - Страница 16

“Silence in the ranks!” shrilled the little button-nosed company commander to the men who plodded behind him four abreast, clashing their hobnails on cobblestones. They were in France, on the road to Festubert.

Captain Augustus Rump was the son of a moderately prosperous fish merchant in a town on the south coast of England. After a not-too-distinguished career at a far-from-famous public school — a career terminated by expulsion — young Rump was sent to Canada.

“’E’s just the sort for the colonies,” his father predicted.

But Canada was blind to his merits. For twenty years he drifted up and down the country, backed by remittances from home. He at last found fortune in the person of a lady of ample means and figure — the widow of a butcher, who prided herself on taking a step up the social ladder when she married an Englishman “of the public-school-boy type.”

A year after his marriage Rump became active in the militia. It was pleasant to escape from the authority of his wife for two weeks in the year, and to go to bed, every night, drunk. When the war broke out he found himself so completely established in the eyes of his wife, his brother officers in the militia, and himself, as “an Englishman of the public-school-boy type,” that there was nothing for him to do but play true to form and volunteer to serve. He hoped the British War Office would use the half-trained Canadian militia only for relieving Imperial troops from garrison duty. A trip to India or Egypt would be pleasant. When the First Canadian Division was ordered to France, Rump bore the blow bravely. He had been left at the base.

Later he was sent to France on a draft that preceded Falcon’s by one week. He arrived too late to take part in the actual fighting at Ypres, but in time to spend four days in reserve trenches there. His experiences qualified him to talk down to his subaltern now as a seasoned veteran addressing a fledgling.

“That’s nothing to jump at,” he said to Falcon, scornfully. “That was just one of our own heavies going off behind the hedge there.”

Falcon was humiliated. He was certainly afraid, as they marched towards the rumble of guns. He was even more afraid of showing his fear.

Sardonically he looked back to Shorncliffe. Three weeks ago he had been eating his heart out there, resenting the fact that, as a very junior supernumerary subaltern, he had been left at the base with the reserve battalion. He was bitter then because he was not in France, at Ypres, at Langemarck. Well, if he had been at Langemark he wouldn’t be here now. The battalion had gone into the trenches then over a thousand strong, had come out with two hundred and seventy. Had gone in with twenty-one officers, had come out with two. No subalterns!…