Читать книгу Wounded Souls - Philip Gibbs - Страница 9

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We walked silently towards the Boulevard de la Liberté, where Brand’s little crowd had established their headquarters.

“Perhaps they’re right,” he said presently. “Perhaps the hatred is divine.... I may be weakening, because of all the horror.”

Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen him—long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and the Bois Français in No Man’s Land. The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw, not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin, and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the Colonel about him.

“Who is that fellow—like a Norman knight?”

The Colonel of the King’s Royal Rifles laughed as we went round the next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down.

“Further back than Norman,” he said. “He’s the primitive man.”

He told me that Wickham Brand—a lieutenant then—was a young barrister who had joined the battalion at the beginning of ’15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter’s instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man’s Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.

“He’s a Hun-hater, body and soul,” said the Colonel. “We want more of ’em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully.”

After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time.

“I hear you go in for sniping a good deal,” I said, by way of conversation.

“Yes. It’s murder made easy.”

“Do you get many targets?”

“It’s a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless.”

He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a “young’un” who popped his head over the parapet, twice, to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater.

“I spared him twice. The third time I said, ‘Better dead,’ and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss.”

Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that.

“Rather a pity,” I mumbled.

“War,” he said. “Bloody war.”

There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on which he leaned his elbow, and by the light of it I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. There was a haggard look on his face.

“It must need some nerve,” I said, awkwardly, “to go out so often in No Man’s Land. Real pluck.”

He stared at me, as though surprised, and then laughed harshly.

“Pluck? What’s that? I’m scared stiff, half the time. Do you think I like it?”

He seemed to get angry, was angry, I think.

“Do any of us like it? These damn things that blow men to bits, make rags of them, tear their bowels out, and their eyes? Or to live on top of a mine-crater, as we are now, never knowing when you’re going up in smoke and flame? If you like that sort of thing yourself you can take my share. I have never met a man who did.”

Yet when Brand was taken out of the trenches—by a word spoken over the telephone from corps Headquarters—because of his knowledge of German and his cousinship to a lady who was a friend of the Corps Commander’s niece, he was miserable and savage. I met him many times after that as an Intelligence officer at the corps cages, examining prisoners on days of battle.

“An embusqué job!” he said. “I’m saving my skin while the youngsters die.”

He stood outside his hut one day on a morning of battle in the Somme fields—up by Pozières. No prisoners had yet come down. He forgot my presence and stood listening to the fury of gun-fire and watching the smoke and flame away there on the ridge.

“Christ!” he cried. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I with my pals up there, getting blown to blood and pulp? Blood and pulp! Blood and pulp!”

Then he remembered me, and turned in a shamefaced way, and said, “Sorry!... I feel rather hipped to-day.”

I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners—those poor grey muddy wretches who come dazed out of the slime and shambles. Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.

“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man—a Feldwebel. “Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany is kaput?”

The German shrugged his shoulders.

“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us.”

“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.”

He spoke a strange sentence in English as he glanced over to me.

“I am beginning to think we are all slaves of a system. None of us can break the chains.”

It was after that day that Brand took a fancy to me, for some reason, inviting me to his mess, where I met Charles Fortune and others, and it was there that I heard amazing discussions about the philosophy of war, German psychology, the object of life, the relation of Christianity to war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune, who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging, bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all of the Press, that most of his fellow-officers—apart from Fortune—thought he went “a bit too far.”

Dear old Harding, who was Tory to the backbone, with a deep respect for all in authority, accused him of being a “damned revolutionary” and for a moment it looked as though there would be hot words, until Brand laughed in a good-natured way and said, “My dear fellow, I’m only talking academic rot. I haven’t a conviction. Ever since the war began I have been trying to make head or tail of things in a sea-fog of doubt. All I know is that I want the bloody orgy to end; somehow and anyhow.”

“With victory,” said Harding solemnly.

“With the destruction of Prussian philosophy everywhere,” said Brand.

They agreed on that, but I could see that Brand was on shifting ground and I knew, as our friendship deepened, that he was getting beyond a religion of mere hate, and was looking for some other kind of faith. Occasionally he harked back, as on the day in Lille when I walked by his side.