Читать книгу No Hero—This - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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They have made me Company Officer. Why, God knows, nor do I know anything of the duties of such a person. I have a suspicion that I owe this to Macartney and Bisgood.

I understand that I am responsible for the company accounts, and the men’s pay. I have been relieved of all ward-work, though I occasionally give anæsthetics. The beastly venereal business has been thrust upon a newcomer. I hand over to him without regret, and dare to hope that my new responsibilities will be permanent. I am both secretly exultant and ashamed.

The Company Office is part of a one-storied brick building. I have a sergeant and four clerks under me. Cooper the sergeant is an engine-driver in civil life, one of those quiet, steadfast sort of men, with honest eyes and a drooping moustache. I am to develop affection and respect for Sergeant Cooper. Apparently there have been three different and successive company officers in six months, all equally ignorant, and according to hints I receive from Cooper all equally bored and casual. Cooper has managed to worry out some of the intricacies of army finance, but the Impress Account has lived in a state of chaos for the last few months. I know nothing about book-keeping and double entry, but Cooper and I sit up till ten at night, chasing elusive half-pennies. It seems to be a peculiar job for a medical man.

I have to pay the men. The pay table is arranged with piles of silver on it. Previously, I have been to the local bank with a stout orderly to draw the pay. Cooper stands with the pay-roll and calls the names. I am not very quick to begin with, either with my head or my fingers. I am interested and a little bothered by the faces of all these unknown men. Is my only duty to them that of handing out cash?

At the end of the first pay day we find that we are ten shillings on the wrong side. Cooper looks worried. He is such a quietly conscientious creature. I tell him that I am responsible, and that the error must have been mine, and I take a ten-shilling note from my breast pocket, and make good the deficiency.

Cooper looks at me gratefully. Why should he be grateful?

I ask Macartney to tell me what my duties should be. I avoid the Colonel’s office, for Barter seems to live perpetually in a state of irritable bewilderment, and Bisgood keeps his knowledge to himself. So long as everybody else is ignorant, his autocracy is unchallenged. Macartney tells me that I should be responsible for the men’s training, their kits and messing and discipline. Their training! Good God, I don’t even know how to tell them to form fours!

I announce that I will hold a kit inspection, but what does a man’s kit consist of? I obtain a list from Macartney. The orderly sergeant for the day accompanies me to the men’s quarters. They are standing at attention beside their beds. I like these men. There is something friendly even in their formalism. With extreme conscientiousness I check kits.

One tall private, who wears pince-nez and looks literary, informs me that he has a pair of boots that are useless to him, and that he is minus a toothbrush.

I tell him to go to the Quartermaster Stores and hand in the spare boots in exchange for a toothbrush.

At lunch old Macartney has a crumpled and mischievous face. He asks me if I have a wicked plan for stopping the war. I ask him what the trouble is.

“My boy, boots are boots, and a toothbrush is a toothbrush. I can’t hand out a toothbrush in exchange for boots?”

“Why not? The exchange ought to be in your favour.”

He chuckles.

“That’s not the army way. A man has to have two pairs of boots, and he must die with those boots, even if he can’t wear ’em. And a toothbrush is a toothbrush. I can issue toothbrushes as toothbrushes, but the man must keep his damned boots.”

“And supposing he can’t wear them?”

“That’s quite another matter. But don’t muddle up boots and toothbrushes. It can’t be done. It would wreck my whole department.”

I decide to inspect the men’s messing arrangements. The orderly sergeant and I enter the mess-room. The sergeant calls them to attention. I want to say, “Please sit down. I am here just as an interested person and a friend.” I see that some men have plates, and that others are eating off pieces of newspaper. One fellow is using his fingers and a pocket-knife. It is messing in more senses than one.

I ask the sergeant if there is a shortage of plates. He tells me that there is a shortage of everything, about a hundred old chipped plates to serve three hundred men. But why? Hasn’t anything been done about it? The answer is that nobody has bothered, and that I am the first officer to interest myself in the men’s messing.

I have discovered in another ledger various mysterious accounts, Canteen Account, etc. I ask Macartney what they are for, and whether they can be used for the men. He says, “Of course.” But why has not anybody done anything about it? He supposes that everybody has been too ignorant and too busy. Or is it apathy, the strange apathy that descends upon men when they cease to be individual?

I go off in the afternoon to Shellstone and manage to buy a hundred or so plates, mugs, cheap knives and forks. I feel rather pleased with myself. After tea I return to the Company Officer to wrestle with accounts. An orderly appears with a message.

“The C.O. wants to see you, sir.”

I go to Barter’s office. Bisgood is with him. The old man sits back in his chair and screams at me.

“You have been neglecting your duties, sir. I sent for you this afternoon and you were not to be found. I won’t have it. You will report at this office three times a day.”

I feel myself going hot about the ears. I am not accustomed to being screamed at.

“If you will excuse me, sir, I had a reason——”

“What reason? You were absent from duty.”

“I was in Shellstone, sir.”

“Shellstone! Who gave you permission to go to Shellstone?”

“I went to buy mess equipment.”

“Mess equipment?”

“Yes, for the men, sir. Some of them were eating off newspaper, and there was about one mug for three men.”

I catch Bisgood’s eye, and there is approval and incitement in it. Colonel Barter has an air of sudden deflation.

“In that case, Mr. Brent——”

“If I have to buy more equipment, sir, I will come and report to you why I shall be absent.”

“That’s all right, Brent, quite all right.”

“But I think it due to me, sir, that——”

“That’s quite in order, Brent.”

Still feeling hot about the ears, I salute and walk to the door. Bisgood opens it, and winks at me as I go out.

I get the impression that I am popular with the men. Is it just because I have bought them dinner plates? How easy it should prove to be popular.

We are admitting a number of cases of gas gangrene. Deplorable cases. Carrington the surgical specialist takes me to see the latest method of amputating a gangrenous limb. The result suggests a butcher’s cleaver and a section across a leg of mutton.

Two patients come into the office to draw their pay. One of them, a big, strapping, red-headed corporal, is on crutches, having lost a leg. The other man has one eye and the remains of a face. I am shy of looking at this mutilated mask. Sergeant Cooper questions them as they produce their pay-books. They were wounded at Neuve Chapelle.

“Funny show—that,” says Cooper.

“I should say so,” said the Corporal, who has bitter and angry eyes, “we sat in the ruddy mud for four hours doing nothing.”

“German shells?”

“No, our own ruddy guns.”

He turns and looks at me defiantly, as though as an officer I represent the official muddle that still fills him with inward rage. He does not care what I think. I nod at him and smile gently.

When they have gone Cooper gives a tug to his mild moustache, and says to me, “That’s war.”

Carrington the surgical specialist has been ordered to Malta. We are living on Dardanelles rumours, and the gas attack at Ypres. Carrington’s place is taken by a large and hefty young man, unmarried, who has been a junior medical officer at a County Asylum. Malim has some cynical things to say about this appointment.

I go up in a sad Spring dusk to watch Canadian reinforcements march off to embark for France. They are to fill the gaps in the Canadian Corps made by the German gas. They are big, fierce, husky men, and as the brown column swings off into the chilly twilight they begin to sing.

“We won’t, we won’t, we won’t be badgered about.”

Old Macartney, who is with me, looks whimsical.

“Between you and me, Brent, that’s what life in the army is, being badgered about.”

“Always and everywhere?” I ask.

He grunts philosophically. “Oh, one gets used to it.”

Mary is coming for the week-end. I have discovered another inn that is less hygienic and hideous than the Crown, the White Hart, a little, funny old place in white and brown, with a garden going down to the sea. I have booked a big and pleasant room on the first floor with a window overlooking the garden and the sea.

This week-end should be like a second marriage and a second honeymoon, save that we shall not suffer from the embarrassments and shy inhibitions of the first intimate and physical contacts. My longing for Mary is a mixture of tenderness and sexual excitement. This war business has so stirred up the elementals that we men who are crowded together in a purely male community are vexed by the flesh. Possibly, if all petticoats were removed from sight, sex might go to sleep in us. One has only to wander out at night to realize how rampant raw sex is.

I order flowers for Mary, a special dinner and champagne. I expect her by the 3.30 train at Southcliffe station. I go up to the hospital after lunch to clear up some correspondence in order that I may be free. At twenty minutes to three I am called to the colonel’s office. Damn the old man! How much is one at the mercy of the machine. I go in feeling rebellious, to find that Colonel Barter is asking me to dinner.

“To-night, sir?”

“Yes, Brent.”

“It is very kind of you, sir, but my wife is coming for the week-end.”

Barter’s currant-bun eyes twinkle.

“Well, let us make it next Saturday, Brent.”

I thank him, and go out realizing that Barter is by no means senile and inhuman, and that he can refrain from persevering in petty social authority.

I rush off to the station, and this May day feels flowery and bridal. I am ten minutes before time, and the train is five minutes late. I see Mary standing at a window. She seems to be in some sort of uniform, or a dress that suggests a uniform, dark blue and austere and practical. I remember that she is the commandant of a new auxiliary hospital that has been opened at Brackenhurst, but the sentimental man in me is disappointed. I don’t want a uniform, but something feminine and sensuous.

Mary passes me her suitcase. I have arranged for a taxi. I kiss her, and she gives me her cheek, and it has some of the clean chilliness of a cold May morning.

It is absurd, but both of us seem slightly embarrassed.

Is this coming together again an anticlimax after that leave-taking six weeks or so ago, when life seemed so tragic and final?

Later I discover the woman beneath the uniform. Mary kisses me differently when she has seen the flowers in our bedroom. She is pleased with the White Hart. I tell her there is a special dinner, and she opens her suitcase and shows me an evening frock.

I kiss her again, and want to lead her to the bed. Her face has the secret glow of the woman who understands. She puts a hand over my mouth, and says, “Presently.”

It is over. I am lying with my head on her shoulder with my heart beating as though I had run a race. She caresses me.

“Lie still a minute.”

I kiss her, and with a strange feeling of deflation, turn on my side.

We begin to talk, and while we are talking I marvel at the illusion of the crude sexual act. It seems to be nothing more than a physiological urge, which, when satisfied, leaves one like an emptied sack. But this woman to whom I am talking is the other Mary, not the pretty lady of a night, but a creature of sensitive understanding, and my dear comrade. She is a spirit inhabiting a body, not mere flesh, and I am conscious of how profoundly she matters to me. I can talk to Mary as I can talk to no one else; she is quick to catch all the subtle shades of meaning, impressions that may be either infantile or sophisticated, prejudices and predilections that it may be difficult to express.

Presently I put her hand to my lips.

“I am sorry I behaved like that.”

She answers, “I would rather you wanted to be like that with me than with any other woman.”

Sunday is fine and warm. I have my work in the morning, but in the afternoon we sit on the beach and watch the sea and the ships. They do not look like things of steel, but softly coloured and diaphanous shapes growing out of the limpid blueness. The peaceful atmosphere is illusive. The sea may hide violence and death, and many of those ships are as Malim puts it “Going Dardanelling.” But we do not want to talk of the war. The beach is warm, and the sky cloudless, and Mary talks to me of home. She has learnt to drive the car, and is helping old Randall with the dispensing and book-keeping. I feel that she is talking to me of dull and simple and homely things because she knows that I am glad to hear of a life that is not in khaki.

Mary has gone. I am feeling horribly alone and homesick, and I am back at No. 7. I do not mention my week-end with my wife, and the other men seem to understand my reticence. At all events they talk nothing but shop.

Dartnell begins to tell a bawdy story, but it seems to fizzle out and become pointless. Perhaps my silly, sorrowful face did not encourage bawdy humour.

I go to bed, and am even more conscious of my loneliness.