Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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It was a hot and stuffy night in August. The tent smelt of grey flannel shirts impregnated with sweat. Brown blankets had been tossed aside. Someone snored. In the high distance an aeroplane droned.

The tent was compelled back to consciousness by the sound of a man shouting. It turned over; it grumbled; it swore.

“What—the hell—!”

In the dimness of a summer dawn the tent became aware of “Hands” sitting naked to the waist, one arm extended and with a finger pointing. He had a strange, ashy look; his eyes stared, the lean, white body of him had a rigidity. His ribs stuck out.

He said very softly—“I say, you men, the war’s going on over there.”

The tent stared, propped upon elbows, raising tousled heads. There was a silence, incredulous, gathering invective. And Scarsdale, with that air of wide-eyed illumination, repeated the words.

“The war is going on over there.”

Someone reached for a boot. Obviously a man who woke up seven other men at three o’clock in the morning to tell them that the war was in progress, was asking for trouble. The boot missed Scarsdale’s head and flopped against the canvas.

“Why, you blasted fool—”

But Scarsdale was unmoved; he had a visionary look.

“I have never seen the war. I have been here two years. It is quite wrong. Don’t you agree with me that it is quite wrong?”

The tent, challenged, glowered upon him.

“Well, of all the blasted fools!”

“You’re damned lucky, my lad.”

“Why not take an afternoon off, old son, and go up and have shrimps and tea in the trenches?”

Scarsdale’s white figure remained motionless.

“That’s just what I’m going to do.”

“What!”

“You’re balmy. Lie down you blasted old idiot.”

In the half-light Scarsdale seemed to smile, and then very quietly he lay down and pulled up his blanket. He did not utter another word, and the tent with heavings and twistings and a sense of heat and disgust resettled itself in an atmosphere of stale shirt and army blanket. It had nothing more to say about Scarsdale, just as it had nothing more to say about the war. Both were bloody, and when you had used that adjective, the English language failed you.

But in Scarsdale something quivered, the spirit of him that had been submerged, the essential self that had sat dumb and distressed watching ambulances come and go. He had been wounded in living among wounds. He was not quite like those other men to whom the war had become a kind of habit, and who could look upon its wreckage with calm and accustomed eyes. Men grew callous; a self-protecting skin seemed to cover their souls. As an orderly Scarsdale had sometimes carried messages to the officers’ mess, and he remembered one particular night when the mess had been playing bridge. He had delivered his message.

“A bad case just come in, sir.”

The officer responsible had called three no trumps.

“All right.”

The game had gone on, and Scarsdale, somehow fascinated, had stood there with his glance glued to the four figures at the table. He had watched the cards played, and the intent faces of the players. He had marvelled, and yet what was there to marvel at? Ambulances came and ambulances went, and men must drink and play.

A voice had spoken sharply.

“Orderly.”

“Sir.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Well, clear out.”

He had cleared out with a sudden strange feeling of heat about the ears, for his ears had heard other words; “The damned fool standing there like a cataleptic.” Yet he wasn’t a damned fool, but a man hurt and a little bewildered, a man who had not been able to get on terms with the war, or to regard it as normal. Ambulances coming in, and ambulances going out; routine, the business of dealing with broken bodies. For these doctors did their job; they might drink whisky and tell smutty stories and make much noise, but in the wards and in the operating theatre they had keen eyes and careful hands. They had a devotion of their own, the practical man’s pride, his credo. When the war flared to some periodic, bloody climax, Scarsdale bemused with weariness, had watched these doctors working without sleep, until their faces grew all lined and grey and their eyes were sunken or stuck on stalks. The eyes of weary men behave differently.

Ambulances coming, ambulances going, squelching and rolling in at the muddy gate.

And suddenly Scarsdale had heard a cry, one of those inward cries that startle and shatter a man’s consciousness.

“Souls—souls! My god, not broken bodies, but broken souls!”