Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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The war was both formal and informal. Scarsdale granted a pass for the day, fraternized with the R.A.M.C. orderly of an outgoing ambulance and was taken on board.

“Where do you want to go, chum?”

“Where are you going?”

“Menin Road dressing-station.”

“How far from the front line?”

The orderly looked at him curiously.

“Three or four miles. Bit lively just at present.”

“I want to go up to the trenches.”

“What for? To see a pal?”

“No, to see the war.”

“See the war. Gosh!”

There was no accounting for some people’s tastes.

The ambulance carried Scarsdale through Flanders. It was a very peaceful day with a large and spacious summer sky and a light breeze playing in the poplars. Corn was ripening. The spires of churches thrust slim grey wedges into the blue of the sky. Women and old men were working in the fields and Scarsdale looking back saw the landscape as in a frame enclosed by the canvas tilt of the ambulance.

They came to Poperinghe and passed through it and in the grey streets of that little Flemish town Scarsdale felt the first tremor of something. There were smashed houses, a sadness, a suggestion of fear. It was as though the town listened. Great poplars lined the road, and here and there the trees were broken; the fields had a shabby look.

The country grew more shabby and desolate. There were troops on the road, transport, guns. Scarsdale met the eyes of some of the marching men; they seemed to stare at him like mute animals, sullenly, stupidly. From somewhere came a rushing sound; and the roar of an explosion.

The orderly grinned.

“The old sod’s shelling the road. Long range. We’ve been pretty lucky lately.”

But Scarsdale noticed that the man’s face had changed. He was a fair, blue-eyed lad, casual, talkative. Away there among the fields his face had seemed smooth and plump, but now it looked older; the lines of it had sharpened; the blue eyes were restless. It seemed to Scarsdale that this other man was listening, and that the drums of his own ears had suddenly grown tense.

He said, “There’s something different up here.”

The orderly stared at him.

“Different! I should say so. You’ve got to the part where there’s always the chance of a bloody mess.”

They passed through the lesser desolation that was Vlamertinghe and the greater desolation that was Ypres. The landscape was all jagged remnants, torn earth, rubbish, blasted trees. In the roadway near the Menin Gate, Scarsdale saw a splodge of blood in the road, and near it a dead horse. Some men were clearing away the wreckage of a smashed limber. There was a sudden metallic crash among some ruins close by, and rubbish and dust surged into the air. And Scarsdale felt a contraction of his stomach; his knees trembled a little. He found himself listening.

The orderly looked at him and laughed. Scarsdale wondered why the fellow laughed. He had been watching Scarsdale’s eyes coming out on stalks.

“Bit lively to-day.”

The ambulance drew up outside a row of doorways that appeared to give entrance to piles of broken brick and sandbagged shelters. R.A.M.C. men lounged uneasily. A stretcher with a body on it was being carried through a doorway under a rolled up gas-curtain. An officer came hurriedly from one bolt-hole and disappeared as hurriedly into another. Fifty yards up the road a volcanic gush of black dirt and smoke spurted into the air. Scarsdale had seen a yellow red glare in the centre of it. The crash of the explosion seemed to shake something inside him.

He got out of the ambulance. He felt a sudden urge towards one of those bolt-holes in the pyramids of broken brick. He stood in the middle of the road as though his feet had suddenly adhered to it; he felt unable to move; the conscious part of him seemed paralysed.

The car orderly grinned, and thrust towards Scarsdale a half-empty packet of cigarettes.

“Have a fag, old lad.”

Scarsdale put out a hand, and was astonished to find that his fingers somehow appeared incapable of picking out one of the white paper tubes. He stared at his own fingers. The orderly gave the packet a shake, and a cigarette protruded.

“Still on the job? You can take the next bus back.”

Something inside Scarsdale winced and hardened. His tight bowels yearned.

“No. I’m going up. Which way?”

“Right along the road till you come to Hell Fire Corner.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like? Oh, it’s just Hell Fire Corner, a bit messy. There’s a duck-board track on the left.”

“Yes.”

“That’ll take you up to Zonnebeke—if you feel like it. And if you get to Zonnebeke don’t stand messing about near the church or the soda-water factory. They’re bloody.”

Scarsdale, with a cigarette between lips that were rather pale, nodded, and smiled a cracked smile.

“Thanks. I’ll be getting on. Suppose there will be buses running back to No. 37 this evening?”

“Sure. So-long, old lad.”

“So-long.”

Scarsdale walked down the road to Menin. He did not like the road to Menin, and he liked Hell Fire Corner less. My god, what a landscape! Desolation upon desolation! Horror, fear! The very shell-holes were mouths full of fear. They had crumbling, oozy lips. And there was rubbish everywhere, or an upheaval of things that suggested rubbish. The very earth seemed to have been torn to tatters. This blasted landscape, this atmosphere of anguish and of fear, while overhead the summer sky was big and blue with white clouds.

Scarsdale got away suddenly from Hell Fire Corner. He ran; he had reason to run; he sighted the duck-board track and clattered along it, until a shell blew up a section of it somewhere behind him. He fell. It was his fear that fell. He found himself half in and half out of a shell-hole, and looking down at something that floated in water that was the colour of pea-soup. A pair of legs in puttees protruded from under a greatcoat. And Scarsdale was conscious of sudden intense nausea. He stared at those legs as though fascinated. His heart was beating a hundred a minute. He could feel it. Its throbbings seemed to shake his body.

Presently he got up. Something made him get up, a little, thin, sneering pride. His lips felt razor-edged. He crammed his cap down and looked about him. His legs quivered, and he cursed them.

“Damn you, keep still.”

Abruptly he became aware of the loneliness of the landscape. There was not a human figure to be seen, no, not one. He alone seemed to be standing upright under that summer sky in a desolation of shell-holes and tumbled earth. He saw the duck-board track going on over the slope of a low hill like some immense tape-worm squirming from east to west.

For the moment this sense of isolation frightened Scarsdale almost as much as did the ripping, metallic shell-bursts. Where was everybody? There were thousands of men somewhere. He hesitated. He wanted to go back as quickly as possible by the way he had come, and not to cease from going back until he was among the quiet, unshelled fields. He fought against the importunities of his fear. It was fierce, shameless, without honour. It would listen neither to reason nor to reproaches. It stood naked and unabashed.

Yet, he went on. He forced himself on. He did not run, but plodded doggedly along the duck-boards. By the carcase of a dead tree and under the shelter of a mud bank he saw a row of guns crouching like strange beasts in pits. Not a soul was to be seen. Extraordinary! And over this seeming solitude a kind of sinister silence was stretched like a tense skin, a silence that reverberated when a shell burst where hundreds of other shells had fallen.