Parachute landings were looked for hourly. The duty company slept in their boots and stood to at dawn and dusk. Men going out of camp carried charged rifles, steel helmets, anti-gas capes. Week-end leave ceased abruptly. Captain Mayfield began to take a censorious interest in the swill tubs; if there was any waste of food, he said, rations would be reduced. The C.O. said, “There is no such thing nowadays as working hours,” and to show what he meant ordered a series of parades after tea. A training memorandum was issued which had the most formidable effect upon Mr. Smallwood; now, when the platoon returned exhausted from field exercises, Mr. Smallwood gave them twenty minutes arms drill before they dismissed; this was the “little bit extra” for which the memorandum called. The platoon referred to it as “—ing us about.”
Then with great suddenness the battalion got orders to move to an unknown destination. Everyone believed this meant foreign service, and a great breath of exhilaration inflated the camp. Alastair met Sonia outside the guardroom.
“Can’t come out to-night. We’re moving. I don’t know where. I think we’re going into action.”
He gave her instructions about where she should go and what she should do while he was away. They now knew that she was to have a child.
There was a special order that no one was to come to the station to see the battalion off; no one in fact was supposed to know they were moving. To make secrecy absolute they entrained by night, disturbing the whole district with the tramp of feet and the roar of lorries going backwards and forwards between camp and station, moving their stores.
Troops in the train manage to achieve an aspect of peculiar raffishness; they leave camp in a state of ceremonial smartness; they parade on the platform as though on the barrack square; they are detailed to their coaches and there a process of transformation and decay sets in; coats are removed, horrible packages of food appear, dense clouds of smoke obscure the windows, in a few minutes the floor is deep in cigarette ends, lumps of bread and meat, waste paper; in repose the bodies assume attitudes of extreme abandon; some look like corpses that have been left too long unburied; others like the survivors of some saturnalian debauch. Alastair stood in the corridor most of the night, feeling that for the first time he had cut away from the old life.
Before dawn it was well known, in that strange jungle process by which news travels in the ranks, that they were not going into action but to “coastal—ing defense.”
The train travelled, as troop trains do, in a series of impetuous rushes between long delays. At length in the middle of the forenoon they arrived at their destination and marched through a little seaside town of round-fronted stucco early Victorian boarding-houses, an Edwardian bandstand, and a modern, concrete bathing pool, three foot deep, blue at the bottom, designed to keep children from the adventure and romance of the beach. (Here there were no shells or starfish, no jelly-fish to be melted, no smooth pebbles of glass to be found, no bottles that might contain messages from shipwrecked sailors, no waves which, bigger than the rest, suddenly knocked you off your feet. The nurses might sit round this pool in absolute peace of mind.) Two miles out, through a suburb of bungalows and converted railway carriages, there was a camp prepared for them in the park of what, in recent years, had been an unsuccessful holiday club.
That night Alastair summoned Sonia by telephone and she came next day, taking rooms in the hotel. It was a simple and snug hotel and Alastair came there in the evenings when he was off duty. They tried to recapture the atmosphere of the winter and spring, of the days in Surrey when Alastair’s life as a soldier had been a novel and eccentric interruption of their domestic routine; but things were changed. The war had entered on a new and more glorious phase. The night in the train when he thought he was going into action stood between Alastair and the old days.
The battalion were charged with the defense of seven miles of inviting coastline, and they entered with relish into the work of destroying local amenities. They lined the sands with barbed wire and demolished the steps leading from esplanade to beach; they dug weapon pits in the corporation’s gardens, sandbagged the bow-windows of private houses and with the co-operation of some neighboring sappers blocked the roads with dragons’-teeth and pill boxes; they stopped and searched all cars passing through this area and harassed the inhabitants with demands to examine their identity cards. Mr. Smallwood sat up on the golf course every night for a week, with a loaded revolver, to investigate a light which was said to have been seen flashing there. Captain Mayfield discovered that telegraph posts are numbered with brass headed nails and believed it to be the work of the fifth column; when mist came rolling in from the sea one evening, the corporal in command of Alastair’s section reported an enemy smoke screen, and for miles round word of invasion was passed from post to post.
“I don’t believe you’re enjoying the army anymore,” said Sonia after three weeks of coastal defense.
“It isn’t that. I feel I could be doing something more useful.”
“But, darling, you told me your mortar was one of the key points of the defense.”
“So it is,” said Alastair loyally.
“So what?”
“So what?” Then Alastair said, “Sonia, would you think it bloody of me if I volunteered for special service?”
“Dangerous?”
“I don’t suppose so really. But very exciting. They’re getting up special parties for raiding. They go across to France and creep up behind Germans and cut their throats in the dark.” He was excited, turning a page in his life, as, more than twenty years ago lying on his stomach before the fire, with a bound volume of Chums, he used to turn over to the next installment of the serial.
“It doesn’t seem much of a time to leave a girl,” said Sonia, “but I can see you want to.”
“They have special knives and tommy-guns and knuckle dusters; they wear rope-soled shoes.”
“Bless you,” said Sonia.
“I heard about it from Peter Pastmaster. A man in his regiment is raising one. Peter’s got a troop in it. He says I can be one of his section commanders; they can fix me up with a commission apparently. They carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with. D’you mind very much if I accept?”
“No, darling. I couldn’t keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn’t. I see that.”
Angela had never considered the possibility of Cedric’s death. She received the news in an official telegram and for some days would speak to no one, not even to Basil, about the subject. When she mentioned it, she spoke from the middle rather than from the beginning or the end of her progression of thought.
“I knew we needed a death,” she said. “I never thought it was his.”
Basil said, “Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know.”
“That’s true.”
“You’d like to be rich, wouldn’t you?”
“Will anyone be rich after this war?”
“If anyone is, I shall be. If no one is, I don’t suppose it matters so much being poor.”
“I don’t know that I want to be rich,” said Basil, after a pause. “I’m not acquisitive, you know. I only enjoy the funnier side of getting money—not having it.”
“Anyway it’s not an important point. The thing is that we aren’t separable anymore.”
“Let nothing unite us but death. You always thought I was going to die, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The dog it was that died… Anyway, this is no time to be thinking of marrying. Look at Peter. He’s not been married six weeks and there he is joining a gang of desperadoes. What’s the sense of marrying with things as they are? I don’t see what there is to marriage, if it isn’t looking forward to a comfortable old age.”
“The only thing in war-time is not to think ahead. It’s like walking in the blackout with a shaded torch. You can just see as far as the step you
’re taking.”
“I shall be a terrible husband.”
“Yes, darling, don’t I know it? But you see one can’t expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there’s one thing right the day is made.”
“That sounds like poor Ambrose in his Chinese mood.”
Poor Ambrose had moved west. Only the wide, infested Atlantic lay between him and Parsnip. He had taken rooms in a little fishing town and the great waves pounded on the rocks below his windows. The days passed and he did absolutely nothing. The fall of France had no audible echo on that remote shore.
This is the country of Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wellington, Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, he thought; this is the people who once lent fire to an imperial race, whose genius flashed through two stupendous centuries of culture and success, who are now quietly receding into their own mists, turning their backs on the world of effort and action. Fortunate islanders, thought Ambrose, happy, drab escapists, who have seen the gold lace and the candlelight and left the banquet before dawn revealed stained table linen and a tipsy buffoon!
But he knew it was not for him; the dark, nomadic strain in his blood, the long heritage of wandering and speculation allowed him no rest. Instead of Atlantic breakers he saw the camels swaying their heads resentfully against the lightening sky, as the caravan woke to another day’s stage in the pilgrimage.
Old Rampole sat in his comfortable cell and turned his book to catch the last, fading light of evening. He was absorbed and enchanted. At an age when most men are rather concerned to preserve familiar joys than to seek for new, at, to be exact, the age of sixty-two, he had suddenly discovered the delights of light literature.
There was an author on the list of his firm of whom Mr. Bentley was slightly ashamed. She wrote under the name of Ruth Mountdragon, a pseudonym which hid the identity of a Mrs. Parker. Every year for seventeen years Mrs. Parker had written a novel dealing with the domestic adventures of a different family; radically different that is to say in name, exhibiting minor differences of composition and circumstance, but spiritually as indistinguishable as larches; they all had the quality of “charm”; once it was a colonel’s family of three girls in reduced circumstances on a chicken farm, once it was an affluent family on a cruise in the Adriatic, once a newly-married doctor in Hampstead; all the permutations and combinations of upper middle-class life had been methodically exploited for seventeen years; but the charm was constant. Mrs. Parker’s public was not vast, but it was substantial; it lay, in literary appreciation, mid-way between the people who liked some books and disliked others, and the people who merely liked reading, inclining rather to the latter group. Mr. Rampole knew her name as one of the authors who were not positively deleterious to his pocket, and consequently when his new manner of life, and the speculative tendencies which it fostered, caused him to take up novel reading, he began on her. He was transported into a strange world of wholly delightful, estimable people whom he had rightly supposed not to exist. With each page a deeper contentment settled on the old publisher. He had already read ten books and looked forward eagerly to re-reading them when he came to the end of the seventeenth. Mr. Bentley was even engaged to bring Mrs. Parker to visit him at a future, unspecified date. The prison chaplain was also an admirer of Mrs. Parker’s. Old Rampole gained great face from disclosing her real name. He half-promised to allow the chaplain to meet her. He was happier than he could remember ever having been.
Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratt’s Club.
“Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,” he said. “Let’s at least hang about with our own friends.”
“I’ve a letter from a man who says he’s a friend of yours. Basil Seal.”
“Does he want to join?”
“Yes. Is he all right?”
“Perfect,” said Peter. “A tough nut.”
“Right. I’ll put him down with Alastair Trumpington as your other subaltern.”
“No. For God’s sake don’t do that. But make him liaison officer.”
“You see, I know everything about you,” said Angela.
“There’s one thing you don’t know,” said Basil. “If you really want to be a widow again, we’d better marry quick. I don’t think I told you. I’m joining a new racket.”
“Basil, what?”
“Very secret.”
“But why?”
“Well, you know, things haven’t been quite the same at the War House lately. I don’t know why it is, but Colonel Plum doesn’t seem to love me as he did. I think he’s a bit jealous about the way I pulled off the Ivory Tower business. We’ve never really been matey since. Besides, you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”
“Basil’s left the War Office,” said Lady Seal.
“Yes,” said Sir Joseph, with sinking heart. Here it was again; the old business. The news from all over the world might be highly encouraging—and, poor booby, he believed it was; we might have a great new secret weapon—and poor booby, he thought we had; he might himself enjoy a position of great trust and dignity—poor booby, he was going, that afternoon, to address a drawing-room meeting on the subject of hobbies for the A.T.S.—but in spite of all this, Basil was always with him, a grim memento mori staring him out of countenance. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose he has.”
“He has joined a special corps d’élite that is being organized. They are going to do great things.”
“He has actually joined?”
“Oh, yes.”
“There’s nothing I can do to help him?”
“Dear Jo, always so kind. No. Basil has arranged it all himself. I expect that his excellent record at the War Office helped. It isn’t every boy who would settle to a life of official drudgery when everyone else was going out for excitement—like Emma’s silly girl in the fire brigade. No, he did his duty where he found it. And now he is getting his reward. I am not quite sure what they are going to do, but I know it is very dashing and may well have a decisive effect on the war.”
The grey moment was passed; Sir Joseph, who had not ceased smiling, now smiled with sincere happiness.
“There’s a new spirit abroad,” he said. “I see it on every side.”
And, poor booby, he was bang right.
THE END
About the Author
[TK]
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Contents
Welcome
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Epigraph
Chapter 1: Autumn
Chapter 2: Winter
Chapter 3: Spring
Epilogue: Summer
About the Author
Ad Card
Copyright
[US copyright tk]
ISBN 978-0-316-21641-8
Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags
(Series: # )
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