‘For God’s sake …’
Barton looked up angrily. Fell silent. But he did not want to leave the man on the ground. The body was warm, the skin faintly flushed. He had been alive, looking into Barton’s face. Then dead. Nothing. Nothing.
A Sergeant came round the traverse. Barton rose to his feet.
‘You’d better get a stretcher.’
‘Sir.’ The Sergeant glanced down. ‘Private Price,’ he said, shaking his head, perhaps unsurprised.
‘Come on, Grosse.’
But he did not want to go on, he wanted to go back, not because he had lost his nerve, but because he was sickened, for where was he going, why was he to spend an afternoon making a map, playing a game, spying and reporting about a few square yards of country, why had the men standing in the traverse with their meal, and this Private with the pale eyelashes, why had they been alive when he came down here less than an hour ago who were dead now? He had wanted to take up the body of the man called Price and dig a grave and bury him himself, for would that not have been more purposeful, would he not have done the first thing of value since coming into this war? Instead, he was going ahead with binoculars and a notebook and pencils, he was detailed to make a map. To make a map!
He stopped. For a moment it was quiet. He supposed they must take time off for meals over there, too. Quickly, he pulled himself up by his hands and rested his toes on one of the higher layers of sandbags lining the trench, moved up until his head was at first level with, and then protruding over, the parapet. He thought, I have never done such a dangerous thing in my life. But felt calm. ‘Mr Barton …’
He took no notice of the runner. The sun was shining straight into his face, so that when he closed his eyes it was pleasant, it was like sitting outside on the terrace of the house at Eastbourne, basking, soothed as a cat, he felt his skin comforted by the warmth. He half opened his eyes, and the space between the two sets of trenches was pale, in a haze he saw smoke going up, saw grass and a couple of gorse bushes and the shell craters, dried in the sun, saw the enemy wire glittering. There were a few small clouds, very high up in the sky. Nothing moved. He thought, I shall stay here, I shall wait and warm my face in the sun and if they fire, they will fire, if I am killed. I shall be killed. For it seemed not to matter, nobody’s life mattered, he was of no more or less importance than the Private who had just spouted blood at his feet.
He was here to make a map.
Jesus Christ!
He felt hands gripping his legs, hauling him roughly down so that he stumbled and lost his balance and landed awkwardly, on the floor of the trench. A splinter of something went through the soft flesh of his palm.
Grosse was standing stiffly, his face furious, and unapologetic. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but …’
‘All right, all right.’
He got up slowly and made a play of checking that his binoculars had not been damaged. Realized that he must have looked over the parapet and been quite still for several seconds and that no shot had been fired at him.
A heavy shell roared overhead and crumped down quite a way behind the trench. The air smelled of cordite and chalk. Grosse said nothing more. Barton wondered what he was thinking, whether he would tell anyone what had just happened.
‘We’d best go on, sir.’
Barton nodded. It was not for a long time that he came to and realized what he had done. But it seemed entirely reasonable, nevertheless, he felt neither ashamed nor surprised. Something had clicked inside his head, he felt different, he would go back to the support trenches and his own dugout, he would talk to John and read Sir Thomas Browne and listen to the ‘Winterreise’, he would draw his map and make his report, but he would not be the same as when he had set out. Something was new. Something …
He wondered who the dead man had been, remembering the sunburn and the open eyes with their pale lashes, the sudden breath. He wanted to kneel down in the trench, then, and press his face into the soil, and weep, out of misery and rage, he wanted never to get up again.
‘Thank your mother for the almonds.’
‘I’m not writing a letter.’ Barton did not look up. His face was closed, whatever he thought or felt was undetectable.
They had moved down here, five miles behind the trenches, and were in tents and some farm buildings in the middle of derelict countryside. Their first tour had been a quiet one, but the men were tired, they had worked long hours at tedious jobs. Within three or four days they would be back and B Company would go into the front line.
‘Elgar.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Or Brahms. We could have the Brahms Serenade.’
‘No.’
‘What then? Schubert again?’
‘I don’t really feel like music.’
‘Oh.’ Hilliard hesitated, fiddling with the head of the gramophone.
It was mid-aftemoon. In half an hour he’d have to go and supervise the Company taking baths in an iron tank situated beside some disused stables.
Barton went on writing.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Perfectly, thanks.’
Hilliard wanted to cry out, so helpless had he felt for the past week, in the face of this blankness.
Barton had the green-bound copy of Sir Thomas Browne beside him, he was writing something into a notebook. John wanted to ask what was wrong, to offer help, anything. But since he had come back from his day in the Observation Post at the front line, he had been like this, silent, apathetic, withdrawn, as though he had new secrets. Hilliard felt snubbed. Once he had said, ‘What have I done?’
‘Nothing, John. Nothing.’
Now, outside, the men were being drilled by Sergeant Dexter.
‘David …’
‘Yes? What is it?’ But he went on writing, his pen moving evenly over the thin paper, he did not look up.
Hilliard realized how used he had grown to Barton’s openness, to the warmth of his conversation and his constant teasing, to the long letters and the stories about his family, to his sympathy, the way he gave and shared so much. He had, simply, grown used to receiving from him. Now he was afraid, in the face of this new mood which he could not fathom. David’s behaviour had become like his own in the past. ‘Moody,’ Constance Hilliard would say. ‘You were always a moody child, John.’ And so the label had stuck and he had grown used to it, almost proud that he preferred his own company to other people’s and found silence easier than conversation and gaiety. His behaviour stood for everything which his parents mistrusted, for them his character was flawed. Well then, he had wanted to be flawed. But since his meeting with Barton he had begun to question himself. He had changed. And now?
He rubbed his fingers over and over the black ridges of the gramophone, needing help. He said irrelevantly, ‘Huxtable’s got compassionate leave. His father’s dying.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ The writing went on. Barton liked Huxtable, they shared a certain sort of humour. Now, he only sounded polite.
‘I’d better go and sort out the bathing facilities. You should come.’
‘Should I?’
‘Well – it’s an entertainment.’
‘For whom?’
‘Look …’
Barton stopped writing. His expression was perfectly friendly, there might have been nothing wrong at all. But there was something. Something … He did not want to talk. Desperately, Hilliard said, ‘I could move. I could have a word with Garrett – I mean, if you need a break. Perhaps that’s what it is? We’ve been together rather. I suppose you might be able to share with Glazier.’
Barton put the cap on his fountain pen and began to screw it around and around. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Yes. I’m not very good company.’
‘No, it isn’t …’
‘So if that’s what you want, of course, go ahead.’
‘No. I’m thinking about you.’
‘What about me?’
Hilliard felt himself sick with the effort of trying to explain what
had never before needed explanation, of trying to break through this tension between them, to help Barton or himself. Do something. He spoke very slowly.
‘I mean that you have been a bit – quiet. Things are different, aren’t they? I thought you probably wanted a break from me.’
‘No.’
‘Oh. I see. I thought …’
‘Oh God Almighty, John, I don’t …’ But Barton pulled himself up, fell silent again. He was still screwing the cap of the pen between his long fingers.
Hilliard thought, he has got to tell me now, it has got to be cleared up, whatever it is. Now, now. Now he would speak. Now …
The thread of the pen broke. Barton put both parts down on the table, stared at them. The silence went on.
Went on too long to be broken then, there was nothing either of them could say. Dared say. They did not move for minute after minute, standing quite apart from one another in the dark little tent.
In the end, Hilliard walked quickly across to the flap, ducked, went outside.
The sun had not been out all that morning and now heavy-bellied clouds were piled up overhead. It would rain.
The men went up, singing, to the communal bath and made the most of it, twenty at a time in the grey, scummy water, but cheerful, splashing and floundering and waving to the war photographer who had been with the Battalion since the previous day. The air smelled of Carbolic and chlorine and of the rain to come. Hilliard stood, pitying them their lack of privacy, the way they were always herded together, and yet envying them too, their carefully ordered life and clear, uninhibited friendships and enmities.
And then he checked himself, for it was more dangerous to think like that, why should this life at war be any more simple, any less full of conflict for the men than for Barton and himself, for Garrett, for any of them? He knew nothing about the men, why should he patronize them? And he thought, too, that none of them knew or greatly liked him, as they liked David. He felt miserable, entirely alone. He wanted to go back to the front.
Let them not complain about immaturity that die about thirty; they fall but like the whole world, whose solid and well-composed substance must expect the duration and period of its constitution.
It is a brave act of valour to condemn death but where life is more terrible, it is then the truest valour to live.
We term sleep a death and yet it is waking that kills us and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.
Themistocles, therefore, that slew his soldier father in sleep, was a merciful executioner: tis a punishment the mildness of which no law hath invented.
After a battle with the Persians, the Roman corpses decayed in a few days, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, no bones equally moulder.
Men are too early old and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth out our days, misery makes Alcmena’s nights, and time hath no wings to it.
But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature. Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible fire within us.
’Tis all one to lie in St Innocent’s churchyard as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstasie of being forever, and as content with six foot of earth as the glorious sepulchre of Adrianus.
‘Which of these is right? Which do you really believe?’ For having read them, Hilliard wanted to understand, he was moved by what was written.
‘Why are you reading those?’ Barton was standing in the entrance to their tent.
‘I wanted to see what you’d been writing.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought it might help.’
‘Help what?’
‘I – I suppose I wanted to know what you were thinking.’
‘And do you?’
Hilliard looked down again helplessly at the sheets of paper, the neat, black script. There was silence again. He read, ‘Men are too early old and before the date of age.’
Barton crossed to his side of the tent, and opened his valise. ‘The C.O. wants to see us. Everyone.’
‘Oh. I suppose we’re going back then.’
‘Probably.’
‘It’s a relief.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well – I don’t much like it here. I never liked this sort of halfway house. One foot in the war and one foot out of it. The men aren’t very cheerful.’
Barton shrugged. ‘What difference does it make, John? Does it matter where we are?’
The camp was dreary, badly equipped. It had begun to rain late that afternoon, a thin drizzle, while the men were still bathing. The estaminet in the nearby village was grubby, the faces of the proprietor and his wife sour and unwelcoming. And a mild dysentery had broken out among B Company.
‘I hate it here,’ Hilliard said. He had been tense, the last few days.
‘Yes. We’d better go and see Garrett.’
Barton had walked across to the packing case that served them as a table, put his hand on the papers which Hilliard had been reading, as though to cover them up or take them away. Then he seemed to change his mind, lose interest. He left them as they were.
Hilliard said, ‘I like reading them. I like the pieces you’ve taken down.’
‘Good.’
‘They seem to set it all at a remove, don’t they? And he gives a shape to something shapeless, gives it all a point, somehow.’
‘Does he? What point has it?’
‘I thought – well, isn’t that why you read him? To try and make some sense out of all this?’
‘The war? I shouldn’t think that’s possible.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘You’ve never really thought it was, have you?’
‘No. So you don’t read this because it helps things?’
‘I don’t know what I do or why, John.’ Barton sounded weary.
‘Why did you take these particular sections out and write them down in a book by themselves? They must mean something.’
‘I really don’t know. It was something to do.’
‘Oh come, that doesn’t sound like you. That isn’t the kind of thing you say.’
‘All right. Perhaps it puts a neat fence around things – tidies them up. I just do not know.’
Hilliard felt again that he had come up against a hard wall, he did not know what to say or how to go further. So often in the time since they had first met he had half-phrased some thought, groped his way towards the precise expression of what he was feeling, and David had at once understood, had picked up his meaning and stated it for him, or expanded it. Not now. Now he blocked everything in the same dull, tired, patient way. He had lost his gaiety and also some edge of understanding. Or was trying to lose them, to numb himself. Now, he asked, ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’ But Hilliard still lingered beside the papers. He said, ‘I wish I could make a pattern out of things like this. Sergeant Hurd keeps a diary. Did you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps that’s what he does – makes a pattern. I wish I could make one. Make sense of it.’
Barton shook his head. ‘So do I.’ He turned to go out of the tent.
It was raining heavily. They walked slightly apart. John Hilliard a pace behind, so that he saw Barton’s shoulders and the side of his head but not his face, not his expression. He felt again the appalling sense of his own failure, a misery that he could say nothing, do nothing, that he did not know.
Glazier joined them and walked beside Barton, began to talk about hunting. He was a well-meaning man and rather lazy. Once, David had suggested that he might also be callous, but when Hilliard had pressed him, asked if it were because of the foxhunting, he had shaken his head, said, ‘No. Anyhow, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it wasn’t a fair thing to say. I don’t know the man really. It’s just – I wonder if he cares much.’
Yet now he seemed to co
me alive for Glazier, more than at any time during the past week, he talked with something of his old, teasing manner, laughed, so that Hilliard, a pace behind, felt jealousy rising in him, he began to hate Glazier. But hated David, too, for giving so much of himself away so freely to another: he thought, what has Glazier got, what does he say or do, that I cannot? What spring has he managed to touch?
They separated going into the briefing conference in the dingy cottage which was Battalion Headquarters. Barton sat across the table from both Glazier and himself, hands together, listening and silent. When he caught Hilliard’s glance, he returned it calmly, and then, the second time, smiled, a vague, dispassionate smile. Garrett told them they were moving the following day.
He woke to a sound which he could not at once identify: it was not only the rain which had already churned up the field outside and soaked under the tent flaps, so that their ground-sheets were wet and muddied. There was the soft rumble of water on the canvas. But something else, a tearing noise. He realized that the lamp was on very low, and shaded by a valise which had been propped up on the packing case in front of it.
‘Barton?’
‘Damn. I’m sorry – I hoped I wouldn’t wake you up.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing and I’ve nearly finished. Go back to sleep.’
Hilliard stretched. His limbs were cramped and he was damp and chilled. There was the close, mouldy smell of wet grass and soil. The tearing noise had stopped. Barton was sitting down, only the top of his head was visible over the upright valise.
‘What are you doing?’
For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, ‘I suppose I found out that whatever I’d been trying to achieve didn’t work and shouldn’t work. I mean that I ought not to have tried at all.’
He spoke very quietly but there was a note of despair in his voice.
‘I couldn’t sleep and I knew why. I’ll feel better now. Look, I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Hilliard was standing. ‘It’s not particularly comfortable anyway.’
‘No.’
‘I’m fairly wet. That would have woken me up before long. I don’t seem to be able to be wet though I get through most other disturbances. I slept for six hours in a trench at Ancerre, with half a hundredweight of earth and a dead man on top of me.’