‘What’s your division like?’ said Wayland-Leigh suddenly.
‘All right,’ said Curzon, and then, throwing traditional modesty to the winds, ‘first rate. As good as anyone could hope for.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Wayland-Leigh. ‘Don’t think much of these New Army divisions myself. We’ve seen a couple of ’em, haven’t we, Norton?’
‘Mine’s good stuff,’ persisted Curzon, refusing to be brow-beaten.
‘We’ll see for ourselves soon enough,’ said Wayland-Leigh brutally. ‘And look here, Curzon, we may as well begin as we mean to go on. There are certain standing orders in this Corps which you’d better hear about now – they’re not written orders. In this Corps there are no excuses. A man who’s got to find excuses – goes, just like that.’
His thick hand cut the air with an abrupt gesture.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘This Corps does not retire,’ went on Wayland-Leigh. ‘It never gives up ground. And in the same way if it is given an objective to reach, it reaches it. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We don’t have any bloody weak-kneed hanky-panky. You’ve never commanded a division in action, have you, Curzon?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, you’ll find that the commanders of units are always looking out for a chance to dodge the dirty work and pass it on to someone else – anxious to spare their own men and all that. Take my advice and don’t listen to ’em. It’ll be a dam’ sight better for you, believe me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Most of the officers in this army want driving, God knows why – the Army’s changed since I was a regimental officer. You drive ’em, and you’re all right. I’ll back you up. And if you don’t – I’ll have to find someone who will.’
‘I understand.’
‘I hope you do. What about a drink before dinner? Norton, you can look after him. I’ll see you at dinner, Curzon.’
Dinner at Corps Headquarters was a stiffly military function. It was served at a long table in what had once been the state bedroom of the jewel-like little château. There were silver candlesticks on the table, and a fair show of other silver – somehow Saint-Cérisy had escaped being looted by any of the three armies which had fought in its streets. The Lieutenant-General sat at the head of the table, huge and silent, with Curzon as the newest arrived guest on his right. Looking down the table Curzon saw a long double row of red-tabbed officers whose rank dwindled in accordance with their distance from him as though in perspective – generals and colonels at the head, and aides-de-camp and signal officers at the foot. There was small attempt at conversation at the far end. The brooding immobility of the Lieutenant-General seemed to crush the young men into awed silence. Even their requests to the mess waiters were couched in half-whispers.
On Curzon’s right was another major-general commanding a division. Bewly, his name was, and he reminded Curzon of Coppinger-Brown, his predecessor in command of the Ninety-first Division. Bewly was able to talk despite the presence of his corps commander; he spent dinner-time complaining unnecessarily to Curzon about the lack of social position of the officers of the New Army.
‘I should have thought,’ said Bewly, ‘that they would have drawn the line somewhere, but they haven’t. There’s a battalion of my old regiment in my division. The subalterns come from anywhere, literally anywhere. I suppose we had to have stockbrokers and schoolmasters. But there are clerks in the regiment now, no better than office boys. And that’s not all. There’s a linen draper! It’s enough to make one weep. What was your regiment?’
Curzon told him.
‘Ah!’ said Bewly, and there crept into his voice the slight deference which Curzon was accustomed to hear from infantrymen. ‘I don’t expect it has happened in your regiment? You can keep that kind of thing out of the cavalry.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Curzon. He was not very interested in this question of the introduction of the lower orders into the commissioned ranks of the infantry. Partly that may have been because he was a cavalryman, but partly it must have been because he was conscious of his own Mincing Lane parentage. As regards his own division he would have wished for no change in its present constitution, and being without blue blood himself, he failed to see the necessity of blue blood as a qualification for leadership.
At the same time he found himself wondering vaguely how long Bewly would last under Wayland-Leigh’s command, and he guessed it would not be long. Bewly’s division was a New Army formation which had been in France for three weeks. The other two divisions in the Corps besides the Ninety-first were of an older pedigree, although, as Bewly pessimistically informed Curzon, they had lost so many men and had been filled up so often with drafts that they retained precious little likeness to their originals.
The dinner was admirable and the service more efficient than that of any mess Curzon had ever known. This was due – Bewly was his informant again, speaking with dropped voice, and with nods, and winks at Curzon’s left-hand neighbour – to the fact that Wayland-Leigh systematically combed his Corps for ex-waiters and ex-cooks. The mess sergeant was lately a maître d’hôtel; the cook had been an assistant chef in a famous restaurant.
‘Trust the Buffalo to have the best of everything,’ murmured Bewly, and Curzon suddenly remembered that far back in the old Indian Army days Wayland-Leigh had been nicknamed ‘the Buffalo’. The original reason for the name had long been forgotten, but the name remained, distinguished by its appropriateness.
As soon as dinner was over the Buffalo rose abruptly from his chair without a glance either to left or to right, and strode away from the table to vanish through an inconspicuous door behind him. A second later Curzon heard another door slam in the farther depths of the house.
‘He’s settled for the night, thank God,’ said Bewly, heaving a sigh of relief. Curzon was reminded (until he put the similarity out of his mind as ludicrous) of the attitude of a small boy at school at the disappearance of a dreaded master.
Chapter Sixteen
Next morning Curzon formed one of a select party sent round a section of the front line to be initiated into the new developments of trench warfare. Their guide was a tall lean captain named Hodge, who occupied some ill-defined position on the Corps Headquarters’ staff, and who wore not merely the blue and red ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order, but the purple and white one of the new-fangled Military Cross. More noticeable than his ribbons was his air of weary lackadaisical tolerance towards his seniors, even major-generals. His uninterested apathy made a bad impression on Curzon, but Bewly took no notice of it, and with Bewly present and senior to him he could not pull him up for it. Life seemed to hold no more secrets and no more attraction for Captain Hodge, who lounged in front of the party along the winding trenches with a weary indifference in striking contrast to the keen interest of the newcomers.
Motor cars had brought them to a cross-roads close behind the line; on the journey up Captain Hodge condescended to point out to them all sorts of things which were new to Curzon, in the way of ammunition dumps (tiny ones, the mere microcosm of their successors, but an innovation as far as Curzon was concerned) and rest billets for troops out of the line, and all the other unheard-of accessories of static warfare.
At the cross-roads Hodge actually was sufficiently awake to say: ‘Dangerous place for shelling here,’ and to display some sign of haste as he walked across with the staff officers scuttling behind him. But the sky was blue and peace seemed to have settled down upon the tortured landscape. There was hardly a sound of firing to be heard. The armies of both sides seemed to be basking like lizards in the unwonted sunshine. A tiny breath of wind fanned Curzon’s face, and brought with it the stink of the front-line trenches, compounded of carrion and mud, and latrines ripened by the present warmth. When Curzon had last quitted the trenches after the First Battle of Ypres that stink had been in its immaturity, only just beginning, but the present whiff called up a t
orrent of memories of those wild days, of the peril and the fatigue and the excitement. Curzon felt vaguely irritated by the prevailing tranquillity. First Ypres had been real fighting; this was nothing of the sort.
The road they were on had ceased to be a road at the cross-roads, where the red-hatted military policeman had stopped the cars. A vague indication of a trench had grown up around them as they progressed, and soon it was quite definitely a trench, floored with mud in which they sank ankle deep – the warm weather had not dried it – crumbling and slipshod in appearance for lack of revetting. They floundered in single file along the trench. Twice Hodge turned and said: ‘Keep low here. They’ve got a fixed rifle on this point.’ Hodge made no bones at all at bending himself double, despite his lackadaisical air, as he made his way round the dangerous bay. Curzon stooped, but could not bring himself to adopt Hodge’s cowardly and undignified attitude. He heard a sharp zzick and felt the breath of a bullet past the back of his neck.
‘Better be careful,’ said Hodge.
A little later they had to crowd themselves against the side of the trench to allow a stretcher to go by; the stretcher bearers were breathing deeply, and on the stretcher lay a soldier, deathly pale, his boots protruding beyond the blanket which covered him. That was all the traffic they met in the communication trench.
They reached the support line and went along it. There were soldiers here, lounging about, sleeping in the sun, making tea over little smokeless flames of solid methylated spirit. They came up to attention not very promptly at sight of the string of brass hats making their way along the trench. Battalion headquarters was established in a dug-out burrowed into the front of the trench; not a very good dug-out, a mere rabbit scrape compared with the dug-outs of the future, but the first Curzon had seen. A worn-looking colonel greeted them, and offered them drinks, which all of them except Curzon drank thirstily; Curzon had no desire at all to drink whisky and water at ten in the morning. The battalion runners were waiting on duty in a smaller dug-out still, next door; in the headquarters dug-out was the telephone which linked precariously the battalion to brigade, and thence through Division and Corps and Army to G.H.Q.
They went on by a muddy communication trench to the front line. Here there was the same idleness, the same lack of promptitude in acknowledging the General’s presence. There were men asleep squatting on the firestep who had to be wakened for discipline’s sake. There were certain concessions made to active-service conditions; the sentries peering into the periscopes were rigidly attentive and stirred not at all at the bustle passing them by; the shell cases hung inverted in every bay to act as gongs for a gas warning should gas come over.
Curzon took a periscope and gazed eagerly over the parapet. He saw a few strands of barbed wire with a tattered dead man – a sort of parody of a corpse – hanging on the farthest one. Then there was a strip of mud pocked with shell craters, more barbed wire beyond, and then the enemy’s front line, whose sand-bagged parapet, although neater and more substantial than the British, showed no more sign of life. It was hard to believe that a wave of disciplined men could not sweep across that frail barrier, and as Curzon began to think of that he found himself believing that it would be better even that they should try and fail than moulder here in unsoldierly idleness – it would be the more appropriate, the more correct thing.
The other generals, and Captain Hodge, waited patiently while he peered and stared, twisting the periscope this way and that – it was not easy to form a military estimate of a landscape while using a periscope for the first time – and were clearly relieved when at last his curiosity was satisfied and he handed back the periscope to the platoon officer from whom he had taken it.
‘We shall be late for lunch if we don’t hurry on our way back, Hodge,’ said Bewly.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Hodge. ‘I’ll try and get you back in time.’
Bewly’s anxiety about lunch irritated Curzon – there was a good deal about Bewly which had begun to irritate him. He almost sympathized with Hodge in his attitude of scarcely concealed contempt for Bewly, even though it was reprehensible in a junior officer. They pushed on along the front-line trench, round bays and traverses innumerable; one bit of trench was very like another, and everywhere the men seemed half asleep, as might have been expected of soldiers who had spent five nights in the trenches – except by Curzon, who could not imagine the physical and still less the moral effects of experiences he had not shared and which were not noticed in the military text-books.
The sparseness of the garrison of the trenches made a profound effect on him; it was a continual source of surprise to him to see how few men there were in each sector. He had long known, of course, the length of line allotted on the average to a division, and he had laboriously worked out sums giving the number of rifles per yard of trench from the data issued by the War Office (Most Secret. For the information of Officers Commanding Divisions Only), but he was not gifted with the power of visualizing in actual pictures the results obtained. Now that he could see for himself he marvelled; presumably the German trenches over there were as scantily manned – it seemed to him impossible that such a frail force could withstand a heavy artillery preparation and then a brisk attack with overwhelming numbers.
He already itched with the desire to make the attempt, to head a fierce offensive which would end this slovenly, unmilitary, unnatural kind of warfare once and for all. There must have been mismanagement at Festubert and Neuve Chapelle, or bad leadership, or bad troops. Nothing else could account for their failure to put an end to a situation against which all Curzon’s training caused him to revolt with loathing. His feverish feeling made him reply very shortly indeed to Bewly’s droned platitudes on the way back to Corps Headquarters and at lunch, and later, when Miller and he were called in to discuss with Wayland-Leigh and Norton what they had seen, his sincerity lent a touch of eloquence to his unready tongue.
He spoke vehemently against the effect on the troops of life in the trenches, and of this system of petty ambuscades and sniping and dirt and idleness. And, with his experience of improvised attacks and defence to help him, he was able to say how advantageous it must be to be allowed ample time to mount and prepare a careful attack in which nothing could go wrong and overwhelming force could be brought upon the decisive point. Curzon checked himself at last when he suddenly realized how fluently he was talking. It was lawyer-like and un-English to be eloquent, and his little speech ended lamely as he looked in embarrassment from Wayland-Leigh to Norton and back again.
But Wayland-Leigh apparently was too pleased with the sentiments Curzon had expressed to be suspicious of his eloquence. There was a gleam of appreciation in his green eyes. He exchanged glances with Norton.
‘That’s the stuff, Curzon,’ he said. ‘That’s different from what I’ve been hearing lately from these can’t-be-doners and better-notters and leave-it-to-youers that the Army’s crowded with nowadays. What about you, Miller?’
Miller, dark, saturnine, silent, had said nothing so far, and now, after a Lieutenant-General and a Major-General had expressed themselves so enthusiastically, it could not be expected of a mere colonel to go against their opinions – not a colonel, at any rate, who placed the least value on his professional career.
‘I think there’s a lot in it sir,’ said Miller, striving to keep the caution out of his voice and to meet Wayland-Leigh’s sharp glance imperturbably.
‘Right,’ said Wayland-Leigh. ‘Norton’s got a lot of trench maps and appreciations and skeleton schemes for local offensives. I want you to start going through them with him. We all know that the real big push can’t come for a month or two while these bloody politicians are muddling about with munitions and conscription and all the rest of it – why in hell they can’t put a soldier in to show them how to run the affair properly I can’t imagine. Your division’s due to arrive in two days. We’ll give ’em a couple of turns in the front line to shake ’em together, and then we’ll start in and get something done.
Your lot and Hope’s Seventy-ninth are the people I’m relying on.’
Curzon ate his dinner with enjoyment that night – it was enough to give any man pleasure in his food to be told that the Buffalo relied upon him. There was a letter from Emily too – full of the shy half-declarations of love which were as far as Emily could be expected to write and as far as Curzon wished. Burning phrases in black and white would have made Curzon uncomfortable; he was well satisfied with Emily’s saying that she missed him and hoped he would soon be back again with her, and with the timid ‘dears’, three in all, interpolated in the halting sentences. Emily was at Bude House, which the Duke had decided to keep open all the summer, but she would soon be going for a few weeks to Bude Manor, in Somerset. She was still being a little sick – Curzon fidgeted with a premonition which he told himself to be unfounded when he read that. The last paragraph but one brought a grin to his lips both because of its contents and its embarrassing phrasing. The grim gaunt housekeeper who had ruled Narling Priory under their nominal control had been found to be with child after forty-one years of frozen virginity, and obstinately refused to name her partner beyond saying he was a soldier. As Emily said, the war was changing a lot of things.
Curzon wrote back the next day, bluffly as usual. The only ‘dear’ he was able to put into his letter was the one that came in ‘my dear wife’, and the only sentiment appeared in the bits addressed in reply to Emily’s statement that she missed him. He devoted three or four lines to the excellent weather prevailing, and he committed himself to a cautiously optimistic sentence or two regarding the future of the war. He bit the end of his pen in the effort of trying to think of something more to say, but found inspiration slow in coming, and ended the letter with a brief recommendation that Emily should take great care of herself, and a note of amused surprise at the fall of the housekeeper.