‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It worked.’
‘But you’re going back. I thought you wanted to lose the commission so you wouldn’t have to go back.’ Then she was clinging to him, cursing him and crying too. ‘You were lying all the time, then. You wanted to go back. You just wanted to be a poor bloody private again.’ She was pulling at his arm. ‘Come on. The gates are still open.’
‘No,’ he said, holding back. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Come on,’ she said, jerking at him. ‘I know these things. There’s a train you can take in the morning; you wont be reported absent until tomorrow night in Boulogne.’ The line began to move. He tried to move with it. But she clung only the harder. ‘Cant you see?’ she cried. ‘I cant get the money to give back to you until tomorrow morning.’
‘Let go,’ he said. ‘I must get aboard and find a corner to sleep in.’
‘The train wont go for two hours yet. How many of them do you think I’ve seen leave? Come on. My room isn’t ten minutes from here.’
‘Let go now,’ he said, moving on. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Just two hours.’ A sergeant shouted at him. It had been so long since an N.C.O. had spoken to him this way, that he did not realise at once himself was meant. But he had already freed himself with a sudden sharp hard movement; a carriage door was open behind him, then he was in the compartment, dropping his pack and rifle onto a jumble of others, stumbling among a jumble of legs, pulling the door behind him as she cried through the closing gap: ‘You haven’t told me where to send the money.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said, closing the door, leaving her on the step, clinging on somehow even after the train was moving, her gaped urgent face moving parallel beyond the voiceless glass until an M.P. on the platform jerked her off, her face, not the train, seeming to flee suddenly with motion, in another instant gone.
He had gone out in 1914 with the Londoners. His commission was in them. This time, he was going out to a battalion of Northumberland Borderers. His record had preceded him; a corporal was waiting on the Boulogne quai to take him to the R.T.O. anteroom. The lieutenant had been with him at officers’ school.
‘So you put up a job on them,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Dont tell me: I dont want to know why. You’re going out to the —th. I know James (the lieutenant colonel commanding it). Cut my teeth with him in the Salient last year. You dont want to go in a platoon. What about a telephonist—a sergeant-major’s man?’
‘Let me be a runner,’ he said. So a runner he was. The word from the R.T.O. lieutenant had been too good; not just his record but his past had preceded him to the battalion also, up to the lieutenant colonel himself before he had been a week in the battalion, possibly because he, the runner, was entitled to wear (he did not wear it since it was the officer’s branch of the decoration and, among the men he would now mess and sleep with, that ribbon up on his private’s tunic would have required too much breath) one of the same candy-stripes which the colonel (he was not a professional soldier either) did; that, and one other matter, though he would never believe that the two were more than incidentally connected.
‘Look here,’ the colonel said. ‘You haven’t come here to stir up anything. You ought to know that the only possible thing is to get on with it, finish it and bloody well have done. We already have one man who could be a trouble-maker—unless he oversteps in time for us to learn what he is up to.’ He named the man. ‘He’s in your company.’
‘I couldn’t,’ the runner said. ‘They wont talk to me yet. I probably couldn’t persuade them to anything even if they would talk to me and I wanted to.’
‘Not even (the colonel named the private again)? You dont know what he’s up to either?’
‘I dont think I’m an agitator,’ the runner said. ‘I know I’m not a spy. This is gone now, remember,’ he said, touching his shoulder lightly with the opposite hand.
‘Though I doubt if you can stop remembering that you once had it,’ the colonel said. ‘It’s your own leg you’re pulling, you know. If you really hate man, all you need do is take your pistol back to the latrines and rid yourself of him.’
‘Yes sir,’ the runner said, completely wooden.
‘Hate Germans, if you must hate someone.’
‘Yes sir,’ the runner said.
‘Well? Cant you answer?’
‘All the Germans with all their kith and kin are not enough to make up man.’
‘They are for me—now,’ the colonel said. ‘And they had better be for you too now. Dont force me to compel you to remember that pip. Oh, I know it too: the men who, in hopes of being recorded as victorious prime- or cabinet- ministers, furnish men for this. The men who, in order to become millionaires, supply the guns and shells. The men who, hoping to be addressed someday as Field Marshal or Viscount Plugstreet or Earl of Loos, invent the gambles they call plans. The men who, to win a war, will go out and dig up if possible, invent if necessary, an enemy to fight against. Is that a promise?’
‘Yes,’ the runner said.
‘Right,’ the colonel said. ‘Carry on. Just remember.’ Which he did, sometimes when on duty but mostly during the periods when the battalion was in rest billets, carrying the unloaded rifle slung across his back which was his cognizance, his badge of office, with somewhere in his pocket some—any—scrap of paper bearing the colonel’s or the adjutant’s signature in case of emergency. At times he managed lifts from passing transport—lorries, empty ambulances, an unoccupied sidecar. At times while in rest areas he even wangled the use of a motorbike himself, as if he actually were a dispatch rider; he could be seen sitting on empty petrol tins in scout- or fighter- or bomber- squadron hangars, in the material sheds of artillery or transport parks, at the back doors of field stations and hospitals and divisional chateaux, in kitchens and canteens and at the toy-sized zinc bars of village estaminets, as he had told the colonel, not talking but listening.
So he learned about the thirteen French soldiers almost at once—or rather, the thirteen men in French uniforms—who had been known for a year now among all combat troops below the grade of sergeant in the British forces and obviously in the French too, realising at the same moment that not only had he been the last man below sergeant in the whole Allied front to hear about them, but why: who five months ago had been an officer too, by the badges on his tunic also forever barred and interdict from the right and freedom to the simple passions and hopes and fears—sickness for home, worry about wives and allotment pay, the weak beer and the shilling a day which
