illustrated the action with his finger and thumb. He daily maintained that the enemy had outrun his supplies and was being lured on to destruction. Finally when it was plain, even to Sir Joseph, that in the space of a few days England had lost both the entire stores and equipment of her regular Army, and her only ally ? that the enemy were less than twenty-five miles from her shores ?that there were only a few battalions of fully armed, fully trained troops in the country ? that she was committed to a war in the Mediterranean with a numerically superior enemy ? that her cities lay open to air attack from fields closer to home than the extremities of her own islands; that her sea-routes were threatened from a dozen new bases ? Sir Joseph said: “Seen in the proper perspective I regard this as a great and tangible success. Germany set out to destroy our Army and failed; we have demonstrated our invincibility to the world. Moreover, with the French off the stage, the last obstacle to our proper understanding with Italy is now removed. I never prophesy but I am confident that before the year is out they will have made a separate and permanent peace with us. The Germans have wasted their strength. They cannot possibly repair their losses. They have squandered the flower of their Army. They have enlarged their boundaries beyond all reason and given themselves an area larger than they can possibly hold down. The war has entered into a new and more glorious phase.”
And in this last statement, perhaps for the first time in his long and loquacious life. Sir Joseph approximated to reality; he had said a mouthful.
A new and more glorious phase: Alastair’s battalion found itself overnight converted from a unit in the early stages of training into first-line troops. Their 1098 stores arrived; a vast profusion of ironmongery which, to his pride, included Alastair’s mortar. It was a source of pride not free from compensating disadvantages. Now, when the platoon marched, Alastair’s pouches were filled with bombs and his back harnessed to the unnaturally heavy length of steel piping; the riflemen thought they had the laugh on him.
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. Weekend 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 tonight. 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. Alasstair 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 Defence.”
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 feet deep, blue at the bottom, designed to keep children from the adventure and romance of the beach. (Here there were no shells or star-fish, no jelly-fish to be melted, no smooth pebbles of glass to be found, no bottles that might contain messages from shipwrecked sailors, no wave 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 to action stood between Alastair and the old days.
The battalion were charged with the defence 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 neighbouring 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 any more,” said Sonia after three weeks of Coastal Defence.
“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 defence.”
“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?”
