September arrived, and we were both expecting to get a week’s leave. (It was known as “last leave.”) One morning Dick came in to the hut with a telegram which he handed me. It happened that I was orderly officer that day. Being orderly officer meant a day of dull perfunctory duties, such as turning out the guard, inspecting the prisoners in the guardroom, the cookhouses, the canteen, and everything else in the Camp. When I opened my telegram the orderly sergeant was waiting outside for me; we were due for a tour of the men’s huts while they were having their midday meal. The telegram was signed “Colwood”; it informed me that Stephen had been killed in action. But the orderly sergeant was waiting, and away we went walking briskly, over the grit and gravel. At each hut he opened the door and shouted “Shun!” The clatter and chatter ceased and all I had to ask was “Any complaints?” There were no complaints, and off we went to the next hut. It was queer to be doing it, with that dazed feeling and the telegram in my pocket. … I showed Dick the telegram when I returned. I had seen Stephen when he was on leave in the spring, and he had written to me only a week ago. Reading the Roll of Honour in the daily paper wasn’t the same thing as this. Looking at Dick’s blank face I became aware that he would never see Stephen now, and the meaning of the telegram became clear to me.
X
At the Front
I
Dick and I were on our way to the first battalion. The real War, that big bullying bogey, had stood up and beckoned to us at last, and now the Base Camp was behind us with its overcrowded discomforts that were unmitigated by esprit de corps. Still more remote, the sudden shock of being uprooted from the Camp at Clitherland, and the strained twenty-four hours in London before departure. For the first time in our lives we had crossed the Channel. We had crossed it in bright moonlight on a calm sea—Dick and I sitting together on a tarpaulin cover in the bow of the boat, which was happily named Victoria. Long after midnight we had left Folkestone; had changed our course in an emergency avoidance of Boulogne (caused by the sinking of a hospital ship, we heard afterwards), had stared at Calais harbour, and seen sleepy French faces in the blear beginnings of November daylight. There had been the hiatus of uncertainty at Etaples (four sunless days of north wind among pine-trees), while we were waiting to be “posted” to our battalion. And now, in a soiled fawn-coloured first-class compartment, we clanked and rumbled along and everything in the world was behind us. …
Victoria Station: Aunt Evelyn’s last, desperately forced smile; and Dick’s father, Canon Tiltwood, proud and burly, pacing the platform beside his slender son and wearing cheeriness like a light unclerical overcoat, which couldn’t conceal the gravity of a heart heavy as lead. What did they say to one another, he and Aunt Evelyn, when the train had snorted away and left an empty space in front of them? …
To have finished with farewells; that in itself was a burden discarded. And now there was nothing more to worry about. Everything was behind us, and the first battalion was in front of us.
At nine o’clock we were none of us looking over-bright, for we had paraded with kit at two in the morning, though the train, in its wartime way, hadn’t started till three hours later. There we sat, Dick and I and Mansfield (at last released from peacetime Army conventions) and Joe Barless (a gimlet-moustached ex-sergeant-major who was submitting philosophically to his elevation into officerdom and spat on the floor at frequent regular intervals). On our roundabout journey we stopped at St. Pol and overheard a few distant bangs—like the slamming of a heavy door, they sounded. Barless had been out before; had been hit at the first battle of Ypres; had left a wife and family behind him; knocked his pipe out and expectorated, with a grim little jerk of his bullet head, when he heard the guns. We others looked to him for guidance now, and he was giving us all we needed, in his taciturn, matter-of-fact way, until he got us safely reported with the first battalion.
It felt funny to be in France for the first time. The sober-coloured country all the way from Etaples had looked lifeless and unattractive, I thought. But one couldn’t expect much on a starved grey November morning. A hopeless hunting country, it looked. … The opening meet would have been last week if there hadn’t been this war. … Dick was munching chocolate and reading the Strand Magazine, with its cosy reminder of London traffic on the cover. I hadn’t lost sight of him yet, thank goodness. The Adjutant at Clitherland had sworn to do his best to get us both sent to the first battalion. But it was probably an accident that he had
