“Monday.
Went with working-party at 3 p.m. Wet day. Awful mud. Tried to dig, till 7:30, and came home soaked. Back 9:45. Beastly night for the men, whose billets are wretched.”
I can see myself coming in, that last night, with Julian Durley, a shy, stolid-faced platoon commander who had been a clerk in Somerset House. He took the men’s discomforts very much to heart. Simple and unassertive, he liked sound literature, and had a sort of metropolitan turn of humour. His jokes, when things were going badly, reminded me of a facetious bus conductor on a wet winter day. Durley was an inspiration toward selfless patience. He was an ideal platoon officer, and an example which I tried to imitate from that night onward. I need hardly say that he had never hunted. He could swim like a fish, but no social status was attached to that.
II
When I had been with the battalion a week we moved away from the La Bassée sector at nine o’clock on a fine bright morning. In spite of my quite mild experiences there, I felt that I’d seen more than enough of that part of the country. Barton and Durley and young Ormand (who was now second-in-command of the company) were always talking about the Givenchy trenches and how their dugout had been “plastered with trench-mortars and whizzbangs.” Now that they were out of it they seemed to take an almost morbid delight in remembering their escapes. No one knew where we were moving to, but the quartermaster had told Barton that we might be going south. “New Army” battalions were beginning to arrive in France, and the British line was being extended.
On our second day’s march (we had done ten kilometres to a comfortable billet the first day) we passed an infantry brigade of Kitchener’s Army. It was raining; the flat dreary landscape was half-hidden by mist, and the road was liquid mud. We had fallen out for a halt when they passed us. Four after four they came, some of them wearing the steel basin-helmets which were new to the English armies then. The helmets gave them a Chinese look. To tell the truth, their faces looked sullen, wretched, and brutal as they sweated with their packs under glistening waterproof capes. Worried civilian officers on horses, young-looking subalterns in new rainproof trench-coats; and behind the trudging column the heavy transport horses plodding through the sludge, straining at their loads, and the stolid drivers munching, smoking, grinning, yelling coarse gibes at one another. It was the War all right, and they were going in the direction of it.
Late that afternoon I walked out a little way from our billets. In the brooding stillness I watched the willows and poplars, and the gleaming dykes which reflected the faint flush of a watery sunset. A heron sailed slowly away across the misty flats of ploughed land. Twilight deepened, and a flicker of star-shells wavered in the sky beyond Bethune. The sky seemed to sag heavily over Flanders; it was an oppressive, soul-clogging country, I thought, as I went back to our company mess in the squalid village street, to find Dick polishing his pipe against his nose, Ormand and Mansfield playing “nap,” and Durley soberly reading The Cloister and the Hearth in an Everyman edition. Already we were quite a happy family. “Old Man Barton,” as we called him, had gone out to invite the Quartermaster to dinner with us. Until that evening I had only seen the Q.M. from a distance, but I was already aware that he was the bedrock of the battalion (as befitted one on whom we relied for our rations). I saw him clearly for what he was, on that first evening (though not so clearly as I can see him now).
Joe Dottrell had been quartermaster-sergeant before the War; he was now Acting Quartermaster, with the rank of captain, since the real Q.M. had faded away into a “cushy job” at Army Headquarters. (He had, in fact, found that haven before the battalion went into action at the first battle of Ypres, whence it had emerged with eighty-five men and one officer—Joe Dottrell.) Whatever might happen Joe was always there, and he never failed to get the rations up; no bombardment could have prevented him doing that. And what those “dixies” of hot tea signified no one knows who wasn’t there to wait for them. He was a small, spare man—a typical “old soldier.” He had won his D.C.M. in South Africa, and had a row of ribbons to match his face, which was weather-beaten and whiskyfied to purple tints which became blue when the wind was cold.
Joe Dottrell now entered, his cap hiding his bald brow, and his British-warm coat concealing his medal ribbons, and old man Barton beaming beside him.
“I’ve brought Dottrell in to jolly you all up,” he said, with his nervous giggle. “Have a drink, Joe,” he continued, holding up a squat bottle of “Old Vatted Highland.”
“Well, my lucky lads!” exclaimed Joe, in his Lancashire voice.
Accepting the proffered glass he wished us all “the best,” and his presence gave us just that sense of security which we were in need of. But something went wrong in the kitchen, and the dinner was a disgrace. Barton “strafed” the servants until they were falling over one another, but Dottrell said the toasted cheese wasn’t too bad, and “There’s worse things in the world than half-warmed Maconochie,” he remarked. (Maconochie, it will be remembered, was a tinned compound of meat and vegetables; but perhaps it has survived the War. If so, it has my sympathy.)
Next day we took it easy. The day after that we travelled to our destination. I have been looking at the map. The distance, by a straight line, was fifty miles. Sixty-five, perhaps, by road; an easy three hours’ drive for the Divisional General in his car. Not so easy for the rank and
