Goodbyes began all over again. A last day with the Ringwell ended at the crossroads by the old Harcombe point-to-point course. I went one way and the hounds went another. Jogging down the lane, they disappeared in the drizzling dusk. Moffat’s “Best of luck, old boy!” left me to ride on, alone with the creak of the saddle. I was due back at the Depot next day, but we’d had a good woodland hunt with one quite nice bit in the open, and I’d jumped a lot of timber and thoroughly enjoyed my day. Staring at the dim brown landscape I decided that the War was worth while if it was being carried on to safeguard this sort of thing. Was it? I wondered; and if a doubt arose it was dismissed before it had been formulated. Riding into Downfield where I was leaving the horse which had been lent me, I remembered how I’d slept on the floor of the Town Hall on the day war was declared. Two years and three months ago I had enlisted for “three years or the duration.” It was beginning to look as if I had enlisted for a lifetime (though the word was one which had seen better days). Under the looming shadow of the hills the lights of the town twinkled cosily. But a distant bugle-call from some camp seemed to be summoning the last reluctant farm labourer. “You’ll all have to go in the end,” it seemed to say, and the comfortless call was being sounded far across Europe. …
On my way home in the train I read about Romania in the paper. Everyone, Aunt Evelyn included, had been delighted when Romania came in on our side in August. But the results had not been reassuring. I couldn’t help feeling annoyed with the Romanian Army for allowing their country to be overrun by the Germans. They really might have put up a better show than that!
VI
At the Depot
I
Clitherland Camp had acquired a look of coercive stability; but this was only natural, since for more than eighteen months it had been manufacturing Flintshire Fusiliers, many of whom it was now sending back to the Front for the second and third time. The Camp was as much an essential cooperator in the national effort as Brotherhood & Co.’s explosive factory, which flared and seethed and reeked with poisonous vapours a few hundred yards away. The third winter of the war had settled down on the lines of huts with calamitous drabness; fog-bleared sunsets were succeeded by cavernous and dispiriting nights when there was nothing to do and nowhere to do it.
Crouching as close as I could to the smoky stove in my hut I heard the wind moaning around the roof, feet clumping cheerlessly along the boards of the passage, and all the systematized noises and clatterings and bugle-blowings of the Camp. Factory-hooters and ships’ foghorns out on the Mersey sometimes combined in huge unhappy dissonances; their sound seemed one with the smoke-drifted munition-works, the rubble of industrial suburbs, and the canal that crawled squalidly out into blighted and forbidding farmlands which were only waiting to be built over.
Except for the permanent staff, there weren’t many officers I had known before this winter. But I shared my hut with David Cromlech, who was well enough to be able to play an energetic game of football, in spite of having had a bit of shell through his right lung. Bill Eaves, the Cambridge scholar, had also returned and was quietly making the most of his few remaining months. (He was killed in February while leading a little local attack.) And there was young Ormand, too, pulling wry faces about his next Medical Board, which would be sure to pass him for General Service. I could talk to these three about “old times with the First Battalion,” and those times had already acquired a delusive unobnoxiousness, compared with what was in store for us; for the “Big Push” of last summer and autumn had now found a successor in “the Spring Offensive” (which was, of course, going to “get the Boches on the run”).
Mess, at eight o’clock, was a function which could be used for filling up an hour and a half. While Ormand was making his periodic remark—that his only reason for wanting to go out again was that it would enable him to pay off his overdraft at Cox’s Bank—my eyes would wander up to the top table where the Colonel sat among those good-natured easygoing Majors who might well have adopted as their motto the ditty sung by the troops: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” At nine-thirty the Colonel went to the anteroom for his game of Bridge. But the second-in-command, Major Macartney, would sit on long afterwards, listening to one or two of his
