There were two silver-haired Army doctors sitting at a table, poring over blue and white documents. One, with a waxed moustache, eyed me wearily when I came into the office. With a jerk of the head he indicated a chair by the table. “Feel fit to go out again?” “Yes; quite well, thank you.” His pen began to move across the blue paper. “Has been passed fit for General Ser. …” He looked up irritably. “Don’t shake the table!” (I was tapping it with my fingers.) The other Colonel gazed mildly at me over his pince-nez. Waxed moustache grunted and went on writing. Shaking the table wouldn’t stop that pen of his!
VII
Rouen in February
I
Sometime in the second week of February I crossed to Havre on a detestable boat named Archangel. As soon as the boat began to move I was aware of a sense of relief. It was no use worrying about the War now; I was in the Machine again, and all responsibility for my future was in the haphazard control of whatever powers manipulated the British Expeditionary Force. Most of us felt like that, I imagine, and the experience was known as “being for it again.” Apart from that, my only recollection of the crossing is that someone relieved me of my new trench-coat while I was asleep.
At nine o’clock in the evening of the next day I reported myself at the 5th Infantry Base Depot at Rouen. The journey from London had lasted thirty-three hours (a detail which I record for the benefit of those who like slow-motion wartime details). The Base Camp was a couple of miles from the town, on the edge of a pine forest. In the office where I reported I was informed that I’d been posted to our Second Battalion; this gave me something definite to grumble about, for I wanted to go where I was already known, and the prospect of joining a strange battalion made me feel more homeless than ever. The 5th I.B.D. Adjutant advised me to draw some blankets; the storeroom was just round the corner, he said. After groping about in the dark and tripping over tent ropes I was beginning to lose my temper when I opened a door and found myself in a Guard Room. A man, naked to the waist, was kneeling in the middle of the floor, clutching at his chest and weeping uncontrollably. The Guard were standing around with embarrassed looks, and the Sergeant was beside him, patient and unpitying. While he was leading me to the blanket store I asked him what was wrong. “Why, sir, the man’s been under detention for assaulting the military police, and now ’e’s just ’ad news of his brother being killed. Seems to take it to ’eart more than most would. ’Arf crazy, ’e’s been, tearing ’is clothes off and cursing the war and the Fritzes. Almost like a shell-shock case, ’e seems. It’s his third time out. A Blighty one don’t last a man long nowadays, sir.” As I went off into the gloom I could still hear the uncouth howlings.
“Well, well; this is a damned depressing spot to arrive at!” I thought, while I lay awake trying to keep warm and munching a bit of chocolate, in a narrow segment of a canvas shed about four feet high. Beyond the army-blanket which served as a partition, two officers were chattering interminably in rapid Welsh voices. They were comparing their experiences at some squalid pleasure house in Rouen, and their disclosures didn’t make the War seem any jollier. It was, in fact, the most disgusting little conversation I’d ever listened to. But what right had I to blame the poor devils for trying to have a good time before they went up to the Line? … Nevertheless, the War seemed to be doing its best to make me feel unheroic.
Next day I found the 5th I.B.D. Mess dispiriting. I knew nobody, and it wasn’t a place where people felt inclined to be interested in one another, since none of them were there for more than a few days. They agreed in grumbling about the alcoholic R.C. padre who managed the mess; the food was bad, and four and threepence a day was considered an exorbitant charge. When they weren’t on the training ground (known as “the Bull Ring”) officers sat about in the Mess Room playing cards, cursing the cold weather, and talking tediously about the War with an admixture of ineffective cynicism which hadn’t existed twelve months before. I watched them crowding round the notice board after a paper had been pinned to it. They were looking to see if their names were on the list of those going up to the Line next day. Those who were on the list laughed harshly and sat down, with simulated unconcern, to read a stale picture paper. On the same notice board were the names of three private soldiers who had been shot for cowardice since the end of January. “The sentence was duly carried out. …” In the meantime we could just hear the grumbling of the guns, and there was the Spring Offensive to look forward to.
I was feeling as if I’d got a touch of fever, and next morning the doctor told me I’d got German measles. So I transferred myself ingloriously to No. 25 Stationary Hospital, which was a compound of tents with a barbed wire fence round it, about 300 yards from the Camp. There were six in the
