H. C. McNeile

“ Thus did Jim Denver come back to his regiment. Once again the life of the moles claimed him—the life of the underworld: that strange existence of which so much has been written, and so little has been really grasped by those who have not been there. A life of incredible dreariness—yet possessing a certain "grip" of its own. A life of peculiar contrasts—where the suddenness—the abruptness of things strikes a man forcibly: the extraordinary contrasts of black and white. Sometimes they stand out stark and menacing, gleaming and brilliant; more often do they merge into grey. ”

“ Away—a bit in front on the other side of the road to Jim's trench there were woods—woods of unenviable reputation. Hence the name of "Sanctuary." In the middle of them, on the road, lay the ruined château and village of Hooge—also of unenviable reputation.
And towards these woods the eyes of all were turned.
"What the devil is it?" shouted the man beside Jim. "Look at them lights in the trees."
The devil it was. Dancing through the darkness of the trees were flames and flickering lights, like will-o'-the-wisps playing over an Irish bog. And men, looking at one another, muttered sullenly. ”

“ Suddenly a great sheet of flame seemed to leap from the German machine and a puff of black smoke: it staggered like a shot bird and then, without warning, it fell—a streak of light, like some giant shooting star rushing to the earth. The Maxim stopped firing, and after circling round a couple of times the British machine buzzed contentedly back to bed. And in a field—somewhere behind our lines—there lay for many a day, deep embedded in a hole in the ground, the battered remnants of Panting Lizzie, with its great black cross stuck out of the earth for all to see. ”

“ Now, Meyrick, I want you to realise that the principle at the bottom of all discipline is the motive that makes that discipline. I want you to realise that all these rules are made for the good of the regiment, and that in everything you do and say you have an effect on the regiment. You count in the show, and I count in it, and so does the Sergeant-Major. We're all out for the same thing, my lad, and that is the regiment. We do things not because we're afraid of being punished if we don't, but because we know that they are for the good of the regiment—the finest regiment in the world. ”

“ Just the usual dull, strange, haunting trench life—which varies not from day's end to day's end.
At intervals a battery of our own let drive, the blast of the explosion catching one through the open door; at intervals a big German shell moaned its way through the air overhead—an express bound for somewhere. Had you looked out to the front, you would have seen the bright green flares lobbing monotonously up into the night, all along the line. War—modern war; boring, incredible when viewed in cold blood.... ”

“ Those are the little things which occasionally paint the grey with a dab of white; the prowls at night—the joys of the sniper who has just bagged a winner and won the bag of nuts—all help to keep the spirits up when the pattern of earth in your particular hole causes a rush of blood to the head. [277]
Incidentally this little comedy was destined to be Jim Denver's last experience of the Hun at close quarters for many weeks to come. The grey settled down like a pall, to lift in the fulness of time, to the black and white day of his life. ”

“ A shell has burst on impact on one of the few remaining houses; some slates and tiles fall into the road, and round the hole torn out of the sloping roof there hangs a whitish-yellow cloud of smoke. In quick succession come half a dozen more, some bursting on the ruined cottages as they strike, some bursting above them in the air. More clouds of dust rise from the deserted street, small avalanches of débris cascade into the road, and, above, three or four thick white smoke-clouds drift slowly across the sky. ”

“ Then one morning Jim's company got driven out of a forward piece of the trench they were holding. Worn out and tired, their faces grey with exhaustion, their clothes grey with chalk, heavy-eyed, unshaven, driven out by sheer weight of numbers and bombs, they fell back—those that remained—down a communication trench. But they were different men from the men who went into the place three days before; the primitive passions of man were rampant—they asked no mercy, they gave none. ”

“ Even the man who comes back on short leave hardly grasps how the thing has changed him: hardly realises that the madness is still in his soul. He has not time; his leave is just an interlude. He is back again in France almost before he realises he has left it. In mind he has never left it.
There is humour there in plenty—farce even; boredom, excitement, passion, hatred. Every human emotion runs its full gamut in the Land of Topsy Turvy; [244] in the place where the life of a man is no longer three-score years and ten, but just so long as the Great Reaper may decide and no more. ”

“ No longer do you throw bombs mechanically from one trench to another. No longer do you have no actual animosity against the men over the way. You understand the feelings of the guard when their German prisoners laughed on seeing men gassed—earlier in the war. And you realise that when a man's blood is up, you might just as well preach on the wickedness of retribution as request a man-eating tiger to postpone his dinner. The joy of killing a man you hate is wonderful ”

“ Men stabbed and hacked and cursed; rifle butts cracked down on heads; triggers were pulled with the muzzle an inch from a man's face. And because the German face to face is no match for the English or French, in a short time there was peace, while men, panting like exhausted runners, bound up one another's scratches, and passed back the serious cases to the rear. They knew it was only a temporary respite, and while Jim eased the dying boy, they stacked bombs in heaps where they could get at them quickly. It was then that the German officer crawled out. ”

“ Think of it, Winkle. A long line stretched out, attacking. One man in the centre wavers, stops. Spreading outwards, the thing rushes like lightning, because, after all, fear is only an emotion, like joy and sorrow, and one knows how quickly they will communicate themselves to other people. Also, in such a moment as an attack, men are particularly susceptible to emotions. All that is primitive is uppermost, and their reasoning powers are more or less in abeyance."
"But the awful thing, Jerry," said Pat quietly, "is that you would never know whether it had been necessary or not. ”

“ Our pessimistic friend at the cross-roads spoke the truth; they're quite lively. Everything bursting beautifully above the road about forty feet up. Bitter thought—if only the blighters knew that it was empty save for your wretched and unworthy self cowering in a ditch, with a bottle of white wine in your pocket and your head down a rat-hole, surely they wouldn't waste their ammunition so reprehensibly! ”

“ There were whispers in the club; men avoided me; women cut me. Then came the dreadful night when a man—half drunk—in the club accused me of cowardice point-blank, and sneeringly contrasted my previous reputation with my conduct on the Astoria. And I realised that someone must have seen. I knocked that swine in the club down; but the whispers grew. I knew it. Someone had seen, and it would be sheer hypocrisy on my part to pretend that such a thing didn't matter. It mattered everything: it ended me. The world—our world—judges deeds, not motives ”

“ Gone is the stout lady of doubtful charm engaged in mastering the fox-trot, what time a band wails dismally in an alcove; gone is the wild-eyed flapper who bumps madly up and down the roads on the carrier of a motor-cycle. It has an atmosphere of its own this fair land of France to-day. It is laughing through its tears, and the laughter has an ugly sound—for the [272] Huns. They will hear that laughter soon, and the sound will give them to think fearfully.
But at the moment when Jim landed it was all very boring. ”

“ The poplar-lined road disappears out of sight a mile ahead, where it tops a gentle slope. And half on this side of the rise, and half on the other, there are the remnants of the tit-bit of the whole bloody charnel-house of the Ypres salient—the remnants of the village of Hooge. A closer examination is not to be recommended. The place where you stand is known in the vernacular as Hell Fire Corner, and the Hun—who knows the range of that corner to the fraction of an inch—will quite possibly resent your presence even there. And shrapnel gives a nasty wound. ”

“ There comes a time, as he had said, when one can't judge by motives, when one can only judge by results.
"You mustn't only try; you must succeed. Three days to barracks."
That night in mess the officer sat next to the Colonel. "It's the thrusters, the martinets, the men of action [63] who win the V.C.'s and D.C.M.'s, my dear fellow," said his C.O., as he pushed along the wine. "But it's the dreamers, the idealists who deserve them. They suffer so much more."
And as Major Seymour poured himself out a glass of port, a face came into his mind—the face of a stumpy, uncouth man with deep-set eyes. ”

“ When Jim Denver told Lady Alice Conway that he was sane again, he spoke no more than the truth. A few weeks in France, and then a shattered arm had brought him back to England with more understanding than he had ever possessed before. He had gone out the ordinary Englishman—casual, sporting, easy going, somewhat apathetic; he had come back a thinker as well, at times almost a dreamer. It affects different men in different ways—but none escape. And that is what those others cannot understand—those others who have not been across. ”

“ Dick stepped out of another car into a ploughed field just behind the little village of Woesten, and, having trodden on his major's face [33] and unearthed his servant, lay down by the dying fire to get what sleep he could. Now and again a horse whinnied near by; a bit rattled, a man cursed; for the unit was ready to move at a moment's notice and the horses were saddled up. The fire died out—from close by a battery was firing, and the sky was dancing with the flashes of bursting shells like summer lightning flickering in the distance. ”

“ Jim walked slowly home. He remembered just such another evening before his own battalion went out. Would those words of the Colonel have their effect: would some white-faced man stick it the better for the remembrance of that moment: would some machine-gun [264] fired with trembling dying hands take its toll? Perhaps—who knows? The ideal of the soldier is there—the ideal towards which the New Armies are led. ”

“ And with his head on a sharp stone and another in his back Dick O'Rourke fell asleep and dreamed of—but dreams are silly things to describe. It was just as he'd thrown the hors-d'œuvres at the head-waiter of Ciro's, who had suddenly become the hated German rival, and was wiping the potato salad off Moyra's face, which it had hit by mistake, with the table-cloth, that with a groan he turned on his other side—only to exchange the stones for a sardine tin and a broken pickle bottle. Which is really no more foolish than the rest of life nowadays.... ”

“ Lawson dragged him reluctantly to his feet. "All the world loves a lover, including the loved one herself; but you look like a deaf-mute at a funeral, who's swallowed his fee. Come and have a cocktail at Ciro's, and then, merry and bright and caracoling like a young lark, return and snatch her from under the nose of the accursed Teuton."
"Do you think she's going to accept him, Ginger?" ”

“ CHAPTER II PRIVATE MEYRICK—COMPANY IDIOT
No one who has ever given the matter a moment's thought would deny, I suppose, that a regiment without discipline is like a ship without a rudder. True as that fact has always been, it is doubly so now, when men are exposed to mental and physical shocks such as have never before been thought of.
The condition of a man's brain after he has sat in a trench and suffered an intensive bombardment for two or three hours can only be described by one word, and that is—numbed. ”

“ Almost can one imagine the mighty turbines, the great guns, the whole infernal paraphernalia of destruction, laughing grimly at their master's amusements—those masters whose brains forged them and riveted them and gave them birth; who with the pressure of a finger can launch five tons of death at a speck ten miles away; whose lightest caprice they are bound to obey—and yet who now cover them with flimsy silks and fairy lights, while they dance and make love to laughing, soft-eyed girls. ”

“ To fight as a sportsman fights and lose has many compensations; to fight as the German fights and lose must be to taste of the dregs of hell.
But that is how they do fight, whatever interesting surmises one may make of their motives and feelings. And that is how it goes on over the water—the funny mixture of the commonplace of everyday with the great crude, cruel realities of life and death.
But as I said, for the next few weeks the grey screen cloaked those crude realities as far as Jim was concerned. Rumour for once had proved true ”

“ You remember Ginger Bathurst—of course you do. Is he still a budding Staff Officer at the War Office, I wonder, or is he over the water? I'm out of touch with the fellows in these days— (the pathos of it: Spud out of touch, Spud of all men, whose soul was in the Army) —one doesn't live in the back of beyond for three years and find Army lists and gazettes growing on the trees. You remember also, I suppose, that I was best man at his wedding when he married the Comtesse de Grecin. ”

“ The opportunities for stirring deeds of heroism in France do not occur with great frequency, whatever outsiders may think to the contrary. For months on end a battalion may live a life of peace and utter boredom, getting a few casualties now and then, occasionally bagging an unwary Hun, vegetating continuously in the same unprepossessing hole in the ground—saving only when they go to another, or retire to a town somewhere in rear to have a bath. ”

“ He stopped underneath the portrait and for a while gazed at the painted face with a smile.
"That old blackguard up there—who lived every moment of his life—do you think he would have accounted that to me for credit? What would he say if he knew that in a crisis like this there are men who cloak perfect sight behind blue glasses; that there are men who have joined home defence units though they are perfectly fit to fight anywhere? And what would he say, Sybil, if he knew that a man, even though he'd done something, was now resting on his oars—content?" ”