“Lyne,” said the Colonel. “Go up to A Company and explain what’s happening. If they come in now from the rear the cars may jink round and give the other companies a chance to get out.”
Cedric set out across the little battlefield. All seemed quite unreal to him still.
The bombers were not aiming at any particular target; they were plastering the ground in front of their cars, between battalion Headquarters and the mouth of the valley where A Company were dug in. The noise was incessant and shattering. Still it did not seem real to Cedric. It was part of a crazy world where he was an interloper. It was nothing to do with him. A bomb came whistling down, it seemed from directly over his head. He fell on his face and it burst fifty yards away, bruising him with a shower of small stones.
“Thought they’d got him,” said the Colonel. “He’s up again.”
“He’s doing all right,” said the Adjutant.
The armoured cars were shooting it out with D Company. The infantry spread out in a long line from hillside to hillside and were moving steadily up. They were not firing yet; just tramping along behind the armoured cars abreast, an arm’s length apart. Behind them another wave was forming up. Cedric had to go across this front. The enemy were still out of effective rifle range from him, but spent bullets were singing round him among the rocks.
“He’ll never make it,” said the Colonel.
I suppose, thought Cedric, I’m being rather brave. How very peculiar. I’m not the least brave, really; it’s simply that the whole thing is so damned silly.
A Company were on the move now. As soon as they heard the firing, without waiting for orders, they were doing what the Colonel intended, edging up the opposing hillside among the boulders, getting into position where they could outflank the outflanking party. It did not matter now whether Cedric reached them. He never did; a bullet got him, killing him instantly while he was a quarter of a mile away.
chapter 4 SUMMER
Summer came and with it the swift sequence of historic events which left all the world dismayed and hardly credulous; all, that is to say, except Sir Joseph Mainwaring, whose courtly and ponderous form concealed a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity, which left him bobbing serenely on the great waves of history which splintered more solid natures to matchwood. Under the new administration he found himself translated to a sphere of public life where he could do no serious harm to anyone, and he accepted the change as a well-earned promotion. In the dark hours of German victory he always had some light anecdote; he believed and repeated everything he heard; he told how he had it on the highest authority the German infantry was composed of youths in their teens, who were intoxicated before the battle with dangerous drugs; “those who are not mown down by machine guns die within a week,” he said. He told, as vividly as if he had been there and seen it himself, of Dutch skies black with descending nuns, of market women who picked off British officers, sniping over their stalls with sub-machine-guns, of waiters who were caught on hotel roofs marking the rooms of generals with crosses as though on a holiday postcard. He believed, long after hope had been abandoned in more responsible quarters, that the French line was intact. “There is a little bulge,” he explained. “All we have to do is to pinch it out,” and he illustrated the action with his finger and thumb. He daily maintained that the enemy had outrun his supplies and was being lured on to destruction. Finally when it was plain, even to Sir Joseph, that in the space of a few days England had lost both the entire stores and equipment of her regular Army, and her only ally that the enemy were less than twenty-five miles from her shores that there were only a few battalions of fully armed, fully trained troops in the country that she was committed to a war in the Mediterranean with a numerically superior enemy that her cities lay open to air attack from fields closer to home than the extremities of her own islands; that her sea-routes were threatened from a dozen new bases Sir Joseph said: “Seen in the proper perspective I regard this as a great and tangible success. Germany set out to destroy our Army and failed; we have demonstrated our invincibility to the world. Moreover, with the French off the stage, the last obstacle to our proper understanding with Italy is now removed. I never prophesy but I am confident that before the year is out they will have made a separate and permanent peace with us. The Germans have wasted their strength. They cannot possibly repair their losses. They have squandered the flower of their Army. They have enlarged their boundaries beyond all reason and given themselves an area larger than they can possibly hold down. The war has entered into a new and more glorious phase.”
And in this last statement, perhaps for the first time in his long and loquacious life. Sir Joseph approximated to reality; he had said a mouthful.
A new and more glorious phase: Alastair’s battalion found itself overnight converted from a unit in the early stages of training into first-line troops. Their 1098 stores arrived; a vast profusion of ironmongery which, to his pride, included Alastair’s mortar. It was a source of pride not free from compensating disadvantages. Now, when the platoon marched, Alastair’s pouches were filled with bombs and his back harnessed to the unnaturally heavy length of steel piping; the riflemen thought they had the laugh on him.
Parachute landings were looked for hourly. The duty company slept in their boots and stood-to at dawn and dusk. Men going out of camp carried charged rifles, steel helmets, anti-gas capes. Weekend leave ceased abruptly. Captain Mayfield began to take a censorious interest in the swill tubs; if there was any waste of food, he said, rations would be reduced. The C.O. said, “There is no such thing nowadays as working hours” and to show what he meant ordered a series of parades after tea. A training memorandum was issued which had the most formidable effect upon Mr. Smallwood; now, when the platoon returned exhausted from field exercises, Mr. Smallwood gave them twenty minutes arms drill before they dismissed; this was the “little bit extra” for which the memorandum called. The platoon referred to it as “––ing us about.”
Then with great suddenness the battalion got orders to move to an unknown destination. Everyone believed this meant foreign service and a great breath of exhilaration inflated the camp. Alastair met Sonia outside the guardroom.
“Can’t come out tonight. We’re moving. I don’t know where. I think we’re going into action.”
He gave her instructions about where she should go and what she should do while he was away. They now knew that she was to have a child.
There was a special order that no one was to come to the station to see the battalion off; no one in fact was supposed to know they were moving. To make secrecy absolute they entrained by night, disturbing the whole district with the tramp of feet and the roar of lorries going backwards and forwards between camp and station, moving their stores.
Troops in the train manage to achieve an aspect of peculiar raffishness; they leave camp in a state of ceremonial smartness; they parade on the platform as though on the barrack square; they are detailed to their coaches and there a process of transformation and decay sets in; coats are removed, horrible packages of food appear, dense clouds of smoke obscure the windows, in a few minutes the floor is deep in cigarette ends, lumps of bread and meat, waste paper; in repose the bodies assume attitudes of extreme abandon; some look like corpses that have been left too long unburied; others like the survivors of some Saturnalian debauch. Alasstair stood in the corridor most of the night, feeling that for the first time he had cut away from the old life.
Before dawn it was well known, in that strange jungle process by which news travels in the ranks, that they were not going into action but to “Coastal––ing Defence.”