‘Well – let me know if they get any worse.’
‘Oh yes, sir, I’ll shout. I could do with a nice week in hospital. Or even a ride on a horse!’
They lay on their backs and their faces burned darker than ever in the mid-day sun and their cigarette smoke plumed gently upwards, wavering blue.
ADVANCE!
He enjoyed marching. He did not mind how far they had to go, did not have blisters like Hughins. Did not think ahead. They passed through a village in which people were still living and some girls waved to them from windows.
The men sang.
You would like it here. The autumn has really come now. We passed by a canal and along its bank most of the poplars were quite bare, the water was still and clogged with all the yellow leaves. The splendid thing about marching is, you just have to go. You assume someone else knows exactly where. There’s always someone over you who knows more than you do and you’re not in any way responsible, so you point yourself in the direction indicated and off you go.
Perhaps I’m lucky, having done so much walking in the course of my life already. Anyway, I’m glad of the training, now!
John has to ride today. Though I think he enjoys it – in fact I’m sure he does, and certainly better than I would, I always feel very insecure on the back of a horse. But John rides about and he is tall and has a good seat, he relaxes and looks over the tops of all our heads. I must say, today I feel like one of the men and he is one of the officers! Still, I’m perfectly happy. I get on well with our platoon. Now the field kitchen is coming up, I shall have to put this away. There are so many butterflies here, the summer has kept them going. John has just gone by, but without a chance of speaking. They are much concerned with watering the horses, in weather like this. Roly would enjoy seeing it all.
‘I wouldn’t mind having a shilling for every letter you’ve written since I first met you, Barton.’
He had wished, then, for some way of conveying the idea, the knowledge of his family, complete and whole, to John Hilliard, of bestowing it like a nugget, something to be held out in the palm of his hand. There they are, take them! For when he talked about them all, perhaps he got it wrong, perhaps John received no true picture of how it was. Just as he himself could not imagine the coldness in Hilliard’s family, the distance that seemed to exist between all of them.
‘It’s different for you. You find things easier.’
Did he? Yes, he supposed so. Certainly he found this friendship easier, he had accepted it at once, even as he recognized its rarity. It had startled him. He had stood in the apple loft at Percelle and heard the footsteps of the man they had all talked about and who had now come back, Hilliard, whose name had been mentioned in despatches and had been wounded, who was only a year older than he was and about whom the C.O. thought so highly, whose belongings were here in this room he had already come to think of as entirely as his own. He had been curious, apprehensive for some reason. What will he be like?
Then, John Hilliard’s head had appeared in the space at the top of the ladder, the pale hair and the very long neck, he had looked across at Barton, a quick, cautious look. Then at once it had been all right, and more than that. He did not know what. But whatever it was, he took it much more in his stride than John, whose face looked uncertain so often, who glanced at him and then away again quickly, as they were walking. Barton felt the need to reassure him.
‘Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you…’
It is all just as you would imagine it, today, they sing all the right songs. You would hear them and nod and smile to yourself, and fit us into one of your pigeon holes, we are behaving as soldiers in France are all supposed to behave, marching and singing Dolly Grey. Though nobody at all sings Tipperary, I have not heard it once since I came out – it seems to be an invention from home. You really would like the sight of John riding his horse, that would please you.
‘Do you always tell them everything you think and feel? In your letters?’
‘Yes,’ Barton had said. For why not? What else should he do? What was there to be kept back?
John had frowned, unable to understand.
I think you would want me to look as good as he does but I never could. I’m simply a sack of potatoes in a saddle. A little while ago a Troop of Lancers trotted down the road in the opposite direction. We stared like small boys. They looked quite amazing, they glittered in the sun like all the soldiers in all the armies of history, and the feet of their horses made so little noise as they hit the ground. Not like ours, pulling carts and so forth. I wish you could all have seen them.
The countryside began to change. There were fewer valleys and fewer trees and many of them were split by shells. It was drier, with a different kind of dryness. There seemed never to have been any water here at all. The fields were full of old shell craters, and the sides of the roads were covered in white-grey dust from all the passing of carts and horses and motors and men.
B Company were singing verses made up by Fyson to a hymn tune, and the verses became more obscene and libellous as they went on, until Barton called out a warning, not because he minded but before anyone who did mind should hear them, and for a time after that they marched in silence, their ranks uneven. They were tired. He called to them to close up. He thought they resented him. Hughins was limping.
Behind, some of A Company had taken up ‘Dolly Grey’.
They heard the whine and crash of a shell, coming out of nowhere, and the whole column ducked, though they did not stop marching, and the shell was not near. One of the horses had shied into a ditch and was being spurred out. Barton felt suddenly anxious.
They were going towards the town of Feuvry. He could see a pall of reddish dust hanging over the buildings, from shattered bricks and shell.
Memorandum. Commanding Officer to 2nd Battalion
At Feuvry we shall be in close billets. Guards will be mounted at once. Great precautions must be taken with drinking water and sanitation.
Feuvry had been occupied by the Germans in the summer of 1914, and relieved by the B.E.F. and evacuated – and then shelled ever since, until it was almost derelict. It was disliked, the name of it was disliked by the whole army. A superstition had attached itself to Feuvry. The men groaned, glanced at one another uneasily, hearing that they were to stay there.
But when he had asked about it, Hilliard had shaken his head, for he had never been there himself. So they only knew what they had heard, what the men said. Barton was not sure what to expect. Perhaps something like Percelle on a large scale, red-brick buildings with roofs caved in, crumbling walls already overgrown with convolvulus. He had grown fond of Percelle even as it was, the village looked as though it had tumbled down after years of neglect, rather than been damaged by shell fire.
He was not prepared for Feuvry. As the column marched in and turned down what was left of the main street, going towards a square, Hilliard had ridden close by. Had seen that Barton was appalled by Feuvry, as he had not been by the sight of the dead pilot in the crashed plane.
The men were swaying on their feet, were seeing nothing, were not singing.
Feuvry.
This is a terrible place. How can I describe it to you? How would you ever be able to imagine what I can see? I do not think there is a building left intact and there are many which are just holes in the ground, or piles of rubble. All along the sides of the road, too, there is every kind of rubbish. But you would not have called it that if you had seen it in its original state. I mean, rubbish is not what most of it used to be, apart from the mess of broken brick and girders. These are all things from people’s houses. You see a chair sticking out, spring coils from sofas and they are all charred and rusted. There are bedsteads and mattresses and piles of bloodstained clothing, part of a smashed wash-basin, children’s toys. And then there is all the litter of the armies, of course. Before us, there were the occupying forces. Everything has been left in the most appalling mess. So much of the rubble is old, two years old, and has never been shifted, so that there are plenty of things you cannot recognize any longer.