I hope we manage to get some sleep. I seem to have gone beyond tiredness, into a kind of daze. I need to sleep.
Glazier is doing tonight’s duty because he was in a different billet last night and they missed the direct shelling.
But it was after all, an easy beginning. For two weeks, they stayed mainly in the support trenches, and fell into some sort of routine, they were getting used to things, it was quiet enough: there was time to play the gramophone.
‘Boring,’ Barton said once.
Hilliard raised his eyes from the pile of ration returns. ‘I’d rather that. So would you if you’ve got any sense.’
‘Come on, John! Where’s your yearning for excitement? The sound of battle “where ignorant armies clash by night”. Doesn’t that stir your blood?’
‘No. And that isn’t especially funny either…’
‘You know, you haven’t much sense of humour, have you?’
Hilliard considered for a moment. A man went past the flap of the dugout, whistling. No, he thought, no, I have not, and David has, it is one of the things I most envy in him. Once, he himself had simply been called ‘a bloody prig’. He had a glimpse of himself down all the years of the past, stiff and reserved, anxious to please – but humourless. Barton burst out laughing. ‘All right, all right – don’t look so stricken!’
Hilliard smiled, went back to the ration returns. And felt, as he was writing, a sudden, warm pleasure, a sensation of being comfortable here, at home and in comparative peace, doing dull, easy jobs in Barton’s company. He was happy. Barton was still reading Sir Thomas Browne.
For some time longer it went on like that, and the weather, too. September passed and there was still sunshine, hot in the middle of the day and with the smell of autumn on the damp, misty mornings. The men were in good spirits.
‘Cushy trenches,’ Hilliard overheard one of them say – Hemp, the pastry-cook from Brighton. Hilliard repeated the phrase to Coulter as he stood outside the dugout one morning shaving from a tin mug of lukewarm water, looking at himself in the mirror he had propped up against a sandbag. The sky was a thin, flat blue and high overhead a lark hovered and trembled, singing.
‘Cushy trenches!’
Coulter looked troubled.
‘Well – aren’t they?’
‘Maybe, sir.’
‘I think they’ve passed us over, forgotten us.’
‘They’re getting it badly up at Chimpers, sir.’ Chimpers – the village of Chimpres, not more than five miles away. Hilliard remembered it from the early days of June. There had been very little left of it even then.
‘Again?’
‘So I hear, sir.’
‘You do manage to hear a lot, Coulter!’
For once, his batman did not return the smile.
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Just a feeling.’
Hilliard glanced at him and was alarmed. It was not like Coulter, who was a cheerful man and usually grew more cheerful, at least on the surface, the more immediate the danger. But he himself had come to respect these forebodings, to know what they might mean, and it was not only Coulter who had them. All through the spring and summer he had come across men who were experiencing ‘just a feeling’ – that today it had their number on it, they would not come through. He remembered Armstrong urgently telling him about a letter which he carried in his breast pocket. If he was killed he wanted Hilliard to be sure and take the envelope and send it home as soon as he could, it had ‘something special’ in it. Armstrong had been in France since the beginning, had gone, with Garrett’s Battalion, through the early battles, Ypres, Loos, and then the whole of the Somme, and had remained quite unscathed. He led a charmed life, the others said, bombs fell within inches of Armstrong and missed. Once he had stuck his head recklessly over the parapet and been rewarded with a sniper’s bullet, which had whistled through his hair and stuck in the earth of the trench behind him. He had volunteered for night raid after night raid, three times he had been one of only a handful of men who had returned safely. He survived and a superstition had grown up around him. If you stuck with Armstrong you would be all right. But on the morning they were waiting for a barrage that began their attack on Belle-Maison, he had been beside himself with trying to impress upon Hilliard the urgency of the letter which he carried. He had ‘had a feeling’. Hilliard had taken little notice though he had promised to take and send home the letter if the time came. Armstrong went over the top with the first wave and was hit almost at once, Hilliard had seen him crumple after no more than thirty yards.
But Armstrong had not been the only one. And there were other men who felt quite differently, who had suddenly known confidence that they would be all right this time. It was as though they were surrounded by an invisible steel cage, impenetrable by shell or bullet, so that they pushed ahead through a surge of fire and knew, were sure, that they would be safe, if only because they were marked out for death at some later date.
Once, Hilliard had been led over the open ground and then along a treacherous sunken road to the 8th Division trenched in the middle of a heavy raid, and the runner who led him had known exactly where and when to leap and duck, run or stay still, he had said afterwards, ‘I knew it was all right today. I had a feeling.’
That had been Baxter, who was still alive, Baxter, with the four front teeth missing and hair shaved as close as a convict’s. Hughin’s brother-in-law. A year ago, Hilliard would have scoffed at such forebodings and superstitions, ‘the feelings’ of the men in the line. Not now.
Now, Coulter was saying little, his face was worried.
‘Well, it’s quiet enough here for the moment. Don’t start putting the wind up everyone.’
The man looked hurt and reproachful. He knew more than the officers about the importance of morale.
‘Have you finished with the water, sir?’ He spoke politely, and the distance opened between them for a moment. Hilliard wanted to make amends, and could not think how.
He went inside. ‘Coulter’s got the wind up.’ The dugout was dark and stuffy after the bright sunlight of the trench. Barton was getting ready to go down the line and take a foot inspection – though, because the weather was dry and the spirits of the men were so good here, they looked after their feet well, obeyed regulations to the letter, changed their socks and oiled themselves as regulations dictated, they had the time and inclination, there were no problems with infection. Barton was tightening the laces on his own boots.
‘What makes him think that? Has anything happened?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps it’s just too quiet for him all of a sudden. You know how he’s always longing to have a go!’
‘Maybe.’
‘Why is he bothered today, especially?’
Hilliard shrugged. ‘He’s got a feeling.’
To his surprise, Barton, who did not share his knowledge about the way the men thought, did not know the truth which so often lay behind their forebodings, looked worried himself. He sat on the edge of his bunk for a moment, entirely still.