He rubbed his fingers over and over the black ridges of the gramophone, needing help. He said irrelevantly, ‘Huxtable’s got compassionate leave. His father’s dying.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ The writing went on. Barton liked Huxtable, they shared a certain sort of humour. Now, he only sounded polite.
‘I’d better go and sort out the bathing facilities. You should come.’
‘Should I?’
‘Well – it’s an entertainment.’
‘For whom?’
‘Look…’
Barton stopped writing. His expression was perfectly friendly, there might have been nothing wrong at all. But there was something. Something… He did not want to talk. Desperately, Hilliard said, ‘I could move. I could have a word with Garrett – I mean, if you need a break. Perhaps that’s what it is? We’ve been together rather. I suppose you might be able to share with Glazier.’
Barton put the cap on his fountain pen and began to screw it around and around. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Yes. I’m not very good company.’
‘No, it isn’t…’
‘So if that’s what you want, of course, go ahead.’
‘No. I’m thinking about you.’
‘What about me?’
Hilliard felt himself sick with the effort of trying to explain what had never before needed explanation, of trying to break through this tension between them, to help Barton or himself. Do something. He spoke very slowly.
‘I mean that you have been a bit – quiet. Things are different, aren’t they? I thought you probably wanted a break from me.’
‘No.’
‘Oh. I see. I thought…’
‘Oh God Almighty, John, I don’t…’ But Barton pulled himself up, fell silent again. He was still screwing the cap of the pen between his long fingers.
Hilliard thought, he has got to tell me now, it has got to be cleared up, whatever it is. Now, now. Now he would speak. Now…
The thread of the pen broke. Barton put both parts down on the table, stared at them. The silence went on.
Went on too long to be broken then, there was nothing either of them could say. Dared say. They did not move for minute after minute, standing quite apart from one another in the dark little tent.
In the end, Hilliard walked quickly across to the flap, ducked, went outside.
The sun had not been out all that morning and now heavy-bellied clouds were piled up overhead. It would rain.
The men went up, singing, to the communal bath and made the most of it, twenty at a time in the grey, scummy water, but cheerful, splashing and floundering and waving to the war photographer who had been with the Battalion since the previous day. The air smelled of Carbolic and chlorine and of the rain to come. Hilliard stood, pitying them their lack of privacy, the way they were always herded together, and yet envying them too, their carefully ordered life and clear, uninhibited friendships and enmities.
And then he checked himself, for it was more dangerous to think like that, why should this life at war be any more simple, any less full of conflict for the men than for Barton and himself, for Garrett, for any of them? He knew nothing about the men, why should he patronize them? And he thought, too, that none of them knew or greatly liked him, as they liked David. He felt miserable, entirely alone. He wanted to go back to the front.
Let them not complain about immaturity that die about thirty; they fall but like the whole world, whose solid and well-composed substance must expect the duration and period of its constitution.
It is a brave act of valour to condemn death but where life is more terrible, it is then the truest valour to live.
We term sleep a death and yet it is waking that kills us and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.
Themistocles, therefore, that slew his soldier father in sleep, was a merciful executioner: tis a punishment the mildness of which no law hath invented.
After a battle with the Persians, the Roman corpses decayed in a few days, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, no bones equally moulder.
Men are too early old and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth out our days, misery makes Alcmena’s nights, and time hath no wings to it.
But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature. Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible fire within us.
’Tis all one to lie in St Innocent’s churchyard as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstasie of being forever, and as content with six foot of earth as the glorious sepulchre of Adrianus.
‘Which of these is right? Which do you really believe?’ For having read them, Hilliard wanted to understand, he was moved by what was written.
‘Why are you reading those?’ Barton was standing in the entrance to their tent.
‘I wanted to see what you’d been writing.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought it might help.’
‘Help what?’
‘I – I suppose I wanted to know what you were thinking.’
‘And do you?’
Hilliard looked down again helplessly at the sheets of paper, the neat, black script. There was silence again. He read, ‘Men are too early old and before the date of age.’
Barton crossed to his side of the tent, and opened his valise. ‘The C.O. wants to see us. Everyone.’
‘Oh. I suppose we’re going back then.’
‘Probably.’
‘It’s a relief.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well – I don’t much like it here. I never liked this sort of halfway house. One foot in the war and one foot out of it. The men aren’t very cheerful.’
Barton shrugged. ‘What difference does it make, John? Does it matter where we are?’
The camp was dreary, badly equipped. It had begun to rain late that afternoon, a thin drizzle, while the men were still bathing. The estaminet in the nearby village was grubby, the faces of the proprietor and his wife sour and unwelcoming. And a mild dysentery had broken out among B Company.
‘I hate it here,’ Hilliard said. He had been tense, the last few days.
‘Yes. We’d better go and see Garrett.’
Barton had walked across to the packing case that served them as a table, put his hand on the papers which Hilliard had been reading, as though to cover them up or take them away. Then he seemed to change his mind, lose interest. He left them as they were.
Hilliard said, ‘I like reading them. I like the pieces you’ve taken down.’
‘Good.’
‘They seem to set it all at a remove, don’t they? And he gives a shape to something shapeless, gives it all a point, somehow.’
‘Does he? What point has it?’
‘I thought – well, isn’t that why you read him? To try and make some sense out of all this?’
‘The war? I shouldn’t think that’s possible.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘You’ve never really thought it was, have you?’