Up above three thousand British guns fired four million shells. Below in their burrows the trogs smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and studied Sidgwick on ethics. They read the poetry of Robert Browning, learnt Arabic script from Ali the Zouave, or refined their understanding of surplus value and the public utility of social-credit unions. All those phases of development Stanley had found it so hard to concentrate on, he now he understood and could expound upon. Feydeau’s Discussion Club and its association with the Socialist League had all been minuted by him — so it was that in his underground reclusion he recalled the words of Morris and Kropotkin, the papers given by Missus Marx Aveling and Miss Schreiner. Those who descended had scant interest in the International Alliance of Women or the International League for Peace and Freedom — but Stan did. He sent his own emissaries aloft, and they came back with copies of the Ardent and The Freewoman, and with books by Miss Dix and Missus Perkins Gilman. Stanley explained to his comrades that: The future belongs to the feminised man, he who is capable of wearing cambric with pleasure — as we do — and of loving — as we do — and of regarding the fairer sex to be our own, and women to be to be not helpmeets but authorities on the blood-law of biology. So as to align still more completely with the emergent world-consciousness, Stanley obtained Southall’s Sanitary Towels and wore them one week a month — then he would not lie with Huggins. He sewed a fillet in his blouse and filled it with increasing amounts of sand, a half-pound per month, while encouraging the others to join in his couvade. And the troglodytes listened — and they approved, and many followed his lead, with the exception of Mohan, who, having been with Stanley since he first came down, felt free to chide him: Blighty, you should know this, Henry Morton, this is a Hindi word, bilyati — meaning foreign, you see. Now, taken up by the Britishers to mean their home, it will point back at them — a bilyati gun. And every time you say it, sing it, scream it, you fire the bilyati gun in your own face!. .
Take me back to dear old bilyati! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! It was not until many months later — after the collapse of the Italian Front, the Bolsheviks’ rising and the taking of the Holy City, that a fellow called Cummins, who’d been a shop steward in Greenock, came down to them. He talked heatedly of Henderson’s constitution, and Stan said, Well and good — your catechism. Yet it’s so here already: what little there is belongs to us all in kind, there’s no sugar — so we’re never bitter. No man would think to lug one of the great shields into his own little pit! As for administration, what of it? A tunnel needs pumping and it’s all hands to the levers, a new one wants electrification and the men with know-how are parcelled up the line without any ado — these things simply happen. But, Cummins said, this is anarchism, man — there’s no system, no method, no means of carryin’ it forward as a programme for the nation —. To drown him out they all sang: I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! And to inflame the doughty Scot still more, Stan planted a smacker on his dirty forehead. . Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! When Ludo broke through at Arras, Cummins — who had a stubborn sense of his own socialistic amour proper — said that this’d teach the trogs — who were in considerable disarray. Stanley and Huggins laughed at him. We’ll sail a lighter up the Scheldt! they cried. Don’t you see, it matters not a fig to us who’s victorious — there’re strikes aplenty in Germany, they’ve no more belly for it than the rest, it ain’t the Russkies who’ve capitulated at Brest — Litovsk, it’s Ludo, Fuckenhayn and Kaiser-bloody-Bill! — And Schmidt, from Köln, who had a lusty tenor, a nose that could smell a bottle of Moselle through sixty feet of cold dead mud, and a genius for organising chorales, led them into the verse, One day Mickey O’Shea stood in a trench somewhere, So brave, having a shave, and trying to part his hair. Mick yells, dodging the shells and lumps of dynamite: Talk of the Crystal Palace on a Firework night —! To vex the Scot further, Stan took the just-boiled dixie, and, making him a cup of George, handed it over, saying, The fucking Irish, they’ve got the right idea: no work — that’s the soup ticket! And Cummins smiled in a doubly-deboshed way. — It had grown quiet on this section of the line, and they’d been there so long the trogs had set the place up all snug: brought down glassware, a horsehair settee, two big old paintings of civic dignitaries from the remains of a Stadhuis, and a model of the pre-war coal mines that recalled to the troglodytes’ minds their own extensive tunnel system made awfully small. There was also a sheep dog who did gamely enough in his treadmill on a diet of Victoria’s Houndmeal that Stan ordered from Spillers of Cardiff and had delivered poste-restante to Boulogne. Brass quoits, a fifteen-inch-long crystal dolphin, a glass case full of stuffed hummingbirds arranged in a fleur-de-lis, a Chinese vase that held a variety of different parasols and ladies walking umbrellas — dressing cases, valises, portmanteaus, collar and bonnet boxes. Goin’ on a journey, are ye, Cummins grumbled, and Stan said, I rather think we will be soon enough. — The summer waned up above, and the febrile Tommies chased the feverish Jerries east — the subterraneans, unaffected by the pandemic, came boiling up