‘Because dont you see? they cant have this. They cant permit this, to stop it at all yet, let alone allow it to stop itself this way—the two shells in the river and the race already underway and both crews without warning simply unshipping the oars from the locks and saying in unison: We’re not going to pull anymore. They cant yet. It’s not finished yet, like an unfinished cricket or rugger match which started according to a set of mutually accepted rules formally and peaceably agreed on, and must finish by them, else the whole theory of arbitration, the whole tried and proven step-by-step edifice of politics and economy on which the civilised concord of nations is based, becomes so much wind. More than that: that thin and tensioned girder of steel and human blood which carries its national edifice soaring glorious and threatful among the stars, in dedication to which young men are transported free of charge and even with pay, to die violently in places that even the map-makers and -dividers never saw, that a pilgrim stumbling on it a hundred or a thousand years afterward may still be able to say Here is a spot that is (anyway was once) forever England or France or America. And not only cant, dare not: they wont. They have already started not to. Because listen. On the way back up tonight, I got a lift in a lorry. It was carrying AA shells. It was in a column almost three miles long, all chock full of AA shells. Think of it: three miles of AA shells; think of having enough shells to measure it in miles, which apparently they did not have in front of Amiens two months ago. But then, naturally it takes more ammunition to recess a war for ten minutes than to stop a mere offensive. The lorry was in charge of an old man I knew who had been waiting for three years at an ammo dump at St Omer for his application to go through for leave and permission to go to Mons and search for his son who hadn’t or didn’t or couldn’t or didn’t want to—anyway, failed to—come back that afternoon four years ago. He showed me one of the shells. It was blank. Not dud: blank, complete and intact except that there was no shrapnel in it; it would fire and even burst, harmless. It looked all right on the outside; I doubt if its father in his West End club (or Birmingham or Leeds or Manchester or wherever people live who make shells) would have known the difference, and only a dyed-in-the-wool archie bloke could. It was amazing, really; they must have worked like beaver all last night and today too there at the dump, altering, gelding three miles of shells—or maybe they had them all ready beforehand, in advance; maybe after four years, even Anglo-Saxons can learn to calculate ahead in war——’ talking, the voice not dreamy now: just glib and rapid, he (the runner) in the moving lorry now, the three of them, himself, the old man and the driver, crowded into the close and lightless cab so that he could feel the whole frail length of the old man’s body tense and exultant against him, remembering how at first his voice had sounded as cracked and amazed as the old man’s, but soon no more: the two voices running along side by side as logical in unreason, rational and inconsequent as those of two children:
‘Perhaps you’d better tell me again. Maybe I have forgot.’
‘For the signal!’ the old man cried. ‘The announcement! To let the whole world know that He has risen!’
‘A signal of AA shells? Three miles of AA shells? Wouldn’t one gun be enough to herald Him? And if one gun, why hold His resurrection up long enough to run three miles of shells through it? Or if one shell to each gun, why only three miles of guns? Why not enough for every gun between Switzerland and the Channel? Aren’t the rest of us to be notified too? To welcome Him too? Why not just bugles, horns? He would recognise horns; they wouldn’t frighten Him.’
‘Dont the Book itself say he will return in thunder and lightning?’
‘But not gunpowder,’ the runner said.
‘Then let man make the noise!’ the cracked voice cried. ‘Let man shout hallelujah and jubilee with the very things he has been killing with!’—rational and fantastic, like children, and as cruel too:
‘And fetch your son along with Him?’ the runner said.
‘My son?’ the old man said. ‘My son is dead.’
‘Yes,’ the runner said. ‘That’s what I meant. Isn’t that what you mean too?’
‘Pah,’ the old man said; it sounded almost like spitting. ‘What does it matter, whether or not He brings my son back with Him? my son, or yours, or any other man’s? My son? Even the whole million of them we have lost since that day four years ago, the billion since that day eighteen hundred and eighty-five years ago. The ones He will restore to life are the ones that would have died since eight oclock this morning My son? My son?’—then (the runner) out of the lorry again (The column had stopped. It was near the lines, just under them in fact, or what had been the front line until three oclock this afternoon; the runner knew that at once, although he had never been here before. But he had not only been an infantryman going in and out of them for twenty-odd months, for seven months he had been a runner going in and out of them every night, so he had no more doubt of where he was than would the old wolf or lynx when he was near a trap-line.), walking up the column toward the halted head of it, and stopped in shadow and watched M.P.’s and armed sentries splitting the column into sections with a guide for each leading lorry, each section as it was detached turning from the road into the fields and woods beyond which lay the front; and not long to watch this either, because almost at once a corporal with his bayonet fixed came quickly around the lorry in whose shadow he stood.
‘Get back to your lorry,’ the corporal ordered.
He identified himself, naming his battalion and its vector.
‘What the bleeding .… are you doing down here?’ the corporal said.
‘Trying to get a lift.’
‘Not here,’ the corporal said. ‘Hop it. Sharp, now’—and (the corporal) still watching him until darkness hid him again; then he too left the road, into a wood, walking toward the lines now; and (telling it, sprawled on the firestep beneath the rigid and furious sentry almost as though he drowsed, his eyes half-closed, talking in the glib, dreamy, inconsequent voice) how from the shadows again he watched the crew of an anti-aircraft battery, with hooded torches, unload the blank shells from one of the lorries, and tumble their own live ammunition back into it, and went on until he saw the hooded lights again and watched the next lorry make its exchange; and at midnight was in another wood—or what had been a wood, since all that remained now was a nightingale somewhere behind him—, not walking now but standing with his back against the blasted corpse of a tree, hearing still above the bird’s idiot reiteration the lorries creeping secretly and steadily through the darkness, not listening to them, just hearing them, because he was searching for something which he had lost, mislaid, for the moment, though when he thought that he had put the digit of his recollection on it at last, it was wrong, flowing rapid and smooth through his mind, but wrong: In Christ is death at end in Adam that began:—true, but the wrong one: not the wrong truth but the wrong moment for it, the wrong one needed and desired; clearing his mind again and making the attempt again, yet there it was again: In Christ is death at end in Adam that——still true, still wrong, still comfortless; and then, before he had thought his mind was clear again, the right one was there, smooth and intact and instantaneous, seeming to have been there for a whole minute while he was still fretting its loss:
—but that was in another country;—and besides
the wench is dead
And this time the flare went up from their own trench, not twenty yards away beyond the up traverse, so near this time that after the green corpse-glare died the sentry could have discerned that what washed over the runner’s face was neither the refraction assumed nor the grease it resembled, but the water it was: ‘A solid corridor of harmless archie batteries, beginning at our parapet and exactly the width of the range at which a battery in either wall would decide there wasn’t any use in even firing at an aeroplane flying straight down the middle of it, running back to the aerodrome at Villeneuve Blanche, so that to anyone not a general it would look all right—and if there was just enough hurry and surprise about it, maybe even to the men themselves carrying the shells running to the guns ramming them home and slamming the blocks and pulling the lanyards and blistering their hands snatching the hot cases out fast enough to get out of the way of the next one, let alone the ones in front lines trying to cringe back out of man’s sight in case the aeroplane flying down the corridor to Villeneuve wasn’t carrying ammunition loaded last night at whatever the Hun calls his Saint Omer, it would still look and sound all right, even if the Hun continued not falling all the way back to Villeneuve because Flying Corps people say archie never hits anything anyway——
‘So you see what we must do, before that German emissary or whatever he will be, can reach Paris or Chaulnesmont or wherever he is to go, and he and whoever he is to agree with, have agreed, not on what to do because that is no problem: only on how, and goes back home to report it. We dont even need to start it; the French, that one French regiment, has already taken up the load. All we need is, not to let it drop, falter, pause for even a second. We must do it now, tomorrow—tomorrow? it’s already tomorrow; it’s already today now—do as that French regiment did, the whole battalion of us: climb over this parapet tomorrow morning and get through the wire, with no rifles, nothing, and walk toward jerry’s wire until he can see us, enough of him can see us—a regiment of him or a battalion or maybe just a company or maybe even just one because even just one will be enough. You can do it. You own the whole battalion, every man in it under corporal, beneficiary of every man’s insurance in it who hasn’t got a wife and I.O.U.’s for their next month’s pay of all the rest of them in that belt around your waist. All you’ll need is just to tell them to when you say Follow me; I’ll go along to the first ones as soon as you are relieved, so they can see you vouch for me. Then others will see you vouch for me when I vouch for them, so that by daylight or by sunup anyway, when jerry can see us, all the rest of Europe can see us, will have to see us, cant help but see us——’ He thought: He’s really going to kick me this time, and in the face. Then the sentry’s boot struck the side of his jaw, snapping his head back even before his body toppled, the thin flow of water which sheathed his face flying at the blow like a thin spray of spittle or perhaps of dew or rain from a snapped leaf, the sentry kicking at him again as he went over backward onto the firestep, and was still stamping his boot at the unconscious face when the officer and the sergeant ran back around the traverse, still stamping at the prone face and panting at it:
‘Will you for Christ’s sake now? Will you? Will you?’ when the sergeant jerked him bodily down to the duck-boards. The sentry didn’t even pause, whirling while the sergeant held him, and slashing his reversed rifle blindly across the nearest face. It was the officer’s, but the sentry didn’t even wait to see, whirling again back toward the firestep though the sergeant still gripped him in one arm around his middle, still—the sentry—striking with the rifle-butt at the runner’s bleeding head when the sergeant fumbled his pistol out with his free hand and thumbed the safety off.
‘As you were,’ the officer said, jerking the blood from his mouth, onto his wrist and flinging it away. ‘Hold him.’ He spoke without turning his head, toward the corner of the down traverse, raising his voice a little: ‘Two-eight. Pass the word for corporal.’
The sentry was actually foaming now, apparently not even conscious that the sergeant was holding him, still jabbing the rifle-butt at or at least toward the runner’s peaceful and bloody head, until the sergeant spoke almost against his ear.
‘Two-seven .… for corporal,’ a voice beyond the down traverse said; then fainter, beyond that, another:
‘Two-six …. corporal.’
‘Use yer boot,’ the sergeant muttered. ‘Kick his .… ing teeth in.’
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
He had already turned back toward the aerodrome when he saw the Harry Tate. At first he just watched it, merely alerting himself to overshoot it safely; they looked so big and were travelling so slowly that you always made the mistake of overestimating them if you were not careful. Then he saw that the thing obviously not only hoped but actually believed that it could cut him off—a Harry Tate, which usually had two Australians in it or one general-and-pilot, this one indubitably a general since only by some esoteric factor like extreme and even overwhelming rank could an R.E.8 even hope to catch an S.E. and send it to earth.
Which was obviously what this one intended to do, he throttling back now until the S.E. was hanging on its airscrew just above stalling. And it was a general: the two aeroplanes broadside on for a second or so, a hand in a neat walking-out glove from the observer’s seat gesturing him peremptorily downward until he waggled his wings in acknowledgment and put his nose down for home, thinking, Why me? What’ve I done now? Besides, how did they know where I was?——having suddenly a sort of vision of the whole sky full of lumbering R.E.8’s, each containing a general with a list compiled by frantic telephone of every absent unaccounted-for scout on the whole front, hunting them down one by one out of back-areas and harrying them to earth.
Then he reached the aerodrome and saw the ground signal-strip laid out on it; he hadn’t seen one since ground school and for a goodish while he didn’t even know what it was; not until he saw the other aeroplanes on the ground or landing or coming in to land, did he recognise it to be the peremptory emergency signal to all aircraft to come down, landing in his turn faster and harder than people liked to land S.E.’s because of their unhappy ground habits, taxi-ing in to the tarmac where, even before he could switch off, the mechanic was shouting at him: ‘The mess, sir! Right away! The major wants you at the mess right away!’
‘What?’ he said. ‘Me?’
‘Everyone, sir,’ the mechanic said. ‘The whole squadron, sir. Best hurry.’
He jumped down to the tarmac, already running, so young in breathing that he wouldn’t be nineteen for another year yet and so young in war that, although the Royal Air Force was only six weeks old, his was not the universal tunic with RFC badges superposed on the remnants of old regimental insigne which veteran transfers wore, and he didn’t even own the old official Flying Corps tunic at all: his was the new RAF thing not only unmartial but even a little epicene, with its cloth belt and no shoulder-straps like the coat of the adult leader of a neo-Christian boys’ club and the narrow pale blue ring around each cuff and the hat-badge like a field marshal’s until you saw, remarked, noticed the little modest dull gold pin on either side of it like lingerie-clips or say the christening’s gift-choice by godfathers whose good taste had had to match their pocket-books.
