The Rough Road Part 21

"I do," said he. "Not even a corporal. You see, I've learned to be a private of sorts, and that satisfies my ambition."

"Well, I give it up," said Peggy. "Though why you wouldn't let dad get you a nice cushy job is a thing I can't understand. For the life of me I can't."

"I've made my bed, and I must lie on it," he said quietly.

"I don't believe you've got such a thing as a bed."

Doggie smiled. "Oh yes, a bed of a sort." Then noting her puzzled face, he said consolingly: "It'll all come right when the war's over."

"But when will that be? And who knows, my dear man, what may happen to you?"

"If I'm knocked out, I'm knocked out, and there's an end of it,"

replied Doggie philosophically.

She put her hand on his. "But what's to become of me?"

"We needn't cry over my corpse yet," said Doggie.

The Dean, after awhile, returned with his bottle of medicine, which he displayed with conscientious ostentation. They dined. Peggy again went over the ground of the possible commission.

"I'm afraid she has set her heart on it, my boy," said the Dean.

Peggy cried a little on parting. This time Doggie was going, not to the fringe, but to the heart of the Great Adventure. Into the thick of the carnage. A year ago, she said, through her tears, she would have thought herself much more fitted for it than Marmaduke.

"Perhaps you are still, dear," said Doggie, with his patient smile.

He saw them to the taxi which was to take them to the familiar Sturrocks's. Before getting in, Peggy embraced him.

"Keep out of the way of sh.e.l.ls and bullets as much as you can."

The Dean blew his nose, G.o.d-blessed him, and murmured something incoherent about fighting for the glory of old England.

"Good luck," cried Peggy from the window.

She blew him a kiss. The taxi drove off, and Doggie went back into the house with leaden feet. The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded, had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her cause for resentment and reproach, her att.i.tude was nothing less than angelic. He sat down moodily in an arm-chair, his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his legs stretched out. The fault lay in himself, he argued. What was the matter with him? He seemed to have lost all human feeling, like the man with the stone heart in the old legend.

Otherwise, why had he felt no p.r.i.c.k of jealousy at Peggy's admiring comprehension of Oliver? Of course he loved her. Of course he wanted to marry her when this nightmare was over. That went without saying.

But why couldn't he look to the glowing future? A poet had called a lover's mistress "the lode-star of his one desire." That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction.

Doggie was no psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a gla.s.s darkly, mystified by unknown change.

He rose, sighed, shook himself.

"I give it up," said he, and went to bed.

Doggie went to France; a France hitherto undreamed of, either by him or by any young Englishman; a France clean swept and garnished for war; a France, save for the ubiquitous English soldiery, of silent towns and empty villages and deserted roads; a France of smiling fields and sorrowful faces of women and drawn patient faces of old men--and even then the women and old men were rarely met by day, for they were at work on the land, solitary figures on the landscape, with vast s.p.a.ces between them. In the quiet towns.h.i.+ps, English street signs and placards conflicted with the sense of being in friendly provincial France, and gave the impression of foreign domination. For beyond that long grim line of eternal thunder, away over there in the distance, which was called the Front, street signs and placards in yet another alien tongue also outraged the serene genius of French urban life. Yet our signs were a symbol of a mighty Empire's brotherhood, and the dimmed eyes that beheld the _Place de la Fontaine_ transformed into "Holborn Circus," and the _Grande Rue_ into "Piccadilly," smiled, and the owners, with eager courtesy, directed the stray Tommy to "Regent Street," which they had known all their life as the _Rue Feuillemaisnil_--a word which Tommy could not p.r.o.nounce, still less remember. It was as much as Tommy could do to get hold of an approximation to the name of the town. And besides these renamings, other inscriptions flamed about the streets; alphabetical hieroglyphs, in which the mystic letters H.Q. most often appeared; "This way to the Y.M.C.A. hut"; in many humble windows the startling announcement, "Was.h.i.+ng done here." British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little _place_ and aligned along the avenues. British faces, British voices, everywhere. The blue uniform and blue helmet of a French soldier seemed as incongruous though as welcome as in London.

And the straight endless roads, so French with their infinite border of poplars, their patient little stones marking every hundred metres until the tenth rose into the proud kilometre stone proclaiming the distance to the next stately town, rang too with the sound of British voices, and the tramp of British feet, and the clatter of British transport, and the screech and whir of cars, revealing as they pa.s.sed the flash of red and gold of the British staff. Yet the finely cultivated land remained to show that it was France; and the little whitewashed villages; the cure, in shovel-hat and rusty ca.s.sock; the children in blue or black blouses, who stared as the British troops went by; the patient, elderly French Territorials in their old pre-war uniforms, guarding unthreatened culverts or repairing the roads; the helpful signs set up in happier days by the Touring Club of France.

Into this strange anomaly of a land came Doggie with his draft, still half stupefied by the remorselessness of the stupendous machine in which he had been caught, in spite of his many months of training in England. He had loathed the East Coast camp. When he landed at Boulogne in the dark and the pouring rain and hunched his pack with the others who went off singing to the rest camp, he regretted East Anglia.

"Give us a turn on the whistle, Doggie," said a corporal.

"I was sea-sick into it and threw it overboard," he growled, stumbling over the rails of the quay.

"Oh, you holy young liar!" said the man next him.

But Doggie did not trouble to reply, his neighbour being only a private like himself.

Then the draft joined its unit. In his youth Doggie had often wondered at the meaning of the familiar inscription on every goods van in France: "40 Hommes. 8 Chevaux." Now he ceased to wonder. He was one of the forty men.... At the rail-head he began to march, and at last joined the remnant of his battalion. They had been through hard fighting, and were now in billets. Until he joined them he had not realized the drain there had been on the reserves at home. Very many familiar faces of officers were missing. New men had taken their place. And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty, some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the eyes of children who had pa.s.sed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

McPhail and Mo Shendish had pa.s.sed through unscathed. In the reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them found themselves in the same platoon of A Company. Doggie almost embraced them when they met.

"Laddie," said McPhail to him, as he was drinking a mahogany-coloured liquid that was known by the name of tea, out of a tin mug, and eating a hunk of bread and jam, "I don't know whether or not I'm pleased to see you. You were safer in England. Once I misspent many months of my life in s.h.i.+elding you from the dangers of France. But France is a much more dangerous place nowadays, and I can't help you. You've come right into the thick of it. Just listen to the h.e.l.l's delight that's going on over yonder."

The easterly wind brought them the roar streaked with stridence of the artillery duel in progress on the nearest sector of the Front.

They were sitting in the cellar entrance to a house in a little town which had already been somewhat mauled. Just opposite was a shuttered house on the ground floor of which had been a hatter and hosier's shop, and there still swung bravely on an iron rod the red brim of what once had been a monstrous red hat. Next door, the facade of the upper stories had been sh.e.l.led away and the naked interiors gave the impression of a pathetic doll's house. Women's garments still hung on pegs. A cottage piano lurched forward drunkenly on three legs, with the keyboard ripped open, the treble notes on the ground, the ba.s.s incongruously in the air. In the attic, ironically secure, hung a cheap German print of blowsy children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, pa.s.sed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like the wind and the rain.

But to Doggie it was new--just as the sight of the wrecked house opposite, with its st.u.r.dy crownless hat-brim of a sign, was new. He listened, as McPhail had bidden him, to the artillery duel with an odd little spasm of his heart.

"What do you think of that, now?" asked McPhail grandly, as if it was The Greatest Show on Earth run by him, the Proprietor.

"It's rather noisy," said Doggie, with a little ironical twist of his lips that was growing habitual. "Do they keep it up at night?"

"They do."

"I don't think it's fair to interfere with one's sleep like that,"

said Doggie.

"You've got to adapt yourself to it," said McPhail sagely. "No doubt you'll be remembering my theory of adaptability. Through that I've made myself into a very brave man. When I wanted to run away--a very natural desire, considering the scrupulous attention I've always paid to my bodily well-being--I reflected on the preposterous obstacles put in the way of flight by a bowelless military system, and adapted myself to the static and dynamic conditions of the trenches."

"Gorblime!" said Mo Shendish, stretched out by his side, "just listen to him!"

"I suppose you'll say you sucked honey out of the sh.e.l.ls," remarked Doggie.

"I'm no great hand at mixing metaphors----"

"What about drinks?" asked Mo.

"Nor drinks either," replied McPhail. "Both are bad for the brain. But as to what you were saying, laddie, I'll not deny that I've derived considerable interest and amus.e.m.e.nt from a bombardment. Yet it has its sad aspect." He paused for a moment or two. "Man," he continued, "what an awful waste of money!"

"I don't know what old Mac is jawing about," said Mo Shendish, "but you can take it from me he's a holy terror with the bayonet. One moment he's talking to a Boche through his hat and the next the Boche is wriggling like a worm on a bent pin."

Mo winked at Phineas. The temptation to "tell the tale" to the new-comer was too strong.

Doggie grew very serious. "You've been killing men--like that?"