Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

He did not think of Claire until he stood on deck and saw the lights receding and the shadow that was England passing out of his sight.

He remembered her then with a little pang of joy — for suddenly he knew that he was free to think of her.

He had thought of her before as a man registers a fact that is always present to him, but in the interval since he had seen her his consciousness of her had been increasingly troubled.

Now the trouble was fading, as England faded, as his old life was fading.

He had a sense that he was finally freed. It was not like seeing Claire again, but it was like not having to see anything else.

“Until I’m dead I’m hers, and after I’m dead I’m hers, so that’s all right,” he said to himself. “I haven’t got to muddle things up any more.”

The sea lay around them at dawn like a sheet of pearl — it was very empty but for the gulls’ wings beating to and fro out of the mist.

Winn had lived through many campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pass, and he had gone through the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country like a garden, met by welcoming populations, with flowers and fruit.

It made him feel sick. The other places were the proper ones for war.

It was not his way to think of what lay before him. It would, like all great emergencies, like all great calamities, keep to its moment, and settle itself. Nevertheless he could not free his mind from the presence of the villages — the pleasant, smiling villages, the little church towers in the middle, the cobbled streets, the steep-pitched, gray roofs and the white sunny walls.

Carnations and geraniums filled the windows, and all the inhabitants, the solid, bright-faced people, had a greeting for their khaki guests.

“Voilà quelque choses des solides, ces Anglais!” the women called to each other.

Winn found himself shrinking from their welcoming eyes. He thought he hadn’t had enough sleep, because as a rule a Staines did not shrink; but when he slept in the corner of the hot jolting railway train, he dreamed of the villages.

They were to attack directly they arrived at their destination. By the time they reached there, Winn knew more. He had gathered up the hastily flung messages by telegram and telephone, by flying cars and from breathless despatch riders, and he knew what they meant.

They had no chance, from the first, not a ghost of a chance. They were to hold on as long as they could, and then retreat. Part of the line had gone already. The French had gone. No reinforcements were coming up. There were no reinforcements.

They were to retreat turn and turn about; meantime they must hold.

They could hear the guns now, the bright harvest fields trembled a little under the impact of these alien presences.

They came nearer and the sky filled with white puffs of smoke that looked like glittering sunset clouds, and were not clouds. Overhead the birds sang incessantly, undisturbed even by the occasional drilling of an aëroplane.

In the plains that lay beneath them, they could see the dim blue lines of the enemy debouching.

They made Winn think of locusts. He had seen a plague once in Egypt. They came on like the Germans, a gray mass that never broke — that could not break, because behind it there were more, and still more locusts, thick as clouds, impenetrable as clouds.

You killed and killed and killed, and yet there were more clouds.

Every now and then it ran through his mind like a flame, that they would spread this loathsome, defiling cloud over the smiling little villages of France.

Fortunately there was no time for pity; there were merely the different ways of meeting the question of holding on.

It was like an attempt to keep back a tide with a teaspoon.

Their guns did what they could, they did more than it seemed possible guns could do. The men in control of them worked like maniacs.

It was not a time to think of what people could do. The men were falling like leaves off a tree.

The skylarks and the swallows vanished before the villainous occupation of the air. The infantry in the loosely built trenches held on, breathless, broken, like a battered boat in a hurricane, stout against the oncoming waves.

The stars came out and night fell — night rent and tortured, darkness assaulted and broken by a myriad new lights of death, but still merciful, reassuring darkness. The moment for the retreat had come.

It was a never-ending business, a stumbling, bewildering business. The guns roared on, holding open indefatigably, without cessation, the way of their escape.

Much later they got away themselves, dashing blindly in the wake of their exhausted little army, ready to turn at command and hold again, and escape again, and once more hold the unending blue lines, with their unnumbered guns, unwinding like an endless serpent in their rear.

The morning showed them still retreating. Sometimes they were miles ahead and could see nothing but the strangely different barred and shivering villages, small settlements of terror, in an untroubled land.

There were no flowers flung upon them now, only hurried gasping questions, “Are they coming?” “How far are they behind you?”

Sometimes they were halted for half an hour at a time, and sat in hedges and ate, or meant to eat, and slept between the bites.

Occasionally they surprised small bands of wandering Uhlans, and if there was time took them prisoners, and if there was no time, shot them in rows against white walls.

Once they met a troop out of one of their own divisions, led by a solitary subaltern of nineteen, with queer fixed eyes, who didn’t know who he was. All he could say, “I brought them out.”

Despatch riders hurled themselves upon the Staff with orders; very often they had conflicting orders; and they always had dust, trouble with horses, trouble with motor ambulances, trouble with transport. Enraged heroic surgeons achieving hourly physical miracles, implored with tears to be given impossible things like time. Of course they couldn’t have time.

Then in the midst of chaos, orders would come to hold. The guns unlimbered, the transports tore madly ahead. Everything that could be cleared off down the road was cleared off, more rough trenches were dug, more hot and sullen hours of waiting followed, and then once more the noise, the helpless slaughter, the steady dogged line gripping the shallow earth, and the unnumbered horde of locusts came on again, eating up the fields of France.

Sometimes whole regiments entrained under the care of fatherly French railway officials, curiously liable to hysteria on ordinary excursion days, but now as calm as Egyptian Pyramids in the face of national disaster. They pieced together with marvelous ingenuity the broken thread of speech presented to them by the occasional French scholars upon the British Staff; but more often still they shook polite and emphatic heads, and explained that there quite simply were no trains. The possible, yes; but the impossible, no. One could not create trains. So the men went on marching. They did not like retreating, but they moved as if they were on parade in front of Buckingham Palace, and when they held, they fought as winners fight.

It was not until they reached the Marne that Winn found time to write to Claire. “We are getting on very nicely,” he wrote. “I hope you are not worrying about us. We have plenty to eat, though we have to take our meals a little hurriedly.

“There is a good deal of work to do.

“This war is the best thing that ever happened to me — bar one. Before I came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won’t mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first, remember that they never do.

“Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start with, and had to fight against odds, which doesn’t matter really if you have the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me commandeer the boots I wanted — the kind they offered me at first wouldn’t have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not mind as much as I did.

“I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It’s a pity the Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in.

“One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck.

“I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your loving Winn.”

In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic châteaux; but they all began in the same reassuring way. “I am very well, and we are getting on quite nicely.”

The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they fenced and circled.

They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.

The battle of the Aisne passed by slow degrees out of their hands, and the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as thinly as a Japanese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very camp cooks were in the trenches.

Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and fell and returned again.

Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few, who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said, “We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it.”

Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.

They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.

They remade it at the cost of their lives in Flanders, in the face of incredulous enemies and criticizing neutrals, painstakingly, without science, doggedly out of their own wills. They held Ypres by a thread, and when it seemed that nothing could keep it, one cold and dreadful day along the Menin road came up their reinforcements.

First one group and then another of tall, dark people, silent footed as falling leaves, turbaned black faces, eyes of appalling and unearthly gravity, hearts half like a rock and half like a child, alien captive people of another blood, took their place silently, regiment by regiment blocking up the dreadful gaps with their guns, their rifles, and the free gift of their lives.

“Lionel has come,” Winn wrote, “and all my men. I never was so glad of anything, but you. Send me all the warm things you can. The winter will be quite jolly now when the men get used to the trenches. It’s a funny thing, but they’ve given me command of the regiment. I hadn’t expected it, but I’ve always liked handling Sikhs. Whatever happens, you’ll remember that I’ve been an awfully lucky chap, won’t you?”

Lionel and Winn talked of the regiment and the war; these two things filled the exacting hours. In a world a very long way off and in the depths of their hearts were England and Claire.

They spent three weeks in the trenches, blackened and water clogged and weary.

It was the darkest time of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes passed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that worshiped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid people who ate sausages, and could be killed.

One or two small parties led in night attacks overcame the worst of their fears.

Later on when the mud dried they could kill more; in the end all would be killed, and they would return with much honor to their land of sunshine.

To the officers who moved among them, absorbed in the questions of their care, there was never any silence or peace, and yet there was a strange content in the huddled, altered life of their wet ditch.