CHAPTER XXVI
A DIRECT HIT
The letter which the Marquis of Truckleford wrote to the general who was a peg above "Duggy" gave Phil an early introduction to Flanders mud. An upstanding man the major to whom he reported. Fresh from the retreat of Mons and the fighting on the Aisne, he had been brought home to mould human clay into gunners. Then there was Jaffers, the regular sergeant, who regarded all recruits as children of his strict parenthood. Treating fledgling young officers with the respect due to their rank, he would whisper to them the right thing to do, the while he stood stiff at the salute.
"They will learn fast under fire," said Jaffers. "It's the blooming Boche shells that'll teach them to be quick about their lessons!"
By the hundred of thousands untrained men were drilling and waiting for uniforms and rifles. Every time that a gun was finished or a shell came out of the shops, a thousand hungry hands seemed to reach across the Channel for it. Phil became one of a myriad of units in a tiny orbit; a cog in one of the many little organisations which were to be assembled into a whole. His technical training stood him in good stead. At first, the battery drilled with heirlooms of the Victorian epoch, which might be useful for home defence against a bow-and-arrow invasion.
Then, one day somebody in the War Office signed a paper which meant that four tubes of steel were to give all the horse-drill and men-drill of Phil's battery a proud reality. New four-inch howitzers could not be kept long away from France in those days. They were needed in the Ypres salient, where the British were holding on by their teeth with their faces to the Germans and their backs to Calais.
Phil's letters about his daily existence ought to have cured an old pair in Longfield of any idea that he was fighting the whole war himself according to the methods of the revolutionary ancestor; though his mother to this day has never been convinced to the contrary. "Mud—and shells at the Germans and from the Germans; and more mud, a great deal more mud, and more shells at the Germans and more from the Germans," was the way that he described it. "I know that I shall never choose to spend a winter holiday in Flanders after the war is over," he said.
The business of the gunners was to hide their "hows" from prying German eyes by land and air and on telephone summons to pump destruction at some unseen point on the map, according to tabular calculations. At other times they might walk about in the mud or sit in the mud inside their dug-outs. It was enough to make a bold knight of olden story, who carried a Toledo or a Damascus blade, fall in a fit, as Phil remarked. Should the Germans locate them, a tornado of "krumps" descended on their position and they sat in the dug-outs considering whether or not everybody there would be "done in," as the English say, by a direct hit.
Then they moved to another place through the mud and built more dug-outs in the mud and began the daily grind over again, the vacancies caused by casualties being filled by recruits. But they had intervals in billets, where they crowded together in peasants' houses out of the zone of shell-fire, and smoked and read and waited for the mail, and expatiated on how it would seem to have a real bath in a real tub in a land where there was no mud.
Spring did come, though there were soldiers in the British army who thought that it never would. They could not comprehend how anything so pleasant could ever happen in war time in Flanders. It found Phil with a bit of white and blue ribbon on his blouse, which had been given for what other people, including a division commander, said was a gallant deed showing exceptional initiative. He was willing to accept their view as official, though he could not honestly agree with it. However, it was the source of enormous happiness in Longfield and Truckleford.
Once he had been back at Truckleford on leave for a week; and, after the mud, he did not mind if the vicar and Mrs. Sanford made as much fuss over him as if he were a real hero. Madame Ribot had returned to Paris. He had seen neither Henriette nor Helen, though Henriette wrote to him regularly. She was at one of the hospital bases not more than three hours' motor ride away; but if he had had ten motors he could not have gone to see her. Each tiny cog of the machine must keep in its place. None may go moving about at will.
He came to watch for Henriette's handwriting and the postmarks of Longfield as the two links with the world; and Truckleford had also become a part of his existence. Henriette seemed the adjutant of Lady Truckleford, devoted to her work. Her letters ever revived the thousand pictures of her from Truckleford to Mervaux and back again and the spirit of them was expressed in the words: "The woman waits while the man goes out to fight." Her references to Helen, who seemed to be at the same base but with another unit, were the only news he had of the other cousin except her drawings, which continued to appear in the weeklies. Helen, Henriette said, was still trying to get used to the sight of blood.
People were coming to know Helen's name. Phil wrote to her in congratulation and the answer he received hardly invited further correspondence. It was unlike her, uncousinly, and it troubled him. She was very busy and very happy. She made a point of that—very happy. New memories of Mervaux occurred to him with the peculiar distinctness of details appearing, after what seemed a long lapse of time, with the freshness of sudden discovery in some recess of the mind. He was thinking that he should not mind sitting again for his portrait on the terrace, with Henriette smiling at her easel and Helen laughing over her cartoons of his proud career.
Spring not only came to Flanders, but the mud dried; the fields were carpeted with the tender green of young grain, and the canopies of foliage gave better cover for the "hows." Green, yes, but flat that vista from the gun-positions, while the graceful slopes of the Berkshires might be dripping and glistening as they had on the afternoon that he returned from the Southwest. Bill Hurley was at his accustomed place on the station platform, no doubt; Hanks, the druggist, was still branching out, no doubt. But Truckleford had the greater call of the two for him that day; for he had received a letter that his father and mother had at last undertaken their pilgrimage and had arrived at the vicarage, where they were waiting until he had another week's leave.
Another bit of news, too. Peter Smithers, without any warning to the War Lord, was about to visit Europe to see things for himself. Peter's only expressed view of Phil's action in going to war had been:
"About what you would expect. I gave him up long ago. So Ledyard's keeping the job for him—hm-m-m! Well, Ledyard's business isn't the sport of a lot of jockeying politicians."
Sometimes Phil had thought what if a shell should take off an arm or a leg, or otherwise maim him for life. Hundreds of thousands of others had thought the same. The merciful bullet through the heart or the wound that heals leaving one whole—these are a part of the game. But that jagged, tearing piece of shell-fragment—this was the devil of the new psychology of war.
It was a glorious morning that he went up to the trench to take his turn at observation. The sun made the wings of the planes overhead shimmer with silver and gold under a fleckless sky. The birds were singing their song in the midst of the song of bullets. It hardly seemed possible that death could lurk in the soft puffs of shrapnel smoke playing around the planes. Death should have no part in such a day. It was a day of life. Soft air to breathe, gentle breezes, kindly sunshine, and youth. Phil enjoyed the fact of existence as some superb privilege which deserved gratitude to earth and sky, and particularly to the sky, which was all that he could see as he entered the winding communication trench.
"Good-morning!"
The cheery greetings were exchanged between fellow-officers as if the game were not with death, but with racquets on an English lawn.
"They are strafing a bit up there," said one; which meant that there was some shelling in the front line, where little mirrors were set up on parapets of sandbags. Through these bits of glass you could look out on a field of weeds across to another line of sandbags, Britain burrowing on one side and Germany on the other of No Man's Land. Phil took the place of another lieutenant at the O.P., or Observation Post. Here he was in touch by telephone with his battery. He watched black bursts of smoke, which were the shells from its guns, and reported their proximity to the target. It was a matter of eyesight and judgment and speaking into a black disk—nothing dramatic about it.
Since he was at Mervaux he had learned much about those bursts of black smoke. He had seen many men knocked over by them. One monster had come even closer to him than the shell which had exploded between him and Helen, and on that occasion he had been dug out from under a tumbled parapet with a spade. When the Germans increased their shell-fire on any section of the British trenches, the British increased theirs on the Germans; then, in turn, the Germans increased theirs and the British increased theirs. Thus it happened on this particular morning, perhaps because the light was good for artillery observation. He was not looking to see what the German shells did to the British trench, but what his shells were doing to the German trench! "Right on!" He had announced the result of a shot when he heard the hurtling, growing scream of a nine-inch coming straight toward him.
After that the end of all sensation; oblivion, which had come to many another man from the burst of a nine-inch whether or not he ever awoke to life in this world.
After he knew not how long Phil felt some one pulling at his body, which seemed to rest under a great weight. This was all, and this only for a fleeting moment; he was uncertain whether he was in this world or the other. Then he was bumped against something and felt his hand brush the hard earth. Vaguely he reasoned that stretcher-bearers were carrying him around the traverse of a trench. A hot, moist sponge seemed pressed into his throat and something besides air was coming into his lungs and he was trying to cough it out. Utter darkness encompassed him and there was no sound.
All volition, all muscular and nerve-initiative had been beaten out of him. He could only try to breathe through that hot sponge and to keep that other trickling thing out of his lungs. It was not his mind that made this effort; only a body detached from his mind, acting involuntarily like the flouncing of a fish out of water. He lost consciousness again before he realised where he was hit; and the litter-bearers bore him on to the casualty clearing station. They did not know whether or not he was dead. Sometimes cases like that were and sometimes they were not when they reached the station.
"Better be, though," said the one who had the rear handles of the stretcher.
"Yes. I'd want to be," said the man in front.