The trenches had silted in. He wandered about, and poked about with his stick, trying to find some of his old dug-outs, and though he had known every inch of this ground, every hummock and hollow, could not find them, for the most part, only one, indeed.
He found a dug-out in which he had lived, not far from Bourlon Wood, by the ruins of Havrincourt Château. The earth had silted there too, but he borrowed a spade from a friendly young farmer near by, and unearthed the wooden steps, and cleared out the entrance, and went inside. The farmer gave him a bit of candle, and would have come inside with him, unless Bertram had said, “Wait a few minutes. I want to be in here alone!” The man understood with the quick sympathy of the French for sentiment like that.
It was sentiment, but also more than that. This was a ghost chamber of tragic memories, the unburying of the dead past. The candle burned straight with a thin flame. By its light Bertram found a wooden table, and two chairs, made out of boxes. It was Bill Huggett, who had knocked them together. On the table were things which had belonged to Bertram—an empty tin of John Cotton tobacco which Joyce had sent him, a cracked mug which he had found in Havrincourt Wood, an old envelope addressed to him.
“Major Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.
Machine Gun Corps, B.E.F.”
It was in Joyce’s handwriting. Good God! Fancy finding it here again, moist and muddy as the walls had oozed about it and earth had dropped! How eagerly he must have opened it when it came! Certainly he had kissed it before opening it. Now Joyce was his wife, away in Paris or somewhere, without him.
He sat very still on one of the boxes, with his elbows on the table, as often he had sat in this hole at the end of ’17. Christy had come down the steps to report the state of things outside. Old Fritz was putting up a bit of a barrage. Bourlon Wood was soaked with gas. He had told the men to keep their masks handy. A counter-attack was expected within the next twelve hours. A man had just had his leg blown off in Beer Alley.
Bertram’s soul lived again in that time. The smell of the dug-out, that thin candle flame, these oozy walls, this table, were no more real than that dead past, yet as real. The past was present. The present was past. There was no difference. All that he had seen in war, the death of many good men, the agony of the wounded, the stench of death, the comradeship of young officers, their laughter, Christy’s tears when his nerve broke, his own fears of fear, the heroism of common men, the endless slaughter, the waste of youth and life, came back to his mind, as drowning men are said to see all their life as in a mirror. Was it all going to happen again? Bernard Hall thought so, unless some divine change happened in human nature by “intensive education”! Jeanne, the chambermaid, thought so! Nearly all those French people with whom he had talked along the wayside believed that after a few years, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, les Boches would come back again for vengeance.
As the candle flickered and shortened in a pool of wax on the table, Bertram, sitting there with its feeble light surrounded by darkness, heard a voice speak to his soul, very clearly, as once before. They were the words his mother had spoken on her death-bed. “Bertram, work for Peace. Promise me—”
He raised his head sharply. Had he heard those words only in imagination, or had they been spoken to him? He had heard them clearly, with distinct utterance, yet it must have been only one of the memories brought back in that dug-out.