“Yes. But when you think of what the men have done.”
Dormer did not reply. He was thinking of the Infantry, with their whole possessions on their backs, always in front in the advance, last in the retreat. The Gunner took his leave. Like everything else, either because of the incident, or more probably without any relation to it, the slow but steady progress of demobilization went on, those men who had the more real grievance, or the greater power of expression, got drafted off. The composition of units was always changing. Even where it did not, what could “other ranks” do? To the last Dormer felt his recurrent nightmare of the Headless Man to be the last word on the subject. But it was becoming fainter and fainter as the violence of the first impression dimmed, keeping pace with the actuality of the dispersal of that khaki nation that lay spread across France, Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and the East. The Headless Man was fading out.
It was mid-April, the first fine weather of the year, when his own turn came. Of course the Mess gave him a little dinner, for although nothing on earth, not even four years of War, could make him a soldier, his length of service, varied experience, and neat adaptability had made him invaluable; again no one had ever found it possible to quarrel with him; further, his preoccupation with games had made him perhaps the most sought-for person in the Brigade.
Had it not been for these reasons, there was little else to which he had a farewell to say; casualty, change, and now demobilization removed friends, then chance acquaintances, until there was no one with whom he was in the slightest degree intimate. He might almost have been some attached officer staying in the Mess, instead of its President, for all he knew of the officers composing it. There was nothing in the village that lay on the edge of the battlefield that he wanted to see again. It was not a place where he had trained or fought, it was not even the place at which the news of the Armistice had reached him. It was just a place where the Brigade of which his battalion had formed a part had been dumped, so as to be out of the way, but sufficiently within reach of rail, for the gradual attrition of demobilization to work smoothly. An unkind person might have wondered if the mild festival that took place in the estaminet of that obscure commune was not so much a farewell dinner to old Dormer, as an eagerly sought opportunity for a little extra food and drink that might help to pass the empty days. Slightly bleary-eyed in the morning, Dormer boarded the train, waved his hand to the little group of officers on the platform, and sat down to smoke until he might arrive at Dunkirk.
On a mild April evening, he paced the port side of the deck of the steamer that was taking him home. He was aware that he might have to spend a night in dispersal station, but it did not matter in the least. The real end of the business to such an essential Englishman as Dormer was here and now, watching the calm leaden sea-space widen between him and the pier-head of Calais. Prophets might talk about the obliteration of England’s island defences, but the sentiment that the Channel evoked was untouched. After years of effort and sacrifice, Dormer remained a stranger in France. He might know parts of it tolerably well, speak its language fairly, fight beside its soldiers, could feel a good deal of intelligent admiration for its people and institutions, but nothing would ever make him French. It would perhaps have been easier to assimilate him into Germany. But on the whole, in spite of his unprovocative manner, he was difficult to assimilate, a marked national type. Lengthier developments and slower, more permanent revolutions were in his inherited mental make-up, than in that of any of the other belligerents. In a Europe where such thrones as were left were tottering and crashing, nothing violent was in his mind, or in the minds of ninety per cent of those men who covered the lower deck, singing together, with precisely the same lugubrious humour, as in the days of defeat, of stalemate, or of victory:
“Old soldiers never die,
They only fade away.”
He turned to look at them, packed like sardines, so that even the sea breeze could hardly dissipate the clouds of cigarette smoke, just as no disaster and no triumph could alter their island characteristics, however much talk there might be about town life sapping the race. As he looked at them, herded and stalled like animals, but cheerful in their queer way as no animal can ever be, he remembered that somewhere among all those thousands that were being poured back into England day by day (unless of course he were buried in one of those graveyards that marked so clearly the hundred miles from Ypres to St. Quentin) was a private soldier, whom he had been told to discover and bring to justice for the Crime at Vanderlynden’s, as Kavanagh had called it. He had never even got the fellow’s name and number, and he did not care. He never wanted the job, nothing but his punctilious New Army spirit, that had made him take the War as seriously as if it had been business, had kept him at it. Now he had done with it, the man would never be found. But in Dormer’s mind would always remain that phantom that he had pursued for so many months—years even, over all those miles, in and out of so many units and formations. It had come to stand for all that mass whose minds were as drab as their uniform, so inarticulate, so decent and likable in their humility and good temper. Theirs was the true Republicanism, and no written constitution could add anything to it. He had not thought of that affair, during all these last months that had seen so many Empires fall, so many nations set upon their feet, but he thought of it now.
He turned once again and surveyed that coastline, somewhere behind which he had made that pilgrimage; there it lay, newly freed Belgium on the left, on the right the chalky downs that ran from Gris-Nez far out of sight, down to Arras. Between the two, on those marshes so like any of South-Eastern England, had taken place that Crime at Vanderlynden’s, that typified the whole War. There, on those flat valleys of the Yser and the Lys, the English army had come to rest after its first few weeks of romantic march and counter-march. There had the long struggle of endurance been the longest and least spectacular. It was there that the English Effort, as they called it, had played its real part, far more than on the greater battlefields farther south, or away on other continents. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s showed the whole thing in miniature. The English had been welcomed as Allies, resented as intruders, but never had they become homogeneous with the soil and its natives, nor could they ever leave any lasting mark on the body or spirit of the place. They were still incomprehensible to Vanderlynden’s, and Vanderlynden’s to them. Dormer was of all men most unwilling and perhaps unable to seek for ultimate results of the phenomena that passed before his eyes. To him, at that moment, it seemed that the English Effort was fading out, leaving nothing but graveyards. And when he found this moving him, his horror of the expression of any emotion asserted itself, and he elbowed his way down the companion, to get a drink.