But nothing happened. Dormer heard various reasons given for this, and twice as many surmises made about it, but well aware how much importance to attach to the talk that floated round Divisional Offices and Messes, relied upon his own experience and arithmetic. According to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground. Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few miles more.
This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the “front” of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument that we went no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years.
For the only time in his life Dormer wished he were something other than Dormer. For a few moments after arriving at his conclusion, he desired to be a person of power and influence, some one who could say with weight that the thing ought to stop here and now. But this very unusual impulse did not last long with him.
All that remained of Belgium and wide tracts of French Flanders adjoining it, became one huge ant-heap. Never had there been such a concentration, Corps next to Corps, Services mosaiced between Services, twenty thousand men upon roads, no one could count how many handling munitions, as, from Ypres to the sea, the great offensive of 1917 slowly germinated.
Dormer was soon caught up and landed in the old familiar blackly-manured soil of the Salient. He was not disgusted or surprised. He was becoming increasingly conscious of a sensation of going round and round. Now, too, that troops were always pouring along a road before him, he had again the feeling that his head was an empty chamber, round which was painted a frieze, men, men, mules, men, limbers, guns, men, lorries, ambulances, men, men, men. It might be just worry and overwork, it might be that he was again forced to share his limited accommodation with Kavanagh. They were in a dug-out on the canal bank, just by one of those fatal causeways built to make the passage of the canal a certainty, instead of the gamble it had been in the days of the pontoon bridges. The passage became, like everything else in the War, a certainty for the Germans as much as for the Allies. The place was registered with the utmost precision and hit at all times of the day and night. It probably cost far more than the taking of any trench.
Amid the earth-shaking explosions that seldom ceased for long, in the twilight of that narrow cavern in the mud, Kavanagh was as unquenchable as he ever had been on the high and airy downs of the Somme. During the daylight, when nothing could be done outside, he bent over his map of cables while Dormer perfected his plan for getting first-line transport past that infernal canal. He purposed to send an N.C.O. a good two miles back, with small square pieces of card, on which were written 9.0 p.m., 9.5 p.m., and so on, the times being those at which the unit so instructed was to arrive beside his dug-out. He thought rather well of this idea, no jamming and confusion, and if the enemy made a lucky hit, there would be fewer casualties and less to clear away. In the middle of his calculations he heard
“Why, soldiers, why
Should we be melancholy,
Whose duty ’tis to die!”
He could not resist saying: