Towards the end of the month comes Boyce to Wellingsford, this time not secretly; for the day after his arrival he drove his mother through the town and incidentally called on me. A neglected bullet graze on the neck had turned septic. An ugly temperature had sent him to hospital. The authorities, as soon as the fever had abated and left him on the high road to recovery, had sent him home. A khaki bandage around his bull-throat alone betokened anything amiss. He would be back, he said, as soon as the Medical Board at the War Office would let him.
On this occasion, for the first time since South African days, I met him without any mistrust. What had passed between Betty and himself, I did not know. Relations between man and woman are so subtle and complicated, that unless you have the full pleadings on both sides in front of you, you cannot arbitrate; and, as often as not, if you deliver the most soul-satisfying of judgments, you are hopelessly wrong, because there are all important, elusive factors of personality, temperament, sex, and what not which all the legal acumen in the world could not set down in black and white. So half unconsciously I ruled out Betty from my contemplation of the man. I had been obsessed by the Vilboek Farm story, and by that alone. Reggie Dacre—to say nothing of personages in high command—had proved it to be a horrible lie. He had Marshal Ney's deserved reputation—le brave des braves—and there is no more coldly critical conferrer of such repute than the British Army in the field. To win it a man not only has to do something heroic once or twice—that is what he is there for—but he has to be doing it all the time. Boyce had piled up for himself an amazing record, one that overwhelmed the possibility of truth in old slanders. When I gripped him by the hand, I felt immeasurable relief at being able to do so without the old haunting suspicion and reservation.
He spoke, like thousands of others of his type—the type of the fine professional English soldier—with diffident modesty of such personal experiences as he deigned to recount. The anecdotes mostly had a humorous side, and were evoked by allusion. Like all of us stay-at-homes, I cursed the censorship for leaving us so much in the dark. He laughed and cursed the censorship for the opposite reason.
"The damned fools—I beg your pardon, Mother, but when a fool is too big a fool even for this world, he must be damned—the damned fools allow all sorts of things to be given away. They were nearly the death of me and were the death of half a dozen of my men."
And he told the story. In a deserted brewery behind the lines the vats were fitted up as baths for men from the trenches, and the furnaces heated ovens in which horrible clothing was baked. This brewery had been immune from attack until an officially sanctioned newspaper article specified its exact position. A few days after the article appeared, in fact, as soon as a copy of the paper reached Germany, a thunderstorm of shells broke on the brewery. Out of it poured a helter-skelter stream of stark-naked men, who ran wherever they could for cover. From one point of view it was vastly comic. In the meanwhile the building containing all their clothes, and all the spare clothing for a brigade, was being scientifically destroyed. That was more comic still. The bather cut off from his garments is a world-wide joke. The German battery, having got the exact range, were having a systematic, Teutonic afternoon's enjoyment. But from another point of view the situation was desperate. There were these poor fellows, hordes of them, in nature's inadequate protection against the weather, shivering in the cold, with the nearest spare rag of clothing some miles away. Boyce got them together, paraded them instantly under the shell fire, and led them at a rush into the blazing building to salve stores. Six never came out alive. Many were burned and wounded. But it had to be done, or the whole crowd would have perished from exposure. Tommy is fairly tough; but he cannot live mother-naked through a March night of driving sleet.
"No," said Boyce, "if you suffered daily from the low cunning of Brother Bosch, you wouldn't cry for things to be published in the newspapers."
At the end of their visit I accompanied my guests to the hall. Marigold escorted Mrs. Boyce to the car. Leonard picked up his cap and cane and turned to shake hands. I noticed that the knob of the cane was neatly cased in wash-leather. Idly I enquired the reason. He smiled grimly as he slipped off the cover and exposed the polished deep vermilion butt of the life-preserver which Reggie Dacre had described.
"It's a sort of fetish I feel I must carry around with me," he explained. "When I've got it in my hand, I don't seem to care a damn what I do. When I haven't, I miss it. Remember the story of Sir Walter Scott's boy with the butter? Something like that, you know. But in its bare state it's not a pretty sight for the mother."
"It ought to have a name," said I. "The poilu calls his bayonet Rosalie."
He looked at it darkly for a moment, before refitting the wash-leather.