“Gilbert White of Shelbourne,” he said to the sergeant “called the behaviour of the female ‘storge’: a good word for it.” But, as for trust in humanity, the sergeant might take it that larks never gave us a thought. We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed their nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H.E. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them.
The sergeant said to the rejoined lance corporal whose box now hung correctly on his muddied chest:
“Now its HAY post you gotter wait at!” They were to go along the trench and wait where another trench ran into it and there was a great A in whitewash on a bit of corrugated iron that was half-buried. “You can tell a great HAY from a bull’s foot as well as another, can’t you Corporal?” patiently.
“Wen they Mills bombs come ’e was to send ‘is Man into Hay Cumpny dugout fer a fatigue to bring ’em along ’ere, but Hay Cumpny could keep ’is little lot fer ’isself.”
“An if they Mills bombs did’n’ come the corporal’d better manufacture them on ’is own. An not make no mistakes!”
The lance-corporal said “Yes sargint, no sargint!” and the two went desultorily wavering along the duckboards, grey silhouettes against the wet bar of light, equilibrating themselves with hands on the walls of the trench.
“Ju ’eer what the orfcer said, Corporal,” the one said to the other. “Wottever’ll’e say next! Skylarks not trust ‘uman beens in battles! Cor!” The other grunted and, mournfully, the voices died out.
The cockscomb-shaped splash became of overwhelming interest momentarily to Tietjens; at the same time his mind began upon abstruse calculation of chances. Of his chances! A bad sign when the mind takes to doing that. Chances of direct hits by shells, by rifle bullets, by grenades, by fragments of shells or grenades. By any fragment of metal impinging on soft flesh. He was aware that he was going to be hit in the soft spot behind the collar-bone. He was conscious of that spot — the right-hand one; he felt none of the rest of his body. It is bad when the mind takes charge like that. A bromide was needed. The doctor must give him one. His mind felt pleasure at the thought of the M.O. A pleasant little fellow of the no-account order that knows his job. And carried liquor cheerfully. Confoundedly cheerfully!
He saw the doctor — plainly! It was one of the plainest things he could see of this whole show…. The doctor, a slight figure, vault on to the parapet, like a vaulting horse for height; stand up in the early morning sun…. Blind to the world, but humming Father O’Flynn. And stroll in the sunlight, a swagger cane of all things in the world, under his arms, right straight over to the German trench…. Then throw his cap down into that trench. And walk back! Delicately avoiding the strands in the cut apron of wire that he had to walk through!
The doctor said he had seen a Hun — probably an officer’s batman — cleaning a top-boot with an apron over his knees. The Hun had shied a boot-brush at him and he had shied his cap at the Hun. The blinking Hun, he called him! No doubt the fellow had blinked!
No doubt you could do the unthinkable with impunity!
No manner of doubt: if you were blind drunk and all!… And however you strained, in an army you fell into routine. Of a quiet morning you do not expect drunken doctors strolling along your parapet. Besides, the German front lines were very thinly held. Amazingly! There might not have been a Hun with a gun within half a mile of that boot-black!
If he, Tietjens, stood in space, his head level with that cockscomb, he would be in an inviolable vacuum — as far as projectiles were concerned!
He was asking desultorily of the sergeant whether he often shocked the men by what he said and the sergeant was answering with blushes: Well, you do say things, sir! Not believing in skylarks now! If there was one thing the men believed hit was in the hinstincks of them little creatures!
“So that,” Tietjens said, “they look at me as a sort of an atheist.”
He forced himself to look over the parapet again, climbing heavily to his place of observation. It was sheer impatience and purely culpable technically. But he was in command of the regiment, of an establishment of a thousand and eighteen men, or that used to be the establishment of a battalion; of a strength of three hundred and thirty-three. Say seventy-five per company. And two companies in command of second lieutenants, one just out…. The last four days… There ought to be, say, eighty pairs of eyes surveying what he was going to survey. If there were fifteen it was as much as there were!… Figures were clean and comforting things. The chance against being struck by a shell-fragment that day, if the Germans came in any force, was fourteen-to-one against. There were battalions worse off than they. The sixth had only one one six left!
The tortured ground sloped down into mists. Say a quarter of a mile away. The German front lines were just shadows, like the corrugations of photographs of the moon: the paradoses of our own trenches two nights ago! The Germans did not seem to have troubled to chuck up much in the way of parapets. They didn’t. They were coming on. Anyhow they held their front lines always very sparsely…. Was that the phrase? Was it even English?
Above the shadows the mist behaved tortuously, mounting up into umbrella shapes. Like snow-covered umbrella pines.
Disagreeable to force the eye to examine that mist. His stomach turned over…. That was the sacks. A flat, slightly disordered pile of wet sacks, half-right at two hundred yards. No doubt a shell had hit a G.S. wagon coming up with sacks for trenching. Or the bearers had bolted, chucking the sacks down. His eyes had fallen on that scattered pile four times already that morning. Each time his stomach had turned over. The resemblance to prostrate men was appalling. The enemy creeping up… Christ! Within two hundred yards. So his stomach said. Each time, in spite of the preparation.
Otherwise the ground had been so smashed that it was flat; went down into holes but did not rise up into mounds. That made it look gentle. It sloped down, to the untidiness. They appeared mostly to lie on their faces; why? Presumably they were mostly Germans pushed back in the last counter-attack. Anyhow you saw mostly the seats of their trousers. When you did not, how profound was their repose! You must phrase it a little like that — rhetorically. There was no other way to get the effect of that profoundness. Call it profundity!
It was different from sleep; flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs…. Well, you can’t go on with a sentence like that…. But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall…. Probably because they — the painters — drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form…. But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi. Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God? As if He had dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth…. Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered…
Dawn on the battlefield…. Damn it all, why sneer? It was dawn on the battlefield…. The trouble was that this battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months, and twenty-seven days of it still…. No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony of effort by numbers. Nor yet by saying “Endless monotony of effort.”… It was like bending down to look into darkness of corridors under dark curtains. Under clouds… Mist…
At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They mopped and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; dropping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying laying out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence, but in accord, they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black, quiet nights, in dugouts where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners’ picks below you: tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening…. But not FEAR.