He laughed, as if trying to excuse such reckless flights of fancy, in doing so displaying the double row of Low Comedy teeth.
‘“The rattle of musketry from distant hills’ — ’a little shower of sand churned up by a bullet in front of the redoubt’?”
These conventional phrases from boys’ adventure stories might encourage Bithel to plunge further into observations about life. The clichés did indeed stir him.
“That’s it,” he said, speaking with much more animation than usual, “that’s just what I meant. Wonderful memory you’ve got. What you said brings those yarns right back. I was a great reader as a lad. One of those thoughtful little boys. Never kept it up as I should.”
This was all a shade reminiscent of Gwatkin, my former Company Commander, poring secretly in the Company office over the Hymn to Mithras; but, whereas Gwatkin had meditated such literary material as a consequence of his own infatuation with the mystique of a soldier’s life, Bithel’s ruminations were quite other. In Bithel, memory of his former partiality for tales of military prowess merely gave rise to a very natural surprise that he was not himself more personally frightened at this moment of comparative danger.
“Strictly speaking, one experienced raids — coming under fire, if you like — when still reading the Boy’s Own Paper. During the earlier war, I mean.”
“Oh, I didn’t,” said Bithel. “The Zeppelins never came near any of the places we lived when I was a kid. That’s just why I was surprised not to mind this sort of thing more. I’m the nervy type, you see. I once had to give evidence in court, rather a nasty case — nothing to do with me, I’m glad to say, just a witness — and I thought my legs were going to give way under me. But this business we’re listening to now really doesn’t worry me. Worst moment’s when the Warning goes, don’t you think?”
The question of fear inevitably propounds itself from time to time if a state of war exists. Will circumstances arise when its operation on the senses might become uncomfortably hard to control? Like Bithel, I, too, had thought a certain amount about that subject, reaching the very provisional conclusion that fear itself was less immediately related to unavoidable danger than might at first be supposed; although no doubt that danger, more or less indefinitely increased in motive power, might — indeed certainly would — cause the graph to rise steeply. In bed at night, months before the blitz struck the locality, I would occasionally feel something like abject fear, turning this way and that in my sleeping-bag, for no special reason except that life seemed so utterly out of joint. That was a kind of nervous condition — as Bithel had said of himself — perfectly imaginable in time of peace; perhaps even experienced then, now forgotten, like so much else of that lost world. In the same way, I would sometimes lie awake enduring torments of thwarted desire, depraved fantasies hovering about the camp-bed, reveries of concupiscence that seemed specifically generated by unprepossessing military surroundings. Indeed, it was often necessary to remind oneself that low spirits, disturbed moods, sense of persecution, were not necessarily the consequence of serving in the army, or being part of a nation at war, with which all-inclusive framework depressive mental states now seemed automatically linked.
The raid in progress at that moment was, as Bithel had indicated, more spectacular than alarming, even a trifle stimulating now one was fully awake and dressed; so long as the mind did not dwell on the tedium of a three-day exercise the following day, undertaken after a missed night’s sleep. On the other hand, if bombs began to fall in the sports field, such light-hearted impressions might easily deteriorate, especially if the bren were knocked out, removing chance of retaliation. (It might be added that all sense of excitement was to evaporate from air-raids three or four years later.) However, Bithel had ceased to require comment on his own meditations about “baptism of fire.” He now returned to those personal worries, predominantly financial, which were never far from his mind.
“I do hope things will be O.K. about that cheque,” he said. “It all started with the Pay Department being late that month in paying Field Allowance into my banking account.”
This situation did, indeed, arise from time to time, owing to absence of method, possibly downright incompetence, on the part of the Financial Branch of the War Office concerned; possibly due to economic ineptitudes, or ingrained malice, of what Pennistone used later to call the “cluster of highly educated apes” ultimately in charge of such matters at the Treasury. Whatever the cause, the army from time to time had to forego its wages; sometimes such individual disasters as Bithel’s resulting.
“I can see there’ll be a fuss,” he said, “but with any luck it won’t come to a court-martial.”
Two or three lesser reports, each thunderous enough, had followed the last big explosion. Now noise was diminishing, the barrage gradually, though appreciably, reducing its volume. Quite suddenly the guns fell entirely silent, like dogs in the night, which, after keeping you awake for hours by their barking, suddenly decide to fall asleep instead. There was a second or two of absolute stillness. Then in the far distance the bell of a fire-engine or ambulance clanged desperately for a time, until the echoes died sadly away on the wind. This discordant ringing was followed by a great clamour, shouts, starting-up of trucks, hooting … the sound of horns and motors, which shall, bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring…. Huge smuts, like giant moths exploring the night air, pervaded its twilight. The smell of burning rubber veered towards a scent more specifically chemical in character, in which the fumes of acetylene seemed recognisable. The consolatory, long-drawn out-drone came at last. At its first note, as if thus signalled, large drops of rain began to fall. In a minute or two the shower was coming down in buckets, the freshness of the newly wet grass soon obtruding on the other scents.
“Buck up and get that bren covered, Corporal.”
“Shall we pack it in now, sir?”
“Go ahead.”
“Think I’ll return to bed too,” said Bithel. “Doubt if I’ll get much sleep. Glad I brought a mac with me now. Need it more than a helmet really. Awful climate over here. Makes you swill down too much of that porter, as they call it. More than you can afford. Just to keep the damp out of your bones. Come and see us in G Mess some time. You’d like Barker-Shaw, the Field Security Officer. He’s a professor — philosophy, I think — at one of the ’varsities. Can’t remember which. Clever face. The bloke in charge of the Hygiene Section is a bright lad too. You should hear him chaffing the Dental Officer about sterility.”
Our several ways parted. Corporal Mantle marched off his men to the barrack-room. I completed the rounds of the other bren sections, dismissed them, made for bed.
F Mess was only a few minutes’ walk from the last of these posts. The Mess was situated in a redbrick, semi-detached villa, one of the houses of a side-street sloping away towards the perimeter of the town. Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep; a prescript of nature unviolated by the character of solely male-infested sleeping quarters established even in buildings hallowed by age and historical association. F Mess was far from such; at least any history to be claimed was in the making. From its windows in daytime, beyond the suburbs, grey, stony hills could be seen, almost mountains; in another direction, that of the docks over which the blitz had been recently concentrating, rose cranes and factory chimneys beyond which inland waters broadened out towards the sea — ”the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.” About half a mile away from the Mess, though still in the same predominantly residential area, two or three tallish houses accommodated all but the ancillary services of Divisional Headquarters. A few scattered university buildings in the same neighbourhood failed to impart any hint of academic flavour.