because the letters sometimes took some time to reach their destination in those days . . . and I was quite right to feel dummy4
badly, because she received the telegram from the War Office about me—or not about me, as it happened—the day before she received my letter, which was after her brithday of course, and that letter gave her a very nasty turn, she told me afterwards—almost worse than the telegram, because she'd been half-expecting that... "Like receiving a message from beyond the grave, Edwin," she always used to say.' Mr Plumb smiled. 'And I always used to reply "But it was slightly exaggerated, Mother"—the telegram, I mean, not the letter.'
'The telegram?'
' "Killed in action",' Mr Plumb nodded. 'It was an administrative error, of course—they had probably confused two E. B. Plumbs, I expect.' The surviving E. B. Plumb wagged his finger at the young Mr Bastable. 'And that's why I always emphasize the importance of administrative efficiency, Henry. The customer is always right, so however good we may be at selling, we must back that up with the same care and efficiency in administration—we must not shock the customer with bad administration. That is a very important lesson which I cannot over-emphasize. Because, in this instance, we took the ridge—and with all those huge mines going up, that isn't surprising—but my mother was nevertheless a dissatisfied customer, you might say—eh?'
It must have been young Mr Bastable's look of frozen incredulity which recalled Mr Plumb to the original direction of his sermon.
'What I mean, Henry, is that God in His Wisdom has so dummy4
constituted the human being that he can speedily become accustomed to anything.'
The waitress was hovering with Mr Plumb's lamb cutlets, but obviously didn't know what to do with young Mr Bastable's brown Windsor soup.
'Now —' Mr Plumb ignored the waitress,'—the things I saw around Spanbroekmolen that morning, and when we went on up the ridge too, would make a—would make a butcher's shop like a—like a—like a florist's on a spring morning.' He paused in triumphant appreciation of his own simile. 'But I soon got used to it—and I had never seen a dead man before I went into the line. So eat up your soup before it gets cold, now.'
Harry Bastable turned Sergeant Hobday over. He wasn't so very terrible, really—he might almost have been sleeping, except that his eyes were open. He was just very dusty and somehow taller, though quite surprisingly heavy and difficult to turn.
But he had no map with him.
Bastable looked around for Darkie, but couldn't find any trace of him. So... while Sergeant Hobday had been thrown clear—though 'clear' wasn't the right word to go with 'dead'—
Darkie must still be under the carrier.
With the map.
He went back to where Sergeant Hobday lay at the roadside, dummy4
with the vague idea of closing those open eyes; and also because Sergeant Hobday hadn't frightened him as much as he had expected, and returning to what he knew, and what wasn't as awful as he had imagined, might somehow help the process of Mr Plumb's advice and God's infinite mercy and wisdom.
But when he got there he didn't see the point of touching the Sergeant's face (there would be other faces, plenty of them; and it wouldn't make any difference to them, closing their eyes, they couldn't see anything: or if they could—any golden bridges and silver rivers—they might just as well go on looking; and he had other things to do, anyway, than to go around closing eyes). He merely robbed Sergeant Hobday of his Webley revolver.
He did this in the first place because the Sergeant's revolver would have a full cylinder, and he had fired two rounds—or at least two—from his own weapon.
The firer must count his rounds as he fires them, to ensure that he will know when to reload. Never advance with less than two or three rounds in the cylinder.
And because he somehow felt also that a Mendip regular's revolver would be better than his own..
And also because his hands were shaking too much to reload.
And it was just as well, because when he examined his own revolver before abandoning it he found that its barrel was full dummy4
of dirt, from when he had presumably jammed it into the ground at some time during his flight from the farm. As he poked instinctively with the nail of his index finger he thought of the earth in the garden in the house off the Meads
—the earth which had got under his nails somehow as a boy, always just before meals, so that his father would send him from the table to scrub at them again. There was earth under his nails now— French dirt— and he would have given a million tons of it in exchange for one nail-full of good Eastbourne soil.
He threw his old revolver over the bank, into a tangle of grass and weeds. Better to let it lie there, rusting, than that some German should come and pick it up and have it.
Second-Lieutenant Greystock had had a map.
He looked up and down the road. There was not a sign of movement still, but it had changed all along its length. It was scuffed and dirty now, with broken banks and clods of earth where the German tanks had smashed across it. And there, fifty yards further on, was the tangled ruin of the other carrier.
He gritted his teeth and commenced to walk towards it, willing himself to put one foot before another against his innermost wishes, because he could remember that vivid flash of bright fire which had engulfed it.
This would be worse. But he needed that map . . .
And it was worse—it was unthinkably worse.
dummy4
There was a thing in the driver's seat. . . but it wasn't a thing he could recognize as ever having been a man, it was just a torn and blackened object where the driver had been.
He found Second-Lieutenant Greystock because there was a single cloth-pip on its red backing on something else which was half-impaled in a small thorn-bush near the carrier—
something with no legs and trailing threads of what looked like pink wool —
He never looked for the map, his legs started to run without being told to do so.
They ran until they had carried him over the brow of the rise, and down the dip on the other side. Then they simply stopped and sat him down at the roadside. He pulled up his knees under his chin and buried his face into them, and wept silently, rocking backwards and forwards, and wishing he could be sick because it must be like being ill—if you could be sick, once you had been sick you felt better. But he couldn't be sick.
The dying and living-again hadn't been completed under the carrier. There was a little more of both to be done, and he did it there, by himself at the roadside, alone.
Finally, he got up and continued up the road again, walking this time, and wiping his face, first with his hands and then with a handkerchief he remembered he had in his pocket.
He realized he was very thirsty, so he drank from his water-dummy4
bottle.
He was aware of everything around him, and he had worked out approximately where he was without the aid of the map.
There was a profound silence all along the road, not even any birdsong. But then there never did seem to be any birds in France, not as there were in England. All the same, he felt that he was carrying the silence with him, in a circle around him, as he went along. Beyond it, in the far distance, there was an almost permanent rumble-rumble going on somewhere, in one direction or another. There was even a very faint knock-knock-knocking which he fixed in the direction of Belléme. The Mendips were probably still fighting their last fight there, by-passed and surrounded, but game to the last, like the Regulars they were.
But he wasn't going to Belléme, now. The homing pigeon had been winged, but only winged, and now it was going back to the loft for rest and refreshment before carrying its message abroad. That was the only thing it could think about, because that was how its mind was programmed. Besides, the pigeon didn't matter, only the message mattered, and there were others who could carry it once they knew its contents.