Phillip tottered off the gangway at Boulogne having, as he said to his companion from Victoria, catted up his heart, despite the fact that the crossing from Folkestone had been made in sunshine on a blue and waveless Channel. Fear had taken the heart out of him: fear of being sick: fear of the idea of having to face machine-guns again. The apparition of death from the back of his mind had come forward to share his living thoughts, so the voyage had been a semi-conscious froth of nausea, of endurance despite abandon.

While the transport had been crossing, with its destroyer escort, there had been a constant heavy thudding of guns. Either the Big Push had started, along the coast towards Ostend, or there had been a naval battle. When the ship docked, they heard: the German fleet had come out, and there had been a tremendous battle in the North Sea. Rumour on shore said that a German invasion force was waiting upon the issue of the battle. Heavy distant blows were still burdening the air, far away to the north-east, across the sea.

Once upon cobbled streets, and after a brandy and soda in the British Officers’ Club, followed by beef tea and soup, colour came back into Phillip’s cheeks, and he began to feel that what others had to go through, he could go through; and even beyond, like Julian Grenfell.

And when the burning moment breaks

And in the air death moans and sings,

he would think of the sun, what astronomers called a dwarf-yellow star, slowly dying, as in the Liebestod; death came to all things upon the earth, and to the eventual sun: that must be the philosophy.

After lunch there were nearly two hours to wait for the train to Étaples. Ray, one of the original mess at Hornchurch, made a suggestion to pass the time, to visit a red-lamp house near the docks. They parted.

Phillip spent the time walking alone about the docks and the town, conscious of a new, alert feeling everywhere. If only he were going to the Gaultshires, and perhaps “Spectre” West, France would be quite bearable. Now—officers were liable to be sent to any regiment, it was said. Still, he might be able to wangle it.

The train for Étaples, the base for Infantry Reinforcements, left in the sunny afternoon—hundreds of officers, thousands of men, for its long, slow, clanking journey down the coast. It stopped finally in a siding surrounded by huts and tents to the horizon, and they had to jump down beside the track, and move up a loose sandy soil to level ground where acres of creosoted wood and dirty grey canvas seemed to enclose the spirit of herded nihilism. He followed other officers to the reporting centre; and when particulars had been given, Ray and he and two other officers were shown a tent by an orderly. Here their valises were dumped on wooden floor-boards. “What a ——ing hole,” remarked Ray. The Officers’ Mess, a marquee, had no food. Dinner was over. They managed to buy some bread and cheese, and ate this with pale French beer which Ray said ought never to have lost the horse. It was now half-past nine, by Phillip’s watch. Was Desmond, at that very moment, talking to Lily in Freddy’s? Or were they together in her house? What a strange person she was. What was she really like? But no man could ever understand a woman.

Ray was full of the details of his Boulogne adventure. When someone in the tent asked if he wasn’t afraid of a dose, he replied, “I’ve got old man gonnock already, thank God.”

“But oughtn’t you to be in hospital?”

“No, it’s only a gleet, but it will get me back to Blighty whenever I’ve had enough of out here.”

Lying on the floorboards of his tent, Phillip passed a wretched night. Apart from sleeplessness, the feared body of Ray next to him would roll over against him, snoring and gurgling. So at first light he got out of his flea-bag, in which he had lain half-dressed, and went into the morning air, where gulls were crying and afar a cuckoo was calling. The town lay below. Between the estuary and the sea beyond was a wood. Returning to his tent, he dressed, and going to the empty mess, lay back in a wicker armchair, covered with newspapers for warmth; and feeling relief at being alone, slept.

The day was hot, the work tiring. Carrying rifles and the leather equipment of the ranks with water-bottles, bayonets, and entrenching tools, a company of subalterns set out for what was called the Bull Ring. It lay beyond a sandy road past hospitals and rows of bell tents, upon an open area of low sandhills where trenches were dug, bayonet-fighting courses laid out, with Lewis gun and bombing ranges. Scores of sergeant-instructors were waiting for them. Fall in on your markers! Carry on, sergeant instructors! Left right left right left right, about turn, left wheel, right wheel, halt! by the right, dress! Eyes front! Quick march!

After half an hour of barrack-square drill, they fell out for five minutes. Followed physical jerks; firing of rifle-grenades, throwing of Mills bombs; filing through a gas-chamber, wearing damp P.H. helmets; an obstacle race while the Canary—instructor with yellow band on his arm—yelled for greater speed from thudding hearts. Under coils and over knife-edge obstacles of barbed wire, down into the trench, to stab sacks of straw painted crudely grey and red.

“Stand on the Hun to get yer bayonet out! Tear out ’is guts. Round the traverse following the bomb! Smash ’is face before ’e can recover! Give ’im Kamerad with three inches of cold steel in ’is throat!”

On the way back to camp Phillip thought that the blue estuary, flecked with far-off tiny white wings of gulls seemed as remote as a half-forgotten holiday picture postcard. If only it were Devon.

*

The tens of thousands of other ranks in the camps were not allowed out. Their lines were enclosed by barbed wire like the German prisoner-of-war camp. Every day prisoner-squads were marched away, their feld grau uniforms patched with blue circles and squares, to work on fatigues. They marched with spirit. Individual Germans about the camps snatched off red-banded caps when officers passed, leaping to stiffness before saluting. There was no ragging or barracking during roll-call in the German officers’ section of the camp, Phillip observed, as British officers were said to treat their camp-commandants in Germany. At night singing came from the prisoners’ lines of tents, with the strains of harmonica and accordion.

One early evening Phillip and Ray, sharing a common loneliness, walked down to Paris Plage. He found it to be a deserted watering-place with a long and wide concrete promenade the colour of the surrounding sands. “I’d like to practise bayonet-fighting on some of the prisoners,” said Ray.

“Why? How have they hurt you?”

“In retaliation for the way British prisoners are treated in Germany.”

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity for practising up the line,” replied Phillip. “Especially if you meet the Prussian Guards.”

“Not this baby,” replied Ray. “I’m not out for the V.C. my boy. I’m looking out for No. 1. If I don’t, who will? Sense, isn’t it?”

“Can you really get back home at any time you want to?”

“A couple of bottles of Johnny Walker, and old man gonnock takes me back to Cherry Hinton.”

Phillip had to put up with other details of his companion’s philosophy of preserving life, against the blue and empty expanse of sea and sky. How could he get rid of him, without hurting his feelings? An excuse came when Ray proposed that they try and get off with two nurses who were laughing together as they strode along the promenade, having come down from the town on the steam tram. Phillip said he would go back on the tram and write letters, and left Ray to try his hand alone. Looking back, he saw him accost them, but the nurses walked on as before, leaving Ray looking about him on the otherwise deserted concrete emptiness of Paris Plage, with its little blue and white villas in the distance.

*

After three days at the Bull Ring, officers were posted to strange regimental units up the line. Many were dismayed, despite foreknowledge of what had already happened to others. The posting system seemed to be senseless: officers in kilts were sent to southern regiments; Londoners to Scottish regiments; men of Kent to the Northumberland Fusiliers, Tyneside Scots to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry; Rifle Brigade officers, with great indignation, to the Welch Regiment; all a complete muck-up, it was generally agreed. Some were less unfortunate; Phillip was marked for the battalion of his own regiment he had been with at Northampton. The wilderness did not seem so empty.

Among the others, there was much grumbling, but the base-staff would accept no complaints. It was laid down in orders from G.H.Q. One major said, “You are destroying esprit-de-corps by your damned stupidity! Three hundred men of my regiment, the Black Watch, have had to discard their kilts for an issue of khaki trousers, before going as a draft to the Somerset Light Infantry! While in the next camp an equal number of the Dorsets have been issued with kilts, to serve with the Black Watch! A Boy Scout could do better than this! Bloody base-wallah Huns! Eating your fat heads off one end of your bodies, and wearing out your trousers at the other end, blast you all!”

Steel-helmets weighing two pounds, painted khaki, were issued. With the strap fixed under his chin, Phillip felt new resolution, which induced optimism when they were told that the manganese steel was capable of resisting shrapnel balls coming down at 750 feet per second. He worked this out to be about 850 miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound: as if that mattered, for it was well-known that a man never heard the bullet that hit him.

*

The battalion was some miles from Querrieu, where he and Ray detrained, to find a G.S. wagon waiting for their valises. A guide led the way through the winding town and so to a country road in a valley beside a stream. Cuckoos were calling in the woods, mayflies rising in clouds over the meadows; but the scene for Phillip was empty, flat, without meaning; for this was not England.

Walking on, the two, now some yards apart, came to a track which bore much traffic, judging by the horse dung flattened by solid tyres of lorries, direction boards with arrows, canvas watering troughs, and dumps under tarpaulins; and topping a rise, Phillip saw before him hundreds, thousands of bell tents covering a wide and shallow valley filled with troops.

It was a division withdrawn from the line, to practise over ground chosen to represent the section of the enemy lines which it was to assault. Irregular chalky white worsted lines herring-boned the threadbare scene to the misty distance. The landscape was downland, broken into arable and pasture, but now overlaid by the dusty squatting of an army, with its wheels and feet that had turned all the living garment of grass to a dust which arose with buzzing blowflies clustering upon open latrines and heaps of dung and garbage despite the scattering of chloride of lime. This was the reality of his life, now, thought Phillip, not the fancied coolth of clear water rushing past the boulders of the shadowy Lyn, or the high moor where the sun cracked the pods of the furze, and bees scrambled over the bells of the heather.

But Phillip’s depression lifted when he saw in the orderly room a face he knew; and asking if Captain Milman was still the adjutant, learned that Major Kingsman was acting CO.

“Welcome back,” said Milman, rising from his chair. He was the only adjutant Phillip had known who did that, as though greeting a guest.

Companies were marching into the lines, singing It’s a long, long trail a-winding, steel-helmeted, boots, puttees, and tunics grey with chalk dust, faces brown and cheerful. And there was dear old Bason on a horse.

Other familiar faces soon came to greet him—Bason, Tommy Thompson, Flagg, Paul—now a captain—Wigg, Cox, and finally, in the company mess with Bason, Jasper Kingsman himself. The extraordinary thing was that they all seemed pleased to see him! Why, Phillip could not imagine.

There was no officers’ mess, for they had had no time, said Bason, to do anything about it, since coming out of the line. Bason now had a ropey moustache; Phillip thought he must grow one, too. Paul, the tall shop-walker who had come to them at Northampton, had a Charlie Chaplin. Phillip envied him his three stars: perhaps, if he had remained with them, he would by now have had a captaincy. Another new captain was “Brassy” Cusack, the Glasgow Trades Union official who had given them a beer party in the pub when on the exercise for promotion. Milman’s friend, Thompson, was another—but Wigg, he saw with relief, still had only one pip, so had Cox, acting second-in-command of Bason’s company. The establishment, he knew, was two captains per company; and since he was senior to Cox, he might stand a chance for promotion.

“So they turfed you out of the Emma Gees, did they, old sport?” enquired Bason genially, as they sat together in the tent that was “A” company office. “Give us the latest about London. Still pretty hectic, I suppose? Seen anything of Frances or Alice? I’ve lost touch with Frances. I was a bit gone on her y’know—still, it’s all in the luck of the game,” he said, playing with a pencil. Then looking at him sideways, “You took her out one night, didn’t you? I rather fancy she was keen on you.”

“Oh no, nothing like that,” said Phillip, not wanting any more misunderstandings. He told Bason about the fiasco of Christmas Eve. “And that was the last I saw of Frances or Alice.”

“Alice wanted to make you jealous, and bring you on, didn’t you know?”

“Good lord, really? I thought she liked her ‘sailor man’, Timmy. Anyway, it’s all over and done with now. What about this push? I heard in London it was to be south of Arras, in the new sector taken over from the French. When are we for it?”

“Couple of weeks, maybe three, perhaps four.”

“Where do we go over, I mean, what are all the practice trenches copied from, what place?”

“North-east of Albert, astride the Bapaume Road.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“You will, old sport, or you’ll see what remains of it when we go over the bags! To give you an idea, take a look at this bumff! It’s going to be a cakewalk this time, for all opposition will be wiped out by our guns before we start, not like those dud attacks in the past.” He tossed over a bunch of cyclostyled foolscap paper, headed

OPERATION ORDER NO. 1 (Part 1)

“It’ll be altered, of course. More and more bumff keeps coming in from Brigade. We’re doing another practice rehearsal tomorrow, that’ll make five so far. When you’ve got the general idea, I’ll show you your platoon, and your sergeant can give you the dope. By the way, who’s senior between you two blokes?”

Cox, who was sitting in a canvas chair, reading a letter from home, eye-glass in eye, looked up promptly and said, “I am”.

“I had an idea you were, Phil?” said Bason.

“No, it’s the other way about, skipper,” said Cox. “Catch!” He threw over a packet of cigarettes.

Phillip knew that he was senior to Cox by ten days, but did not like to say so. Bason took a cigarette, and flipped back the yellow packet.

Cox is a liar, thought Phillip; and went on reading.

I’ll wear a tommy’s tunic, thought Phillip, thank God. That will give me an even chance.

He read the next paragraph, and then sat very still, feeling that Bason must hear the thudding of his heart.

He looked across at Cox, sitting cross-legged in his canvas chair, swinging his whangee cane, and knew that Cox had read his thoughts when he said immediately, with an eye-glassy stare, “Go on, you one piecee bad boy, read the rest of it! Gasper?” He threw over the packet of Goldflakes.

Like bloody hell it is, thought Phillip, recalling to mind “Spectre” West’s company of Gaultshires hung up by wire in front of Lone Tree.

Where will the ladders come from, and what about the jam-up they will cause in the jumping-off trench? And who will place them in position? The Angels of Mons? He saw again the chalk-filled bags of the parapet at Loos before Zero, torn by machine-guns to ragged ears of hessian.

“What sort of attack is it to be, I mean how wide is No-man’s Land, d’you know, skipper?”

“Varies between six and eight hundred yards opposite our sector. Why?”

“That means nearly a quarter of a mile for the first two waves to go, after the first advance. What is the rate of advance, is it at the double?”

“What, with over sixty pounds per man of clobber we’ll have to carry? Give us a chance, old sport! At present it’s a hundred yards every two minutes.”

“That’s less than two miles an hour. Rather slow, isn’t it, to go a quarter of a mile under fire.”

“There won’t be a Boche left alive after the bombardment, old sport.”

Phillip picked up the pages, and glanced through half a dozen more. An item caught his eye.

There were many other paragraphs, including RATIONS, WATER DUMP, REGIMENTAL AID POST; and then his gaze fastened on something which accentuated his thoughts.

He put this bunch of papers down, then took up OPERATION ORDER No. 2, which consisted of four cyclostyled pages. Then OPERATION ORDER No. 3, which was of three pages; followed by OPERATION ORDER, Amendment No. 2, and OPERATION ORDERS, Additions and Amendments No. 3.

*

“Cox, here’s the Imprest Account for the company’s pay tomorrow. You’ll find the Field Cashier at Querrieu. Now don’t go to Amiens with the cash and paint the place red, will you?”

“What, with my missus expecting a baby next month? No damned likelihood of that, skipper!”

When Cox had gone, Bason said, “Cox likes to think he is very much the family man these days. Now I’ll take you to your platoon, and introduce you to their feet and kits. The usual inspection. Then you’re free till tomorrow. I’m going down to Amiens this evening, to get a bath, and then a bite at the Godbert. How about coming? We can ride over, it’s only ten kilometres. Are you on? Good. Remember when we used to go up together to Baker Street from camp, and our long walks back after midnight? Good old days. We had some sport, not half we didn’t!”

They walked down to the company lines. Phillip was taken to his platoon sergeant, a small alert, wiry man.

“You’ll find him a good chap,” said Bason, aside. “Between you and me, he asked to be transferred away from the platoon last week, under Wigg. You remember the old lizard? Fortunately for us, Wigg’s just got himself another job.”

“What kind of job, skipper?”

“Acting Area Commandant—and I hope he stays there—we don’t want him back. All the other chaps in the company are keen as mustard.”

“For the attack, you mean?”

“What else? It will be a cakewalk, with one howitzer for every forty yards of Hun front, and one field gun to every twenty-five! That’s in addition to gas, smoke, all the trench mortars—light, medium and heavy—Stokes, Christmas Puddings, Flying Pigs, all going the bundle! We’ll all be home by Christmas, old sport, I’ll take a bet on it. How about a bradbury, level betting?”

“Do you think the war will be over by then?”

“I’ll make it five to one, that it’s over by Christmas! Are you on?”

“All right. Only it will be like robbing an incubator.”

the words flashed in his head as he reversed his puttees preparatory to riding into Amiens for dinner with Bason. Followed by two grooms, they avoided the main road, with its heavy traffic, and went along a track which passed away from the practice area of facsimile German trenches. He had a 16 h.h. chestnut, with a white blaze down its face, and a hard mouth; temporary gentleman with temporary charger’s mariners. However, behind Captain Bason bumping up and down on a bay mare, like the Galloping Major of the song, he felt like a cavalry wallah. His mount kept shaking its head. He dismounted to loosen the curb-chain, which had been hooked too tight under the animal’s jaw. The groom didn’t know his job.

“Two fingers should slide easily between jaw and curb, like this!”

“Very good, sir.”

The wind-waves were upon the corn. Larks sang in the sky. There was no other sound save the clop of hooves, the creak of leather, an occasional clink of the loose curb-chain, as the chestnut behaved, he thought, with gratitude.

*

Thus began one of the most pleasant periods of Phillip’s military life, brief as it was. It was a time given not only to the practice assault, but to sport. There was cricket in the long evenings between the companies, and inter-platoon football matches. Running events, too, and boxing. The company boxing instructor was Phillip’s platoon sergeant, an alert, cheery man with a brown face and pale blue eyes, part Welsh and part Devon, coming from a village inland from the Exmoor coast—so he and Phillip soon had plenty to talk about. Davy Jones gave him boxing lessons, using patience and kindness, and away from the men, because Phillip was shy of his inability, at first, to avoid blows, which wove around and under and through the almost static guard of his right arm. He used the posture taught him years before by his father, left arm straightly extended, right arm covering chin, with no idea of working the forearm to divert blows. But he persisted, and learned the elements of countering, the use of his toes and calves when striking—it could not be called punching.

The frame of Davy Jones was spare and hard as the ash handles of the shovels, paring hooks, mattocks, and picks he had used since boyhood with precision. Phillip persisted, and the exercise gave him confidence and some sort of belief in his body powers. He went for long runs, loping along, mile after mile with the athletes of his platoon, and practised deep breathing in the early morning and at night.

This was after Sergeant Jones had said, “I’ve been a-listening to your breathing, sir. It’s in-out, in-out, like putting three inches of the bayonet in a sack. Lungs is like bellowses, sir, they work best with deep draughts, in and out at the same rate, slowly. Town people don’t know how to use bellowses,” he went on scornfully. “They puff and blast away, scattering the embers, instead of fanning them, sir, to give them new flame with the air in equal proportions, if you understand my meanin’. There’s so much power in an ember, and no more is gained by blasting it to sparks, when its heat is wanted to bake a stick, then fire it. And ’tes the same wi’ breathing, a lung is nothin’ but a bellows. Take in slowly, like, and let out slowly. I breathe eight to a minute, and can expand my chest five inches. I’ll show you.”

And putting a piece of string round his chest, Davy Jones asked Phillip to tie it tight, with a double knot. When this was done he said, “Now watch me!” and with his eyes fixed on Phillip’s he drew in breath slowly, more and more, until the string broke. Holding up a hand for silence, he completed his act, letting out air slowly as he had drawn it in.

“Twenty seconds you’ll find that took, and I could run a mile without breathing any faster if I’d a mind to!”

After parades, in the calm summer evenings, there was the bioscope, with one riotous night, a Charlie Chaplin film. In another barn in Querrieu was the Ah-Rays concert party, run by some gunners. This, like the mobile cinema, was also packed every evening. Some of the actors dressed up as girls, with various types of wigs. Each man in the audience dwelt upon the plaits, golden curls and rouged faces, upon the eyes made large, liquid, and luring with red specks of paint in the corners and crowsfeet of black extending the lids made shadowy with blue powder. Each herded man in the audience was fascinated, filled with longing, stirred by lust which made him shout or grin or hide his facial feelings according to the experiences, or lack, of his body.

Phillip sat motionless, for one of them looked like Polly, with short dark curls to the shoulder; he soon transferred to another with fair hair and eyes which reminded him of Lily, as he longed for her with regrets that he had not had her on Reynard’s Common, since Desmond had cast him off, in the words of the girl in Northampton who had been chucked by her boy after he had had her. Why hadn’t he had that girl, too? What was the point of being idealistic, when no one but yourself cared, really, for ideals? He stared at “Lily”, with unutterable longing, until another “girl” with golden curls sang the duet They’d Never Believe Me with an actor who, Bason said, was a West End matinée idol, and the eyes and curls were those of Helena Rolls, remote and beautiful above the tragedy that was ordinary life.

“Cheer up,” said Bason, behind his hand, “still thinking of that girl who’s ‘too good for you’?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“All right, old sport, don’t get huffy. Frances told me all about it.”

The introspective mood passed when other songs followed: the Cobbler’s Song from Chu Chin Chow, and others from Razzle Dazzle; and by the time they were over, he had revisited many more scenes of his secret life, with their array of swiftly-passing faces, longings, and regrets. Then he forgot himself and lived in the present, thinking of dear old faithful Eugene when the star-turn came on towards the end. This was the West End actor, now in the Kite Balloon branch of the R.F.C., who was famous before the war for his song Gilbert the Filbert. He sang it now—glass in eye, walking to and fro, so debonair with silver-topped cane, silk hat, morning coat and striped trousers with white spats—and brought down the house.

After this someone at the back—it was Ray, it would be—started others to join in a parody, beginning

at which the man at the piano promptly played God Save the King, for some padres and staff-officers were in the front row. Among them, unknown to Phillip, was Father Aloysius, now a chaplain to one of the Irish battalions in the division.

8th (Service) Bn. The Prince Regent’s Own Regt.    

B.E.F., France                

4 June, 1916         

Dear Lily,

How are you getting on? I often think of our jaunt to Reynard’s Common and the Fish Ponds, and the reflections in the water. You are I hope well, and things have not been too bad for you with our mutual friend K. As you can see, I am out here again, and the old life at Freddy’s etc. seems already a far memory. I thought that my feelings for the countryside had gone for ever, but when you were with me, I felt them very much as in the old days. I mean the beauty and the wildness, the enchantment of so much colour and life and warmth of the sun. Most people are restless in the country, they feel a vacancy, and want to get back to the shops and pavements and traffic; what they call life. Sometimes the war seems to have come directly out of that restlessness. This is awkwardly expressed, and probably silly, but you may know what I am trying to say.

Write to me if you have time. But only if you want to. I mean, if you find or know friends you are happy with, please don’t bother. I send in this letter a poppy and a marigold. They grow quite a lot out here, in this chalk country rather like the North Downs, but smoothed out, made larger, and so much more empty, if one forgets for the moment the vast swarming masses of troops, camps, convoys of lorries and guns and horse-transport for ever passing in a haze of dust.

The last of the nightingales still sing. Late at night the notes seem to travel from afar, bird answering bird under the pale glow of the midnight sun in the north-west, the glimmer of the stars upon the chalk of our practice trenches, and the ghostly lines of tents wherein, for the moment, hopes are at peace. Sometimes the thought of the hundreds of thousands of our men out here is momentarily overpowering, when I think of so many individual lives, and what they are really thinking, and hoping. Sometimes I feel that I must know everything that everyone is doing and thinking. I have an idea that a stream of English thought runs through all our days—not like the Randiswell which is no longer a living brook—but like a brook which is crystal clear and pure, with fish in it, and lilies, and dragon-flies.

Do you remember those lakes in the woods we saw together? The time I was there last, before we went together, was on the Saturday before August Bank Holiday. How far away it seems now, that time before the war! Yet it is always near me, sometimes seeming to pass right through the strange life one lives out here, an outward life, in a sense quite unreal. My cousin Willie’s roach pole is still in the rhododendrons where we hid it, by one of the lower lakes—we were coming back for it on the following Saturday. Somehow you seem to be part of the spirit of the Lake Woods: the trees so quiet, the water so cool, the lilies resting among their leaves, whereunder pass the red fins of the roach.

I would like to go there with you again when and if I come back. Please tell no-one this, if you chance to meet any friends (or otherwise!) of mine. They might not understand. Well, I must get down to it now; I write by candlelight, and the three other subalterns sharing the tent are asleep. Write if you feel like it, but don’t tell anyone if you do, or that I have written to you. The reason for this, as I have said, is that some people might misunderstand. Mèfiez-vous, les oreilles ennemies vous ècoutent, as they write up in French railway carriages: Keep your own counsel, enemy ears are listening.

Yours sincerely                                 

PHILLIP MADDISON            

Somewhere in France

5 June, 1916

Dear Polly

How are you? As you can see, I am out again, this time it is do or die. For great things portend. I thought of you last night, at the divisional concert party, where were to be seen some most beautiful actresses, who sang some of the current London hits, Razzle Dazzle etc., How is your Father? Enjoying good health, I hope? And Grannie Thacker? And of course Aunt Liz, whose sausage rolls I shall never forget. How is Percy? I am sorry I have not been to see you lately, duty calls, etc. etc., but when I get some leave I will make amends. Ye olde mo-bike is laid up at ye olde Wetherley’s, he of ye olde long curling moustaches, in ye olde High Street of ye olde Borough. Do write if you have time and give me all your news. How is ye olde wood-pecker in ye olde room with ye olde tester bedde, is he still glinting i’th’ eye when ye candelle shineth on ye patchwork bedspread where of yore these my bones rested, so well cushioned on ye most soft and delightful dove-like sweetness of my dreams?

Until we meet again, book-boo-roo-roo, as the ring dove croodles to his mate in the tali holly hedges of the village I remember so well in Gaultshire.

With love to all,                  

PHIL.     

British Expeditionary Force

6 June. 1916

Dear Mrs. Rolls

I write this in my tent, where all is grey, from the marching hosts sending up the chalk dust of Picardy. I trust that all is well at Turret House, and that no cockchafers under monstrous cocoons have been droning across your skies of late. We are now well behind the front, and what can be seen here makes one realise how mighty is the strength of Albion when once it is aroused. Thousands of shunting trains heard at night from the Hill, from the district beyond Shooter’s Hill, have it would appear discharged their loads upon the rolling downlands where until recently all was pastoral peace and agricultural activity.

There is a stream here where we bathe, to the unhappiness of various French fishermen, who now that the mayfly is up would prefer the solitude of human herons. This is understandable, although not to hordes in khaki who consider that Piscator, as Isaak Walton calls him, would be better equipped for present-day activities with a rifle and bayonet than with a green-heart rod. It does seem strange to be fishing amidst all this activity, until one considers that one was oneself about to go to Lynmouth for the very same purpose, until the threat to Verdun called for a counter-stroke, as the military writers say. I don’t think I would like to fish here, all the same; for it is not England, where my thoughts lie, as do those of most of us.

Tomorrow we are leaving here, and will be marching nearer the sun. We had divisional sports today, including judging horses, vehicles, etc., a wonderful spectacle. Bands played, and the chains of our transport glittered so brightly that the French interpreter asked if they were nickel-plated. It is all quite different now from what it was when I was out before; leather straps and breechings are saddle-soaped and spotless, waggons and limbers painted and oiled, even the horny feet of the horses are polished with ox-blood shoe polish! Ready for the triumphal march into Berlin, in fact. At least, that is the feeling here. For myself, I think it will not be such a cake-walk as the others seem to think; but at any rate the spirit is that of your favourite character in a book, as you once told me, Richard Coeur-de-Lion.

I expect the green slopes of the Seven Fields will be echoing, during these long summer evenings, to the crack of Mr. Rolls’ rifle. This country is in places not unlike the landscape there, although it is more continuous, like a prolonged swell of the open Atlantic compared with an inland sea. France is less populated than England, Major Kingsman (a friend of mine from Hornchurch days) tells me, in relation to the rural areas. The French farmer has heavy grey Percheron horses to work with, and they go with his wooden sabots and imperturbable mien. I expect they will not be sorry to see the troops off their crops, especially as the corn has come into ear, and the wind-waves rush over the wide fields, carrying the butterflies in the hot sun and the swallows skimming high after gnats and other of the ephemeridae from the water meadows of the stream, which flows, under its green mail of water-weed, on its way to join the Somme, and the sea which washes the chalk cliffs of old England.

It is past midnight, I must say, “Out brief candle!”, and turn in upon the floor of my tent. This day we march towards the unknown. Please will you give my kind regards and my best wishes to all for a fine summer. Shall you be going to the Isle of Wight this year, or will war-time restrictions prove too much to overcome? Salaam!

Yours sincerely                          

PHILLIP      

He felt suddenly tired after writing this letter, lost confidence, and tore it up.