The Path without Primroses
I was not anxious to go. An uncertain but unceasing disquiet had been upon me, and when, returning to the officers’ mess at Shoreham Camp one Sunday evening, I read the notice that I was under orders for France, I did not hide my feelings. Berry, a subaltern of my set, who was also named for the draft, might pipe to me, ‘Hi, Blunden, we’re going out: have a drink’; I could not dance. There was something about France in those days which looked to me, despite all journalistic enchanters, to be dangerous. For a fortnight or so I had been in charge of a squad of men nominally recovered from wounds and awaiting their next transmigration. It had been my happiness to march them out to a place at once as sequestered and sunny as I could find, overlooking the lazy Adur, and there to let them bask on the grass, and tell their tales, and be peaceful. How contentedly they had rested in the lucky sun! Nor was much said among them – their thoughts were their conversation. In that brief fortnight I began to love these convalescent soldiers, and their distinguishing demeanour sank into me. They hid what daily grew plain enough – the knowledge that the war had released them only for a few moments, that the war would reclaim them, that the war was a jealous war and long-lasting. 1914, 1915, 1916 … Occasionally I would ask the silly questions of non-realization; they in their tolerance pardoned, smiled and hinted, knowing that I was learning, and should not escape the full lesson.
Such formalities as were attached to a temporary second lieutenant’s departure for the front no doubt took place on Monday morning, but I have forgotten them. The adjutant, warranted by expert observers to have been previously a commercial traveller, though I did not think his heavy gleamless manner supported that theory, smiled sourly, and inwardly congratulated himself on having four fewer unnecessary officers. (There were still about 150 to dispose of.) The commanding officer, a timid fragile man, gave me (as his way was) a pocket Testament bound in green suède, with coloured pictures. It went with me always, mainly unconsulted; it survives. I took myself off to Framfield, home, and all too soon it came out why. Walks and depredations round the glebelands, and stolen fishing at Heaver’s Mill, and Sunday service with its acceptable display of amusing human peculiarity – all faded from my head, and my brothers and sisters allowed a melancholy hue to steal upon their mood. The builder’s daughter too showed signs of emotion, under the evening star.
My mother went to the station with me, between pride and revolt – but the war must be attended to. Next, let us remark the platforms of Victoria, on this occasion perceptibly more remarkable to me than hitherto. That evening, a lugubriously merry Highlander and a sturdy Engineer, to whom I had democratically appealed for help on some matter, who were themselves returning to the British Expeditionary Force next morning, asked me my age. I replied; and, discipline failing, the Scotchman murmured to himself ‘Only a boy – only a boy,’ and shed tears, while his mate grunted an angry sympathy. Then, ‘But you’ll be all right, son – excuse me, won’t you? – you’ll be all right!’ They were discussing the diminished prospect of a bombardment of Lille when I withdrew.
Light does not gleam up on the immediately following journey; surely I shall recall, from that crisis of my life above all, the evanescence of England beyond the grey waves, and the imminence of France. Surely the usual submarine excitement, and avoidance of the captain selecting victims for duties, marked the crossing. Something about an hotel, and manful drinks, and going down to the saloon for a plate of ham, and meeting a school-fellow pensively returning to the line, and then the cloak-room at Boulogne Station, flutters dimly for elucidation; there was a train journey between verdurous banks and silvering poplars, ending drearily at Etaples, known as Eatapples or Heeltaps. The Base! dismaltents, huge wooden warehouses, glum roadways, prisoning wire. I took my share of a tent, trying to remember the way to freedom, and laid on my valise the ebony walking-stick which had been my grandfather’s, and was to be my pilgrim’s staff. It went. I was away from it only a few minutes – it went. But this was before the war was officially certified to be making the world safe for democracy.
Was it on this visit to Etaples that some of us explored the church – a fishing-village church – and took tea comfortably in an inn? Those tendernesses ought not to come, however dimly, in my notions of Etaples. I associate it, as millions do, with ‘The Bull-Ring,’ that thirsty, savage, interminable training-ground. Marching up to it, in the tail of a long column, I was surprised by shouts from another long column dustily marching the other way: and there, sad-smiling, waving hands and welcoming, were two or three of the convalescent squad who had been so briefly mine on the April slopes opposite Lancing. I never saw them again; they were hurried once more, fast as corks on a millstream, without complaint into the bondservice of destruction. Thinking of them, and the pleasant chance of their calling to me, and the evil quickness with which their wounds had been made no defence against a new immolation, I found myself on the sandy, tented training-ground. The machine-guns there thudded at their targets, for the benefit of those who had advanced through wire entanglements against such furies equally with beginners like myself. And then the sunny morning was darkly interrupted. Rifle-grenade instruction began. A Highland sergeant-major stood magnificently before us, with the brass brutality called a Hales rifle-grenade in his hand. He explained the piece, fingering the wind-vane with easy assurance; then stooping to the fixed rifle, he prepared to shoot the grenade by way of demonstration. According to my unsoldierlike habit, I had let the other students press near the instructor, and was listlessly standing on the skirts of the meeting, thinking of something else, when the sergeant-major having just said ‘I’ve been down here since 1914, and never had an accident,’ there was a strange hideous clang. Several voices cried out; I found myself stretched on the floor, looking upwards in the delusion that the grenade had been fired straight above and was about to fall among us. It had indeed been fired, but by some error had burst at the muzzle of the rifle: the instructor was lying with mangled head, dead, and others lay near him, also blood-masked, dead and alive. So ended that morning’s work on the Bull-Ring.
This particular shock, together with the general dreariness of the great camp, produced in me (in spite of the fear with which I had come into France) a wish to be sent quickly to the line. The wish was answered the next afternoon or thereabouts. I hear now the tink-tink-tink of the signal bell, the thin insistent cry Abbéville, Abbéville, through the dark; but many train journeys made later in that curious country have with their rumbling wheels and jerking, banging trucks drowned the self-story of that first one. At last we were unloaded at Béthune, many young officers and bulging valises; it was morning, a staff officer or two walked and illumined the platform. That sinister war was not far off, and air seemed to communicate without noise or any definite instance; but I looked along the railway track going on eastwards, and saw how high the grass and weeds had grown between certain of the metals. Orders were given me: with my excellent companion Doogan, a plump, ironical, unscareable Irishman, and others, I was to travel by light railway to Locon, a place of which the newspapers had not spoken. Meanwhile, Doogan decided that we must have coffee before setting out again, and he had led the way into a shop outside the station, and with little or no French caused two cheerful cups to appear, when there was shouting outside, and across the cobbled square the little street-train for Locon was on the instant of departing.
Locon is a few miles north of Béthune. Many times afterwards did the blush come to my cheeks as I recalled my asking a sapper, on this first approach, whether things were very noisy at Locon. In truth it was not a long way behind the trenches, but those trenches were a ‘rest sector,’ and peace prevailed much nearer their barbed wire and rusty tins than Locon. The steam-car rattled on. ‘Are we anywhere near Manchester?’ shouted a Tommy to a peasant on the track. We presently alighted in a muddy country road, alongside a green ditch and a row of short willow-stubs, looked for our valises in the heap, and then were haled to a kind of loft, the Brigade office, to be told our further proceeding. ‘Report at le Touret.’ The battalion mess-cart was coming to carry us.