The Penguin Book of First World War Stories by None, Anne-Marie Einhaus Page B

Cath’lic.” So I passed him the an’mal and off on me journey. Not the least trouble at all, findin’ the body. The birds were all pointin’ to ut. They hated ut. Faith, but that fellow had seen the quare things!’ Toomey looked down again at the monstrously staring eyes of his capture, bursting with agonies more fantastic, I thought, than any that stare from the bayoneted dead in a trench.
    â€˜The man wi’ the dog,’ Toomey said, ‘may go the same road. His teeth are all knockin’ together. A match for your own, Billy.’ In trenches you did not pretend not to know all about one another, the best and the worst. In that screenless life friendship frankly condoled with weak nerves or an ugly face or black temper.
    â€˜Sergeant,’ said Toomey, ‘ye’ll help me indent for the fiver? A smart drop of drink it’ll be for the whole of the boys.’
    I nodded. ‘Bring him along,’ I said, ‘now.’
    â€˜Well, God ha’ mercy on his sowl,’ said Toomey, hoisting the load on to his back.
    â€˜And of all Christian souls, I pray God.’ I did not say it. Only Ophelia’s echo, crossing my mind. How long would Mynns last? Till I could wangle his transfer to the divisional laundry or gaff?
    I brought Toomey along to claim the fruit of his guile. We had to pass Schofield. He looked more at ease in his mind than before. I asked the routine question. ‘All correct, Sergeant,’ he answered. ‘Deucks is coom dahn. Birds is all stretchin’ dahn to it, proper.’
    Its own mephitic mock-peace was re-filling The Garden. But no one can paint a miasma. Anyhow, I am not trying to. This is a trade report only.

RICHARD ALDINGTON
VICTORY
    A motor despatch-rider, with a broad blue and white band on his khaki arm, chugged and bumped along the
pavé
road. He slowed down as he came to two infantry officers, arguing over maps, and straddled his legs out like a hobby-horse rider as he handed over a slip of folded paper.
    â€˜From Division, sir. Urgent.’
    Captain Baron, commanding C Company, 1 shoved his transparent map case under his arm and irritatedly thrust back his tin hat, which was new and chafed his head. He was a plump, stuggy little man in gold-rimmed glasses, in peace time the head of the clerical department of a large London commercial firm, and enormously devoted to ‘bumph,’
i.e.
all the vast paper apparatus of war. His conscientiousness in answering paper questions drew down on him and his cursing subalterns unending streams of chits and reports. He spent hours a day in useless writing. This made him so tired that he was always dropping off to sleep, like the Dormouse in
Alice
. 2 Under the stress of perpetual insomnia and conscientiousness this mildest of men had become frightfully irritable. He liked a well-planned unalterable routine, and his conscientiousness was always flabbergasted by any scrimshanking in his subordinates. He petulantly disapproved of the open warfare which had suddenly come after years of trench routine: unexpected things kept happening and decisions had to be made at once without any guiding precedent – which was most incorrect. Consequently, much of the practical work of the company was performed by his second-in-command, a tall young man, who submitted tohis superior’s fantasies with bored resignation – an attitude he adopted to the whole war.
    â€˜Tch, tch, tch! Now what are we to make of this, Ellerton? Another of these
wretched
counter-orders!’
    Ellerton glanced at the despatch. It was marked ‘Urgent’, and contained a peremptory order to all units not to cross the Mons–Maubeuge road. Baron mechanically pushed up his ill-fitting helmet again, and continued irritatedly:
    â€˜What
do
they want us to do? First we get urgent orders to push on at all costs and establish contact with the Boche – the Colonel strafed me not fifteen minutes ago