And since three oclock yesterday afternoon (yesterday morning rather, noon when the French quit) it had merely hung in its spent bulge against the arrested weight of the Germanic air, even roofless now since with dark the last patrolling aircraft had gone to roost and there remained only the flares arching up from behind the flickerless wire with a faint hiss, a prolonged whispered sniff, to bloom and parachute and hang against the dark with the cold thick texture and color of the working lights in a police morgue, then sliding silently down the black air like drops of grease on a window-pane, and far away to the North the spaced blink and thump of a single gun, a big one, with no following burst at all, as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate I-Am, harmless: the iron maw of Dis, toothless, unwearyable, incapable, bellowing.
One of the privates was a sentry. He stood on the firestep, leaning slightly against the wall beside the sand-bagged aperture in which his rifle lay loaded and cocked and with the safety off. In civil life he had indubitably been a horse-groom, because even in khaki and even after four years of infantryman’s war he still moved, stood in an aura, effluvium of stalls and tack-rooms — a hard-faced jockey-sized man who seemed to have brought on his warped legs even into the French and Flemish mud something of hard, light, razor-edge horses and betting-rings, who even wore the steel helmet at the same vicious rake of the filthy heavy-checked cap which would have been the badge of his old dead calling and dedication.
But this was only inference, from his appearance and general air, not from anything he ever told anyone; even his mates in the battalion who had stayed alive long enough to have known him four years knew nothing about his past, as if he did not have one, had not even been born until the fourth of August 1914 — a paradox who had no business in an infantry battalion at all, and an enigma to the extent that six months after he entered the battalion (this was about Christmas, 1914) the colonel commanding it had been summoned to Whitehall to make a specific report on him.
Because the authorities had discovered that eleven privates in the battalion had made the man beneficiary of their soldiers’ life assurance policies; by the time the colonel reached the war ministry, the number had increased to twenty, and although the colonel had made an intensive two-days’ investigation of his own before leaving the battalion, he knew little more than they in London did.
Because the company officers knew nothing about it, and from the N.C.O.’s he got only rumor and hearsay, and from the men themselves, only a blank and respectful surprised innocence as to the man’s very existence, the sum of which was, that the (eleven when the war office got its first report, and twenty by the time the colonel reached London, and — the colonel had been absent from the battalion twelve hours now — nobody knew how many more by this time) men had approached the battalion sergeant-major all decorously and regularly and apparently of their own free will and desire, and made the request which, since none of them had legal heirs, was their right to make, and the Empire’s duty to acquiesce to. As for the man himself ——
‘Yes,’ the staff-major who was doing the informal questioning, said. ‘What did he say about it?’ and then, after a moment: ‘You didn’t even question him?’
This time, the colonel did shrug. ‘Why?’ he said.
‘Quite,’ the major said. ‘Though I should have been tempted — if only to learn what he can be selling them.’
‘I should rather know what the ones who have legal heirs and cant make over the insurance, are paying him instead,’ the colonel said.
‘Their souls, obviously,’ the major said. ‘Since their deaths are already pledged.’ And that was all. In the whole King’s Regulations, through which had been winnowed and tested and proved every conceivable khaki or blue activity and posture and intention, with a rule provided for it and a penalty provided for the rule, there was nothing to cover it: who (the man) had infringed no discipline, trafficked with no enemy, failed to shine no brass nor wrap properly any puttie nor salute any officer. Yet still the colonel sat there, until the major, a little more than curious now, said, ‘What? Say it.’
‘I cant,’ the colonel said. ‘Because the only word I can think of is love,’ — explaining that: the stupid, surly, dirty, unsocial, really unpleasant man, who apparently neither gambled nor drank (during the last two months, the battalion sergeant-major and the colonel’s orderly sergeant had sacrificed — unofficially, of course — no little of their own free time and slumber too, walking suddenly into dugouts and rest billets and estaminets, ascertaining that), who, in the light of day, seemed to have no friends at all, yet each time the sergeant-major or the orderly sergeant entered one of the dugouts or billets, they would find it jammed with men.
And not the same men either, but each time there would be a new set of faces, so that in each period between two pay-days, the entire battalion roll could have been called by anyone detailed to sit beside the man’s bunk; indeed, on pay-day itself, or for a day or two days after it, the line, queue, had been known to extend into the street, as when people wait to enter a cinema, while the dugout, the room, itself would be jammed to the door with men standing or sitting or squatting about the bunk or corner in which the man himself lay quite often asleep, morose and resigned and not even talking, like people waiting in a dentist’s anteroom; —
waiting, that was it, as both the sergeant-major and the sergeant realised, if for nothing else except for them — the sergeant-major and the sergeant — to leave.
‘Why dont you give him a stripe?’ the major said. ‘If it’s devotion, why not employ it for the greater glory of English arms?’
‘How?’ the colonel said. ‘Try to buy with one file, the man who already owns the battalion?’
‘Perhaps you should assign your own insurance and pay-book over to him.’
‘Yes,’ the colonel said. ‘If he gives me time to.’ And that was all. The colonel spent fourteen hours with his wife. At noon the next day, he was in Boulogne again; at six that afternoon, his car entered the village where the battalion was in rest billets. ‘Stop here,’ the colonel said, and sat for a moment in the car, looking at the queue of men which was moving infinitesimally toward and through the gate into one of those sweating stone courtyards which for a thousand years the French have been dotting about the Picard and Artois and Flanders countryside, apparently for the purpose of housing between battles the troops of the allied nations come to assist in preserving them. No, the colonel thought, not a cinema; the anticipation is not great enough, although the urgency is twice as strong. They are like the parade outside a latrine. ‘Drive on,’ he said.
The other private was a battalion runner. He was sitting on the firestep, his unslung rifle propped beside him, himself half-propped, half-reclining against the trench-wall, his boots and putties not caked with the drying mud of trenches but dusted with the recent powdery dust of roads; even his attitude showed not so much indolence, but fatigue, physical exhaustion.
Except that it was not spent exhaustion, but the contrary: with something tense behind it, so that the exhaustion did not seem to possess him, but rather he seemed to wear it as he did the dust, sitting there for five or six minutes now, all of which he had spent talking, and with nothing of exhaustion in his voice either.
Back in the old spanking time called peace, he had been not only a successful architect, but a good one, even if (in private life) an aesthete and even a little precious; at this hour of those old dead days, he would have been sitting in a Soho restaurant or studio (or, his luck good, even in a Mayfair drawing room or even — at least once or twice or perhaps three times — boudoir), doing a little more than his share of the talking about art or politics or life or both or all three.
He had been among the first London volunteers, a private at Loos; without even a lance corporal’s stripe on his sleeve, he had extricated his platoon and got it back alive across the Canal; he commanded the platoon for five days at Passchendaele and was confirmed in
