At first they had just looked, ready to avert their gaze, but as the man did not seem to be aware of them, they began to whisper quietly to one another behind their hands. But the man did not seem to notice this, so they soon were talking in undertone, watching with bright, alert, curious eyes the stiff, incongruous figure leaning a little forward on the stick, looking out a foul window beyond which there was nothing to see save an occasional shattered road and man-high stump of shattered tree breaking small patches of tilled land whorled with apparent unreason about islands of earth indicated by low signboards painted red, the islands inscrutable, desolate above the destruction which they wombed.
Then the train, slowing, ran suddenly among tumbled brick, out of which rose a small house of corrugated iron bearing a name in big letters; they watched the man lean forward.
“See!” one of the women said. “His mouth. He is reading the name. What did I tell you? It is as I said. His son fell here.”
“Then he had lots of sons,” the other woman said. “He has read the name each time since we left Arras. Eh! Eh! Him a son? That cold?”
“They do get children, though.”
“That is why they drink whisky. Otherwise . . .”
“That’s so. They think of nothing save money and eating, the English.”
Presently they got out; the train went on. Then others entered the carriage, other peasants with muddy boots, carrying baskets or live or dead beasts; they in turn watched the rigid, motionless figure leaning at the window while the train ran across the ruined land and past the brick or iron stations among the tumbled ruins, watching his lips move as he read the names.
“Let him look at the war, about which he has apparently heard at last,” they told one another. “Then he can go home. It was not in his barnyard that it was fought.”
“Nor in his house,” a woman said.
II
The battalion stands at ease in the rain. It has been in rest billets two days, equipment has been replaced and cleaned, vacancies have been filled and the ranks closed up, and it now stands at ease with the stupid docility of sheep in the ceaseless rain, facing the streaming shape of the sergeant-major.
Presently the colonel emerges from a door across the square. He stands in the door a moment, fastening his trench coat, then, followed by two A.D.C.’s, he steps gingerly into the mud in polished boots and approaches.
“Para-a-a-de— ‘Shun!” the sergeant-major shouts. The battalion clashes, a single muffled, sullen sound. The sergeant-major turns, takes a pace toward the officers, and salutes, his stick beneath his armpit. The colonel jerks his stick toward his cap peak.
“Stand at ease, men,” he says. Again the battalion clashes, a single sluggish, trickling sound. The officers approach the guide file of the first platoon, the sergeant-major falling in behind the last officer. The sergeant of the first platoon takes a pace forward and salutes. The colonel does not respond at all.
The sergeant falls in behind the sergeant-major, and the five of them pass down the company front, staring in turn at each rigid, forward-staring face as they pass it. First Company.
The sergeant salutes the colonel’s back and returns to his original position and comes to attention. The sergeant of the second company has stepped forward, saluted, is ignored, and falls in behind the sergeant-major, and they pass down the second company front. The colonel’s trench coat sheathes water onto his polished boots. Mud from the earth creeps up his boots and meets the water and is channelled by the water as the mud creeps up the polished boots again.
Third Company. The colonel stops before a soldier, his trench coat hunched about his shoulders where the rain trickles from the back of his cap, so that he looks somehow like a choleric and outraged bird. The other two officers, the sergeant-major and the sergeant halt in turn, and the five of them glare at the five soldiers whom they are facing. The five soldiers stare rigid and unwinking straight before them, their faces like wooden faces, their eyes like wooden eyes.
“Sergeant,” the colonel says in his pettish voice, “has this man shaved today?”
“Sir!” the sergeant says in a ringing voice; the sergeant-major says:
“Did this man shave today, Sergeant?” and all five of them glare now at the soldier, whose rigid gaze seems to pass through and beyond them, as if they were not there. “Take a pace forward when you speak in ranks!” the sergeant-major says.
The soldier, who has not spoken, steps out of ranks, splashing a jet of mud yet higher up the colonel’s boots.
“What is your name?” the colonel says.
“024186 Gray,” the soldier raps out glibly. The company, the battalion, stares straight ahead.
“Sir!” the sergeant-major thunders.
“Sir-r,” the soldier says.
“Did you shave this morning?” the colonel says.
“Nae, sir-r.”
“Why not?”
“A dinna shave, sir-r.”
“You dont shave?”
“A am nae auld enough tae shave.”
“Sir!” the sergeant-major thunders.
“Sir-r,” the soldier says.
“You are not . . .” The colonel’s voice dies somewhere behind his choleric glare, the trickling water from his cap peak. “Take his name, Sergeant-major,” he says, passing on.
The battalion stares rigidly ahead. Presently it sees the colonel, the two officers and the sergeant-major reappear in single file. At the proper place the sergeant-major halts and salutes the colonel’s back. The colonel jerks his stick hand again and goes on, followed by the two officers, at a trot toward the door from which he had emerged.
The sergeant-major faces the battalion again. “Para-a-a-de—” he shouts. An indistinguishable movement passes from rank to rank, an indistinguishable precursor of that damp and sullen clash which dies borning. The sergeant-major’s stick has come down from his armpit; he now leans on it, as officers do. For a time his eye roves along the battalion front.
“Sergeant Cunninghame!” he says at last.
“Sir!”
“Did you take that man’s name?”
There is silence for a moment — a little more than a short moment, a little less than a long one. Then the sergeant says: “What man, sir?”
“You, soldier!” the sergeant-major says.
The battalion stands rigid. The rain lances quietly into the mud between it and the sergeant-major as though it were too spent to either hurry or cease.
“You soldier that dont shave!” the sergeant-major says.
“Gray, sir!” the sergeant says.
“Gray. Double out ’ere.”
The man Gray appears without haste and tramps stolidly before the battalion, his kilts dark and damp and heavy as a wet horse-blanket. He halts, facing the sergeant-major.
“Why didn’t you shave this morning?” the sergeant-major says.
“A am nae auld enough tae shave,” Gray says.
“Sir!” the sergeant-major says.
Gray stares rigidly beyond the sergeant-major’s shoulder.
“Say sir when addressing a first-class warrant officer!” the sergeant-major says. Gray stares doggedly past his shoulder, his face beneath his vizorless bonnet as oblivious of the cold lances of rain as though it were granite. The sergeant-major raises his voice:
“Sergeant Cunninghame!”
“Sir!”
“Take this man’s name for insubordination also.”
“Very good, sir!”
The sergeant-major looks at Gray again. “And I’ll see that you get the penal battalion, my man. Fall in!”
Gray turns without haste and returns to his place in ranks, the sergeant-major watching him. The sergeant-major raises his voice again:
“Sergeant Cunninghame!”
“Sir!”
“You did not take that man’s name when ordered. Let that happen again and you’ll be for it yourself.”
“Very good, sir!”
“Carry on!” the sergeant-major says.
“But why did ye no shave?” the corporal asked him. They were back in billets: a stone barn with leprous walls, where no light entered, squatting in the ammoniac air on wet straw about a reeking brazier. “Ye kenned we were for inspection thae mor-rn.”
“A am nae auld enough tae shave,” Gray said.
“But ye kenned thae colonel would mar-rk ye on parade.”
“A am nae auld enough tae shave,” Gray repeated doggedly and without heat.
III
“For two hundred years,” Matthew Gray said, “there’s never a day, except Sunday, has passed but there is a hull rising on Clyde or a hull going out of Clydemouth with a Gray-driven nail in it.” He looked at young Alec across his steel spectacles, his neck bowed. “And not excepting their godless Sabbath hammering and sawing either.
Because if a hull could be built in a day, Grays could build it,” he added with dour pride. “And now, when you are big enough to go down to the yards with your grandadder and me and take a man’s place among men, to be trusted manlike with hammer and saw yersel.”
“Whisht, Matthew,” old Alec said. “The lad can saw as straight a line and drive as mony a nail a day as yersel or even me.”
Matthew paid his father no attention. He continued to speak his slow, considered words, watching his oldest son across the spectacles. “And with John Wesley not old enough by two years, and wee Matthew by ten, and your grandfather an auld man will soon be—”
“Whisht,” old Alec said. “I’m no but sixty-eight. Will you be telling the lad he’ll make his bit journey to London and come back to find me in the parish house, mayhap? ‘Twill be over by Christmastide.”
“Christmastide or no,” Matthew said, “a Gray, a shipwright, has no business at an English war.”
“Whisht ye,” old Alec said. He rose and went to the chimney cupboard
