His Second War Read online

  What was in his valise after all? Three blankets and a sleepingbag. He could always wangle a couple of blankets from the store. A gas cape—what on earth would he want with that? A suit of battle-dress was easily replaced. He had lugged camp kit round with him for two years now and had not needed it since his first week in camp. He had not worn his webbing equipment once. Binoculars, and map cases and drawing-boards, how likely was he to miss them? The socks and shorts, the shirts and handkerchiefs, what were they but reserves? He could stock up when the need came for them. One should travel light. Was that valise really anything more than an encumbrance? Was he not lucky to be rid of it? Was not its loss another reason for bearing gratitude to that later train?

  He tried to trace it: he telephoned here and there. He left messages through the E.S.O. with every R.T.O. in the north of England. But in his heart he prayed that it might not turn up in time. His prayer was granted.

  9

  s.s. “—VILLE”

  He had been posted to a Belgian ship, an eleven-thousand tonner built shortly before the war, for the West African run from Antwerp to the Guinea Coast. She was a luxury liner, the flagship of the line. She carried pre-war advertisements of cruises to South America and aeroplane passages to the Congo. She was decorated with murals of brown rivers and green hills: of natives carrying gourds upon their heads. The notices in the lounges were in Walloon and French.

  She had a Belgian captain and a Belgian crew; the same crew and captain that had sailed the ship out of Casablanca on a mid-May morning eighteen months before, to change their course suddenly in mid-channel heading west for Plymouth instead of east for Antwerp. For eighteen months none of the crew had seen their families, few had had any word from them. They were living in the familiar atmosphere of their ship and of the sea: each man was doing exactly what he had been doing in the autumn of 1938. Yet no men’s lives could have been more uprooted. They were living in a void, a vacuum. It was their fate until the war was won, till their country’s liberties had been restored, to travel as strangers between foreign ports, on a succession of blind voyages, not knowing whither they were bound, headed for nowhere, with nowhere to return to, with no port that they could think of as their home. One had the feeling of being on a ghost ship.

  10

  RIVER MOUTH, 31 SEPTEMBER 1941

  In the middle of the third night he woke to the gentle shiver of vibrating engines. “We’re off,” he thought.

  It was a grey cold morning. It had rained in the night. It would be raining again by noon. They were moving slowly up a narrow river. On one side the fields stretched flat and featureless into the obscured outlines of an autumn mist. There were buildings on the other side and men bicycling along a towpath to their work. As the troopship passed they waved at it.

  It was a little after seven. Half a dozen fellow-passengers leant in silence against the taffrail. One of them turned away. “This gives me the willies,” he said, and went below.

  11

  CHARACTERS ON BOARD

  I. O.C. Ship. Tall, thin, cadaverous, with a stiff black moustache, wearing tartan trews, and looking like Groucho Marx, he was a man of fifty with all the last-war medals including the M.C. He was a war-substantive Major, a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel: a local Colonel. On the first evening he paraded the officers in the lounge.

  “I do not know where we are sailing,” he said. “But this is my fourth trip. I have normally found that it takes ten weeks to get there and, though this does not concern you, I have found that it takes rather longer to get back.”

  He had a nice dry humour.

  “For the first six days at sea,” he said, “you will be in danger of attack both from air and submarines. You will therefore sleep in your clothes. That does not mean, of course, that you may not sleep with your pyjamas under your trousers, provided that your trousers are near at hand.

  “You are not allowed to bring more than ten pounds aboard with you. A great many of you have brought a great deal more. I am going to assume, however, that you have obeyed the regulations, and the finances of the ship will be run upon that basis. There will be no treating. That does not mean, of course, that if an officer wishes to celebrate his birthday or his wife’s birthday or some friend’s birthday, he may not place a bottle of wine upon the table.

  “Gambling is not allowed on board. That does not mean that officers may not play a quiet game of bridge or poker or pontoon. I put up a notice ‘No gambling’ because, well, because there must be no gambling.”

  2. The Count. It was the obvious nickname. He was young, slim, short, dapper, ambassadorial, bilingual. He had an immense Parker fountain pen, an inch and a half in circumference: and a shaving brush which was three inches long when out of use, but whose brush unscrewed and fitted into its own hilt, doubling its length for use. He wrote amusingly libidinous verse and was at work upon a novel of aristocratic life in eighteenth-century Germany. He spent two hours a day polishing his boots and belt. He was always ready to “work up” a friend’s boots for him provided they had been made out of expensive leather. He wore an eyeglass. In the third week out he shaved off his small black moustache. He asked everyone whether the change suited him. No one however had noticed any change. One had never been conscious of his moustache. One had thought of him as “the man with the eyeglass.”

  3. The “Get-Together” Major. He was kilted, in the London Scottish, in the early thirties. He was tall and stoutly built. He had a long, stiff, black moustache. He had a signet ring which he revolved whenever he made a speech, which was quite often. He had worked before the war in the advertising side of journalism. He hoped after the war to move to the editorial side. He usually carried an anthology of modern verse with him.

  He was chairman of the Sports Committee. He “compered” the ship’s concerts, extremely well. His introductory speeches concluded with a smoking-room story that had the great merit of never appearing to be a chestnut. He was a good churchman, and read the lessons at the ship’s Sunday service. He read them well. But his reading of them caused considerable concern to a rather junior officer who in peace-time was a medical missionary. It seemed to him very shocking that the man who on Saturday night had been twiddling his signet ring and recounting smutty anecdotes, should thirteen hours later from the same dais, be declaiming holy script.

  4. The Praying Mantis. He was thin, of medium height, bald with pointed features. Every morning he went on deck and performed a series of exercises that he had learnt from a Hindu. They were undramatic exercises carried through at the rate of a slow-motion film. He would crouch like a sprinter before a race and slowly bend his head forward till his forehead touched the ground, then slowly draw up his other knee, then slowly straighten himself out. It looked easy, but was extremely difficult. They were stretching exercises. He wore nothing but shorts. He looked very cold and scarcely human. He practised them, he said, for reasons of economy. He was a poor man and they fulfilled the functions of a laxative.

  5. Romantic Novelist. His first question at table was: “Do any of you fence? I have brought my foils with me.”

  A set of foils seemed a strange article to take on a campaign. But actually they proved a godsend. They provided in that confined space almost the only violent exercise that was possible.

  Their owner was a man of forty: a scholar of Winchester and New College. He had written a number of one-act blank-verse plays and two historical novels that had proved best sellers. He was married to an actress of skill and charm. Though he had served for two years in the ranks and taken part in a Commando raid, he looked a ragged don rather than a soldier. His shoulders were bent, he was thin and angular. His uniform did not fit. He looked out of health. He wore spectacles that one presumed were powerful. But when he fenced, when he was gloved and stood at the “on guard,” he had the air of a cavalier. One appreciated then to what extent his novels were self-expressive, emotionally autobiographic.

  12

  AT SEA, OCTOBER 1941

 
It was like the first act of Outward Bound. There was the same timelessness, the same lack of an immediate objective: the same sense of being on an uncharted course. He knew that most ships refuelled somewhere during the second fortnight, though where he did not know. He knew, for he had read it before sailing, that a convoy’s chief event was the five days’ halt at Cape Town or at Durban. Since he had been posted to Syria he assumed that his portion of the convoy at least was bound for Suez. He knew that the journey would last two months. He knew that, but that was all he knew. He had no idea from day to day what his position was. There was no flag moving along a map, no sweep on the day’s run, no advancing or retarding of the clock. One relied on guesswork.

  It was cold to start with and grew colder. He assumed therefore that he was headed north. When the mornings grew colder and the evenings lighter, he knew they were moving west. One morning the sight of the sun on the port side told him that they were swinging south. But from day to day he had no idea where he was within five hundred miles.

  In a way it was like the first act of Outward Bound. In a way it was like being a prisoner of war again. There was the same propinquity: the same unrelieved atmosphere of masculinity, the same lack of space, the same lack of privacy, the same simplification of existence, the removal of all minor problems, with nothing to decide, nothing to plan for: there was the same monotony.

  On a troopship carrying several hundred men there was, for those officers who were travelling with their units, a certain amount of daily routine in connection with the care and training of their men. There was a daily inspection followed by P.T. There were lectures. There was mail to censor. But in that confined space there was not a great deal that one could do, and on this particular ship the majority were travelling independently. For the majority of officers, that is to say, each day presented the prisoner of war’s problem—the filling in of fourteen empty hours. At the start the solving of it in most cases was very similar; there was a rush of enthusiasm “to get organized.” The Sports Committee got busy with competitions. Classes in Arabic and French were opened.

  During the first fortnight the corners of the lounge and writing-room would be occupied with groups of seven or eight students with note-books and pencils, the air would be filled with guttural noises. As the weeks passed the enthusiasm lessened, in a troopship just as in a prisoner of war camp. By the time the journey was half finished the groups of eight had become trios. The guttural nosies were a bare murmuring against the heavy breathing of those many others who, having stared into vacancy for half an hour, had fallen off to sleep.

  13

  DAILY ROUTINE

  Hours became days, days weeks: it was in a series of moods, of pictures, of contrasted feelings that in retrospect the essence of those days remained for him:—the luxury of Continental cooking after months of rationing—eggs and cheese and butter and marmalade and meat meals twice a day; the confined space of his cabin, the lack of chairs in the lounge, the lack of tables. The healthiness of the days, the fresh air and the sunlight; the unhealthiness of the nights, the hermetically-sealed porthole, the lounge grey with cigarette smoke.

  The cool air of the morning on his face, the clean air of the morning in his lungs when he came on deck for half an hour’s run while the deck was empty. The five minutes before breakfast of leaning against the taffrail watching the broad panorama of the convoy, ship after ship—tramps and liners, grey or camouflaged, the greyhound destroyers and corvettes that guarded them.

  The quiet half-hours on the top deck in the chair that he had hurried up from breakfast to secure; a quiet half-hour’s reading before the deck became congested, before the sun had become high and hot; a quiet interlude before he went below to two hours of writing in the lounge, to an hour and a half of Arabic. A short walk before lunch when the decks had been deserted for the bar.

  The long slow torpor of the afternoon, the longest part of the day to live through: when some slept, usually to wish afterwards they hadn’t, when some sunbathed on the upper deck, some dozed over books, and some tried to keep themselves awake with bridge, while the entertainments committee broadcast swing music over the ship’s loudspeaker.

  The cool of the evening after tea, with the black-out two hours off: two hours of exercise, of fencing, of deck tennis, of medicine ball, of walking during the last half-hour. The watching of the sun going down, the waiting to see on nights when there were no clouds if there would be the final emerald ray before it sank. The cold, rich sweetness of the barman’s “special”—a long drink that could be only called a cocktail because it came out of a shaker.

  The heat of the lounge at night as the air thickened: the watching of the clock for the bar to open, the rush to it when it did. The first taste on one’s palate of a lemonsquash: the instantaneous burst of sweat that followed: the thirst that returned, redoubled in twenty minutes. The debate as to whether one should smoke under conditions of discomfort or got out on deck where smoking was forbidden. The wondering as one dozed over a book whether one was sleepy enough to fall asleep in one’s airless cabin: the wash of phosphorus against the sides: the ghostlike shapes of the other ships, the single red lights on the mast. The thronged passages where officers sat and lay, hoping that an occasional draught would blow from behind the double curtains.

  The attempts of the entertainments committee to relieve the boredom. A game with numbers called Housey, Housey that was easy to learn, required no skill, of which he could remember nothing except its phrases, “eyes down and looking,” such nicknames for numbers as “unlucky” for thirteen, “doctors” for ninety-nine and, he never could think why, “legs eleven” for eleven.

  The cinema-shows three times a week in the dining-saloon after dinner. From only a limited number of seats could one see properly the small screen that was on the level of one’s eye. All you could book was your right to fill a seat. There were two performances a night: the first for the men, the second for the officers. Before the men’s show was two-thirds over, the stairway leading from the deck to the saloon was crowded with waiting officers, the majority of whom were about to see the show for the third time.

  The concerts when the moon was full. The compère and the performers standing on the lounge deck, outside the secondclass bar. The men in the well of the ship piled on hatches, round the airshafts, their faces blurred in the half-light, crooning nostalgic choruses, Down Mexico Way, reminding him of the singing twenty-four years back, before lights out, from the Nissen huts, by the long straight roads, Let the great big world keep turning … Abide with me … If you were the only girl …

  14

  “THE MEN”

  It was strange to be travelling on a troopship without the responsibility of troops. All the time he was conscious of their presence there. There was the clearing of the lower decks for their inspection every morning. There was the clearing of the upper decks an hour later for their P.T. The canteen was on the promenade deck and mornings and afternoons there was a queue stretching away from it. One saw them from the upper deck lying out on the hatches, reading or writing letters or polishing their equipment. At night after dinner they brought up their blankets to the promenade deck to sleep in the fresh air. Once every ten days, as orderly officer, he went round their quarters with the O.C. ship, inspected their dinner and their supper. It was strange being among them, to have no responsibility towards them: to be leading an alien life, a stranger to them, with no section there that he could think of as “my men.”

  He felt envious of the officers whom he saw censoring their men’s letters. He wished that he were travelling not as a staff officer, but with a unit. Many times during that ten weeks he wished that he could put back the clock two years, that he were back in regimental life.

  15

  SEPTEMBER, 1939

  Himself at the start, he had had seven months of it. Though he had been forty-one when war broke out, though he had not been on a parade-ground or read a military text-book for eighteen and a half years, he h
ad found himself back at his regimental depot in the third week of the war, through the fact of his holding an R.A.R.O. (Regular Army Reserve of Officers) Commission.

  It was by chance that he was holding one. He had never intended to make the army his career. But in the spring of 1916, having enlisted the previous autumn at the age of seventeen in the Inns of Court, he had found that with the age limit for a commission raised to nineteen, the only alternative to a year of coastal guard duties as a private in a provisional battalion, was a cadetship at the R.M.C. When the war was over, he had been told that the only way in which he could leave the army, was by joining the R.A.R.O. He had been instructed to report to the War Office in writing every first of January. For the first two years he had done this dutifully. During the coal strike of 1921 he had indeed been recalled to service for six weeks. Then he had begun to travel. He had never seemed to be within postal range of the War Office on the first of January. He had assumed, however, that his name still figured in the Army List, since every so often he would receive instructions accompanied by a railway warrant explaining what he was to do in the event of a general mobilization, and requesting him to return the previous warrant and instructions which usually by then he had contrived to lose.

  Till July 1933 it had gone on like that. Then on his thirty-fifth birthday he was informed that he had been relegated to Class B of the Reserve and that in the event of a general mobilization he was to take no action until he received instructions.

  He had taken this to mean that his military career was over; in celebration of which he had had the buttons and badges cut off his tunics and greatcoat, had the clothes dyed blue, and presented them to charity. He had been definitely surprised when at the time of Munich, his application to be granted an emergency reserve commission had been turned down on the grounds that he already possessed a commission in the R.A.R.O. He was, he had then realized, in the army still.