Sword of Honor Read online

  “You forget I don’t know Augustus.”

  “Well, take it from me he was a monumental cad.”

  A tiny light gleamed in their darkness, a pin-point in each easy tear which swelled in her eyes and fell.

  “Admit I’m not as bad as Augustus.”

  “Very little to choose. But he was fatter. I’ll admit that.”

  “Virginia, for God’s sake don’t let’s quarrel. It’s my last chance of seeing you for I don’t know how long.”

  “There you go again. The warrior back from the wars. ‘I take my fun where I find it.’ ”

  “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t.”

  Guy was beside her again with his hands on her. “Don’t let’s be beastly?”

  She looked at him, not loving yet, but without any anger; sharp and humorous again.

  “Go back and sit down,” she said, giving him one friendly kiss. “I haven’t finished with you yet. Perhaps I do look like an easy pick-up. Lots of people seem to think so, anyway. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. But I can’t understand you, Guy, not at all. You were never one for casual affairs. I can’t somehow believe you are now.”

  “I’m not. This isn’t.”

  “You used to be so strict and pious. I rather liked it in you. What’s happened to all that?”

  “It’s still there. More than ever. I told you so when we first met again.”

  “Well, what would your priests say about your goings-on tonight; picking up a notorious divorcée in an hotel?”

  “They wouldn’t mind. You’re my wife.”

  “Oh, rot.”

  “Well, you asked what the priests would say. They’d say: ‘Go ahead.’ ”

  The light that had shone and waxed in their blackness suddenly snapped out as though at the order of an air-raid warden.

  “But this is horrible,” said Virginia.

  Guy was taken by surprise this time.

  “What’s horrible?” he said.

  “It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s worse than anything Augustus or Mr. Troy could ever dream of. Can’t you see, you pig, you?”

  “No,” said Guy in deep, innocent sincerity. “No, I don’t see.”

  “I’d far rather be taken for a tart. I’d rather have been offered five pounds to do something ridiculous in high heels or drive you round the room in toy harness or any of the things they write about in books.” Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. “I thought you’d taken a fancy to me again and wanted a bit of fun for the sake of old times. I thought you’d chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless, lunatic pig.”

  Even in this discomfiture Guy was reminded of his brawl with Trimmer.

  She turned to leave him. Guy sat frozen. On the silence left by her strident voice there broke a sound more strident still. While her hand was on the door-knob, she instinctively paused at the summons. For the third time that evening the telephone bell sang out between them.

  “I say, Crouchback, old man, I’m in something of a quandary. I’ve just put a man under close arrest.”

  “That’s a rash thing to do.”

  “He’s a civilian.”

  “Then you can’t.”

  “That, Crouchback, is what the prisoner maintains. I hope you aren’t going to take his part.”

  “Virginia, don’t go.”

  “What’s that? I don’t get you, old man. Apthorpe here. Did you say it was ‘No go’?”

  Virginia went. Apthorpe continued.

  “Did you speak or was it just someone on the line? Look here, this is a serious matter. I don’t happen to have my King’s Regulations with me. That’s why I’m asking for your help. Ought I to go out and try and collect an N.C.O. and some men for prisoners’ escort in the street? Not so easy in the black-out, old man. Or can I just hand the fellow over to the civilian police?… I say, Crouchback, are you listening? I don’t think you quite appreciate that this is an official communication. I am calling on you as an officer of His Majesty’s Forces…”

  Guy hung up the receiver and from the telephone in his bedroom gave instructions that he was taking no more calls that night, unless by any chance he was rung up from Number 650 in the hotel.

  He went to bed and lay restless, half awake, for half the night. But the telephone did not disturb him again.

  Next day when he met Apthorpe at the train he said: “You got out of your trouble last night?”

  “Trouble, old man?”

  “You telephoned to me, do you remember?”

  “Did I? Oh yes, about some point of military law. I thought you might be able to help.”

  “Did you solve the problem?”

  “It blew over, old man. It just blew over.”

  Presently he said: “Not wishing to be personal, may I ask what’s happened to your mustache?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Exactly. Just what I mean.”

  “I had it shaved off.”

  “Did you? What a pity. It suited you, Crouchback. Suited you very well.”

  Three

  Apthorpe Furibundus

  I

  Orders were to report back at Kut-al-Imara by 1800 hours on 15 February.

  Guy traveled through the familiar drab landscape. The frost was over and the countryside sodden and dripping. He drove through the darkling streets of Southsand where blinds were going down in the lightless windows. This was no homecoming. He was a stray cat, slinking back mauled from the rooftops, to a dark corner among the dustbins where he could lick his wounds.

  Southsand was a place of solace. Hotel and Yacht Club would shelter him, he thought. Giuseppe Pelecci would feed him and flatter him; Mr. Goodall raise him. Mist from the sea and the melting snow would hide him. The spell of Apthorpe would bind him, and gently bear him away to the far gardens of fantasy.

  In his melancholy Guy had taken no account of the Ritchie-Hook Seven Day Plan.

  Later in his military experience, when Guy had caught sight of that vast uniformed and bemedaled bureaucracy by whose power alone a man might stick his bayonet into another, and had felt something of its measureless obstructive strength, Guy came to appreciate the scope and speed of the brigadier’s achievement. Now he innocently supposed that someone of the brigadier’s eminence merely said what he wanted, gave his orders and the thing was done; but even so he marveled, for in seven days Kut-al-Imara had been transformed, body and soul.

  Gone were Major McKinney and the former directing staff and the civilian caterers. Gone, too, was Trimmer. A notice on the board, headed Strength, Decrease of, stated that his temporary commission had been terminated. With him went two other delinquents, and a young man from the depot whose name was unfamiliar to Guy for the sufficient reason that he had been absent without leave for the whole of the course at Southsand. In their stead were a group of regular officers, Major Tickeridge among them. They sat at the back of the mess behind the brigadier when at six o’clock on the first evening he rose to introduce them.

  He held his audience for a moment with his single eye. Then he said: “Gentlemen, these are the officers who will command you in battle.”

  At those words Guy’s shame left him and pride flowed back. He ceased for the time being to be the lonely and ineffective man—the man he so often thought he saw in himself, past his first youth, cuckold, wastrel, prig; he was one with his regiment, with all their historic feats of arms behind him, with great opportunities to come. He felt from head to foot a physical tingling and bristling as though charged with galvanic current.

  The rest of his speech was an explanation of the new organization and regime. The brigade had already taken embryonic form. The temporary officers were divided into three battalion groups of a dozen each under the regular major and captain who would eventually become respectively their commanding officer and adjutant. All
would live in. Permission to sleep out would be given to married men for Saturday and Sunday nights only. All would dine in mess at least four nights a week.

  “That is all, gentlemen. We will meet again at dinner.”

  When they left the mess, they found that the table top over the fireplace in the hall had been covered in their brief absence with typewritten sheets. Gradually spelling his way through the official abbreviations Guy learned that he was in the Second Battalion under Major Tickeridge and the Captain Sanders with whom Apthorpe had once so notably played golf. With him were Apthorpe, Sarum-Smith, de Souza, Leonard and seven others all from the barracks. He was back in Passchendaele; as was Apthorpe.

  Then and later he learned of other changes. The closed rooms of the house were now thrown open. One was labeled “Bde. H.Q.” and held a brigade major and two clerks. The headmaster’s study housed three Battalion Orderly Rooms. There were also a regular quartermaster, with an office and a clerk, three regimental sergeant-majors, Halberdier cooks, new, younger Halberdier servants, three lorries, a Humber Snipe, three motor-bicycles, drivers, a bugler. The day’s routine was a continuous succession of parades, exercises and lectures from eight in the morning till six. “Discussions” would be held after dinner on Mondays and Fridays. “Night Operations,” also, were two a week.

  “I don’t know how Daisy will take this,” said Leonard.

  She took it, Guy learned later, very badly, and returned heavy and cross to her parents.

  Most of the young officers were worried. Apthorpe, who had mentioned in the train that he was suffering from “a touch of tummy,” looked more worried than anyone.

  “It’s the question of my gear,” he said.

  “Why not leave it at your digs?”

  “At the commodore’s? Pretty awkward, old man, in the case of a sudden move. I think I’d better have a palaver with the Q.M. about it.”

  And later: “Do you know, the Q.M. wasn’t a bit helpful? Said he was busy. Seemed to think I was talking about superfluous clothing. He even suggested I might have to scrap half of it when we move under canvas. He’s just one of those box-wallahs. No experience of campaigning. I told him so and he said he’d served in the ranks in Hong Kong. Hong Kong—I ask you! About the cushiest spot in the whole empire. I told him that too.”

  “Why is it all so important to you, Apthorpe?”

  “My dear fellow, it’s taken me years to collect.”

  “Yes, but what’s in it?”

  “That, old man, is not an easy question to answer in one word.”

  Everyone dined in the mess that first evening.

  At half past ten the brigadier said: “Well, gentlemen, Bedfordshire for you. I’ve got work. You haven’t got a training program yet.”

  He led his staff away into the room marked “Bde. H.Q.” It was two o’clock when Guy heard them disperse.

  *

  The Training Program followed no textbook. Tactics as interpreted by Brigadier Ritchie-Hook consisted of the art of biffing. Defense was studied cursorily and only as the period of reorganization between two bloody assaults. The Withdrawal was never mentioned. The Attack and the Element of Surprise were all. Long raw misty days were passed in the surrounding country with maps and binoculars. Sometimes they stood on the beach and biffed imaginary defenders into the hills; sometimes they biffed imaginary invaders from the hills into the sea. They invested downland hamlets and savagely biffed imaginary hostile inhabitants. Sometimes they merely collided with imaginary rivals for the use of the main road and biffed them out of the way.

  Guy found that he had an aptitude for this sort of warfare. He read his map easily and had a good eye for country. When townsmen like Sarum-Smith gazed blankly about them Guy could always recognize “dead ground” and “covered lines of approach.” Sometimes they worked singly, sometimes in “syndicates”; Guy’s answers usually turned out to be the “staff solution.” At night when they were dropped about the downs, with compass bearings to guide them to a meeting-place, Guy was usually one of the first home. There were great advantages in a rural upbringing. In the “discussion,” too, he did well. These were debates on the various more recondite aspects of biffing. The subjects were announced beforehand with the implication that the matter should be given thought and research. When the evening came most were drowsy and Apthorpe’s fine show of technical vocabulary fell flat. Guy spoke up clearly and concisely. He realized that he was once more attracting favorable notice.

  The thaw gave place to clear, cold weather. They returned to Mudshore range but with the brigadier in charge. This was a period before the invention of “Battle Schools.” The firing of a live round, as Guy well knew, was attended with all the solemnity of a salute at a funeral, always and everywhere, except when Brigadier Ritchie-Hook was about. The sound of flying bullets exhilarated him to heights of levity.

  He went to the butts to organize snap-shooting. Markers raised figure-targets at unpredictable points drawing bursts of Bren fire. The brigadier soon tired of this, put his hat on his stick and ran up and down the trench, raising, lowering, waving it, promising down the telephone a sovereign to the man who hit it. All missed. Enraged he popped his head over the parapet shouting: “Come on, you young blighters, shoot me.” He did this for some time, running, laughing, ducking, jumping, until he was exhausted though unwounded.

  It was a period when ammunition was short. Five rounds a man was the normal training allowance. Brigadier Ritchie-Hook had all the Brens firing at once, continuously, their barrels overheated, changed, plunged sizzling into buckets of water, while he led his young officers on all fours in front of the targets a few inches below the rain of bullets.

  II

  The newspapers, hastily scanned, were full of Finnish triumphs. Ghostly ski-troops, Guy read, swept through the sunless Arctic forests harassing the mechanized divisions of the Soviet who had advanced with massed bands and portraits of Stalin expecting a welcome, ill-equipped, under-fed, quite ignorant of whom they were fighting and why. English forces, delayed only by a few diplomatic complications, were on their way to help. Russian might had proved to be an illusion. Mannerheim held the place in English hearts won in 1914 by King Albert of the Belgians. Then quite suddenly it appeared that the Finns were beaten.

  No one at Kut-al-Imara House seemed much put out by the disaster. For Guy the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore, had succeeded in ignoring more often than not in his service in the Halberdiers; that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.

  Apthorpe said: “I’ve other things to worry about,” and Guy at once knew that there must have been a new development in the tense personal drama which all that Lent was being played against the background of the brigadier’s training methods; which, indeed, drew all its poignancy from them and itself formed their culminating illustration.

  This adventure had begun on the first Sunday of the new regime.

  The schoolrooms were almost deserted that afternoon; everyone was either upstairs asleep or else in the town. Guy was reading his weekly papers in the hall when he saw through the plate-glass window a taxi drive up and Apthorpe emerge carrying, with the help of the driver, a large square object, which they placed in the porch. Guy went out to offer his help.

  “That’s all right, thank you,” said Apthorpe rather stiffly. “I’m just shifting some of my gear.”

  “Where d’you want to put it?”

  “I don’t quite know yet. I shall manage quite well, thank you.”

  Guy returned to the hall and stood in the window gazing idly out. It was getting too dark to read comfortably and the man had not yet appeared to put up the black-out screens. Presently he saw Apthorpe emerge from the front door into the twilight and begin furtively burrowing about in the shrubbery. He watched fascinated until some ten minutes later he saw him return. The front porch opened directly into the hall. Apthorpe entered backwards dragging his piece of gear.

&nb
sp; “Are you sure I can’t help?”

  “Quite sure, thank you.”

  There was a large cupboard under the stairs. Into this Apthorpe with difficulty shoved his burden. He removed his gloves and coat and cap and came with an air of unconcern to the fire saying: “The commodore sent you his compliments. Says he misses us at the Club.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Not exactly. I just dropped in on the old man to fetch something.”

  “That piece of gear?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Is it something very private, Apthorpe?”

  “Something of no general interest, old man. None at all.”

  At that moment the duty servant came in to fix the black-out. Apthorpe said: “Smethers.”

  “Sir.”

  “Your name is Smethers, isn’t it?”

  “No, sir. Crock.”

  “Well, never mind. What I want to ask you is about the offices, the back-parts of the house.”

  “Sir?”

  “I need some sort of little shed or store-house, a gardener’s hut would do, a wash-house, dairy, anything of that kind. Is there such a place?”

  “Was you wanting it just for the moment, sir?”

  “No, no, no. For as long as we’re here.”

  “Couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir. That’s for the Q.M.”

  “Yes, I was only wondering,” and when the man had gone: “Stupid fellow that. I always thought he was called Smethers.”

  Guy turned back to his weekly papers. Apthorpe sat opposite him gazing at his boots. Once he got up, walked to the cupboard, peered in, shut it and returned to his chair.

  “I can keep it there, I suppose, but I can’t possibly use it there, can I?”

  “Can’t you?”

  “Well, how can I?”

  There was a pause during which Guy read an article about the inviolability of the Mikkeli Marshes. (These were the brave days before the fall of Finland.) Then Apthorpe said: