Men at Arms Page 6

  ‘Come along,’ said the Captain-Commandant. ‘Ashamed to be seen sitting with us? Meet madam and the brat.’

  They took their places with the distinguished party.

  ‘Do you go home for the week-end?’ asked the brat,

  ‘No. You see my home’s in Italy.’

  ‘Not really. Are you artistic or something? How thrilling.’

  ‘My home used to be in Bechuanaland,’ said Apthorpe.

  ‘I say,’ said the Captain-Commandant. ‘You must have some interesting yarns, Well, I suppose I’d better get this thing started.’

  He gave a nod; the footlights went up; he rose and climbed the steps to the stage.

  ‘We’re all greatly looking forward to this show,’ he said ‘These charming ladies and accomplished gentlemen have come a long way on a cold night to entertain us. Let’s see we give them a real Halberdier welcome.’

  Then he returned to his place amid loud applause.

  ‘It’s really the chaplain’s job,’ he said to Guy. ‘But I give the little fellow a rest now and then.’

  A piano began playing behind the curtain. The curtain rose. Before the stage was fully revealed the Captain Commandant sank into deep but not silent sleep. Under the Corps crest in the proscenium there was disclosed a little concert party comprising three elderly women, over-made-up, a cadaverous old man, under-made-up, and a neuter beast of indeterminable age at the piano. All wore the costume of pierrots and pierrettes. There was a storm of loyal applause. A jaunty chorus opened the show. One by one the heads in the first two rows sank into their collars. Guy slept too.

  He was awakened an hour later by a volume of song striking him, from a few feet away. It carne from the cadaverous man whose frail northern body seemed momentarily possessed by the ghost of some enormous tenor from the south. He woke the Captain-Commandant, too.

  ‘I say, that’s not “God Save The King”, is it?’

  ‘No, sir. “There’ll always be an England”.’

  The Captain Commandant collected his wits and listened.

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Never can tell a tune till I’ve heard the words. The old fellow’s got a voice, hasn’t he?’

  It was the last item. Soon everyone was at attention. The tenor did more. He stood at attention while company and audience joined in the National Anthem.

  ‘On these occasions we always have the performers in for a drink. You might round up some of the young chaps to do the honours, will you? I expect you’ve more experience in entertaining the theatrical world than we have. And, I say, if you’re here for Sunday and have nothing better to do, come and lunch.’

  ‘Very glad to, sir,’ said Apthorpe, whose inclusion in the invitation was by no means clear.

  ‘You’ll be here, too? Yes, of course, do come. Delighted.’

  The Captain-Commandant did not go with them to the Officers’ House. Two regulars and three or four of Guy’s batch formed the reception committee. The ladies had shed all theatrical airs with their make-up and their fancy dress. They might have come in from a day’s household shopping.

  Guy found himself next to the tenor, who had shed his wig, revealing a few grey wisps of hair which made him appear somewhat younger, but still very old. His cheeks and nose were blotchy and bright-veined, his eyes watery in a nest of wrinkles. It was many weeks since Guy had looked into a sick man’s face. He might have taken the tenor for an alcoholic, but he chose only coffee to drink.

  ‘Find I don’t sleep if I drink whisky nowadays,’ he said apologetically. ‘You’re all wonderfully hospitable. Especially the Corps. I’ve always had a very warm corner for the Copper Heads.’

  ‘Copper Heels.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I meant Copper Heels. We were next to you in the line once in the last show. We got on very well with your chaps. I was in the Artists. Not with a commission, mind you. I wasn’t the age for that, even then. Joined up in the ranks and saw it all through.’

  ‘I only just scraped in.’

  ‘Oh, you’re young. I wonder if I might have another cup of this excellent coffee. Takes it out of one, singing.’

  ‘You’ve got a fine voice.’

  ‘D’you think it went down all right? One never knows.’

  ‘Oh, yes, a great success.’

  ‘Of course we aren’t a No. 1 Company:

  ‘You were all a great success.’

  They stood silent. A burst of laughter rose from the group round the ladies. Everything was going easily there.

  ‘More coffee?’

  ‘No more, thank you.’

  Silence.

  ‘The news looks better,’ said the tenor at last.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Oh, much better.’

  ‘We don’t get much time to read the papers.’

  ‘No, I suppose you don’t. I envy you. There’s nothing in them but lies,’ he added sadly. ‘You can’t believe a word they say. But it’s all good. Very good indeed. It helps to keep one’s spirits up,’ he said from the depths of his gloom. ‘Something cheerful every morning. That’s what we need in these times.’

  Quite soon the party. bowled away into the night.

  ‘That looked a very interesting man you were talking to,’ said Apthorpe.

  ‘Yes.

  ‘A real artist. I should think he’s been in opera.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  ‘Grand Opera.’

  Ten minutes later Guy was in bed. In youth he had been taught to make a nightly examination of conscience and an act of contrition. Since he joined the army this pious exercise had become confused with the lessons of the day. He had failed dismally in the detail of the pile-arms… – ‘…the even numbers of the centre rank will incline their muzzles to the front and place their rifles under their right arms, guards uppermost, at the same time seizing the piling swivel…’ – He was not now certain which had the more ribs, a cat or a rabbit. He wished it had been he, not Apthorpe, who had called the impudent corporals to order in the gym. He had snubbed that decent, melancholy old man about the ‘Copper Heads’. Was that the real, ‘Halberdier welcome’ expected of him? There was much to repent and repair.

  2

  ON Saturday at twelve there was a large exodus from bar racks. Guy, as usual remained. More than his longer and more bitter memories, his modest bank balance, his blue patrols, his boredom in the gym or any of the small symptoms of age which distinguished, him from his youthful fellows, there was this recurring need for repose and solitude. Apthorpe went off to play golf with one of the regulars. It was holiday enough for Guy to change at his leisure, wear the same clothes all the afternoon, to smoke a cigar after luncheon, walk down the High Street to collect his weekly papers – the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Tablet – from the local newsagent, to read them drowsily over his own fire; in his own room.. He was thus employed when, long after nightfall, Apthorpe returned from golf. He wore flannel trousers and a tweed coat much patched and bound with leather. There, was a fatuous and glassy squint in his eyes. Apthorpe was tight.

  ‘Hallo. Have you had dinner?’

  ‘No. I don’t intend to. It’s a sound rule of health not to have dinner.’

  ‘Never, Apthorpe?’

  ‘Now, old man, I never said that. Of course not never. Sometimes. Give the juices a rest. You have to be your own doctor in the bush. First rule of health, keep your feet dry; second, rest the juices. D’you know what the third is?’

  ‘No.

  ‘Nor do I. Just stick to two rules – and you’ll be all right. You know you don’t look well to me, Crouchback. I’ve been worrying about you. You know Sanders?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been playing golf with him.’

  ‘Good game?’

  ‘Terrible. High wind, poor visibility. Played nine holes and knocked off. Sanders has a brother in Kasanga. I suppose you think that’s near Makarikari.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Just about twelve hundred miles, that’s how ne
ar it is. You know, old man, for a chap who’s knocked about as much as you have, you don’t know much, do you? Twelve hundred bloody miles of bush and you call that near.’ Apthorpe sat down and stared at Guy sadly. ‘Not that it really matters,’ he said. ‘Why worry? Why go to Makarikari? Why not stay in Kasanga?’

  ‘Why not indeed?’

  ‘Because Kasanga’s a perfectly awful hole, that’s why. Still if you like the place, stay there by all means. Only don’t ask me to join you, that’s all, old, man. Of course you’d have Sanders’ brother. If he’s anything like Sanders he plays pretty rotten golf, but I’ve no doubt you’d be jolly glad of his company in Kasanga. It’s a perfectly awful hole. Don’t know what you see in the place.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘Lonely,’ said Apthorpe. ‘That’s why. It’s always the same, wherever you are, Makarikari, Kasanga, anywhere. You have a good time drinking with the chaps in the club, you feel fine, and then at the end of it all you go back alone to bed. I need a woman.’

  ‘Well, you won’t find one in barracks.’

  ‘For company, you understand. I can do without the other thing. Not, mind you, that I haven’t done myself well in my time. And I will do again I hope. But I can take it or leave it. I’m above sex. You have to be, in the bush, or it gets a grip on you. But I can’t do without company.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You mean you want me to go? All right, old man, I’m not as thick-skinned as you might think. I know when I’m not wanted. I’m sorry I inflicted myself on you for so long, very sorry.’

  ‘We’ll meet again tomorrow.’

  But Apthorpe did not move. He sat goggling sadly. It was like watching the ball at roulette running slower and slower, trickling over the numbers. What would turn up next: Women? Africa? Health? Golf? It clicked into boots.

  ‘I was wearing rubber soles today,’ he said. ‘I regret it now. Spoiled my drive. No grip.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better get to bed?’

  It was half an hour before Apthorpe rose from the chair. When he did so, he sat heavily on the floor and continued the conversation, without apparently noticing his change of position. At last he said with a new lucidity: ‘Look here, old man, I’ve enjoyed this talk tremendously. I hope we can go on with it some other night but at the moment I’m rather sleepy so if you don’t mind I think I’ll turn in.’

  He then rolled over and lay silent. Guy went to bed to the sound of Apthorpe’s breathing, turned off the lights and slept also. He woke in the dark to hear groaning and stumbling. He turned on the light. Apthorpe was on his feet blinking.

  ‘Good morning, Crouchback,’ he said with dignity. ‘I was just looking for, the latrines. Must have taken a wrong turning. Good night.’

  And he staggered from the room leaving the door ajar. Next morning when Guy was called, the batman said ‘Mr Apthorpe’s sick. He asked for you to go in and see him when you’re dressed.’

  Guy found him in bed with a japanned tin medicine chest on his knees.

  ‘I’m a bit off colour, today,’ he said. ‘Not quite the thing at all. I shan’t be getting up.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘No, no, it’s just a touch of Bechuana tummy. I get it from time to time. I know just how to take it.’ He was stirring a whitish mixture with a glass rod. ‘The hell of it is I promised to lunch with the Captain-Commandant. I must make a signal putting him off.’

  ‘Why not just send him a note?’

  ‘That’s what I mean, old man. You always call it “making a signal” in the service, you know.’

  ‘Do you remember calling on me last night?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What an extraordinary question, old man. I’m not a talkative bloke as you well know, but I do enjoy a regular chinwag now and then in the right company. But I don’t feel so good today. It was bloody cold and wet on the links and I’m liable to this damned Bechuana tummy if I get a chill. I wondered if you could let me have some paper and an envelope. I’d better let the Captain-Commandant know in good time.’ He drank his mixture. ‘Be a good chap and put this down for me somewhere where I can reach it.’

  Guy lifted the medicine chest, which on inspection seemed to contain only bottles labelled ‘Poison’, put it on a table, and brought Apthorpe paper.

  ‘D’you suppose I ought to begin: “Sir, I have the honour”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just “Dear Colonel Green?’

  ‘Or “Dear Mrs Green”.’

  ‘That’s the ticket. That’s exactly the right note. Good for you, old man. “Dear Mrs Green” of course.’

  One of the characteristics of the Halberdiers was a tradition of firm churchmanship. Papistry and Dissent were almost unknown among the regulars. Long-service recruits were prepared for Confirmation by the chaplain as part of their elementary training. The parish church of the town was the garrison chapel. For Sunday Mattins the whole back of the nave was reserved for the Halberdiers who marched there from the barracks behind their band. After church the ladies of the garrison – wives, widows and daughters in whom the town abounded, whose lawns were mown by Halberdiers and whose joints of beef were illicitly purchased from the Halberdier stores – assembled with hymn books in their hands at the Officers’ House for an hour’s refreshment and gossip. Nowhere in England could there be found a survival of a Late-Victorian Sunday so complete and so unselfconscious, as at the Halberdier barracks.

  As the only Catholic officer Guy was in charge of the Catholic details. There were a dozen of them, all National Service men. He inspected them on the square and marched them to mass at the tin church in a side street. The priest was a recent graduate from Maynooth who had little enthusiasm for the Allied cause or for the English army, which he regarded merely as a provocation to immorality in the town. His sermon that morning was not positively offensive; there was nothing in it to make the basis of a complaint; but when he spoke of ‘this terrible time of doubt, danger and suffering in which we live,’ Guy stiffened. It was a time of glory and dedication.

  After mass, as the men were waiting to, fall in for their return march, the priest accosted Guy at the gate. ‘Won’t you just slip in to the presbytery, Captain, and pass the time of day? I’ve a bottle of whisky a good soul gave me, that needs opening.’

  ‘I won’t, thank you, Father Whelan. I’ve got to take the men back to barracks.’

  ‘Well now and what a wonderful thing the army is to be sure, that a lot of grown lads can’t walk half a mile by themselves.’

  ‘Those are the orders, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Now that little matter of the list of names, Captain. His Lordship wants a list of all the names of the Catholic serving men for his records as I think I mentioned to you last Sunday.’

  ‘Very good of you to take so much interest in us. I think you get a capitation grant from the War Office, don’t you, Father Whelan, when there’s no Catholic chaplain?’

  ‘Well, I do now, Captain, and isn’t it me right at law?’

  ‘I’m not a captain. You’d better write to the adjutant.’

  ‘And how would I be telling one officer from another and me not a military man at all?’

  ‘Just write “the Adjutant, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers”. That’ll get to him all right.’

  ‘Well, if you won’t help, you won’t, I suppose. God bless you, Captain,’ he said curtly and turned to a woman who had been standing unnoticed at his elbow. ‘Well, my dear woman, and what’s troubling you now?’

  On the march home they passed the parish church, a lofty elaborate tower rising from a squat earlier building of flint and grey stone, with low dog-toothed arches. It stood in a well-kept graveyard behind ancient yews. Within from the hammer-beams hung the spider’s-web Colours of the Corps. Guy knew them well. He often stopped there on Saturday afternoons with his weekly papers. From such a doorway as that Roger de Waybroke had stepped out on his unaccomplished journey, leaving his madam padlocked.

 
; Less constrained than the Lady of Waybroke, the womenfolk of the Halberdiers were all over the ante-room when Guy returned. He knew most of them now and for half an hour he helped order sherry, move ashtrays and light cigarettes. One of his own batch, the athletic young man named Leonard, had brought his wife that morning. She was plainly pregnant. Guy knew Leonard little for he lodged in the town and spent his evenings there, but he recognized him as peculiarly fitted for the Halberdiers. Apthorpe looked like any experienced soldier but Leonard seemed made of the very stuff that constituted the Corps. In peace he had worked in an insurance office and had travelled every winter Saturday afternoon, carrying his ‘change’ in an old leather bag, to outlying football grounds to play scrum-half for his club.

  In his first speech of welcome the Captain-Commandant had hinted that there might be permanent commissions for some of them after the war. Guy could imagine Leonard in twelve years’ time as hairy and kindly and idiomatic as Major Tickeridge. But that was before he met his madam.

  The Leonards sat with Sarum-Smith talking of money.

  ‘I’m here because I’ve got to be,’ Sarum-Smith was saying. ‘I went to town last week-end and it cost me over a fiver. I shouldn’t have thought twice of it when I was in business. Every penny counts in the army.’

  ‘Is it true, Mr Crouchback, that they’re moving you all after Christmas?’

  ‘I gather so.’

  ‘Isn’t it a shame? No sooner settled in one place than you’re off somewhere else. I don’t see the sense of it.’

  ‘One thing I won’t do,’ said Sarum-Smith, ‘and that’s buy a map-case. Or King’s Regulations.’

  ‘They say we’ve got to pay for our battle-dress when it comes. I call that a bit thick,’ said Leonard.

  ‘It’s no catch being an officer. They’re always making you buy something you don’t want. The War Office is so busy sucking up to the other ranks it hasn’t time for the poor bloody officers. There was three bob on my mess bill yesterday marked entertainment I asked what that was for and they told me it was my share of the drinks for the Ensa party. I didn’t even go to the show, let alone stand any drinks.