In Araby Orion

Preface

The War setting and dedication of this story may mislead readers (as well as reviewers) into assuming it to be autobiography, as happened with These Men Thy Friends. But fiction is the medium which the age imposes. The novel, having taken over poetry’s functions, must perform that of elegiac.

‘Blind Orion hungry for the morn.’

In Araby Orion

In the turmoil of the Brentfords striking their camp, Lieutenant Warren Remfry paid little heed to the Arab women hawking oranges. Turning from watching his men fall in, to pick up haversack and water-bottle, he found these had vanished.

He opened his heart to Father O’Hara. ‘The blighters have taken a whole shute of things that are no earthly use to them, but necessities to me. My mirror—what does an Ayrab want with a mirror?’

‘For her lord to shave with.’

‘Shave! You’re an unworldly spirit, Father! You’ve never looked on the outward man of any Ayrab at all, at all’—it was Remfry’s conviction that he could produce ‘the Irish’ at will and to the life—‘if you imagine he shaves. An Ayrab’d think the Father of Evil was glowering at him if he once caught a glimpse of his own scrubby, unwashed phiz. My safety razor and shaving tackle—another “Present from the E.E.F.¹—with love to a nice husband!” And a box of cheroots. What the hell,’ he added with fervour, ‘do they let those swine come mouching round our camps for? Sorry, Father! You know yourself that it’s got to be something quite notably bloody to make me swear!’

O’Hara neither contested nor conceded the point; he recognised but respected the illusion behind it. It is by these visions of himself, not as he is but as he would wish to be, that man lives.

He replied tolerantly, ‘You took the very thought out of me mind. For the blighters—what was it ye called them, Remfry?’

‘Swine.’

‘I thank you. They’ve looted me own belt and braces, before I had time to dress. Which is why I must wear this infernal red handkerchief, a cummerbund round me waist—for all the world as if I were a dancing-girl! ‘

‘And what do Ayrab women want with cheroots?’ persisted Remfry.

‘Ah, sure, they’ll make coffee of them.’

‘And when we’ve done our twenty odd miles to-day, and another twenty to-morrow, with a few thinning-out parades thrown in, I’ve got to tramp back—if I survive—into Jerusalem to buy fresh shaving tackle! It’s a hard world, Father! Seems to me!’—his tones were awed, as with a revelation now first vouchsafed to him—‘that these oppressed nationalities for whose freedom we’re going through all this nonsense deserve most of what comes to them. It’s like fighting against the Light, trying to rid them of Johnny Turk, who knows the proper way to handle them. Why ever are we doing it Father?

The priest shrugged his shoulders. ‘You should know better than me, Remfry.’

‘How do you make that out?’

‘The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.’

‘But what’s the Bible got to do with it?’

‘Isn’t the Old Testament full of talk of oil?’

‘Yes. But that’s olive oil.’

‘D’ye think Lloyd George and Bonar Law know that? Not they! They think it’s motor oil.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

It was the last day but two of April 1918.

The dizzily steep sides of the wadi, towering into vagueness and vacuity above them, were honeycombed with caves. Clinging there, as to some outpost of Eternity, gazing out on depth and space and sun and stars, had dwelt during millenniums men whose lives were meditation. Below ran the oleander-crimson brake, sown through its length with the silvery emergences of the brook where an earlier eremite had been fed by ravens (or by Arabs—see the commentators). Down narrow broken ways a human stream was defiling—ants crawling, lost in the pockets of the monstrous hills.

It became possible to walk three abreast, and Remfry was joined by Martin Chapman. Barrett, the commander of the next company, noted the fact.

‘Not the least of the jokes this wittiest of wars has played,’ he observed to the adjutant, Captain Beresford, ‘is the bringing of those two blokes together.’

Chapman, the Nonconformist, reasonably but not extravagantly educated, Wesleyan local preacher, within his limits bookman and scholar, had become the companion of Remfry, fresh from his public school, Remfry rattling of thought and tongue, fooling, jesting, swearing. After service and friendship in the ranks both had come commissioned to this Cockney battalion.

Among Remfry’s graces was a considerable gift of ventriloquy. As his comrade fell into step between him and Father O’Hara a voice, apparently Chapman’s and from Chapman, remarked, ‘To hell with the Pope!’

Before the startled priest could disentangle the voice, he heard his own, passable brogue and all, upbraiding the new-comer.

‘Ye’ll not bring your vulgar Orange oaths and ondaicint notions of daicincy here, I’d inform ye, Martin Chapman. Misther Remfry and meself are holding swate converse as we march; and it’s ourselves do have a right to be walking this land in paice and quietness, as it were the Blessed Brigit herself, and she having come all the way from Connemara in an ass-cart.’

‘Ye’ve a true Englishman’s ideas of Irish talk,’ said the Father. ‘And for wan thing—and wan only, mind you—I could wish you a Papist, that I might have the pleasure of excommunicating you, to prove to the Division that we’ve no room for scallywags.’

‘I’ll help you to drown him when we reach Jordan,’ said Martin. ‘It’s his one chance of salvation.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

For it was to Jordan that the Brentfords were marching. While they were yet on the pleasant edge of this world’s deepest desolation, a turn in the way made the Valley open clear to view. From it a dust and heat ever steamed and seethed upward; through the midst of that fire-scarred wrinkle Jordan could be traced—a dank, unhealthy greenness, thrusting out by a delta into that Sea of hard blue. Presently the road broke down steeply, the hills grew rapidly, even in this finish of spring, more stark and forsaken. Anemones that looked dishevelled; ragged grass, fast dying; Dianthus multipunctatus, the pink which grows from Jericho, far below sea-level, to the crest of Nebi Samwil, through four thousand feet of fall and climb, shrivelled here though flowering—these survived, but all other vegetation seemed to wither as it came within the spell of this intense loneliness.

Two hours later there was a halt for tea while the battalion had still abundant water flowing beside its march, before it debouched into the sandy sea of the Ghor. I should be no true Englishman if I were to use the word ‘sacramental’ in connection with such a pause and such refreshment. Nevertheless, since no one for one second supposed that the river would be crossed without its price, and all knew that another hour would bring them within the area of Jericho Jane’s ministration, we may be sure that beneath the icy surface of indifference currents were crossing. Boredom, vague irritation and a stirring of resentment; in some a fearful disquiet, as imagination, too capable, framed varying manners of death and maiming; stoicism and resignation, as before an operation there is no escaping; bodily restlessness, the index of all these. They had marched this way a month ago, which was why they came now in such depleted strength.

Meanwhile the minute might be snatched. In this morning air it was pleasant to lie on your back, your mug of tea cooling beside you, and to listen to larks and brook.

A hostile plane spotted them, and steered in their direction. But he was not out for bombing; the kestrel of war merely hovered, then careened away. He was human brother to the kites in the blue swiftly glazing into day; and to the shrike sitting solitary on a thorn bush, the very spirit of the waste. The Brentfords followed him with their eyes.

‘That means we catch it hot from Jericho Jane presently,’ observed Captain Barrett indifferently.

Chapman grunted. ‘Allenby’s gambling with us again.’

Remfry yawned as he rolled half over to watch the bird of their doom flying back. ‘Why can’t we stay here? I never thought that little Warren would develop a love for country life. As it is—

A book of spicy yarns beneath the bough,
A mug of chlorinated tea—and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness

That doesn’t mean you, Martin; I’m addressing my brother the lark up yonder.’

Another subaltern, Palfreyman, broke into song:

‘I don’t like the heat, and I don’t like the work,
I don’t like associating with the Turk!
Oh, my!
I’m too young to die!
I want to go home!’

Barrett grinned. ‘You may thank your stars, Pally, that you belong to this damned civilian army. Any decent organisation would have you shot for trolling forth such defeatist sentiments. Think of the effect on the men!’

‘Wonder if we really should do better if we were like the Hun,’ said Chapman, ‘and moved into action chanting “Whacked on the Rhine”?’

‘You’re going to be whacked somewhere else, my boy,’ said Remfry. ‘Well, this little rest is over. When we get back to peace I shall quite miss my little pinch of chlorine in my tea.’

As the Brentfords moved on again, the ranks sang. It was not a patriotic or an uplifting chorus, nor was it reasonable in men who had just left a bubbling stream. But the words had their own poignancy in those ribald years:

‘We want some bukshee water!
And someone’s bukshee daughter!’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

They were marching on Jordan, a thought charged with the symbolism and hopes of generations. Many were moved to impious jesting.

‘We’re going to cross Jordan, ’Arry.’

‘You bet we are. That means kicking the bucket, don’t it—crossing Jordan?’

‘I’m sure’ (this was a London battalion). ‘But ask Jim. He preaches in a Wezleyan’ (the speaker was a benighted Anglican) ‘show dahn Smiffield wye.’

‘It’ll be a bloody baptism in Jordan if you ask me—same as last time.’

But to at least one of the Brentfords the thought of Jordan came with an effect exalting and disturbing.

Chapman had changed his place, and was walking beside Corporal Henry Bateman. They were old schoolfellows, which added punctilio to Bateman’s scrupulous correctness of demeanour in public. It was not for him to embarrass his friend by remembering that they had been in the Sixth Form of a Grammar School together. Even in a New Army battalion, opportunities when rank might be laid aside without officious eyes taking note of the impropriety were rare. But common memories count for something.

Between these two they counted for a great deal. Lieutenant Chapman could talk with a trusted N.C.O. as they moved towards action—what was more natural? And silent companionship, of which there were long spells (for neither man was a great talker), was a very precious thing.

Chapman had come from outside, whereas Bateman had been with the Brentfords all along, which was part reason why he remained uncommissioned. If you send away a first-rate N.C.O. to be commissioned, he usually does not return; you lose a man of value, and some other battalion acquires a novice and stranger. Another reason for his non-promotion was Henry’s utter lack of ambition. His life, a thing impersonal, lay in other hands than his own; as its course was set, so it would run. He himself, a queerly detached denizen of this transitory planet, had his eyes elsewhere.

He was a type, reader, that you will hardly know, so completely has it vanished. Not since Cromwell’s time had eyes so grave yet tolerantly happy looked out on the world. When you see the word ‘puritan,’ do not think only of Major-General Harrison, butcher turned prophet, with his whole being tense—an air through which swordlike flames are rising—for that Day of Armageddon when he would command a brigade of the Righteous Armies. (Yet did not King Charles himself testify that from this bigot, of whom he had heard dismal fore-warning, he received only gentleness and courtesy?) Remember the young man whose mind, austerely fashioning its path, could yet bask, as the lark does, in sunlight, with each beat of its music finding a wider scope:

‘To the Ocean now I fly—
And those happy climes that lie—
Where Day never shuts his eye—
Up in the broad fields of the sky—
There I suck the liquid air.’

Or, if you cannot forget the later Milton, think of Vane; think of Andrew Marvell. This type, in the peaceful afternoon of the pre-War time, had been recommissioned for service, had been sent back into our island history, that its bones, now buried in alien earth and sea, might buy our peace. It had not existed in the intervening years, for it had known no freedom in which to grow wise. The puritan mind, flung out of the main channels of national life into chains and intellectual darkness, developed such fierce brooding strength as belongs to kraken and goblin-guard of metallic ores. Under a Wesley it could evangelise a brutal age; it could in a Carey endure the unendurable, until its patience awed even the airy spirit of contempt into admiration; it could live such lives as we can scarcely bear to visualise, amid slave-holding colonists and man-eating savages of the isles. But it had no share in England’s pomp of ruling. It contributed nothing to the march of her literature, except the witness of its tortured, exultant hymns.

When the War came, at last a puritan generation was growing up infiltrated with a few who had glimpsed life on a national, and not denominational, scale. Nonconformity was becoming aware that there is a sunlight other than the Gospel sunlight. Other, yet not alien to it; for it was not unknown in Galilee of the Gentiles.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Bateman pointed to Jericho, and broke a long silence. ‘Remember old Haydon’s quoting Blind Bartimaeus?’

‘Oh . . . the only . . . respectable . . . poem . . . Longfellow . . . ever wrote!’ Chapman got to the life their old master’s manner and intonation. He went on, ‘I don’t think he was altogether fair. The Wreck of the Hesperus isn’t so dusty, with that billow sweeping the crew “like icicles from the deck.” And the ship going

“like a sheeted ghost
Toward the reef of Norman’s Woe”.’

But Henry was rapt, murmuring as they moved,

‘Blind Bartimaeus at the gates
Of Jericho in silence waits.
He hears a voice, he hears a breath
Say, “It is Christ of Nazareth——”’

The air above them was shaken by scission, a spout of sand jerked up beyond them. In the frontward distance was the coming of a slower, heavier passenger, an express train whose wheels grew a closer rumbling. Crash! a fountain of blackness was splashed high. Jericho Jane was taking note of them; the pipsqueak which had burst beyond them was merely a vaunt-courier to the cleaving thunderbolt that now fell where they were marching.

Like a lioness awaking to defence of her cubs, a six-inch gun opened from the British side of Jordan. It infuriated Nimrin Nellie also, who joined in with her sister. This was early going, and a nuisance; the range of those dragons couched in their rocky hold did not usually extend so far. They would draw assistance; Jericho lay on converging points of fire, from somewhere in the mid-mass of Ephraim another long-range gun used to shell it. Normal range was lengthened by that terrific drop into the Valley.

Amid the roars of challenge, defiance and anger, the Brentfords opened into artillery formation. It was a relief that shelling had commenced; anyway, better than the strain of expectancy for those first explosions. Moving by side-tracks, they skirted Jericho, while the shells bounced into the dust of that famous village. As they gave death a wide berth, Nimrin Nellie’s attentions came thick and fast, with no plane to correct her wastefulness, where she supposed them to be going.

Martin saw a date palm uprooted and flung high. Its fronded head, decapitated, spun like an umbrella caught into a cyclone. A queerer thing yet claimed notice. Avoidance of the road meant a toilsome thrusting forward over broken ground, and from the hollow into which he was stepping a large piece of earth, olive-grey but mottled, detached itself and disappeared. He was so startled by this semblance of troubled planet stirring under their hesitant going that he was grateful for corroboration of his vision.

‘Lumme, I’ve got ‘em again!’ said Private Goodbody. ‘A blinking land-crocodile!’

The monitor had gone. But there were other shocks for men nervously attuned to danger, for whom the air might at any moment flash into explosion or the ground spout beneath them. Jordan hares and gazelles popped out of the bushes. They had been warned to beware of the little horned asps; it was an irritation to watch for these while your body grew argus-eyed for other foes. Martin had been in a worse ‘show’ that had strained temper less. Then he looked at Henry, and saw he was smiling. The clear morning air, not yet dimmed by excessive brightness, had opened the whole Valley to the mystic’s vision. Henry, no doubt, was alive to these blinding strokes of danger; he would make no mistake with his men. But how trivial a thing to him was any wrong that befell the body his friend had never realised, till he saw him moving encompassed now with his own dreams—and not this uneasy dream of time that torments the rest of us.

The same thought struck others. Martin overheard Private Goodbody observe to Private Mason: ‘Look at Old Batey. He’s a cushy bloke to be wiv. ’E never gets the wind up, but goes quiet whatever happens. Give me Batey when I ’ave to go wiring or on night-patrol!’

And when they reached a place of quiet, Henry’s first words were glaringly irrelevant. ‘Remember how Haydon used to quote “The ancient poet saith, Dear City of Cecrops. But wilt not thou say, Dear City of God?”

‘Those Greeks,’ Henry persisted, in the large charity of the mystic who has escaped from our factitious antinomies and can say both ‘Dear City of Cecrops’ and ‘Dear City of God,’ and would have Ilissus murmur in the streets of Jerusalem, ‘gave mankind a good half of all the decent thoughts it has ever had. They were better fellows than our so-called Christians in the Middle Ages.’

‘You and I were always taught not to bother about the “Dear City of Cecrops.” It was all “Dear City of God”?’

To his own amazement, Martin noted bitterness in his voice. He rebuked the feeling swiftly. How often had he used his charm of zealous, ingenuous youth to lend attraction to an austere code! ‘Help us to remember that there is only one thing worth doing—and that in comparison with it nothing else is worth doing at all!’ So he had prayed, to edification of his hearers. It had been sincere enough, as youth is sincere when confronted with the terrible, appealing beauty of renunciation, especially renunciation of this glorious world as yet not half realised. And the Lord had answered the prayer by sending him to march and fight, perhaps to die, amid the Holy Land lilies.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Jordan is a valley within a valley. The burnt levels dip suddenly. The road turns and twists rapidly. You are on the green strip of dense jungle—the Zor, a thicket averaging half a mile in width. Away from this tangle, impassable except where path or wadi cuts across it, there is scanty cover. But there is a deal of rough scrub of a fanged and naked sort, especially the twin poison-plants, Dead Sea and Sodom apples. Very striking are the tall gnarled bushes of the former, bearing fleshy, milky leaves. There are wastes of dry reeds and of lote-plants, the grey shrike’s throne; and tiny valleys abound, marshy with abortive salt brooks and strangled backwaters that intermittently reach the Dead Sea.

After their weary arrival at noon, the Brentfords spent the rest of the day in stony wadis that ran at right angles to Jordan. Here was pleasant shade; they lay under the willow-like poplar and the yellow-balled mimosa and masses of blue-flowered agnus castus. At four o’clock the officers were summoned to the colonel.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Martin had been preoccupied and forward-glancing; but that busy self and its trivial interests stood aside at the nulla—it was no tent, not even a dug-out, merely a scraping in the wadi’s side, to which they went—and did not accompany him. He heard the statement of the estimated enemy forces, the naming of the points they were to storm. He saw—it did not need an imaginative man, merely an experienced one—beyond these merciful abstractions, to a tormented march over which hovered invisible death, to a hillside strewn with dying men, dead men, defeated men. They had come this way recently. Their swimmers had crossed Jordan, whose current had fought against them like the muscles of an excited giant. Men had perished in mud where you had to lay down brushwood piles for a causey. Jacko had passed the river at their back, insurgent from Mount Ephraim, and had intercepted them; they had scurried across again, and the triumphant advance had turned into a successful raid on the enemy’s lines of communications. Every man present before the colonel remembered this, and their losses; if he had merely suspected it before, now he knew the folly of pretending that words do anything but darken truth.

There was a huddle of officers outside the nulla’s mouth; company commanders scanned maps with their juniors, and discussed points before passing on the news to the men. ‘My God!’ he heard another subaltern, Bennett, say. ‘Up in those hills—twenty-five guns and—was it seven or seventeen thousand bayonets? Oh, and something about a detachment of the Caucasian Cavalry.’

‘They’ll be a damn lot of use, anyway!’ said Barrett, over his shoulder.

‘Bayonets!’ said Remfry. ‘But not a word of the fact that matters, a scrubby, close-capped, ruffianly Jacko who’ll use that jolly little toy if you get up to him, and meanwhile handles a rifle pretty adequately while you squirm and break your ankle up a sort of infernal rockery!’

Names and numbers meant nothing, an outworn convention from days when men battled on the level face to face, with their own hands. They were now algebraical formulae, a hideous and supremely silly mathematics. The War, if it did nothing else, was going to make mankind’s thinking concrete again. Let x equal Milton’s experience, y his reading, z his metrical skill.

Then, infallibly, xyz equals Samson Agonistes. But Samson Agonistes moves sublimely irrelevant of all formulas:

‘I shall be named among the famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who, to save
Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock bands; my tomb,
With odours visited and annual flowers.’

Twenty-five guns, seventeen thousand men, a detachment of the Caucasian Cavalry— xyz—equalled moments innumerable of alertness, terror, wretchedness and pain, glancing visions of a countryside the brain photographed indelibly as it flashed the blinding sunlight of its tenseness on it, and such following agonies of knowledge—in England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand—as humanity could hardly sustain.

In the colonel’s nulla Martin knew his comrades also as formulae, deceptive masks to the facts they were. Warren Remfry, with his jaunty, almost insolent pose of correct indifference—he read the restlessness, obedient but vexed, as of a horse turned back on his tracks, when he knows it is the other direction that leads home and that this is but the folly of repetition of a space already cantered over. Barrett, Geoghagan, Raithby, Holt, the four company commanders—there was not a man of them whose demeanour did not cloak a mood not at peace. An angel might read each and every one by a kind of celestial X-ray process, never wasting thought on the outward appearance.

But outside, Martin’s daily life, unsubtle, unperceiving, crammed with teasing detail, was waiting to wrap him round.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Word reached the men, and there was duplication on that wider field, of what had been spoken in the colonel's nulla. Martin overheard jesting, some of it unseemly in men preparing for a solemnity.

‘Old ’Arry’s going to fill ’is bottle wiv Jordan water. ’E’ll need it to baptise that kid of ’is that’ll be coming along presently at—wot was the plice, ’Arry?’

‘’Arry ’as so many plices, ’e can’t be shore.’

’Arry, a large, harmless, sheeplike man, defended himself with a leer that it is no libel to dub lascivious. Tight little Raithby, Martin’s company commander, was disgusted.

‘Some of these chaps are too foul-minded for words. You’d have thought the sacredness of the country—let alone the fact that no one of us knows how long he has to live—would have kept them to some sense of decency.’

Raithby’s thoughts were unswervingly correct; his God, an essential pivot of the island polity, was worried by impropriety. Raithby was a prig. But his words were his own especial fashion of revealing, and warding off, unrest; he was drawing about him his coat of perfect good form, as Warren Remfry when waiting to advance under fire would pull together belt and haversack, as though they knitted his tunic into a mail of defence.

There was a meal at six o’clock, to be taken seriously, since there were days of scanty and scattered food ahead. It is but a picture now, dimmed with time and doomed to fade out altogether in a few more years; but it was queerly static then, as though painted for eternity, this vision of men moving up with their canteens and mugs or sitting back against the wadi’s banks. There was no breeze; in the evening sunlight the yellow bitter apples on their thorny bushes were polished into gold, the flowers and leaves on mimosa and agnus castus and poplar were a brilliant painting. They were but a canvas hung on the walls of some rich woman’s house. Overhead was the deepest sky in the world; cloudless and infinite, a tenuous vacuity that seemed as if it obviously could not carry either mist or stars. Those motionless specks were thousands of birds of prey. Jordan’s full-volumed murmur came up from the thickets into which this little wadi passed.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

When it was too dusk for enemy observation, the battalion fell in. They marched swiftly to the river, and crossed. Here, again, were worlds conducting their existence in entire disconnection. The river, a fiercely purposeful thing, was sweeping up mighty armfuls of dark water and flinging them downward, to disappear into swirling masses beneath the bridge. Again, and infinitely again, the process was repeated, a magnificence of effort which came out of omnipotence and would pass eternally into it. Over all this effort, that was proceeding so far elsewhither from them, moved the lines of men, their tread sounding dully on the swaying bridge, their equipment sending out a metallic clank. Of these men, how small was the purview and limit within which each was vivid and real! His own mind, inside of which his own being and experience were a flame; the minds of those few, his close companions, where it was a faint and occasional shadow. The battalion outside, where he was a number and presently might be an identity disk, to be sent home when time and other jobs permitted.

To Martin, illogically, came sections of his former life, pressing in even now for notice, though there was no place for them, however elsewhere there might have been a time for such words. Man clings to the hope that appearance, in its most trivial aspect of all, may prove right, and that he really is an individual and not the wave of an invisible wind passing over a shrivelling meadow. The generations perish; the grass assumes new viridity, but is ever the same, a multitudinous surface. Martin thought back to Blind Bartimaeus. A modern writer would have told us how the beggar looked, of his gaunt cheekbones, of his picturesque rags. He would have found a striking simile for his way of reaching forward. But the New Testament had set down only his eagerness and agony of urgency, and the kindness which out of all that colourless, nameless crowd—who even when living had mattered to no one but themselves, and were now not even such as we can visualise, just a typical drab mob in a dusty Palestine town—had picked the beggar out as an individual and given him a destiny. Was there in the universe a Love that would do that for this line trudging over Ghoraniyeh Bridge, some of them to die in the hills of Moab? There were, by an outside computation, about a dozen people who in any real sense cared for him, Martin Chapman, ex-clerk and Wesleyan local preacher, possible candidate for the Wesleyan ministry. Of these, most had other, stronger interests, which would strengthen while that in him grew less.

He was in charge of the bridge’s further end, to see that no hitch occurred. As ‘’Arry] passed, recognisable even in that twilight by a shamble that the most zealous of drill sergeants had failed to eradicate, Martin recalled the question of curiosity long ago: ‘Lord, and what shall this man do?’ Was it plausible that there was anything ‘’Arry’ was meant to do, other than his present sordid and patriotic service? If he survived, his vocation (thought Martin) would be to keep a fried-fish shop in the Mile End Road. Warren Remfry passed, superbly youthful, magnificently casual; our schools turned out this type by the thousand annually, as a brook throws up its dancing, lovely wavelets. In peace-time the Empire absorbed them, life drew them into obscurity and uniformity, the War now used them up in hundreds daily. Henry passed, acknowledging acquaintance with a smile. ‘Lord, and what shall Corporal Henry Bateman do?’ Return to his clerking for the London County Council? Act again as Secretary to a Walthamstow Sunday School?

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

It had been a jumpy business, this crossing in semi-darkness. Spasms of machine-gun fire, though their source had been pushed into pockets of the transjordanic hills that no longer commanded the river, sent strays splashing the lead with a sudden spurt of silver. A few bullets sang over the bridge; several men were hit, and one killed. There was intermittent shelling, due to grow fiercer when night deepened; Martin was glad that the Claphams were after the Brentfords, and not the other way round. Once a shell, aimed at that teasing random which is so hard to endure—it is a tugging at the nerves, when you see shells bursting far apart, and know that your foe is firing without observation, but for that very reason is going to try all possible targets—burst in the river, so little above the bridge that it was almost under it. Jacko had the range all right! It was only luck that he had not caught them. That plane which had spotted them this morning had reported that there would be night crossings; every yard of the road beyond the river would be plastered! Each man felt his heart sink sickeningly as out of night came that swoop and descent. We have lost our fathers’ dread of demons; but you who have known a quiet road at night without warning pass into an inferno of shelling know also what Guthlac abroad in a shrieking winter darkness imagined. All the eyes are with your foe; he sees, and strikes out of the blackness. He lets you go forward a while, for no reason but malignant pleasure in your terror, and then he has you. A mighty geyser shot up, the bridge was blinded with spray, a huge muscular beast of water with points of brightness like so many eyes swung over it, serpentine, irresistible. The bridge rocked like a bamboo suspension in a Himalayan storm, the men nearest the shell-burst were tossed against the rail. Two missed it, and when the beast had ebbed again, they had gone with it. Scylla had pounced and taken her prey.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Corporal Bateman had gone into Transjordan, and had a welcome rest with his section while the Brentfords re-formed. Martin returned from his temporary duty; he told Henry of the casualties, and Henry saw that his friend’s nerves were raw. Martin was restless, he kept walking away and peering to right and left.

‘Damn it! why the devil are they fooling about here?’

Neither the language nor the uncontrolled irritability was Martin’s; but his imagination had joined the demons of the night, and was creating its own tempest. He was momently visualising another burst out of the dark, whose results would be terrifying, with a whole battalion massed on the road.

Corporal Bateman spoke, respectfully and reassuringly. ‘I can see the colonel talking to the guides they’ve sent us from the Richmonds, sir. We’ll be moving again in a second.’

Calm returned to his officer. ‘Yes, of course, Corporal. I’m glad we’ve done with that bridge. It was the rottenness of wondering whether you’d get the whole shute over before Jacko began. I say, Henry’—at a bitter tangent—‘do you still feel tempted to say Dear City of Cecrops?’

‘Give me a chance,’ came a voice out of the darkness, ‘and I’ll never say again anything but Dear City of Piccadilly. What the sanguinary hades are we playing the goat beside Jordan for—to liberate’—and Lieutenant Remfry’s tones grew heavy with sarcasm—‘a gang of pinching, slouching, lousy Ayrabs?’

His words, unfortunately, threw Second-Lieutenant Palfreyman back on his extensive repertoire of music-hall ditties. They were favoured with a chant, pitched to an exasperating whisper:

‘As, I was going down Piccadilly,
With a filly
Not so crazy,
All the boys and girls I chanced to meet
Cried——’

Barrett, returning from conference with Battalion Headquarters, heard it. ‘Shut up, Pally,’ he said. ‘Your bawdy humour will pass, as a sort of poor joke, when we’re out of the line. But no one wants it now.’

Pally shut up. He realised that his harmless Cockney cheerfulness had failed to encourage even himself.

Men were glad to be moving. These Jordan mosquitoes were maddening; the night had in it a distinct bite of cold, surprising after day’s intolerable hot discomfort. For six miles now the column flowed forward at a snail’s pace—silent, cigaretteless, in a blackness that numbed. It was to attack at dawn.

Martin made his apology for loss of equanimity. ‘You’re a good chap, Henry. I wish I were like you.’

‘All the same,’ he added to himself, ‘you’re luckier than you know, to have had imagination left out of your make-up.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The diagnosis was not quite correct. The nerves by which fear, no less than desire, is stirred had by no means been left out of Henry’s make-up. Neither was he without perception of all the varied loveliness which puritanism has generously assigned to the devil. But he had early schooled himself to accept the limitations within which his life must run. He must find his pleasure in books, in an annual fortnight’s holiday, in outings to woods and commons near London. He had married young, a further curtailment of range. And there had come a religious experience, not catastrophic—it was hard to see what reason for upheaval could be found, with a will and practice so austere and controlled already—but going to the depths. The War tore him from the routine of an existence which gave him his wife’s society and books in the evening, and the knowledge that he was helping the Kingdom forward by acting as Secretary and Librarian of a Sunday School. It requires faith to see the Kingdom moving forward by means of a Sunday School. But Henry had faith.

In Flanders, serving three months on a quiet sector, he was surprised to find how little the shelling troubled him. After France, Salonika. After Salonika, Palestine. The Brentfords had been in the storming of many a Judaean height; his mind contained in its placid depths pictures of his comrades crouching behind slopes that were one wilderness of limestone confusedly hurled together. He had been helped by his unshakable conviction that he was destined to come through the War.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

And now when he had confronted the Valley, outspread before him in the morning’s silvery freshness, he had found all jangling finished. In this universe there may be, after all, a Love that is as helpless and illogical and comforting as a woman’s. We know that it cannot turn aside distress or save us from horror. It did not save Joan of Arc or John Frith. But it can step close to an individual soul, with an extraordinary concentration of tenderness that wraps even from death. To Henry this Love seemed to encompass him, as if for his sake it had forsaken all other souls than his. As he strode beside the singing brook which led them to the desolation of Jordan, all clangour ceased; he was but a mind at rest, and eyes that feasted on the crimson oleander brakes and the cleansing austere infinity of loneliness. The larks sang into a brain that had space to listen; he heard them as the first man might have done, before he learnt how clamorous and possessive thought can be.

The Valley opened, and he saw; there were depths beyond depths, a vastitude that had room within it for endless experiences, life upon life, where you can die only to be revived. This very air, hot as it stirred beside you, was clean and untrammelled. It must have been out of inexhaustible peace and leisure that these desiccated reeds had been moulded to their dry perfection, in this desert where no man dare try to survive a summer. It was nonsense to suppose that after shaping—for ends far other than the trivial one of amusing man—the limbs of Jordan hare and gazelle and jerboa, the creative force had made man without purpose except that of being severely ethical. Henry felt free and happy, with an unreasoning ecstacy that he feared to express, lest it should go. He thanked God, and went forward, dazed almost to tears.

‘Blind Bartimaeus’ was the first outlet for this gratitude; with night he found a second in another poem he knew by heart:

‘Then, through the mid-complaint of my confession,
Then, through the pang and passion of my prayer,
Leapt with a start the shock of His possession,
Thrilled me, and touched me—and the Lord was there!’

That was what had happened to him, moving—by starlight now—through this desert. For what was it that went before those words?

‘So have I seen in Araby Orion,
Seen without seeing, till he set again—
Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion,
Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain.’

For the lion Jericho Jane might serve as sufficiently terrifying substitute; as for Orion, he was striding on those hills they were marching to conquer, his bright sword and baldric glittering above them. Henry should have known that it was a very inferior art that spattered the lines so with alliteration: complaint, confession, pang, passion, prayer, possession, start, shock. Instead, he repeated to himself a hundred times, moving through that night of apprehensions, stealth and pauses:

‘Leapt with a start the shock of His possession,
Thrilled me, and touched me—and the Lord was there!’

He rang the changes on it—poor and pitiful changes; but he was too uncritical where he had been helped, he did not look even the Almighty’s gift-horses in the mouth. ‘Leapt,’ he said; and the blankness became in a word the Divine Companion. ‘Shock’; and his whole being received an electric current. He recovered—or did he create?—the wonder and amazement of ‘And the Lord was there!’ The whole story was the finest tale of magic anywhere, yet true—the way that guest at Emmaus had been suddenly revealed in the breaking of bread, and then had vanished! Why on earth were men ever given that story, when they were bound to make such woeful drabness out of it? Sermons, conferences, hierarchies, vestments. No sermon had ever helped him like this morning’s vision of dirty, noisy Bartimaeus.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Away beyond those heights, now mercifully cloaked in blackness, other men lay and waiting for dawning, to whom the name of Jordan came with no less of exaltation, in a fashion less ashamed of its own solemnity than is our English wont. You can trace the manner of their lives yet, where one of their number drew in charcoal on the walls of their billets the very order of their existence. There the handful of German N.C.O.’s and mechanics stand, as clearly limned beyond the brevity of their vanished day as any sketch in old Egyptian tombs. The artist has spared nothing of crop-haired exactitude; he and his fellows carry pails, cook meals, polish equipment. Some poet in their midst has accompanied the drawings with verse:

‘You who watch by the Jordan strand,
Keeping guard on the Holy Land!’

So, and in such fashion, did they conceive of the life they led—a life of loneliness, leisure, ennui, pleasant apartness from the exacting rigour of army ways. They were watching by a hallowed stream, helping to cling on to what remnants of a Palestine already torn away in its more sacred half were still in their hands.

In this land, so mingled of austerity and luxury, of beauty and terror—where Kypris lamented Adonis, Pan and his nymphs guarded Jordan’s mint-fragrant beginnings, where on every hill of Gilead the high places remained to witness what Powers of Nature had won man’s allegiance here, and the tumbled stones of the Valley of Hinnom and the olives of Kedron drew the mind to other reverie—a small part of the worldwide battle was about to be fought out. Many things were tested in the Great War; among them was the issue between thoroughness and the amateur spirit of gaiety and self-resource. And, as in other issues, to neither side came complete vindication.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The stealthy flowing forward in night had ended, and in a bleak morning, not yet fissured with grey, the Brentfords took up their positions of attack. At 4 a.m., when a white eyelid opened in a low gap of the hills, the attack was launched. The racket of the guns as yet neither helped nor hindered. Presently, out of the grey emerged the features of the world. The oleanders of the Wadi Shunet Nimrin became a watchful blackness, such a covert as might conceal the conscious stream’s presiding divinity; they changed to sullen red, to laughing crimson. The Brentfords saw they were still in an avenue of thorns and gleaming-appled poison-bush; and about them, and above them, hung the immeasurable heights they were to storm, a conglomerate of fanged and shelving stone. Throughout that day they raged, as might have raged some valiant child of men, confronted by a foe out of legend, who was cloaked with invisibility and with armour from celestial smithies.

A blood-stained advance brought them to the road where it narrowed, mounting fast. They thrust forward, in single file and by such rushes as the slope and their weariness permitted. Windings that exposed them had to be taken under cover of their own small-arms fire flung at almost random, in an uncharted, sightless waste. Always above and around were the menacing rocks, naked of visible foe but alive with capricious and terrifying activity. The white sweet broom was in blossom; red and creamy cistus made a glorious heath; from cliff faces hung the trailing caper, the hyssop that springeth out of the wall, looking out of blue-veined, hairy eyes.

With knowledge of their task’s impossibility, despair came early. If it had been the bursting of one lock it might have been done—at that lock’s price. It was the bursting of a succession of locks, clamped tight in these narrow doors. For their own numerous dead and wounded no return could be exacted. Nevertheless, the London men, fighting a battle without hope, endured, trusting that elsewhere their useless valour might bring in gain; the Anzacs were engaged to north of them.

One thing was burnt into Martin Chapman’s mind (and into hundreds of other minds), and became the setting of the nightmare which was all he carried hence. This was the rows of seeming endless red towering hollyhocks through which they moved. For many of them they were the lurid candles on their lykewalk to the Brig of Death.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

By mid-afternoon the Brentfords were held, after heavy losses. The path had shrunk into an incline slipping between thrust-up crags, leading thence into a wilderness of stones built up into sangars and kept by machine-guns. The rest of the brigade was similarly held up, a little to their rear and on their left flank.

The desultory day wore on. There was every now and then, with spasms of quickening in between, the noise of a shell passing over or the swift accelerated duck of one about to burst among your rocks; there were the resultant clouds of dust and a gale packed with stony splinters; there were waspish bullet-flights. Chapman, lying behind his sangar, teased by the ennui of it all and with eyes that would have drowsed had he closed them, jumped as a bullet hissed over his shoulder and chipped the dry sod of the bank above him. It was followed by another. One of his men fell, a crimson gush on his forehead.

Sergeant Bosworth was the quicker to grasp the situation. ‘Get down, you chaps. As low as you can.’ He wormed his way to his officer. ‘There’s a sniper working round our flank, sir. He’s enfilading this nulla.’

‘We’ll have to bag him somehow.’

‘Yes, sir. The best man for the job’s Private Hann, sir. Shall I tell him off to get him?’

The sniper’s bagging necessitated time, patience, skill, and in the interim a discomfortable skulking at the bottom of a ditch. Hann unobtrusively worked his way to a rock at the rear, one crowned with shaggy cistus. Private Allcroft, with whom he had worked on more than one job of this kind, hoisted a rifle topped with service-cap, which tauntingly persisted just at the edge of cover, visible but not a mark unless you exposed yourself to shoot. Many minutes of this, drawing several vain bullets, passed; there was then a jerky lifting of the cap for another three inches, and as it was withdrawn, the sniper, too eager, showed half his head, which received Private Hann’s bullet.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Gazing on his comrades in that primitive existence, Martin smiled wryly, as one who discovers that while he has been beguiled into chatter his tea has been well salted. The smile was seen, and answered, by Private Goodbody, a diminutive Cockney with a merry eye.

‘Looks like a scene in the “’Umours of ’Ist’ry,” sir,’ Goodbody vouchsafed suitably.

This was a pre-War publication, which showed our ancestors as unshaven, unscrubbed, bulky and absurd; the little princes as squalling imps led by the ear to their doom in the Tower; Arthur supervising the extrication of Excalibur by a navvy working a handle; the Picts and Scots, hairy and bottle-nosed, sacking London, mainly for whisky. Martin saw the comment’s appositeness, and smiled back. He was touched by the matter-of-fact zeal with which Corporal Henry Bateman had entered into the bagging of the sniper, suggesting a more lifelike tilting of the cap, at present a shade too jaunty. Henry’s dark face showed quickly the result of going unshaved. The already bushy chin and bristly lips, the black, earnest eyes—the whole form thrown forward on the ground—it was homo primigenius hunting the cave-bear, conscious that the cave-bear was also hunting homo primigenius. Neither antagonist dare lift his head; a lightning paw round the rock, or the equally lightning crash of a flint hatchet—and a head would be scalped or cracked.

Meanwhile, another man, as unshaven and as earnest as Henry, was watching from a coign of considerable but imperfect vantage the vaguely flung-up shadows of a fuss that interested him. A German schoolmaster, whose watch on children had given place to a watch on the Jordan, had his rifle trained on the sangar and nulla. But it gave him no opportunity for blood. Then his attention was caught, too late for action, by a terebinth bush shaking to the nulla’s rear. He saw also, again too late for action, the tops of cistus scrub dispart as when a wild cat rustles through. This was the serpentine progression of Private Hann to his sniping post. Our German, whom we may call Private Fritz, was puzzled both as to what movements the enemy was making and as to what points might profitably receive a bullet. After close watching he saw a gap in the stony wilderness where for a moment anyone who passed that way must be exposed.

This narrow neck of the valley leading into Moab was the first key to Transjordan, and must be kept if the British were to be held from raiding across to Amman and the Hejaz railway, as they had done three weeks before. The relations of the Turks and their Teuton allies were strained; the former alleged that the German troops sent to help them, besides being an exiguous handful, were arrogant, obnoxious to Islam, and carefully shielded from battle risks. All this is why a maniple of German soldiers had been sent to assist in holding the Shunet Nimrin pass.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Having bagged his quarry, Private Hann, exultant, desired some trophy also. He was worming his way to the dead body when he came to a steep rock, which dropped ten or twelve feet into a sandy hollow. A terebinth bush sprang from the crest. Midway down was a slippery niche of foothold, complicated by a nest of thorns of the caper-bramble. He was feeling for this, digging into the rock with his talons, as one who gathers samphire, perilous trade. It was now that a German ex-schoolmaster saw a swaying of scrub, opened his eyes to their widest expansion, picked out a dark patch, and fired. The bullet broke Private Hann’s collar-bone, and he tumbled, abruptly and painfully. There was no climbing back; he cursed his folly, which had marooned him here in a crack of the endless hills, where his comrades might go on or (far more likely) go back, and never find him. He would be left, as the ebb leaves a crab, in this hole, to be butchered at ease by anyone who found him. All round him were slippery rocks, unscalable to a mere left hand that must keep all jars away from the body’s right side; and a rifle as skilled and vigilant as his own kept that crest.

It became clear to those in the nulla that their foe had either been accounted for, or had developed excessive cunning. The cap, perked up and wriggled, drew no more bullets.

‘Jacko’s no fool. He’s tumbled to our little gyme.’

‘How can he have tumbled to it? He’s not had a chance to see anyfink but the cap. He doesn’t know there’s only a blooming hipes beneaf it.’

‘No, but he bloody well guesses. You can’t fool Jacko long. He wants us to bob up to see; then he’ll send a bullet, and not for any blooming bit of cloth, neither.’

Nevertheless, the sceptical school gradually ceased to be dominant. With khaki handkerchiefs the passable semblance of a face—or, at any rate, the back of a head of sorts—was packed round the rifle, cap-crowned, and pushed boldly up, right up. The poor mime of cloth was perforated by a bullet immediately; but not the sniper’s.

Sergeant Bosworth inspected the slain decoy. ‘Peeping Tom’s done for,’ he found. ‘This ain’t his shot. Good old Hann!’

But time passed, and Hann did not return. What if the enemy had merely shifted his position? He might be working up a flank or rear attack. In this wilderness of cracks and boulders there was almost infinite possibility for a sniper of resource.

Martin was troubled. ‘Hann hasn’t come back, Sergeant.’

‘No, sir. I don’t like it, sir.’

‘Neither do I, Sergeant. Better send a couple of chaps to look for him, and see what’s happened. Send them together, and tell them not to separate, whatever happens.’

‘Yes, sir.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Snipers appeared above the cliff. They could do little harm, firing into such a confusion of stone and scrub; but they added a fresh reason for jumpiness, and for keeping your head down. Worse, they could signal and observe. A heavy barrage was tossed down, and for twenty minutes the air round the Brentfords was an infernal thing, a whirl of bushes, stumps, fragments of rock. Fifty miles above the earth, some say, such a wind speeds ever, carrying in its course meteorites and star-dust. You who have known modern shell-fire laugh at the catapults of the ancients, slinging their useless stones! Laugh, that is, if you have not read of the siege of Jerusalem, and learned that there was terror before the Somme was fought. The grotesque and ghastly mingled when a chunk of rock the size of a child’s head came spinning over and left a man stunned or with face smashed in. You could not dig real trenches in that limestone, and men felt more exposed than they actually were. But with every movement of position came exposure of the most naked kind.

A belt of machine-gun fire drew closer in. In its wake a hand-to-hand assault developed; out of the innumerable tiny valleys men came swarming, with the terrifying precipitancy of a troll-army springing from its burrows. When they were repulsed, it was to hang in nearer than they were; and the Londoners had many dead and wounded. The telephone wire, which had been cut, was repaired at the cost of a life. Martin had known so little that it was from Battalion Head-quarters that he got word that his company commander was killed. Warren Remfry was next in succession, since two senior subalterns were casualties.

The Anzacs’ attack to north of them had gone badly, the enemy had forced a wedge between them and the London Division and threatened to isolate the latter. He captured a raised promontory between the Richmonds and the Brentfords, from which he enfiladed men who gave better targets than they could themselves find. He grew insolent, with prospects of such another capture as he had made at the second battle of Gaza. The wires went wrong again; and Martin, wondering from minute to minute when his handful would be overwhelmed by a wave out of the tumbled, featureless world which shut them in with ignorance and blindness, was grateful when a runner—if the name can be given to a man who has had to squirm his way through a hundred yards of scrub and limestone—brought him Warren’s order to withdraw to a point fifty yards to the rear. This was merely to a momentary halting-place; a general retirement was in process, and the step was in anticipation of the new assault expected.

Warren’s company fell back in sections, under cover of their own furious small-arms fire. The battle-front, curving inward and round a mountain, had removed them from artillery support. The random character of their defence was not lost on the enemy, who followed up boldly, and put down a barrage on the new line. Martin prayed for speedy repetition of the order to retreat. Where each man took hasty cover behind any rock that lifted above its fellows, and there was no connecting regularity of trenches, a fresh risk appeared. The line was disintegrating, the platoons were breaking up into individuals.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

‘Help a bloody fool up, Corporal!’

Hearing himself addressed hoarsely, Henry looked down, and saw Private Hann, caged at the bottom of a steep drop.

‘Don’t touch that tree, Corporal! There’s a Jacko got a bead on it. Crimes! I’m an ass, Corporal! I wanted to pinch the blooming sniper’s cap or somefink—I got ’im all right—and ’is pal pipped me froo the shoulder. Serves me right. But give a chap a leg-up, Corporal. And don’t say nuffink abaht it, will yer?’

Another face peered over the edge. ‘’Ullo, Bill!’ said Private Goodbody. ‘Glad to see you, Bill. Nice little cushy ’ome from ’ome you’ve been and found, ’aven’t you? Where’ve you been, Bill, while your mates ’as been winning the blinking War without you?’

‘Keep your fat, silly face be’ind the bush! There’s a Jacko sees every grasshopper the uwer side.’

Henry lowered himself, to hoist the repentant one back. He knelt, and raised Hann on his shoulders, slowly, slowly. The process entailed considerable disturbance of the bush already guilty of betrayal. As Henry tried to return, the schoolmaster secured his second victim. The bullet broke the spine, and Henry fell backward, into the pit.

They told Martin the incredible thing that had happened. With the line staggering back—depleted, buffeted out of darkness and vacuity, death humming and crashing his way along the hillside—he was holding his men together, hoping to reach a place they might defend till dusk gave a cloak and cover for retreat. It was useless to raise the cry of ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ No stretcher could pass through that storm. The walking wounded hobbled as they might, aware that death moved faster and that the wilderness lay in wait to trip them. The maimed and mortally struck remained where they fell.

Martin had leapt down into the hollow. He was refusing to face the fact there was no outfacing, that nothing could be done. He pushed a prop of sand beneath the head. He scanned the wall, while despair visualised the leisure and pausing care required to lift his friend above it. Then the extreme of war’s ruthless cruelty came in Sergeant Bosworth’s words, spoken from above.

‘We’ve to continue falling back, sir. Orders just come.’

Henry reinforced him. ‘You must go, old man. I’m done for.’

The message came weighted with another friend’s name. ‘Orders urgent, sir, from Mr. Remfry. There’s another attack expected.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Contending figures began to show on that canvas of death. One shone with the conqueror’s serenity. It was not his time, and a gaunter, nobler spirit appeared, one aware of comrades vanishing and of strength ebbing into helplessness. But the dying man saw the agony which answered that appeal—saw his friend’s look desperately search that forbidding wall. Will took command, and banished the suffering dread within. Stoically radiant, pleased indifferently with approaching loneliness as with the shining Valley of the morning, Henry used the unanswerable word.

‘You’ve got your job to do. I’m all right, Martin. Absolutely all right!’

‘Shall I carry on, sir?’ It was Sergeant Bosworth, about to go. ‘We’ll be all done in if we wait.’

Martin had to clutch the scrub to scale the cliff; Bosworth swung him over. A bullet ripped through the leaves, past Martin’s shoulder. Then the tide of retreat, which he must direct and lead, engulfed him.

Henry’s last vision of his companions was of Private Hann’s remorseful eyes. ‘Forgive a bloody fool, Corporal!’

‘It’s all right, Hann.’

‘Are you quite cushy?’

‘Yes, yes. It’s all right, old chap.’

‘Our chaps ’ll be back presently, then we’ll have you taken care of proper.’ His voice quavered on the lie. ‘Say, Batey, you’re a good feller, if there ever was one!’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Strange thoughts confronted him, not clear in outline yet. A shell tore overhead, ploughing and ripping the air into wide, deep furrows and troughs of sound; he heard the slow purposeful whine of a nosecap seeking for mischief before its energy failed; there was the rat-tat-tat of the machine-guns. Flowers stared from every cranny. On the leisure of his lonely passing they peered in like faces, puckish, pitying, complacent, various as the expressions of men and women in a crowd. Overlooking all were the hollyhocks, their crimson towers a deeper glow in the dimness already shadowing his brain.

Images pressed upon him, as seeming aware that they must use this instrument now or not at all. In the machine-guns’ rattle—he had often thought how like typewriters they sounded!—he heard the shuttle on which men’s lives were woven. The threads of his own were drawing together for the shearer’s hand. His lower body sprawled paralysed, and he remembered Socrates, and thought, ‘When this numbness reaches the heart I shall die.’ Strangest of all was the realisation that this thing had happened to him—that he was alone, dying in a pocket of the Moab hills, trapped as completely as any beast caught in a pit. He was in solitude, with no presence but that overwatching one of death.

And on this solitude other thoughts strove to break in, such as the dying man could not afford to have with him. He knew that the enemy was moving forward over these rocks, and his friends were passing into an eternity of distance. He knew what it would mean if Arabs found him. In his helplessness and his certainty of death couching for him in this wide wilderness he began to see a hunched-up shadow watching from the top of this hole. There came over him, in one sweeping wave, such anguish as he had not known that any man could feel. Terror for himself and of what might, even more than of what he knew must, befall him. He summoned to him all his valour, tried so long during a life which had brought him nothing of what the world considers gain, nothing but toil and obscurity. In that supreme struggle his bodily eyes cleared a moment, and he saw the hunched-up shadow as only the terebinth bush waving and darkening in the evening air. He banished his fears; he would not think of these things.

Nevertheless, he wondered about his friends. He saw them on that tramp, down from these hills and back towards Jordan. He could see, as clearly as though his spirit hovered over every yard of the retreat, each incident of the way. He could see Martin, wrung with distress and unbelief of this thing that had separated them. Thought grew vaguer, and fell to imagining the future, now that they were severed for so long. Their lives were sent down different watersheds. No, his was spilt on sand.

The thundering that had reverberated through the hills was dying down. The bank of hollyhocks grew drowsy, nodding for night. He felt his heart; there was no numbness there yet. His brain, he was sure, was clear. It could not be late, though it was dimming; evening came early, with such gaunt fells on either hand. Yet in the pale blue stuff of heaven he could see—or did he imagine?—stars. Hesperus, that brings all home; and he was coming home, by a manner beyond all fashioning his mind could have made. But no! It would not be Hesperus that he saw here. He heard a roar, and caught above the rim of his prison a swift flash, an arc of light, as of faintly flaming eyebrows. Some gun, moved forward to a point of vantage on these rocks, was firing at his friends. He did not so interpret it. The crash set his mind working on familiar paths; it brought back the

‘night-noise and thunder of the lion.’

And in the skies he picked out a line of liquid silver, a glittering archer walking these heights. Surely it was Orion!

He was poor, and lonely, and forsaken; helpless and dying. But in this darkness he grew aware of help coming swiftly towards him, he knew that he was going to be lifted from this ground of time that was failing beneath him. He cried out, certain that the night and the wilderness were not empty. In that pit he was sure that eternity had found him, and that its face was full of compassion. That face was bending over him, and in his last delirium all of comfort and love that life had ever brought him took form as one Figure he had often imagined:

‘Leapt with a start the shock of His possession.’

To that Figure he lifted up his hands, and sent his whole life out in a cry of appeal.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

That evening, and from the first breaking up of dusk next day, the Brentfords slipped through the hills. It was baneful shepherding. There were countless episodes of the sort our ready writers term Homeric, knowing neither Homer nor modern war. There were hasty snatchings of cover and loosings off of machine-gun and rifle fire; the foe was both too wary to come within close range and too fortunate to require to. When the mountain road curved outward into pinnacled eminence and naked exposure, a gust of bullets might lay a human swathe low; or a shell burst and dash half-a-dozen men against the rocks. The wounded had to be gathered, had to be helped forward. There was a place (whose outlines are bitten, as with acid, into minds that yet move among men) where a thick brush of oleanders swept up out of the brook and across the winding of the way. It was dimming when the last of the Brentfords passed this point; and Remfry, hard pressed, left a handful to hold it. He knew Martin’s thought, its anguish and shame and horror, and it was in his charge that he gave the ambush. It was magnificently successful, for the enemy, thinking the night had drawn his prey into the deeper darkness of the Valley, thrust forward and almost into the Lewis guns and the rifles. Not Achilles, flinging Trojan lives as a sacrifice to his wounded friendship, felt a sterner relief of vengeance than came to Martin. There was a slaughter sufficient to ensure that the foe thereafter crept careful-footed again and at distance.

But the episode, though it brought rest when rest or destruction must have come, came only at the end of long wretchedness. Not till the Division had withdrawn into the Valley could their own guns render effectual assistance. Not until night fell was there any respite. Through the long dusk they moved, borne despairingly downward and backward, through the riot of white and crimson cistus and creamy broom and beneath cliffs where the blue, spider-eyed hyssop seemed to watch them. Always, in never-ending avenue, towered the red hollyhocks, a nightmare of mocking brightness.