A Fable

But it was quite simple, when he finally thought of the method. He waited until his leave came up. He would have to do that; desertion was exactly what he did not want. In London he found a girl, a young woman, not a professional, not really a good-standing amateur yet, two or three months pregnant from any one of three men, two of whom had been killed inside the same fortnight and mile by Nieppe Forest, and the other now in Mesopotamia, who didn’t understand either and therefore (so he thought at the time) was willing to help him for a price—a price twice what she suggested and which represented his whole balance at Cox’s—in a plot whose meretricity and shabbiness only American moving pictures were to match: the two of them taken in delicto so outrageously flagrante and public, so completely unequivocal and incapable of other than one interpretation, that anyone, even the field-rank moralists in charge of the conduct of Anglo-Saxon-derived junior officers, should have refused point blank to accept or even believe it.

It worked though. The next morning, in a Knightsbridge barracks anteroom, a staff officer spokesman offered, as an alternative to preserve the regiment’s honor, the privilege which he had requested of his company commander and then the battalion commander, and finally of the brigadier himself in France three months ago; and three nights later, passing through Victoria station to file into a coach full of private soldiers in the same returning train which had brought him by officers’ first class up from Dover ten days ago, he found he had been wrong about the girl, whom at first he didn’t even remember after she spoke to him. ‘It didn’t work,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It worked.’

‘But you’re going back. I thought you wanted to lose the commission so you wouldn’t have to go back.’ Then she was clinging to him, cursing him and crying too. ‘You were lying all the time, then. You wanted to go back. You just wanted to be a poor bloody private again.’ She was pulling at his arm. ‘Come on. The gates are still open.’

‘No,’ he said, holding back. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Come on,’ she said, jerking at him. ‘I know these things. There’s a train you can take in the morning; you wont be reported absent until tomorrow night in Boulogne.’ The line began to move. He tried to move with it. But she clung only the harder. ‘Cant you see?’ she cried. ‘I cant get the money to give back to you until tomorrow morning.’

‘Let go,’ he said. ‘I must get aboard and find a corner to sleep in.’

‘The train wont go for two hours yet. How many of them do you think I’ve seen leave? Come on. My room isn’t ten minutes from here.’

‘Let go now,’ he said, moving on. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Just two hours.’ A sergeant shouted at him. It had been so long since an N.C.O. had spoken to him this way, that he did not realise at once himself was meant. But he had already freed himself with a sudden sharp hard movement; a carriage door was open behind him, then he was in the compartment, dropping his pack and rifle onto a jumble of others, stumbling among a jumble of legs, pulling the door behind him as she cried through the closing gap: ‘You haven’t told me where to send the money.’

‘Goodbye,’ he said, closing the door, leaving her on the step, clinging on somehow even after the train was moving, her gaped urgent face moving parallel beyond the voiceless glass until an M.P. on the platform jerked her off, her face, not the train, seeming to flee suddenly with motion, in another instant gone.

He had gone out in 1914 with the Londoners. His commission was in them. This time, he was going out to a battalion of Northumberland Borderers. His record had preceded him; a corporal was waiting on the Boulogne quai to take him to the R.T.O. anteroom. The lieutenant had been with him at officers’ school.

‘So you put up a job on them,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Dont tell me: I dont want to know why. You’re going out to the —th. I know James (the lieutenant colonel commanding it). Cut my teeth with him in the Salient last year. You dont want to go in a platoon. What about a telephonist—a sergeant-major’s man?’

‘Let me be a runner,’ he said. So a runner he was. The word from the R.T.O. lieutenant had been too good; not just his record but his past had preceded him to the battalion also, up to the lieutenant colonel himself before he had been a week in the battalion, possibly because he, the runner, was entitled to wear (he did not wear it since it was the officer’s branch of the decoration and, among the men he would now mess and sleep with, that ribbon up on his private’s tunic would have required too much breath) one of the same candy-stripes which the colonel (he was not a professional soldier either) did; that, and one other matter, though he would never believe that the two were more than incidentally connected.