Mr. Standfast - John Buchan (autobiographies to read TXT) 📗

I had special companies for counterattack at selected points, when I wanted time to retire the rest of the division. I think we must have fought more than a dozen of such little battles. We lost men all the time, but the enemy made no big scoop, though he was always on the edge of one. Looking back, it seems like a succession of miracles. Often I was in one end of a village when the Boche was in the other. Our batteries were always on the move, and the work of the gunners was past praising. Sometimes we faced east, sometimes north, and once at a most critical moment due south, for our front waved and blew like a flag at a masthead⁠ ⁠… Thank God, the enemy was getting away from his big engine, and his ordinary troops were fagged and poor in quality. It was when his fresh shock battalions came on that I held my breath⁠ ⁠… He had a heathenish amount of machine-guns and he used them beautifully. Oh, I take my hat off to the Boche performance. He was doing what we had tried to do at the Somme and the Aisne and Arras and Ypres, and he was more or less succeeding. And the reason was that he was going bald-headed for victory.

The men, as I have said, were wonderfully steady and patient under the fiercest trial that soldiers can endure. I had all kinds in the division⁠—old army, new army, Territorials⁠—and you couldn’t pick and choose between them. They fought like Trojans, and, dirty, weary, and hungry, found still some salt of humour in their sufferings. It was a proof of the rock-bottom sanity of human nature. But we had one man with us who was hardly sane.⁠ ⁠…

In the hustle of those days I now and then caught sight of Ivery. I had to be everywhere at all hours, and often visited that remnant of Scots Fusiliers into which the subtlest brain in Europe had been drafted. He and his keepers were never on outpost duty or in any counterattack. They were part of the mass whose only business was to retire discreetly. This was child’s play to Hamilton, who had been out since Mons; and Amos, after taking a day to get used to it, wrapped himself in his grim philosophy and rather enjoyed it. You couldn’t surprise Amos any more than a Turk. But the man with them, whom they never left⁠—that was another matter.

“For the first wee bit,” Hamilton reported, “we thocht he was gaun daft. Every shell that came near he jumped like a young horse. And the gas! We had to tie on his mask for him, for his hands were fushionless. There was whiles when he wadna be hindered from standin’ up and talkin’ to hisself, though the bullets was spittin’. He was what ye call demoralized⁠ ⁠… Syne he got as though he didna hear or see onything. He did what we tell’t him, and when we let him be he sat down and grat. He’s aye greetin’⁠ ⁠… Queer thing, sirr, but the Gairmans canna hit him. I’m aye shakin’ bullets out o’ my claes, and I’ve got a hole in my shoulder, and Andra took a bash on his tin that wad hae felled onybody that hadna a heid like a stot. But, sirr, the prisoner taks no scaith. Our boys are feared of him. There was an Irishman says to me that he had the evil eye, and ye can see for yerself that he’s no canny.”

I saw that his skin had become like parchment and that his eyes were glassy. I don’t think he recognized me.

“Does he take his meals?” I asked.

“He doesna eat muckle. But he has an unco thirst. Ye canna keep him off the men’s water-bottles.”

He was learning very fast the meaning of that war he had so confidently played with. I believe I am a merciful man, but as I looked at him I felt no vestige of pity. He was dreeing the weird he had prepared for others. I thought of Scudder, of the thousand friends I had lost, of the great seas of blood and the mountains of sorrow this man and his like had made for the world. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the long ridges above Combles and Longueval which the salt of the earth had fallen to win, and which were again under the hoof of the Boche. I thought of the distracted city behind us and what it meant to me, and the weak, the pitifully weak screen which was all its defence. I thought of the foul deeds which had made the German name to stink by land and sea, foulness of which he was the arch-begetter. And then I was amazed at our forbearance. He would go mad, and madness for him was more decent than sanity.

I had another man who wasn’t what you might call normal, and that was Wake. He was the opposite of shell-shocked, if you understand me. He had never been properly under fire before, but he didn’t give a straw for it. I had known the same thing with other men, and they generally ended by crumpling up, for it isn’t natural that five or six feet of human flesh shouldn’t be afraid of what can torture and destroy it. The natural thing is to be always a little scared, like me, but by an effort of the will and attention to work to contrive to forget it. But Wake apparently never gave it a thought. He wasn’t foolhardy, only indifferent. He used to go about with a smile on his face, a smile of contentment. Even the horrors⁠—and we had plenty of them⁠—didn’t affect him. His eyes, which used to be hot, had now a curious open innocence like Peter’s. I would have been happier if he had been a little rattled.

One night, after we had had a bad day of anxiety,