A TRADE REPORT ONLY. BY C. E. MONTAGUE. I. devils one empty place more than another? He has to prick up his ears when he gets there. Then he starts sweating. That's all he knows, and No one has said what was wrong with The Garden, nor even why it was called by that name: whether because it had apples in it, and also a devil, like Eden; or after Gethse- it was the same story with us mane and the agonies there; in The Garden. All I can do or, again, from Proserpine's is to tell you, just roughly, garden, because of the hush the make of the place, the way filling the foreground. All the that the few honest solids and air near you seemed like so liquids were fixed that came much held breath, with the into it. They were the least long rumble of far-away guns part of it, really. stretching out beyond it like some dreamful line of low hills in the distance of a landscape. The rest of the Western Front has been well written up-much too well. The Garden alone the Holy Terror, as some of the men used to call it has not. It is under some sort of taboo. I think I know why. If you never were in the line there before the smash came and made it like everywhere else, you could not know how it would work on the nerves when it was still its own elvish self. And if you were there and did know, then you knew also that it was no good to try to tell people. They only said, "Oh, so you all had the wind up? We had. But who could say why? How is a horse to say what it is that be It was only an orchard, to look at: all ancient apples, dead straight in the stem, with fat wet grass underneath, a little unhealthy in colour for want of more sun. Six feet above ground, the lowest apple boughs all struck out level, and kept so; some beasts, gone in our time, must have eaten every leaf that tried to grow lower. So the under side of the boughs made a sort of flat awning or roof. We called the layer of air between it and the ground The Six-Foot Seam, as we were mostly miners. The light in this seam always appeared to have had something done to it: sifted through branches, refracted, messed about somehow, it was not at all the stuff you wanted just at that time. You see the like of it in an eclipse, when the sun gives a queer wink at the earth round the edge of a black mask. Very nice, too, in its place; but the war itself was quite enough out of the common just then-falling skies all over the place, and half your dead certainties shaken. You We and the Germans were both in The Garden, and knew it. But nobody showed. Everywhere else on the Front somebody showed up at last; somebody fired. But here nothing was seen or heard ever. found you were whispering and walking on tiptoe, expecting you didn't know what. Have you been in a great crypt at twilight under a church, nothing round you but endless thin pillars, holding up a low roof? Suppose there's a wolf at the far end of the crypt and you alone at the other, staring and staring into the thick of the pillars, and wondering, wondering-round which of the pillars will that grey nose come rubbing? Why not smash up the silly old spell, you may say-let a good yell, loose a shot, do any sane thing to break out That's what I said till I got there. Our unit took over the place from the French. A French platoon sergeant, my opposite number, showed me the quarters and posts and the like, and I asked the usual question, How's the old Boche?" 66 "Mais assez gentil," he pattered. That Gaul was not waiting to chat. While he showed me the bomb-store, he muttered something low, hur I knew all about that. French sergeants were always like that: dervishes in a fight when it came, but dead set, at all other times, on living paisiblement, smoking their pipes. Paisiblement-they love the very feel of the word in their mouths. Our men were no warrior race, but they all hugged the belief that they really were marksmen, not yet found out by the world. They would be shooting all night at clods, heads of posts, at anything that might pass for a head. Oh, I knew. Or I thought so. But no. Not a shot all the night. either. We were just sucked into the hush of The Garden, the way your voice drops in a church-when you go in at the door you become part of the system. I tried to think why. Did nobody fire just because in that place it was so easy for anybody to kill? No trench could be dug; it would have filled in an hour with water filtering through from the full stream flanking The Garden. Sentries stood out among the fruit trees, behind little breastworks of sods, like the things you use to shoot grouse. These screens were merely a form; they would scarcely have slowed down a bullet. They were not defences, only symbols of things that were real elsewhere. Every thing else in the place was on queer terms with reality; so were they. Our first event was the shriek. It was absolutely detached, unrelated to anything seen or heard before or soon after, just like the sudden fall of a great tree on a still windless day. At three o'clock on a late autumn morning, a calm moonless night, the depths of The Garden in front of our posts yielded a long wailing scream. I was making a round of our posts at the time, and the scream made me think of a kind of dream I had had twice or thrice: not a story dream, but a portrait dream; just a vivid rending vision of the face of some friend with a look on it that made me feel the brute I must have been to have never seen how he or she had suffered, and how little I had known or tried to know. I could not have fancied before that one yell could tell such a lot about any one. Where it came from there must be some kind of hell going on that went beyond all the hells now in the books, like one of the stars that are still out of sight because the world has not lived long enough to give time for the first ray of light from their blaze to get through to our eyes. I found the sentries jumpy. "What is it, sergeant," one of II. them almost demanded of me, as if I were the fellow in charge of the devils. "There's no one on earth,” he said, could live in that misery." Toomey himself, the red-headed gamekeeper out of the County Fermanagh, betrayed some perturbation. He hinted that "Thim Wans were in it. "Who?" I asked. "Ach, the Good People," he said, with a trace of reluctance. Then I remembered, from old days at school, that the Greeks too had been careful; they called their Furies "The Well- disposed Ladies." All the rest of the night there was not a sound but the owls. The sunless day that followed was quiet till 2.30 P.M., when the Hellhound appeared. He came trotting briskly out of the orchard, rounding stem after stem of the fruit trees, leapt our little formal pretence of barbed wire, and made straight for Toomey, as any dog would. It was a young male black-and-tan. It adored Toomey till three, when he was relieved. Then it came capering around him in ecstasy, back to the big living cellar, a hundred yards to the rear. At the door it heard voices within and let down its tail, ready to plead lowliness and contrition before any tribunal less divine than Toomey. The men, or most of them, were not obtrusively divine just then. They were out to take anything ill that might come. All the hushed days had first drawn their nerves tight, and then the scream had cut some of them. All bawled or squeaked in the cellar, to try to feel natural after the furtive business outside. "Gawd a'mighty!" Looker shrilled at the entry of Toomey, "if Fritz ain't sold 'im a pup!' Jeers flew from all parts of the smoky half - darkness. "Where's licence, Toomey?" "Sure 'e's clean in th' 'ouse?" ""Tain't no Dogs 'Ome 'ere. Over the way! Corporal Mullen, the ever friendly, said to Toomey, more mildly, Wot? Goin' soft? 66 'A daycent dog, Corp," said Toomey. "He's bruk wi' the Kaiser. An' I'll engage he's through the distemper. Like as not, he'll be an Alsatian." Toomey retailed these commendations slowly, with pauses between, to let them sink in. "What'll you feed him?" asked Mullen, inspecting the points of the beast with charity. "Feed 'im!" Looker squealed. "Feed 'im into th' incinerator!" Ah!" Looker agreed. "An' roostin' up yer armpit." "Thot's reet, Filthy," said Brunt. We all called Looker Filthy, without offence meant or taken. "I'll bet 'arf a dollar," said Looker, eyeing the Hellhound malignantly, "the 'Uns 'ave loaded 'im up with plague fleas. Sent 'im acrorse. Wiv instructions." "Can't Toomey protested. ye see the dog has been hit, ye blind man?" In fact, the immigrant kept his tail licking expressively under his belly except when it lifted under the sunshine of Toomey's regard. Brunt rumbled out slow gloomy prophecies from the gloom of his corner. "'A'll be tearin' 'imsel' t' bits wi' t' mange in a fortneet. Rat for breakfas', rat for dinner, rat for tea; bit o' rat las' thing at neet, 'fore 'e'll stretch down to 't." "An' that's the first sinse ye've talked," Toomey conceded. "A rotten diet-sheet is ut. An' dirt! An' no kennel the time the roof 'll start drippin'. A dog's life for a man, an' God knows what for a dog." We felt the force of that. We all had dogs at home. The Hellhound perhaps felt our ruth in the air like a rise of temperature, for at this point he made a couple of revolutions on his wheel base to get the pampas grass of his imagination comfortable about him, and then collapsed in a curve and lay at rest with his nose to the ground and two soft enigmatic gleams from his eyes raking the twilight recesses of our dwelling. For the moment he was relieved of the post of nucleus-in-chief for the vapours of fractiousness to condense upon. He had a distinguished successor. The Company Sergeant Major, no less, came round about five minutes after with "word from the Colonel." Some mischief, all our hearts told us at once. They were right too. The Corps had sent word—just what it would, we inwardly groaned. The Corps had sent word that G.H.Q.Old G.H.Q.! At it again! we savagely thought. We knew what was coming. Yes, G.H.Q. wanted to know what German unit was opposite to us. That meant a raid, of course. The Colonel couldn't help it. Like all sane men below Brigade staffs, he hated raids. But orders were orders. He did all he could. He sent word that if any one brought in a German, dead or alive, on his own, by this time to-morrow, he, the Colonel, would give him a fiver. Of course nobody could, but it was an offer, meant decently. Darkness and gnashing of teeth, grunts and snarls of disgust, filled the cellar the moment the C.S.M. had departed. "Gawd 'elp us!" "A ride! In The Gawden!" "'Oo says Gawd made gawdens ?' "Ow! Everythink in The Gawden is lovely!" "Come into The Gawden, "We gotten dog for't ahl reet," said Brunt. This was the only audible trace of good humour. Toomey looked at Brunt quickly. Toomey was destined to trouble that afternoon ; one thing came after another. At 3.25 I sent him and Brunt, with a clean sack apiece, to the Sergeant-Major's dug-out for the rations. They came back in ten minutes. As Toomey gave me his sack, I feared that I saw a thin train of mixed black and white dust trending across the powdered mortar floor to the door. Then I saw Looker, rage in his face, take a candle and follow this trail, stooping down, and once tasting the stuff on a wet finger-tip. And then the third storm Christ!" Looker "If he ain't put the tea in the sack with the 'ole in it! burst. yelled. 66 We all knew that leak in a bottom corner of that special sack as we knew every very small thing in our life of small things-the cracked dixie-lid, the brazier's short leg, the way that Mynns had of clearing his throat, and Brunt of working his jaws before spitting. Of course, the sack was all right for loaves and the tinned stuff. But tea!-loose tea mixed with powdered sugar! |