Williamson A Fox Under My Cloak

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28753-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 200 Seiten

Reihe: A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight

A Fox under My Cloak (1954) was the fifth entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It follows Phillip Maddison into the Great War, surviving in the face of terror, from the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 to the gas attacks of the Battle of Loos the following year. While home in England on sick leave Phillip obtains his commission into a fashionable regiment in which his social inadequacies make him the butt of his fellow officers' scorn. Yet, alone among them, Phillip has tasted the bleak reality of life, and death, on the Western Front. 'Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williamson, Henry

Leseproben

Chapter 1

INTO THE LINE

IN the first week of December 1914 the King Emperor George V arrived at St. Omer in Northern France, headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force. Orders were given immediately to all units, in rest and refitting after the battle of Ypres, to prepare for a Royal inspection.

Among them was a territorial battalion, the London Highlanders. Boots and short puttees had already replaced worn-out shoes and spats in which members of the original battalion had left England nearly three months previously; but only in some cases had new rifles been issued in place of those defective Mark 1 Lee-Metfords which, in action, had been used as single-loaders with the new, pointed ammunition. That was in the past, a memory of Hallo’e’en and the fighting beside the Menin road.

New faces, inter-company football matches, parcels and letters from home, estaminet nights, had reduced the war to a rumour beyond the eastern horizon of flat, tree-lined arable fields gleaming with wintry water in cart-rut and furrow.

The day before the King was to arrive there was a battalion route march led by pipers along dull pavé roads leading to nowhere and back again, before dismissal by the new Commanding Officer, a regular soldier from the Coldstream, for the great clean-up.

His Britannic Majesty in the service uniform of a Field-Marshal, brown-gloved, brown-booted with gold spurs, brown-bearded, pouches prominent under blue eyes, passed with Field-Marshal Sir John French, Aides-de-camp, and various General Staff Officers down the ranks of silent, staring-ahead, depersonalised faces of No. 1 Company, in whose ranks, one of the survivors of Messines and Ypres, stood Phillip Maddison, thinking that the gruff tones in which the King spoke to Sir John French and the Colonel were of that other world infinitely far away from what really happened.

Behind the King walked the Prince of Wales, seeming somehow detached from the massive power of red and gold, the big moustaches and faces and belts and boots and spurs all so shining and immaculate between the open ranks of the troops in kilts of hodden grey. The slight figure of the Prince, in the uniform of the Grenadiers, appeared to be looking for something beyond the immediate scene—a small white-faced boy in the shadow of Father.

*

The London Highlanders were looking forward to spending Christmas in billets. The battalion was still 500 under strength, having received a draft of only 300 officers and men to replace the wastage of fourteen days of fighting. There was to be a Christmas tree, and company dinners with turkey and plum pudding. Football teams were practising daily; and a match was being played between No. 1 and No. 3 Companies in a field outside the town when a motor-cycle dispatch-rider arrived with a message for the Adjutant. Many eyes watched him open and read it, and pass it to the Colonel.

Immediately the match was stopped. Laughing talk and banter behind the goal-posts ceased. Everyone back to billets immediately; the battalion had orders to move at once. The misty dampness of the December afternoon seemed suddenly to be hanging chill. Nobody took a last kick at the football. It was picked up, by orders of the regimental sergeant-major, and carried off the field.

Feelings of dread—thoughts of imminent dereliction in cold and wet, and worse, of sleeplessness—possessed the survivors of the recent battles walking to their billets among the slightly excited and inexperienced men of the new draft.

Phillip Maddison, accompanied by four of the new draft in his billet in the Rue de Calais, walked in silence among them, all in step with him, kilts swinging in unison. He was thinking what a fool he had been for not having applied, during the four weeks the battalion had been out at rest, to join the transport. What more wonderful life could there be, with just enough excitement near the front line at night to give the feeling that one was really in the war—unlike the base-wallahs of the A.S.C., the Ordnance Corps, and others too far back to see the flares over the battlefield at night? He envied the transport drivers, not so much for the safety of their jobs—the horse wagons taking up rations and ammunition stopped at least half a mile from the firing line—but because they could sleep after their work was done, in hay or straw in a barn, out of the rain and mud.

For Phillip the terror of battle, of attacking into the loud cracking of bullets fired from a few hundred yards away, from behind uncut barbed-wire, was the same terror of having to face cane-strokes at school in the past: when it was over, it was over; but sleeplessness at night, without shelter in rain and frost, life achingly unendurable from one long hopeless moment to another in chilly darkness, was the worse thing. Oh, to be with the transport—the excitement of bringing up rations and letters at night to the battalion dump, handing over the 20 per cent over-proof rum in earthenware jars, ammunition and rolls of barbed-wire—then round went the horses’ heads, back jolted the four-wheeled wagons, faster than they had come because the horses were thinking of nose-bags of oats awaiting them in stable or on picket-line, the drivers thinking of hot tea or soup, of snuggling into dry straw under a roof.

*

Oh, why had he not applied, when the remnants of the battalion had first come out to rest, for a transfer? Several of the Bleak Hill chaps—including cousin Bertie, the transport sergeant—were then going back to England, to take up commissions, and there had been vacancies.

Some had been filled from the new draft. What an idiot he had been, deciding to stay in the company, to be with the four new fellows with whom he had chummed up! They had attached themselves to him, marvelling at the horizontal bullet-rip across his greatcoat, souvenir of sentry-go in Bellewaarde Wood in early November. One of the four, Glass, had actually asked him for tips of what to avoid doing in a battle! Phillip had pronounced the old soldier’s philosophy.

“If your number is already scratched on a bullet, or your name painted on a shell, then it will find you. There’s nothing you can do about it.” And later, one particularly cheery evening, “Keep by me when we go in, it isn’t so bad, really.” This was after several rounds of café-rhum in the Au Rossignol, when he was thinking of the way the bearded Grenadier Guards had looked after them when they had first gone into the Brown Wood line. Cranmer! He drank a toast to Cranmer, his eyes averted from the others. Cranmer, a Boy Scout with him in the Bloodhound patrol—those faraway days of cricketing hats and linen haversacks dyed in tea to look like khaki, of twopenny broomsticks and little pewter bugle, of scrapping between rival patrols and troops, Boer War tents of rotten canvas, and black-smelling wooden water-bottles!

*

In the billet there were three members of the original battalion, including Phillip, and nine of the new draft, mucking-in together—sharing food-parcels and rations at one table. Now the problem was what to take, and what to abandon—cakes, pots of jam, sardines, boxes of sweet biscuits, even the best part of a tinned ham. The men of the new draft spoke quietly among themselves; but the three survivors of the old battalion were, in different ways, visibly agitated. Lance-corporal Collins, with sour face, was swearing as he threw aside one thing after another, muttering about the balls-up of Christmas; Church had a sardonic, to-hell-with-everything expression on his face; Phillip felt that his life was shattered, or on the point of being shattered, as he failed again and again to decide which of his mother’s gifts he must leave behind, and so forsake and abandon part of her gentle face regarding him. The effect was one of irritability. Why had she sent such silly things, like that bottle of linctus? And the red flannel chest-protector, gift from Gran’pa?

Even so, he was deeply attached to, or loyal to, all thoughts from home which had prompted the sending—both had come from the old life that was now lost for ever. What about the linctus? He could see Mother buying the bottle at Leo the chemist’s in the High Road, Leo’s own special recipe. Every winter since he was little, especially when the yellow fogs had come before the frosts, Mother had given him teaspoonfuls of syrupy, sweet linctus to guard against a return of childhood croup. How could he betray her loving care? Or her cakes? Or any of the pairs of socks (not sox, as she spelled the word) she had knitted for him? Then there were the two woollen scarves, the two cholera or body belts, the woollen cardigan (worn with the chest protector, it made his tunic tight), the two pairs of woollen gloves, half a dozen tins of cocoa and café-au-lait, thick bars of chocolate, two extra shirts, a dozen boxes of matches, a pork pie, almonds and raisins——

The door opened. The company sergeant-major, no longer “Colours” of easy Bleak Hill days, stood there. Quietly he said, “Company parade outside in twenty minutes’ time.”

When the door was shut again, Phillip, while knowing that he was showing his own weakness, appealed to Lance-corporal Collins, despite Collins’s dislike of him.

“I suppose you don’t know where I can get a sandbag, Corporal, by any chance, to pack my extra clobber in?”

“If you...