Williamson Love and the Loveless

A Soldier's Tale
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30999-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 7, 384 Seiten

Reihe: A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight

Love and the Loveless (1958) was the seventh 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. The year covered by this novel, 1917, was perhaps the darkest of the Great War, with widespread mutinies in the French Army after the disastrous Nivelle offensive. Phillip Maddison is now a young transport officer, tending pack animals, surviving amid devastation and death. His courage, sustained by poetry, by comradeship, by the comfort of whisky and water, is perhaps unnatural; but amid the charnel house of battle he endures, in a way of life so alien to those at home that it might be the dark side of the moon. '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

NEW BEGINNING

By one of the platforms of Charing Cross station Red-cross vehicles were drawn up. Civilians were moving towards them. Phillip, walking through the ticket barrier of the suburban line, followed by a porter wheeling his valise, went with the crowd. Near the ambulances, on the asphalt, stretcher cases were lying in rows. They had the usual greyish yellow faces, weary of pain. Beyond the ambulances, peering from open windows of the train, were to be seen the optimistic faces of lightly wounded men. Heads and arms had been newly bandaged, judging by the absence of blood stains; while from the dried mud on some tunics, and khaki aprons over kilts, they were not long out of the line.

Talking with the men at one window, he learned that they had been in action on the morning of the day before, at Thiepval and the Zollern Redoubt, north of the Ancre. How quickly they had come home! The attack had been mentioned in the communiqué from G.H.Q. only that morning, with headlines, in The Daily Trident. It was now nearly October; half of the objectives of July the First immediately south of the Ancre valley had only just been taken; attack and counter-attack had crossed the chalky upheaved soil during all the intervening days and nights since that brazen sunny morning, which appeared with voiceless glassy pain in his mind at odd moments of the day and night.

Moving down the train, longing to see a known face, he spotted the Gaultshire badge on a trench cap, and asked what battalion had been in action. “The seventh! Were you, by any chance, at Carnoy on July the First? When the battalion got all its objectives?”

“That’s right, sir!” There were three chevrons on the hanging sleeve belonging to the unshaven face above him.

“Then you knew Captain West, sergeant?”

“I was with ‘Spectre’—beg pardon, sir—when the Captain was hit, in White Trench, sir.”

“How extraordinary! I was talking to him only the other day, when he went to Buckingham Palace for his D.S.O.”

“If ever a man earned a decoration that day, it was Captain West, sir, or Major, I should say.”

He noticed the riband of the Military Medal on the sergeant’s tunic, as he stood upright at the window to let a man pass behind him.

“I’m not with the Gaultshires any longer, sergeant. I’m with the Machine Gun Corps—in fact, I’m on my way now back to the Training Centre.”

“So you’ve joined the Suicide Club, sir!”

“I’d say the infantry was that, sergeant.”

“Give me bombers and bayonet men every time, sir, and my mobility!”

The young subaltern opened a new silver case, twenty-first birthday present, and put a cigarette in the sergeant’s mouth. Pushing the wheel of his lighter upon the flint he blew the spark to smoulder on the fusee; and was offering it when a reporter with a camera called out beside him. “Now then, boys, let’s show ’em—Are we down-hearted?” At the massed yell of ‘No!’ he pressed the shutter bulb; after which he went from window to window, asking names of regiments. A dialection of voices broke forth—Manchesters, Northumberland Fusiliers, Dorsets, Green Howards, Borderers. They were full of beans, thought Phillip, their minds saw brightly because they were out of it.

“How do you feel about going back again, sergeant?”

“When my turn comes, sir, I’ll be ready.”

“But is that how you really feel?”

The sergeant gave him a look, between surprise and caution, before replying, “Not much good thinking about it, is it, sir? Job’s got to be done, we’re all in it, aren’t we?”

“Yes, including the prächtig kerls on the other side.” When the sergeant looked puzzled he said, “That’s what the old Alleyman in 1914 called the Crown Prince. You know, they like him as much as we like the Prince of Wales. It means ‘decent fellow’. Well, goodbye, and good luck!”

He shook the uninjured hand; the sergeant came to attention; Phillip saluted him, also at attention, before turning away to the porter waiting with his valise on a trolley. Then he saw the station clock.

“My hat, I’ll miss my train! Taxi to King’s Cross! Drive like hell!” as he leapt in over his valise, and gave the porter half-a-crown.

The taxi, with its modest single-cylinder engine that had thumped beside many a jeering cabbie in the early years of Edward the Peacemaker’s reign, arrived with its big-end no hotter than usual, with five minutes to spare. Another half-crown changed hands, the driver touching his cap-peak on receiving so substantial a tip as a shilling. Having bought a copy of The Times at the bookstall for a penny, the tall young subaltern, with no ribands on his breast but two wound stripes of gold braid on his left sleeve above the cuff, followed the porter wheeling the valise to an empty carriage, wherein, having let down the window, he leaned out in the hope of discouraging others from entering. Far away beyond the end of the platform he saw the engine blowing off steam, as it waited to draw the dark carriages to the North.

The guard stood by, a large silver watch in his hand. He looked to be a kind man, elderly, the sort called Dad by his children, and not Father. Phillip was musing about him, wondering if he had any sons in the war, when he saw a figure coming through the ticket barrier that caused him immediately to withdraw his head. Downham! Hell, if he came in the carriage! He held his head down in the far corner, pretending to be looking in his haversack. Where would Downham be going? Perhaps beyond Grantham, to Catterick camp, which he had heard was as bleak as its name. Downham—one of his seniors in the office—Downham, who had been a private in the London Highlanders like himself, at the outbreak of war, but had not volunteered for foreign service—Downham, now major, never having been to the front!

Thank God, he had gone past the carriage.

Phillip returned to the window, and looked at the guard’s face. A splendid fellow, tall, dutiful, a little anxious, as he waited for the last minute to pass. His zero hour—exactly to the second. Well, now he would have the carriage to himself, to think his own thoughts, to be able to rest in the presence of Lily. Yes, the guard was anxious: he showed it by the way he checked his watch with the station clock. Now he was staring at the second hand, whistle in mouth. And then—a shout from the ticket barrier made him turn his head. A latecomer was hurrying through, followed by porter with valise. At once the guard made for the carriage and pulled open the door, while Phillip stood back. “This way, sir, please!” Rapidly the valise was lifted in, the officer followed, and as the door was shut without slam a long whistle-blast and waving of green flag sent the train gliding down the platform.

“That was a close shave,” remarked the newcomer, with a smile. “The taxi I bagged was running on paraffin, with a vapouriser, and broke a piston.” With a slight stutter he continued, “My God, I’ve had a bon time!” He went on to describe how and why he had almost missed the train, mentioning, with complete lack of reserve, incidents in a Torrington Square hotel with a girl he had met on leave. Phillip was relieved when the account was over, and he need pretend interest no more. Seeing the crossed Vickers gun badges on the other’s lapels, he tried to recall the face opposite, as one among many others seen months ago at the theatre bar in Grantham.

Opening his newspaper, he found the London Gazette, and looked for the regiments with which he had served. One item, in the first territorial home-service battalion to which he had been attached for training after he had been commissioned, made him see again the heavy veldt-tanned face of an elderly second-lieutenant at Heathmarket, long ago in the summer of 1915. Brendon, the Boer War veteran who had snubbed him—‘Maddison as a soldier, simply non est’—was in the Gazette seconded for duty as an Assistant Provost Marshal, with the temporary rank of Major. Portly Brendon, complaining of having to support a wife and child on second-lieutenant’s pay, would be feeling pretty happy just now.

Glancing at the man opposite, he saw with relief that he was lying back, with eyes closed.

The train, beyond the cavernous darkness of King’s Cross, was leaving veils of steam between drab backs of houses of the inner northern suburbs. Gradually the space cleared on either side, until they were racing through a countryside almost as meaningless as the streets and buildings left behind. Fields, hedgerow timber, spinneys with rookeries visible in the treetops now that autumn had broken the pattern of leaves, teams of heavy horses ploughing up grass and stubble, even cock pheasants unconcerned by the rushing of the train, were equally of a flatness through the glass of the window.

Terror for a moment possessed him: every moment he was going farther from ——. But, even if he returned, she would not be there. Never, never would he see her again. If only this was the train to Folkestone, and the front.

He wondered if his wound would prevent him from re-joining the Transport Course. He must say nothing about it when he arrived, lest a slightly gammy leg, with its crater-like scar on the left buttock, disqualify him from riding. If so, he could hardly be returned to the infantry, for if he couldn’t ride, he certainly couldn’t march. No home-service...