One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 5

shrapnel!" someone cried.
"The Boche has a Mercedes motor," said someone else. "You can tell
by the sound of it."
"They say one of their planes chased an ambulance ten miles along a
straight road the other day, trying to get it with a machinegun. The man
who was driving got away, but he had shell-shock afterwards."
"Did he really?"
"Oh, I'm goin' to turn in. God, these French nights are cold!"
The rain pattered hard with unfaltering determination on the roof of the
little arbour. Martin lolled over the rough board table, resting his chin
on his clasped hands, looking through the tinkling bead curtains of the
rain towards the other end of the weed-grown garden, where, under a

canvas shelter, the cooks were moving about in front of two black
steaming cauldrons. Through the fresh scent of rain-beaten leaves came
a greasy smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties
that must have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the
lovers who must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek
against sunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields.
A man broke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking
the water off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet
and was plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead that
was the entablature of a determined rock-hewn face.
"Hello," said Martin, twisting his head to look at the newcomer. "You
section twenty-four?"
"Yes.... Ever read 'Alice in Wonderland'?" asked the wet man, sitting
down abruptly at the table.
"Yes, indeed."
"Doesn't this remind you of it?"
"What?"
"This war business. Why, I keep thinking I'm going to meet the rabbit
who put butter in his watch round every corner."
"It was the best butter."
"That's the hell of it."
"When's your section leaving here?" asked Martin, picking up the
conversation after a pause during which they'd both stared out into the
rain. They could hear almost constantly the grinding roar of camions on
the road behind the café and the slither of their wheels through the
mud-puddles where the road turned into the village.
"How the devil should I know?"
"Somebody had dope this morning that we'd leave here for Soissons

to-morrow." Martin's words tailed off into a convictionless mumble.
"It surely is different than you'd pictured it, isn't it, now?"
They sat looking at each other while the big drops from the leaky roof
smacked on the table or splashed cold in their faces.
"What do you think of all this, anyway?" said the wet man suddenly,
lowering his voice stealthily.
"I don't know. I never did expect it to be what we were taught to
believe.... Things aren't."
"But you can't have guessed that it was like this... like Alice in
Wonderland, like an ill-intentioned Drury Lane pantomime, like all the
dusty futility of Barnum and Bailey's Circus."
"No, I thought it would be hair-raising," said Martin.
"Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that
must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new
particular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of
the press and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?"
Martin nodded.
"Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living,
growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul....
And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't
they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?"
"I agree with you that the little thin noise is very silly," said Martin.
Martin slammed down the hood of the car and stood upright. A cold
stream of rain ran down the sleeves of his slicker and dripped from his
greasy hands.
Infantry tramped by, the rain spattering with a cold glitter on grey
helmets, on gun-barrels, on the straps of equipment. Red sweating faces,

drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the
struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were
the only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed
mud-coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky. In the cold
colourlessness they were delicate and feeble as the faces of children,
rosy and soft under the splattering of mud and the shagginess of
unshaven beards.
Martin rubbed the back of his hand against his face. His skin was like
that, too, soft as the petals of flowers, soft and warm amid all this dead
mud, amid all this hard mud-covered steel.
He leant against the side of the car, his ears full of the heavy shuffle, of
the jingle of equipment, of the splashing in puddles of water-soaked
boots, and watched the endless rosy patches of faces moving by,