Anthony Powell - The Valley of Bones

‘We saved a mug for you, sir. Wet you are, by Christ, too.’

I could have embraced him. The tea was of the kind Uncle Giles used to call ‘a good sergeant-major’s brew’. It tasted like the best champagne. I felt immediately ten years younger, hardly wet at all.

‘She was a big woman that gave us that jug of tea, she was,’ said Corporal Gwylt.

He addressed Williams, W. H.

‘Ah, she was,’ agreed Williams, W. H.

He looked thoughtful. Good at running and singing, he was otherwise not greatly gifted.

‘She made me afraid, she did,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘I would have been afraid of that big woman in a little bed.’

‘Indeed, I would too that,’ said Williams, W. H., looking as if he were sincere in the opinion.

‘Would you not have been afraid of her, Sergeant Pendry, a great big woman twice your size?’

‘Shut your mouth,’ said Sergeant Pendry, with unexpected force. ‘Must you ever be talking of women?’

Corporal Gwylt was not at all put out.

‘I would be even more afeared of her in a big bed,’ he said reflectively.

We finished our tea. A runner came in, brought by a sentry, with a message from Gwatkin. It contained an order to report to him at a map reference in half an hour’s time. The place of meeting turned out to be the crossroads not far from the cowshed.

‘Shall I take the jug back, Corporal?’ asked Williams, W. H.

‘No, lad, I’ll return that jug,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘If I have your permission, sir?’

‘Off you go, but don’t stay all night.’

‘I won’t take long, sir.’

Gwylt disappeared with the jug. The weather was clearing up now. There was a moon. The air was fresh. When the time came, I went off to meet Gwatkin. Water dripped from the trees, but a little wetness, more or less, was by then a matter of indifference. I stood just off the road while I waited, expecting Gwatkin would be late. However, the truck appeared on time. The vehicle drew up in the moonlight just beside me. Gwatkin stepped out. He gave the driver instructions about a message he was to take and the time he was to return to this same spot. The truck drove off. Gwatkin began to stride slowly up the road. I walked beside him.

‘Everything all right, Nick?’

I told him what we had been doing, giving the results of the reconnaissance on the far side of the canal

‘Why are you so wet?’

‘Fell off the rope bridge into the canal.’

‘And swam?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was good,’ he said, as if it had been a brilliant idea to swim.

‘How are things going in the battle?’

‘The fog of war has descended.’

That was a favourite phrase of Gwatkin’s. He seemed to derive support from it. There was a pause. Gwatkin began to fumble in his haversack. After a moment he brought out quite a sizeable bar of chocolate.

‘I brought this for you,’ he said.

‘Thanks awfully, Rowland.’

I broke off a fairly large portion and handed the rest back to him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all for you.’

‘All this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you really spare it?’

‘It’s meant for you. I thought you might not have any chocolate with you.’

‘I hadn’t.’

He returned to the subject of the exercise, explaining, so far as possible, the stage things had reached, what our immediate movements were to be. I gnawed the chocolate. I had forgotten how good chocolate could be, wondering why I had never eaten more of it before the war. It was like a drug, entirely altering one’s point of view. I felt suddenly almost as warmly towards Gwatkin as to Corporal Gwylt, though nothing would ever beat that first sip of tea. Gwatkin and I had stopped by the side of the road to look at his map in the moonlight. Now he closed the case, buttoning down its flap.

‘I’m sorry I sent you off like that without any lunch,’ he said.

‘That was the order.’

‘No,’ said Gwatkin. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There would have been lots of time for you to have had something to eat,’ he said.

I did not know what to answer.

‘I had to work off on someone that rocket the CO gave me,’ he said. ‘You were the only person I could get at — anyway the first one I saw when I came back from the Colonel. He absolutely took the hide off me. I’d have liked to order the men off, too, right away, without their dinner, but I knew I’d only get another rocket — an even bigger one — if it came out they’d missed a meal unnecessarily through an order of mine.’

I felt this a handsome apology, a confession that did Gwatkin credit. Even so, his words were nothing to the chocolate. There were still a few remains clinging to my mouth. I licked them from the back of my teeth.

‘Of course you’ve got to go,’ said Gwatkin vehemently, ‘lunch or no lunch, if it’s an order. Go and get caught up on a lot of barbed wire and be riddled by machine-gun fire, stabbed to death with bayonets against a wall, walk into a cloud of poison gas without a mask, face a flame-thrower in a narrow street. Anything. I don’t mean that.’

I agreed, at the same time feeling no immediate necessity to dwell at length on such undoubtedly valid aspects of military duty. It seemed best to change the subject. Gwatkin had made amends — one of the rarest things for anyone to attempt in life — now he must be distracted from cataloguing further disagreeable potentialities to be encountered in the course of a soldier’s life.

‘Sergeant Pendry hasn’t been very bright today,’ I said. ‘I think he must be sick.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about Pendry,’ said Gwatkin.

‘You noticed he was in poor shape?’

‘He came to me last night. There wasn’t time to tell you before, with all the preparations going on for the exercise — or at least I forgot to tell you.’

‘What’s wrong with Pendry?’

‘His wife, Nick.’

‘What about her?’

‘Pendry had a letter from a neighbour saying she was carrying on with another man.’

‘I see.’

‘You keep on reading in the newspapers that the women of this country are making a splendid war effort,’ said Gwatkin, speaking with all that passion which would well up in him at certain moments. ‘If you ask me, I think they are making a splendid effort to sleep with as many other men as possible while their husbands are away.’

Even if that were an exaggeration, as expressed by Gwatkin, it had to be admitted letters of this kind were common enough. I remembered my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell, once saying: ‘The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can’t imagine a more snobbish assumption.’ Certainly no one who administered the Company’s affairs for a week or two would make any mistake on that score. I asked Gwatkin if details were known about Pendry’s case. None seemed available.

‘It makes you sick,’ Gwatkin said.

‘I suppose the men have some fun too. It isn’t only the women. Not that any of us are given much time for it here — except perhaps Corporal Gwylt.’

‘It’s different for a man,’ said Gwatkin. ‘Unless he gets mixed up with a woman who makes him forget his duty.’

These words recalled a film Moreland and I had seen together in days before the war. A Russian officer — the story had been set in Tsarist times — had reprimanded an unpunctual subordinate with just that phrase: ‘A woman who causes a man to neglect his duty is not worth a moment’s consideration.’ The young lieutenant in the film, so far as I could remember, had arrived late on parade because he had been spending the night with the Colonel’s mistress. Afterwards, Moreland and I had often quoted to each other that stern conclusion.