A Test to Destruction by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online Page B

the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
         The drums rum-tumming everywhere:
    So prepare, say a prayer,
    Send the word, send the word to beware!
    We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
    And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!
    Lie-a-beds in cubicles were ragged, wrestling matches became rugger scrums for waste-paper baskets, which were torn to withies. Docherty, the Ulsterman, used his stump-arm like a blunted rhino-horn, keeping all others at a distance. One captain, who had never been overseas since being gazetted early in 1915, an unpopular man with chocolate-brown eyes, was rolled in the carpet and carried half-way to the incinerator by bloodshot-eyed subalterns howling like red Indians. While resting with the carpet load—Captain Despard had accepted it all without struggle—someone suggested the sea, so the carpet went over the shingle and Despard was thrown into the waves. Phillip, who had liked Despard’s conversation about music and poetry until something in his ingratiating manner had put him off, suddenly realized that it was the almost naked cowardice in the dark eyes, affecting others, which was responsible for Despard’s unpopularity. His own sympathy had been alienated because of his own hidden fear; this, as he realized it, changed to sympathy, so when the poor devil was swung out of the carpet into the sea, Phillip plunged in after him, pretending that it was all a rag. Afterwards he took him into his billet, where Despard, teeth chattering behind fixed smile, got out of his wet uniform, while Phillip made a telescope of the rest of the old magazines up the chimney and set fire to the base. The room flickered, the chimney roared, caught fire, a final blast of lilac and yellow flames rose six feet above the chimney-pot which exploded and a shrapnel-rattling of fragments came down on the roof.
    Meanwhile Captain Despard’s servant had brought him a change of uniform, and when both had gone away Phillip was sick.
    The next morning, with half-dried tunic and slacks wrapped in a groundsheet within his valise, and wearing a tommy’s tunic with stars on the shoulder straps, he caught the early train to Ipswich. From Liverpool Street station he sent off two telegrams, one to Lt.-Col. West, 2nd Gaultshire Regt., B.E.F., saying he was on his way; the other to his father at Head Office, telling him that he was going overseas, and love to all at home.
    *
    At the beginning of March the old men on the Hill usually met of a morning in the wood-framed brick shelter near the crest, with its view of the Crystal Palace. Spring was on the way, and the talk about food was more hopeful. The new rationing system allowed 15 oz. of meat, 5 of bacon, 4 of butter or margarine per person per week. And, with rationing, prices were now controlled.
    “You know,” said Thomas Turney. “Just as many firms before this war made their profit out of waste, so a lot of these rascals have made their fortunes out of farthings, which they don’t produce, blaming the shortage of coin—11¾ d . for a sheep’s head, 1 s. 11¾ d . for unspecified scraps of meat per pound, ‘three and eleven three’ for steak—now thank the powers that be, all that is a thing of the past.”
    The fixed prices for mutton, lamb, and beef were 1 s. 10 d. the pound, steak 2 s. 2 d.
    Another of the regulars in the shelter was a Mr. Warbeck, understood to be something to do with Admiralty. Thomas Turney did not think much of the fellow, a man about ten years his junior, a mere sixty-nine or so. He was a bit of a fop, dressed invariably in grey frock coat and trousers, grey spats, grey cravat held by pearl pin, starched wing collar, and white slip to his waistcoat. Grey eyes, bushy eyebrows, a precise manner of speech and the sweeping grey moustaches went with the rig-out of fine Edwardian gentlemen—but he crowned it all with a black bowler hat, not exactly de rigeur, even allowing for the war. But it was the fellow’s know-all manner,