The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [35]
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