The Dark Tower

Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.

They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.

They remade it at the cost of their lives in Flanders, in the face of incredulous enemies and criticizing neutrals, painstakingly, without science, doggedly out of their own wills. They held Ypres by a thread, and when it seemed that nothing could keep it, one cold and dreadful day along the Menin road came up their reinforcements.

First one group and then another of tall, dark people, silent footed as falling leaves, turbaned black faces, eyes of appalling and unearthly gravity, hearts half like a rock and half like a child, alien captive people of another blood, took their place silently, regiment by regiment blocking up the dreadful gaps with their guns, their rifles, and the free gift of their lives.

“Lionel has come,” Winn wrote, “and all my men. I never was so glad of anything, but you. Send me all the warm things you can. The winter will be quite jolly now when the men get used to the trenches. It’s a funny thing, but they’ve given me command of the regiment. I hadn’t expected it, but I’ve always liked handling Sikhs. Whatever happens, you’ll remember that I’ve been an awfully lucky chap, won’t you?”

CHAPTER XXXI

Lionel and Winn talked of the regiment and the war; these two things filled the exacting hours. In a world a very long way off and in the depths of their hearts were England and Claire.

They spent three weeks in the trenches, blackened and water clogged and weary.

It was the darkest time of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes passed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that worshiped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid people who ate sausages, and could be killed.

One or two small parties led in night attacks overcame the worst of their fears.

Later on when the mud dried they could kill more; in the end all would be killed, and they would return with much honor to their land of sunshine.

To the officers who moved among them, absorbed in the questions of their care, there was never any silence or peace, and yet there was a strange content in the huddled, altered life of their wet ditch.

Every power of the will, every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes. Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, impervious to human ingenuity.

In the quieter hours of the night, they crouched side by side formulating fresh schemes and going over one by one the weak points of their defenses.

They hadn’t enough guns, or any reinforcements; they had no dry clothes. The men were not accustomed to wet climates or invisible enemies.

They wanted more sand-bags and more bombs, and it would be better for human beings not to be in trenches for three weeks at a time in the rain.

They sat there pitting their brains against these obstacles, creating the miraculous ingenuity of war. Personal questions dropped. Lionel saw that Winn was ill beyond mending, but he saw it without definite thought — it was one more obstacle in a race of obstacles. It wouldn’t do for Winn to break down. He fitted himself without explanations, selflessly, with magnificent disinterestedness, into his friend’s needs. He was like a staff in the hand of a blind man.

Winn himself had begun to wonder, moving about in his sea of mud, how much worse you could be before you were actually done. His cough shook him incessantly, his brain burned, and his hands were curiously weak. He was conscious that he had to repeat to himself all day long the things he had to do; even then he might have forgotten if there had not been Lionel. He might have forgotten to give orders. In spite of everything a strange inner bliss possessed him which nourished him like food. He had Claire’s letters, they never failed him, they were as regular as the beats of a heart. Something in him lived that had never lived before, something that did not seem likely ever to die.

It was helping him as Lionel was helping him to get through things. What he had to get through was dying. It was going to be quicker than the way they had of dying in Davos, but it mightn’t be quick enough; it might drive him out of his last fight, back to an inconceivable stale world.

This must not happen. Lionel must live and he must die, where he was. You could bully fate, if you were prepared to pay the price for it.

Winn was not sure yet what the price would be, he was only sure that he was prepared to pay it.