A Test to Destruction Read Free

hung about the camp wearing only a crown, had exchanged into another regiment, where he expected to get a battalion. So there was hope for himself, after all: he who had lost his way on coming out of the battle of Bourlon Wood, taking the transport of 286 Machine Gun Company to the wrong place in that night of flame and gas-shell, before the surprise German attack the next morning, leading to the break-through, and the death of the ‘Boy General’ of the Brigade, while sixteen perfectly good Vickers guns were miles away when they had been needed in the line.
    *
    The notes of reveillé floated through the grey February air. He heard a stir, and knew that Allen, his room mate lying against the other wall, was awake. Allen practised deep-breathing as he lay in bed, slowly drawing in air, and letting it out as slowly. Allen was usually very calm, he said he breathed eight times a minute. Phillip had timed his own breathing; twenty-eight to the minute. He was a shallow breather, using only the top of his lungs, according to Allen. So for two months he had breathed deeply. It had produced calmness. While boxing or running, he was no longer easily puffed.
    What was Allen thinking? He was just nineteen, and was on the roster for the next draft. Allen did not know this, and would not think of asking Phillip for information. He was an only child, his father a parson. Still, drafts were not very frequent, now that infantry brigades in France had been broken up into three battalions, which meant that every fourth battalion had been disbanded to feed the remaining three.
    Phillip waited, feeling the little dog’s silky hair against his throat. Then black and white ears arose. Sprat had heard the chink of cup on saucer. He crawled out of bed and stood up, tail-stump and pied blotched face quivering. Then with a yelp of joy he sprang off the bed to greet the batman entering with the morning tea.
    As soon as this was swallowed, Phillip and Allen got into bathing slips, put on shoes and burberrys, and with towels round necks left the billet to trudge over shingle to the sea, now a tarnished coppery-leaden hue with the sun about to move over the far horizon, where a speck in silhouette was the mast of the Cork lightship.
    “Looks bloody cold today, Jimmy.” Allen’s reply was to run into a pebble-jumping breaker. Phillip hesitated, clasping ribs with elbows, while Sprat stood some way behind him: he had been thrown into the water some days before, and now kept well clear. Phillip walked down to the white pebble-rush of a wave’s withdrawal, while looking south towards Landguard House, where the Colonel lived. Usually that tall Viking figure, bearded and almost totally enclosed in blue-and-white striped bathing suit of late Victorian pattern—he was said to possess a dozen of such suits, made specially for him in the Burlington Arcade—went into the sea about that time. Ah, there he was, striding down in his white bath-robe. At that moment the rim of the sun blazed upon the horizon. Phillip raised his arms, and diving into a wave, emerged to see Allen apparently making for the Cork lightship.
    For Phillip, two minutes in the water was enough. He waited to be swept up the concave of wet pebbles, and holding against the drag of water, crawled out and stood up, giddy for the moment while his heart thudded in his ears. A couple of slow deep breaths, with slow respirations, equalized him with the day; while his skin showed pink, and the golden glow, reward of winter bathing, possessed his being.
    He had to shake Sprat off his towel—a thin, war-time affair—whereon the dog had been chewing a bit of flotsam. As he bent down within the towel he noticed that the hairs were beginning to grow again on the insides of his thighs. He must have ridden well over four thousand miles from first to last, during the past year in France. The new hairs were thin and without sharpness, unlike the hairs on jowl and chin, which were made stubbly by constant