THE CONQUERORS

The public room (which in England would be the Public Bar) of the “Cheval Blanc” estaminet, or “Chevvle Blank” as its present-day customers know it, had filled very early in the evening. Those members of the Labour Company who packed the main room had just returned to the blessings of comparative peace after a very unpleasant spell in the line which had culminated in a last few days—and the very last day especially—on a particularly nasty “job o’ work.” Making a corduroy road of planks across an apparently bottomless pit of mud in a pouring rain and biting cold wind cannot be pleasant work at any time. When you stir in to the dish of trouble a succession of five-point-nine high-explosive shells howling up out of the rain and crashing thunderously down on or about the taped-out line of road, it is about as near the limit of unpleasantness as a Labour Company cares to come. The job was rushed, five-nines being a more drastic driver than the hardest hustling foreman, but the German gunners evidently had the old road nicely ranged and had correctly estimated the chance of its being reconstructed, with the result that their shells pounded down with a horrible persistency which might have stopped anything short of the persistency of the Company and the urgency of the road being put through. The men at work there, stripped to open-throated and bare-armed shirts, and yet running rivers of sweat for all their stripping, drove the work at top speed on this last day in a frantic endeavour to complete before dark. They knew nothing of the tactical situation, nothing of what it might mean to the success or failure of “the Push” if the road were not ready to carry the guns and ammunition waggons by that nightfall, knew only that “Roarin’ Bill, The Terrible Turk,” had pledged the Company to finish that night, and that “Roarin’ Bill” must not be let down. It must be explained here that “Roarin’ Bill” was the Captain in command of the Company, and although the men perhaps hardly knew it themselves, or ever stopped to reason it out, the simple and obvious reason for their reluctance to let him down was merely because they knew that under no circumstances on earth would he let them, the Company, down. His nickname was a private jest of the Company’s, since he had the voice and manners of a sucking dove. But for all that his orders, his bare word, or even a hint from him, went farther than any man’s, and this in about as rough and tough a Company as a Captain could well have to handle. “Bill” had said they must finish before dark, walked up and down the plank road himself watching and directing the work, and never as much as looked—that they knew of—at the watch on his wrist to figure whether they’d make out or not. “Th’ Terrible Turk ’as spoke; wot ’e ’as said, ’e blanky well ’as said,” Sergeant Buck remarked once as the Captain passed down the road, “an’ all the shells as Gerry ever pitched ain’t goin’ to alter it. Come on, get at it; that blighter’s a mile over.” The gang, who had paused a moment in their labour to crouch and look up as a shell roared over, “got at it,” slung the log into place, and had the long spike nails that held the transverse planks to “the ribbon” or binding edge log half hammered home before the shell had burst in a cataract of mud and smoke three hundred yards beyond. The shells weren’t always beyond. Man after man was sent hobbling, or carried groaning, back over the road he had helped to build; man after man, until there were six in a row, was lifted to a patch of slightly drier mud near the roadside and left there—because the road needed every hand more than did the dead who were past needing anything.

The job was hard driven at the end, and with all the hard driving was barely done to time. About 4 o’clock an artillery subaltern rode over the planks to where the gang worked at the road-end, his horse slithering and picking its way fearfully over the muddy wet planks.

“Can’t we come through yet?” he asked, and the Captain himself told him no, he was afraid not, because it would interrupt his work.

“But hang it all,” said the Gunner officer, “there’s a couple of miles of guns and waggons waiting back there at the Control. If they’re not through before dark——”

“They won’t be,” said the Captain mildly, “not till my time to finish, and that’s 5 o’clock. You needn’t look at your watch,” he went on, “I know it’s not five yet, because I told my men they must finish by five—and they’re not finished yet.” He said the last words very quietly, but very distinctly, and those of the gang who heard passed it round the rest as an excellent jest which had completed the “’tillery bloke’s” discomfiture. But the Captain’s jest had a double edge. “Start along at five,” he had called to the retiring Gunner, “and she’ll be ready for you. This Company puts its work through on time, always.” And the Company did, cramming a good two hours’ work into the bare one to make good the boast; picking and spading tremendously at the shell-torn earth to level a way for the planks, filling in deep and shallow holes, carrying or dragging or rolling double burdens of logs and planks, flinging them into place, spiking them together with a rapid fusillade of click-clanking hammer-blows. They ceased to take cover or even to stop and crouch from the warning yells of approaching shells; they flung off the gas-masks, hooked at the “Alert” high on their chests, to give freer play to their arms; they wallowed in mud and slime, and cursed and laughed in turn at it, and the road, and the job, and the Army, and the war. But they finished to time, and actually at 5 o’clock they drove the last spikes while the first teams were scrabbling over the last dozen loose planks.

Then the Company wearily gathered up its picks and shovels and dogs and sleds, and its dead, and trudged back single-file along the edge of the road up which the streaming traffic was already pouring to plunge off the end and plough its way to its appointed places.

And now in the “Cheval Blanc” as many of the Company as could find room were crowded, sitting or standing contentedly in a “fug” you could cut with a spade, drinking very weak beer and smoking very strong tobacco, gossiping over the past days, thanking their stars they were behind in rest for a spell.

The door opened and admitted a gust of cold air; and the cheerful babel of voices, shuffling feet, and clinking glasses, died in a silence that spread curiously, inwards circle by circle from the door, as three men came in and the Company realised them. The Captain was one, and the other two were—amazing and unusual vision there, for all that it was so familiar in old days at home—normal, decently dressed in tweeds and serge, cloth-capped, ordinary “civilians,” obviously British, and of working class.

The Captain halted and waved them forward. “These two gentlemen,” he said to the Company, “are—ah—on a tour of the Front. They will—ah—introduce themselves to you. Corporal, please see them back to my Mess when they are ready to come,” and he went out.

The two new-comers were slightly ill at ease and felt a little out of place, although they tried hard to carry it off, and nodded to the nearest men and dropped a “How goes it?” and “Hullo, mates” here and there as they moved slowly through the throng that opened to admit them. Then one of them laughed, still with a slightly embarrassed air, and squared his shoulders, and spoke up loud enough for the room to hear.

The room heard—in a disconcerting silence—while he explained that they were two of a “deputation” of working men brought out to “see the conditions” at the Front, and go back and tell their mates in the shops what they saw.

“It’s a pity,” said the Corporal gently when he finished, “you ’adn’t come to us a day earlier. ’Twoulda bin some condition you’da seen.”

“Wot d’jer want to see?” asked another. “This ... ain’t front ezackly.” “Listen!” cried another, “ain’t that a shell comin’ over? Take cover!” And the room tittered, the nearest shell being a good five miles away.

“Want to see everything,” said the deputy. “We’re going in the trenches to-morrow, but bein’ here to-night we asked your Cap’n where we’d meet some o’ the boys, an’ he brought us here.”

“Wot trenches—wot part?” he was asked, and when, innocently enough, he named a part that for years has had the reputation of a Quaker Sunday School for peacefulness, a smile flickered round. The deputy saw the smile. He felt uneasy; things weren’t going right; there wasn’t the eager welcome, the anxious questions after labour conditions and so on he had expected. So he lifted his voice again and talked. He was a good talker, which perhaps was the reason he was a chosen deputy. But he didn’t hold the room. Some listened, others resumed their own chat, others went on with the business of the evening, the drinking of thin beer. When he had finished the other man spoke, with even less success. There is some excuse for this. You cannot quite expect men who have been working like niggers under the filthiest possible conditions of wet and mud, weather and squalor, have been living and working, sleeping and eating, with sudden and violent death at their very elbows, to come straight out of their own inferno and be in any way deeply interested in abstract conditions of Labour at Home, or to be greatly sympathetic to the tea-and-butter shortage troubles of men who are earning good money, working in comfortable shops, and living in their own homes. The men were much more interested in affairs in France.

“Wot’s the idea anyway?” asked one man. “Wot’s the good o’ this tour business?”

“We’ve come to see the facks,” said a deputy. “See ’em for ourselves, and go back home to tell ’em in the shops what you chaps is doing.”

“Wish they’d let some of us swap places wi’ them in the shops,” was the answer. “I’d tell ’em something, an’ they’d learn a bit too, doin’ my job here.”

“The workers, Labour, wants to know,” went on the deputy, ignoring this. “Some says finish the war, and some says get on with it, and——”

“Which are you doing?” came in swift reply, and “How many is on this deputation job?”

“There’s three hundred a week coming out,” said the deputy with a touch of pride, “and——”

“Three hundred!” said a loud voice at the back of the room. “Blimey, that’s boat an’ train room for three ’undred a week the less o’ us to go on leaf.”

The talk drifted off amongst the men themselves again, but the deputation caught snatches of it. “Same ol’ game as ol’ Blank did ... we’ll see their names in the papers makin’ speeches when they’re home ... wearin’ a tin ’at an’ a gas-mask an’ bein’ warned to keep their ’eads down cos this is the front line—at Vale-o’-tears. Oh Lord!”... “Square the Quarter-bloke an’ take the shrap helmet home as a souvenir to hang over the mantel——” (Here a listening deputy blushed faintly and hastily renounced a long-cherished secret idea.) “Will this trip entitle ’em to a war medal?” “Lord ’elp the one of ’em I meets wearing a medal that they gets for a week where they’re goin’, an’ that I’ve took years to earn, where we come from.”

The deputy began a long speech, worked himself up into a warmth befitting the subject, begged his hearers to “hold together,” not to forget they were workers before they were soldiers (“an’ will be after—with a vote apiece,” struck in a voice), and finally wound up with a triumphant period about “Union is Strength” and “Labor omnia vincit—Labour Conquers All,” which last he repeated several times and with emphasis.

Then the Corporal answered him, and after the first sentence or two the room stilled and the Company held its breath to listen, breaking at times into a running murmur of applause. The Corporal spoke well. He had the gift; still better he had the subject; and, best of all, he had an audience that understood and could not be shocked by blunt truths. He told the deputation some details of the work they had been doing and the conditions under which it was done; what the shell-fire was like, and what some of the casualties were like; the hours of their labour and the hours of their rest; how they had made their road with the shells smashing in at times as fast as it could be made; how a waggon of timber, six-horse team, and driver had been hit fair by a five-nine on the road, and how the wreckage (and nothing else that they could help) had been used to begin fill in the hole; what their daily pay was and what their rations were, especially on nights when a shell wrecked the ration-carrying party; and, finally, their total of killed and wounded in the one day, yesterday.

“Union is strength,” he finished up. “But does their union at home help our strength here? What strength do we get when a strike wins and you get more pay—at ’ome, an’ we’re left short o’ the shells or airyplanes that might save us gettin’ shelled an’ air-bombed in the ruddy trenches. Labour Conquers All! Does it? Tell that to a five-nine H.E. droppin’ on you. Ask Black Harry an’ Joe Hullish an’ the rest o’ them we buried yesterday, if Labour Conquers All.”

The deputation had no answer, gave up the argument, and presently withdrew.

But actually, if they had seen it, and if Labour could see it, they were entirely right, and the Corporal himself unwittingly had proved it. Union is strength—if it be the union of the workshops and the Front; Labour does conquer all—if Labour, Back and Front, pull together. There was no need to ask the question of Black Harry and Joe Hullish and the rest, because they themselves were the answer, lying in their shallow graves that shook and trembled about them to the roar and rumble of the traffic, the guns and limbers and ammunition waggons pouring up the road which they had helped to make. They were dead; but the road was through. Labour had won; they were, are, and—if their mates, Back and Front, so decree—will be The Conquerors.