Brideshead revisited: Prologue

Evelyn Waugh

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
(1944)


To Laura

Author's Note
I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.
E.W.


Prologue

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I
paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me
through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we
marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first
leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes
of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and
I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

Here the tram lines ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow
could doze in their seats until roused by the conductress at their journey's
end. There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; a
quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten
their caps before passing the guard-room, a quarter of a mile in which
concrete gave place to grass at the road's edge. This was the extreme limit
of the city, a fringe of drift-wood above high-water mark. Here the close,
homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the
hinterland began.

The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and
ploughland; the farm-house still stood in a fold of the hill and had served
us for battalion offices; ivy still supported part of what had once been the
walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the
wash-houses survived of an orchard. The place had been marked for
destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of
peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already
half a mile of concrete road lay between bare clay banks, and on either side
a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had
designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the
place part of the neighbouring suburb. Now the huts where we had wintered
waited their turn for destruction.

Over the way, the subject of much ironical comment, half hidden even in
winter by its embosoming trees, lay the municipal lunatic asylum, whose
cast-iron railings and noble gates put our rough wire to shame. We could
watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim
gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had
given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the
undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at
their ease. As we marched past the men used to shout greetings to them
through the railings -- "Keep a bed warm for me, chum. I shan't be long" --
but Hooper, my newest-joined platoon commander, grudged them their life of
privilege: "Hitler would put them in a gas chamber," he said; "I reckon we
can learn a thing or two from him."

Here, when we marched in at midwinter, I brought a company of strong
and hopeful men; word had gone round among them, as we moved from the moors
to this dockland area, that we were at last in transit for the Middle East.
As the days passed and we began clearing the snow and levelling a parade
ground, I saw their disappointment change to resignation. They snuffed the
smell of the fried-fish shops and cocked their ears to familiar, peace-time
sounds of the works' siren and the dance-hall band. On off-days they
slouched now at street corners and sidled away at the approach of an officer
for fear that, by saluting, they would lose face with their new mistresses.
In the company office there was a crop of minor charges and requests for
compassionate leave; while it was still half-light, day began with the whine
of
the malingerer and the glum face and fixed eye of the man with a
grievance.

And I, who by every precept should have put heart into them-- how could
I help them, who could so little help myself? Here the colonel under whom we
had formed was promoted out of our sight and succeeded by a younger and less
lovable man, cross-posted from another regiment. There were few left in the
mess now of the batch of volunteers who trained together at the outbreak of
war; one way and another they were nearly all gone -- some had been
invalided out, some promoted to other battalions, some posted to staff jobs,
some had volunteered for special service, one had got himself killed on the
field firing range, one had been court-martialled -- and their places were
taken by conscripts; the wireless played incessantly in the ante-room
nowadays, and much beer was drunk before dinner; it was not as it had been.

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and
weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed
proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three
glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed
immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an
hour before reveille.

Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of
its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake
before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid
the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over
in my mind what I had to do that day -- had I put in the names of two
corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest
number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could
I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? -- as I lay in
that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long
sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the
fourth year
of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or
tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company,
no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or
think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I
knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been
through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship
until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and
duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found
the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the
reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and
cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the
loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and
learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful
stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the
corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept
house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her
slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and
self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She
was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial
stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

So, on this morning of our move, I was entirely indifferent as to our
destination. I would go on with my job, but I could bring to it nothing more
than acquiescence. Our orders were to entrain at 0915 hours at a near-by
siding, taking in the haversack the unexpired portion of the day's ration;
that was all I needed to know. The company second-in-command had gone on
with a small advance party. Company stores had been packed the .day before.
Hooper had been detailed to inspect the lines. The company was parading at
0730 hours with their kit-bags piled before the huts. There had been many
such moves since the wildly exhilarating morning in 1940 when we had
erroneously believed ourselves destined for the defence of Calais. Three or
four times a year since then we had changed our location; this time our new
commanding officer was making an unusual display of "security" and had even
put us to the trouble of removing all distinguishing badges from our
uniforms and transport. It was "valuable training in active service
conditions," he said, "If I find any of these female camp followers waiting
for us the other end, I'll know there's been a leakage."

The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp
lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the
unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a
party of archaeologists.

The Pollock diggings provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave
communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy, which succeeded
them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate
draining system, and the construction of permanent highways, overrun by a
race of the lowest type. The measure of the newcomers may be taken by the
facts that their women were devoid of all personal adornment and that the
dead were removed to burying places a great distance from the settlement --
a sure sign of primitive taboo. ...
Thus, I thought, the pundits of the future might write; and, turning
away, I greeted the company sergeant-major: "Has Mr. Hooper been round?"
"Haven't seen him at all this morning, sir." We went to the dismantled
company office, where I found a window newly broken since the
barrack-damages book was completed. "Wind-in-the-night, sir," said the
sergeant-major.(All breakages were thusattributable, or to
"Sappers'-demonstration, sir.")

Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without
parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the
company two months.

The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his
work and would sometimes address them individually as "George" at
stand-easics, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for
him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.
The new colonel had been with us less than a week at the time and we
had not yet taken his measure. He had been standing rounds of gin in the
ante-room and was slightly boisterous when he first took notice of Hooper.

"That young officer is one of yours, isn't he, Ryder?" he said to me.
"His hair wants cutting."

"It does, sir," I said. It did. "I'll see that it's done."

The colonel drank more gin and began to stare at Hooper, saying
audibly, "My God, the officers they send us now!"

Hooper seemed to obsess the colonel that evening. After dinner he
suddenly said very loudly: "In my late regiment if a young officer turned up
like that, the other subalterns would bloody well have cut his hair for
him."

No one showed any enthusiasm for this sport, and our lack of response
seemed to inflame the colonel. "You," he said, turning to a decent boy in A
Company, "go and get a pair of scissors and cut that young officer's hair
for him."

"Is that an order, sir?"

"It's your commanding officer's wish and that's the best kind of order
I know."

"Very good, sir."

And so, in an atmosphere of chilly embarrassment, Hooper sat in a chair
while a few snips were made at the back of his head. At the beginning of the
operation I left the ante-room, and later apologized to Hooper for his
reception. "It's not the sort of thing that usually happens in this
regiment," I said.

"Oh, no hard feelings," said Hooper. "I can take a bit of sport."

Hooper had no illusions about the army--or rather no special illusions
distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the
universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made
every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he
said, "like the measles." Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child
ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at
the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry -- that stoic, red-skin
interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the
child and the man -- Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on
St. Crispin's Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they
taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail
about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava,
Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon -- these, and the
Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose
trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me
irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength
of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

He seldom complained. Though himself a man to whom one could not
confidently entrust the simplest duty, he had an overmastering regard for
efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would
sometimes say of the ways of the army in pay and supply and the use of
man-hours: "They couldn't get away with that in business."

He slept sound while I lay awake fretting.

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of
Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming
what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would
test these general statements by substituting "Hooper" and seeing if they
still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes
pondered: "Hooper Rallies," "Hooper Hostels," "International Hooper
Co-operation" and "the Religion of Hooper." He was the acid test of all
these alloys.

So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now thaa when he
arrived from his OCTU. This morning, laden with full equipment, he looked
scarcely human. He came to attention with a kind of shuffling dance-step and
spread a wool-gloved palm across his forehead.

"I want to speak to Mr. Hooper, sergeant-major . . . well, where the
devil have you been? I told you to inspect the lines."

" 'M I late ? Sorry. Had a rush getting my gear together."

"That's what you have a servant for."

"Well I suppose it is, strictly speaking. But you know how it is. He
had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they
take it out of you other ways."

"Well, go and inspect the lines now."

"Rightyoh."

"And for Christ's sake don't say 'rightyoh.'"

"Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out."

When Hooper left the sergeant-major returned.

"C.O. just coming up the path, sir," he said.

I went out to meet him.

There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little red
moustache.

"Well, everything squared up here?"

"Yes, I think so, sir."

"Think so? You ought to know."

His eyes fell on the broken window. "Has that been entered in the
barrack-damages?"

"Not yet, sir."

"Not yet? I wonder when it would have been if I hadn't seen it."

He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity,
but I thought none the better of it for that.

He led me behind the huts to a wire fence which divided my area from
the carrier-platoon's, skipped briskly over and made for an overgrown ditch
and bank which had once been a field boundary on the farm. Here he began
grubbing with his walking-stick like a truffling pig and presently gave a
cry of triumph. He had disclosed one of those deposits of rubbish which are
dear to the private soldier's sense of order: the head of a broom, the lid
of a stove, a bucket rusted through, a sock, a loaf of bread, lay under the
dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.

"Look at that," said the commanding officer. "Fine impression that
gives to the regiment taking over from us."

"That's bad," I said.

"It's a disgrace. See everything there is burned before you leave
camp."

"Very good, sir. Sergeant-major, send over to the carrier-platoon and
tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up."

I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebuff; so did he. He
stood a moment irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned
on his heel and strode away.

"You shouldn't do it, sir," said the sergeant-major, who had been my
guide and prop since I joined the company. "You shouldn't really."

"That wasn't our rubbish."

"Maybe not, sir, but you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side
of senior officers they take it out of you other ways."

As we marched past the madhouse two or three elderly inmates gibbered
and mouthed politely behind the railings.

"Cheeroh, chum, we'll be seeing you"; "We shan't be long now"; "Keep
smiling till we meet again," the men called to them.

I was marching with Hooper at the head of the leading platoon.

"I say, any idea where we're off to?"

"None."

"D'you think it's the real thing?"

"No."

"Just a flap?"

"Yes."

"Everyone's been saying we're for it. I don't know what to think
really. Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go
into action."

"I shouldn't worry. There'll be plenty for everyone in time."

"Oh, I don't want much you know. Just enough to say I've been in it."

A train of antiquated coaches were waiting for us at the siding; an
R.T.O, was in charge; a fatigue party was loading the last of the kit-bags
from the trucks to the luggage vans. In half an hour we were ready to start
and in an hour we started.

My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to ourselves.
They ate sandwiches and chocolate, smoked and slept. None of them had a
book. For the first three or four hours they noted the names of the towns
and leaned out of the windows when, as often happened, we stopped between
stations. Later they lost interest. At midday and again at dark some tepid
cocoa was ladled from a container into our mugs. The train moved slowly
South through flat, drab main-line scenery.

The chief incident in the day was the C.O.'s "Order Group." We
assembled in his carriage, at the summons of an orderly, and found him and
the adjutant wearing their steel helmets and equipment. The first thing he
said was: "This is an Order Group. I expect you to attend properly dressed.
The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial." I thought he was
going to send us back but, after glaring at us, he said: "Sit down. . . ."

"The camp was left in a disgraceful condition. Wherever I went I found
evidence that officers are not doing their duty. The state in which a camp
is left is the best possible test of the efficiency of regimental officers.
It is on such matters that the reputation of a battalion and its commander
rests. And"--Did he in fact say this or am I finding words for the
resentment in his voice and eye? I think he left it unsaid--"I do not intend
to have my professional reputation compromised by the slackness of a few
temporary officers."

We sat with our note-books and pencils waiting to take down the details
of our next jobs. A more sensitive mian would have seen that he had failed
to be impressive; perhaps he saw, for he added in a petulant schoolmasterish
way: "All I ask is loyal co-operation."

Then he referred to his notes and read: --

"Orders.
"Information. The battalion is now in transit between location A and
location B. This is a major L of C and is liable to bombing and gas attack
from the enemy.

"Intention. I intend to arrive at location B.

"Method. Train will arrive at destination at approximately 2315 hours .
. ." and so on.

The sting came at the end under the heading, "Administration." C
Company, less one platoon, was to unload the train on arrival at the siding
where three three-tonners would be available for moving all stores to a
battalion dump in the new camp; work to continue until completed; the
remaining platoon was to find a guard on the dump and perimeter sentries for
the camp area.

"Any questions?"

"Can we have an issue of cocoa for the working party?"

"No. Any more questions?"

When I told the sergeant-major of these orders he said: "Poor old C
Company struck unlucky again"; and I knew this to be a reproach for rny
having antagonized the commanding officer.
I told the platoon commanders.

"I say," said Hooper, "it makes it awfully awkward with the chaps.
They'll be fairly browned-off. He always seems to pick on us for the dirty
work."

"You'll do guard."

"Okcydoke. But I say, how am I to find the perimeter in the dark?"

Shortly after blackout we were disturbed by an orderly making his way
lugubriously down the length of the train with a rattle. One of the more
sophisticated sergeants called out "Deuxieme service."

"We are being sprayed with liquid mustard-gas," I said. "See that the
windows are shut." I then wrote a neat little situation-report to say that
there were no casualties and nothing had been contaminated; that men had
been detained to decontaminate the outside of the coach before detraining.
This seemed to satisfy the commanding officer, for we heard no more from
him. After dark we all slept.

At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training
in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and
platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for
disorder and breakages in the darkness:

"Fall in on the road below the embankment. C Company seem to be taking
their time as usual, Captain Ryder."

"Yes sir. We're having a little difficulty with the bleach."

"Bleach?"

"For decontaminating the outside of the coaches, sir."

"Oh, very conscientious, I'm sure. Skip it and get a move on."

By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into shape on the
road. Soon Hooper's platoon had marched off into the darkness; I found the
lorries, organized lines of men to pass the stores from hand to hand down
the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something
with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores ;
with them for the first half-hour; then broke off to meet the company
second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.

"It's not a bad camp," he reported; "big private house with two or
three lakes! Looks as if we might get some duck if we're lucky. Village with
one pub and a post office. No town within miles. I've managed to get a hut
between the two of us."

By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry,
through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the wind screen;
somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an
open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked
the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed
the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of
rain beginning now to fall.



I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in
silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the
second-in-command, "What's this place called?"

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched
off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly,
fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense
silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense
regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and
long-forgotten sounds -- for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to
me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the
phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Outside the hut I stood awed and bemused between two realities and two
dreams. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It
was a still morning and the smoke from the cookhouse rose straight to the
leaden sky. A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and
churned to mud, followed the contour of the hillside and dipped out of sight
below a knoll, and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of
corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and
catcalls, all the zoo-noises of the battalion beginning a new day. Beyond
and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It
was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley.
Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still
unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream -- it
was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called
Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a
considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon -- which had been
dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the
reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty
beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey
and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they
made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide
green spaces -- Did the fallow deer graze here still? -- and, lest the eye
wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water's edge, and an ivy-grown
arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned
and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might
be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green
spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees
like a hind in the bracken. Which was the mirage, which the palpable earth?

Hooper came sidling up and greeted me with his much imitated but
inimitable salute. His face was grey from his night's vigil and he had not
yet shaved.

"B Company relieved us. I've sent the chaps off to get cleaned up."

"Good."

"The house is up there, round the corner."

"Yes," I said.

"Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a
place. I've just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I'd call it. And a queer
thing, there's a sort of R.C. church attached. I looked in and there was a
kind of service going on -- just a padre and one old man. I felt very
awkward. More in your line than mine." Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a
final effort to excite my interest he said: "There's a frightful great
fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals.
You never saw such a thing."

"Yes, Hooper, I did. I've been here before."

The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my
dungeon.

"Oh well, you know all about it. I'll go and get cleaned up."

I had been there before; I knew all about it.