I asked whether the attack had been considered successful. He thought not. The Manchesters had failed, and Ginchy wasn’t properly taken till about a week later. “When I was in hospital in London,” he went on, “I talked to a son of a gun from the Brigade Staff; he’d been slightly gassed. He told me we’d done all that was expected of us; it was only a holding attack in our sector, so as to stop the Boches from firing down the hill into the backs of our men who were attacking Guillemont. They knew we hadn’t a hope of getting Ale Alley.”
He had told it in a simple unemphatic way, illustrating the story with unconscious gestures—taking aim with a rifle, and so on. But the nightmare of smoke and sunlight had been in his eyes, with a sense of confusion and calamity of which I could only guess at the reality. He was the shattered survivor of a broken battalion which had “done all that was expected of it.”
I asked about young Fernby. Durley had been in the same hospital with him at Rouen and had seen him once. “They were trying to rouse him up a bit, as he didn’t seem to recognize anybody. They knew we’d been in the same Battalion, so I was taken into his ward one night. His head was all over shrapnel wounds. I spoke to him and tried to get him to recognize me, but he didn’t know who I was; he died a few hours later.”
Silence was the only comment possible; but I saw the red screens round the bed, and Durley whispering to Fernby’s bandaged head and irrevocable eyes, while the nurse stood by with folded hands.