REMEMBERED DAWNS
By TREVOR ALLEN
COMING off night duty at a wardens' post, and seeing an exquisite dawn over the river, I reflect that dawns mean so much more to us in war-time than in peace, when the ambition of most of us is to keep between the blankets and never sample the day until it is well aired.
Dawn is the time of stand-to on fire-step, in outpost and advance sap—and sometimes of attack. Once we have seen the greying and flushing of a sky over a wired parapet, we never forget ; or perhaps silhouetting the gaunt ruins of what was once a house with smoke curling from the chimney. . . .
What dawns our men of the Eighth and Fifth must have seen— over desert and Italian height, through vineyard and olive grove and the gardens of ancient hill-towns and villages! And that dawn at El Alamein, that sea-dawn of the Dunkirk evacuation and Dieppe raid. . . Can those who were there ever forget? Wasn't there something eerie and unearthly about them, etched on the memory for all time?
All night the roads to the front line have resounded with lorry, gun and limber ; but when dawn comes a sudden desolation over- takes those which are under enemy observation—files of men trudge through the trench alongside, their tin hats bobbing up here and there like mushrooms, but the road is bare, and will remain so till dusk. In the shelter of some wall is a blear-eyed soldier feeling much as Edmund Blunden did when he wrote in that finest of soldiers' chronicles, Undertones of War: "The east was scarlet with dawn and the flickering gun-flashes ; I thanked God I was not in the assault, and joined the subdued carriers nervously lighting cigarettes in one of the cellars, sitting there on the steps, studying my watch."
There was another soldier-author who wrote a book describing how, in quiet spells in and behind the line, he would saunter out at dawn bird-watching. Are there bird-watchers in Italy today, combining pleasure with the grim business of war? I should not be surprised. Certainly there are dawn-watchers in Burma, for Graham Stanford, from his airborne " jungle Tobruk," tells us " how beautiful Burma is as the sun rises behind the mountains and a thousand gaily-plumaged birds chirp their morning greeting from the boughs of giant teak trees." I recall the dawns when I had to race, after short summer nights, getting water for the battalion over hill-paths unuseable by day.
It was two rough miles to the old stone fountain in the ravine ; one had to make six double journeys at least with the mules, filling up the packals and emptying them into the company tanks—enough for the whole day. Machine-guns swept the paths and sometimes shells and mortars. There would be hold-ups in the dark when a mule became temperamental or slithered off the track into a ravine.
But the heaven of those dawns when the job was finished at last and one could enjoy a smoke before turning in! And those dawns after relief nights when the first light found us out of the trenches in rest billets, a few miles behind the line, almost in a world of peace! Yes, I think the soldier remembers his dawns, linking them, perhaps, with the rarer ones of peace-time and youth when he ranged abroad while saner folk were still sleeping ; for you have to be young and crazy to enjoy them voluntarily ; later in life—if you are not a farm or factory worker—they are a discipline to be agreeably shunned, pending the buzzing of the alarum-clock round about eight or eight-thirty. . . .
One of my prize dawns was a smoky, crimson one behind the mill-stacks of Stockport. I had chosen to go there (of all places) for my summer holiday because I was a cockney, born and bred, and wanted to see how Lancashire cotton-spinners lived. One night I returned late from an excursion. hadn't the heart to knock up the mill-workers in whose house I lodged, so squatted all night in the backyard, reading Shaw's Man and Superman by the light of a back-alley lamp to the accompaniment of squalling cats. Then I wandered down to Mersey Square in the red dawn, seeing the knockers-up going their rounds, hearing the first clatter of clogs on the pavements. It was a thrilling adventure for a cockney ; but you have to be young to think so.
Unforgettable, too, were the dawns of my first rail journey through.France and Switzerland, when I sat on the steps of the carriage through the night, watching ghostly farms slip past, deter- mined to lose nothing of the strange, romantic, moonlit landscape in sleep. What does sleep matter when you are young, and ardent, and full of dreams? From my inn on the Dolderberg above Zurich I would set out before midnight, to tramp through tall fir-woods under the stars, and see the dawn of the Bernese Oberland set the snow-peaks aglow. Surely these dawns were the most enchant- ing of all, for as one climbed to the Sub-Alpine pastures the air had that miraculous freshness and odour one finds only on high mountains. Cow-bells tinkled in the stillness, lights began to glimmer in lonely timbered farmhouses, and at one where I asked my way the farm-wife handed me, through a window, a bowl of milk warm from the cow and thick with cream. Journey's-end was a lofty ledge from which one seemed to gaze over all Switzerland, watching rose-peaks soar from purple and magenta valleys.
A pastel powder-blue dawn over Stockholm's archipelago of pine- clad isles and reed-fringed waterways, when we motored out to them from a night-club. Dawn from the bow of a tanker in the Caribbean, with flying fish skimming the dark water under a hushed sky, and a hawk alighting on the mast-top to tell us land was near. Dawn as we neared friendly little Dieppe on the night crossing, or from the boat that took us up the Ouistreham Canal to Caen. Dawn by the lake in St. James's Park, after an all-night party in Mayfair or a walk home through silent Kensington squares. . . .
Then our home-front dawns, hurrying to the war factory to clock in, or coming off night shift ; those after the 1940 blitz nights, when the All Clear sounded and we emerged from shelters and cellars to hear " the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds " and put on the kettle for that ambrosial cup of tea which drowned all night's terrors and much of its strain and fatigue! . . .
But most of all the soldier's dawns, touching bloodshot eyes with benediction, for they tell him—momentarily—of a world that might be, a world of beauty and peace in which a few twisted, tortured, perverted men no longer wield the power to hound their fellows to battle and slaughter, turning to hell an earth whose eyes should be set on heaven.
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