So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority
list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers
and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly
want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural
worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no
agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’
course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year,
and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of
war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been
excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while
still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant
would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough.
It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would
count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was
a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my
living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the
only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good
record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our
scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever
we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact,
to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled
again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.
I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office
asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would
do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of
Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the
adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said
that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with
company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions
were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders,
stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention
table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were
now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior
officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North
Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the
senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed
very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in
1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries
and set free by the terms of the Armistice.
The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised
to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged
for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in _Julius Cæsar_. His
change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the
senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off
with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible.
Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as _The
Handcuff King_; he got away safely to America.
I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper,
at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had
been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent.
Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the
Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t
had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent
the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it
was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War
Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that
all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the
following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there.
The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let
you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested,
but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish
military hospital with my lungs in their present state.
I had to think quickly. I decided to make a run for it. The
orderly-room sergeant had made my papers out on receipt of the
telegram. I had all my kit ready packed. There only remained two things
to get: the colonel’s signature to the statement that I had handled
no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which only the battalion
demobilization officer could supply—but he was hand-in-glove with the
adjutant, so it was no use asking him for them. The last train
before demobilization ended was the six-fifteen from Limerick the
same evening, February 13th. I decided to wait until the adjutant had
left the orderly room and then casually ask the colonel to sign the
statement, without mentioning the adjutant’s objection to my going. The
adjutant remained in the orderly room until five minutes past six. As
soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the colonel’s
signature, saluted, hurried out to collect my baggage. I had counted
on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but none was to be seen. I had
about five minutes left now and the station was a good distance away. I
saw a corporal who had been with me in the First Battalion. I shouted
to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men. I’ve got _my
ticket_ and I want to catch the last train back.’ Summers promptly
called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it,
left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it was
moving out of the station and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers.
‘Good-bye, corporal, drink my health.’
But still I had not my demobilization code-marks and knew that when
I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon they would refuse
to pass me out. I did not care very much. Wimbledon was in England,
and I would at least have my influenza out in an English and not an
Irish hospital. My temperature was running high now and my mind was
working clearly as it always does in fever. My visual imagery, which is
cloudy and partial at ordinary times, becomes defined and complete. At
Fishguard I bought a copy of the _South Wales Echo_ and read in it that
there would be a strike of London Electric Railways the next day, 14th
February, if the railway directors would not meet the men’s demands.
So when the train steamed into Paddington and while it was still
moving I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up and ran across to
the station entrance, where, in spite of competition from porters—a
feeble crew at this time—I caught the only taxi in the station as its
fare stepped out. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford
to waste no time getting to Wimbledon. I brought my taxi back to the
train, where scores of stranded officers looked at me with envy. One,
who had travelled down in my compartment, had been met by his wife.
I said: ‘Excuse me, but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I
have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I only
need go as far as Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ They
were delighted; they said that they lived out at Ealing and had no idea
how to get there except by taxi. On the way to Waterloo he said to me:
‘I wish there was some way of showing our gratitude. I wish there was
something we could do for you.’ I said: ‘Well, there is only one thing
in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me,
I’m afraid. And that,’ I said, ‘is the proper code-marks to complete
my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and
there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’ He
rapped on the glass of the taxi and stopped it. Then he got down his
bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. He said: ‘Well, I
happen to be the Cork District Demobilization Officer and I’ve got the
whole bag of tricks here.’ So he filled my papers in.
At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for nine or ten
hours as I had expected, I was given priority and released at once;
Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’ and demobilization from
theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. So
after a hurried visit to my parents, who were living close by, I
continued to Hove, arriving at supper-time. When I came in, I had a
sudden terror that made me unable to speak. I seemed to see Nancy’s
mother. She was looking rather plump and staid and dressed unlike
herself, and did not appear to recognize me. She was sitting at the
table between Nancy and her father. It was like a bad dream; I did
not know what to say or do. I knew I was ill, but this was worse than
illness. Then Nicholson introduced me: ‘This is Nancy’s Aunt Dora, just
over from Canada.’
I warned them all that I had influenza; and hurried off to bed. Within
a day or two everybody in the house had caught it except Nicholson
and the baby and one servant who kept it off by a gipsy’s charm. I
think it was the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new
epidemic as bad as the summer one had started; there was not a nurse
to be had in Brighton. Nicholson at last found two ex-nurses. One was
competent, but frequently drunk, and when drunk she would ransack all
the wardrobes and pile the contents into her own bags; the other,
sober but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of
the open window, spread out her arms, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea,
sea, give my husband back to me.’ The husband, by the way, was not
drowned, merely unfaithful. A doctor, found with difficulty, said that
I had no chance of recovering; it was septic pneumonia now and both my
lungs were affected. But I had determined that, having come through
the war, I would not allow myself to succumb to Spanish influenza.
This, now, was the third time in my life that I had been given up as
dying, and each time because of my lungs. The first occasion was when
I was seven years old and had double-pneumonia following measles. Yet
my lungs are naturally very sound, possibly the strongest part
of me and, therefore, my danger mark. This time again I recovered and
was up a few weeks later in time to see the mutiny of the Guards, when
about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp
and paraded through the streets of Brighton in protest against camp
discipline.
The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and
the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had
taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George
forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for
hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting
Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a
threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes
and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him
a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the
two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half
hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against
the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England
the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food,
beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets
at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could
be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict
four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won
the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George.
The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’
mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The
signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’
When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went
up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We
were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing
else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to
see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school
uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe
that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been
still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian
life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At
the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior
of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech
about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in
commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered.
I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to
come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it
with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who
had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind
Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only
see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out
tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley
against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I
were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and
what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still
had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership
that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it
was always easier for me now when overtaken in any fault to lie my way
out. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a
review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers,
communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel
and lighting—each item was ticked off as satisfactory. And other loose
habits of war-time survived, such as stopping passing motors for a
lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway
carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever was
about. And I retained the technique of endurance, a brutal persistence
in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied
with the main points of any situation. But I modified my language,
which had suddenly become foul on the day of Loos and had been foul
ever since. The chief difference between war and peace was money. I
had never had to worry about that since my first days at Wrexham; I
had even put by about £150 of my pay, invested in War Bonds. Neither
Nancy nor I knew the value of money and this £150 and my war-bonus of,
I think, £250 and a disability pension that I was now drawing of £60 a
year, and the occasional money that I got from poetry, seemed a great
deal altogether. We engaged a nurse and a general servant and lived as
though we had an income of about a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of
her time drawing (she was illustrating some poems of mine), and I was
busy getting _Country Sentiment_ in order and writing reviews.
I was very thin, very nervous, and had about four years’ loss of
sleep to make up. I found that I was suffering from a large sort of
intestinal worm which came from drinking bad water in France. I was
now waiting until I should be well enough to go to Oxford with the
Government educational grant; it seemed the easiest thing to do. I knew
that it would be years before I was fit for anything besides a quiet
country life. There was no profession that I wished to take up, though
for a while I considered school-mastering. My disabilities were
many; I could not use a telephone, I was sick every time I travelled
in a train, and if I saw more than two new people in a single day it
prevented me from sleeping. I was ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy.
I had been much better when I was at Rhyl, but my recent pneumonia had
set me back to my condition of 1917.
Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as he was demobilized,
expecting me to join him. But after being there for a term or so he
became literary editor of the newly-published _Daily Herald_. He gave
me books to review for it. In these days the _Daily Herald_ was not
respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only
daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the
blockade of Russia by the British Fleet. The Versailles Treaty shocked
me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared.
When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public
interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s
Atlantic flight and rescue, the marriage of Lady Diana Manners, and
a marvellous horse called The Panther, which was the Derby favourite
and came in nowhere. The _Herald_ spoilt our breakfast for us every
morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country, due to the
closing of munition factories, of ex-service men refused re-instatement
in the jobs that they had left in the early stages of the war, of
market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news,
too, of my mother’s relatives in Germany and the penury to which
they had been reduced, particularly those who were retired officials
and whose pension, by the collapse of the mark, was reduced to a few
shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart; we now called
ourselves socialists.
The attitude of my family was doubtful. I had fought gallantly
for my country—indeed I was the only one of my father’s five sons of
military age who had seen active service—and was entitled to every
consideration because of my shell-shocked condition; but my socialism
and sympathy for the Bolsheviks outraged them. I once more forfeited
the goodwill of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over,
reminding me that my brother Philip had once been a pro-Boer and a
Fenian, but had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and
come out all right in the end. Most of the elder members of my family
were in the Near East, either married to British officials or British
officials themselves. My father hoped that when I was recovered I
would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family
influence would be of great service to me, and there get over my
revolutionary idealism. Socialism with Nancy was rather a means to
a single end. The most important thing to her was judicial equality
of the sexes; she held that all the wrong in the world was caused by
male domination and narrowness. She refused to see my experiences in
the war as in any way comparable with the sufferings that millions of
married women of the working-class went through. This at least had the
effect of putting the war into the background for me; I was devoted to
Nancy and respected her views in so far as they were impersonal. Male
stupidity and callousness became an obsession with her and she found
it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men.
It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the
house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify
her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population,
or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything
at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the
newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its
literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.
It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized.
My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my
publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose
religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her
give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy,
finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes,
refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances.
At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it
was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I
saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I
was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the
children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not
legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be
thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much
the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson.
This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand
then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They
were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad
luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by
a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly
afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy
seemed merely eccentric.