But the easy flexibility of Hetty’s temperament was a large part of her
charm.
“I suppose you ought to go, Peter,” she said, “really. I had no business
to try and keep you. But I’ve had so little of you. And I love you.”
She melted. Peter melted in sympathy. But he was much relieved....
She slipped into his bedroom to help him pack his rucksack, and she went
with him to the station. “I wish I was a man, too,” she said. “Then I
would come with you. But wars don’t last for ever, Peter. We’ll come
back here.”
She watched the train disappear along the curve above the station with
something like a sense of desolation. Then being a really very
stout-hearted young woman, she turned about and went down to the
telegraph office to see what could be done to salvage her rent and
shattered holiday.
And Peter, because of these things, and because of certain delays at
Paris and Havre, for the train and Channel services were getting badly
disorganized, got to England six whole days later than Troop.
§ 2
This passion of indignation against Germany in which Peter enlisted was
the prevailing mood of England during the opening months of the war. The
popular mind had seized upon the idea that Europe had been at peace and
might have remained at peace indefinitely if it had not been for the
high-handed behaviour, first of Austria with Serbia, and then of Germany
with Russia. The belief that on the whole Germany had prepared for and
sought this war was no doubt correct, and the spirit of the whole nation
rose high and fine to the challenge. But that did not so completely
exhaust the moral factors in the case as most English people, including
Peter, supposed at that time.
Neither Peter nor Joan, although they were members of the best educated
class in the community and had been given the best education available
for that class, had any but the vaguest knowledge of what was going on
in the political world. They knew practically nothing of what a modern
imperial system consisted, had but the vaguest ideas of the rôle of
Foreign Office, Press and Parliament in international affairs, were
absolutely ignorant of the direction of the army and navy, knew nothing
of the history of Germany or Russia during the previous half-century, or
the United States since the Declaration of Independence, had no inklings
of the elements of European ethnology, and had scarcely ever heard such
words, for example, as Slovene, or Slovak, or Ukrainian. The items of
foreign intelligence in the newspapers joined on to no living historical
conceptions in their minds. Between the latest history they had read and
the things that happened about them and in which they were now
helplessly involved, was a gap of a hundred years or more; the profound
changes in human life and political conditions brought about during that
hundred years by railways, telegraphs, steam shipping, steel castings
and the like, were all beyond the scope of their ideas. For Joan history
meant stories about Joan of Arc, Jane Shore, the wives of Henry the
Eighth, James I. and his Steenie, Charles the Second, and suchlike
people, winding up with the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay; Peter had ended
his historical studies when he went on to the modern side at Caxton—it
would have made little difference so far as modern affairs were
concerned if he had taken a degree in history—and was chiefly conversant
with such things as the pedigree of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the
Constitutions of Clarendon, the statute of Mortmain, and the claims of
Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth to the crown of France. Neither of
them knew anything at all of India except by way of Kipling’s stories
and the Coronation Durbar pictures. If the two of them had rather
clearer ideas than most of their associates about the recent opening up
and partition of Africa it was because Oswald had talked about those
things. But the jostling for empire that had been going on for the past
fifty years all over the world, and the succession of Imperialist
theories from Disraeli to Joseph Chamberlain and from Bismarck to
Treitschke, had no place in their thoughts. The _entente cordiale_ was a
phrase of no particular significance to them. The State in which they
lived had never explained to them in any way its relations to them nor
its fears and aims in regard to the world about it. It is doubtful,
indeed, if the State in which they lived possessed the mentality to
explain as much even to itself.
How far the best education in America or Germany or any other country
was better, it is not for us to discuss here, nor how much better
education might be. This is the story of the minds of Joan and Peter and
of how that vast system of things hidden, things unanalysed and things
misrepresented and obscured, the political system of the European
“empires” burst out into war about them. The sprawling, clumsy, heedless
British State, which had troubled so little about taking Peter into its
confidence, displayed now no hesitation whatever in beckoning him home
to come and learn as speedily as possible how to die for it.
The tragedy of youth in the great war was a universal tragedy, and if
the German youths who were now, less freely and more systematically,
beating Peter by weeks and months in a universal race into uniform, were
more instructed than he, they were also far more thoroughly misinformed.
If Peter took hold of the war by the one elemental fact that Belgium had
been invaded most abominably and peaceful villagers murdered in their
own fields, the young Germans on the other hand had been trained to a
whole system of false interpretations. They were assured that they
fought to break up a ring of threatening enemies. And that the whole
thing was going to be the most magnificent adventure in history. Their
minds had been prepared elaborately and persistently for this heroic
struggle—in which they were to win easily. They had been made to believe
themselves a race of blond aristocrats above all the rest of mankind,
entitled by their moral and mental worth to world dominion. They
believed that now they did but come to their own. They had been taught
all these things from childhood; how could they help but believe them?
Peter arrived, tired and dirty, at Pelham Ford in the early afternoon.
Oswald and Joan were out, but he bathed and changed while Mrs. Moxton
got him a belated lunch. As he finished this Joan came into the
dining-room from a walk.
“Hullo, Petah,” she said, with no display of affection.
“Hullo, Joan.”
“We thought you were never coming.”
“I was in Italy,” said Peter.
“H’m,” said Joan, and seemed to reckon in her mind.
“Nobby is in London,” she said. “He thinks he might help about East
Africa. It’s his country practically.... Are you going to enlist?”
“What else?” said Peter, tapping a cigarette on the table. “It’s a
beastly bore.”
“Bunny’s gone,” said Joan. “And Wilmington.”
“They’ve written?”
“Willy came to see me.”
“Heard from any of the others?”
“Oh!... Troop.”
“Enlisted?”
“Cadet.”
“Any one else?”
“No,” said Joan, and hovered whistling faintly for a moment and then
walked out of the room....
She had been counting the hours for four days, perplexed by his delay;
his coming had seemed the greatest event in the world, for she had never
doubted he would come back to serve, and now that he had come she met
him like this!
§ 3
They dressed for dinner that night because Oswald came back tired and
vexed from London and wanted a bath before dining. “They seemed to be
sending everybody to East Africa on the principle that any one who’s
been there before ought not to go again,” he grumbled. “I can’t see any
other principle in it.” He talked at first of the coming East African
campaign because he hesitated to ask Peter what he intended to do. Then
he went on to the war news. The Germans had got Liége. That was certain
now. They had smashed the forts to pieces with enormous cannon. There
had been a massacre of civilians at Dinant. Joan did not talk very much,
but sat and watched Peter closely with an air of complete indifference.
There was a change in him, and she could not say exactly what this
change was. The sunshine and snow glare and wind of the high mountains
had tanned his face to a hard bronze and he was perceptibly leaner; that
made him look older perhaps; but the difference was more than that. She
knew her Peter so well that she could divine a new thought in him.
“And what are you going to do, Peter?” said Oswald, coming to it
abruptly.
“I’m going to enlist.”
“In the ranks, you mean?” Oswald had expected that.
“Yes.”
“You ought not to do that.”
“Why not?”
“You have your cadet corps work behind you. You ought to take a
commission. We shan’t have too many officers.”
Peter considered that.
“I want to begin in the ranks.... I want discipline.”
(Had some moral miracle happened to Peter? This was quite a new note
from our supercilious foster brother.)
“You’ll get discipline enough in the cadet corps.”
“I want to begin right down at the bottom of the ladder.”
“Well, if you get a rotten drill sergeant, I’m told, it’s disagreeable.”
“All the better.”
“They’ll find you out and push you into a commission,” said Oswald. “If
not, it’s sheer waste.”
“Well, I want to feel what discipline is like—before I give orders,”
said Peter. “I want to be told to do things and asked why the devil I
haven’t done ’em smartly. I’ve been going too easy. The ranks will brace
me up.”
(Yes, this was a new note. Had that delay of four or five days anything
to do with this?... Joan, with a start, discovered that she was holding
up the dinner, and touched the electric bell at her side for the course
to be changed.)
“I suppose we shall all have to brace up,” said Oswald. “It still seems
a little unreal. The French have lost Mulhausen again, they say, but
they are going strong for Metz. There’s not a word about our army. It’s
just crossed over and vanished....”
(Queer to sit here, dining in the soft candlelight, and to think of the
crowded roads and deploying troops, the thudding guns and bursting
shells away there behind that veil of secrecy—millions of men in France
and Belgium fighting for the world. And Peter would go off tomorrow.
Presently he would be in uniform; presently he would be part of a
marching column. He would go over—into the turmoil. Beyond that her
imagination would not pass.)
“I wish I could enlist,” said Joan.
“They’re getting thousands of men more than they can handle as it is,”
said Oswald. “They don’t want you.”
“You’d have thought they’d have had things planned and ready for this,”
said Peter.
“Nothing is ready,” said Oswald. “Nothing is planned. This war has
caught our war office fast asleep. It isn’t half awake even now.”
“There ought to be something for women to do,” said Joan.
“There ought to be something for every one to do,” said Oswald bitterly,
“but there isn’t. This country isn’t a State; it’s a crowd adrift. Did
you notice, Peter, as you came through London, the endless multitudes of
people just standing about? I’ve never seen London like that before.
People not walking about their business, but just standing.”...
Peter told of things he had seen on his way home. “The French are in a
scowling state. All France scowls at you, and Havre is packed with
bargains in touring cars—just left about—by rich people coming home....”
So the talk drifted. And all the time Joan watched Peter as acutely and
as unsuspectedly as a mother might watch a grown-up son. Tomorrow
morning he would go off and join up. But it wasn’t that which made him
grave. New experiences always elated Peter. And he wouldn’t be afraid;
not he.... She had been let into the views of three other young men who
had gone to war already; Troop had written, correctly and consciously
heroic, “_Some of the chaps seem to be getting a lot of emotion into
it_,” said Troop. “_It’s nothing out of the way that I can see. One just
falls into the line of one’s uncles and cousins._”
Wilmington had said: “I just wanted to see you, Joan. I’m told I’ll be
most useful as a gunner because of my mathematics. When it comes to
going over, you won’t forget to think of me, Joan?”
Joan answered truthfully. “I’ll think of you a lot, Billy.”
“There’s nothing in life like you, Joan,” said Wilmington in his white
expressionless way. “Well, I suppose I’d better be going.”
But Bunny had discoursed upon fear. “_I’ve enlisted_,” he wrote,
“_chiefly because I’m afraid of going Pacifist right out—out of funk.
But it’s hell, Joan. I’m afraid in my bones. I hate bangs, and they say
the row of modern artillery is terrific. I’ve never seen a dead body, a
human dead body, I mean, ever. Have you? I would go round a quarter of a
mile out of my way any time to dodge a butcher’s shop. I was sick when I
found Peter dissecting a rabbit. You know, sick, à la Manche. No
metaphors. I shall run away, I know I shall run away. But we’ve got to
stop these beastly Germans anyhow. It isn’t killing the Germans I shall
mind—I’m fierce on Germans, Joan; but seeing the chaps on stretchers or
lying about with all sorts of horrible injuries._”
Sheets of that sort of thing, written in an unusually bad
handwriting—apparently rather to comfort himself than to sustain Joan.
Well, it wasn’t Peter’s way to think beforehand of being “on stretchers
or lying about,” but Bunny’s scribblings had got the stretchers into
Joan’s thoughts. And it made her wish somehow that Peter, instead of
being unusually grave and choosing to be a ranker, was taking this job
with his usual easy confidence and going straight and gaily for a
commission.
After dinner they all sat out in garden chairs, outside the library
window, and had their coffee and smoked. Joan got her chair and drew it
close to Peter’s. Two hundred miles away and less was battle and
slaughter, perhaps creeping nearer to them, the roaring of great guns,
the rattle of rifle fire, the hoarse shouts of men attacking, and a
gathering harvest of limp figures “on stretchers and lying about”; but
that evening at Pelham Ford was a globe of golden serenity. Not a leaf
stirred, and only the little squeaks and rustlings of small creatures
that ran and flitted in the dusk ruffled the quiet air.
Oswald made Peter talk of his climbing. “My only mountain is
Kilimanjaro,” he said. “No great thing so far as actual climbing goes.”
Peter had begun with the Dolomites, had gone over to Adelboden, and then
worked round by the Concordia Hut to Bel Alp. “Was it very beautiful?”
asked Joan softly under his elbow.
“You could have done it all. I wish you had come,” said Peter.
There was a pause.
“And Italy?” said Joan, still more softly.
“Where did you go in Italy, Peter?” said Oswald, picking up her
question.
Peter gave a travel-book description of Orta and the Isle of San Giulio.
Joan sat as still and watchful as a little cat watching for a mouse.
(Something had put Peter out in Italy.)
“It’s off the main line,” said Peter. “The London and Paris papers don’t
arrive, and one has to fall back on the _Corriere della Sera_.”
“Very good paper too,” said Oswald.
“News doesn’t seem so real in a language you don’t understand.”
He was excusing himself. So he was ashamed to that extent. That was what
was bothering him. One might have known he wouldn’t care for—those other
things....
Late that night Joan sat in her room thinking. Presently she unlocked
her writing-desk and took out and re-read a letter. It was from Huntley
in Cornwall, and it was very tender and passionate. “_The world has gone
mad, dearest_,” it ran; “_but we need not go mad. The full moon is
slipping by. I lay out on the sands last night praying for you to come,
trying to will you to come. Oh—when are you coming?_”...
And much more to the same effect....
Joan’s face hardened. “Po’try,” she said. She took a sharpened pencil
from the glass tray upon her writing-table and regarded it. The pencil
was finely pointed—too finely pointed. She broke off the top with the
utmost care and tested the blunt point on her blotting-paper to see if
it was broad enough for her purpose. Then she scrawled her reply across
his letter—in five words: “_You ought to enlist. Joan_,” and addressed
an envelope obliquely in the same uncivil script.
After which she selected sundry other letters and a snap-shot giving a
not unfavourable view of Huntley from her desk, and having scrutinized
the latter for an interval, tore them all carefully into little bits and
dropped them into her wastepaper basket. She stood regarding these
fragments for some time. “I might have gone to him,” she whispered at
last, and turned away.
She blew out her candle, hesitated by her bedside, and walked to the
open window to watch the moon rise.
She sat upon her window-sill like a Joan of marble for a long time. Then
she produced one of those dark sayings with which she was wont to wrap
rather than express her profounder thoughts.
“Queer how suddenly one discovers at last what one has known all
along.... Queer....
“Well, I know anyhow.”...
She stood up at last and yawned. “But I don’t like war,” said Joan.
“Stretchers! Or lying about! Groaning. In the darkness. Boys one has
danced with. Oh! beastly. _Beastly!_”
She forgot her intention of undressing, put her foot on the sill, and
rested chin on fist and elbow on knee, scowling out at the garden as
though she saw things that she did not like there.
§ 4
So it was that Joan saw the beginning of the great winnowing of mankind,
and Peter came home in search of his duty.
Within the first month of the war nearly every one of the men in Joan’s
world had been spun into the vortex; hers was so largely a world of
young or unattached people, with no deep roots in business or employment
to hold them back. Even Oswald at last, in spite of many rebuffs, found
a use for himself in connection with a corps of African labourers behind
the front, and contrived after a steady pressure of many months towards
the danger zone, to get himself wounded while he was talking to some of
his dear Masai at an ammunition dump. A Hun raider dropped a bomb, and
some flying splinters of wood cut him deeply and extensively. The
splinters were vicious splinters; there were complications; and he found
himself back at Pelham Ford before the end of 1916, aged by ten years.
The Woman’s Legion captured Joan from the date of its formation, and
presently had her driving a car for the new Ministry of Munitions, which
came into existence in the middle of 1915.
Her career as a chauffeuse was a brilliant one. She lived, after the
free manner of the Legion, with Miss Jepson at Hampstead; she went down
every morning to her work, she drove her best and her best continually
improved, so that she became distinguished among her fellows. The
Ministry grew aware of her and proud of her. A time arrived when
important officials quarrelled to secure her for their journeys. Eminent
foreign visitors invariably found themselves behind her.
“But she drives like a man,” they would say, a little breathlessly,
after some marvellously skidded corner.
“All our girls drive like this,” the Ministry of Munitions would remark,
carelessly, loyally, but untruthfully.
Joan’s habitual wear became khaki; she had puttees and stout boots and
little brass letterings upon her shoulders and sleeves, and the only
distinctive touches she permitted herself were the fur of her overcoat
collar and a certain foppery about her gauntlets....
Extraordinary and profound changes of mood and relationship occurred in
the British mind during those first two years of the war, and reflected
themselves upon the minds of Joan and Peter. To begin with, and for
nearly a year, there was a quality of spectacularity about the war for
the British. They felt it to be an immense process and a vitally
significant process; they read, they talked, they thought of little
else; but it was not yet felt to be an intimate process. The habit of
detachment was too deeply ingrained. Great Britain was an island of
onlookers. To begin with the war seemed like something tremendous and
arresting going on in an arena. “Business as usual,” said the business
man, putting up the price of anything the country seemed to need. There
was a profound conviction that British life and the British community
were eternal things; they might play a part—a considerable part—in these
foreign affairs; they might even have to struggle, but it was
inconceivable that they should change or end. September and October in
1914 saw an immense wave of volunteer enthusiasm—enthusiasm for the most
part thwarted and wasted by the unpreparedness of the authorities for
anything of the sort, but it was the enthusiasm of an audience eager to
go on the stage; it was not the enthusiasm of performers in the arena
and unable to quit the arena, fighting for life or death. To secure any
sort of official work was to step out of the undistinguished throng. In
uniform one felt dressed up and part of the pageant. Young soldiers were
self-conscious in those early days, and inclined to pose at the ordinary
citizen. The ordinary citizen wanted to pat young soldiers on the back
and stand them drinks out of his free largesse. They were “in it,” he
felt, and he at most was a patron of the affair.
That spectacularity gave way to a sense of necessary participation only
very slowly indeed. The change began as the fresh, bright confidence
that the Battle of the Marne had begotten gave place to a deepening
realization of the difficulties on the road to any effective victory.
The persuasion spread from mind to mind that if Great Britain was to
fight this war as she had lived through sixty years of peace, the
gentleman amateur among the nations, she would lose this war. The change
of spirit that produced its first marked result in the creation of the
Ministry of Munitions with a new note of quite unofficial hustle, and
led on through a series of inevitable steps to the adoption of
conscription, marks a real turning about of the British mind, the close
of a period of chaotic freedom almost unprecedented in the history of
communities. It was the rediscovery of the State as the necessary form
into which the individual life must fit.
To the philosophical historian of the future the efforts of governing
and leading people in Great Britain to get wills together, to explain
necessities, to supplement the frightful gaps in the education of every
class by hastily improvised organizations, by speeches, press-campaigns,
posters, circulars, cinema shows, parades and proclamations; hasty,
fitful, ill-conducted and sometimes dishonestly conducted appeals though
they were, will be far more interesting than any story of battles and
campaigns. They remind one of a hand scrambling in the dark for
something long neglected and now found to be vitally important; they are
like voices calling in a dark confusion. They were England seeking to
comprehend herself and her situation after the slumber of two centuries.
But to people like Joan and Peter, who were not philosophical
historians, the process went on, not as a process, but as an apparently
quite disconnected succession of events. Imperceptibly their thoughts
changed and were socialized. Joan herself had no suspicion of the
difference in orientation between the Joan who stood at her bedroom
window in August, 1914, the most perfect spectator of life, staring out
at the darkness of the garden, dumbly resenting the call that England
was making upon the free lives of all her friends, and the Joan of 1917,
in khaki and a fur-collared coat, who slung a great car with a swift,
unerring confidence through the London traffic and out to Woolwich or
Hendon or Waltham or Aldershot or Chelmsford or what not, keen and
observant of the work her passengers discussed, a conscious part now of
a great and growing understanding and criticism and will, of a
rediscovered unity, which was England—awakening.