were the chief ones. Others came in and went again—stories of the
sufferings of wounded men, of almost incredible brutalities done to
women and children and helpless people, and of a hundred chance
reasonless horrors; they came in with an effect of support and
confirmation to these two principal figures—the shrill little girl
making her bitter complaint against God and the world which had promised
to take care of her, and had scared her horribly and torn her limbs and
thrust her, thirsty and agonized, into a stinking drain to die; and the
poor puzzled lout, caught and condemned, who had to die so dingily and
submissively because his heart had failed him. Against the grim
instances of their sombre and squalid fates the soul of Bunny battled
whenever, by night or day, thought overtook him in his essential and
characteristic resolve to see life as “fun”—as “great fun.”
These two fellow-sufferers in life took possession of his imagination
because of their intense kindred with himself. So far as he got his
riddle clear it was something after this fashion: “Why, if the world is
like this, why are we in it? What am I doing in this nightmare? Why are
there little girls and simple louts—and me?”
The days drew near when he would have to go to the front. He wrote
shamelessly to Joan of his dread of that experience.
“_It’s the mud and dirtiness and ugliness_,” he said. “_I am a domestic
cat, Joan—an indoor cat...._
“_I’ve got a Pacifist temperament...._
“_All the same, Joan, the Germans started this war. If we don’t beat
them, they will start others. They are intolerable brutes—the Junkers,
anyhow. Until we get them down they will go on kicking mankind in the
stomach. It is their idea of dignified behaviour. But we are casting our
youth before swine.... Why aren’t there more assassins in the world? Why
can’t we kill them by machinery—painlessly and cleanly? We ought to be
cleverer than they are._”
There was extraordinarily little personal fear in Bunny. He was not
nearly so afraid of the things that would happen to him as of the things
that would happen about him. He hated the smashing even of inanimate
things; a broken-down chair or a roofless shed was painful to him.
Whenever he thought of the trenches he thought of treading and slipping
in the dark on a torn and still living body....
He stuck stoutly to his reasoning that England had to fight and that he
had to fight; but hidden from Joan, hidden from every living soul, he
kept a secret resolve. It was, he knew, an entirely illogical and
treasonable resolve, and yet he found it profoundly comforting. He would
never fire his rifle so that it would hurt any one even by chance, and
he would never use his bayonet. He would go over the top with the best
of them, and carry his weapons and shout.
If it came to close fighting he would go for a man with his hands and
try to disarm him.
But this resolve was never put to the test. The Easter newspapers of
1916 arrived with flaming headlines about an insurrection in Dublin and
the seizure of the Post Office by the rebels. Oddly enough, this did not
shock Bunny at all. It produced none of the effect of horror and
brutality that the German invasion of Belgium had made upon his mind. It
impressed him as a “rag”; as the sort of rag that they got up to at
Cambridge during seasons of excitement. He was delighted by the seizure
of the Post Office, by the appearance of a revolutionary flag and the
issue of Republican stamps. It was as good as “Little Wars”; it was
“Little Revolutions.” He didn’t like the way they had shot a policeman
outside Trinity College, but perhaps that report wasn’t true. The whole
affair had restored that flavour of adventure and burlesque that he had
so sadly missed from the world since the war began.
He had always idealized the Irish character as the pleasantest
combination of facetiousness and generosity. When he found himself part
of a draft crossing to Dublin with his back to the grim war front, his
spirits rose. He could forget that nightmare for a time. He was going to
a land of wit and laughter which had rebelled for a lark. He felt sure
that the joke would end happily and that he would be shaking hands with
congenial spirits still wearing Sinn Fein badges before a fortnight was
out. Perhaps he would come upon Mrs. O’Grady or Patrick Lynch, whom he
had been accustomed to meet at the Sheldricks’. He had heard they were
in it. And when the whole business had ended brightly and cheerfully
then all those clever and witty people would grow grave and helpful, and
come back with him to join in that temporarily neglected task of
fighting on the western front against an iron brutality that threatened
to overwhelm the world.
He was still in this cheerful vein two days later as he was crossing St.
Stephen’s Green. His quaint, amiable face was smiling pleasantly and he
was marching with a native ungainliness that no drill-sergeant could
ever overcome, when something hit him very hard in the middle of the
body.
He knew immediately that he had been shot.
He was not dismayed or shocked by this, but tremendously interested.
All other feelings were swamped in his surprise at a curious
contradiction. He had felt hit behind, he was convinced he had been hit
behind, but what was queer about it was that he was spinning round as
though he had been hit in front. It gave him a preposterous drunken
feeling. His head was quite clear, but he was altogether incapable of
controlling these spinning legs of his, which were going round backward.
His facile sense of humour was aroused. It was really quite funny to be
spinning backwards in this way. It was like a new step in dancing. His
hilarity increased. It was like the maddest dancing they had ever had at
Hampstead or Chelsea. The “backwards step.” He laughed. He had to laugh;
something was tickling his ribs and throat. His whole being laughed. He
laughed a laugh that became a rush of hot blood from his mouth....
The soul of Bunny, for all I know, laughs for ever among the stars; but
it was a dead young man who finished those fantastic gyrations.
He paused and swayed and dropped like an empty sack, and lay still in
St. Stephen’s Green, the modest contribution of one happy Sinn Fein
sniper to the Peace of Mankind.
Perhaps Bunny was well out of a life where there can be little room for
Bunnyism for many years to come, and lucky to leave it laughing. And as
an offset to his loss we have to count the pleasant excitement of
Ireland in getting well back into the limelight of the world’s affairs,
and the bright and glowing gathering of the armed young heroes who got
away, recounting their deeds to one another simultaneously in some
secure place, with all the rich, tumultuous volubility of the Keltic
habit.
“Did ye see that red-haired fella I got in the square, boys?... Ah, ye
should have seen that fella I got in the square.”
§ 7
But not all the world of Joan was at war. The Sheldrick circle, for
example, after some wide fluctuations during which Sydney almost became
a nurse and Babs nearly enlisted into the Women’s Legion, took a marked
list under the influence of one of the sons-in-law towards pacifism.
Antonia, who had taken two German prizes at school, was speedily
provoked by the general denunciation of “Kultur” into a distinctly
pro-German attitude. The Sheldrick circle settled down on the whole as a
pro-German circle, with a poor opinion of President Wilson, a marked
hostility to Belgians, and a disposition to think the hardships of
drowning by U-boats much exaggerated.
The Sheldricks were like seedlings that begin flourishing and then damp
off. From amusing schoolfellows they had changed into irritating and
disappointing friends. Energy leaked out of them at adolescence. They
seemed to possess the vitality for positive convictions no longer, they
displayed an instinctive hostility to any wave of popular feeling that
threatened to swamp their weak but still obstinate individualities.
Their general attitude towards life was one of protesting
refractoriness. Whatever it was that people believed or did, you were
given to understand by undertones and abstinences that the Sheldricks
knew better, and for the most exquisite reasons didn’t. All their
friends were protesters and rebels and seceders, or incomprehensible
poets, or inexplicable artists. And from the first the war was
altogether too big and strong for them. Confronted by such questions as
whether fifty years of belligerent preparation, culminating in the most
cruel and wanton invasion of a peaceful country it is possible to
imagine, was to be resisted by mankind or condoned, the Sheldricks fell
back upon the counter statement that Sir Edward Grey, being a landowner,
was necessarily just as bad as a German Junker, or that the Government
of Russia was an unsatisfactory one.
In a few months it was perfectly clear to the Sheldricks that they would
have nothing to do with the war at all. They were going to ignore it.
Sydney just went on quietly doing her little statuettes that nobody
would buy, little portrait busts of her sisters and suchlike things; now
and then her mother contrived to get her a commission. Babs kept on
trying to get a part in somebody’s play; Antonia continued to produce
djibbahs in chocolate and grocer’s blue and similar tints. One saw the
sisters drifting about London in costumes still trailingly
Pre-Raphaelite when all the rest of womankind was cutting its skirts
shorter and shorter, their faces rather pained in expression and
deliberately serene, ignoring the hopes and fears about them, the stir,
the huge effort, the universal participation. It was not their affair,
thank you. They were not going to wade through this horrid war; they
were going round.
Every time Joan went to see them, either they had become more
phantomlike and incredible, or she had become coarser and more real.
Would they ever get round? she asked herself; and what would they be
like when at last they attempted, if ever they attempted, to rejoin the
main stream of human interests again?
They kept up their Saturday evenings, but their gatherings became
thinner and less and less credible as the war went on. The first wave of
military excitement carried off most of the sightly young men, and
presently the more capable and enterprising of the women vanished one
after another to nurse, to join the Women’s Legion, to become substitute
clerks and release men to volunteer, to work in canteens and so forth.
There was, however, a certain coming and going of ambiguous adventurers,
who in those early days went almost unchallenged between London and
Belgium on ambulance work, on mysterious missions and with no missions
at all. Belgian refugees drifted in and, when they found a lack of
sympathy for their simple thirst for the destruction of Germans under
all possible circumstances, out again. Then Ireland called her own, and
Patrick Lynch went off to die a martyr’s death with arms in his hands
after three days of the most exhilarating mixed shooting in the streets
of Dublin. Antonia discovered passionate memories as soon as he was
dead, and nobody was allowed to mention the name of Bunny in the
Sheldrick circle for fear of spoiling the emotional atmosphere. Hetty
Reinhart, after some fluctuations, went khaki, flitted from one ministry
to another in various sorts of clerical capacities, took such
opportunities as offered of entertaining young officers lonely in our
great capital, and was no more seen in Hampstead. What was left of this
little group in the Hampstead _Quartier Latin_ drew together into a band
of resistance to the creeping approach of compulsory service.
Huntley’s lofty scorn of the war had intensified steadily; the harsh
disappointment of Joan’s patriotism had stung him to great efforts of
self-justification, and he became one of the most strenuous writers in
the extreme Pacifist press. Not an act or effort of the Allies, he
insisted, that was not utterly vile in purpose and doomed to accelerate
our defeat. Not an act of the enemy’s that was not completely thought
out, wisely calculated, and planned to give the world peace and freedom
on the most reasonable terms. He was particularly active in preparing
handbills and pamphlets of instruction for lifelong Conscientious
Objectors to war service who had not hitherto thought about the subject.
Community of view brought him very close in feeling to both Babs and
Sydney Sheldrick. There was much talk of a play he was to write which
was to demonstrate the absurdity of Englishmen fighting Germans just
because Germans insisted upon fighting Englishmen, and which was also to
bring out the peculiarly charming Babsiness of Babs. He studied her
thoroughly and psychologically and physiologically and intensively and
extensively.
By a great effort of self-control he abstained from sending his writings
to Joan. Once however they were near meeting. On one of Joan’s rare
calls Babs told her that he was coming to discuss the question whether
he should go to prison and hunger-strike, or consent to take up work of
national importance. Babs was very full of the case for each
alternative. She was doubtful which course involved the greatest moral
courage. Moral courage, it was evident, was being carried to giddy
heights by Huntley. It would be pure hypocrisy, he felt, to ignore the
vital value of his writings, and while he could go on with these quite
comfortably while working as a farm hand, with a little judicious
payment to the farmer, their production would become impossible in
prison. He must crucify himself upon the cross of harsh judgments, he
felt, and take the former course. He wanted to make his views exactly
clear to every one to avoid misunderstanding.
Joan hesitated whether she should stay and insult him or go, and chose
the seemlier course.
§ 8
Joan was already driving a car for the Ministry of Munitions before
Peter got himself transferred from the ranks of the infantry to the
Royal Flying Corps. Peter’s career as an infantryman never took him
nearer to the western front than Liss Forest. Then he perceived the
error of his ways and decided to get a commission in the Royal Flying
Corps. In those days the Flying Corps was still a limited and
inaccessible force with a huge waiting list, and it needed a
considerable exertion of influence to secure a footing in that select
band.... But at last a day came when Peter, rather self-conscious in his
new leather coat and cap, walked out from the mess past a group of
chatting young pilots towards the aeroplane in which he was to have his
first experience of flight.
He had a sense of being scrutinized, but indeed hardly any one upon the
aerodrome noted him. This sense of an audience made him deliberately
casual in his bearing. He saluted his pilot in a manner decidedly
offhand. He clambered up through struts and wire to the front seat as if
he was a clerk ascending the morning omnibus, and strapped himself in as
if it hardly mattered whether he was strapped in or not.
“Contact, sir,” said the mechanic. “Contact,” came the pilot’s voice
from behind. The engine roared, a gale swept backwards, and Peter
vibrated like an aspen leaf.
The wheels were cleared, the mechanics jumped aside, and Peter was
careering across the grass in a series of light leaps, and then his
progress became smoother. He did not perceive at first the reason for
this sudden steadying of the machine. He found himself tilting upward.
He was off the ground. He had been off the ground for some seconds. He
looked over the side and saw the grass fifty feet below, and the black
shadow of the aeroplane, as if it fled before them, rushing at a hedge,
doubling up at the hedge, and starting again in the next field. And up
he went.
Peter stared at fields, hedges, trees, sheds and roadways growing small
below him. He noted cows in plan and an automobile in plan, in a lane,
going it seemed very slowly indeed. It was a stagnant world below in
comparison with his own forward sweep. His initial nervousness and
self-consciousness had passed away. He was enormously interested and
delighted. He was trying to remember when it was that Nobby had said: “I
doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime—or yours.” It was somewhen long
ago at Limpsfield. Quite early....
And then abruptly Peter was clutching the side with his thick-gloved
hand; the aeroplane was coming round in a close curve and banking
steeply, very steeply. For a moment it seemed as though there was
nothing at all between him and England below. If he fell out——!
He looked over his shoulder and met the hard regard of a pair of
steel-blue eyes.
He remembered that after all he was under observation. This was no mere
civilian’s joy ride. He affected a concentration upon the scenery. The
aeroplane swung slowly back again to the level, and his hand left the
side....
They were going up very rapidly now. The world seemed to be rolling in
at the edges of a great circle that grew constantly larger. Away to the
left were broad spaces of brown sand, and grey rippled and smooth
shining water channels, and beyond, the sapphire sea; beneath and to the
right were fields, houses, villages, woods, and a distant range of hills
that seemed to be coming nearer. The scale was changing and everything
was becoming maplike. Cows were little dots now and men scarcely
visible.... And then suddenly all the scenery seemed to be rushing
upward before Peter’s eyes and he had a feeling like the feeling one has
in a lift when it starts—a down-borne feeling. He affected indifference,
and gave the pilot his whistling profile. Down they swept, faster than a
luge on the swiftest ice run, until one could see the ditches in the
shadows beneath the hedges and cows were plainly cows again, and then
once more they were heeling over and curving round. But Peter had been
ready for that this time; he had been telling himself over and over
again that he was strapped in. He betrayed no surprise. He was getting
more and more exhilarated.
And then they were climbing again and soaring straight out towards the
sea. Up went this roaring dragonfly in which Peter was sitting, at a
hundred and twenty miles or so per hour, leaving the dwindling land
behind.
Up they went and up, until the world seemed nearly all sea and the coast
was far away; they mounted at last above a little white cloud puff and
then above a haze of clouds, and when Peter looked down he saw at a vast
distance below, through a clear gap in that filmy cloud fabric, three
ships smaller than any toys. Of the men he could distinguish nothing.
How sweet the cold clear air had become!
And high above the world, in the lonely sky above the cloud fleece, the
pilot saw fit to spring a surprise upon Peter.
He was not of the genial and considerate order of teachers; he believed
in weeding out duds as swiftly as possible. He had an open mind as to
whether this rather over-intelligent-looking beginner might not, under
certain circumstances, squeal. So he just tried him and, without a note
of preparation, looped the loop with him.
The propeller that span before the eyes of Peter dipped. Peter bowed in
accord with it. It dipped more and more steeply, until the machine was
almost nose down, until Peter was looking at the sea and the land as one
sits and looks at a wall. He was tilted down and down until he was face
downward. And then as abruptly he was tilted up; it was like being in a
swing; the note of the engine altered as if a hand swept up a scale of
notes; the sea and the land seemed to fall away below him as though he
left them for ever, and the blue sky swept down across his field of
vision like a curtain: he was, so to speak, on his back now with his
legs in the air, looking straight at the sky, at nothing but sky, and
expecting to recover. For a vast second he waited for the swing to end.
This was surely the end of the swing....
Only—most amazingly—he didn’t recover! He wanted to say, “Ouch!” He was
immensely surprised—too surprised to be frightened. He went over
backwards—in an instant—and the sea and the land reappeared above the
sky and also came down like curtains, too, and then behold! the
aeroplane was driving down and the world was in its place again far
below.
“The Loop!” whispered Peter, a little dazed, and glanced back at his
pilot and smiled. This was no perambulator excursion. “The Loop—first
trip!”
The blue eyes seemed a little less hard, the weather-red face was
smiling faintly.
Then gripped by an irresistible power, Peter found himself going down,
down, down almost vertically. The pilot had apparently stopped the
engine....
Peter watched the majestic expansion of the landscape as they fell. They
had come back over the land. Far away he could see the aerodrome like a
scattered collection of little toy huts, and growing bigger and bigger
every instant. He sat quite still, for it was all right—it must be all
right. But now they were getting very near the ground, and it was still
rushing up to meet them, and pouring outwardly as it rose. A cat now
would be visible....
It _was_ all right. The engine picked up with a roar like a score of
lions, and the pilot levelled out a hundred feet above the trees....
Then presently they were dropping to the aerodrome again; down until the
hedges were plain and the grazing cattle close and distinct; and then,
with a sense of infinite regret, Peter perceived that they were back on
the turf again and that the flight was over. They danced lightly over
the turf. Their rush slowed down. They taxied gently up to the hangar
and the engine shuddered and, with a pathetic drop to silence,
stopped....
A little stiffly, Peter unbuckled himself and stretched and set himself
to clamber to the ground.
His weather-bitten senior nodded to him and smiled faintly....
Peter walked towards the mess. It was wonderful—and intensely
disappointing in that it was so soon over. There were still great pieces
of the afternoon left....
§ 9
The aerodrome was short of machines and instructors, and he had to wait
a couple of weeks before he could get into the air a second time.
He worked sedulously to gather knowledge during that waiting interval,
and his first real lesson found him a very alert and ready pupil. This
time the dual control was at his disposal, and for a straight or so the
pilot left things to him altogether. Came half a dozen other lessons,
and then Peter found himself sitting alone in a machine outside the
great sheds, watched closely by a knot of friendly rivals, and, for the
first time on his own account, conducting that duologue he had heard now
so often on other lips. “Switch off.”... “Suck in.” “Contact!”
He started across the ground. His first sensations bordered on panic.
Hitherto the machines he had flown in had been just machines; now this
one, this one was an animal; it started out across the aerodrome like a
demented ostrich, swerving wildly and trying to turn round. Always
before this, the other man had done the taxi business on the ground. It
had never occurred to Peter that it involved any difficulty. Peter’s
heart nearly failed him in that opening twenty seconds; he was convinced
he was going to be killed; and then he determined to get up at any cost.
At any rate he wouldn’t smash on the ground. He let out the accelerator,
touched his controls, and behold he was up—he was up! Instantly the
machine ceased to resemble a floundering ostrich, and became a steady
and dignified carinate, swaying only slightly from wing to wing. Up he
went over the hedges, over the trees, beyond, above the familiar field
of cows. The moment of panic passed, and Peter was himself again.
He had got right outside the aerodrome and he had to bank and bring her
round. Already he had done that successfully a number of times with an
instructor to take care of him. He did it successfully now. His
confidence grew. Back he buzzed and droned, a hundred feet over the
aerodrome. He made three complete circuits, rose outside the aerodrome
and came down, making a good landing. He was instantly smitten with the
intensest regret that he had not made eight or nine circuits. It was a
mere hop. Any man of spirit would have gone on. There were four hours of
daylight yet. He might have gone up; he might have tried a spiral....
_Damn!_
But the blue eyes of the master approved him.
“Couldn’t have made a better landing, Stubland,” said the master. “Try
again tomorrow. Follow it up close. Short and frequent doses. That’s the
way.”
Peter had made another stage on his way to France.