For some days Mr. Britling could think of nothing but Hugh, and always
with a dull pain at his heart. He felt as he had felt long ago while he
had waited downstairs and Hugh upstairs had been under the knife of a
surgeon. But this time the operation went on and still went on. At the
worst his boy had but one chance in five of death or serious injury, but
for a time he could think of nothing but that one chance. He felt it
pressing upon his mind, pressing him down....
Then instead of breaking under that pressure, he was released by the
trick of the sanguine temperament. His mind turned over, abruptly, to
the four chances out of five. It was like a dislocated joint slipping
back into place. It was as sudden as that. He found he had adapted
himself to the prospect of Hugh in mortal danger. It had become a fact
established, a usual thing. He could bear with it and go about his
affairs.
He went up to London, and met other men at the club in the same
emotional predicament. He realised that it was neither very wonderful
nor exceptionally tragic now to have a son at the front.
"My boy is in Gallipoli," said one. "It's tough work there."
"My lad's in Flanders," said Mr. Britling. "Nothing would satisfy him
but the front. He's three months short of eighteen. He misstated his
age."
And they went on to talk newspaper just as if the world was where it had
always been.
But until a post card came from Hugh Mr. Britling watched the postman
like a lovesick girl.
Hugh wrote more frequently than his father had dared to hope, pencilled
letters for the most part. It was as if he was beginning to feel an
inherited need for talk, and was a little at a loss for a sympathetic
ear. Park, his schoolmate, who had enlisted with him, wasn't, it seemed,
a theoriser. "Park becomes a martinet," Hugh wrote. "Also he is a
sergeant now, and this makes rather a gulf between us." Mr. Britling had
the greatest difficulty in writing back. There were many grave deep
things he wanted to say, and never did. Instead he gave elaborate
details of the small affairs of the Dower House. Once or twice, with a
half-unconscious imitation of his boy's style, he took a shot at the
theological and philosophical hares that Hugh had started. But the
exemplary letters that he composed of nights from a Father to a Son at
War were never written down. It was just as well, for there are many
things of that sort that are good to think and bad to say....
Hugh was not very explicit about his position or daily duties. What he
wrote now had to pass through the hands of a Censor, and any sort of
definite information might cause the suppression of his letter. Mr.
Britling conceived him for the most part as quartered some way behind
the front, but in a flat, desolated country and within hearing of great
guns. He assisted his imagination with the illustrated papers. Sometimes
he put him farther back into pleasant old towns after the fashion of
Beauvais, and imagined loitering groups in the front of cafés; sometimes
he filled in the obvious suggestions of the phrase that all the Pas de
Calais was now one vast British camp. Then he crowded the picture with
tethered horses and tents and grey-painted wagons, and Hugh in the
foreground--bare-armed, with a bucket....
Hugh's letters divided themselves pretty fairly between two main topics;
the first was the interest of the art of war, the second the reaction
against warfare. "After one has got over the emotion of it," he wrote,
"and when one's mind has just accepted and forgotten (as it does) the
horrors and waste of it all, then I begin to perceive that war is
absolutely the best game in the world. That is the real strength of war,
I submit. Not as you put it in that early pamphlet of yours; ambition,
cruelty, and all those things. Those things give an excuse for war, they
rush timid and base people into war, but the essential matter is the
hold of the thing itself upon an active imagination. It's such a big
game. Instead of being fenced into a field and tied down to one set of
tools as you are in almost every other game, you have all the world to
play and you may use whatever you can use. You can use every scrap of
imagination and invention that is in you. And it's wonderful.... But
real soldiers aren't cruel. And war isn't cruel in its essence. Only in
its consequences. Over here one gets hold of scraps of talk that light
up things. Most of the barbarities were done--it is quite clear--by an
excited civilian sort of men, men in a kind of inflamed state. The great
part of the German army in the early stage of the war was really an army
of demented civilians. Trained civilians no doubt, but civilians in
soul. They were nice orderly clean law-abiding men suddenly torn up by
the roots and flung into quite shocking conditions. They felt they were
rushing at death, and that decency was at an end. They thought every
Belgian had a gun behind the hedge and a knife in his trouser leg. They
saw villages burning and dead people, and men smashed to bits. They
lived in a kind of nightmare. They didn't know what they were doing.
They did horrible things just as one does them sometimes in dreams...."
He flung out his conclusion with just his mother's leaping
consecutiveness. "Conscript soldiers are the ruin of war.... Half the
Germans and a lot of the French ought never to have been brought within
ten miles of a battlefield.
"What makes all this so plain are the diaries the French and English
have been finding on the dead. You know at the early state of the war
every German soldier was expected to keep a diary. He was ordered to do
it. The idea was to keep him interested in the war. Consequently, from
the dead and wounded our people have got thousands.... It helps one to
realise that the Germans aren't really soldiers at all. Not as our men
are. They are obedient, law-abiding, intelligent people, who have been
shoved into this. They have to see the war as something romantic and
melodramatic, or as something moral, or as tragic fate. They have to
bellow songs about 'Deutschland,' or drag in 'Gott.' They don't take to
the game as our men take to the game....
"I confess I'm taking to the game. I wish at times I had gone into the
O.T.C. with Teddy, and got a better hold of it. I was too high-browed
about this war business. I dream now of getting a commission....
"That diary-hunting strategy is just the sort of thing that makes this
war intellectually fascinating. Everything is being thought out and then
tried over that can possibly make victory. The Germans go in for
psychology much more than we do, just as they go in for war more than we
do, but they don't seem to be really clever about it. So they set out to
make all their men understand the war, while our chaps are singing
'Tipperary.' But what the men put down aren't the beautiful things they
ought to put down; most of them shove down lists of their meals, some of
the diaries are all just lists of things eaten, and a lot of them have
written the most damning stuff about outrages and looting. Which the
French are translating and publishing. The Germans would give anything
now to get back these silly diaries. And now they have made an order
that no one shall go into battle with any written papers at all.... Our
people got so keen on documenting and the value of chance writings that
one of the principal things to do after a German attack had failed had
been to hook in the documentary dead, and find out what they had on
them.... It's a curious sport, this body fishing. You have a sort of
triple hook on a rope, and you throw it and drag. They do the same. The
other day one body near Hooghe was hooked by both sides, and they had a
tug-of-war. With a sharpshooter or so cutting in whenever our men got
too excited. Several men were hit. The Irish--it was an Irish
regiment--got him--or at least they got the better part of him....
"Now that I am a sergeant, Park talks to me again about all these
things, and we have a first lieutenant too keen to resist such technical
details. They are purely technical details. You must take them as that.
One does not think of the dead body as a man recently deceased, who had
perhaps a wife and business connections and a weakness for oysters or
pale brandy. Or as something that laughed and cried and didn't like
getting hurt. That would spoil everything. One thinks of him merely as a
uniform with marks upon it that will tell us what kind of stuff we have
against us, and possibly with papers that will give us a hint of how far
he and his lot are getting sick of the whole affair....
"There's a kind of hardening not only of the body but of the mind
through all this life out here. One is living on a different level. You
know--just before I came away--you talked of Dower-House-land--and
outside. This is outside. It's different. Our men here are kind enough
still to little things--kittens or birds or flowers. Behind the front,
for example, everywhere there are Tommy gardens. Some are quite bright
little patches. But it's just nonsense to suppose we are tender to the
wounded up here--and, putting it plainly, there isn't a scrap of pity
left for the enemy. Not a scrap. Not a trace of such feeling. They were
tender about the wounded in the early days--men tell me--and reverent
about the dead. It's all gone now. There have been atrocities, gas,
unforgettable things. Everything is harder. Our people are inclined now
to laugh at a man who gets hit, and to be annoyed at a man with a
troublesome wound. The other day, they say, there was a big dead German
outside the Essex trenches. He became a nuisance, and he was dragged in
and taken behind the line and buried. After he was buried, a kindly soul
was putting a board over him with 'Somebody's Fritz' on it, when a shell
burst close by. It blew the man with the board a dozen yards and wounded
him, and it restored Fritz to the open air. He was lifted clean out. He
flew head over heels like a windmill. This was regarded as a tremendous
joke against the men who had been at the pains of burying him. For a
time nobody else would touch Fritz, who was now some yards behind his
original grave. Then as he got worse and worse he was buried again by
some devoted sanitarians, and this time the inscription was 'Somebody's
Fritz. R.I.P.' And as luck would have it, he was spun up again. In
pieces. The trench howled with laughter and cries of 'Good old Fritz!'
'This isn't the Resurrection, Fritz.'...
"Another thing that appeals to the sunny humour of the trenches as a
really delicious practical joke is the trick of the fuses. We have two
kinds of fuse, a slow-burning fuse such as is used for hand-grenades and
such-like things, a sort of yard-a-minute fuse, and a rapid fuse that
goes a hundred yards a second--for firing mines and so on. The latter is
carefully distinguished from the former by a conspicuous red thread.
Also, as you know, it is the habit of the enemy and ourselves when the
trenches are near enough, to enliven each other by the casting of homely
but effective hand-grenades made out of tins. When a grenade drops in a
British trench somebody seizes it instantly and throws it back. To hoist
the German with his own petard is particularly sweet to the British
mind. When a grenade drops into a German trench everybody runs. (At
least that is what I am told happens by the men from our trenches;
though possibly each side has its exceptions.) If the bomb explodes, it
explodes. If it doesn't, Hans and Fritz presently come creeping back to
see what has happened. Sometimes the fuse hasn't caught properly, it has
been thrown by a nervous man; or it hasn't burnt properly. Then Hans or
Fritz puts in a new fuse and sends it back with loving care. To hoist
the Briton with his own petard is particularly sweet to the German
mind.... But here it is that military genius comes in. Some gifted
spirit on our side procured (probably by larceny) a length of mine fuse,
the rapid sort, and spent a laborious day removing the red thread and
making it into the likeness of its slow brother. Then bits of it were
attached to tin-bombs and shied--unlit of course--into the German
trenches. A long but happy pause followed. I can see the chaps holding
themselves in. Hans and Fritz were understood to be creeping back, to be
examining the unlit fuse, to be applying a light thereunto, in order to
restore it to its maker after their custom....
"A loud bang in the German trenches indicated the moment of lighting,
and the exit of Hans and Fritz to worlds less humorous.
"The genius in the British trenches went on with the preparation of the
next surprise bomb--against the arrival of Kurt and Karl....
"Hans, Fritz, Kurt, Karl, Michael and Wilhelm; it went for quite a long
time before they grew suspicious....
"You once wrote that all fighting ought to be done nowadays by metal
soldiers. I perceive, my dear Daddy, that all real fighting is...."