Tod fought all through the summer months; in the autumn he fought at Le
Cateau and Landrecies, and even before he had reached that October phase
he was made to realise that he was not going to be killed. At
Wallincourt he had a house knocked down about his head, and beyond being
buried and smothered with plaster, he was not hurt. James, his adjutant,
was shot dead beside him in a street in Le Cateau. Somewhere near
Landrecies Tod missed the exploding of a “delayed action mine,” and
missed it with a margin of forty seconds. “The C.O.’s luck.” It was
proverbial, and the men agreed that he deserved it, but they warned
Cane, his servant, to look out. “You be very careful, Whacker, or some
bloomin’ shell that ’asn’t the cheek to touch him will blow you to
b——y blazes.”
Cane “looked out” until the Armistice intervened, and he found himself
tacking oiled linen over the broken windows of a villa in Landrecies,
and arranging old pails to catch the drip from the ceiling. Cane
believed in the colonel; he believed too in that little old French
Testament which he knew Tod always carried in the breast pocket of his
tunic. Cane was a religious boy, though the battalion had given him the
irreverent name of “Whacker.”
Tod felt lost, most strangely lost. The amazing business was over, the
high spirited tension of it relaxed after those years of inward
discipline. It was as though the world had struck work of a sudden, and
stood waiting at the street corners for God and the millennium to arrive
on earth. Tod did not quite know whether he was glad or sorry. He was
glad for these poor French folk, but he had a feeling that something
fine and heroic and simple had gone out of life, and that the great
adventure was at an end.
They had reached the top of the hill, and the dull misty November sky
was like a grey curtain showing the world nothing but a huge question
mark. What next? Whither? How?
Were they going back down the hill again, back to the old life, or would
they push on to other hills vaguely imagined in the grey distance?
To Tod it was a day of interrogation.
He remembered standing in the garden of the little rococo French villa
that had been hit by a couple of German shells. Through one big hole in
the brickwork the staircase leading to the attics was visible, hanging
derelict in mid-air, its banisters splintered and twisted. A broken lime
tree lay half across the iron gate, resting on one of the brick pillars.
The grass plot was covered with broken tiles and bricks, the flower beds
pulped and trampled. The front door hung by one hinge, a pathetic and
drunken door. But the villa was not dead. An old Frenchman in carpet
slippers was patiently raking up the rubbish and taking it off in a
basket to a far corner of the garden. Madame and her two daughters had
carried out some chairs and a settee and were dusting them with
affectionate care.
Tod was touched.
“They don’t understand these things in England,” he said to himself;
“they never will.”
He went across and spoke to the old Frenchman, who was his host.
“To-morrow, monsieur, I will get some of my men to help you. It was bad
luck, those two shells, after all these years.”
“Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, we are quite happy. Are we not free?”
“I admire your courage, monsieur,” said Tod, “and the courage of madame
and her daughter.”
The Frenchman pointed with his rake at the hole in the wall.
“Bricks, monsieur, only bricks; not the blood of my children. That can
be remedied. We shall get to work in France; we shall clean up all the
rubbish.”
“I wish England had had some of this,” said Tod thoughtfully; “the few
bombs we got were nothing. I suppose that is why you French are so much
finer than our people.”
“But your army, monsieur, is it not superb?”
“There was nothing wrong with our army; I’m thinking of some of those
people at home.”
Tod wandered out alone one afternoon, and passing through a battered and
slimy-streeted old town, broke away into the country that was strangely
still and quiet under the grey November sky. It was a land of little
farms and green meadows shut in by high hedges, and Tod followed the
track of a tank that had cut square gaps in the hedgerows, the bushes
lying flattened like crushed faggots in the ditches. There were shell
holes everywhere, turf and scattered earth where the barrage of the
English guns had advanced across the fields. The farmhouses still seemed
to be deserted, and a great silence reigned over those little secret
meadows.
But Tod was not concerned with the war and its last dramatic phases. He
had come to the edge of the “Afterwards,” an afterwards that was as
sudden and strange as the sea to a man who has marched for months
through a forest. Tod wanted to think. He had been thinking in jerks and
spasms during the war, disconnectedly, rather vaguely, though certain
stark and fundamental facts had emerged from the chaos. He had learnt to
know men. He had learnt that they were utterly unequal. He loved them,
even though he knew that most of them were good-hearted sluggards, born
to be led and managed. He had discovered the bad man, who was often
clever and dangerous, and who responded to nothing but fear and the
voice of a master. Tod had been a master. No man less of a bully than
he, but he had learnt the great lesson of mastery. Character; that was
the one thing that counted. And because of his ideals, his love of men
and his passionate vision of what life should be for them in the future,
he was torn within himself, puzzled, challenged. He had had dreams of a
new leader and a new earth. Socialism—perhaps? But what of the
master-men, the leaders? Was not good staff-work as important in a State
as in an army? Was not civil discipline as necessary as military
discipline? Could a committee of battalion cooks have schemed and
carried through a big offensive? Were not the best talkers often the
worst fighters, and the least dependable of men? Tod had been living
with realities. He had learnt the great lesson, that the very nature of
man has a way of upsetting the most elaborate and beautiful theories.
You can use workmen to build a cathedral, but you cannot use the
workmen’s backs in place of stones. You can set a hundred men running a
race, but the whole hundred will not breast the tape together. Life was
still a race. Penalise the speedy men, and the thing would become a
farce, a disgraceful strolling match for loafers. Nature would put up
her starting pistol, and go in search of a better strain, of new men.
Civilisation’s business was to see that there was a fair start for all,
and no fouling.
In wandering over those wet fields Tod came upon a little orchard close
to a long rambling red-roofed house whose eyes still seemed to be
staring in a blind and frightened way at certain horrors that had been
enacted close to it. The orchard had been a German howitzer position. A
scattering of poplars and willows in the surrounding hedgerows had
screened it well, but chance or some English airmen had spotted those
squat black cannon, and death had come out of the grey sky.
The orchard was all brown with shell holes and scattered earth. Half the
trees had been smashed. One big howitzer lay wallowing in a crater like
some huge black beast dead and swollen. A second had been caught in the
act of making off towards the road, and stood where it had been left,
its snout cocked in the air as though it had been squealing in terror.
The ground round about was littered with wicker cases, fuse boxes,
shells, German helmets, overcoats, gas-masks, a torn and bloody tunic.
Two or three dead Germans still sprawled under the hedge. Tod could
picture the fierce intensity of that battle scene. The sudden plunging
shells, the crash of the explosives, the spurts of dirt and smoke, the
shrinking desperate men drifting away from their smothered guns, the
dead left lying. What a glimpse of the last judgment on the men who had
conceived and created the war!
Tod sat down on a wooden case. He was used to such scenes. This smashed
German battery was a thing of the past, and Tod’s thoughts were in the
future.
He had a packet of Mr. Burgetrode’s letters in his pocket, and he wanted
to read them again at his leisure. Some of them were in answer to the
scrawls he had sent to this big friend, the curt, frank outpourings of a
soldier to a man who understood.
There were many passages in Julian Burgetrode’s letters that spoke as an
answering voice to Tod’s thoughts.
“Am I an idealist? Of course I am an idealist, but I prefer good
concrete for my foundations, to building in a bog of sentimental and
Utopian slush.”
“If you think you are coming back to a new heaven and a new earth, my
son, get rid of that idea at once. We are going forward, but I think
that we shall go forward in a way very different from what most people
imagine. Read French history as it concerns a period like our own. And
don’t think that England has been chastened, as the best of you have
been chastened out there. It hasn’t. The grocer is still stronger than
God.”
“Keep away from the people who are always calling on the State to do
this and to do that. Don’t be befogged by that word ‘State.’ Be ready to
take your coat off and fell your own trees.”
“After all, what is the ‘State’ to which these good people are always
appealing? Such a State is nothing but officialdom. And who is your
official? Just old Mr. Peasgood Nonsuch, a rather dull and phlegmatic
old gentleman who goes back to Surbiton or Ealing each evening, and
grumbles over the paper, with his feet in the fireplace. Mr. Peasgood
Nonsuch, and whole cohorts of Nonsuches are not going to do your
business for you.”
“The country that sits down and waits for someone to hand it its spade,
bring it its dinner, and wipe its unsweated forehead, is going to the
devil.”
“Tod, my boy, you must know that men have to be managed and to be moved.
Most of them are just marionettes. Necessity is the great wire. Cut it
and you will stop the vital current to the whole complex scheme. And an
intoxicated mob of fools will be fighting like starving dogs.”
“We are still creatures of necessity, not democratic demigods. We have
created our scheme of civilisation, and we have got to live with it;
it’s our Sphinx, our Master. Nature is not going to be cheated.”
“For the average man needs fear, the fear of hunger and no fire. The
truth is as old as Adam. Have we suddenly become automatic angels?”
“Tod, my man, don’t sink yourself to the level of the pap-mongers and
visionary journalists. Don’t be quixotically unselfish. Not one man in
ten thousand really cares about the big dream. He’s thinking of his
coal-cellar and the income tax. The grocer will beam you his blessing
and do you behind your back. It’s in the blood.”
“Nature is not going to let us all wallow in a social elysium just yet.
We have got to be up and doing, every man of us. Those who sit under the
apple tree and smoke and wait for Mr. Peasgood Nonsuch to climb up and
throw down the apples won’t get ’em. They don’t deserve to get ’em.”
“Get power. Be big. Keep away from the clever little people. Character
and courage are worth more than cleverness. As you say—the war has
taught us that.”
“Get power. Use it benignantly, wisely, but get power. Why should a man
be afraid to be big? What sort of world would it be if we were all like
a field of cabbages. Refuse to be lopped and dragged down by the people
who haven’t the heart to be big.”
“Is it wrong to say that all the great work of the world has been done
by adventurers, pioneers, students, individuals? The mob of little men
comes trailing along through the gaps cut by the pioneers, and you will
hear the little men shouting: ‘How well we are doing this job!’”
“I’m not talking ‘superman stuff.’ It is that other damned creed that
I’m attacking, the cry of ‘all in the trough together,’ the mob spirit
that lusts to pull down because it has not the grit to climb up.”
“You seem to write at times, Tod, as though you wondered whether I ever
felt afraid of the power I happen to hold. I don’t. I created what I
have created; no other man has a grip of the great machine as I have.
I’m not modest about it, because it is a fact.”
“Why should one be so absurdly sensitive? I’m fair to the men who work
for me; I try to do all I can for them; I try to push up the keen and
the good ones.”
“I can almost imagine the day when the Proletariat will say to God:
‘Look here, you come down out of that. We’re fed up with your swank. We
can run the bally show ourselves.’”
“And supposing God agreed?”
“Take it another way. Supposing a general of a division was seized with
a hypersensitive false modesty. ‘I must really apologise to you men for
having the impertinence to be in authority over some fifteen thousand of
you. I suggest you elect a committee and fight the division. Of course,
if I might tender a little innocent advice—now and again, but believe
me I shall not intrude upon your authority!’”
“No, I’m not going to abdicate. I’m not senile just yet. The man who
knows that he can lead is a coward if he abdicates.”
“I often think there is too much open-mindedness about our young men of
brains. A little more backbone and a little more battle-axe would be
better.”
Tod smiled over these letters of Mr. Burgetrode’s. They were so fresh,
so pungent, so vigorous, and they echoed many of the grim facts that Tod
has discovered during the war. He had learnt how to father a battalion,
that little world of men in miniature.
And then he re-read Julian Burgetrode’s last letter.
“So the Bloody Business is nearly over. It has been the most religious
thing in all history. The German organisation should have won. It was
beaten by something higher and finer than mere organisation. Character,
the good heart of the plain man.
“I want you back with me, and I shall agitate when the time comes. I am
getting a little old. I want you to help me to manage men.”
Tod put those letters away, and began to think of other things. In this
battered orchard under the grey of the November sky, his thoughts went
back to Myonville and Claire—sturdy, grey-eyed, deep-bosomed Claire. He
had carried the little book she had given him, still tied about with a
bit of blue ribbon, a warm memory next to his heart. He unbuttoned the
flap of his breast pocket, drew out the worn, brown Testament, and,
looking at it, thought of her with a tenderness that was as sacred as
the memory of his mother.
That other life was claiming him again. He saw himself going back to
England, to the woman who inspired in him nothing but a profound
distrust. He had no letter from Millie in his pocket. It was three weeks
since he had received one from her, and perhaps the silence between her
letters had been a relief to him. He did not want to remember his wife.
Walking home towards the pale winter sunset, Tod tried to hold fast to
some of Julian Burgetrode’s words.
“Be big. Work is more lasting and more satisfying than love.”
And in Landrecies Tod happened to see a French soldier, home on leave in
Landrecies after more than four years of its occupation, being embraced
by his weeping wife.
“Oh, Jean, mon mari!”
“Damn!” said Tod; “Burgetrode’s wrong.”