journey could be made on the following day by way of Dieppe and
Folkestone, found him clad in his new-bought mourning for Griselda and
poring over English newspapers. His eyes were still haggard and moved
her to pity, but she took it as a good sign that his stupor of grief had
passed and that he had begun (as his first question told her) to feel a
need for more information which might bridge the month's gap in his
knowledge of the outer world. She gave him, with such detail as she had
in her possession, the story of the outbreak of war and the causes
thereof: and from her he learned for the first time of the ultimatum to
Servia, and the tension thereby created; of the political consequences
of the invasion of Belgium, and the feverish days of hesitation in
England that had ended, on the Fourth of August, with the formal
declaration of war. He listened, sometimes puzzled but always intent,
from time to time putting a question that revealed his blank ignorance
of the network of European politics; to which she replied as clearly as
she could, showing him maps and talking on in the hope of distracting
him from the thoughts behind his haggard eyes. By degrees she gleaned,
from his hesitating queries and disconnected comments, some
understanding not only of his profound ignorance of the forces that had
brought about the war, but of the upheaval of his mind and soul which
was the direct and inevitable consequence of the loss of his former
faith. Once or twice as they talked he quoted her scraps and jerks of
anti-militarist propaganda--from Faraday, from orators of the Trades
Union Congress, from a speech of Philip Snowden's in Parliament urging
the reduction of the Navy--and she saw that he was trying to justify to
himself his attitude and creed of yesterday. In the midst of a
quotation from Faraday on the general strike as a certain preventive of
war, he broke off suddenly to appeal to her with: "Every one thought he
was right. He seemed so sure. I didn't see how he could be wrong!"
She noticed that, wherever their talk might stray, he came back, time
and again, to his central fact--that the blankly impossible had happened
and the jest was a brutal truth. That, in the beginning, was all his
mind had laid hold of; now, the first stage of amazement over, he was
groping instinctively, and perhaps unconsciously, after rights and
wrongs of quarrel, and striving to understand how the impossible had
come into existence. Edith Haynes had not passed her life in the
atmosphere of Internationalism, and would have been more than human had
she been an impartial guide to him where the causes of war were
concerned--just as he would have been more than human had he been
capable of impartial guidance. What he lacked in patriotism he made up
in personal suffering; he hated the German because he had been robbed of
his wife, and it added but little to the fire of his hatred to learn of
faith broken with Belgium. If he listened intently when she told of it,
if he pored over newspaper paragraphs dealing with German cruelty to the
conquered, it was because they fitted with his mood and justified the
loathing in his soul.
It was his persistent poring over English newspapers that brought him in
the end the salvation of a definite purpose. An article in _The Daily
Chronicle_--some days old--described the beginning of the recruiting
campaign for the raising of Kitchener's Army; he read it as he read
everything else that explained or described the war. At first the
article was nothing but news to him, a mere statement of facts; but as
he read further a meaning flamed into the news. Bereft as he was of
guidance, his mind swinging rudderless in chaos, he was waiting
unconsciously for the man or the impulse that could seize on his
helpless emotion and give purpose and direction to his life; thus the
journalist's vigorous appeal to the nation's patriotism was driven home
by the force of his own experience and became an appeal to himself. The
writer had illustrated his argument in the obvious manner, by reference
to the condition of invaded Belgium and the suffering of her people
under the hand and heel of the enemy; he wrote of women outraged, of
hostages killed, of cities laid waste, and of houses fired with
intention. He was spurred by indignation, by pity and a natural
patriotism, and had laid on his colours--to all but William--with a
vivid and forcible pen. To William, as he read, the result seemed lame
and pitiful, an inadequate babbling of the living horrors that had
burned themselves into his soul; but for all its weakness--perhaps
because of it--the article gave him the impulse for which he had been
waiting in torment. It may have been his very sense of the inadequacy
with which it described what he had known that set his imagination to
work, that drove home its purport and made of it a lead to his blind and
whirling emotions. He read and re-read while he quivered with
impatience at its failure; if the man had seen what he had seen, if the
man had lost what he had lost, he could not have argued so tamely. His
pen would have been dipped in fire; he would have written so that all
men reading him would have rushed to arms. The paper dropped from his
hands to the table and he sat staring at a picture of his own making--of
a crowd bitter and determined, moved by the tale of wrongdoing to a
righteous and terrible wrath. He saw it setting forth to execute
justice and avenge innocent blood ... and himself one of it, spurring
and urging it on. So he first visualized himself as a soldier--an
unscientific combatant of the Homeric pattern, but nevertheless a
soldier. The vision thrilled and inspired him, and out of the deep
waters of his impotent misery he clutched at the knowledge that he could
act, resent, resist; that, ceasing to suffer as the slave suffers, he
could give back blow for blow.
There was enough of the old leaven in him to bring him up suddenly, and
with something like a round turn, as he realized that the act of
striking blow for blow against the German would involve the further act
of enlistment and the wearing of the King's uniform. His first mental
vision of his warrior crowd had been vague as well as Homeric; he had
only seen faces uplifted by courage, not the khaki and buttons below
them--seeing himself rather as an avenger of Griselda than as a soldier
of the British Empire. But it was only for a moment that he shied Like
a nervous horse at the bogey of the "hired assassin." The prophets from
whom he had learned his one-time contempt for the soldier were no longer
prophets to him, and his conversion was the more thorough from his
ingrained and extremist conviction that the opposite of wrong must be
right. Conversion, in the sense in which the word is employed by the
religious, describes most clearly the process through which he had
passed: conviction of ignorance, the burden of Christian; a sense of
blind longing and humiliated confusion--and now, at the end, light
flashed on him suddenly, salvation figured by the sword.... It was, so
to speak, but a partial salvation. He had lost his capacity for
absolute faith, for the rapture that comes of infallibility; but he was
of all men the last who could live without guidance, and his new creed
had at least this merit--it was supported by his own experience. Its
articles, had he formulated them, would have been negative rather than
assertive--I have ceased to believe in the old, rather than I believe in
the new; but it gave him that working hypothesis without which Life to
him was impossible.
When he took his seat, next morning, in the train bound for Dieppe, his
mind was made up--made up fiercely and definitely--on his future course
of action; and as a result something that was by comparison peace had
succeeded to the chaos and dazed rebellion of his first few hours of
loss. His companion noticed the change in his manner and bearing; it
was not that he seemed more resigned, but that he had ceased to
drift--his eyes were as haggard as yesterday, but not so vague and
purposeless. So far during their brief but close acquaintance she had
treated him perforce as she would have treated a child--providing for
his bodily and mental needs and giving him kindly orders; now, ignorant
and obedient as he still was in the matter of foreign travel, he was
once more a reasonable being. He was still for the most part sunk in
his own thoughts, but not helplessly and endlessly so; he was capable of
being roused and at intervals he roused himself. Once when they halted
she was struck by the intentness with which he gazed at a trainload of
soldiers in khaki--new come from England and moving up from Havre to the
front. They crossed at a wayside station, and the two trains stood side
by side for some minutes while William craned out of the window to stare
at the brown young faces that were thrust from the opposite carriages.
The sight moved him, if not in the same fashion as it moved his
companion; he felt no tightening of the throat and no pride in the men
themselves. What kept his head at the window till the train moved off
was chiefly the thought that soon he would be even as these sunbrowned
men of war, the personal desire to know what manner of men they were,
how they lived and moved and had their daily military being. Hitherto a
soldier of the home-grown variety had been to him nothing more definite
than an impression of uniform, khaki and occasionally red; now, with the
eyes of his newborn interest, he became aware of detail that had
formerly escaped him, and compared him in figure, in face and garment,
with Heinz and Heinz's companions. These hot-faced lads smoking pipes
and calling jests would be his own comrades in days to come; thus he
studied their features, their dress, their manner, as a small boy scans
and studies the bearing of his future schoolfellows. If he did not
thrill at the sight of young men about to die, he sent with them
(remembering Griselda) his strong desire for their great and terrible
victory.
Those were the days just before Mons was fought, when France (and others
with her) was hopeful of a war that would end at her frontier and beyond
it; when, whatever her wiser soldiers may have known, her people in
general had no premonition of the coming retreat of the Allied Armies
and the coming peril of the capital. There were still some ignorant and
optimistic days to live before France as a whole would be stunned by the
curt official admission that the enemy was well within her
borders--since his battle-line stretched across the country from the
Vosges mountains to the Somme. As for railway communication on the
western lines, the rush of returning tourists that had followed on the
outbreak of war was over, and the rush from Paris that began with the
new threat of Kluck's advance was as yet a thing of the future. Thus
William and his companion, though they travelled slowly and with lengthy
halts, travelled in comparative comfort--finding in unpunctuality and a
measure of overcrowding but little to grumble at after their journey by
cattle-truck to Paris.
Rouen kept them waiting an hour or two, and there was another long,
purposeless halt on the boat in Dieppe Harbour; so that it was nigh upon
sundown when they slipped into the Channel and headed north-westward for
Folkestone. The day, very calm with the stillness of perfect summer,
was even as that day but a month ago when William and his little bride
had steamed away from Dover, sitting deck-chair to deck-chair, touching
hands when they thought no one saw them. And remembering the fading of
those other white cliffs, William's heart cried out against God.
It was well past midnight when they slid into Folkestone Harbour where
again there were long delays; so long that morning was red over France
when the train drew away from the pier. It was during the two-hour
journey to Charing Cross that William first spoke to his friend of his
purpose of becoming a soldier; they were not by themselves in the
carriage, but the other occupants nodded off to sleep soon after the
train had left Folkestone, and for all practical purposes he and Edith
Haynes were alone. She was surprised by the announcement, more
surprised perhaps than she should have been--less on account of his
previous record than because his appearance and manner were so utterly
unmilitary. The British soldier of pre-war days was a type, a man of a
class apart; it was a type and class to which William Tully was far from
approximating, and she found it impossible to picture his essentially
civilian countenance between a khaki collar and cap. Her surprise must
have shown in her manner, for he began to explain in jerks.
"It seems the only thing to do," he said. "You can't sit down and let
it go on; when you've seen what I've seen, you've got to do what you
can. And they want men--they're asking for them. The papers say they
want all the men they can get ... it's got to be stopped--that
devilry--somehow or another ... and there doesn't seem any other way..."
His voice tailed off and he turned his eyes away--to the flying fields
where the dew was still wet and the shadows still long upon the grass.
When, a few minutes later, he told her suddenly, "It was just as pretty
as this--where it happened," she knew that he was mentally transforming
the peace and greenery of a Kentish landscape into the background of
such an imitation of hell as he had lived through in the Forest of
Arden.
It was not till they were well on the London side of Tonbridge that he
turned again to his companion. Something that she had said in
appreciation of his decision--a kindly meant phrase that commended his
courage--had seemingly been held in his mind.
"I don't want you to think it's courage, and I don't want you to think
I'm making any sacrifice--I'm not. I'm enlisting because I want to
enlist--and there isn't anything else for me to do. Everything's gone
now--I haven't anything to go back to. No duties or ... I don't see how
you can call it a sacrifice."
He swallowed and halted again and she could only nod in silence. She
knew enough of him by this time to know that what he said was truth,
having learned in the course of their days of acquaintanceship that he
had lost even more than his newly made wife, his hopes of a home and
children. In very deed he had nothing to go back to, neither home nor
daily occupation; in losing his cocksure, infallible creed he had lost
the interests wherewith his days had been filled. His meetings, his
busy committees, the whole paraphernalia of his agitator's life, were
with yesterday's seven thousand years. Even if Griselda had not died he,
knowing what he knew, would have had to begin life again.
Near Chislehurst, reminded of the nearness of London, he put an
apologetic question.
"You'll think me very ignorant," he said, "but you see I've never had
anything to do with soldiers. Have you any idea how you set about
joining the Army?"
She explained that he had only to offer himself, and turned up an
English newspaper bought the day before at Dieppe to point out a
paragraph giving the situation of the various London recruiting
stations. He studied it with interest and showed her that the nearest
to Charing Cross was a station on the Horse Guards Parade. She had not
understood that his intention was to enlist at the moment of arrival in
London, and suggested a delay of a day or two for rest if not for
reflection: the life before him was a hard one physically, and he had
been passing through a week of exhaustion both physical and mental. To
her arguments he shook his head, stubbornly impatient; he was so urgent
to translate his new convictions into immediate action that it was with
difficulty she prevailed on him to delay at Charing Cross for breakfast,
and only manoeuvred him into the hotel by assuring him--whether rightly
or wrongly she knew not--that it was as yet far too early in the day for
any recruiting official to be at his post. On that assurance he
yielded, and they took their last meal together.
She had contracted an odd species of affection for the little bereft and
destitute man whom chance had thrown on her hands in his hour of need;
it was difficult for her to rid herself of a sense of responsibility for
him and his doings: and as they disposed of their eggs and bacon she
found herself wondering, with tears in her throat, how he could come
through the discipline and hardship for which his soft life had done so
little to prepare him. It was pathetic and even ridiculous to think of
him as a soldier, this wisp of a town-bred talker; to think of him
marching and bearing arms in defence of such as herself--who topped him
by a good two inches and had treated him almost as a child. She coaxed
him to eat a good breakfast, dawdling over her own that he should sit
and rest the longer; and when he suddenly remembered to ask her how much
he owed her for the expenses of the last few days, she gave him, with
the hastily invented amount, her address in Somerset and made him
promise to write and keep her informed of his doings. He, on his part,
shrinking instinctively from those who had shared his errors in the old
life, clung to her as the one person who understood the new world into
which he had so lately entered--understood it because she was part of
it; thus neither was unmoved when they shook hands as friends and parted
at the door of the hotel. She entered a taxi for Paddington and he
turned his face to Whitehall and the tent on the Horse Guards Parade.
As he walked down Whitehall his heart thudded loudly on his ribs. He
remembered, with a sudden tremor of rage, how Heinz had boasted of his
Kaiser at Westminster and a German entry into London. The very thought
made London dearer and finer to him, and he had a vision of himself
driving Heinz before him--Heinz and that other, the round-faced young
man with black eyebrows who had worked his will on Griselda. He saw
himself striking and stabbing at the round-faced young man--beating him
down while he prayed in terror for a mercy that was not granted. His
lips were a hard white line and his fingers clenched and unclenched.
London! by God, it should be not London but Berlin!
He had never dreamed of rejection; he knew vaguely that recruits were
required to pass some sort of medical examination, but the idea that his
proffered services might be refused had never entered his head. Edith
Haynes, like himself, had seen few English newspapers for weeks; thus he
did not know till he came to enlist that the standard of measurement for
recruits had been raised since the outbreak of war, and that he,
standing under five foot five, was not up to the Army's requirements in
the matter of breadth and inches. The knowledge took him like a blow
between the eyes, and he stood with dropped jaw, incredulous--it was
inhuman, it was monstrous that they should take from him his right to
strike back. For a moment he had no words; he dressed mechanically,
stupid with the shock--while the round-faced man grinned damnably over
Griselda dead by the roadside.... And when, in the end, his speech came
back and he tried to stammer an appeal, some one patted him
good-naturedly on the shoulder, put his hat into his hand, and turned
him loose into a world that had no meaning for him.
*CHAPTER XV*
There were many parallels to the case and conversion of William Tully in
the first few weeks of the war. There is, and always will be, the
self-centred temperament that can shut its eyes to the fact and tread
the pathways of the paradise of fools, even if it treads them alone; but
on the whole humanity is reasonable and, given a fact, however
surprising and savagely unpleasant, accepts it because it must.
Those who struggled hardest against the acceptance of the War-Fact of
1914 were, naturally enough, those who had fiery little battles of their
own to fight, and whose own warfare was suddenly rendered null and
incompetent by a sudden diversion of energy and interest in the face of
the national danger. The war was the successful rival of their own,
their sectional strife, overshadowing its importance and sucking the
life from its veins. Hence instinctively they sneered at it and strove
to ignore its existence; hating it as a minor and incompetent artist may
hate the greater professional rival who sings or acts him off the stage.
Only by some such reasoning can one account for the fact that the
aggressive and essentially militarist type of political enthusiast so
often runs to pacifism where the quarrels of others are concerned.
But for the bitter mischance of a honeymoon spent in the Forest of Arden
and the consequences thereby brought about, such would, very certainly,
have been the mental attitude of William Tully in the August of 1914.
His own battles would have absorbed his aggressive instincts, and, never
having seen a shot fired in anger, he would have continued, for quite a
long time, to think of other battles as enlarged street riots which were
thoroughly enjoyed by the bloodthirsty soldiery who provoked them. He
would have pooh-poohed the possibility of a war until the war actually
broke out; and then, insisting that it was avoidable and should not have
been, have clung angrily to his customary interests and done his small
energetic best to keep his comrades from straying into that wider and
bloodier field where they and their services would be lost to the
sectional conflict. Such, very certainly, would have been his course of
action had he made his wedding journey to Torquay. Fate and not
temperament had willed it that he should be driven to enlist under the
rival banner of nationality; but there were others of his kidney whom
fate had not driven so brutally, and who, unable to effect, as William
had done, a rapid transfer of allegiance and antagonisms, struggled
desperately to uphold, in despite of war, their partially deserted
standard. Of such was Faraday, dogged and fiercely indefatigable; though
the man had soul and brain enough to feel the ground rock beneath him.
His ignorance of European politics was a thought less profound than
William's, but sufficiently profound to have bred in him a complete
disbelief in the possibility of European war; hence his surprise at the
international earthquake was almost as great as that of his former
disciple. When the unbelievable happened he, as was but natural, was
angry--all men are angry when the habit of years is interfered with; and
in the first flush of his annoyance ascribed the falsification of his
every prediction not to his own blundering, but to the sins of those who
did not think as he did. Those who prophesied war--so he argued--had
prophesied what they desired.... All the same, he was not, like
William, devoid of the imaginative faculty; but the war was as yet a
great way off and his hatred of the Government of his own country was
real. With time he, too, came to understand that a people may have
other foes than those of its own household and be threatened with death
from without; when he was called up under the Conscription Act he went
without protest, made an excellent soldier and died fighting in a night
raid near Hulluch; but in the beginning the habit and association of
years was too strong for him and his bitter dislike of his neighbour
overpowered his fear of the German. During the first few weeks of the
war he held peace meetings at considerable personal risk, which, as
became a good fighter, he took, even with enjoyment; distributed printed
appeals to pacifist and anti-British sentiment and wrote passionately,
if with less than his usual clarity, in _The Torch_. He could not in
honesty bring himself to defend every action of his country's enemies
and was conscious of occasional difficulty and a sense of thin ice
underneath him; at the same time it was against his tradition and
principles to admit that the statesmanship of the land he was born in
could ever have right on its side. Tradition and principles might have
won hands down, making him ardently and happily pro-German, had it not
been for the complication introduced by the attitude of other nations
which, foreign even as Germany was foreign, had chosen to range
themselves with England. Hence a difficulty in indiscriminate
condemnation and a momentary confusion of thought and outlook of which
Faraday himself was quite clear-brained enough to be conscious; it
irritated him and he was sensible of failure and uncertainty.