two of his return to London, to get rid of the lease of the haunted
little flat in Bloomsbury. The place was dreadful to him, with its
empty demand for Griselda, and he left it thankfully for a lodging in
Camden Town. There for some weeks he lived drearily in two small rooms,
with no occupation to fill up the void in his life, passing hermit days
in the company of newspapers and poring over cheap war literature; he
bought many newspapers and much war literature and aroused the sympathy
of his elderly landlady by his helplessness and continual loneliness.
What kept him alive mentally was his thirsty interest in the war;
anything and everything that dealt with it was grist to his mill, and he
acquired necessarily in the course of his eager reading some smattering
of European history and the outlines of European geography. The pamphlet
and journal soon ceased to satisfy, and he felt the need of
supplementing their superficial comments and sketchy allusions by
reading that was not up-to-date. A newspaper denunciation of the
Silesian policy of Frederick the Great led him to Macaulay and others on
the Kaiser's ancestor, and references to the Franco-German War resulted
in the borrowing from the nearest Free Library of a volume of modern
French history. One volume led on to others and the local librarian
came to know him as a regular client.
His reading was haphazard, but perhaps, for that reason, all the more
informative and illuminating. So far he had acquired such small learning
as he possessed on a definite and narrow plan, assimilating only such
facts as squared with his theories and rejecting all the others; where
his new studies were concerned the very blankness of his ignorance was a
guarantee of freedom from prejudice. He stumbled amongst facts and
opinions, making little of them and yet making much--since for the first
time in his life there was no glib mentor to guide him and he was thrown
on his own resources. With his theories demolished and his mind blank
as a child's, he became aware of phases of human idea and striving of
which he had known nothing in the past, and the resulting comprehension
of the existence of spheres outside his own increased his sense of the
impossibility of his previous classification of mankind into the
well-intentioned and the evil. His own experience had shown him that
there might be at least a third class--the ignorant, the mistaken, to
which he, William Tully, belonged--and his reading, by its very
vagueness, confirmed that personal experience. As he floundered through
histories, bewildered and at random, he realized dizzily, but none the
less surely, something of the vast and terrifying complexity of these
human problems upon which he had once pronounced himself with the
certainty of absolute ignorance.
The Free Library, though he knew it not, was a salve to his wounded
heart; all unconsciously he had done the best for himself in applying
his mind to matters of which his little wife had known nothing.
Bismarckian policy and the Napoleonic Wars were topics he had not
discussed and interests he had not shared with her; hence they tended to
come between him and her memory and distract him from lonely brooding.
Without his new studies he might have drifted into sheer melancholia and
helplessness; as it was, he burned midnight gas over his books and kept
his brain alive. In a measure his interest in his new studies was
personal; the craving to strike back was always with him and his reading
fed and fanned it; beginning without system he was naturally enough
attracted by the drama and movement of the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic epoch, read avidly all that the librarian could give him on
the subject and moulded his ideas of a soldier's life and military
science on the doings of men of those days. The seed of hope that
Faraday had implanted did not die, and he thought of himself as a
soldier to be, while queer little ambitions flamed up in his barren
heart. He read of Ney and Murat, who had carried marshals' batons in
their knapsacks--until, the fervour of his obsession growing, he dreamed
of himself as an avenging leader, and, with a half-confessed idea of
fitting himself for the office, applied hours to the study of the art of
war through the medium of an obsolete volume on military lore picked up
from a second-hand bookstall in the Charing Cross Road. By its aid--it
had been published in the early 'fifties--he attempted to work out the
strategy of Kluck and Joffre, and spent long evenings poring over
diagrams explanatory of the tactics of Napoleon at Montereau or the
Archduke Charles at Essling.
For a time his only real human intercourse, and that by letter, was with
Edith Haynes; he had written to her telling of his rejection for the
Army and she wrote to him more than occasionally. She was fixed busily
in her Somersetshire home, looking after the property of a brother
fighting in Flanders, acting as bailiff and herself taking a hand in
farm-work. For the first few weeks after Griselda's death she remained
William's only friend in the new world of war, and it was not until he
had been settled for nearly two months in his Camden Town lodging that
he discovered that some at least of his former associates had seen fit,
like himself, to reconsider their views and take up arms for their
country. He ran against one of them--Watson, in the old days a fiery
committee-member of his branch--in the garb of the London Scottish; and
he did not know how lonely he had been until he spent an evening in the
convert's company, talking his heart out, talking of the war and
himself.
With the first announcement of the reduction in the standard of height
for recruits he tried to enlist again and was again refused--this time
by the doctor who seemingly had doubts about his heart. On the way home
a fool woman, arrogating to herself the right to make men die for her,
offered him a white feather as he stood waiting for his 'bus--whereupon
he turned and swore at her using filthy words that were strange to his
lips till her vapid little face grew scarlet. That day, for the first
time, his books were no comfort to his soul and he thrust them away and
sat brooding--understanding perhaps how personal and revengeful had been
his interest in the lore of the past, understanding how strong had been
the dreams and ambitions he had cherished in his empty heart. Watson,
dropping in for a final chat before starting on foreign service, found
him sullen and inert before his fire, and, casting about for a method of
comfort, suggested application to another recruiting station; he knew,
he said, of more than one man who, refused at a first medical
examination, had been passed without trouble at a second. Hope was
beaten out of William and he shook his head ... all the same, next
morning he tubed to the other end of London, there to make his third
attempt.
He asked his way to the townhall and in a species of dull resignation
stood waiting his turn for the ordeal of medical inspection. When it
came he went listlessly through the now familiar process, stripped, was
weighed and measured, was pummelled, showed his teeth, answered
questions. It was the stethoscope that had done the business yesterday,
and would do it again to-day; not that there was anything the matter
with him or his heart--it was just the blind cruel stupidity that was
always and in everything against him.... While the doctor bent to
listen he was wondering what he should do with to-morrow, what he should
do with the next day, what he should do with his life!
He had made so sure of a third rejection that he could hardly believe
his ears when he heard he was up to the physical standard required of a
soldier of the King. "You've made a mistake," was on the tip of his
tongue, and though he checked the words before they were uttered, he
stood dazed and staring, much as he had done on the day he was first
refused. He could not remember clearly what happened to him next or
what he did; he went where he was told, he sat and waited, he repeated
words which he knew must have been the oath; his fellows talked to him
and he answered back ... but all he was conscious of was the stunning
fact of his acceptance. It seemed to him Griselda must know and
rejoice--and he had thoughts of her watching him, of her white soul
blessing him to victory.
*CHAPTER XVII*
A pencilled scrawl despatched from a mushroom camp in the Home Counties
told Edith Haynes that William was at last a soldier; it was brief,
written shakily by a man tired in body but uplifted in spirit, informed
her that he had just been absorbed into a London battalion, that he had
not yet got his uniform, was sleeping in a barn and drilling hard and
concluded with the words "Thank God!" She answered the scrawl by return
of post and a few weeks later, hearing nothing, wrote again; but, in
spite of her request for further news, for month after month she waited
in vain for a successor to the shaky scribble.
When it came the war had been in progress a couple of years and the
address was a procession of letters--whereof the three last were the
B.E.F. that denoted service over-Channel. It was a restrained and
correct little letter, on the face of it uninteresting and not much
longer than the last, but differing from it in that it was written in
ink and in the tidy, clerical hand which William had acquired in the
days of his boyhood for the use of the insurance office. It expressed
regret for his lengthy silence, but did not attempt to explain it; and
went on to relate that before coming to France he had been an
orderly-room clerk, that he was at present at an advanced base--he must
not of course give its name--where he was employed in office work,
principally the typewriting of letters. It concluded with an assurance
that he had not forgotten her kindness and a hope she would write to him
again ... and she read and re-read the polite little missive,
half-guessing what lay between its lines.
It had been written in an interval of that typing of local official
communications which was Private Tully's daily contribution to the
waging of the European War; and it had not been written earlier because
Private Tully was too sullen of heart to write.
For a few weeks only he had known what it was to be a soldier of England
in the making; he had drilled, he had marched, he had learned to hold a
rifle and his body had ached with the discipline. He had lain down at
night so weary that he could not sleep, and he had risen giddily in the
morning in fear of the day that was coming. Other men filled out and
hardened with their training, grew healthy, muscular and brown--and he
set his teeth and argued with himself that this stage of sick exhaustion
was only a stage and in time he would be even as they. What he lacked
in strength he made up in fiery willingness, overtaxing his energy by
dogged efforts to keep level with broader shouldered, tighter muscled
men, and steadfastly refusing to admit that his bodily misery was more
than a passing discomfort. More than once a good-natured comrade
suggested a visit to the doctor--whereat William would flush as at an
insult and turn on the meddler almost savagely.
He held on longer than he could have done unaided, by virtue of much
kindly help. Once, in a sudden need for sympathy he had told to one of
his fellows the story of Griselda and his own conversion to militarism;
and, unknown to himself, the story went the round of his mess. From the
beginning the men had treated him with the instinctive kindness that the
stronger feels for the weakling, but from that time forth their kindness
was more than instinctive; they ranged themselves tacitly on the
weakling's side in his struggle with his own deficiencies. Little odd
jobs of cleaning and furbishing were done for him--often secretly, he
knew not by whom--and no man was ever too weary to take on work that
would spare him. They were in a conspiracy to save him from
blunders--to warn him or shield him from consequences, and as far as
camp life permitted they coddled him, with something of the sweet
roughness wherewith Nelson was coddled by his captains.
All the same, and in spite of coddling, the breakdown came as it was
bound to do in the end; the doctor who refused had been wiser than the
man who passed him. There was nothing urgently or seriously wrong with
his health; but he was not made soundly enough to stand the violent and
sudden change from a sedentary life to a life of unceasing exertion. He
had never taken much out-of-door exercise; had always trained or 'bussed
it rather than travel afoot; and of late his days had been spent
entirely between the four walls of his Camden Town sitting-room.
It was on the homeward stretch of a route march that his strength failed
him suddenly and he knew that he could do no more; his pack was a
mountain, his body was an ache, and a blackness closed upon his eyes.
He fought very gallantly to save himself and, by the dogged effort of
his will, kept going for a few minutes more. "I can do ten steps," he
told himself and counted each step as he took it; then, the first ten
accomplished, "Now I can do ten more." So he kept going for a few yards
more and dragged foot after foot till he had reached the tale of two
hundred; at which point--twenty tens--he staggered, fell out of the
ranks in a faint and was brought back to camp on a stretcher.
That was the end of his soldiering with pack and rifle; from the day of
his breakdown on the route march his platoon knew him no more and when
he came out of hospital, some three weeks later, he was put on to
clerical duties. As orderly-room clerk he handled a typewriter instead
of a bayonet, and handled it steadily as the months lengthened into
years. Others, his contemporaries, completed their training, left the
camp, and went off to the front; he remained, at first savagely
resentful and later sullenly resigned.
His conception of soldiering, derived as it was from his own brief and
fiery experience in Belgium, from the descriptive articles of war
correspondents and his reading of bygone campaigns, had never included
the soldier who was merely a clerk. He had never realized that a man in
uniform was not necessarily a man of blood; the revelation came to him
only when he copied letters and routine orders, filed papers and, for
all practical purposes, was back at his desk in the insurance office.
His daily duties mocked and derided the hopes and ambitions wherewith he
had joined the Army; and, ticking at his typewriter, he contrasted,
half-ashamedly, the blank reality with the strenuous and highly coloured
dream. One phase of that dream--inspiring then, ridiculous now--had
shown him to himself as the hero of some bloody enterprise and the
central figure of such a scene as he had read of in Napoleonic history;
a scene of be-medalling and public praise in token of duty bravely done.
He had pictured it often, awake and asleep ... and fancied Griselda
looking down.
Slowly, under the benumbing influence of office routine, his revengeful
ambitions faded, and with them his half-acknowledged hope of emulating
Murat and Augereau. His interest in the war had been fundamentally a
personal interest, and though there had grown up in him, by force of
circumstance, a tardy consciousness of his Englishry, it was hardly
strong enough to inspire him with pride in a humble and wearisome duty
done in the name of England. Be it said in excuse for him that few men
could feel pride in the labour of dealing with daily official
communications--the duty of copying out vain repetitions and assisting
in the waste of good paper. The stilted uselessness of half the
documents was evident even to William; and there were moments when he
told himself, in savage discontent, that he would have been less
unprofitable in civilian idleness than busied in promoting futility.
For a time he was jolted out of his rut by his transfer to France in the
August of 1916. He was drafted out, at a few hours' notice, with a
batch of men destined for clerical duties, and found himself planted in
a small French town round which camps were spreading in a fringe of tent
and hutment, and where house after house was being rapidly annexed for
the service of the British Army. But, save for change of scene and
country, the new rut into which he had been jolted was twin to his old
rut in England. It was the same clerk's life--this time in the office
of a military department--but with longer and more irregular hours than
fall to the lot of the ordinary civilian clerk, and with restrictions on
personal freedom unknown since his days in the City. The Army kept him
as tightly as his strait-laced mother; demanded as regular hours and
refused, as steadfastly as she had done, to let him wander o' nights.
He filed, he copied, he ate his rations--and from the beaten track of
his everyday life, the war seemed very far away. Sometimes in his
off-hours, afternoon or evening, he would tramp up the hills that held
the little town as in a cup to a point where, looking eastward, he could
see the sudden flashes of the guns. The bright, fierce flashes in the
evening sky were war, real war made visible and wickedly beautiful; such
war as he had seen in the Ardennes village, and such as he had dreamed
of fighting when he first donned his khaki tunic. And instead a chair
and a typewriter in the Rue Ernest Dupont, the papers to be filed that a
girl might have filed, the round of safe and disciplined monotony. That
was war as he knew it: an office with flashes in the distance.
For a few days after his arrival in France his new surroundings
interested him--the cobbled roads, the build of the houses, the sound of
French in the streets; but once their strangeness had worn off he
accepted and ceased to notice them. He was not sufficiently educated,
sufficiently imaginative or observant, to take at anything beyond their
face-value the various and incongruous types of humanity with which he
was brought into contact. The strange life of Northern France affected
him only where it touched him personally, and to him the sight of a
turbaned brown trooper bargaining in the market-place with a
swift-spoken, bare-headed Frenchwoman was an oddity and nothing more;
just as the flamboyant facade of the great church of St. Nicholas was an
oddity, a building unlike, in its mass and its detail of statuary, to
the churches he knew of in London. He came across many such
oddities--and having no meaning for him, they made but a passing
impression. After a week or two he no longer turned his head at the
sight of a gang of Annamite labourers or the passing of a detachment of
heavy-booted German prisoners marched campwards at the end of their day;
these things, like the ambulances crawling in a convoy from the station,
like the shuttered French houses built squarely round courtyards, became
part of the background of his daily life and he ceased to wonder or
reflect on them. Perhaps his contact with alien races, with strange
buildings and habits once unknown, may have increased his vague sense of
the impossibility of fitting all men to one pattern, and of solving the
problems of human misgovernment and government by means of the simple
and sweeping expedients he had once been so glib in upholding; but on
the whole it left him unaffected because little interested. His course
of Free Library reading had placed him in possession of certain
scattered facts concerning France, facts dealing chiefly with the First
Napoleon and the German War of 1870; but for all the hot interest they
had stirred in him once, they gave him small insight into the forces
that had gone to the making of the country in which his life was spent
wearily. He was lacking entirely in the historical sense, the sense
that makes dead men alive; thus, in connection with the doings of
present-day Frenchmen, his odds and ends of historical reading had
little more meaning to him than the Late Gothic carving on the ornate
portal of St. Nicholas.
* * * * *
The phase of warfare with which France familiarized him was not only
secure and uneventful; as far as the native was concerned it was
likewise prosperous. The town where he plodded through his daily toil
was blessed as never before in the matter of trade and turnover;
commercially it blossomed and bore good fruit in the deadly shade of the
upas tree. The camps and the offices meant custom to its citizens, and,
whatever the toll in the blood of its sons, it gained in its pocket by
the war. The Germans, in 1914, had threatened but barely entered it; it
had neither damage to repair nor extorted indemnity to recoup, and money
flowed freely to the palms of its inhabitants from the pockets of the
British soldier. Its neighbours, a few miles away, lay in hopeless
ruin, their industries annihilated, their inhabitants scattered, their
very outlines untraceable--beaten to death by that same chance of war
which had spared the city in the cup of the hills and exalted her
financial horn. Here were neither misery nor shell-holes; the local
shopkeeper was solidly content, the local innkeeper banked cheerfully
and often, the local farmer sold his produce to advantage and the volume
of trade in the district expanded and burst new channels. Eating-houses
broke out into English announcements concerning eggs, fried potatoes,
and vegetables; English newspapers were plentiful as French in the shops
and small boys cried them in the streets; and when the weekly market
gathered in the shadow of St. Nicholas, to the stalls for hardware,
fruit and cheap finery were added the stalls that did a roaring business
in "souvenirs" for the English markets.
* * * * *
His days were steadfastly regular and steadfastly monotonous. Each
morning by half-past eight he was seated in the office in the Rue Ernest
Dupont; in a roomy house, most provincially French, built round a paved
courtyard and entered from the street by an archway. A projecting board
at the side of the archway bore the accumulation of letters which
denoted the department by which the house had been annexed, and on the
door of the room where William laboured was the legend "Letters and
Enquiries." At half-past twelve he knocked off for dinner and was his
own master till three; then the office again till supper and after
supper--with good luck till ten, with bad luck indefinite overtime. On
Sundays he was his own master for the space of an afternoon, and now and
again there were parades and now and again the "late pass" that entitled
to an evening at liberty. When he first arrived he was fed and roofed in
one of the camps on the borders of the little city; later, with
half-a-dozen fellows, he slept and messed in the upper rooms of the
building in which he did his daily work.... It was a life of bleak
order and meticulous, safe regularity, poles apart from his civilian
forecast of the doings of a man of war. There was small thrill of
personal danger about its soldiering; the little city at the "Front" was
far less exposed to the malice of enemies than London or the East Coast
of England: and almost the only indication of possible peril was the
occasional printed notice displayed in a citizen's window to the effect
that within was a cellar "at the disposition of the public in case of
alarm"--from aircraft. Once or twice during the first year that William
dwelt there the anti-aircraft section grew clamorous on its hills and
spat loudly at specks in the blue--which, after a few minutes, receded
to the east while the city settled down without injury. The men in the
town and quartered in the camps outside it were for the most part
office-workers, men of the A.S.C., of Labour companies or Veterinary
service; to whom the monotony of daily existence was a deadlier foe than
the German.
* * * * *
His life had been unusually clean; partly, no doubt, from inclination to
cleanliness, but partly through influence of circumstance. While his
mother lived he had small opportunity for dissipation even of the
mildest variety; and hard on her death had come the great new interests
which his friendship with Faraday opened to him. Those interests had
been so engrossing that he had little energy to spare from them; all his
hopes and pleasures were bound up in his "causes," and the very violence
of his political enthusiasms had saved him from physical temptation.
Thus he had come to Griselda heart-whole and sound, and, even when his
causes and his wife were lost, the habit of years still clung to him and
the follies that came easily to others would have needed an effort in
him.