turn to the gross pleasures of drink and worse in which others found
distraction from their dullness; but the temptation was never an urgent
one and there was no great merit in his resistance. One night he
overdrank himself in a deliberate attempt at forgetfulness--whereupon he
was violently sick, crawled to bed throbbing with headache, and did not
repeat the experience.
He felt himself drifting mentally, and, to his credit, made efforts to
save himself; tried to awaken an interest in the French language, bought
a dictionary and phrase-book and attended bi-weekly classes in a
neighbouring Y.M.C.A. hut. He spent a certain amount of his leisure in
the Y.M.C.A. hut; borrowing books from its library, listening to its
concerts, and now and again making one at a game of draughts. He made no
real friends--probably because he was not in the mood for making any;
with his comrades of the office he got on well enough, but there was no
such tie between him and them as had existed between him and the men of
his mess in the days when he first donned his uniform. The hope
deferred that had sickened his heart had driven him in upon himself;
then his desk-work was obviously well within his powers and outwardly
there was nothing about him to call for special sympathy and kindliness.
His fellows mostly looked on him as a harmless, uncompanionable chap who
preferred to be left to himself.
* * * * *
By degrees William Tully was moulded to the narrow little life
departmental and lived through its duties and hours of leisure taking
not much thought for the morrow; in the Rue Ernest Dupont the war seemed
much smaller, much farther away, than it had seemed at home in England,
and, absorbed in its minor machinery, he could no longer consider it as
a whole. The office and the daily details of the office, the companions
he worked with, disliked and liked, loomed larger in his eyes than the
crash of armies or the doings of men at the front. As a civilian he had
wrestled with strategy and pored over maps; as a soldier of England he
could not see the wood for the trees. And if he did not fall mentally
to the level of that species of surgeon to whom war is an agency for the
provision of interesting cases, it was merely because, unlike the
surgeon, he had little enthusiasm for his work.
Inevitably, with the passing of month after month, the memory of
Griselda grew less poignant; and with the soothing of his sense of loss
there came about, also inevitably, a cooling of his fury for instant and
personal revenge. He had not forgiven and would never forget, but he no
longer agonized at his helplessness to strike a blow; in part, perhaps,
because the discipline under which he lived had weakened his power of
initiative. Though he chafed under discipline he learned to depend on
it and became accustomed to the daily ordering of his life; and his
early training in the insurance office stood him in good stead, so that
he performed his duties with the necessary efficiency and smartness....
What remained with him, long after the memory of his dead wife had
ceased to be an ever-present wound, was the sense of having been fooled
by he knew not whom, of having been trapped and held by false pretences.
The fact that his grievance was vague did not lessen its bitterness; it
lay too deep for the grousing that he heard from others, and for the
most he nursed it in silence, the silence of smouldering rebellion.
There were moments when his face must have been more communicative than
his tongue; for one Sunday, an early spring Sunday as he sat on a hill
above the town and stared vaguely at the skyline, a man addressed him
with, "Are you feeling like that, mate?" and squatted on the grass
beside him: a lean young man with a worn brown face--deeply lined on the
forehead and with eyes, like a sailor's, accustomed to looking at
distances.
"I'm like it myself," he went on without waiting for an answer, and
stretched himself out on to his elbow. "These last few days it's been
almost beyond holding in; it's the spring, I suppose, the good road
weather and the sun. I don't mind it so much when there's mud and the
country doesn't grin at you; I can stand it well enough then."
Lying stretched on his elbow he began to talk about himself. He was
English-born and he had begun his career at a desk--staying there just
long enough to save up his fare and a few pounds to start him in Canada.
After that came a farm--to his thinking but a shade less narrow than the
office; to be left for the rolling, the shifting life, the only life
worth living. He had had his ups, he had had his downs--but always with
his eyes on the distance. Ten fine years of it, American, African,
Australian; the life independent where you shouldered your pack and gave
men the go-by when you were sick of them. And then, in the summer of
1914, a fancy to see the Old Country. He had worked his passage
homeward in a short-handed tramp and arrived at Tilbury on the day the
Kaiser's government sent its ultimatum to Russia. Four days later he
was a soldier in the British Army, and a year or so later had a knee-cap
damaged and a shoulder put out of action. They had patched him up
carefully, made quite a decent job of him, and he walked and moved his
left arm with comfort; but, adjudged unfit for the fighting line, he had
done with the trenches for good. Permanent base now, with a cushy job
at the office of the D.D. of Works. Filing and copying documents
relating to hut construction; he had been fool enough to let out that he
had had some small training as a clerk.
"In a way," he said, chewing at a long blade of grass, "it's a good
thing I've got my stiff knee. If I could put the miles under me as I
used to, I believe--I believe I'd go. It would come over me and I'd go.
Not that I want to desert, but it might be too strong for me; I've
always been my own master and I've always wanted to know what was on the
other side of the hill. Straight on"--he pointed southward--"straight
on, anywhere. The road--if you've once tramped it" ... He broke off and
stared with his eyes on the distance and beyond it.
After a minute or two of silence he asked William suddenly what had made
him join the Army; and William gave him confidence for confidence,
attracted he knew not why. The man's craving for loneliness and bodily
exertion was something he could not understand; but they were on common
ground in their mutual rebellion against the weariness of daily life.
They talked with long silences in between their speech, telling out
their hearts to each other; or rather finding in each other's presence
an excuse for speaking their hearts. Later it seemed odd to William
that though they spoke freely of their lives and their griefs it had
never struck either of them to ask of the other his name.
"So you joined up because of your wife," said the man who lay on his
elbow.
"Yes," William answered him, "I thought----" He did not finish the
sentence; it wearied him now to remember what he had thought.
"Sometimes," the other broke the silence, "I ask myself why I joined up.
Don't see how it could have been patriotism; England hadn't been
anything to me for years. My sister died soon after I left it and I
hadn't any one else. So far as I can make out it never was much to me;
I was always unhappy in England, hated school and office and towns--I
lived in a town. Never knew what life could be till I got away from it.
Say the Germans had won and dominated the earth! They wouldn't have
dominated my earth. I could always have made myself a camp-fire where
they wouldn't have wanted to follow me. If they'd sacked London and
swallowed up New York I could have lain out under the stars at night and
laughed at 'em. So what made me? ... Some say man's a fighting animal."
He pulled a fresh grass-blade to chew and rolled over on his chest till
his chin rested on his hands.
"I knew I should hate soldiering--I made no mistake about that. The
regularity--shipboard's too regular for me. I've tried it more than
once for the sake of getting somewhere, and before the voyage was half
over I'd always had more than enough. I knew I should hate it, but I
joined up straight and away.... I've lost everything that made life
good to me. Other chaps--blind chaps and crippled--might think I'd got
off easily. So I have, I daresay; but then it isn't every one whose
life was in moving on. Often when I was alone I've shouted and laughed
just to feel how my legs moved under me.... It's the devil--this
compound--but even if I were out of it, I'm a lame thing. When the war
ends I'm a lame thing. Not what most people would call crippled, of
course; I can walk a few miles and feed myself, and to look at me you
wouldn't know there was anything at all the matter. If I were a
townsman it wouldn't make very much difference; if I'd stayed a clerk I
could go on being a clerk. But I can't be ... what I was. I've lost
everything that made life good to me. What for?
"I can't remember exactly the feeling I had about it when I
enlisted--what made me do it. So many things have happened since then.
But I know I didn't think about it long; so far as I remember I didn't
hesitate, not for a minute. I went straight off the morning after war
was declared. Midnight, fourth, we were at war, and midday, fifth, I
was a soldier. Must have been some sort of instinct.... Sometimes I
tell myself what a blazing fool I am.
"That's sometimes. Other times----"
He was silent for so long that William concluded the flow of his
confidence had ceased.
"When you live in a crowd," he said at last, "you can always make
excuses for yourself. Most likely you don't need to. If you're a fool
or a coward you herd with a lot of other fools and cowards, and you all
back each other up. So you never come face to face with yourself."
The idea was new to William, and a year or two ago he would have
repelled it because it was new; now he turned his eyes from the horizon,
curiously, to the lean brown face at his elbow.
"No?" he said interrogatively.
"If," said the other, "if I had gone back ... it wouldn't have been the
same. It couldn't have been.... If you live that way there's two
things you can't do without: a good strong body to stand rain and wind
and work, and a mind you're not afraid to be alone with. When you're
miles from any one, in the woods at night, you want to be good company
for yourself. If I'd turned my back on it all, I mightn't have been
very good company. I've done plenty of things to set the parsons praying
over me if I told 'em; I've been a fool times out of mind and ashamed of
it afterwards; but----"
He slid into a silence that lasted until William took up the word; not
in answer or argument but irrelevantly, so that he, too, might talk out
his heart.
"Do you know what I think I am sometimes? a rat in a trap--or a squirrel
spinning round in a cage. Very busy doing nothing.... I'll tell you
one of the things I've been doing lately--every word of it truth. I've
been typing a long correspondence about a civilian--a worker in one of
the religious organizations who came into the town, ten miles by train,
to get stores he wanted for his hut. The rule is, civilians mustn't
travel by train without a movement order from the A.P.M.; there isn't an
A.P.M. in the place he comes from, so he went to the military and got an
_ordre de service_. He came all right, but it's irregular--an _ordre de
service_ should only be given to a soldier. One of the M.P.'s on duty
at the station reported it--and there's been strafing and strafing and
strafing. Reams written about it--I've written 'em. Not only about the
_ordre de service_ but about who the correspondence is to go
through--the A.P.M.'s office or the Base Commandant or some one else.
After three or four weeks it was referred to G.H.Q. and some one there
wrote to the secretary of the organization asking for an
explanation--and naturally he answered the letter. Well, that was
irregular too; he oughtn't to have answered because the matter should
have been dealt with locally--'gone through the proper channels.' So
more correspondence and strafing.... Sheets of paper--reams of it--and
they say it's scarce! And in the end, nothing--just nothing. When the
wretched people wrote and asked exactly what they were to do--how they
were to get a movement order from an A.P.M. when there wasn't an A.P.M.
to give it, we wrote back and said, 'This correspondence must now
cease.' I ticked it out on my typewriter."
"I believe you," the other nodded, "I've seen something of that sort
myself.... And the papers say, 'Your country wants you'!"
"And it goes on," said William, "day after day. I'm always busy--about
nothing. 'Attention is directed to G.R.O. 9999. The Return called for
in the form shown as the third appendix----'"
"Good Lord," cried the other, "stop it. That's just what maddens me--I
don't want to think of it."
William laughed sullenly with his chin resting on his hand.
"I've not much else to think of," he said.
* * * * *
He watched the lean man down the hill till a winding of the road hid
him; and then he too rose, in his turn, and went back to the town--to
the rat-trap wherein he made war!
*CHAPTER XVIII*
The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith
Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with
a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he
should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty
invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare--the whole of
it if he would--with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was
an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office,
had been dreary enough in comparison with the home-comings of other
men--it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed
that had prompted Edith's invitation. She met him at the station and
drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point
where they had left it off.
The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a
delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at
Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a
prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as
the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the
passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for
the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her
mother's; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a
kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to
her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other's
company--sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff's
duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two
he was not communicative--engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his
new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his
letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over
him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains,
on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By
degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of
the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the aimlessness
with which he plodded the pathway of his disciplined life. She knew him
for a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days
had died as completely as his faith in his pre-war creed. Had the lot
fallen to him he would not have shrunk from his turn in the trenches,
and at the bottom of his heart, for Griselda's sake, there was always a
smoulder of hatred; but he had seen much of the war machine, had
realized keenly his own unimportance therein, and he blushed when he
remembered that he had once imagined that his one small arm and his
private vengeance might be factors, and important factors, in the
downfall of the German Empire. And the first mad impulse of agony, the
impulse which would have sent him into battle single-handed, had passed
as it was bound to pass.
If she suspected him at first of a drift towards his former "pacifism"
she soon discovered her mistake; the one rock on which he stood fast was
that conviction of error which had come to him in the Forest of Arden.
He hated the war as it affected himself, was weary of the war in
general; all he longed for was its ending, which meant his release from
imprisonment; but neither hatred nor weariness had blinded his eyes to
the folly of that other blindness which had denied that war could be.
His contempt for his past dreams of a field-marshal's baton was as
nothing to his contempt for those further past dreams wherein fact was
dispelled by a theory; and he had, in his own words, "no use for" a
pacifist party which had never, as he had, made confession of its
fundamental error. He was still in his heart a soldier, even though a
soldier disillusioned; his weariness of the military machine, his
personal grievance against it, were not to be compared to the fiery
conversion that had followed on the outbreak of war. The one concerned
matters of detail only; the other his fundamental faith.... So much
Edith Haynes understood from their intimate fragmentary talks.
One change in himself he had not noticed till Edith, half jestingly,
spoke of it: an affection that was almost a tenderness for the actual
soil of England. More than once when he walked with her he contrasted
the road or the landscape with those grown familiar in France; and the
contrast was always in favour of the Somerset hills or the winding
Somerset highway. Without ties as he was, without household, without
family, she saw that he shrank from the idea of again leaving "home."
"What shall you do when the war is over?" she asked him one evening as
his leave neared its end, curious to know how he had planned to spend
his arrested life. So far he had spoken of no future beyond the end of
the war itself; and when she put to him the question direct he only
shook his head vaguely.
"I don't know. It may seem odd to you, but I haven't thought much about
it. In fact"--he smiled apologetically--"I don't believe I've really
thought at all."
"No, I don't think it odd," she told him. "There are a good many like
you--I'm inclined to think that you're only one of the majority. People
whose business it is to reorganize industry--I suppose they're thinking
ahead. One prays they are. But as for the rest of us ... it's
difficult to think ahead because of the way it has broken up our lives
and our plans. We've got used to its breaking them up."
"That's it," he nodded back. "We've been made to do things for so long.
Taken and made to do them.... Some have been taken and killed and some
have been taken and crushed--and some have only been made prisoners,
like me. But we've all of us been taken--and bent and twisted into
things we never meant to be.... So we don't plan--what's the use? ... I
might of course--I'm not like the men in the trenches who may be killed
any minute. I'm safe enough where I am--safer than in London; but all
the same I don't.... I just wait to see what happens."
* * * * *
For a week before William left England there had been expectation of
coming developments at the front, and the papers had spoken of
"considerable aerial activity," on the enemy's side as on ours. The
developments commenced in earnest on the day of his return from leave;
but his first personal experience of the increase in aerial activity was
not for a few days later, when, as he was passing through the square in
the centre of the town, a gun thudded out--and then another. He stopped
and made one of a little knot of khaki that was staring up into the
blue, and whereof one of the component parts was a corporal who worked
in his office. He himself could see nothing but a drift or two of
smoke, but he gathered from the sharper-sighted corporal that there were
two Fritz planes overhead, and he stood cricking his neck and blinking
upwards in the strong sunlight while passers-by made groups on the
pavement and shopkeepers issued from their doors. He had seen the same
thing happen before and quite harmlessly; no one around him seemed
alarmed or disturbed, and in a few minutes the guns ceased firing as the
aeroplanes passed out of range.
"Photographing," said the corporal, as they walked away to the office.
"He's been over quite a lot the last week or two, and some time or other
I suppose we shall have him in earnest. It's a wonder to me he's left
us alone so long; it 'ud be worth his while coming even if he didn't do
more than drop a bomb or two on the A.H.T.D., and start a few hundred
horses."
"Yes," agreed William, "I suppose it would." He was not in the least
alarmed as he settled down to his files; since he joined the Army he had
never been exposed to danger, and security had become with him a habit.
* * * * *
That night there was a heavy post, and the office was kept working late;
it was close on eleven when William was called upstairs to take down
some letters from dictation. The officer who had sent for him was
clearing his throat for the first sentence when the door opened for the
announcement, "Local aircraft alarm, sir."
"Oh, all right," said the officer resignedly. "Go downstairs, Tully,
and come up again when the lights go on. Probably only a false
alarm--we had two the other night. Just the sort of thing that would
happen when we're behindhand."
He went out grumbling, and William followed him, feeling his way by the
banisters, for the electric light was turned off while he was still on
the upper landing; other men from all over the warren of a building were
descending likewise, and they bumped and jostled each other in the
sudden darkness on the stairs. There were jests as they bumped and much
creaking of boots--through which, while William was still a flight from
the ground floor, came the first rapid thudding of "Archie." On it, a
moment later, an unmistakable bomb and the pattering outburst of
machine-guns.... William listened curiously; it was his first
experience of an air raid, and though the pace of his heart quickened,
as yet there was no real fear in him; but a man pressed against him by
the descending stream gasped audibly and clawed round William's arm with
his fingers. The action was fear made manifest in darkness, and
William, instinctively knowing it infectious, repelled it and strove to
free his wrist; but the shaking fingers, eloquent of terror, only clung
more tightly to their hold.
"What is it?" William snapped. "What's the matter?"
"It's me--Wright," a voice whispered back in jerks. "I can't help
it--the Lord knows I try, but I can't. If it was shells I could stand
'em, but----"
A near-by gun beat down his voice but did not stop it--"at Dunkirk. I
was buried two hours: two mortal hours before they got me out--and when
I was in hospital he came over and bombed us again. He got one right on
to us, and I was blown out of bed, and the men at the other end of the
ward were in pieces. In pieces, I tell you--beastly bits of flesh----"
William tried to stand it--realizing that the man must cling and gibber
to some one as a child clings and wails to its nurse. They had turned
into a room on the ground floor--there were no cellars, but it was
esteemed the safest place in the building by reason of the comparative
absence of glass--and the pair of them stood backs against the wall.
When Wright stopped talking--which was not often--William could hear his
breath as it came whining through his teeth; and he remembered that the
man wore the ribbon of the D.C.M.--a man who had once had nerve and to
all appearance was sound, but who had not sufficient hold on himself to
keep his terror from his tongue. He spoke of it unceasingly; whenever
the sounds without died down William could hear him whispering--now of
the night when he was bombed in hospital and now of the building they
were in. It was no good as a shelter--would crumble like a house of
cards. Nothing was any good but a cellar or trenches--there should have
been trenches. And they were so damnably close to the station, and the
station was just what those devils were trying to hit. There came a
moment when William could bear it no more, and wrenched himself free of
the clawing fingers on his sleeve; he dared not feel them longer, lest
his heart also melted within him.