Asquith government so softly foundered, he began to suffer agonies. But
when the Asquith government went right under, and in its place came that
_John Bull_ government of ’16, ’17, ’18, then agonies gave way to
tortures. He was summoned to join the army: and went. Spent a night in
barracks with forty other men, and not one of these other men but felt
like a criminal condemned, bitter in dejection and humiliation. Was
medically examined in the morning by two doctors, both gentlemen, who
knew the sacredness of another naked man: and was rejected.
So, that was over. He went back home. And he made up his mind what he
would do. He would never voluntarily make a martyr of himself. His
feeling was private to himself, he didn’t want to force it on any other
man. He would just act alone. For the moment, he was rejected as
medically unfit. If he was called up again, he would go again. But he
would never serve.
“Once,” he said to Harriet, “that they have really conscripted me, I
will never obey another order, if they kill me.”
Poor Harriet felt scared, and didn’t know what else to say.
“If ever,” he said, looking up from his own knees in their old grey
flannel trousers, as he sat by the fire, “if ever I see my legs in
khaki, I shall die. But they shall never put my legs into khaki.”
That first time, at the barracks in the country town in the west, they
had treated him with that instinctive regard and gentleness which he
usually got from men who were not German militarist bullies, or worse,
British commercial bullies. For instance, in the morning in that prison
barracks room, these unexamined recruits were ordered to make their beds
and sweep the room. In obedience, so far, Richard Lovat took one of the
heavy brooms. He was pale, silent, isolated: a queer figure, a young man
with a beard. The other soldiers--or must-be soldiers--had looked at him
as a queer fish, but that he was used to.
“Say, Dad,” said a fattish young fellow older than himself, the only
blatherer, a loose fellow who had come from Canada to join up and was
already cursing: he was a good deal older than Somers.
“Say, Dad,” said this fellow, as they sat in the train coming up, “all
that’ll come off to-morrow--Qck, Qck!”--and he made two noises, and gave
two long swipes with his finger round his chin, to intimate that
Richard’s beard would be cut off to-morrow.
“We’ll see,” said Richard, smiling with pale lips.
He said in his heart, the day his beard was shaven he was beaten, lost.
He identified it with his isolate manhood. He never forgot that journey
up to Bodmin, with the other men who were called up. They were all
bitterly, desperately miserable, but still manly: mostly very quiet, yet
neither sloppy nor frightened. Only the fat, loose fellow who had given
up a damned good job in Canada to come and serve this bloody country,
etc., etc., was a ranter and a bragger. Somers saw him afterwards naked:
strange, fat, soft, like a woman. But in another carriage the men sang
all the time, or howled like dogs in the night:
“I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine,
All my life I’ll be you-o-o-ur Valentine.
Bluebells I’ll gather, take them and be true,
When I’m a man, my plan will be to marry you.”
Wailing down the lost corridors of hell, surely, those ghastly
melancholy notes--
“All my li-i-i-ife--I’ll be you-u-r Valentine.”
Somers could never recall it without writhing. It is not death that
matters, but the loss of the integral soul. And these men howled as if
they were going to their doom, helplessly, ghastly. It was not the death
in front. It was the surrender of all their old beliefs, and all their
sacred liberty.
Those bluebells! They were worse than the earlier songs. In 1915,
autumn, Hampstead Heath, leaves burning in heaps, in the blue air,
London still almost pre-war London: but by the pond on the Spaniards
Road, blue soldiers, wounded soldiers in their bright hospital blue and
red, always there: and earth-coloured recruits with pale faces drilling
near Parliament Hill. The pre-war world still lingering, and some vivid
strangeness, glamour thrown in. At night all the great beams of the
searchlights, in great straight bars, feeling across the London sky,
feeling the clouds, feeling the body of the dark overhead. And then
Zeppelin raids: the awful noise and the excitement. Somers was never
afraid then. One evening he and Harriet walked from Platts Lane to the
Spaniards Road, across the Heath: and there, in the sky, like some god
vision, a Zeppelin, and the searchlights catching it, so that it gleamed
like a manifestation in the heavens, then losing it, so that only the
strange drumming came down out of the sky where the searchlights tangled
their feelers. There it was again, high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one
might imagine the Holy Ghost, far, far above. And the crashes of guns,
and the awful hoarseness of shells bursting in the city. Then gradually,
quiet. And from Parliament Hill, a great red glare below, near St
Paul’s. Something ablaze in the city. Harriet was horribly afraid. Yet
as she looked up at the far-off Zeppelin she said to Somers:
“Think, some of the boys I played with when I was a child are probably
in it.”
And he looked up at the far, luminous thing, like a moon. Were there men
in it? Just men, with two vulnerable legs and warm mouths. The
imagination could not go so far.
Those days, that autumn ... people carried about chrysanthemums, yellow
and brown chrysanthemums: and the smell of burning leaves: and the
wounded, bright blue soldiers with their red cotton neckties, sitting
together like macaws on the seats, pale and different from other people.
And the star Jupiter very bright at nights over the cup hollow of the
Vale, on Hampstead Heath. And the war news always coming, the war horror
drifting in, drifting in, prices rising, excitement growing, people
going mad about the Zeppelin raids. And always the one song:
“Keep the home fires burning,
Though your hearts be yearning.”
It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit
of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished
from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions,
lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and
the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and
the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, _John Bull_.
No man who has really consciously lived through this can believe again
absolutely in democracy. No man who has heard reiterated in thousands of
tones from all the common people, during the crucial years of the war:
“I believe in _John Bull_. Give me _John Bull_,” can ever believe that
in any crisis a people can govern itself, or is ever fit to govern
itself. During the crucial years of the war, the people chose, and chose
Bottomleyism. Bottom enough.
The well-bred, really cultured classes were on the whole passive
resisters. They shirked their duty. It is the business of people who
really know better to fight tooth and nail to keep up a standard, to
hold control of authority. Laisser-aller is as guilty as the actual,
stinking mongrelism it gives place to.
It was in mid-winter 1915 that Somers and Harriet went down to Cornwall.
The spirit of the war--the spirit of collapse and of human ignominy, had
not travelled so far yet. It came in advancing waves.
We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at the front. Brave the men
were, all honour to them. It was at home the world was lost. We hear too
little of the collapse of the proud human spirit at home, the triumph of
sordid, rampant, raging meanness. “The bite of a jackal is
blood-poisoning and mortification.” And at home stayed all the jackals,
middle-aged, male and female jackals. And they bit us all. And
blood-poisoning and mortification set in.
We should never have let the jackals loose, and patted them on the head.
They were feeding on our death all the while.
Away in the west Richard and Harriet lived alone in their cottage by the
savage Atlantic. He hardly wrote at all, and never any propaganda. But
he hated the war, and said so to the few Cornish people around. He
laughed at the palpable lies of the press, bitterly. And because of his
isolation and his absolute separateness, he was marked out as a spy.
“I am not a spy,” he said, “I leave it to dirtier people. I am myself,
and I won’t have popular lies.”
So, there began the visits from the policeman. A large, blue, helmeted
figure at the door.
“Excuse me, sir, I have just a few enquiries to make.”
The police-sergeant always a decent, kindly fellow, driven by the
military.
Somers and Harriet lived now with that suspense about them in the very
air they breathed. They were suspects.
“Then let them suspect,” said he. “I do nothing to them, so what can
they do to me.”
He still believed in the constitutional liberty of an Englishman.
“You know,” said Harriet, “you _do_ say things to these Cornish people.”
“I only say, when they tell me newspaper lies, that they _are_ lies.”
But now the two began to be hated, hated far more than they knew.
“You want to be careful,” warned one of the Cornish friends. “I’ve heard
that the coast-watchers have got orders to keep very strict watch on
you.”
“Let them, they’ll see nothing.”
But it was not till afterwards that he learned that the watchers had
lain behind the stone fence, to hear what he and Harriet talked about.
So, he was called up the first time and went. He was summoned to
Penzance, and drove over with Harriet, expecting to return for the time
at least. But he was ordered to proceed the same afternoon to Bodmin,
along with sixteen or seventeen other fellows, farm hands and working
men. He said good-bye to Harriet, who was to be driven back alone across
the moors, to their lonely cottage on the other side.
“I shall be back to-morrow,” he said.
England was still England, and he was not finally afraid.
The train-journey from Penzance to Bodmin with the other men: the fat,
bragging other man: the tall man who felt as Somers did: the change at
the roadside station, with the porters chaffing the men that the
handcuffs were on them. Indeed, it was like being one of a gang of
convicts. The great, prison-like barracks--the disgusting evening meal
of which he could eat nothing--the little terrier-like sergeant of the
regulars, who made them a little encouraging speech: not a bad chap. The
lounging about that barracks yard, prisoners, till bed time: the other
men crowding to the canteen, himself mostly alone. The brief talks with
men who were for a moment curious as to who and what he was. For a
moment only. They were most of them miserable and bitter.
Gaol! It was like gaol. He thought of Oscar Wilde in prison. Night came,
and the beds to be made.
“They’re good beds, clean beds, you’ll sleep quite comfortable in them,”
said the elderly little sergeant with a white moustache. Nine o’clock
lights out. Somers had brought no night clothes, nothing. He slept in
his woollen pants, and was ashamed because they had patches on the
knees, for he and Harriet were very poor these years. In the next bed
was a youth, a queer fellow, in a sloppy suit of black broadcloth, and
down-at-heel boots. He had a degenerate sort of handsomeness too. He
had never spoken a word. His face was long and rather fine, but like an
Apache, his straight black hair came in a lock over his forehead. And
there was an Apache sort of sheepishness, stupidity, in everything he
did. He was a long time getting undressed. Then there he stood, and his
white cotton day-shirt was long below his knees, like a woman’s
nightgown. A restless, bitter night, with one man cough, cough,
coughing, a hysterical cough, and others talking, making noises in their
sleep. Bugle at six, and a scramble to wash themselves at the zinc
trough in the wash house. Somers could not crowd in, did not get in till
towards the end. Then he had to borrow soap, and afterwards a piece of
comb. The men were all quiet and entirely inoffensive, common, but
gentle, by nature decent. A sickening breakfast, then wash-up and sweep
the floors. Somers took one of the heavy brooms, as ordered, and began.
He swept his own floors nearly every day. But this was heavier work. The
sergeant stopped him. “Don’t you do that. You go and help to wipe the
pots, if you like. Here, you boy, _you_--take that sweeping brush.”
And Somers relinquished his broom to a bigger man.
They were kindly, and, in the essential sense, gentlemen, the little
terrier of a sergeant too. Englishmen, his own people.
When it came to Somers’ turn to be examined, and he took off his clothes
and sat in his shirt in the cold lobby: the fat fellow pointed to his
thin, delicate legs with a jeer. But Somers looked at him, and he was
quiet again. The queer, soft, pale-bodied fellow, against Somers’ thin
delicate whiteness. The little sergeant kept saying:
“Don’t you catch cold, you chaps.”
In the warm room behind a screen, Richard took off his shirt and was
examined. The doctor asked him where he lived--where was his home--asked
as a gentleman asks, treated him with that gentle consideration Somers
usually met with, save from business people or official people.
“We shall reject you, leave you free,” said the doctor, after consulting
with the more elderly, officious little man, “but we leave it to you to
do what you can for your country.”
“Thank you,” said Richard, looking at him.
“Every man must do what he can,” put in the other doctor, who was
elderly and officious, but a gentleman. “The country needs the help of
every man, and though we leave you free, we expect you to apply yourself
to _some_ service.”
“Yes,” said Somers, looking at him, and speaking in an absolutely
neutral voice. Things said like that to him were never real to him: more
like the noise of a cart passing, just a noise.
The two doctors looked from his face down his thin nakedness again.
“Put your shirt on,” said the younger one.
And Somers could hear the mental comment, “Rum sort of a fellow,” as he
did so.
There was still a wait for the card. It was one of those cards:
_A_--Called up for military service. _B_--Called up for service at the
front, but not in the lines. _C_--Called up for non-military service.
_R_--Rejected. _A_, _B_, and _C_ were ruled out in red ink, leaving the
Rejected. He still had to go to another office for his pay--two
shillings and fourpence, or something like that. He signed for this and
was free. Free--with two shillings and fourpence, and pass for a railway
ticket--and God’s air. The moment he stepped out with his card, he
realised that it was Saturday morning, that the sun was shining, filling
the big stone yard of the barracks, from which he could look to the
station and the hill with its grass, beyond. That hill beyond--he had
seemed to look at it through darkened glass, before. Till now, the
morning had been a timeless greyness. Indeed, it had rained at seven
o’clock, as they stood lounging miserably about in the barracks yard
with its high wall, cold and bitter. And the tall man had talked to him
bitterly.
But now the sun shone, the dark-green, Cornish hill, hard-looking, was
just a near hill. He walked through the great gates. Ah God, he was out,
he was free. The road with trees went down-hill to the town. He hastened
down, a free human being, on Saturday morning, the grey glaze gone from
his eyes.
He telegraphed the ignominious word Rejected, and the time of his
arrival, to Harriet. Then he went and had dinner. Some of the other men
came in. They were reserved now--there was a distance between him and
them--he was not of their social class.
“What are you?” they asked him.
“Rejected,” he said.
And they looked at him grudgingly, thinking it was because he was not a
working man he had got special favour. He knew what they thought, and he
tried not to look so glad. But glad he was, and in some mysterious way,
triumphant.
It was a wonderful journey on the Saturday afternoon home--sunny, busy,
lovely. He changed at Truro and went into town. On the road he met some
of the other fellows, who were called up, but not summoned for service
immediately. They had some weeks, or months, of torment and suspense
before them. They looked at Somers, and grinned rather jeeringly at him.
They envied him--no wonder. And already he was a stranger, in another
walk of life.
Rejected as unfit. One of the unfit. What did he care? The Cornish are
always horrified of any ailment or physical disablement. “What’s amiss
then?” they would ask. They would _say_ that you might as well be shot
outright as labelled unfit. But most of them tried hard to find
constitutional weaknesses in themselves, that would get them rejected
also, notwithstanding. And at the same time they felt they must be
horribly ashamed of their physical ignominy if they were _labelled_
unfit.
Somers did not care. Let them label me unfit, he said to himself. I know
my own body is fragile, in its way, but also it is very strong, and it’s
the only body that would carry my particular self. Let the fools peer at
it and put me down undeveloped chest and what they like, so long as they
leave me to my own way.
Then the kindly doctor’s exhortation that he should find some way for
himself of serving his country. He thought about that many times. But
always, as he came near to the fact of committing himself, he knew that
he simply could not commit himself to any service whatsoever. In no
shape or form could he serve the war, either indirectly or directly. Yet
it would have been so easy. He had quite enough influential friends in
London to put him into some job, even some quite congenial, literary
job, with a sufficient salary. They would be only too glad to do it,
for there in his remoteness, writing occasionally an essay that only
bothered them, he was a thorn in their flesh. And men and women with
sons, brothers, husbands away fighting, it was small pleasure for them
to read Mr Somers and his pronunciation. “This trench and machine
warfare is a blasphemy against life itself, a blasphemy which we are all
committing.” All very well, they said, but we are in for a war, and what
are we to do? We hate it as much as he does. But we can’t all sit safely
in Cornwall.
That was true too, and he knew it, and he felt the most a dreary misery,
knowing how many brave, generous men were being put through this
slaughter-machine of human devilishness. They were doing their best, and
there was nothing else to do. But even that was no reason why he should
go and do likewise.
If men had kept their souls firm and integral through the years, the war
would never have come on. If, in the beginning, there had been enough
strong, proud souls in England to concentrate the English feeling into
stern, fierce, honourable fighting, the war would never have gone as it
went. But England slopped and wobbled, and the tide of horror
accumulated.
And now, if circumstances had roped nearly all men into the horror, and
it was a case of adding horror to horror, or dying well, on the other
hand, the irremediable circumstance of his own separate soul made
Richard Lovat’s inevitable standing out. If there is outward,
circumstantial unreason and fatality, there is inward unreason and
inward fate. He would have to dare to follow his inward fate. He must
remain alone, outside of everything, everything, conscious of what was
going on, conscious of what he was doing and not doing. Conscious he
must be, and consciously he must stick to it. To be forced into nothing.
For, above all things, man is a land animal and a thought-adventurer.
Once the human consciousness really sinks and is swamped under the tide
of events--as the best English consciousness was swamped, pacifist and
patriotic alike--then the adventure is doomed. The English soul went
under in the war, and, as a conscious, proud, adventurous,
self-responsible soul, it was lost. We all lost the war: perhaps Germany
least. Lost all the lot. The adventure is always lost when the human
conscious soul gives way under the stress, fails to keep control, and is
submerged. Then out swarm the rats and the Bottomleys and crew, and the
ship of human adventure is a horrible piratic affair, a dirty sort of
freebooting.
Richard Lovat had nothing to hang on to but his own soul. So he hung on
to it, and tried to keep his wits. If no man was with him, he was hardly
aware of it, he had to grip on so desperately, like a man on a plank in
a shipwreck. The plank was his own individual self.
Followed that period of suspense which changed his life for ever. If the
postman was coming plunging downhill through the bushes over the moor,
the first thought was: What is he bringing now? The postman was over
military age, and had a chuckle of pleasure in handing out those
accursed _On His Majesty’s Service_ envelopes which meant that a man was
summoned for torture. The postman was a great Wesleyan and a chapel
preacher, and the thought of hell for other men was sweet in him: he had
a religious zest added to his natural Cornish zest in other people’s
disasters.
Again, if there was the glint of a bicycle on the moor road, and if it
turned down the bypath towards the cottage, then Somers strained his
eyes to see if the rider were fat and blue, or tall and blue. Was it the
police sergeant, or the police constable, coming for more identification
proofs.
“We want your birth certificate,” said the sergeant. “They’ve written
from Bodmin asking you to produce your birth certificate.”
“Then tell them to get it. No, I haven’t got it. You’ve had my marriage
certificate. You know who I am and where I was born and all the rest.
Now let them get the birth certificate themselves.”
Richard Lovat was at the end of all patience. They persisted he was a
foreigner--poor Somers, just because he had a beard. One of the most
intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for
his country, even if it were often a passion of hatred. But no, they
persisted he was a foreigner. Pah!
He and Harriet did all their own work, their own shopping. One wintry
afternoon they were coming home with a knapsack, along the field path
above the sea, when two khaki individuals, officers of some sort,
strode after them.
“Excuse me,” said one, in a damnatory officious voice. “What have you
got in that sack?”
“A few groceries,” said Lovat.
“I would like to look.”
Somers put the sack down on the path. The tall and lofty officer stooped
and groped nobly among a pound of rice and a piece of soap and a dozen
candles.
“Ha!” he cried, exultant. “What’s this? A camera!”
Richard peeped in the bag at the groping red military hands. For a
moment he almost believed that a camera had spirited itself in among his
few goods, the implication of his guilt was so powerful. He saw a block
in brown paper.
“A penn’orth of salt,” he said quietly, though pale to the lips with
anger and insult.
But the gentlemanly officer--a Captain--tore open the paper. Yes, a
common block of salt. He pushed the bag aside.
“We have to be careful,” said the other, lesser man.
“Of course,” said Richard, tying up his bag.
“Good afternoon!” said Harriet.
The fellows half saluted, and turned hastening away. Richard and Harriet
had the advantage of sauntering behind them and looking at their noble
backs. Oh, they were gentlemen, true English gentlemen: perhaps Cornish.
Harriet gave a pouf of laughter.
“The poor innocent salt!” she exclaimed.
And no doubt that also was chalked up against her.
It was Christmas time, and two friends came down to stay at the cottage
with the Somers. Those were the days before America joined the Allies.
The man friend arrived with a whole parcel of American dainties,
buckwheat meal and sweet potatoes and maple sugar: the woman friend
brought a good basket of fruit. They were to have a Christmas in the
lonely cottage in spite of everything.
It was Christmas Eve, and a pouring black wet night outside. Nowhere can
it be so black as on the edge of a Cornish moor, above the western sea,
near the rocks where the ancient worshippers used to sacrifice. The
darkness of menhirs. The American woman friend was crouching at the
fire making fudge, the man was away in his room, when a thundering knock
at the door. Ah Lord!
The burly police-sergeant, and his bicycle.
“Sorry to trouble you, sir, but is an American, a Mr Monsell, stopping
here with you? He is. Can I have a word with him?”
“Yes. Won’t you come in?”