That night young Digby came to see him. The boy was not wearing his
uniform in the Black and Tans. It was not popular in London, and the
authorities kept it out of sight.
They greeted each other in the usual way.
“Hulloa, old man!” from Digby. “Hulloa, young fellow!” from Bertram.
They were alone together in the “study,” Joyce having gone out to dinner
again.
“How are things?” asked Digby.
“How’s yourself?” asked Bertram.
“I feel good to be in England again, after that hellish place, Ireland!
One feels safe in the streets. No need to keep an eye over one’s
shoulder. A knock at the door doesn’t make one jump out of one’s giddy
seat!”
And yet, a little later, he started and looked towards the door when
there was the double rat-tat of a postman’s knock.
“Sorry!” he said, with a queer grin, as he fumbled for his pipe and lit
it.
He was barely twenty, and had escaped the Great War by a year or two,
though he had been in training as an officer-cadet before the Armistice;
a fair-haired boy, with clear-cut, delicate features, almost girlish,
and something of his mother’s look. But altered, thought Bertram.
Something had changed in him. There was a loose look about his mouth,
and his eyes were shifty. He had developed a slight stutter in his
speech.
“Any whiskey, old man?” he asked Bertram, after some preliminary
conversation about his father and mother, Joyce, and the right thing to
see at the theatre.
Bertram produced the whiskey, but raised his eyebrows when Digby poured
out half a glass and drank it like water.
“I say! That’s a stiff dose, isn’t it?”
The boy said it was nothing. He had got into the habit of it. Everybody
drank like a fish in his crowd. Nothing else to do in the old barracks.
It was rather encouraged by the “Officer commanding.” Even the men could
drink as much as they liked before going out on search parties and
raids. It made ’em a bit fierce and kept up their spirits. Otherwise
they would be too easy with the Irish, especially the Irish girls, who
were damn pretty, many of them.
It wasn’t a pleasant thing to search girls’ bedrooms at night. At night?
Yes, of course. All search parties went out at night, drew a cordon
round certain streets, then banged at the doors, or bashed them in,
while an officer, with a sergeant and five men or so, went through the
house looking for rebels, and fellows on the run, concealed arms, and
all that.
A rotten job for a gentleman.
One night he had a lot of trouble with his men. They routed out three
girls in their night-shirts—ladies, too, and amazingly pretty—and
started mucking about with them. One girl had her night-shirt torn off,
and screamed enough to pull the house down. It was the sergeant’s fault.
He was drunk that night, and beastly amorous. Digby had threatened to
shoot him, and did actually knock down one of the men. That sobered them
up, and they left the girls alone, but it made them savage, and in the
next house they shot a young boy—just a kid—who tried to shut a door
in their faces.
“Killed him?” asked Bertram in a strangled voice. This narrative made
his blood feel like boiling lead. Hot and cold waves passed up his spine
to the top of his scalp.
“Oh, Lord, yes! Plugged through the head.”
On another night there had been a hell of a scene. They had run to earth
a young rebel in Collin’s command. He had been in the ambush at Black
Rock where five Scotties had been killed. O’Callaghan by name. His
mother and sister had hidden him in a linen cupboard. Of course, they
found that pretty quick, but the sister stood between his men and the
cupboard, with a red-hot poker, and threatened to burn the eyes out of
the first man who tried to pass her. The sergeant drew his revolver, but
the mother flung herself at him and he had to shoot her. Then the sister
attacked, and one of his fellows ran her through with a bayonet, to save
himself from the red-hot poker. What else could he do?
It was worse when the women started screaming and praying round their
men folk. It put the fellows’ nerves on edge. Their nerves were always
on edge. They couldn’t walk a yard without the chance of getting a
sniper’s bullet in the brain, or being plugged in the back of the head
by some fellow who had just passed, in a busy street, or a lonely lane.
That sort of thing gave a man the jim-jams. It was worse than real war,
he imagined.
No wonder the men treated the Irish “rough” at times or got out of hand
and shot up a village in which some of their pals had been killed.
Killed without a dog’s chance. What did it mean, exactly, “shooting up”
a village? Oh, just driving through in an armoured car and spraying the
windows and door-ways with machine-gun bullets. Women and children
killed like that? Often, of course. A rotten game, but guerrilla warfare
was like that. . . .
“Any more whiskey, old man? Oh, thanks.”
He went on talking, describing raids and ambushes and reprisals, for an
hour or more, until Bertram could listen to no more of this narrative by
his “kid brother” as he used to call him. It made him feel physically
sick. It seemed to drain him of all vitality, so that he trembled at the
knees when he began to walk about the room.
“It’s frightful! It’s devilish! After the Great War and all our
sacrifice for liberty! Two English-speaking peoples, bound together by
blood, by Christian faith, by heroic memories! My God! Digby, I implore
you to chuck it. Hand in your papers. Resign. Cut your right hand off
rather than do that dirty work! It’s dishonouring. It’s filthy. It’s
murderous.”
Digby’s face flushed. He gulped down some more whiskey, and lit a
cigarette.
“It’s got to be done,” he said, sullenly. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s
what happens in this bloody world.”
He was less than twenty years old, and all his memories were of war, and
blood, and death. He was annoyed by the emotion of his elder brother. He
was also a little drunk. Presently he said, “So long, old man, I think
I’ll go and do a show.”
Bertram had not asked him about Susan and Dennis. When the boy had gone,
he raged about the room again. He remembered this boy, Digby, when he
was a little fair-haired thing to whom he used to tell fairy-tales in
bed. Their mother used to come and kiss them and tell them to go to
sleep. Now this! Bertram was overwhelmed by a sense of pity for the
mothers of the world.