_MORTE D’UN EROE_
_ALLEGRETTO_
The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the
Armistice—last spasms of Europe’s severed arteries. Of course, nobody
much bothered to read the lists. Why should they? The living must
protect themselves from the dead, especially the intrusive dead. But
the twentieth century had lost its Spring with a vengeance. So a good
deal of forgetting had to be done.
Under the heading “Killed in Action,” one of these later lists
contained the words:
Winterbourne, Edward Frederick George, A./Capt.,
2/9 Battn., R. Foddershire Regt.
The small interest created by this item of news and the rapidity with
which he was forgotten would have surprised even George Winterbourne;
and he had that bottomless cynicism of the infantry subaltern which
veiled itself in imbecile cheerfulness, and thereby misled a good
many not very acute people. Winterbourne had rather hoped he would be
killed, and knew that his premature demise in the middle twenties would
be borne with easy stoicism by those who survived him. But his vanity
would have been a little shocked by what actually happened.
A life, they say, may be considered as a point of light which suddenly
appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a luminous
geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as suddenly disappears.
(Interesting to have seen the lights disappearing from Space-Time
during one of the big battles—Death dowses the glims.) Well, it
happens to us all; but our vanity is interested by the hope that the
rather tangled and not very luminous track we made will continue to
shine for a few people for a few years. I suppose Winterbourne’s name
does appear on some War Memorial, probably in the Chapel of his Public
School; and, of course, he’s got his neat ration of headstone in
France. But that’s about all. Nobody much minded that he was killed.
Unassertive people with no money have few friends; and Winterbourne
hadn’t counted much on his scanty flock, least of all on me. But I
know—because he told me himself—that he had rather relied on four
people to take some interest in him and his fate. They were his father
and mother, his wife and his mistress. If he had known what actually
occurred with these four at the news of his death I think he would
have been a little shocked, as well as heartily amused and perhaps
a bit relieved. It would have freed him from certain feelings of
responsibility.
* * * * *
Winterbourne’s father, whom I knew slightly, was an inadequate
sentimentalist. Mild, with an affectation of gentility, incompetent,
selfishly unselfish (i.e., always patting himself on the back for
“renouncing” something he was afraid to do or be or take), he had a
genius for messing up other people’s lives. The amount of irreparable
harm which can be done by a really “good” man is astounding. Ten
astute rogues do less. Old Winterbourne messed up his wife’s life by
being weak with her; messed up his children’s lives by being weak and
sentimentalish with them and by losing his money—the unforgivable sin
in a parent; messed up the lives of his friends and clients by honestly
losing their money for them; and messed up his own most completely.
That was the one thing he ever did with complete and satisfactory
thoroughness. The mess he got his life into would have baffled an army
of psychologists to unravel.
When I told Winterbourne what I thought of his father, he admitted
it was mostly true. But he rather liked the man, probably disarmed by
the mildness, and not sufficiently hard to his father’s soft selfish
sentimentality. Possibly old Winterbourne would have felt and have
acted differently in his reactions to George’s death, if circumstances
had been different. But he was so scared by the war, so unable to
adjust himself to a harsh intruding reality—he had spent his life
avoiding realities—that he took refuge in a drivelling religiosity.
He got to know some rather slimy Roman Catholics, and read the slimy
religious tracts they showered on him, and talked and sobbed to the
exceedingly slimy priest they found for him. So about the middle
of the war he was “received,” and found—let us hope—comfort in
much prayer and Mass-going and writing rules for Future Conduct and
rather suspecting he was like François de Sales and praying for the
beatification of the super-slimy Thérèse of Lisieux.
* * * * *
Old Winterbourne was in London, “doing war work,” when the news of
George’s death came. He would never have done anything so positive and
energetic if he had not been nagged and goaded into it by his wife.
She was animated less by motives of disinterested patriotism than by
exasperation with him for existing at all and for interrupting her
love affairs. Old Winterbourne always said with proud sad dignity that
his “religious convictions forbade” him to divorce her. Religious
convictions are such an easy excuse for being nasty. So she found a
war job for him in London, and put him into a position where it was
impossible for him to refuse.
The telegram from the War Office—“Regret to inform... killed in
action.... Their Majesties’ sympathy....”—went to the home address in
the country, and was opened by Mrs. Winterbourne. Such an excitement
for her, almost a pleasant change, for it was pretty dull in the
country just before the Armistice. She was sitting by the fire, yawning
over her twenty-second lover—the affair had lasted nearly a year—when
the servant brought the telegram. It was addressed to Mr. Winterbourne,
but, of course, she opened it; she had an idea that “one of _those_
women” was “after” her husband; who, however, was regrettably chaste,
from cowardice.
Mrs. Winterbourne liked drama in private life. She uttered a most
creditable shriek, clasped both hands to her rather soggy bosom,
and pretended to faint. The lover, one of those nice clean sporting
Englishmen with a minimum of intelligence and an infinite capacity for
being gulled by females, especially the clean English sort, clutched
her unwillingly and automatically but with quite an Ethel M. Dell
appearance of emotion, and exclaimed:
“Darling, what is it? Has _he_ insulted you again?”
Poor old Winterbourne was incapable of insulting any one, but it was a
convention always established between Mrs. Winterbourne and her lovers
that Winterbourne had “insulted” her, when his worst taunt had been to
pray earnestly for her conversion to the True Faith, along with the
rest of “poor misguided England.”
In low moaning tones, founded on the best tradition of sensational
fiction, Mrs. Winterbourne feebly ejaculated:
“Dead, dead, dead!”
“Who’s dead? Winterbourne?”
(Some apprehension perhaps in the attendant Sam Browne—he would have
to propose, of course, and might be accepted.)
“They’ve killed him, those vile, _filthy_ foreigners. My _baby_ son.”
Sam Browne, still mystified, read the telegram. He then stood to
attention, saluted (although not wearing a cap) and said solemnly:
“A clean sportin’ death, an _Englishman’s_ death.”
When Huns were killed it was neither clean nor sportin’, but served the
beggars—(“buggers,” among men)—right.
The tears Mrs. Winterbourne shed were not very natural, but they
did not take long to dry. Dramatically, she ran to the telephone.
Dramatically, she called to the local exchange:
“Trrrunks. (Sob.) Give me Kensington 1030. Mr. Winterbourne’s number,
you know. (Sob.) Our _darling_ son—Captain Winterbourne,—has been
killed by those (sob) beasts. (Sob. Pause.) Oh, thank you _so_ much,
Mr. Crump, I _knew_ you would feel for us in our trouble. (Sob. Sob.)
But the blow is so sudden. I _must_ speak to Mr. Winterbourne. Our
hearts are _breaking_ here. (Sobissimo.) Thank you. I’ll wait till you
ring me.”
Mrs. Winterbourne’s effort on the telephone to her husband was not
unworthy of her:
“Is that you, George? Yes, Isabel speaking. I have just had _rather_
bad news. No, about George. You must be prepared, darling. I fear he
is seriously ill. What? No. _George._ GEORGE. Can’t you hear? Yes,
that’s better. Now, listen, darling, you must prepare for a _great_
shock. George is seriously ill. Yes, _our_ George, our _baby_ son.
What? Wounded? No, not wounded, very _dangerously_ ill. No, darling,
there is little hope. (Sob.) Yes, darling, a telegram from the _King_
and _Queen_. Shall I read it? You are prepared for the shock (sob),
George, aren’t you? ‘Deeply regret... killed in action.... Their
Majesties’ sympathy....’ (Sob. Long pause.) Are you there, George?
Hullo, hullo? (Sob.) Hullo, hullo. HULLO. (Aside to Sam Browne.) He’s
rung off! How that man _insults_ me, how can I bear it in my sorrow?
After I had prepared him for the shock! (Sob. Sob.) But I have always
had to _fight_ for my children, while he squatted over his books—and
_prayed_.”
To Mrs. Winterbourne’s credit let it be said, she had very little
belief in the value of prayer in practical affairs. But then her real
objection to religion was founded upon her dislike for doing anything
she didn’t want to do, and a profound hatred for everything distantly
resembling thought.
At the fatal news Mr. Winterbourne had fallen upon his knees (not
forgetting, however, to ring off the harpy), ejaculating: “Lord Jesus,
receive his soul!” Mr. Winterbourne then prayed a good deal, for
George’s soul, for himself, for “my erring but beloved spouse,” for
his other children, “may they be spared and by Thy Mercy brought to
the True Faith,” for England (ditto), for his enemies, “though Thou
knowest, Dear Lord Jesus, the enmity was none of my seeking, sinner
though I be, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Ave Maria....”
Mr. Winterbourne remained on his knees for some time. But, as the hall
tiles hurt his knees, he went and knelt on a hassock at the prie-dieu
in his bedroom. On the top of this was an open Breviary in very
ecclesiastical binding with a florid ecclesiastical book-marker, all
lying on an ecclesiastical bit of embroidery, the “gift of a Catholic
sister in Christ.” Above, on a bracket, was a coloured B.V.M. from the
Place St. Sulpice, holding a nauseating Infant Jesus dangling a bloody
and sun-rayed Sacred Heart. Over this again was a large but rather
cheap-looking imitation bronze Crucifix, with a reproduction (coloured)
of Leonardo’s _Last Supper_ to the right, and another reproduction
(uncoloured) of Holman Hunt’s (heretical) _Light of the World_ to the
left. All of which gave Mr. Winterbourne the deepest spiritual comfort.
After dinner, of which he ate sparingly, thinking with dreary
satisfaction how grief destroys appetite, he went round to see his
confessor, Father Slack. He spent a pleasantly emotional evening. Mr.
Winterbourne cried a good deal, and they both prayed; Father Slack
said perhaps George had been influenced by his father’s prayers and
virtues and had made an act of contrition before he died, and Mr.
Winterbourne said that although George had not been “received” he had
“a true Catholic spirit” and had once read a sermon of Bossuet; and
Father Slack said he would pray for George’s soul, and Mr. Winterbourne
left £5 for Masses for the repose of George, which was generous (if
foolish), for he didn’t earn much.
And then Mr. Winterbourne used to pray ten minutes longer every night
and morning for George’s soul, but unfortunately he went and got
himself run over just by the Marble Arch as he was meditating on that
blessed martyr, Father Parsons, and that other more blessed martyr,
Father Garnet of Gunpowder fame. So, as the £5 was soon exhausted,
there was nobody to pray for George’s soul; and for all the Holy Roman
and Apostolic Church knows or cares, poor old George is in Hell, and
likely to remain there. But, after the last few years of his life,
George probably doesn’t find any difference.
* * * * *
So much for George’s father and George’s death. The “reactions” (as
they are called) of Mrs. Winterbourne were different. She found it
rather exciting and stimulating at first, especially erotically
stimulating. She was a woman who constantly dramatized herself and
her life. She was as avid of public consideration as an Italian
lieutenant, no matter what the quality of the praise. The only servants
who ever stayed more than a trial month with her were those who bowed
themselves to an abject discipline of adulation for Mrs. Winterbourne,
Mrs. Winterbourne’s doings and sayings and possessions and whims and
friends. Only, since Mrs. Winterbourne was exceedingly fickle and
quarrelsome, and was always changing friends into enemies and vowed
enemies into hollow friends, a more than diplomatic suppleness was
exacted of these mercenary retainers, who only stayed with her because
she gave them presents or raised their wages whenever the praise was
really gratifying.
Although a lady of “mature charms,” Mrs. Winterbourne loved to fancy
herself as a delicious young thing of seventeen, passionately beloved
by a sheik-like but nevertheless “clean” (not to say “straight”)
Englishman. She was a mistress of would-be revolutionary platitudes
about marriage and property (rather like the talk of an “enlightened”
parson) but, in fact, was as sordid, avaricious, conventional and
spiteful middle-middle class woman as you could dread to meet. Like
all her class, she toadied to her betters and bullied her inferiors.
But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite. In
her kittenish moods, which she cultivated with a strange lack of a
sense of congruity, she liked to throw out hints about “kicking over
the traces.” But, as a matter of fact, she never soared much above
tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs
with bounderish young men, whom only her romantic effrontery could have
dared describe as “clean and straight,” although there was no doubt
whatever about their being English, and indeed sportin’ in a more or
less bounderish way.
She had had so many of these clean straight young sheiks that even
poor Mr. Winterbourne got mixed up, and when he used to write dramatic
letters beginning: “Sir, you have robbed me of my wife’s affection like
a low hound—be it said in no unChristian spirit”—the letters were
always getting addressed to the penultimate or ante-penultimate sheik,
instead of the straight clean one of the moment. However, rendered
serious by the exhortations of the war press and still more by the ever
ripening maturity of her charms, Mrs. Winterbourne made an instinctive
and firm clutch at Sam Browne—so successfully that she clutched the
poor devil for the remainder of his abbreviated life. (She did the
abbreviating.) Sam Browne, of course, was almost too good to be true.
If I hadn’t seen him myself I should never have believed in him. He was
an animated—and not so very animated—stereotype. His knowledge of
life was rudimentary to the point of being quadruped, and intelligence
had been bestowed upon him with rigid parsimony. An adult Boy Scout, a
Public School fag in shining armour—the armour of obtuseness. He met
every situation in life with a formula, and no situation in life ever
reached him except in the shape imposed upon it by the appropriate
and pre-determined formula. So, though he wasn’t very successful at
anything, he got along all right, sliding almost decorously down
grooves which had nothing ringing about them. Unless urged, he never
mentioned his wound, his decoration, or the fact that he had “rolled
up” on August 4th. The modest well-bred, et cetera, English gentleman.
The formula for the death of a married mistress’s son was stern
heroism, and gentle consolation to the wounded mother heart. Mrs.
Winterbourne played up at first—it was the sort of thing that the
sheik always did with his passionate but tender love. But the effect of
George’s death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly
erotic. The war did that to lots of women. All the dying and wounds and
mud and bloodiness—at a safe distance—gave them a great kick, and
excited them to an almost unbearable pitch of amorousness. Of course,
in that eternity of 1914-18 they must have come to feel that men alone
were mortal, and they immortals; wherefore they tried to behave like
houris with all available sheiks—hence the lure of “war work” with
its unbounded opportunities. And then there was the deep primitive
physiological instinct—men to kill and be killed; women to produce
more men to continue the process. (This, however, was often frustrated
by the march of Science, viz., anticonceptives; for which, much thanks.)
So you must not be surprised if Mrs. Winterbourne’s emotion at the
death of George almost immediately took an erotic form. She was lying
on her bed in an ample pair of white drawers with very long ruffles and
a remarkably florid, if chaste, chemise. And the sheik, strong, silent,
restrained, tender, was dabbing her forehead and nose with Eau de
Cologne, while she took large sips of brandy at increasingly frequent
intervals. It was, of course, proper and even pleasant to have her
grief so much respected; but she did wish Sam hadn’t to be poked always
into taking the initiative. Couldn’t the man see that tender nerves
like hers needed to be soothed with a little Real Love _at once?_
“He was so much to me, Sam,” she said in low, indeed tremulous, tones,
subtly calculated, “I was only a child when he was born—a child _with_
a child people used to say—and we grew up together. I was so young
that I did not put up my hair until two years after he was born.” (Mrs.
Winterbourne’s propaganda about her perennial youth was so obvious
that it would hardly have deceived the readers of “John Blunt”—but
the sheiks all fell for it. God knows how young they thought she
was—probably imagined Winterbourne had “insulted” her when she was
ten.)
“We were always together, such pals, Sam, and he told me everything.”
(Poor old George! He had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn’t
seen her five times in the last five years of his life. And as for
telling her anything—why, the most noble of noble savages would
immediately have suspected _her_. She had let George down so badly time
after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside, and couldn’t
give confidence to his wife or his mistresses or a man.)
“But now he’s gone,” and somehow Mrs. Winterbourne’s voice became so
erotically suggestive that even the obtuse sheik noticed it and was
vaguely troubled; “now he’s gone, I’ve nothing in the world but _you_,
Sam. You heard how that vile man insulted me on the telephone to-day.
Kiss me, Sam, and promise you’ll always be a pal, a _real_ pal.”
Active love-making was not in the sheik’s formula for that day;
consolation there was to be, but the “sacredness” of mother grief was
not to be profaned by sexual intercourse; although that too, oddly
enough, was “sacred” between a “clean” Englishman and a “pure” woman
who had only had one husband and twenty-two lovers. But what can the
Sam Brownes of the world do against the wills, especially the will
to copulate, of the Mrs. Winterbournes? He rose—if the expression
may be allowed—powerfully to the situation. He too found a certain
queer perverse satisfaction in honeying and making love over a nasty
corpse; while, if he had been capable of making the reflection, he
would have realized that Mrs. Winterbourne was not only a sadist, but a
necrophilous one.
In the succeeding weeks George’s death was the source of other, almost
unclouded, joys to Mrs. Winterbourne. She pardoned—temporarily—the
most offending of her enemies to increase the number of artistically
tear-blotched letters of bereavement she composed. Quite a few of the
nearly gentry, who usually avoided Mrs. Winterbourne as a particularly
virulent specimen of the human scorpion, paid calls—very brief
calls-y-of condolence. Even the Vicar appeared, and was greeted with
effusive sweetness; for though Mrs. Winterbourne professed herself a
social rebel and an “Agnostic” (not, however, until she had been more
or less kicked out of middle-class and Church society) she retained a
superstitious reverence for parsons of the Established Church.
Another joy was squabbling with Elizabeth Winterbourne, George’s wife,
about his poor little “estate” and military effects. When George joined
up, he thought he had to give his father as his next-of-kin. Later, he
found his mistake and when he went out to France the second time, he
gave his wife. The War Office carefully preserved both records, either
under the impression that there were two George Winterbournes, or
because the original record was never erased, and so became law. At any
rate, some of George’s possessions were sent to the country address,
and, although directed to the father, were unscrupulously seized by
his mother. And the remainder of his military kit and the pay due him
went to his wife. Old Mrs. Winterbourne was fearfully enraged at this.
Stupid red tape, she said it was. Why! Wasn’t her baby son _hers?_
Hadn’t she borne him, and therefore established complete possession
of him and his for the rest of her natural life? What can any woman
mean to a _Man_ in comparison with his _Mother?_ Therefore, it was
plain that she was the next-of-kin, and that all George’s possessions,
including the widow’s pension, should come to her and her only: Q.E.D.
She bothered her harassed husband about it, tried to stimulate Sam
Browne to action—but he evaporated in a would-be straight, clean
letter to Elizabeth, who knocked him out in the first round—and even
consulted a lawyer in London. Old Mrs. Winterbourne came back from
London in a spluttering temper. “That man” (i.e., her husband) had
“insulted” her again, by timidly stating that all George’s possessions
ought to be given to his wife, who would doubtless allow them to keep
a few “mementos.” And the lawyer—foul brute—had unsympathetically
said that George’s wife had a perfect right to sue her mother-in-law
for detaining her (Elizabeth’s) property. George’s will was perfectly
plain—he had left everything he had to his wife. However, that small
amount of George’s property which his mother got hold of, she kept,
in defiance of all the King’s horses and writs. And she took, she
embraced, the opportunity of telling “that woman” (i.e., Elizabeth)
what she thought of her—which, if believed, meant that poor Elizabeth
was a composition of Catherine of Russia, Lucrezia Borgia, Mme. de
Brinvilliers, Moll Flanders, a _tricoteuse_ and a hissing villainness
from the Surrey side.
But George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement
for about two months. Just as the quarrel with Elizabeth reached
stupendous heights of vulgar invective (on her side), old Winterbourne
got himself run over. So there was the excitement of the inquest and
a real funeral, and widow’s weeds and more tear-blotched letters. She
even sent a tear-blotched letter to Elizabeth, which I saw, saying that
“twenty years”—it was really almost thirty—“of happy married life
were over, both father and son were now happily united, and, whatever
Mr. Winterbourne’s faults, he was a _gentleman_.” (Heavily underlined
and followed by several exclamation marks, the insinuation being
apparently that Elizabeth was no lady.)
A month later Mrs. Winterbourne married the sheik—alas, no sheik
now—at a London registry office, whence they departed to Australia
to live a clean sportin’ life. Peace be with them both—they were too
clean and sportin’ for a corrupt and unclean Europe.
George’s parents, of course, were grotesques. When, in a mood of
cynical merriment, he used to tell his friends the exact truth
about his parents, he was always accused—even by quite intelligent
people—of creating a monstrous legend. Unless all the accepted
ideas about heredity and environment are false—which they probably
are—it is a regular mystery of Udolpho how George managed to be so
different from his parents and the family milieu. Physically he looked
like them both—in every other respect he might have dropped from
the moon for all the resemblance he had to them. Perhaps they seemed
so grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous
revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The
whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never
perceived it. They only worried about their rations. Old Winterbourne
also worried a good deal about “the country,” and wrote letters of
advice to the _Times_ (which didn’t publish them) and then rewrote
them on Club notepaper to the Prime Minister. They were invariably
politely acknowledged by a secretary. But Mrs. Winterbourne only
cared spasmodically about “the country.” Her view of the British
Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the
extermination of all “filthy, vile foreigners,” making the world safe
for straight, clean sheiks and pure, sweet, kittenish English women of
fifty. Grotesques indeed, fanciful, unbelievable, like men’s fashions
of 1840. To me, who only saw them a few times, either in company with
George or as his executor, they seemed as fantastic, as ridiculous, as
prehistoric as the returning _émigrés_ seemed to Paris in 1815. Like
the Bourbons, the elder Winterbournes learned nothing from the war, and
forgot nothing. It is the tragedy of England that the war has taught
its Winterbournes nothing, and that it has been ruled by grotesques and
a groaning Civil Service of disheartened men and women, while the young
have simply chucked up the job in despair. _Gott strafe England_ is a
prayer that has been fully answered—by the insanity of retaining the
old Winterbourne grotesques and pretending they are alive. And we go
on acquiescing, we go on without even the guts to kick the grotesque
Aunt Sallies of England into the Limbo they deserve. _Pero, pacienza.
Mañana. Mañana_....
* * * * *
I sometimes think that George committed suicide in that last battle
of the war. I don’t mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a
company commander to stand up when an enemy machine gun was traversing.
The situation he had got into with Elizabeth and Fanny Welford was not
inextricable, but it would have needed a certain amount of patience
and energy and determination and common sense to put right. But by
November ’18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was
a bit off his head, as were nearly all the troops after six months in
the line. Since Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves, and when
I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October ’18, he struck me as a
man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier
and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being
afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even
of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn’t see how we would face another
barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to
the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle.
We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny
and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth until it was such a
nightmare, such a portentous house of Atrides tragedy, that I began to
think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing
attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering
to each other—or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried
to interrupt and couldn’t. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near
the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were
certainly all to pieces.
Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted themselves
to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they
afterwards adapted themselves to the post-war. They both had that
rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the
ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful
smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them
talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon
the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes,
sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, et cetera. Such
wise young women, you thought; no sentimental nonsense about _them_.
No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come _their_ way.
They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There
was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the
intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as
easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to
anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom,
was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers.
But where there was a “proper relationship,” nothing could break it.
Jealousy? It was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit
those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand
tricks? Insulting to make such a suggestion. No, men. Men must be
“free” and women must be “free.”
Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair”
with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best
friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why
bother? Elizabeth _must_ know instinctively, and it was so much better
to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the
inferior intelligence.” So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t
know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually
antipathetic.” That was just before the war. But in 1914 something
went wrong with Elizabeth’s period, and she thought she was going to
have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head
entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more
talk of “freedom” _then!_ If she had a baby, her father would cut off
her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn’t be asked to Lady
Saint-Lawrence’s dinners, she.... Well, she “went at” George in a way
which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on
a special license, and they were married at a Registry office in the
presence of Elizabeth’s parents, who were also swept bewildered into
this sudden match, they knew not how or why. Elizabeth’s father had
feebly protested that George hadn’t any money, and Mrs. Winterbourne
senior wrote a marvellous tear-blotched dramatic epistle, in which
she said that George was a feeble-minded degenerate who had broken
his mother’s tender heart and insultingly trampled upon it, in a low
sensual lust for a vile woman who was only “after” the Winterbourne
money. As there wasn’t any Winterbourne money left, and the elder
Winterbournes lived on tick and shifts, the accusation was, to say the
least, fanciful. But Elizabeth bore down all opposition, and she and
George were married.
After the marriage, Elizabeth breathed again and became almost human.
Then and only then did she think of consulting a doctor, who diagnosed
some minor female malady, told her to “avoid cohabitation” for a few
weeks, and poofed with laughter at her pregnancy. George and Elizabeth
took a flat in Chelsea, and within three months Elizabeth was just as
“enlightened” as before and fuller of “freedom” than ever. Relieved by
the doctor’s assurance that only an operation could enable her to have
a child, she “had an affair” with a young man from Cambridge, and told
George about it. George was rather surprised and peeved, but played
the game nobly, and most gallantly yielded the flat up for the night,
whenever Elizabeth dropped a hint. Of course, he didn’t suffer as much
deprivation as Elizabeth thought, because he invariably spent those
nights with Fanny.
This went on until about the end of 1915. George, though attractive
to women, had a first-rate talent for the malapropos in dealing with
them. If he had told Elizabeth about his affair with Fanny at the
moment when she was full-flushed with the young man from Cambridge, she
would no doubt have acquiesced, and the thing would have been smoothed
over. Unluckily for George, he felt so certain that Fanny was right
and so certain that Elizabeth was right. He was perfectly convinced
that Elizabeth knew all about him and Fanny, and that if they didn’t
speak of it together, the only reason was that “one took such things
for granted,” no need to “cerebrize” about them. Then, one night, when
Elizabeth was getting tired of the young man from Cambridge, she was
struck by the extraordinary alacrity George showed in “getting out.”
“But, darling,” she said, “isn’t it very expensive always going to a
hotel? Can we afford it? And don’t you mind?”
“Oh, no,” said the innocent George, “I shall run round and spend the
night with Fanny as usual, you know.”
* * * * *
Then there was a blazing row, Elizabeth at George, and then Fanny at
George, and then—epic contest—Elizabeth at Fanny. Poor old George
got so fed up he went off and joined the infantry, fell into the first
recruiting office he came to, and was whisked off to a training camp
in the Midlands. But, of course, that didn’t solve the situation.
Elizabeth’s blood was up, and Fanny’s blood was up. It was Achilles
against Hector, with George as the body of Patroclus. Not that either
of them so horribly wanted George, but it was essential to each to
come off victorious and “bag” him, with the not improbable epilogue
of dropping him pretty quickly after he had been “bagged” away from
the other woman. So they each wrote him tender and emotional and
“understanding” letters, and sympathized with his sufferings under
military discipline. Elizabeth came down to the Midlands to bag him
for week-ends: and then one week when she was “having an affair” with
a young American in the Flying Corps, George got his “firing leave”
and spent it with Fanny. George was a bit obtuse with women. He was
very fond of Elizabeth, but he was also very fond of Fanny. If he
hadn’t been taken in with the “freedom” talk and had kept Elizabeth
permanently in the dark about Fanny, he might have lived an enviable
double life. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t, and never did, see
that the “freedom” talk was only talk with the two women, although
it was real enough to him. So he wrote them both the most imbecile
and provocative letters, praised Elizabeth to Fanny, and Fanny to
Elizabeth, and said how much he cared for them both; and he was like
Shelley, and Elizabeth was like Mary, and Fanny was like Emilia
Viviani. And he went on doing that even in France, right up to the end.
And he never even suspected what an ass he was.
Of course, George had not set foot on the boat which took him to the
Bolougne Base-Camp for the first time, before both Elizabeth and Fanny
had become absorbed in other “affairs.” They only fought for George in
a desultory way as a symbol, more to spite each other than because they
wanted to saddle themselves with him.
* * * * *
Elizabeth was out when her telegram came from the War Office. She did
not get it until nearly midnight, when she came back to the flat with a
fascinating young Swedish painter she had met at a Chelsea “rag” that
evening. She was a bit sozzled, and the young Swede—tall, blonde,
and handsome—was more than a little fired with love and whiskey. The
telegram was lying on the door-mat with two or three letters. Elizabeth
picked them up, and opened the telegram mechanically as she switched
on the electric light. The Swede stood watching her drunkenly and
amorously. She could not avoid a slight start, and turned a little pale.
“What’s the matter?”
Elizabeth laughed her high little nervous laugh, and laid the telegram
and letters on the table.
“The War Office regrets that my husband has been killed in action.”
It was now the Swede’s turn to be startled.
“Your husband...? Perhaps I’d better...”
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” said Elizabeth sharply, “he went out of my
life years ago. _She’ll_ mind, but I shan’t.”
She cried a bit in the bathroom, however; but the Swede was certainly a
very attentive lover. They drank a good deal of brandy, too.
* * * * *
Next day Elizabeth wrote to Fanny the first letter she had sent her for
months:
“Only a line, darling, to tell you that I have a telegram from the W.
O. to say George was killed in France on the 4th. I thought it would be
less of a shock for you to hear it from me than accidentally. Come and
see me when you get your weeps over, and we can hold a post mortem.”
* * * * *
Fanny didn’t reply to the letter. She had been rather fond of George,
and thought Elizabeth heartless. But Elizabeth, too, had been fond of
George; only, she wasn’t going to give it away to Fanny. I saw a good
deal of Elizabeth while settling up George’s scanty estate—mostly
furniture and books in the flat, his credit at Coxe’s, a few War
Bonds, a little money due to him from civilian sources and Elizabeth’s
pension. However, it meant a certain amount of letter-writing, which
Elizabeth was glad to have me do. I also saw Fanny once or twice, and
took her the trifles George had left her. But I never saw the two women
together—they avoided each other—and when my duties as executor were
done, I saw very little of either. Fanny went to Paris in 1919, and
soon married an American painter. I saw her in the Dome one night in
1924, pretty well rouged and quite nicely dressed, with a party. She
was laughing and flirting with a middle-aged American—possibly an art
patron—and didn’t look as if she mourned much for George. Why indeed
should she?
As for Elizabeth, she rather went to pieces. With her father’s
allowance, which doubled and became her own income when he died, and
her widow’s pension, she was quite well off as poor people of the
“artistic” sort go. She travelled a good deal, always with a pretty
large brandy flask, and had more lovers than were good for her—or
them. I hadn’t seen her for years, until about a month ago I ran into
her on the corner of the Piazzetta in Venice. She was with Stanley
Hopkins, one of those extremely clever young novelists who oscillate
between women and homosexuality. He had recently published a novel so
exceedingly clever, so stupendously smart and up-to-date and witty
and full of personalities about well-known people, that he was quite
famous, especially in America, where all Hopkins’s brilliantly quacking
and hissing and kissing geese were taken as melodious swans and (vide
press) as a “startling revelation of the corruption of the British
Aristocracy!” We went and had ices together, all three, at Florians;
and then Hopkins went off to get something, and left us together for
half an hour. Elizabeth chattered very wittily—you had to be witty
with Hopkins or die of shame and humiliation—but never mentioned
George. George was a drab bird from a drab past. She told me that she
and Hopkins would not marry, they had both determined never to pollute
themselves with the farce of “legalized copulation,” but they would
“probably go on living with each other.” Hopkins, who was a very rich
young man as well as a successful novelist, had settled a thousand a
year on her, so that they could both be “free.” She looked as nearly
unmiserable as our cynical and battered generation can look; but she
still had the brandy flask.
* * * * *
Like a fool, I allowed myself to be persuaded to drink liqueur
brandies after dinner that evening; and paid for it with a sleepless
night. No doubt it was the unexpected meeting with Elizabeth which
made me think a lot about George during those ghastly wakeful hours. I
can’t claim that I had set up any altar to the deceased George in my
heart, but I truly believe that I am the only person left alive who
ever thinks of him. Perhaps because I was the only person who cared
for George for his own sake, disinterestedly. Naturally, his death
meant very little to me at the time—there were eighty deaths in my own
battalion on the day George was killed, and the Armistice and getting
out of the blasted Army and settling my own problems and starting
civilian life again and getting to work, all occupied my attention. In
fact it was not until two or three years after the war that I began to
think much, if at all, about George. Then, although I didn’t in the
least believe in it, I got a half-superstitious, half-sentimental idea
that “he” (poor old bag of decaying bones) wanted me to think about
him. I half-knew, half-guessed that the people on whom he had counted
had forgotten him, at least no longer cared that he had existed; and
would have been merely surprised and rather annoyed if he had suddenly
come back, like one of those shell-shocked heroes of fiction who
recover their wits seven years after the Armistice. His father had
taken it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in
“unlicensed copulation” and brandy, and Fanny in tears, and marrying a
painter. But I hadn’t taken it out in anything, I hadn’t been conscious
that George’s death meant anything in particular to me; and so it was
waiting inside patiently to be dealt with in due course.
Friendships between soldiers during the war were a real and beautiful
and unique relationship which has now entirely vanished, at least
from Western Europe. Let me at once disabuse the eager-eyed Sodomites
among my readers by stating emphatically once and for all that there
was nothing sodomitical in these friendships. I have lived and slept
for months, indeed years, with “the troops,” and had several such
companionships. But no vaguest proposal was ever made to me; I never
saw any signs of sodomy, and never heard anything to make me suppose it
existed. However, I was with the fighting troops. I can’t answer for
what went on behind the lines.
No, no. There was no sodomy about it. It was just a human relation, a
comradeship, an undemonstrative exchange of sympathies between ordinary
men racked to extremity under a great common strain in a great common
danger. There was nothing dramatic about it. Bill and Tom would be in
the same section, or Jones and Smith subalterns in the same company.
They’d go on fatigues and patrols together, march behind each other on
trench reliefs, booze at the same estaminet, and show each other the
“photos” of “Ma” and “my tart,” if Tommies. Or they’d meet on trench
duty and volunteer for the same trench raid and back up each other’s
lies to the inspecting Brigadier and share a servant and stick together
in a battle and ride together when on rest and talk shyly about their
“fiancées” or wives in England, if officers. When they separated,
they would be glum for a bit, and then, in the course of a month or
two or three, strike up another friendship. Only, the companionship
was generally a real one, pretty unselfish. Of course, this sort of
friendship was stronger in France than in England, more vivid in the
line than out of it. Probably a man must have something to love—quite
apart from the “love” of sexual desire. (Prisoners are supposed to
love rats and spiders.) Soldiers, especially soldiers overseas in the
last war, entirely cut off from women and friends, had perforce to
love another soldier, there being no dogs available. Very few of these
friendships survived the Peace.
* * * * *
After seven months in France and a month’s leave, I felt pretty glum
when I was sent to an Officers’ Training Camp in a beautiful but very
remote part of Dorset. I was mooning about in a gloomy way before my
first dinner as a potential though temporary gentleman, when I ran into
another fellow similarly mooning. He was George, who had been seen off
that day from Paddington by Elizabeth and Fanny (although I did not
then know it) and who was also feeling very glum about it. We exchanged
a few words, found we were both B. E. F. (most of the others were not)
and that we were allotted to the same barrack room. We found we had
certain tastes in common, and we became friends.
I liked George. For one thing he was the only person in the whole of
that hellish camp with whom I could exchange a word on any topic but
booze, “tarts,” “square-pushing,” smut, the war, and camp gossip.
George was very enthusiastic about modern painting. His own painting,
he told me, was “pretty dud,” but in peace time he made a good living
by writing art criticism for various papers and by buying modern
pictures, chiefly French and German, on commission for wealthy
collectors. We lent each other books from our scanty store, and George
was quite thrilled to know that I had published one or two little
books of poetry and had even met Yeats and Marinetti. I talked to him
about modern poetry, and he talked to me about modern painting; and I
think we helped to keep each other’s “souls” alive. In the evenings
we played chess or strolled about, if it was fine. George didn’t go
square-pushing with tarts, and I didn’t go square-pushing with tarts.
So on Saturday afternoons and Sundays we took long walks over that
barren but rather beautiful Dorset down country, and had a quiet dinner
with a bottle of wine in one or other of the better country inns.
And all that kept up our own particular “morale,” which each of us
had determined not to yield to the Army swinishness. Poor George had
suffered more than I. He had been more bullied as a Tommy, had a worse
time in France, and suffered horribly from that “tightness” inside,
that inability to confide himself, induced by his singular home life
and appalling mother. I feel quite sure he told me more about himself,
far more, than he ever told any one else, so that eventually I knew
quite a lot about him. He told me all about his parents and about
Elizabeth and Fanny, and about his childhood and his life in London and
Paris.
As I say, I liked George, and I’m grateful to him because he helped
me to keep alive when a legion of the swine were trying to destroy me.
And, of course, I helped him. He had a strong dose of shyness—his
mother had sapped his self-confidence abominably—which made him seem
rather conceited and very aloof. But _au fond_ he was extraordinarily
generous, spontaneous, rather Quixotish. It was that which made him
so helpless with women, who neither want nor understand Quixotic
behaviour and scrupulousness, and who either think they mean weakness
or are veils for some devilish calculation. But with another man,
who wanted nothing from him but a frank exchange of friendliness,
he was a charming and inexhaustible companion. I was damned glad
to get my commission and leave that stinking hole of a Camp, but I
was really sorry to part from George. We agreed to write, and both
applied for commissions in the same regiment. Needless to say, we were
both gazetted to completely different regiments from those we had
applied for. We exchanged one or two letters while waiting in depots
in England, and then ceased writing. But, by an odd freak of the War
Office, we were both sent to different battalions in the same Brigade.
It was nearly two months before we found this out, when we both met by
accident at Brigade Headquarters.
I was rather startled at George’s appearance, he looked so worried and
almost scared. I saw him on reliefs or at Brigade Headquarters or at
Divisional Rest Camp several times. He looked whacked in May ’18. In
July the Division moved down to the Somme, but George’s company front
was raided the night before we left, and he was badly rattled by it.
I had watched the box barrage from the top of Battalion Headquarters
dugout (I was then signal officer), but I never thought that George was
in it. He lost several men as prisoners, and the Brigadier was a bit
nasty about it, which made George more rattled and jumpy than ever. I
told him then that he ought to apply for a rest, but he was in an agony
of feeling that he was disgraced and a coward; and wouldn’t listen to
me.
The last time I saw him was at Hermies, in October ’18, as I
mentioned before. I had come up from a course and found George had
been “left-out” at Divisional Rest Camp for that tour. There were some
sacking beds in the Orderly room, and George got me one. He talked on
in the dark for what seemed hours during the air-raids, and I really
thought he was demented. Next morning, we rejoined our battalions, and
I never saw him again.
George was killed soon after dawn on the 4th of November, 1918, at a
place called Maison Blanche, on the road from La Cateau to Bavay. He
was the only officer in his battalion killed in that action, for the
Germans surrendered or ran away in less than an hour. I heard about
it that night, and, as the Brigade was “resting” on the 5th, I got
permission from my Colonel to ride back to George’s funeral. I heard
from George’s Colonel that he had got enfiladed by a machine-gun.
The whole of his company were lying down, waiting for the flying
trench-mortar squad to deal with the machine-gun, when for some
unexplained reason, George had stood up, and a dozen bullets had gone
through him. “Silly ass,” was the Colonel’s comment, as he nodded and
left me.
No coffins were available, so they wrapped George in a blanket and the
Union Jack. The parson stood at the head of the grave, a mourning party
of Tommies and N.C.O.’s from his company on one side, and, facing them,
the officers of his battalion. I was on the extreme left of the line.
The Chaplain read the military burial service in a clear voice, and
read it well. There was very little artillery fire. Only one battery of
our own heavies, about a mile nearer the enemy, was shelling at regular
intervals like a last salute. We stood to attention, and the body was
lowered. Each of the officers in turn stepped up to the grave-side,
saluted and turned away. Then the battalion buglers blew that
soul-shattering, heart-rending Last Post, with its inexorable chains
of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails. I admit I did a
lot of swallowing those few minutes. You can say what you like against
the Army, but they treat you like a gentleman, when you’re dead.... The
Tommies were numbered, formed fours, right turned, and marched away;
and the officers strolled over to the mess for a drink....
* * * * *
The death of a hero! What mockery, what bloody cant. What sickening
putrid cant. George’s death is a symbol to me of the whole sickening
bloody waste of it, the damnable stupid waste and torture of it. You’ve
seen how George’s own people—the makers of his body, the women who
held his body to theirs—were affected by his death. The Army did its
bit, but how could the Army individually mourn a million “heroes”? How
could the little bit of Army which knew George mourn him? At dawn next
morning we were hot-foot after the retreating enemy, and did not pause
until the Armistice—and then we had our own lives to struggle with and
disentangle.
That night in Venice, George and his death became a symbol to me—and
still remain a symbol. Somehow or other we have to make these dead
acceptable, we have to atone for them, we have to appease them. How,
I don’t quite know. I know there’s the Two Minutes Silence. But after
all a Two Minutes Silence once a year isn’t doing much—in fact, it’s
doing nothing. Atonement, how can we atone? How can we atone for the
lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes
and seas of blood? Something is unfulfilled, and that is poisoning us.
It is poisoning me, at any rate, though I have agonized over it, as
I now agonize over poor George, for whose death no other human being
has agonized. What can we do? Headstones and wreaths and memorials and
speeches and the cenotaph—no, no, it has got to be something _in_ us.
Somehow, we must atone to the dead, the dead, murdered, violently-dead
soldiers. The reproach is not from them, but in ourselves. Most of us
don’t know it, but it is there, and poisons us. It is the poison that
makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless—us the war generation and
the new generation, too. The whole world is blood-guilty, cursed like
Orestes, and mad, and destroying itself, as if pursued by an infinite
legion of Eumenides. Somehow we must atone, somehow we must free
ourselves from the curse—the blood-guiltiness. We must find—where?
how?—the greater Pallas who will absolve us on some Acropolis of
Justice. But meanwhile the dead poison us and those who come after us.
* * * * *
That is why I am writing the life of George Winterbourne, a unit,
one human body murdered, but to me a symbol. It is an atonement, a
desperate effort to wipe off the blood-guiltiness. Perhaps it is the
wrong way. Perhaps the poison will still be in me. If so, I shall
search for some other way. But I shall search. I know what is poisoning
me. I do not know what is poisoning you, but you are poisoned. Perhaps
you too must atone.