by John Buchan
‘He served, didn’t he?’ Leithen asked. ‘I remember running across him at GHQ.’
‘You may call it serving, if you mean that he was never out of uniform for four years. But he didn’t fight. I wanted him to. I thought a line battalion might make a man of him, but he shrank from the notion. It wasn’t lack of courage — I satisfied myself of that. But he hadn’t the nerve to sink himself into the ranks of ordinary men. You understand why? It would have meant the realisation of what was the inmost fear of his heart. He had to keep up the delusion that he was some sort of a swell — had to have authority to buttress his tottering vanity.
‘So he had a selection of footling staff jobs — liaison with this and that, deputy-assistant to Tom, Dick and Harry, quite futile, but able to command special passes and staff cars. He ranked, I think, as a full colonel, but an Army Service Corps private was more useful than ten of him. And he was as miserable as a man could be. He liked people to think that his trouble was the strain of the war, but the real strain was that there was no strain. He knew that he simply didn’t matter. At least he was candid with himself, and he was sometimes candid with me. He rather hoped, I think, that I would inspan him into something worth doing, but in common honesty I couldn’t, for you see I too had come to disbelieve in him utterly.
‘Well, that went on till March 1918, when his brother Reggie was killed in the German push. Ninth Division, wasn’t it?’
Palliser-Yeates nodded. ‘Ninth. South African Brigade. He went down at Marrières Wood, but he and his lot stuck up the enemy for the best part of a Sunday, and I solemnly believe, saved our whole front. They were at the critical point, you see, the junction of Gough and Byng. His body was never found.’
‘I know,’ said Sir Arthur, ‘and that is just the point of my story.’ He stopped. ‘I suppose I’m right to tell you this. He left instructions that if anything happened to him I was to have his diary. He can’t have meant me to keep it secret... No, I think he would have liked one or two people to know.’
He looked towards Palliser-Yeates. ‘You knew Reggie Souldern? How would you describe him?’
‘The very best stamp of British regimental officer,’ was the emphatic reply.
‘Clever?’
‘Not a bit. Only average brains, but every ounce of them useful. Always cheery and competent, and a born leader of men. He was due for a brigade when he fell, and if the war had lasted another couple of years he might have had a corps. I never met the other Souldern, but from what you say he must have been the plumb opposite of Reggie.’
‘Just so. George had a great opinion of his brother — in addition to the ordinary brotherly love, for there were only the two of them. I thought the news of his death would break him altogether. But it didn’t. He took it with extraordinary calm, and presently it looked as if he were actually more cheerful... You see, they never found the body. He never saw him lying dead, or even the grave where he was buried, and he never met anybody who had. Reggie had been translated mysteriously out of the world, but the melancholy indisputable signs of death were lacking.’
‘You mean he thought he was only missing and might turn up some day?’
‘No. He knew he was dead — the proof was too strong, the presumption was too heavy... But while there was enough to convince his reason, there was too little for his imagination - no white face and stiff body, no wooden cross in the cemetery. He could picture him as still alive, and George had a queer sensitive imagination about which most people knew nothing.’
Sir Arthur looked round the table and saw that we were puzzled.
‘It is a little difficult to explain... Do you remember a story of the French at Verdun making an attack over ground they had been fighting on for months? They shouted “En avant, les morts” and they believed that the spirits of the dead responded and redressed the balance. I think it was the last action at Vaux... I don’t suppose the poilu thought the dead came back to help him, but he pretended they were still combatants, and got a moral support from the fancy... That was something like George Souldern’s case. If you had asked him, you would have found that he had no doubt that what was left of Reggie was somewhere in the churned-up wilderness north of Péronne. And there was never any nonsense about visitations or messages from the dead... But the lack of visible proofs enabled his imagination to picture Reggie as still alive, and going from strength to strength. He nursed the fancy till it became as real to him as anything in his ordinary life... Reggie was becoming a great man and would soon be the most famous man in the world, and something of Reggie went into him and he shared in Reggie’s glory. In March’18 a partnership began for George Souldern with his dead brother, and the dead, who in his imagination was alive and triumphant, lifted him out of the sticky furrow which he had been ploughing since he left Oxford.’
We were all silent except Pugh, who said that he had come across the same thing in the East — some Rajput prince, I think.
‘How did you know this?’ Lamancha asked.
‘From the diary. George set down very fully every stage of his new career. But I very nearly guessed the truth for myself. You see, knowing him as I did, I had to admit a sudden and staggering change.’
‘How soon?’
‘The week after the news came. I had been in Paris, and on my return ran across George in the Travellers’ and said the ordinary banal words of sympathy. He looked at me queerly, as he thanked me, and if I had not known how deeply attached the brothers were, I would have said that he was exhilarated by his loss. It was almost as if he had been given a drug to strengthen his arteries. He seemed to me suddenly a more substantial fellow, calmer, more at peace with himself. He said an odd thing too. “Old Reggie has got his chance,” he said, and then, as if pulling himself up, “I mean, he had the chance he wanted.”
‘In June it was clear that something had happened to George Souldern. Do you remember how about that time a wave of dejection passed over all the Allied countries? It was partly the mess in Russia, partly in this country a slight loss of confidence in the Government, which seemed to have got to loggerheads with the soldiers, but mainly the “drag” that comes in all wars. It was the same in the American Civil War before Gettysburg. Foch was marking time, but he was doing it by retreating pretty fast on the Aisne. Well, our people needed a little cheering up, and our politicians tried their hand at it. There was a debate in Parliament, and far the best speech was George’s. The rest was mere platitude and rhetoric, but he came down on the point like a steam-hammer.’
‘I know,’ said Lamancha. ‘I read it in the Times in a field hospital in Palestine.’
‘In his old days nobody would have paid much attention. He would have been clever and epigrammatic — sound enough, but “precious”. His speech would have read well, if it had been reported, but it wouldn’t have mattered a penn’orth to anybody... Instead he said just the wise, simple, stalwart thing that every honest man had at the back of his head, and he said it with an air which made everybody sit up. For the first time in his life he spoke as one having authority. The press reported him nearly verbatim, for the journalists in the Gallery have a very acute sense of popular values.
‘The speech put George, as the phrase goes, on the political map. The Prime Minister spoke to me about him, and there was some talk of employing him on a mission which never materialised. I met him one day in the street and congratulated him, and I remember that I was struck by the new vigour in his personality. He made me come home with him to tea, and to talk to him was like breathing ozone. He asked me one or two questions about numbers, and then he gave me his views on the war. At the time it was fashionable to think that no decision would be reached till the next summer, but George maintained that, if we played our cards right, victory was a mathematical certainty before Christmas. He showed a knowledge of the military situation which would have done credit to any soldier, and he could express himself, which few soldiers can do. His arguments stuck in my head, and I believe I used them in the War Ca
binet. I left with a very real respect for one whom I had written off as a failure.
‘Well, then came the last battle of the Marne, and Haig’s great advance, and all the drama and confusion of the autumn months. I lost sight of George, for I was busy with the peace overtures, and I don’t think I even heard of him again till the new year... But the diary tells all about those months. I am giving you the bones of the story, but I am going to burn the diary, for it is too intimate for other eyes... According to it Reggie finished the war as a blazing hero. It was all worked out in detail with maps and diagrams. He had become a corps commander by August, and in October he was the chief fighting figure on the British front, the conduit pipe of Foch’s ideas, for he could work out in practice what the great man saw as a vision. It sounds crazy, but it was so convincingly done that I had to rub my eyes and make myself remember that Reggie was lying in a nameless grave on the Somme and not a household word in two hemispheres... George, too, shared in his glory, but just how was not very clear. Anyway, the brothers were in the front of the stage, Reggie the bigger man and George his civilian adviser and opposite number. I can see now how he got his confidence. He was no longer a struggler, but a made man; he had arrived, he was proved, the world required him. Whatever he said or did must be attended to, and, because he believed this, it was.’
Lamancha whistled long and low. ‘But how could his mind work, if he lived among fairy tales?’ he asked.
‘He didn’t,’ said Sir Arthur. ‘He lived very much in the real world. But he had all the time his private imaginative preserve, into which his normal mind did not penetrate. He drew his confidence from this preserve, and, having once got it, could carry it also into the real world.’
‘Wasn’t he intolerably conceited?’ someone asked.
‘No, for the great man was Reggie and he was only a satellite. He was Reggie’s prophet, and assured enough on that side, but there was no personal arrogance. His dead brother had become, so to speak, his familiar spirit, his demon. The fact is that George was less of an egotist than he had ever been before. His vanity was burned up in a passion of service.
‘I saw him frequently during the first half of’19, and had many talks with him. He had been returned to Parliament by a big majority, but he wasn’t much in the public eye. He didn’t like the way things were going, but at the same time as a good citizen he declined to make things more difficult for the Government. The diary gives his thoughts at that time. He considered that the soldiers should have had the chief share in the settlement of the world — Foch and Haig and Hindenburg —— and Reggie. He held that they would have made a cleaner and fairer job of it than the kind of circus that appeared at Versailles. Perhaps he was right — I can’t be dogmatic, for I was a performer in the circus.
‘That, of course, I didn’t know till the other day. But the change in George Souldern was soon manifest to the whole world. There was the Irish business, when he went down to the worst parts of the South and West, and seemed to be simply asking for a bullet in his head. He was half Irish, you know. He wrote and said quite frankly that he didn’t care a straw whether Ireland was inside or outside the British Empire, that the only thing which mattered was that she should find a soul, and that she had a long road to travel before she got one. He told her that at present she was one vast perambulating humbug, and that till she got a little discipline and sense of realities she would remain on the level of Hayti. Why some gunman didn’t have a shot at him I can’t imagine, except that such naked candour and courage was a new thing and had to be respected... Then there was the Unemployment Commission. You remember the majority report — pious generalities and futile compromises, George’s dissenting report made him for a month the best abused man in Britain, for he was impartially contemptuous of all sides. To-day — well, I fancy most of us would agree with George, and I observe that he is frequently quoted by the Labour people.
‘What struck me about his line of country was that it was like that of a good soldier’s. He had the same power of seeing simple facts and of making simple syllogisms, which the clever intellectual — such as George used to be — invariably misses. And there was the soldier’s fidelity and sense of service. George plainly had no axe to grind. He had intellectual courage and would back his views as a general backs his strategy, but he kept always a curious personal modesty. I tell you it seemed nothing short of a miracle to one who had known him in the old days.
‘I accepted it as the act of God and didn’t look for any further explanation. I think that what first set me questioning was his behaviour about Reggie’s memorial. The family wanted a stone put up in the churchyard of the family place in Gloucestershire. George absolutely declined. He stuck his toes into the ground and gave nothing but a flat refusal. One might have thought that the brothers had been estranged, but it was common knowledge that they had been like twins and had written to each other every day.
‘Then there was the business about a memoir of Reggie. The regiment wanted one, and his Staff College contemporaries. Tollett — you remember him, the man on the Third Army Staff — volunteered to write it, of course with George’s assistance. George refused bluntly and said that he felt the strongest distaste for the proposal. Tollett came to me about it, and I had George to luncheon and thrashed it out with him. I found his reasons very difficult to follow, for he objected even to a regimental history being compiled. He admitted that Tollett was as good a man as could be found for the job, but he said he hated the idea. Nobody understood Reggie but himself. Someday, he suggested, he might try to do justice to him in print - but not yet. I put forward all the arguments I could think of, but George was adamant.
‘Walking home, I puzzled a good deal about the affair. It couldn’t be merely the jealousy of a writer who wanted to reserve a good subject for himself - that wasn’t George’s character, and he had no literary vanity. Besides, that wouldn’t explain his aversion to a prosaic regimental chronicle, and still less his objection to the cenotaph in the Gloucestershire churchyard. I wondered if there was not some quirk in George, some odd obsession about his brother. For a moment I thought that he might have been dabbling in spiritualism and have got some message from Reggie, till I remembered that I had heard him a week before declare his unbridled contempt for such mumbo-jumbo.
‘I thought a good deal about it, and the guess I made was that George was living a double life — that in his subconsciousness Reggie was still alive for him. It was only a guess, but it was fairly near the truth, and last year I had it from his own lips.
‘We were duck-shooting together on Croftsmoor, the big marsh near his home. That had been Reggie’s pet game; he used to be out at all hours in the winter dawns and dusks stalking wildfowl. George never cared for it, or indeed for any field sport. He would take his place at a covert shoot or a grouse drive and was useful enough with a gun, but he would have been the first to disclaim the title of sportsman. But now he was as keen and tireless as Reggie. He kept me out for eight hours in a filthy day of rain wading in trench boots in Gloucestershire mud.
‘We did fairly well, and just before sunset the weather improved. The wind had gone into the north, and promised frost, and as we sat on an old broken-backed stone bridge over one of the dykes, waiting for the birds to be collected from the different stands, the western sky was one broad band of palest gold. We were both tired, and the sudden change from blustering rain to a cold stillness, and from grey mist to colour and light, had a strange effect upon my spirits. I felt peaceful and solemnised. I lit a pipe, but let it go out, for my attention was held by the shoreless ocean in the west, against which the scarp of the Welsh hills showed in a dim silhouette. The sharp air, the wild marsh scents, the faint odour of tobacco awoke in me a thousand half-sad and half-sweet recollections.
‘I couldn’t help it. I said something about Reggie.
‘George was sitting on the bridge with his eyes fixed on the sky. I thought he hadn’t heard me, till suddenly he repeated “Reggie. Yes, old Reggi
e.”
‘“This was what he loved,” I said.
‘“He still loves it,” was the answer, spoken very low. And then he repeated — to himself as it were:
“‘Fight on, fight on,’ said Sir Andrew Barton.
‘Though I be wounded I am not slain.
I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile
And then I’ll rise and fight again.’”
He turned his fine-drawn face to me.
‘“You think Reggie is dead?”
‘I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I stammered, ‘I suppose—”
‘“What do you mean by death?” His voice was almost shrill. “We know nothing about it. What does it matter if the body is buried in a shell-hole — ?”
‘He stopped suddenly, as a lamp goes out when you press the switch. I had the impression that those queer shrill words came not from George but from some other who had joined us.
‘“I believe that the spirit is immortal,” I began.
‘“The spirit—” again the shrill impersonal voice—”I tell you the whole man lives... He is nearer to me than he ever was... we are never parted...”
‘Again the light went out. He seemed to gulp, and when he spoke it was in his natural tones.
‘“I apologise,” he said, “I must seem to you to be talking nonsense... You don’t understand. You would understand, if anyone could, but I can’t explain — yet — someday...”
‘The head-keeper, the beaters and the dogs came out of the reed beds, and at the same time the uncanny glow in the west was shrouded with the film of the coming night. It was almost dark when we turned to walk home, and I was glad of it, for neither of us wished to look at the other’s face.
‘I felt at once embarrassed and enlightened. I had been given a glimpse into the cloudy places of a man’s soul, and had surprised his secret. My guess had been right. In George’s subconscious mind Reggie was still alive - nay more, was progressing in achievement as if he had never disappeared in the March battle. It was no question of a disembodied spirit establishing communication with the living — that was a business I knew nothing about, nor George either. It was a question of life, complete life, in a peculiar world, companionship in some spiritual fourth dimension, and from that companionship he was drawing sustenance. He had learned Reggie’s forthrightness and his happy simplicity... I wondered and I trembled. There is a story of an early Victorian statesman who in his leisure moments played at being Emperor of Byzantium. The old Whig kept the two things strictly separate — he was a pious humanitarian in his English life, though he was a ruthless conqueror in the other. But in George’s case the two were mingling. He was going about his daily duties with the power acquired from his secret world; that secret world, in which, with Reggie, he had become a master, was giving him a mastery over our common life... I did not believe it would last. It was against nature that a man could continue to live as a parasite on the dead.