by John Fowles
"Her parents moved into the house next door. I met Lily face to face. And there was some bridge between us. It was not all my imagination, this something came from her as well as from me — a joint umbilical cord, something we dared not speak of, of course, yet which we both knew was there.
"She was very like me in many ordinary ways. She too had few friends in London. And the final touch to this faiiy story was that she too was musical. Not very strikingly gifted, but musical. Her father was a peculiar man, Irish, with private means, and with a passion for music. He played the flute very well. Of course he had to meet Bruneau, who sometimes came to our house, and through Bruneau he met Dolmetsch, who interested him in the recorder. Another forgotten instrument in those days. I remember so well Lily playing her first solo on a flat-sounding descant recorder made by Dolmetsch and bought for her by her father.
"Our two families grew very close. I accompanied Lily, we sometimes played duets, sometimes her father would join us, sometimes the two mothers would sing. We discovered a whole new continent of music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Arbeau, Frescobaldi, Froberger — in those years people suddenly realized that there had been music before 1700."
He paused. I wanted to light a cigarette, but more than that I wanted not to distract him, his reaching back. So I held the cigarette between my fingers, and waited.
"Lily. She had, yes, I suppose a Botticelli beauty, long fair hair, gray-violet eyes. But that makes her sound too pale, too Pre-Raphaelite. She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naϊvety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress. I make her sound too colorless to you. Of course, in those days, what we young men looked for was not so much the body as the soul. Lily was a very pretty girl. But it was her soul that was sans pareil.
"No obstacles except those of propriety were ever put between us. I said just now that we were very alike in interests and tastes. But we were opposites in temperament. Lily was always so very selfcontrolled, patient, helping. I was temperamental. Moody. And very selfish. I never saw her hurt anyone or anything. But if I wanted something I wanted it at once. Lily used to disgust me with myself. I used to think of my Greek blood as 'dark' blood. Almost Negro blood. "And then too I soon began to love her physically. Whereas she loved me, or treated me, more as a brother. Of course we knew we were going to marry; we promised ourselves to each other when she was only sixteen. But I was hardly ever allowed to kiss her. You cannot imagine this. To be so close to a girl and yet so rarely be able to caress her. My desires were very innocent. I had all the usual notions of the time about the nobility of chastity. But I was not completely English.
"There was o Pappous — my grandfather — really my mother's uncle. He had become a naturalized Englishman, but he never carried his anglophilia to the point of being puritan, or even respectable. He was not, I think, a very wicked old man. What I knew of him corrupted me far less than the false ideas I conceived. I always spoke with him in Greek, and as you perhaps realize Greek is a naturally sensual and uneuphemistic language. I surreptitiously read certain books I found on his shelves. I saw La Vie Parisienne. I came one day on a folder full of tinted engravings. And so I began to have erotic daydreams. The demure Lily in her straw hat, a hat I could describe to you now, still, as well as if I had it here in front of me, the crown swathed in a pale tulle the color of a summer haze . . . in a long-sleeved, high-necked, pink-and-white striped blouse . . . a dark blue hobble skirt, beside whom I walked across Regent's Park in the spring of 1914. The entranced girl I stood behind in the gallery at Covent Garden in June, nearly fainting in the heat — such a summer, that year — to hear Chaliapin in Prince Igor . . . Lily — she became in my mind at night the abandoned young prostitute. I thought I was very abnormal to have created this second Lily from the real one. I was bitterly ashamed again of my Greek blood. Yet possessed
by it. I blamed everything on that, and my mother suffered, poor woman. My father's family had already humiliated her enough, without her own son joining in.
"I was ashamed then. I am proud now to have Greek and Italian and English blood and even some Celtic blood. One of my father's grandmothers was a Scotswoman. I am European. That is all that matters to me. But in 1914 I wanted to be purely English so as to be able to offer myself untainted to Lily.
"You know, of course, that something far more monstrous than my adolescent Arabian Night was being imagined in the young mind of twentieth-century Europe. I was just eighteen. The war began. They were unreal, the first days of that war. So much peace and plenty, for so long a time. Unconsciously, in the Jungian collective id, perhaps everyone wanted a change, a purge. A holocaust. But it appeared to us unpolitical citizens a matter of pride, of purely military pride. Something which the Regular Army and His Majesty's invincible Navy would settle. There was no conscription, no feeling, in my world, of necessity to volunteer. It never crossed my mind that I might one day have to fight. Moltke, Bà¼low, Foch, Haig, French — the names meant nothing. But then came the somber coup d'archet of Mons and Le Cateau. That was totally new. The efficiency of the Germans, the horror stories about the Prussian Guards, the Belgian outrages, the black shock of the casualty lists. Kitchener. The Million Army. And then in September the battle of the Marne — that was no longer cricket. Eight hundred thousand — imagine them drawn up down there on the sea — eight hundred thousand candles all blown out in one gigantic breath.
"December came. The 'flappers' and the 'nuts' had disappeared. My father told me one evening that neither he nor my mother would think the worse of me if I did not go. I had started at the Royal College of Music, and the atmosphere there was at first hostile to volunteering. The war had nothing to do with art or artists. I remember my parents and Lily's discussing the war. They agreed it was inhuman. But my father's conversation with me became strained. He became a special constable, a member of the local emergency committee. Then the son of his head clerk was killed in action. He told us that one silent dinner-time, and left my mother and me alone immediately afterwards. Nothing was said, but everything was plain. One day soon afterwards, Lily and I stood and watched a contingent of troops marching through the streets on their way to Victoria. It was wet after rain, the pavements shining. They were going to France, and someone beside us said they were volunteers. I watched their singing faces in the yellow of the gaslamps. The cheering people around us. The smell of wet serge. They were drunk, marchers and watchers, exalted out of themselves, their faces set in the rictus of certainty. Medieval in their certainty. I had not then heard the famous phrase. But this was le consentement frémissant a la guerre.
"They are mad, I said to Lily. She did not seem to hear me. But when they had gone she turned and said, If I was going to die tomorrow I should be mad. It stunned me. We went home in silence. And all the way she hummed, I now — but could not then — believe without malice, a song of the day."
He paused, then half sung it:
We shall miss you, we shall kiss you,
But we think you ought to go.
"I felt like a small boy beside her. Once again I blamed my miserable Greek blood. It had made me a coward as well as a lecher. I see, when I look back, that indeed it had. Because I was less a true coward, a calculating coward, than someone so innocent, or so Greek, that he could not see what the war had to do with him. Social responsibility has never been a Greek characteristic. "When we reached our houses, Lily kissed my cheek and ran in. I understood. She could not apologize, but she could still pity. I spent a night and a day and a second night in agony. The next day I saw Lily and told her I was going to volunteer. All the blood left her cheeks. Then she burst into tears and threw herself into my arms. So did my mother when I told her. But hers was a purer grief.
"I was passed fit, accepted. I was a hero. Lily's father presented me with an old pistol he had. My father opened champagne. And then when I got to my room, and sat on my bed with th
e pistol in my hands, I cried. Not from fear — for the sheer nobility of what I was doing. I had never felt public-spirited before. And I also thought that I had conquered that Greek half of me. I was fully English at last.
"I was pushed into the 13th London Rifles — Princess Louise's Kensington Regiment. There I became two people — one who watched and one who tried to forget that the other watched. We were trained less to kill than to be killed. Taught to advance at two-pace intervals — against guns that fired two hundred and fifty bullets a minute. The Germans and the French did the same. No doubt we should have objected if we had ever seriously thought about action. But the current myth at that time maintained that the volunteers were to be used only for guard and communication duties. The regulars and reservists were the fighting troops. Besides, every week we were told that because of its enormous cost the war could not last another month."
I heard him move in his chair. In the silence that followed I waited for him to continue. But he said nothing. The stars shimmered in their dustless glittering clouds; the terrace was like a stage beneath them.
"A glass of brandy?"
"I hope you're not going to stop."
"Let us have some brandy."
He stood up and lit the candle. Then he disappeared.
I lay in my chair and stared up at the stars. 1914 and 1953 were eons apart; 1914 was on a planet circling one of the furthest faintest stars. The vast stretch, the pace of time. Then they came again, those footsteps. This time, they approached. It was the same rapid walk. But it was much too warm for rapid walking. Someone wanted to reach the house urgently, and without being seen. I got quickly to the parapet.
I was just in time to glimpse a pale shape at the far end of the house move up the steps and under the colonnade. I could not see well, my eyes had been dazzled, after the darkness, by the candle. But it was not Maria; a whiteness, a flowing whiteness, a long coat or a dressing gown — I had only a second's sight, but I knew it was a woman and I knew it was not an old woman. I suspected, too, that I had been meant to see her. Because if one wanted to get into the house unheard, one wouldn't cross the gravel, but approach the house from the rear, or the far side. There was a sound from the bedroom and Conchis appeared in the lamplit doorway, carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. I waited till he had set it by the candle. "You know someone has just come in downstairs."
He betrayed not the least surprise. He uncorked the bottle and carefully poured the brandy. "A man or a woman?"
"A woman."
"Ah." He handed me my brandy. "This is made at the monastery of Arkadion in Crete." He snuffed the candle and went back to his chair. I remained standing.
"You did say you lived alone."
"I said that I liked to give the islanders the impression that I lived alone."
The dryness in his voice made me feel that I was being very naϊve. The woman was simply his mistress, whom for some reason he did not want me to meet; or perhaps who did not want to meet me. I went and sat down on the lounging chair.
"I'm being tactless. Forgive me."
"Not tactless. Perhaps a little lacking in imagination."
"I thought perhaps I was meant to notice what obviously I'm not meant to notice."
"Noticing is not a matter of choice, Nicholas. But explaining is."
"Of course."
"Patience."
"I'm sorry."
"Do you like the brandy?"
"Very much."
"It always reminds me of Armagnac. Now. Shall I continue?"
As he began to speak again I smelt the night air, I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I touched a piece of chalk in my pocket. But a strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality.
19
"I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted. I had no aptitude with the rifle. I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly. But I was considered 'sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast. So I was selected as company runner. "My training company commander was a Regular Army officer of thirty or so. His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg sometime before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
"Before our training was finished, he received an urgent posting to France. That same day he told me, as if he were giving me a magnificent present, that he thought he could pull strings and have me posted with him. Only a man as blank as he would have failed to see the hollowness of my enthusiasm. But unfortunately he had grown fond of me.
"He had a brain capable of only one idea at a time. With him it was the offensive a outrance — the headlong attack. Foch's great contribution to the human race. 'The force of the shock is the mass,' he used to say — 'the force of the mass is the impulsion and the force of the impulsion is the morale. High morale, high impulsion, high shock — victory!' Thump on the table — 'Victory!' He made us all learn it by heart. At bayonet drill. Vic-tor-ree! Poor fool.
"I spent a last two days with my parents and Lily. She and I swore undying love. The idea of heroic sacrifice had contaminated her, as it had contaminated my father. My mother said nothing, except an old Greek proverb: A dead man cannot be brave. I remembered that later. "We went straight to the front. One of the company commanders had died of pneumonia, and it was his place Montague had to take. This was early in 1915. It sleeted and rained incessantly. We spent long hours in stationary trains in railway sidings, in gray towns under grayer skies. One knew the troops who had been in action. The ones who sang their way to death, the new recruits, were the dupes of the romance of war. But the others were dupes of the reality of war, of the ultimate Totentanz. Like those sad old men and women who haunt every casino, they knew the wheel must always win in the end. But they could not force themselves to leave. "We spent a few days on maneuvers. And then one day Montague addressed the company. We were going into battle, a new sort of battle, one in which victory was certain. One that was going to bring us to Berlin in a month. The night of the next day we entrained. The train stopped somewhere in the middle of a flat plain and we marched eastwards. Dikes and willows in the darkness. Endless drizzle. It crept down the columns that the place we were to attack was a village called Neuve Chapelle. And that the Germans were to receive something revolutionary. A giant gun. A mass attack by the new airplanes.
"After a while we turned into a field, thick with mud, and were marched up to some farm buildings. Two hours' rest before taking up position for the attack. No one can have slept. It was very cold, and fires were forbidden. My real self began to appear, I began to be afraid. But I told myself that if I was ever to be really frightened, I should have known it before then. This is what I had willed to execute. That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.
"Before dawn we filed forward slowly, many stops, to the assault positions. I overheard Montague talking with a staff officer. The entire First Army, Haig's, was engaged, with the Second in support. And there seemed to me a safety, a kind of warmth in such numbers. But then we entered the trenches. The terrible trenches, with their stench of the urinal. And then the first shells fell near us. I was so innocent that in spite of our so-called training, of all the propaganda, I had never really been able to believe that someone might want to kill me. We were told to halt and stand against the walls. The shells hissed, whined, crashed. Then silence. Then a splatter of falling clods. And shivering, I awoke from my long sleep.
"I think the first thing I saw was the isolation of each. It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But the battlefield — that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in
Montague, as in the invisible Germans.
"The madness of it, Nicholas. Standing in holes in the ground, thousands of men, English, Scots, Indians, French, Germans, one March morning — and what for? If there is a hell, then it is that. Not flames, not pitchforks. But a place without the possibility of reason, like Neuve Chapelle that day.
"A reluctant light began to spread over the eastern sky. The drizzle stopped. A trill of song from somewhere outside the trench. I recognized a hedge sparrow, the last voice from the other world. We moved forward again some way and into the assault trenches — the Rifle Brigade was to form the second wave of the attack. The German trenches were less than two hundred yards ahead, with our front trench only a hundred yards from theirs. Montague looked at his watch. He raised his hand. There was complete silence. His hand fell. For some ten seconds nothing happened. Then, from far behind us, there was a gigantic drum-roll, a thousand tympani. A pause. And then the whole world ahead exploded. Everyone ducked. A shaking of earth, sky, mind, all. You cannot imagine what the first few minutes of that bombardment were like. It was the first massive artillery barrage of the war, the heaviest ever delivered.
"A runner came from the front trenches, down the communicating trench. His face and uniform were streaked with red. Montague asked if he was hit. He said everyone in the front trenches was splashed with blood from the German trenches. They were so close. If only they could have stopped to think how close .
"After half an hour the barrage was moving over the village. Montague, at the periscope, cried, 'They're up!' And then — 'The Boches are done for!' He leapt onto the parapet and waved to all of us around him to look over the edge of the trench. A hundred yards ahead a long line of men trotted slowly across the scarred earth towards some shattered trees and broken walls. A few isolated shots. A man fell. Then stood up and ran on. He had simply tripped. The men about me began to shout as the line reached the first houses and a cheer came back. A red light soared up, and then we in our turn advanced. It was difficult to walk. And as we went forward, fear was driven out by horror. Not a shot was fired at us. But the ground became increasingly hideous. Nameless things, pink, white, red, mud-bespattered, still with rags of gray or khaki. We crossed our own front trench and traversed the no-man's-land. When we came to the German trenches there was nothing to see. Everything had been buried or blown out of them. There we halted for a moment, lying down in the craters, almost in peace. To the north the firing was very intense. The Cameronians had been caught on the wire. In twenty minutes they lost every officer except one. And four-fifths of their men were killed.