A War Romance

by F. W. Harvey

  ‘For a long time existence generally, and all that law business in particular, had been just a swarm of flies round my head,’ he began by way of explaining his flight. ‘I thought that as time went on I should be able to shut a door in my brain when I left office, and then live – I mean write. But I never could. For nine months I wrote nothing – nothing. My leisure was full of that same buzz. And yet,’ he concluded, ‘to produce lovely things is the only real life …’ Eric nodded. ‘Not only that, but the old poems, and stories, the plays, I had poured my heart into when that was living, came back one after another, so that I ceased to send them out any more. And on the top of all this something else happened – very dreadful, though not a personal tragedy. A woman was murdered … Life that was already sordid turned to living death in such a place, and I left it without saying a word to you or to anybody. I just walked out of the office, and out of the town. Nobody there knew my home address. You thought I was in Eccleton. They thought I was at home, and anyway didn’t care where I was, having in hand about six weeks salary, and being able easily to fill my place.

  ‘It was a bright summer’s morning. On my way I remember meeting a pimpled parson (no offence, old man!) and three or four young men. They were weakly hideous, but he was like a gargoyle – only a gargoyle is funny. I got out of the town – south west as it happened – but going anywhere away from it. Then I passed a blind man singing ‘Lead kindly light,’ a wanderer like myself, but he tried to steal the bit of money I had, in the lodging-house where we slept, and I went on next morning, marching anywhere, but towards Gloucestershire as it turned out. Next day I walked out into a grey, strange world. How still: how vigorous yet spell-bound! The summer meadows lay in white mist which magnified the great cart horses as they limped slowly round tearing off grey-green grass.

  ‘I breakfasted on bread and cheese in a wood by the roadside. It was old and deserted by the birds, though a few rook nests hung in its high trees. Soon a light appeared in the east. The sky intensified its blue. As I left the wood veins of gold ran intersecting upon heaven in a sort of steady lightning. It was light rimming the clouds fantastically shaped to eastward. I turned my back upon that and marched. My shadow leapt before me a hundred yards on the white road. The odour of morning-earth uprose.For the first time that year I felt myself a living man. Remembering my past life, I said to old grandpa who was present in that earth-smell: “Grandfather, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am worthy no more to be called grandson! I (and many) never believed that you were dead for three weeks – never understood that it was possible. Yet I have been sad for a year and more. Blackbirds fluted in orchards, and I did not hear. Apple bloom was a dazzle of white, and I did not see. So my brain became Severn and mud taking no hard impression of things lovely; and life something dirtier than that: It was not to live. I grant that I have been dead and have risen again, even as you did!”

  Eric and his mother chuckled. Willie continued: ‘I walked on. I came to a village, and sitting there on a doorstep were two mites in blue overalls (like Eric and I used to wear) feeding a dog with a basin of bread and milk. I was talking to them about ducks and hens – how a hen had long horny toes, but a duck ‘flat skin between his scratchers,’ when out came their father, an interesting fellow (mason by profession), who told me that his father, an old man of eighty, was dying upstairs. And nothing would please him but that he should make a will, wherefore he (the son) was for finding a lawyer to do it – though since he as only son would naturally inherit everything the old man had to leave him there seemed no sense in it. So I told him that, as fate willed it, he need go no further, since I was a solicitor – which for a time he was reluctant to believe, but was at last satisfied, or possibly thought it didn’t matter.

  So I went upstairs into a room which smelt of dead man, and at the dictation of a poor hawk-nosed corpse with a white billy goat beard, wrote:–

  ‘This is the last will and testament of me, Joseph Mitchel, labourer, of Stars Lane in the village of Something in the County of Warwick’ (I believe) ‘whereby I give and bequeath all real and personal estate whatsoever whereof I at the time of my death do stand possessed to Henry Howard Mitchel, my son,’

  It was signed by me and a neighbour ‘in the presence of one another both being present at the same time’ after we had duly witnessed the cross made by the now satisfied testator on the bland day of blank (July, it was, of course) in the year 1914.

  And after that I walked on, leaving my friends the more convinced that I was no lawyer since I would accept no fee. ‘Who washes God?’ was a last question put to me by the smaller of these two children before I left, and pondering the correct answer to that I went my way, glad to have been a service to old age if not to babyhood.

  I slept that night in a shed. (Don’t turn up your noses, and look sympathetic!) It was a sight better than the lodging house. Little mice rustled in the straw. The wind sighed hush! hush! over my head. I was lying soft, and cleanly – and alone. A dog poked his wet nose into my face in the morning, but neither I nor he, was afraid. “There is no fear in straw, for clean and perfect straw casteth out fear.”

  ‘Don’t quote sacred things profanely, dearest,’ expostulated his mother.

  ‘All right, darling,’ said Will, ‘we are agreed – only it’s all the same thing. To sleep under stars and clean straw is holy.

  And the next day, since my money was getting low, I worked for a farmer in the hay-field, and also the next day after that. Haymaking had just started in that part.

  I should have stayed longer than I did at that farm (I did a week there as it was!) Therefore I moved on. She was a hefty woman of thirty-five who brought supper to me in the barn where I slept, and washed and ironed my collar. She’s got it now.

  In the next village I bought a jolly scarf much more comfortable to wear. True comfort is obtained only by a social descent – in summer.

  And so is luxury – the fine luxury of letting your body rest after hard open-air labour.

  Tramping on, I had a lovely bathe unseen and cool in the gloom of a tunnel which conveyed a clean little brook under the road. There was dusty traffic rumbling but a few yards over my head, and – “how short a distance off the common highway lies fairyland!” thought I, lying in little green forest of moss as slanting light seemed lazily to open and close its eyes, gilding those ripples which reflected its ringed blinking upon the tunnel’s roof.

  It was in Worcestershire, near Pershore, that I first heard tidings of the war. ‘And wot be we gwine ter do when them bloody allies do come to rape and ruin us all?’ enquired rhetorically an ancient stone breaker of very unseductive appearance, having a mouth like a kipper’s, and a face of divine discontent.

  At Gloucester barracks I enlisted because I discovered that soldiers did not wear stiff collars in war time – and for other reasons. But before that, a queer thing had happened to me. Within Gloucestershire, but on the borders by Broadway whither I had come wandering I fell in with a camp of gypsies. And who – whom – do you think they were? They very same people that we, Eric and I, met in the Forest of Dean a year ago: the same man who had shown us Christ a-weeping: the same lovely girl who told us fortunes: the same three scraggy dogs: the same others of ’em!’

  ‘Meeting them again seems to have impressed you,’ said Mrs Harvey.

  ‘It did. It did impress me, and it does still impress me,’ replied Will. ‘You see, I lived with them for several days. They insisted on giving me hospitality – but that was not the most impressive thing.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t think I can tell you. Well, to begin with I got to that part thinking. Casual work and not much food but chiefly (since I have actually suffered) a mood of reflection caused it. I remembered that these nights were comparatively warm – how in dying Kingsley, a good Christian, a friend of poor people thanked God for the frost on his window. And then I thought of the people who were outside: who could only shudder with the cold wind,
and the vision of some bleak white workhouse, or farms with dogs savagely barking near shiny ricks and friendly barns. I saw the road stretching endlessly, and no courage to walk it.

  “Age comes,” I said, “and then comfort – mere comfort – tells a fairy tale.” I saw old men sitting over fire dreaming their dreams. “And what have old men left?” I asked, pondering on such things as poverty, and old age, and December, on a warm moonlighted night of July.

  Spreading a yellower sheet on yellow moonlight a motor rushed callously by me on the road. It offended me in an unreasonable way. I didn’t want another car to do that. I got over a wall and into meadows. The clock in some distant steeple had just rung nine faint airy hour-strokes. Time was made precious and audible. The wet meadows lay silver in moonlight. Yet their lovely silver was tarnished when the broad stream which streaked a hollow appeared suddenly as I turned the corner of a wood, and foreboding thoughts which had already melted in those meadows turned suddenly to a startled delight, when as naturally as nymph from shade stole silently out a naked girl.

  No thought or image of lust kept me there silent … watching, as she stood a moment bright upon the brink and then dived. It was sheer loveliness. The lamp-lit artifices of sensuality were in another world. Flakes of cool fire flicked from her limbs as she swam. When she had reached mid-stream I turned, walking I knew not where, but with that image burning like a naked loveliness in my brain – the silver image of one moment!

  I in the open night which was my bedroom till morning did not sleep but made a poem which I wrote down at sunrise.

  ‘Flower-like and shy

  You stand, sweet mortal, at the river’s brim:

  With what unconscious grace

  Your limbs to some strange law surrendering

  Which lifts you clear of our humanity.

  Nor would I sacrifice

  Your breathing, warmth, and all the strange romance

  Of living to a moment. Ere you break

  The greater thing than you, I would my eyes

  Were basilisk to turn you into stone.

  So should you be the world’s inheritance …’

  ‘But what has this to do with the gypsies?’ asked Eric and Mrs. Harvey together.

  ‘It was she,’ whispered Willie. ‘I found their fire next morning, and heard where she had been. She told me of the place – little thinking that I had seen it – and her, the night before. But that was the reason I did not dare go bathe there myself. I kept a memory instead. I shall always keep it. It was sacred beauty and I shall die with it in me …

  I lived with those people for three days and I walked with her in the woods gathering sticks and I don’t now what. And we talked … I remember her saying that sheep were “that foolish it seemed a shame. Their little brains just tell them to eat and drink and lie down. Then they are driven off and killed and eaten. But rooks” (she thought) “must have a lot of brain in a little head, with their houses thick as the houses in cities all without names or numbers, and they flying miles every night to find each one his own.” She liked all wild things especially the birds: them she would never kill, though she considered all animals, especially the rabbits and hedgehogs, meant for food.

  She said a lot that I have forgotten for the time, though I don’t forget any of it in reality. But she said a very strange thing just before we parted – that I should go over the sea, and that we should meet again there! And that (he added) was another reason why I enlisted.’

  ‘You are in love with that gypsy girl,’ said Mrs. Harvey.

  Willie shook his head. ‘I remember her as a strange beauty – impersonally, no more …’

  ‘I forget her’ he said, gazing at the fire, ‘and then blue smoke brings her vividly before me with her dark golden-brown beauty and her blowing dress … or sometimes moonlight …’ He shivered.

  It was a different shiver from that which had caused Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart to smile.

  Well, love means many things to many people.

  ‘and so,’ he went on (puffing smoke at the ceiling) ‘and so I left those people, and came back through Winchcomb and Gloucester, and – here I am.’

  ‘No one was ever more welcome, dearest,’ said his mother, and then sighed.

  Eric also was thinking of the parting.

  ‘We must eat Holy Communion all three together tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed now.’

  PART V

  ‘THE LINE’

  CHAPTER I

  ‘They drills us, and marches us about (marches was not the word, but it will do!) and we goes to Colchester for firing, and gets so many blinkin’ “bulls” that the brigadier ’as to put ’is ’and into ’is pocket ant stand footballs to every platoon, and then they sends us back ’ere to dig our way through to Aus-bloody-stralia!’

  ‘Say that again old man, will you?’ requested Willie with a smile as he deposited another shovelful of earth upon the parados of the half-dug trench in which they stood.

  ‘What’s the matter with Australia without the blood?’ asked Eric, laughing.

  ‘Well mate, I should say that it would be kind of anaemic’ was the unanswerable retort.

  ‘Phreee!’ echoed a whistle. They ‘fell in’ to march back to billets, to the tune of mouth organs, and songs ‘not nice’. Another day, typical of all, was done. In an hour’s time the regiment would be off duty: free to play cards, drink beer, go ‘skirt-hunting’, or write letters, as mood and the provost-marshall permitted.

  Ninety per cent of the men were ‘old hands’ of the county territorial unit, who had volunteered to go to the front: the rest, replacing those who found reasons for not so volunteering, and bringing the regiment up to ‘strength’, were recruits. In this latter category were Willie and Eric, the whole of the county Rugby fifteen, half the Gloucester rowing club, and a score of other boys of various class, occupation, and kind.

  The common factor was simply that they were all Gloucestershire soldiers, and the accent must be placed upon the county, since to none was soldiering a profession. They were patriotic in a sense of the word unknown to cosmopolitan ‘Empire builders’.

  ‘I always knew the old county was good, but where on earth did this assortment of nobility arrive from, even within it?’ asked Willie after his first week. Eric’s explanation was logical and orthodox to Christians. They were God’s children.

  ‘But the parsons know nothing of ‘em’ retorted his brother. ‘They are only shocked by their swear words!’

  ‘I am talking of Christ’, replied Eric with significance.

  ‘Meaning – ?’

  ‘That ‘The Great War’ is a chance to wake up, and substitute brothers for “dearly beloved brethren”. It isn’t easy’ he added. ‘We’ve been bred to mix with people, but this is something staggering in the way of revelation even to farmbred folks. Consider what a difference of manners means to most folks!’

  ‘Well, it didn’t to the disciples’ was a natural retort. ‘Not that I’m arguing for the self-vanity of a proletariat that imagines it can’t be improved, and won’t learn’ or the damnable heresy “vox populi, vox Dei”. But these chaps are the salt of the earth. And they are outside the pale!’

  ‘The war will change that’ said Eric. ‘That is my belief: that is what I am fighting for.’

  (‘How unfortunate’ sighs the Ironic Muse, ‘that he died for his belief!’)

  ‘Good lad!’ said Willie; ‘may we live to see it! It is a pity that every parson is not encouraged or forced to join the ranks of the new army instead of forbidden to do it. A university is nothing to this.’ Eric agreed.

  ‘I often wonder why I am going to fight’ said Willie. ‘It is not because I am out of work. I could get that, and more than a bob a day, easily enough; and I know that none of the reasons allegedly in newspapers will account for it in my or three parts of the other chaps here. In us abstract principle may count something, but it is not much, and when we come to concrete things what have we got to defend? Would we die �
�� (to give your life is the last test of any man’s conviction) – would we die for any of these catch phrases? Yet we are ready – all here – to die for something …’

  ‘Since it is not the kingdom of Earth, it may be the Kingdom of heaven’ suggested Eric.

  ‘I think it is Gloucestershire – and what she means … We would rather die for that, than live for Eccleton – and what it means.’

  ‘Yet Eccleton is probably raising forces’ said Eric.

  ‘No doubt – and that is what I don’t understand, unless it is just – better the hell you don’t know, than the hell you do!’

  Eric laughed. ‘That’s a good misquotation’ said he.

  ‘Well, let’s leave it at ‘Something’. That has always been your motto in life, old man, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Let what we die for be some blessed abstract beauty – not some concrete floor’, spoke Willie epigrammatically, but knowing well that there was no such thing as abstract beauty. ‘Call it Gloucestershire – though it is rather some mixture of adventure and beauty bred out of her!’

  ‘It is love of home’ said his brother, ‘yet that home is but glimpsed in Gloucestershire. It is not of the earth, though mirrored in it, to you and such poets.’

  That was true. To the hill of Flanders ran two different roads. But they led through it, and on to the same destination. Call it Home!

  Now if this book has a hero (or heroes) the argument must stand for that. And remember that it was typical (though some would deny it) of every other regiment raised in England in the early part of the war. It is beyond the scope of story-telling to trace the lives of a thousand soldiers, and fortunate that (as fruit of an earlier combined effort between writer and reader) we now stand intimately with the lives of two who must exist not merely as separate personalities but also as symbols of the rest – of all who took one of two roads leading to Flanders.