by F. W. Harvey
It is the symbolic likeness, not the personal idiosyncrasy, which is important. But the latter had to be drawn, because lacking it the figures would seem such unconvincing puppets that the reader could not imagine them representing anything. Therefore attention has so been carefully focussed upon two people, and this was an artistic necessity. It is still a necessity since the story must to told. But that story would not need to be told and never should be told, did not those two people stand for more than themselves: for England: for the dead.
Willie and Eric differing superficially from one another (as from their fellows) must be a million men. They must stand as the two main types of volunteer in the year 1914. The fact that they did volunteer makes analysis curious and of interest. A conscientious objector is psychologically plain sailing:– besides he is alive, you may ask him! The movie of a conscript in joining up needs to subtility of analysis. But these thousands …!
There was Headler, a surveyor, Gurney, an art student, Ridley, a bank clerk, Stinchcombe, a labour, Higham, a lawyer’s clerk, Willie, a lawyer, Wilteley, a miner of the Dean Forest, Walker, God knows what! Eric, an embryo parson, Meadows, a farm hand, Knight, a schoolmaster and an old ‘blue’, Brookfield, a poacher, Whatley – why go on? There were:
‘As many tempers, moods, and minds
As leaves are on a tree.’
And that simile is the more perfect because of the single life which they lived together, and the common root that nourished it.
Youth was not the name of that root. Ages varied from 16 to 40. But all these men were of the county.
When (no doubt under press of casualties) the War Office recruited indiscriminately to any regiment, it offended something deeper than mere preference. There is more than safety in numbers. There is joy. But that joy is known best to those who are in company with their countrymen. It makes the difference there is between ‘a team’, and ‘eleven players’.
This must be set down to assure readers of something which is nowadays in danger of being forgotten in a very admirable hatred of war and whose forgetting must cause misunderstanding of certain men with whom the story is concerned. (That is an artist’s only excuse for digression.)
Truth will permit no question of these men going sorrowfully to war, driven like sheep to slaughter. That is a false modern idea.
I say, and I know, that there was joy in those days even in filthy death. John Meadows’ jokes gave courage and bravery in the worst trenches. Ray Knight’s gay and gallant soul shone like fire upon the coldest night. Some cannot understand this. But they have not lived with these men.
Believe, and go on with the tale! Or believe not, and shut the book!
Such men were joyful in one another’s company. Circumstances could not vanquish that joy. It illuminated billets here,and barns in Flanders. It did not fall in the filthiest trench, with grunted oaths for common speech – oaths which have been seized upon by smart journalists to prove (in prose or poetry) the obsession of things which were never in their hearts – hate and despair. One can show war as the horror it is, without telling lies about soldiers. Soldiers were far the least comfortable, but far the most happy of England’s population during the war.
Not that they were all saints or even pleasant fellows. There were in this regiment characters quite as despicable as any civilian. The joy of a wide unique comradeship, which was the joy of those days, was sometimes dissipated. There were private soldiers whose chief passion was to obtain stripes. There were dignified lance-corporals.
It happened soon after that day’s trench digging mentioned that the Adjutant’s groom received (via the Adjutant’s horse) a rumour which turned out true! The regiment departed in a night. Its destination was not as stated. It was … halt! Before this departure, something else happened. This must be related since it affects the story of Willie and Eric, and reveals them adequate representatives of men who enlisted (a) in a spirit of adventure, and (b) for conscious principle – which two types (speaking generally) composed the regiment, though each was inclined to overlap and blend as it appreciated the other’s secret.
A telegram came. Mrs. Harvey was, it turned out, ill, and moreover in sudden financial straits owing to the failure of a bank. She had concealed the former circumstance, but a relative revealed it simultaneously with the latter, saying that application to Authority had resulted in the decision that one of the two boys should be released from military service to attend to affairs. It was suggested that Willie, as the lawyer, should come home.
‘Good lord! But why me?’ asked Willie. ‘You have been a bank clerk. You understand business. And you hate it less than I hate it. Why should I go?’
‘Well, one of us has got to go.’
‘Then you go. How can I leave these chaps on the eve of going to the front? What will they think of me?’
‘The same as they will think of me if I go’ said Eric, ‘and that will be nothing bad, I hope. But anyway it’s a poor soldier who won’t do his duty because of public opinion. I’ll go if you prefer it. I can join up again later.’
‘You are a brick, I am just a moral coward’ cried Willie. ‘But it isn’t only that. For you will do the work just as well. And, though cowardice is at the bottom of my wish, it isn’t a fear of opinion. It’s deeper. After the way life treated me – the muck I made of it. (But you don’t know all that.) I found peace in war, and home, among these men. It is leaving those things that frightens me. I dread going back to the old life – to anything that reminds me of it.’
‘I understand’, said his brother. ‘Shake hands, old man. It’s settled.’
So Eric went home a few days before the battalion crossed to Flanders. His comrades were sorry – they loved his kind quiet says. But comment was drowned in the excitement of the move, and was always characteristically understanding of the circumstances, save in one instance.
They had fallen in for roll call on the eve of departure. Willie having answered his name, Eric’s was called by chance – the roll being an old one. There was no answer. ‘Oh, he’s left us, hasn’t he?’ said the sergeant, correcting the list.
‘The only jibber’, answered a newly-made corporal, by no means famed for his anxiety to see active service.
‘Say that again, and stripes or none I’ll knock your teeth down your throat!’ cried Willie, flaming.
‘Silence!’ shouted the sergeant. ‘Kindly apologise for that remark, Corporal.’
‘I didn’t mean –’ shamefacedly began the N.C.O.
‘That’ll do then! And you, Private Harvey, remember that you are on parade.’
Willie resumed a rigid position in the ranks, but murder was in his heart as they moved off – it was not directed against a foreign enemy.
CHAPTER II
Now where is Clemmy to watch these hundreds of little boys return exhausted and smarting from her nettles?
Let her face loom above the Flanders battle fields: let her smile beam cynically upon those barns where rest the weary men! Smile back at her, brothers: call her endearingly our civilisation!
‘Dear Mother: (wrote Willie) I am so very glad to hear, from Eric, that you are getting better and that the operation was a success. We are back from an eight day spell of trenches in a lovely barn dangerously lighted with candles stuck in the rings of bayonets. The bayonet makes an admirable hold for shaved candles when stuck perpendicularly in the earth. That is the only use we have made of it so far – except to toast impaled bacon upon the point!
There seems no sign of move on either side at present. It is a rotten business. Not that I long for slaughter like a true patriot, but because the war can’t end in this way. Our nice sergeant was ‘sniped’ the day before we came out. Shells killed four others, but otherwise the platoon is as it was – a little dirtier, and a little more serious – that’s all.
Everyone remains cheery; to-night (and since ‘wang rouge’ and clean straw are available) almost hilarious. Discomforts are soon forgot; and sorrows (we feel) not worth bro
oding upon. May we die as clearly as those, and as quickly! My dread is a bullet in the stomach. That is the reason I carry morphia – enough to end the tournament. God, I feel, will forgive the deed; and you, and Eric – so parsons may go hand – all except our chaplain, who is as likely as not to have to do the same himself!
He has taken a dug-out which he calls ‘The Vicarage’, and is the hero of a tale wrongly reported of someone else. A party of the Bucks marching in on relief passed the shelter. ‘Look’, said one, ‘there’s a blasted vicarage!’
‘And here’s the blasted vicar!’ answered H, sticking out his head.
He has started a trench paper, of which I enclose a copy. Sandwiched between the casualties and some delicious regimental scandals are a couple of poems by me. It is queer to get published after all my efforts. What pleases me is that the chaps like ’em. Perhaps this is the only public I shall ever have. But it is a good one. A delightfully left-handed compliment was paid me to-night. “I can’t read Shakespeare”, remarked one of the fellows, ‘but I’m damned if I didn’t read every word of your thing called “In Flanders”.” That’s good, isn’t it? But listen: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself”, he added. ‘It made me homesick. It’s bloody!’
Dearest, if that’s not fame, what is?
Now darling, I am happy and unhurt, so don’t worry. But the war won’t end yet. If it were to, it would be no use. I am not being pessimistic, but only telling the truth. Eric will be wanted, I’m afraid – though he isn’t! He will fiNd rather more comforts at the front than he expects (for like myself he expected none) and as much happiness as true fellowship can give. I am – though nearly smothered in kind ladies’ mufflers –
Ever your loving son.’
Things continued for a time much as outlined in Willie’s letter. Both armies were marking time: making visits to the front line: losing a few men in the period: returning to billets after eight or ten days to bandy ancient jests in estaminets with the R.E.’s, who directed their fatigues, and A.S.C. men whom they accused of eating strawberry jam all day, and being paid six times as much as front line men, because it was skilled work.
In every army throughout the world the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay, and is cause of such good-humoured chaff. Perhaps the most that can be said for this system is that it provides a standard ‘grouse’ which is dear as gold to the hearts of infantrymen – even when that gold can purchase but watery beer.
With the end of open order fighting, and those almost superhuman marches on cobbled roads which caused wearied men to conjure up visions of invisible things, a different spirit had settled upon our now entrenched armies. The sense of active crusade had gone, and was succeeded by that of a dogged endurance which coupled itself in the English character to a kind of humour incomprehensible to the rest of the world. This had not (in 1915) turned to the hopeless anger and weariness which possibly manifested itself in later stages.
Bairnsfather had succeeded Rupert Brooke, but Siegfried Sasson had not arrived.
Yet it would be wrong to think that the warfare of that year could from any angle be regarded in the light of a review entitled ‘The Better ‘Ole’. Setting aside such small matters as Nurse Cavell, the ordinary trench warfare provided little in the way of comedy, though something of grim farce – in retrospect.
A nightmare atmosphere overhung, even in daytime, that Flanders countryside; and darkness only deepened it into horrible reality.
With nightfall, and the snaky rising of Verey lights along irregularly designed trenches, a sense of all dreadful possibilities entered the mind. And these possibilities were inclined to realise.
Agonised men lay helplessly lingering out existence in No-man’s-land. Their bodies were brought in by comrades the following night, or left to rot where they lay. Iron torn like brown paper cut living men in half who joked with their friends a minute before. Their blood poured into the ground like wine from a broken bottle. Massed suffering was undoubtedly greater at a later date: individual suffering never so.
Willie volunteered for all night patrols. That was better than standing in a trench to curse the stars that would never go out. That was his nature. He could never wait. Success, danger, glory, death itself, must come quickly. Life missed a glorious opportunity in not condemning him to die lingering through one of those horror-filled nights of his own choosing.
As a matter of fact all he got was a decoration. That was ironic enough, for he had on many occasions gone through similar experience – tasted the same emotions – without thanks. But this time it was a case of one oF two rival patrols being wiped out. And fortune favoured the British.
It placed at the critical moment the Germans against a sky line. It concealed in grass those whom they hunted. With cinema-like haste and inconsequence the scene flashed into sight, twinkled, and vanished, amid groans and excited cries. It might never have happened only that the horrible bodies were brought in three days later to convince the patrollers themselves.
Then the mind could reconstruct the affair. Darkness – a snaky wriggle over the parapet – our wire – suppressed oaths – no-man’s-land – whispers – tussocky grass that turned to figures, and back to grass: advance of creeping men keeping touch as best they could over uneven ground; falling flat into filth or water as floating stars lifted from the German lines and drifted slowly down upon them – whispers – sighing wind – more whispers – Germans! – silence broken only by the rattle of machine guns – suspense broken by nothing: peering figures as anxious as they but against the sky line – fire – rapid fire! – a dreadful shriek from one whose belt buckle with its text ‘Gott mit uns’ had been driven through the stomach – a rush with bayonets – shouts – wriggles – groans – grunts – indiscriminate fire from both trenches – crawling on the belly: excited whispers – challenges – shots from British lines – ‘Let us in, you bloody fools!’ Cries of recognition – falls into a friendly trench – congratulations then rum – short report – sleep – forgetfulness – and three weeks later, with the battalion in another part of the line, this letter from Willie to end the chapter:
‘Dearest: I am expecting leave. What joy to see you and Eric and England again! It is five months since I saw either – and how dear they all seem! I scarcely believed that they existed. That is the curse (and comfort) of this life. It draws you into its atmosphere. You fill sand bags and take risks mechanically, and the very reasons why, are as remote as things which never existed. Not that you are forgotten. Only you seem too good to be true. Memory of you is an act of faith. You exist as Heaven does. Perhaps that is the greatest of all realities. Yet a man expects death before he expects to see it. It is so with you, and Eric, and those English meadows smoking with September.
At risk of being censored I will say that we are now far from Plug Street wood and its amazing nightingales that used to sing above the unnatural thunder of guns: and have marched many a night through silent cobbled towns whose houses gazed blankly upon our commotion (they had seen this before) and then with aching feet, too weary even to sing, yet finding joy in the after memory, unwound the length of lonely roads flanked always with star-crowned poplars, and slept as upon down in barns and open fields. What snores: what curses: what singing: those barns have heard!
And now we are in Picardy trenches opposite another wood. I will say no more. I am lousy, and so is everybody from the Colonel down …
But I have got (if it please you) a minor sort of decoration to show when I come home, and (which pleases me at all events) some lines on Gonnehun, that rose in our desert of marching – a tiny village enclosing the most gracious little farm imaginable out of England, and the kindest people, and the ripest cherries, and the prettiest little dark-eyed children.
The war goes on in a kind of bloody stupor. Nobody can even guess when it may end. But how, we do not doubt. Meanwhile for a few fortunate people there is leaving pending, and waking up at home in bed, and sweet birds to whistle instead of shells, and moth
ers, and brothers, and all unbelievable things.
Till then, with best love, I remain your invisible son,
Willie
P.S.
I am sorry to say dear old Stinchcombe has died in hospital. We hoped that he was for Blighty, and his mother, but – the news has just come. Possibly you have heard already. His mother will certainly. Go and see her if you can, and say – well, you know best what to say. There is not much, is there? Only all of us loved him.
CHAPTER III
While this letter was being penned, Mrs. Harvey and Eric sat talking together. Financial affairs had come out better than were expected. Money had been lost, but the land (let off) remained, and that had appreciated in value and so brought better rents. Moreover that which the doctors had feared to be cancer had proved something which surgeons could remove, and the patient had made good recovery. She was an older and greyer woman than Willie knew her, but filled with the same courage.
Probably Eric had aged more than she. It was not a sweet life to any other than those engaged heart and soul in the making of money during 1915, but to a man cut off from the fine men with whom he had enlisted, and misunderstood by those who willingly remained at home, it was a thing which only conviction of righteousness could make tolerable.
Eric had that solace. But he was unhappy.
‘Mother’, he said, as the log fire crackled in purple spurts and poured a golden torrent up over the chimney soot, ‘dear, you are well again, and things are settled as satisfactorily as they can be. I ought …’
‘I know what you are going to say –’
‘I ought to join up again.’
‘Very well, darling.’
So the talk ended. and a week later Eric departed, entering the old regiment’s reserve battalion with a view of joining this brother as soon as possible.