The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  Thus I set about preparing myself for the day when I would be called up. But meanwhile Hartfield itself was threatened.

  It is hard to believe now that we were quite seriously expecting the Germans to land on our Sussex coast, for example somewhere around Bishopstone where our friends, the Darlingtons lived; that we were quite seriously expecting to have Panzer columns roaring down from the Forest, over the bridge and up the hill past our house, with parachutists landing in our meadow to welcome them. But it had happened in France. So what were we going to do about it? The important thing was to do something, no matter how futile; for only by doing something could we keep up our morale during the months of waiting. And no doubt most of what we did was futile. No doubt the invader, had he come, would have swept past our concrete pillboxes, our dragon’s teeth, our barbed wire road blocks, brushing them aside as if they had never existed.

  But something would have survived from all our preparations, something which was not so easily destroyed: our determination to resist. So we each of us did our modest bit. My mother and I went out into the fields, gathered a harvest of nettles, gave them to Mrs Wilson to cook and ate them with resolution if without much pleasure. My father and I collected all our Ordnance Survey maps and buried them in the garden. And I, for my part, found a length of wire, tied one end to a tree by the main road, and coiled the other end ready to tie to a tree on the opposite side just before the first German motorcyclist made his appearance. And then of course I joined the Local Defence Volunteers; and of course I didn’t do it the obvious way – walking down to the village and enrolling at the village hall. My father did it for me, if not actually writing to the Commander in Chief Home Forces, most certainly writing a letter to somebody. . . .

  I spent about eight months in the LDV (or Home Guard as it was later called) beginning with an arm band and finishing with a full denim uniform. It was not my first introduction to a soldier’s life, for my OTC unit at Cambridge had already taught me how to slope a rifle; and the additional military knowledge I acquired defending Hartfield was only slight. However, there were two other things I learned – two new experiences – that were to be of the very greatest value to me.

  The first concerned people. The England of those days was much more sharply divided into two classes than it is today. ‘Good morning, Smith,’ said the one. ‘Good morning, Sir,’ replied the other. Even when the two met as equals a certain inequality remained. Thus at Lords Cricket Ground they made their appearance through two separate gates, one labelled ‘Gentlemen’ the other ‘Players’. Hitherto I had passed my life in a Gentleman’s world, a world in which the Players existed only to serve our needs. Now, for the first time, I was to become a Player myself. In the Scout Hut at Hartfield the author’s son would be lying down beside the cowman, he Jack, I Robin. It was a tremendous experience for me, an experience that seemed to be epitomized by my new name. Robin. No one had ever used it by itself before and I scarcely recognized it as mine. It was the name they had chosen for me and they couldn’t have chosen better or done a kinder thing. With it they welcomed me across on to their side; and, oh, how gladly I went and how happy and proud I was to be among them, listening to them, learning from them. I learned much that I hadn’t known before. I learned, for instance, that not all Players were contented with their lot. ‘You see, Robin,’ said Cherry, ‘it’s Them as makes the laws and We as have to obey them. Now we’ve got only two pleasures in life, you might say: our beer and our baccy. And when They want more money, you’ll find it’s always beer and baccy that they tax. And it’s not fair on the Working Man.’ I learned quite a bit from Cherry. He was something of the odd man out, the only one of us who seemed to bear life a grudge, who questioned and argued and said he didn’t think it was right. A muscular man, he drove the coal lorry.

  My other experience was of the night – dark, outdoor night. Hitherto when it got dark I had come indoors and turned on the light. It was the obvious thing to do. My parents and I would read, perhaps, for a while, sitting before the fire, then, one by one, go upstairs to bed. But now, while others slept, we in the Home Guard were watching, awake and alert, rifle in hand, scanning the skies for enemy invaders. And it was during these vigils that my love of night was born. When not on Home Guard duty I started going for night walks after dinner, up the road or along the lane, and occasionally even through Posingford Wood and so to the Forest. And I was delighted to find it neither frightening nor difficult, even without a torch. It was not that I could see in the dark especially well, but that I seemed able to sense my surroundings and so could move easily and confidently. I still feel this way about night, loving to be out in it, alone, the darker the better. Sight has gone. Sound now becomes all important, sound and a sort of sixth sense. The friendly hoot of an owl. The gentle munching of cows, or perhaps no more than their soft breathing coming from the other side of the hedge. Even the wind has its special night voice, a voice that seems to tell me that it is not just blowing, but up and doing, moving things around like a scene shifter on a darkened stage.

  Walking at night I like to come upon the lighted windows of a wayside cottage, and to feel that behind the curtains is another world, a world bounded by four walls, a world of sight. I long to peer through the windows, and I know that even the dullest scene within would to me become high drama. I love, especially, returning home, to see the lights of my own house shining. So, I am sure, did the astronauts feel returning from the Moon, travelling through black space towards a waiting world. Soon they will once more be a part of that world. Soon I will be home, part once more of the indoor world of light and warmth. Such is a dark night.

  But there is another sort of night, the night of the full Moon, a winter’s night, of course, for only in the winter does the Moon ride high. And now you can see. Indeed, you can almost distinguish colours. Trees cast shadows and their leafless branches make intricate patterns on the roadway. There is a special oak near here that I like to visit when the Moon is full. I like to look up and see the pattern of twigs against the sky, and then down to see the pattern repeated at my feet. When the night is dark my world is small, no further than I can reach with my hand, and I prefer to keep to the valley bottom. On moonlit nights I like to climb out of my valley and stand on a hill top and reach up to the stars and feel myself part of a larger world, a world that embraces Moon and stars – and all Creation.

  Guard duty over. Back to the Scout Hut. And now for the bread and dripping sandwiches that Mrs Wilson has prepared for me. No. Nothing to report. A quiet night. The Germans hadn’t yet launched their assault on the Sussex beaches. . . .

  So, as that long summer turned to autumn and then towards winter, we waited. We waited for the German army; and we waited (we Milnes) for a certain buff envelope. The German army never came. The envelope did; and its contents informed me that I was to join a Royal Engineer Training Battalion in November.

  The posting (it went on to say) was of course conditional on my passing a medical examination; and a further buff envelope instructed me to report for that purpose to a drill hall in Brighton.

  I went. I arrived. I gave my name, age and other bits of information to a man at a desk, then perambulated the various medical booths within the hall, being measured at one, tapped on the knees at another, made to jump up and down at a third, and so on until I had done the round and could return to the man at the desk. I was all keyed up, all excited, fairly trembling with excitement in fact, for I was now very nearly a real soldier. The man at the desk passed me a slip of paper. I read it. It was my certificate, and it told me – and anyone else who might be interested – that, having been duly examined by such-and-such a board at such-and-such a place on such-and-such a date I had been placed in . . . the words dissolved as I stared at them: Category C.

  Even now at the memory my fingers become moist, for it was without doubt the most terrible moment of my life. But . . . but . . . but . . . I could hardly speak. But what’s supposed to be wrong with me? The man answ
ered sadly that it was not for the board to say. I must ask my doctor at home. But what do I do now? Just go home, he said. The army wouldn’t be needing my services for the moment. I blundered out blind with tears. . . .

  What does a father do when he learns that his son is not fit for military service? Does he heave a sigh of relief? Maybe mine did, but it would have been a sigh quickly stifled by an understanding of how I felt about it, and by the thought that here was yet another opportunity for him to do something to help.

  ‘We’ll make a start by ringing up Dr Thornton tonight,’ he said. It was almost as if he welcomed the challenge. If there really was something the matter with me, he would have it put right. On the other hand if the medical board had made a mistake, he would jolly well see that I went before another board. Now then: who would be the best person to fix this?

  Lord Horder, physician to the King, adviser to the Government and chairman of innumerable medical committees, was at that time probably the most influential doctor in the country. My father wrote him a letter.

  To our relief, if not to our very great surprise, the medical board had got it wrong. They had, quite understandably, mistaken my excited trembling for something rather more serious. It might have been only nervousness, but equally it might not. Better, as far as they were concerned, not to take a chance. Better to lose an able-bodied Sapper than to have to nurse a sick one. They were naturally reluctant to give me a second look over, and but for Horder’s intervention, might well have refused. And the fact that all this wasted only a bare three months of my military career (but of course gave me an extra three months in which to perfect my carpentry) shows how fast things can happen if you pull the right strings.

  So on a February afternoon behold a young man in a train speeding north. He is tall and thin, nervous and excited, and very, very happy. Behold also a middle-aged man in a Sussex garden. He too is happy, though in not quite the same sense. Content, rather. If the young man in the train is looking ahead to what might lie in the future, the other is probably looking back to what lay in the past. For the one a new world is just about to unfold. For the other a world is just ending.

  He would write to me, of course, and I would write to him. He would be with me, or rather just behind me – as close behind me as the distance between us would allow. He would always be ready to advise if advice were sought, to help if help were needed. He would always understand.

  He went indoors, found an atlas and opened it at a map of England. Newark in Nottinghamshire: here it is, on the River Trent. Here’s where his next letter would be sent. To Sapper Milne, C. R., the Second Training Battalion of the Royal Engineers, Newark, Notts.

  3. Training for War

  ‘To people like myself,’ wrote my father, ‘the Great Sacrifice (the 1914-18 War) was not the sacrifice of our lives but of our liberties. Ever since I had left Cambridge I had been my own master. I fixed my own hours, I was under no discipline; no bell rang for me, no bugle sounded. Now I was thirty-two, married, with a happy home of my own and engaged happily in work which I loved. To be a schoolboy again, to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and “Please, sir” and “May I, sir?” was no hardship to schoolboys, no hardship to a million men in monotonous employment, but it was hell itself to one who had been as spoilt by good-fortune as I.’

  Luckily, when my turn came I was twelve years younger than he had been: I was still virtually a schoolboy. I was leaving nothing that I didn’t want to leave. I was being diverted from nothing that I had set my heart on achieving. The road I had been following had died on me. Here was another road in another direction, inviting, exciting. I plunged happily along it.

  Human beings are governed by two opposite instincts: the instinct to be an individual and the instinct to be gregarious. In each of us the one or the other is the stronger. My father was an individualist, and I took after him. At school, however, one is forced to be gregarious. I didn’t resent this, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it, and whenever I could I withdrew into my own private world. At my prep school it was largely an imaginary world visited at night before going to sleep; but at Stowe it was often real. On summer Sundays I would go immense solitary walks through the countryside hunting for birds’ nests. If I had been a bird, I would have been a robin rather than a rook, defending my territory against all who would invade it, not living at the top of an elm tree with a lot of chattering neighbours.

  But if school is a rookery, the army is different. In the army one becomes not a rook but a starling. One of the most glorious sights on a winter’s day is to see a flock of starlings rise from a field, sweep through the sky, and then settle again a hundred yards away. A flock of rooks is a collection of individual birds; a flock of starlings in flight is a single entity, as if one single brain directs it, one single set of muscles controls its movement. Starlings can be individuals if they wish – as of course they are during the breeding season. And they can chatter together in groups on the lawn or on roof tops at any time of the year. But in the winter they set an example in precision of movement that a Company of Guardsmen on ceremonial parade can only stumble towards.

  We arrived at Newark, straggling in off our various trains, variously attired, bearing assorted bags of belongings, and making our way in ones and twos up to the camp. We were all ages from twenty to early thirties, all heights and shapes, and we slouched, ambled, loped or strutted according to our build and the length of our legs. We had come from all parts of the country and had been in a variety of occupations. Some were builders, some navvies, some clerks, many were miners, one or two were Civil Engineers or surveyors. . . . I think I was the only one who had been nothing.

  The following day we all bore at least a superficial likeness to one another, clothed now in khaki. And then began the process of turning fifty individuals into a single unit. It took a month. This was the basic infantry training that every recruit had to undergo before he could come on to his more technical training. And I enjoyed every minute of it. I was, of course, lucky in that I was one of the youngest and one of the more agile, and I was accustomed to living a day that began with a bell that got you out of bed and finished with a bell that meant lights out and no more talking. It was certainly harder for some of the others. Yet, as the weeks went by and we got fitter and tougher, and discovered that our bodies could do things we had never dreamt they were capable of (and do them moreover without protest), so we gradually developed a pride in ourselves as individuals, in our physiques, and a pride, too, in our corporate identity.

  Then one day as we drilled on the Square, marching and counter-marching, sloping and presenting our arms, fixing and unfixing our bayonets, and finally standing-at-ease, standing-easy, our eyes were caught by another Section1 of recruits also marching and counter-marching. Heavens, what a gangling, straggling, shambling lot they were! Their uniforms unfitting, their caps sitting awkwardly on their heads, their boots too big for their feet. Everything about them seemed awkward from the uncoordinated way they moved to the jackknives that dangled stupidly from the lanyards round their waists. Had we looked like that a few short weeks ago?

  And it was then that we realized how far we had come, how much we were changed, and so took extra pride in the way we saluted when we passed an officer, in the way the toe caps of our boots gleamed in the sunshine, in the satisfying noises we could make when we smacked our rifles with the flats of our hands or brought our iron-shod heels down with a crack that set the tarmac ringing.

  Of course there were moments when we complained, when we failed to see how the precise folding of a greatcoat could affect the outcome of the war. But when you realize that many of us had been dragged unwillingly from wives and families, conscripted into an army we didn’t want to join in order to fight a war we didn’t want to fight, and were now being shouted at by NCOs whom we regarded as mere boys, it is surprising that we complained so little. There were many things that the army taught me – how to use a pick and shovel, how to tie knots, how to drive a car, how
to handle a boat – that I have subsequently found useful, but of all the things I learned the most valuable was what I learned in the first month of my army life. The chain of command which starts with the General does not finish with the Private but with his limbs, and it is this last link that is the most important of them all. I learned the things my body could do and I learned to disregard its messages of protest. Just as a good officer is in command of his men, getting from them the maximum they can give and receiving in addition their loyalty and respect, so I learned to command my body and my body learned to obey.

  Inevitably the training an army gives its troops is based to some extent on the last war it fought; and in 1941 our last war had been 1914-18. All we had learned as yet from 1939 had been how to retreat. So, not surprisingly, our only up-to-date training was in demolitions. For the rest we were taught how to dig trenches and how to prevent them from subsequently caving in; and then we made wonderful Boy-Scout things from long poles, bits of rope and pulleys. The tools with which we were eventually going to win the war – the mine detector, the bulldozer and the Bailey Bridge – had yet to make their appearance. But it didn’t in fact matter that what we were learning was in itself so useless. The point was that we were being taught to work as a team. Once we had learned this anything new could be picked up in a matter of days.

  But where, you may ask, does the Carpenter come in? What price Modern Practical Joinery? I must explain. In the army there is only one sort of infantryman. It makes little difference to what regiment he is posted, his work is much the same. But a Sapper can be posted to any one of a score of units each totally different from all the others. He can go to a Survey Unit or a Bomb Disposal Unit; he can go to a unit that looks after stores, or one that builds camps, or one that organizes docks or drives trains or makes roads. And all these are jobs calling for a particular skill, a skill which in many cases has been acquired in civilian life. Or on the other hand he can join a Field Company where he will be called upon to undertake a great variety of jobs according to the immediate needs of the formation to which his Company is attached. If the army is retreating at the time this will include mine laying and demolitions. If the army is advancing, mine clearing, road repairing, bridge building, operating ferries and so on. None of these jobs requires specialized knowledge, merely familiarity with the equipment – British or German – that one is handling. So a bricklayer might possibly find himself ultimately in a Company that spent its entire time laying bricks or he might never see a brick at all throughout his army career. A carpenter might be called upon to make roof trusses or lay floors or hang doors, or his special skill might be needed only when his Section wanted a new, portable, two-seater latrine.