The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  “Well.…”

  “Somewhere a long way off.”

  “What do you mean by a long way off?”

  “Paris can be a long way off. Haven’t you friends in Paris you could visit, and not visit?”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  They laughed at that. But, seriously, it might be possible. Suppose she were to offer to take Francis to Wimereux. Her parents would never let him go alone, nor would they let her go alone. But in that killing of two birds with a single stone, she would be able to conceal the fact that her own invitation to stay with a friend in Dieppe was a flimsy one. She could say “It’s such luck. The Martins have asked me to stay with them. That means there would be someone to take Francis across to Wimereux.” And in Francis’s excitement and the general discussion of his plans, her own movements would be overlooked. It was the kind of chance that would not come again.

  “If you meet the midday train from London next Tuesday at the Gare du Nord, you’ll find me on it.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll put myself entirely in your hands. For a week, if you want me for that long,” she added.

  He did not ask her to go back with him to his flat. She half-thought he would. She would have gone if he had asked her. But she was glad he hadn’t. For a moment, as they stood side by side on the pavement of Davies Street, he put his hand upon her arm above the elbow, pressing it.

  “I’ll be counting the seconds until Tuesday. It’ll be heaven having you to myself.”

  Then the taxi had drawn up and he was gone. Her eyes followed the small shaking cab. Only five days off. Yes: it would be heaven. She had never thought she would feel about him in this way. It wouldn’t last, she knew that. In the nature of things it couldn’t. I must be careful not to fall too much in love with him. I mustn’t let myself be hurt too much, when it’s all over.

  But she didn’t care how much she was going to be hurt. She only knew that she was falling, headlong, into love. She didn’t care. She was so happy. She would enjoy this loving to the full. It would never come again; not in the same way. First honeymoon. She wondered if he had guessed he was the first. I’d like to tell him. But I never shall. Many years hence, perhaps; not now. It might spoil things for him; give him a sense of responsibility. It might worry him. That mustn’t happen. I want it to be perfect for him as it is for me. I want him to have all the happiness he knows how to take.

  Sunlight was in the streets and sunlight was in her heart as she walked southwards to Piccadilly. She wanted to sing, she was so happy. Five days. Then Paris. To be alone with him; to be in love in love’s own city. Five days. Five days. Five days. Her heart beat to the rhythm of the refrain. Five days. Five days.

  But it was in the last hours of July that the rhythm beat through her heart. And the year was 1914.

  III

  There have been written innumerable descriptions of those last July days and that first week in August. On the memory of those old enough to be aware of what was happening every detail is clearly cut. It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. I was then sixteen. At prize-giving on the last Monday in July the headmaster spoke of the “serious news that we have read in our morning’s papers.” I thought he referred to Ireland. On the next day I returned home for the summer holidays. I was chiefly concerned with Middlesex’s chance of winning the county championship. On the following Saturday I went to Blackheath to watch the last day of the Kent and Surrey match. So much had happened during those four days that as I watched Colin Blythe run up to the wicket with that slow tripping run and the left arm curled behind his back, I thought, “Shall I ever watch another first-class cricket match?” I was sitting next Philip Trevor. He was reporting the match for the Daily Telegraph. “My account of this match will never be printed. There’ll be no sports page in Monday’s paper.” On the Sunday I travelled down into the country. Outside the station stood a group of villagers. “Have you any news?” they asked. They had waited for the London train, believing that Londoners would know more than they did.

  Everyone has memories of that kind. And everyone has memories, similar to mine, of the stages by which during that long, slow-passing, sun-soaked August he came to realize that this war was not like every preceding war, to be the concern solely of the professional soldier; that the civilian population had to make larger and costlier contributions than an increase in income tax.

  I spent that August with my aunts in Somerset. I had planned it to be a cricket-playing, cricket-watching holiday. But in the matches that I had meant to watch no one took any interest. No one cared whether Surrey, Kent or Middlesex were champions. The games in which I had meant to play were cancelled. It was no longer possible to find eleven players. Every day brought the message of some new person “joining up.”

  Everyone has memories of such a kind. In detail they are different; but in essentials they are the same. They provide snapshots of a world, unprepared for war, leading a personal life, happily or unhappily, as the case might be; realizing first that war was imminent, then more surely that the problems of war were personal. During the war, for purposes of propaganda, addressed in the main to neutral countries, Britain’s unpreparedness for war was over-stressed. There was so much talk of “the unprovoked assault” that since the war the tendency has been to argue that Britain was no less ready for war than Germany, France, Russia; that twentieth-century diplomacy had created a situation which could have had no other outcome; that “in tragic life God wot, no villain need be.”

  That is the modern tendency; and it may be that a few politicians, industrialists, diplomatists were awake to the closeness and reality of the danger. But for the majority of thinking English, the outbreak of the war came without any warning.

  The same tendency to contradict our earlier attitude of exaggeration has since led many to mistake the spirit in which during that first autumn Kitchener’s first army was recruited. The pulpit and the press delivered so much intolerable highfalutin about the sacred cause of a crusade that the soldier is informed to-day by those who were too young, or physically unfit to serve, that he joined up either because he thought it would be fun, or because he was coerced by public opinion. I doubt if a single soldier enlisted in the recruiting-poster spirit of crusade with which the press endowed him. Many, no doubt, were excited by the spirit of adventure; nobody knew then that three-quarters of active service consisted of wading through mud-filled trenches. Nobody cares to be “out of things.” But Kitchener’s army, even so, was for the most part recruited from men who believed that an honourable obligation had been laid upon them not to desert their friends.

  Edward Balliol spent the month of August in London. He preferred to take his holiday in October. The golf links of East Kent were by then pleasantly free of “green-fee” visitors. He was a member both of Royal St. George’s and the Cinque Ports Club at Deal. He took a golfing holiday at a time when golf could be enjoyed in its proper setting: at the seaside, in a leisured atmosphere, when the wind is fresh, but not a gale; when it is more likely to be dry than wet; when sunshine is intermittent; when the fairways are fresh and green; when the light is still good at tea-time.

  In consequence his memories ofthat August were London ones; of scare headlines: of newspaper boys announcing sensation upon sensation: of rumours: of men in his club who had this, that or the other thing, on the very best authority. They were such memories that he shared with a million other Londoners. There were those other ones that were personal to himself.

  There was the Bank Holiday Monday, with war practically certain; with Ruth suddenly flinging down the paper on the breakfast table, rising to her feet, her meal half finished, walking over to the window, leaning there, her head on her hand, staring at the garden. Francis saying “I suppose this means I shan’t be able to have my holiday in France”; Ruth swinging round from the window, on her face a look of anger that was almost hatred. “Your holiday!” then turning back to stare out of the window. Francis’
s mouth gaped wide, as though he had been struck across the face. Jane stretching out a consoling hand: “Darling, you shall have the loveliest holiday when it’s over.”

  There was the first board-meeting of Peel & Hardy. As he passed through the counting-house on his way to the board-room, he found half the staff grouped round a khaki-clad figure. He paused, for an explanation.

  “It’s Walker, sir, he’s been called up. He’s come to say goodbye to us.”

  In his short-tunicked, baggy-trousered, high-collared uniform, he looked very much as he had done seven years earlier when he had appealed to the board for a rise of wages. There was the same roguish twinkle in his eye. Though his hair had been clipped close where it would show beneath his hat, the front lock still curled with an auburn daring.

  Balliol shook him by the hand.

  “I’d no idea you were a reservist.”

  “I’m not, sir. A terrier; joined up last year; thought as ‘ow it’d get me a good ‘oliday fer nothink. Seems like I’m getting it.”

  Balliol recounted the incident in the board-room afterwards. Lord Huntercoombe nodded his head sagely.

  “I remember him; liked the look of him. A rascal. I like rascals. Not enough of ’em nowadays. Everyone too well-behaved. No spirit. I suggest that as he’s the first man from this office to join the colours, the board should make him a present of five pounds. He won’t be the first to go. My boy’s in camp. His commission will be through now any day.”

  On his way back that evening Balliol saw a huge crowd gathered round a platform in Trafalgar Square. The platform was decorated with the Union Jack and the flags of France, Belgium, Russia. A dozen or so persons were seated upon the platform. Several of their faces were familiar to Balliol. There were two Cabinet ministers, a Conservative ex-minister. There was the Bishop of Banchester; a nonconformist publicist; a couple of Socialists; a prominent Trades Union official. It was a gathering representative of the main half-dozen currents of English thought. A tall, strong-featured woman was speaking. She wore a tailor-made coat and skirt. As she spoke, she kept her hand in her coat pocket. Her voice was clear-toned; the sentences short, tense, banged home, one after the other: as a shoemaker bangs nails into a sole.

  Balliol stopped. It was nearly a year since he had seen his sister. They had never really liked each other. He knew he had no right to blame her for Lucy’s accident; but he did. She knew he did: and she resented it. Their meetings had been less and less frequent, more and more formal, till they had become little more than an occasional “duty” dinner. The last two invitations she had declined. She was too busy, she had said. He could well believe it. Speaking here, heckling there; scarcely ever long out of the press; harried by the “cat and mouse” act; a political refugee. But now apparently all that was over. She had called down the curtain. All her energies, all the scope of her organization were flung into the war.

  He listened to her speech.

  “We must close the ranks. Three weeks ago those who stood before you now were, in our different ways, sworn enemies of one another. We were opposed by irreconcilably hostile points of view. We were prepared to fight with our last breath for what we held and still hold to be the truth. To-day, in the face of a greater danger, a more ruthless foe, we stand united. We have forgotten our points at issue. We have only one enemy; a common enemy. Till that enemy is broken and humbled we shall fight side by side. We must close the ranks.”

  From the huge crowd rose a swelling murmur of applause. Yes, she could move audiences, all right. She was strong and she spoke the truth. She had no axe to grind. She was an important woman, he supposed. One of the people who influenced events. It was hard to realize that one’s sister should be somebody that mattered.

  He found, on his return, in the hall a large canvas kit-bag. It was stamped with the letters I.C.O.T.C.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he asked.

  But he did not need telling. He read the reply in the eager, excited expression of Hugh’s face.

  “When do you go?” he asked.

  “Not to camp for another fortnight. There’ll be some preliminary training in the Inns of Court depot at Lincoln’s Inn. Then we go to Berkhamsted. I stay here till then. I shall probably get my commission in November.”

  “We must try and make things nice for you.”

  His son! The Inns of Court; that kit-bag in the hall. An officer in November, and then.… But quite likely the war would be over before then.

  Every evening before taking his bath and changing into his velvet dinner-jacket he spent half an hour or so with Helen, telling her a story: some adaptation of Grimm and Andersen: a long serial story that wandered on from evening to evening till he had quite forgotten how the story had begun, where or with what characters. He took care to end upon an atmosphere of suspense, so that the next day he should be able to pick up the thread of the narrative. Helen would say, “The prince was just going to be bewitched by the ogre. Quick, daddy, what happened?” Balliol would recount the episode of the ogre. By the time he had finished that, he would be in his stride and able to think of something else.

  He would devise episodes for about twenty minutes. “Now it’s time for you to say your prayers and go to sleep.” She would jump out of bed, kneel down beside him and repeat her prayers.

  This evening, as she knelt, he checked her. “I want you to alter your prayer. I want you, when you get to Hugh, to add ‘who is going to be a soldier, please bring him back safe to us.’“

  Helen frowned, memorizing the sentence as though it were a lesson, repeating it over to herself; then bent her head forward into her hands.

  “Anyhow, the war won’t touch her,” thought Balliol.

  She was, it seemed, the only member of the family whom it wouldn’t. One morning, half-way through the month, Ruth came down to breakfast with a set, resolute expression on her face.

  “It’s no good,” she announced. “I can’t stand this any more. It’s driving me mad. I can’t sit about here doing nothing. I’ve got to do something.”

  “What are you going to do,” asked Francis, “sew shirts for soldiers?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, exactly. I’m going to Aunt Stella. She’ll find something for me to do.”

  Her mother was about to protest, but Balliol checked her. It was the best thing that she could do, Stella would be able to find something for her: was the one woman who could.

  When war broke out, she had an organization ready made that she could put at the disposal of war services. During those first weeks of the war, when everyone wanted to do something and nobody knew what, she was the one person who seemed able to direct their enthusiasm into appropriate channels. She was the chairman of innumerable committees. Letter after letter bearing her signature appeared in the daily Press, suggesting the various ways in which women might be useful. The Suffragettes were the first organized group of women since the days of Boadicea. Their organization was a nucleus from which the main body of woman’s war work might be attacked. Punch had a cartoon of Kitchener and Stella Balliol standing side by side; the one was beckoning to the men, the other to the women. Each pointed towards a road that, littered in the middle distance with signs of war, led to a shadowly effulgent group of towers labelled Victory. This cartoon was displayed with great prominence in recruiting offices, and outside village halls. No one recalled that three months earlier Stella had been caricatured by the same hand as a wild-haired, ragged-skirted, pince-nezed fanatic, waving a mallet in one hand and a firebrand in the other, to whom an exasperated woman attired according to the dictates of middle-aged suburbanism pointed the finger of ignorant scorn. The caption ran: “If you knew the harm you were doing to my cause!” Balliol wondered whether Stella derived an ironic entertainment from the comparison. Probably she was unaware of it. She had a job to do and was busy doing it.

  It was the first time that Ruth had visited her aunt’s office in the Temple. In consequence, she did not notice, as Lucy would have
done, one of the first differences that the war had caused. Miss Draft was no longer seated in the front office. During the last two years Stella, remembering the earlier split that had come into the Union, had held herself a little apart from the central organization. She had worked beside rather than with it; suspecting that a time might come when she would value her independence; when she might want to act alone.

  She was glad of her independence when the war began. There had been several clearly marked points of view at the first committee meeting. There were those who, in view of the Movement’s close connection with the Independent Labour Party, were in favour both of opposing the war and taking the opportunities that the war provided of attacking a government that would have its hands half tied. Another section was wholly for the war, was resolved to prosecute this war with all its power, to turn the Movement’s paper into an organ for patriotic propaganda, to conduct anti-German and recruiting meetings throughout the country in the same way that they had before conducted suffrage meetings. To both these policies Stella was opposed. To the first for the reason that her whole upbringing had taught her that in time of war there is only one attitude for a patriot: “My country, right or wrong.” The second because she was convinced that such a campaign would sooner or later prove more of a nuisance than a help.

  “We must work,” she had asserted, “not independently, but with the government. We must behave as the Conservative politicians are behaving. We must say to them, ‘How can we help you? When? Where?‘ We must show them in what ways we can help them. The war has got to be won. Nothing matters, nothing can matter till it has been won.”

  That was how she had argued. She had thought it better not to voice the argument, to her very potent, but whose expression at this moment would be misunderstood, that the Suffragettes, by abandoning their struggle now, would find themselves at the end of the war in an unassailable position. They would have proved their loyalty and their capacity. They would be entitled to their reward. The country would be on their side. In times of war bribes were offered to neutral countries to remain neutral; or to exchange their neutrality for an alliance. The vote was the price which the Suffragettes would receive for their alliance. It would not be phrased that way. But that, in fact, was how the bargain stood.