J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  ‘The burn that runs into the Kinglass under the railway bridge’

  ‘“Well – er – Sir, we were advised by Major Thornton to come here to ask about getting a commission – Sir,” said George.

  ‘“Oh, Bulger Thornton at Cambridge, eh? What's your name?”

  ‘“Davies, sir.”

  ‘ “Where were you at school?”

  ‘“Eton, sir.”

  ‘“In the Corps?”

  ‘“Yes, sir, Sergeant.”

  ‘“Play any games? Cricket?”

  ‘“Well sir, actually, I managed to get my eleven.”

  George in 1914

  George's fishing diary for 1914

  ‘“Oh, you did, did you?”

  ‘The Colonel, who had played for Eton himself in his day, now became noticeably more genial, and by the time he had ascertained that George was the Davies who had knocked up a valuable 59 at Lord's (which knock he had himself witnessed with due appreciation) it was evident that little more need be said.

  ‘“And what about you, young man?” he asked, turning to me.

  ‘“Please, sir, I'm his brother” was the best I could offer in the way of a reference.

  ‘“Oh, well, that's all right, then. Just take these forms and fill them in and get them signed by your father and post them back to me. Then all you have to do is to get your uniforms … and wait till you see your names in the London Gazette. I'm pretty busy just now, so good-bye.” And the Colonel dismissed his smile, waved dismissal to two slightly bewildered Second-Lieutenants designate, and went on with his writing.

  ‘So easy it was, in August 1914, to obtain the King's commission in the Special Reserve of the 60th Rifles.’

  Meanwhile Barrie, at fifty-four, was feeling decidedly useless. He returned to London a few days after George and Peter and offered his financial aid to Lord Lucas, who had turned his family home, Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, into a hospital (henceforth known as Wrest in Beds). His money, as always, was gratefully received, but there was little else he could do, so he returned to Auch, where Michael and Nico had remained with Mary Hodgson. George and Peter were still waiting to be gazetted, and they too travelled to Scotland for a few more weeks of fishing. ‘Aug. 21. A slack day fishing Michael's burn. One trout of 6 oz. … Let me not be daunted.’ A few days later, Barrie received an indirect summons from Prime Minister Asquith requesting him to put aside his plans for a ragtime revue and write a stirring propaganda play extolling the cause of the allies. Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and several other authors had been asked to conjure up similar odes to patriotism, though few approached the task with any measure of enthusiasm. Barrie agreed to have a go, but needed time to think about it. He wrote to George in Scotland at the end of August: ‘I hope all is going well at Auch. You will have seen that the opening of the first real battle [Mons] has not gone too well for the allies tho' of course it is only a rebuff. It all goes to show that the war will be a long one. … Nothing in men's minds & faces here but the seriousness of the war. … Fish as much as you can just now. Loving, J.M.B.’ This was the first instance of Barrie using the signature ‘loving’ as opposed to ‘your affecte’ in his (surviving) letters to George, and it perhaps indicated both premonition and a maternal urge to protect him from the inevitable, to ‘envelop him as with wings’.1 George took his guardian's advice, fishing every day in the remote Highland rivers and lochs with his brothers. He was now unofficially engaged to Josephine Mitchell-Innes, and wrote to her frequently, confiding his fears of the future. Her sister Norma recalled, ‘Our brother Gilbert thought the war was going to be one long cavalry charge, everyone waving their swords – smash the Kaiser! – terrific! But George had absolutely no illusions whatsoever. He knew what he was in for from the word go.’ On September 9th, George and Peter received their orders to proceed to Sheerness for training. George wrote in his little fishing diary:

  Sept 9.

  In the morning I threw a farewell Jock Scott, Blue Doctor, & Silver Doctor over the Orchy. Not a rise. The fish were very lively, evidently owing to the rain that came after lunch.

  Finis.

  On the same day, Barrie wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis at Glan Hafren, who had now become a firm friend: ‘Jack is in the North Sea, he is scarcely allowed to tell me that much, and George and Peter are waiting for their commissions. So the world suddenly alters and we must hope for the better. But it has all at once passed into the hands of our young men, and for what they may be we are responsible. I believe they are to be as right as rain. … I am probably going to America on Saturday: we must all try to do something.’

  The American visit was an impulsive attempt on Barrie's part to raise support for the allies. He persuaded A. E. W. Mason and his business manager, Gilmour, to go with him. Their journey was to be shrouded in mystery: nothing must leak out until they arrived, but when the Lusitania docked in New York, Barrie found letters awaiting him from the Consul-General and the British Ambassador, both urging him to call the mission off lest he offend American neutrality and embarrass the British Government. On September 20th, the New York Tribune published a front-page article:

  SIR J. M. BARRIE CAUGHT TRYING TO SURPRISE NEW YORK:

  Would Slip Into City Like Peter Pan to Look Around, but Reporters Catch Him and Make Him Talk –

  ‘It has been seventeen years since Sir James has been in America, and his arrival this time has been looked forward to with the utmost interest. There were stories that his trip … was made to further our interest in the cause of England. But this was all upset by Sir James.

  ‘“I've been coming for a long time,” he said, “and since we're out of the fighting – and writing – for some time, we came to look around.”…

  ‘It was a severe examination that he underwent before an ever growing audience, and when it was all over and he had again declared that his trip had nothing to do with the war in England, he said:–

  ‘“I had only one boast left. I was never interviewed. Now you have taken that away from me.”

  Barrie locked himself away in the Plaza Hotel, but was cornered by a persevering reporter from the New York Herald, who managed to penetrate his suite and obtain a rare interview with the playwright:

  ‘Sir James found the ordeal of being interviewed a difficult one, so he fell to talking about children. …

  ‘“It's funny,” he said, “that the real Peter Pan – I called him that – is off to the war now. He grew tired of the stories I told him, and his younger brother became interested. It was such fun telling those two about themselves. I would say, ‘Then you came along and killed the pirate’ and they would accept every word as the truth. That's how Peter Pan came to be written. It is made up of only a few stories I told them.”

  ‘Once engrossed in the subject of children Sir James underwent a transformation that was remarkable.

  ‘“Do you know,” he said, “I like the moving pictures? In them I can see cowboys. I have always wanted to be a cowboy.”’

  With the reporter out of the way, Barrie sat down and wrote to George, who had begun training at Sheerness:

  c/o Messrs Scribner, New York.

  24 Sept. 1914

  My dear George,

  A letter from M. & N. y'day tells me in a casual sort of way (as if it were not about the most important news in the world to me) that you have been summoned to Sheerness. I am looking forward so much to getting some details. …

  Mason went off today to Canada to speak. Gilmour has been to Washington staying at the Legation … & I am mostly in hiding. Great placards outside, ‘BARRIE EXONERATES THE KAISER’ &c. &c. ‘BARRIE SAYS WAR WILL BE LONG’ varied with more social ones, such as ‘BARRIE LIKES OUR VIRGINIA HAM’.

  Last night I had a Gin Whizz with a Long Tom in it. I slept well. Mason had two & slept better. …

  Your loving

  J.M.B.

  P.S. I am going to stay with Roosevelt.

  Sir James Barrie, Bart

  On October 1st, a long interview appear
ed in the New York Times, in which the reporter stated that Sir James had escaped down an elevator shaft on seeing him approach, and that he was therefore obliged to content himself with interviewing Sir James's manservant, Brown. After much discussion about his master's pipe, in which Brown revealed, ‘He does not smoke any pipe … he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers’, the intrepid reporter asked him about Barrie's views on the Kaiser. ‘Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr. Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the destruction of Louvain … he wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with. … Sir James is of a very sympathetic nature.’ Barrie had evidently instructed Brown to maintain strict neutrality while he was in America, in accordance with the President's wish: ‘To express no preference on matter of food, for instance, and always to … walk in the middle of the street lest he should seem to be favoring either sidewalk.’ Sir James had further instructed him, ‘When we reach New York, … we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time they are taking down our observations, they will be saying to themselves, “Pompous asses.” … Above all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we are at war – and if you don't you will be the only person who hasn't – don't be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest America takes you for another university professor.’ The interviewer concluded his article, ‘A disquieting feeling has since come to me that perhaps it was Sir James I had been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped down the elevator.’ Barrie wrote to George the following day:

  My dear George,

  …I must get hold of an interview – ‘Barrie at Bay – Which was Brown?’ – that appeared in the New York Times y'day & is being a good deal talked of. It is all about Brown's views of the war, the President, the German Ambassador &c. including his ‘Sir James's pipe’, & they are trying to find out who the interviewer was. I flatter myself you will be able to guess! Brown has no suspicions & says ‘tut tut tut’ & ‘Did you ever!’ to which I reply that I never.

  I am picturing you both as having very hard and laborious work with a tremendous lot of stiff marching. …

  Your loving

  J.M.B.

  Peter described his training at Sheerness with George in the Morgue:

  ‘The afternoon we arrived, eight young officers (children, I should call them now) who had only joined a week or two earlier, with little or no more previous training than ourselves, had just received their orders from France, to replace casualties in the Battalions on the Marne and the Aisne. This somewhat abrupt confrontation with the exigencies of the service had, temporarily, a depressing effect, and I remember George, as we undressed in our tent that night, breaking a rather long silence with the words, “Well, young Peter, for the first time in our lives we're up against something really serious, **** me if we aren't.”

  ‘In a day or two his usual gaiety reasserted itself, and I believe our time “on the square” was a regimental record for light-heartedness of a most unmilitary kind, entirely due to George's unorthodox attitude. … [He] had quite made up his mind by now that life was going to be too short for much seriousness to enter into it. … The “young officers” of that Reserve Battalion, in those very early days of the war, were mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, with a few younger, straight from school. … Hardly any had thought of the army as a career. Looking back, I can see that they were what would nowadays be called a “cross-section” of the élite and cream of the nation. Average age about twenty-one; on the whole a devoted, laughing, fatalistic, take-it-as-it-comes company, often coarse of tongue, too young to have been coarsened in body or soul by the asperities of adult life – the bloom of youth on them still. … Among them George was unquestionably conspicuous; few that survive would recall anyone whose image serves better as the flower and type of that doomed generation.’

  Barrie arrived back in London on October 22nd, and immediately wrote to George: ‘Here I am again and thirsting nightly to see you. … I thought of rushing out to Sheerness, … but I also wonder whether there is any possibility of you & Peter being able to run up to town. Reply, reply, reply!’ He wrote again on November 15th:

  George, shortly before leaving for the Western Front

  My dear George,

  Very glad to get your letter and to hear there is some chance of your getting a couple of nights soon. I shall be your humble servant for the occasion. It is very strange to me to read of your being at your musketry practice, for it seems to me but the other day your mother was taking bows and arrows out of your hands and pressing on me the danger of giving you penny pistols. Last week or so darts to fling against a target were considered too risky. In some other ways it all seems longer than it is, however. … We seem farther away from July of this year than that July was from the days of crinolines. There is certainly some gain – a stirring of manhood, but at a terrible cost. I enclose you the Eton Chronicle, from which I see that 8 per cent of Etonians have been killed. In the Army all over the percentage of killed is under 2 per cent. … I dined at Asquith's the other day, and he was certainly hopeful and K. of K.* is also encouraging. Once they are back on German soil it mightn't take so long, but to get them back! … I've written a short play with the Kaiser as chief figure which has its points I think but unfolds a tragic tale. When I have copies I'll want your opinion. …

  My love

  J.M.B.

  The short play was Barrie's attempt at dramatic propaganda, Der Tag – the German toast to victory. It took the form of a duologue between the German Emperor and the Spirit of Culture, reminiscent of Bernard Partridge's patriotic cartoons in Punch, but proved to be too sympathetic to Germany for the average Briton's taste. It is also among the very few examples of Barrie's writing in which there is none of his redeeming humour:

  EMPEROR. … Britain has grown dull and sluggish: a belly of land, she lies overfed, no dreams within her such as keep Powers alive. … Britain's part in the world's making is done: ‘I was,’ her epitaph…

  CULTURE. She fought you where Crecy was and Agincourt and Waterloo, with all her dead to help her. The dead became quick in their ancient graves, stirred by the tread of the island feet, and they cried out, ‘How is England doing?’ The living answered the dead upon their bugles with the ‘All's well.’ England, O Emperor, was grown degenerate, but you have made her great again. …

  EMPEROR. God cannot let my Germany be utterly destroyed.

  CULTURE. If God is with the Allies, Germany will not be destroyed. Farewell!

  November 25th, 1914, would have been Sylvia's forty-eighth birthday; five days later Barrie wrote to George:

  My dear George,

  I was very gratified by your writing me for your mother's birthday. I would rather have you do so than any one alive; you can understand how I yearn to have you sitting with me now and at all times. What you don't know in the least is the help you have been to me and have become more and far more as these few years have passed. There is nothing I would not confide in you or trust to you. …

  I was amused by a letter from your tutor [Hugh Macnaghten] in which he bewailed my having the son in The Will sent to Eton. He would undoubtedly, he says, have been sent by such a father to Harrow! But it was a werry nice letter indeed. … I was in Lord Lucas's hospital ‘Wrest in Beds’ the other day – 100 wounded. One of them told me (he had a broken leg) that he thought the French officers were better than the English. His explanation was thus – ‘They wouldn't have sent me here 'cos I had this bad leg. There was a Frenchy near me what had the top of his head blown off & his officer said to him “You run up to the tent & get your head bandaged & come back slippy.” He didn't come back slippy, so the officer went
& fetched him. Yes, I think their officers are better than ours.’ Amazing, isn't it?

  I've done Der Tag, my war play, and will get you a copy. It's also possible I'll turn the [Granville-]Barker revue into a shorter thing for Gaby. Jack wires he may get up tomorrow tho' whether only for the day he doesn't say.

  Your loving

  J.M.B

  In early December, George was posted to the 4th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, prior to his departure for the Western Front. He wrote to Barrie, telling him he would be allowed a short leave – his first since joining. Barrie replied, ‘Your news is great, and … I'll keep the time as clear as the deck of one of H.M. ships!’ Peter Davies later speculated:

  Gaby

  ‘Did George, during those last few hours of freedom, have anything more than just a mild flirtation with Gaby? I like to think so. Both were charmers, and it would have been a good finale. It is my belief that J.M.B., though so insulated himself … from the flesh and the Devil, had the perception and imagination and tolerance and sense of the fitness of things to smile on such a little piece of naughtiness, … and even pave the way for it. I have no evidence one way or the other, … but I will leave the theory in, because I think it a charming one, which George would have appreciated. And you never know. J.M.B. had his moments of profound insight and wisdom as well as his practically limitless generosity. And he loved George with an exceeding great love.’

  A. E. W. Mason once referred to ‘the emotional frankness with which Barrie could always write but never speak’.2 In saying goodbye to George, Barrie doubtless had to exercise considerable self-control not to reveal his emotions and the premonition already in his notebook:

  — The Last Cricket Match. One or two days before war declared – my anxiety & premonition – boys gaily playing cricket at Auch, seen from my window – I know they're to suffer – I see them dropping out one by one, fewer & fewer.