George wrote to Barrie on February 20th:
‘Fortnum & Mason's goods have just arrived – boxes & boxes of them. We are a grateful party of officers, & shall be in clover for the six days' rest that is coming. It is good of you. I shall probably ask for more in a fortnight or three weeks. This time I ask you for a new novel. I ask for the devil of a lot, but everything I get here is worth thirty times what it was in the piping times of peace. … P.S. Cash is running short. Could you get me 100 francs from the bureau de change at Charing Cross in notes?’
Barrie replied on February 28th:
Peter
My dear George,
Your letter dated 20th Feb arrived yesterday and made me happy for the moment at all events. I had hardly finished reading and re-reading it (quite as if I was a young lady) when there arrives, unexpected, a gent of the name of Peter. He had managed at last to get two days by bearding his colonel, and in he walked, larger than ever, and between you and me a d-v-1-shly handsome fellow in my opinion and I guess in that of any candid person. Peter, whom a few years ago we chuckled over as rather a comic, is a werry fine youth indeed. … Life, sir, is odd, as you have been seeing this last two months, but it is even odder than that. Such a queer comedy of tears and grimness and the inexplicable – as your du Maurier blood will make you understand sooner than most. It will teach you that the nice people are the nastiest and the nastiest the nicest, and on the whole leave you smiling.
A few things to note from your last. For one thing I enclose four pounds in French money, and for another it is always a blessed thing for me when you want something. So if you don't want, go on inventing. I'll send you a book or two tomorrow (this is Sunday). Then I'll also send tomorrow a hamper similar to the last from Fortnum & Mason as it, thank goodness, seems to have been a success. … The one great doing for me is when we are all together again.
Loving
J.M.B.
The white chateau in 1914
Although Guy and George gave widely differing accounts of the miseries of trench warfare, both shared a similar response to the stark beauty of ruins. Guy had written to Gwen of ‘a lone and much-shelled chateau, looking picturesque in the rising moonlight’. George came across the same chateau a month later, writing to Barrie:
‘It was a bright moonlit night, & the chateau looked wonderful. It was all white with four great pillars in front, one of them broken. I walked up to it feeling, in spite of mud & dirt, like a Roman Emperor. It is the best sight I've seen yet. And then of course romance was a bit spoiled by an N.C.O. just behind me making some low remark about spotted fever (alluding to the shrapnel marks that covered the walls). … Next day I prowled round the chateau. It was really nothing but a shell, with whole rooms battered to bits. There was a little shrine out in the garden, practically untouched by gunfire. On the altar, just in front of the figure of Christ, there was a charger of four cartridges. To a sentimental civilian like me, not yet hardened into a proper mercenary, this had rather a striking effect. Perhaps it sounds a bit cheap, but the chateau, which was rather beautiful, had made me feel romantic.’
Peter Davies commented, ‘No word could be more aptly applied to George than romantic. He was romantically minded … and romantic in appearance. He had a nice “dirty” mind, too, and that makes a delightful combination, particularly when it is seasoned with a gay and at times extravagant sense of humour.’
Michael was now fourteen, still unhappy at Eton, but, according to Hugh Macnaghten, ‘resolved to face every event with absolute self-possession, however much it costs him. … Very full of anxieties, a boy of a tender heart and delightful feelings, full of promise. … Very anxious not to give himself away or show any excitement.’5 Michael's only surviving letter to George is distinctly lacking in the usual Etonian slang adopted by boys of his age:
George. ‘It is impossible to do justice to the charm of his modesty or to his character,’ recorded the Eton College Chronicle in March 1915; ‘the Greek epithets σώϕρωνobwise] χαρίɛις[elegant], καλóς κἀγαθóς [honourable and good] express him best.’
Eton College
Windsor.
3rd March 1915.
X A.M.
Dear George,
As I am at the present moment afflicted with a belly-ache, and 蝖 staying out, I seize the chance to write this news letter. Leave is passed, last week-end I found Peter at 23, having got leave from Friday to Sunday evening. And Uncle Jim rehearsing plays with a bad cold. I went to the Coliseum, which was not at its best. … The evening [of returning to Eton] passed in the usual way: – Tea: then wait, wait, wait, with futile attempts to play Rat-tat etc: books for Mary to pack: taxi comes early: wait: bag in taxi: hurried farewells, and station: crowds of boys: greetings which freeze on sight of Sir James: shouts of Good Lord here's Davies! on finding a carriage: walk up to tutor's [i.e. Macnaghten's House] on arriving, to feel you haven't been to leave at all, except for the atmosphere of purses replenished and change suits: supper & prayers after which [Macnaghten] comes in & asks all about George & Peter & Leave in general, while doing his best to obliterate the foot of the bed. Then lights suddenly go out at ten when a new book by Wells or Bierce becomes very interesting. Wake in morning to the refrain of ‘Nearly a quarter to seven, Mr Davies. Are you awake, sir?’ To which the only possible reply is a grunt. A superhuman effort drags you to the shower-bath, etc. …
My dame has just come in, and on my suggestion asks me to give you her best regards. … Again enters [my dame] with castor-oil in Brandy, which now reposes in my belly. … I had a letter from Jack this morning, in which he says he has done over 3,000 miles in the last twelve days, which seems rather a lot. … My source of information is now beginning to diminish rapidly and I feel that you will have to be satisfied with nine pages or thereabouts. … I cudgel my brains, but I can find nothing more to say, so I fear I must finish. J'ai fini.* Now for a letter to Jack, and then the night only.
Michael.
George wrote to Barrie on March 7th:
‘There is nothing to chronicle, except the gruesome fact that I've seen violent death within a yard of me. I was quite safe myself, Uncle Jim, as I was right down underneath the parapet. The poor chap wasn't one of my fellows, & put his head up in a place where at that time he could scarcely fail to stop a bullet. The top of his head was shot off, so he didn't feel it. But it was a dreadful sight. I oughtn't to write about these things, but it made an impression. Good luck with the burlesque. I am longing to see it. … Fortnum & Mason has again rolled up in abundance. It is so good of you.’
On the evening of Thursday, March 1 ith, Barrie wrote the last letter to reach George alive:
Envelope containing Barrie's last letter to George
My dear George,
I don't know when news from quite near you may reach you – perhaps later than we get it – but we have just heard that your Uncle Guy has been killed. He was a soldier by profession, and had reached a time of life when the best things have come to one if they are to come at all, and he had no children, which is the best reason for caring to live on after the sun has set; and these are things to remember now. He certainly had the du Maurier charm at its best – the light heart with the sad smile, & it might be the sad heart with the bright smile. There was always something pathetic about him to me. He had lots of stern stuff in him, and yet always the mournful smile of one who could pretend that life was gay but knew it wasn't. One of the most attractive personalities I have ever known.
Of course I don't need this to bring home to me the danger you are always in more or less, but I do seem to be sadder to-day than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. For four years I have been waiting for you to become 21 & a little more, so that we could get closer & closer to each other, without any words needed. I don't have any little iota of desire for you to get military glory. I do not care a farthing for anything of the kin
d, but I have the one passionate desire that we may all be together again once at least. You would not mean a featherweight more to me tho' you came back a General. I just want yourself. There may be some moments when a knowledge of all you are to me will make you a little more careful, and so I can't help going on saying these things.
It was terrible that man being killed next to you, but don't be afraid to tell me of such things. You see it at night I fear with painful vividness. I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.
Loving
J.M.B
Peter Davies wrote, ‘Surely no soldier in France or Flanders ever had more moving words from home than those in this tragic, desperately apprehensive letter. … Plenty of other people, no doubt, were thinking and writing much the same sort of thing, but not in such perfection. Indeed, taking all the circumstances into consideration, I think it must be one of the great letters of the world. Its poignancy is so dreadfully enhanced, too, by the realisation that, whatever of the pathetic there may have been in Guy du M., … far, far the most pathetic figure in all the world was the poor little genius who wrote these words, and afterwards, no doubt, walked up and down, up and down his lonely room, smoking pipe after pipe, thinking his dire thoughts.’
On the following Monday, March 15th, Nico and Mary Hodgson were asleep in the night nursery at Campden Hill Square. ‘Suddenly there came a banging on the front door, and the door-bell ringing and ringing. Mary got out of bed and went downstairs, while I sat up with ears pricked. Voices soon came up the stairs, but stopped just short of the landing. Then I heard Uncle Jim's voice, an eerie Banshee wail – “Ah-h-h! They'll all go, Mary – Jack, Peter, Michael – even little Nico – This dreadful war will get them all in the end !” A little later, realising I was awake, he came and sat on my bed for a while. I don't think he spoke, but I knew that George was dead.’
George had been killed in the early hours of March 15th. Lord Tennyson's son, Aubrey, wrote to Peter from Flanders a few days later, giving him as many details as he could gather:
‘The battalion was advancing to drive the Germans out of St. Eloi. … Stopford Sackville was marching alongside of George part of the way up, & he says he fancied George had a sort of premonition that he was going to be killed & said he hoped that they would not take him back into one of the villages behind but would bury him outside his own trench, & that he considered it was the finest death one could die & he wished to be buried where he fell. He was the first officer to be shot that night. The Colonel was talking to all C Company officers before the attack was made, & George was sitting on a bank with the others, when he was shot through the head, & died almost immediately, so that he can have felt nothing. It was impossible to comply with his wishes & bury him there, [so] they took him back and buried him in a field on the left of the road … outside Voormezeele … and they took a lot of trouble making the grave look nice, & planting it with violets. … I do not stand alone in this battalion in my affection for George. When I first asked about him when I got here, I was told by an officer who has been in the battalion for some years that he had never known any officer come into the battalion, who after so short a time had won the love of everyone, so much so that all his brother officers felt when he was killed that even though they had only known him such a short time, they had lost one of their best friends. As regards myself I don't think anyone can ever take his place, as there is no one whom I have ever loved more.’
Peter Davies wrote in his Morgue:
‘I remember getting a telegram at Sheerness from J.M.B. – GEORGE IS KILLED, HOPE YOU CAN COME TO ME. – And I remember arriving at the flat in Adelphi Terrace, … and that it was all very painful. … The effect on J.M.B. was dire indeed, poor little devil. Oh, miserable Jimmie. Famous, rich, loved by a vast public, but at what a frightful private cost. Shaken to the core – whatever dark fancies may have lurked at the back of his queer fond mind – by the death of Arthur; tortured a year or two later by the ordeal of his own divorce; then so soon afterwards prostrated, ravaged and utterly undone when Sylvia pursued Arthur to the grave; and after only four and a half years, George; George, whom he had loved with such a deep, strange, complicated, increasing love, and who as he knew well would have been such a pillar for him to lean on in the difficult job of guiding the destinies of Sylvia & Arthur Llewelyn Davies's boys – “my boys”.’
A telegram from the King and Queen conveying their sympathies arrived later in the day, followed by other telegrams and letters of condolence as the news spread that one of Sir James Barrie's adopted sons had been killed. Among them was a small white envelope, addressed in pencil, and stamped ‘PASSED BY CENSOR’:
March 14 [1915]
Dear Uncle Jim,
I have just got your letter about Uncle Guy. You say it hasn't made you think any more about the danger I am in. But I know it has. Do try not to let it. I take every care of myself that can be decently taken. And if I am going to stop a bullet, why should it be with a vital place? But arguments aren't any good. Keep your heart up, Uncle Jim, & remember how good an experience like this is for a chap who's been very idle before. Lord, I shall be proud when I'm home again, & talking to you about all this. That old dinner at the Savoy will be pretty grand. …
The ground is drying up fast now, and the weather far better. Soon the spring will be on us, & the birds nesting right up in the firing line. Cats are the only other thing left there. I wonder what spring will bring for us in this part of the line. Something a little different from the forty-eight hours routine in the trenches, I daresay. …
Meanwhile, dear Uncle Jim, you must carry on with your job of keeping up your courage. I will write every time I come out of action. We go up to the trenches in a few days again.
Your affec.
George
George's last letter. At the foot of the page, Barrie has written: ‘This is the last letter, and was written a few hours before his death. I knew he was killed before I got it.’
By the week-end, the four surviving brothers had forgathered at Campden Hill Square. Nico, aged eleven, remembered ‘seeing Jack standing by the dining-room window looking down the square, with big tears running down his cheeks. For myself, I'm afraid, my chief feeling was the thrill at seeing Jack and Peter in their uniforms.’
Peter concluded his Morgue with his own retrospective thoughts on George, and the effect of his death on their lives:
‘For his brothers, George's death was, with no exaggeration, a bad business. … The fortunes of war brought me pretty close to him for a short time within a few months of his death, and I had in the preceding five or six years been with him a great deal, fishing latterly, and bug-hunting in the more childish days before that; but it would be untrue to say that there existed tremendous intimacy between us, or that we were bound together by that ineffable love of brother for brother which one has occasionally read of. On the other hand it is not in the least untrue to say that I have gone on missing him possibly ever since I last saw him, leaning out of the window as his train steamed away from Sheerness station and calling out, “Till our next merry meeting!” He had so much that was really good without being in the least goody-goody, and was such fun, and so tolerant, and would have been such value always; and blood and background and memories are a mighty strong bond; and how few, after all, are those in all one's life with whom one can be completely at ease. That he had his fair share of the celebrated du Maurier charm or temperament, is certain; there was also a good leavening of sound, kind, sterling Davies in him too. I think he had that simplicity which J.M.B. and [Hugh] Macnaghten saw in Arthur, and which, though I only partly understand it, I dimly perceive to be perhaps the best of all characteristics. In fact I think he had in him a very great deal of all the best and finest qualities of both Arthur & Sylvia. But it was all thirty years ago, and he was only twenty-one, and what do I know about him really?
‘This much is certain, that when he died, some essential v
irtue went out of us as a family. The combination of George, who as eldest brother exercised a sort of constitutional, tacitly accepted authority over us, who was of our blood, and on whom still lingered more than a little of our own good family tradition, with the infinitely generous, fanciful solicitous, hopelessly unauthoritative J.M.B., was a good one and would have kept us together as a unit of some worth; as it was, circumstances were too much for J.M.B. left solitary, as well as for us, and we became gradually, but much sooner than would or should have been the case, individuals with little of the invaluable, cohesive strength of the united family. …
Oh well, bugger it. To make an end of this penultimate chapter of the family morgue, the epitaph which a poet wrote for George and his kind seems as appropriate as anything I know of:
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung;
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
George's grave in the British War Cemetery at Voormezeele. Peter visited the cemetery in 1946.‘I had the place to myself, and never remember feeling more alone. It was a grey, lowering, dismal sort of day, shivery too, in spite of the month. All sorts of vague thoughts came and went in my head, of dust and skeletons and the conqueror worm, and old, unhappy, far-off things, and older days that were happier. What with one thing and another I am not ashamed to admit that I piped an eye.’
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys Page 31