Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  Now he was a fighting man, who carried sidearms, but very little ammunition. Ammunition was in desperately short supply. Now he was no longer a musician but a soldier living day to chaotic day in a place they called Passchendaele. Now, every vestige of military order was gone. Men were potted at and went down like grouse on 4 August. Food was whatever was available. Big guns were restricted to firing only a few rounds a day. There were not enough rifles to go round so that men went into battle with picks and shovels, arming themselves when they could from the dead and injured. For the first winter months of the war, on that front, it had been mud and cold and mud and frustration and mud and dead men.

  According to Headquarters’ statistics, he too should have been dead, for he had spent months being moved around the battlefields and had gone much beyond his officially calculated life-expectancy. But he knew something that ‘they’ did not know, he now knew that he was one of the chance statistics. If statistics proved that eight out of every ten men were killed within a month of arriving at the Front, they proved equally that two out of ten were not killed. From this belief he helped himself to the fact that there would eventually be a statistic which showed that a certain percentage of men would go home unscathed. Now, Bindon Blood was assured that he was to be of their number.

  He was aware that he had many mad thoughts these days but it’s my madness that keeps me sane. He chuckled to himself and began in his head another rambling, endless letter. Darling Ess, he withdrew to the only place where there was no chaos, you have no cause to worry about me, I feel that my life is charmed. There is a magic bubble into which I can slip whenever I wish. In here there are green fields and trees, a yellow bordered sea, white cottages and red cows, for this is how I remember Lyme. There is a woman who slowly walks in those fields, or along the strand. I see the reason that she walks slow. It was a soldier who gave her the tell-tale silhouette that she holds as she walks. He who gave her that ever-swelling mound of love. Do you remember, Ess? Do you remember the sun and the sound of the waves? Do you remember the breakfasts and the rush to straighten the tumbled bed? Do you remember how she tried to muffle her cries of passion. Their laughter? His ecstatic happiness? This woman who walks so stately in the field… she is the woman who has given the soldier his charmed life, and it is she who will soon give life to the soldier’s child. Oh, darling Ess, I can hardly bear it that you must have the child and I shall not be close by…

  He cuffed away some tears… how easily they came now that he had learned the knack. It was a perfect spring day. The town that had been prosperous in the Middle Ages was now inhabited by about only 20,000 inhabitants who lived by the beets and corn that their land yielded. So far, they had tried to ignore the battles that were fought around their flat countryside. Bindon Blood sat with his back against warm stone and rested, passing the time till his men would be ready to transport canisters of food to the battle-zone.

  Even though publicly weeping, he was invisible to passers-by. Another piece of khaki like thousands more – Canadian, Pathan, Indian Army, British, Baluchi, Sikh – all anonymous pieces of khaki. Bindon Blood thought briefly of the times when he had been anything but anonymous; when, standing alone on a raised podium, he had performed solo; and when as a young officer in full dress uniform picked out by a spotlight he had played the Last Post before the King. Except at their wedding, Esther had never seen him in his splendour; gleaming buttons and insignia, plumed cap, braided jacket. He took out a tobacco-tin and papers. She did not know that he had taken to smoking. It hardly seemed to matter now, that his breathing might be impaired for the playing of wind instruments. His newly-discovered satisfaction from nicotine outweighed that consideration, the comfort of nicotine was here and now and the burning end of a cigarette could finish off a dozen lice.

  With smoke curling over his face from a meanly-filled cigarette, he leaned his head against his recently-issued gasmask bag and closed his eyes to the sun and wrote to his brother-in-law, I wonder whether you will answer Kitchener’s call for volunteers, Jack? I know almost nothing of military strategy, but even I must know more than those who are commanding us. I believe that they cannot understand that an entirely different set of rules must apply now that we are not using cavalry, otherwise they would not sit in England planning battles that cannot be won no matter how many tons of bodies they ship out here. We desperately need supplies, Jack, and armaments… not men, especially not untrained barbers, clerks and waiters who took the shilling in a moment of patriotic fervour…

  The first shells fell late morning.

  It was Saturday, market day, and the town was busy. Bindon Blood, returning to reality, saw the same looks of bewilderment and terror on the faces of townspeople as he had seen on those of his own men, and they must have seen upon his, when they first experienced being targeted by an unseen enemy who fired at them from a great distance. Soon the market-place was cleared as the people ran into the town’s cellars.

  By midday guns were pounding continuously. By early afternoon, when there was a lull, there was turmoil on the roads leading westward from town, as a tide of refugees laden with possessions streamed out against the oncoming horse-drawn limbers of Bindon and his transporters.

  By five o’clock walls were crumbling and towers crashing. The town was dying in a cloud of dust.

  On the first light breeze of evening there wafted in from the north a heavy yellow cloud. It descended like a fog, catching men in the throat, burning their eyes and retching their guts. When men had no masks to protect themselves, they soaked any piece of cloth with water, urine, slops of tea, and held it across their faces. Horses with eyes streaming and rolling shrieked and broke out, crazed with panic. Foot-soldiers with blinded, burning eyes, staggered across the flat fields.

  Behind the yellow cloud, with bayonets fixed and peering through the goggles of their grotesque rubber masks, came the German infantry.

  Four miles of the line collapsed, heavy guns were abandoned as blinded, wounded and choking troops were loaded on to any vehicle which would serve as an ambulance. Ahead of the advancing enemy, Bindon Blood, his charmed life protected by his lucky gas-mask, organized the limbers of the gun-carriages, on which earlier the food canisters had been transported, to transport men to dressing-stations or shelter behind the lines.

  Later, he remembered thinking: Providence issued gas masks alphabetically. My lungs are saved. I shall stop smoking. I shall play for Esther and the child at a great military tattoo, with the spotlight upon me. Esther will say, Listen, Baby, listen to your papa playing.

  The soaked sack which was over the head of his horse served to make the creature rear and struggle to break loose. Bindon held tightly to the leather leading strap which he had twisted about his fist. The horse rose on its back legs, knocked Bindon flying, and leapt forwards, pulling a wheel of the limber across Bindon’s ankle, crushing it into the road. He heard the scream before he blacked out, but did not know that it was himself. As he lay there with the remnants of gas swirling about him, his mask was ripped from his face by a retching soldier who could not believe his good luck at this find.

  When Major Blood came to an agonized consciousness and in a pool of vomit, the remnants of his last thoughts before the horse reared were still with him.

  Listen, Baby…

  Listen to the strange music your papa’s breath makes.

  1916

  In London, at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, Victoria Ormorod, with other members of the League for Peace, is in her usual Sunday morning place, arguing the case against continuing the war.

  ‘…and a multitude of men uselessly lost. I was at The Hague congress where women of every nation supported the notion that in the twentieth century governments must give up the notion that disputes are settled by brute force. It is honourable to work for peace.’

  A young woman, standing in the crowd that is gathered around the stool Victoria stands upon, raises her fist triumphantly. ‘And so it is honourable for Our Boys to die
for their country.’ She receives cheers from some supporters. Later in the day the woman will be speaking, whipping up a jingoistic frenzy; then it will be the turn of Victoria and her friends to give this heckler as rough a time. Hecklers are the stone on which wits are sharpened.

  Victoria is not thrown off-stride, but raises her voice above the cheers for the interrupter. ‘This lady says that it is honourable for them to die for their country. Those men –I will not abuse them by addressing them as “boys” with such false sentimentality – it is true were no age at all. It is true also that they were the sons and husbands of women who had no right to vote. When it came to electing the government who decided that this country should go to war, no woman and scarcely any of those young men who have died had any say in it – the very people who have most to lose have the least power.’ She pauses as a male voice cuts in singing, ‘Here we go, Here we go, Here we go again…’

  As she waits, her eyes slide over the crowd until she sees, standing at the back, the tall figure of Jack Moth. It is a while since she has seen him, and she hopes that he will not go before she can speak to him.

  The singing man’s regular cronies at Speakers’ Corner take their lead from him and join in. Victoria rolls her eyes heavenwards, indicating that this is an old joke, but she will humour them. When they have finished, they move off to perform before another gathering further along in Hyde Park.

  She continues, trying, at the same time as keeping a hold on her crowd, to keep Jack in view. Ever since the night when she sat and comforted him after his mother’s death, her memory has kept insisting that experience upon her. ‘The names of men in those shocking and ever-growing fists of the casualties of Flanders have not died for their country, they did not die for Canada, or India, or Wales, or Ireland, or Scotland, or England…’

  The woman interrupts again, ‘No! They have died for gallant little Belgium.’

  Victoria turns on her. ‘No! No! The young men in Flanders are dying for the pride and honour of incompetent generals, and for war-loving people like you. You tolerate 60,000 casualties in a few weeks rather than tolerate what you think of as defeat. I am not a general or a politician, I am a midwife – yet even I can see what the war lords could not or would not see – that it would have been sensible to withdraw from the Salient, to abandon Ypres and re-form a stronger line beyond the canal.’

  For the moment the crowd has fallen silent. Jack is looking directly at her, and she wonders whether he has come purposely to see her.

  ‘If we are not to continue pouring the very best of our young men down the barrels of the German guns, there is only one course open to us, and that course is to negotiate for peace.’

  For a moment the Sunday morning crowd listens, but soon closes its ears to the unthinkable. Peace? Just when its blood is up, the whip raised and the fox in sight? No matter what, the crowd wants nothing except to lash out – even though it might lose its limbs in the attempt.

  The British public does not want to hear the words ‘negotiated peace’, and these are at the heart of Victoria Ormorod’s message.

  The woman and her friends will go out with their white feathers, and join in the singing: ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go, Your King and your Country they need you so…’

  Young men, filled with nationalistic fervour, will listen to the whine of shells and the thunder of guns, believing that they hear bugles and drums.

  There is an excitement in the air that comes when a country that has been spoiling for a fight is in the throes of fighting it. The crowd, whose attention Victoria has had for thirty minutes, knows how much blood is being spilled; it sees itself as part of a Nation in Mourning, and so wants no part of a negotiated peace – it wants vengeance.

  When Victoria’s supporters hand out leaflets these are rolled into balls and shied at the members of the League for Peace.

  Victoria has not been home for weeks. Her way of life has for years been almost nomadic, a few days here helping to set up a local organization, a few days there speaking at rallies and meetings, sleeping wherever a supporter of the cause had room to spare. Her cause now was peace as well as suffrage.

  Within the circle of supporters of the League, it was easy to believe that there was urgent and growing support, and it is true that their numbers grew steadily from the parents and relatives of soldiers. Young men who had been blithe-spirited youths when they were shipped to France, but who had come back on leave changed; or been sent home injured, withdrawn and racked, not speaking of what it was that filled the night-time with nightmares. Or had not come back at all.

  There were, too, many Quakers and other religious sects whose pacifist beliefs pushed them into speaking out against the continuance of the war. And some who believed that there were no circumstances in which they could go armed with the intention of killing another human being.

  * * *

  As Jack Moth watched Victoria Ormorod, he felt the same thrill of attraction that he had felt that balmy summer in Southsea before the war. He wanted her. Had wanted her since their first meeting. He longed for her fine body, longed to sit quietly with her, to sit and talk with her, to sit and listen. As he listened now, he resented the passion she expended on the crowd.

  He watched the crowd with disgust. A man of about Jack’s own age was gathering up leaflets and compressing them into a hard ball. As he aimed, Jack snatched the ball from him, caught his collar, jerked him back and spun him around so that he was facing into Jack’s broad chest. ‘Exactly what were you going to do?’

  ‘They’re damned traitors the lot of them. She should be locked up.’

  ‘Because she speaks her mind? I should have thought you would be for that.’

  ‘They are all in the pay of the Germans…’

  ‘You are not only ignorant, you are contemptible with it.’ And so saying, Jack Moth stuffed the paper ball into the man’s breast pocket and slapped it hard, twirling him away as he did so.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The girl who addressed him was beautifully and expensively dressed, link-armed with another girl equally well got up. ‘I just wanted to say how brave of you that was.’ She reached up as though to embrace him, and as she did so her companion deftly slipped a white flight feather into his lapel. In a second they had gone.

  ‘Oh Jack, what a rotten thing.’

  He had not noticed Victoria until she was standing before him. She reached up to remove the obnoxious badge of cowardice. ‘No, Victoria, leave it. It is just a feather.’

  ‘They are spreading so much awfulness, these women. To them it is a bit of entertainment to fill their bored lives. Who are they to tell one man to go out and kill another man?’

  Smiling, he laid a hand across her lips. The soft feel of them was an aphrodisiac. ‘I have been listening to that argument for thirty minutes.’

  ‘I saw you. I hoped that you would wait.’

  ‘May I walk with you?’

  ‘I am free until this evening.’

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘So long as it is somewhere cheap… the V and A?’

  ‘Tramcar or walk?’

  ‘Oh, I prefer a walk every time.’

  They had walked along the autumn pavements of London, the air smelling more of leaves than of the more usual combustion-engine fumes and horse-droppings. They were warmly polite and friendly to each other, Jack asking questions about her work, but not saying much about his own life. From time to time, as he turned sideways to speak, he let his gaze rest upon the movements of her body as she strode along, swinging her arms.

  ‘I am still a country girl,’ she said when he laughingly feigned breathlessness. ‘I cannot trit-trot as city women do.’ Her figure was firm and beautiful, and he remembered again his surprise, when she had put her arms about him at Southsea, to discover warm softness instead of the whalebone and steel hooks that shaped most female forms. He felt a great desire to smooth his hand over her round hip and cup his hand beneath the curve of her breast.

/>   When they reached the Victoria and Albert Museum, the smell of hot food from the gentlemen’s grill in the Poynter Room made them realize how hungry they were, so they ordered a grill.

  Victoria pushed her coat back from her shoulders and looked around her with satisfaction. ‘Isn’t this the most wonderful room to come in to from the old, drab world? I always feel when I come here that I could have my appetite assuaged by the light and colour.’

  Jack smiled at her. ‘Shall I cancel our order then?’

  ‘No, let’s be greedy and have the food as well as the room.’

  The Gamble Room in which they sat being polite to one another was indeed a satisfying room, highly decorated mainly in white, warm orange, blue and gold. Skirting around their sudden, unexpected intimacy, Jack, pointing to a frieze, said, ‘Do you agree?’

  She craned her neck to decipher the letters of a highly decorative alphabet. ‘It runs off. I can read…“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink…” and then it runs off.’

  ‘“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. ” Ecclesiastes, 2.’

  ‘Goodness, I am impressed.’

  ‘Gleanings of a child too smart for its own good.’

  Victoria threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, how well I know that child.’

  When their food arrived, Jack, looking at a fairly meagre portion, said, ‘Is this sufficient that we shall make our souls enjoy good in our labour?’

  ‘It is not a bit of good asking me, I eat only to enjoy good in my person.’ She pointed to the frieze with the handle of her fork. ‘“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.” That is a perfect example of the invisibility of women in our society. All messages are addressed to the man.’