Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “‘I have nothing to say to you.’

  “‘Think again. You are a man of honour. Your honour matters more to you than anything in life. Far more than life itself. You bear a name which many generations of men have honoured. That name will be branded with the slur of cowardice. You will forfeit the respect forever of your parents and your wife, your brothers and your children. You will shame your family as no bearer of your name has ever before shamed it. Very likely your children will prefer to change that name. They will not want to be spoken of as your children. You speak of yourself as a man of honour. But what is the use of honour if it does not confer honour? I shall know you to be a brave and honourable man, but I shall be the only living man who will. What is honour but the extent of other men’s opinion of you? You will not gain honour, but forfeit honour by remaining silent.

  “‘Do not decide at once,’ I added. ‘In two hours’ time I will have you brought again to me.’

  But he shook his head.

  “‘That would be a waste of time. I shall not have then, any more than now, a word to say to you.’

  “Those were practically the last words he said. I argued, I pleaded, I entreated.

  “‘Death has no horrors for you, I know that. You consider your life to be well spent if it can save the lives of certain other hundreds. But do you not, I ask you, owe something to the honour of the name you bear? Have you any right to disgrace your ancestors and those living who are dear to you? Which, after all, is of greater matter—a thousand common soldiers whom you have never seen, who mean nothing to you, to whose presence or absence in the world you have been until yesterday utterly indifferent: which is of greater matter, those nameless men, or the five or six people dearer than life to you, with all that past and all that future that they represent? Is it worth it? As a question of exchange, I ask it you.’

  “He made no answer. His face with its hard, furrowed lines from nose to mouth was like an exquisitely chiselled piece of stone.

  “We tied him up, gagged him as we had threatened, on the Wednesday morning; with the placard pinned upon his chest, and the memoranda to the commanders of battalions scattered upon the desk. At half-past five we were decided to withdraw. At twenty-five past I came back to him.

  “‘It’s not too late,’ I said. ‘Don’t be quixotic. Tell me and come back with us. No one will know. No one can ever know. You know what it must mean if we leave you here.’

  “He could not speak or move his head so close bound was he. But his eyes were eloquent. They were steely grey, lit with such self-sacrificial fire as the martyrs of old time must have shown. I was tempted as I looked into them to break my word, to loose him and take him with us.

  “But… well, what would you? War is war. It is no good to threaten and not perform. Besides, with the guilt and the betrayal fixed on him, our spies would be the less hedged by vigilance.

  “I left him there. Half-an-hour later the attack began, disastrously for the Italians, but less disastrously than it would have had our prisoner spoken.”

  The Austrian paused.

  “And he was shot?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “He made no defence. I heard the story of it two months later from another prisoner.

  “We were talking of this battle:

  “‘We should have won a great triumph, had we not been betrayed,’ the Italian asserted.

  “‘So?’

  “‘Two days before the fight a Staff Officer who had been captured gave away the whole plan of our attack. We found him when we came across, bound and gagged in an Austrian dug-out with a notice pinned on his chest saying that he’d served their purpose and we could have him back. Rather low of them, I thought; they might have sheltered him. But then war is war. There were papers lying about that proved the affair completely.’

  “‘He was shot?’

  “‘Of course; he did not try to defend himself. ‘I have nothing to say,’ he said, and stood there like a piece of stone listening to the evidence. He’d been a good soldier, too. He came of a fine family. It broke his father, his wife re-married after a few weeks a man she did not love so as to change her name. A bad business.’

  Again the Austrian paused.

  “I had half a mind to tell him. But it would have served small purpose. The man might have escaped, and things would have been made the harder for our spies. Perhaps, who knew? I might want later on to try the same tactics on another prisoner: tactics that would be unlikely a second time to fail.

  “I said nothing. I let it pass. But I’ve not attached much importance to medals since.”

  §

  It was a year ago in Vienna that I was told that story. But it was not the story so much as the tone of voice that it was told in that was remarkable. It was told not as a tragedy; nor as an account of courage; but as an ironic commentary on war. That was what war was like: a concern in which glory went by chance to the deserving: in which the symbols of desert were as likely as not to be unearned. War was less the test of manhood than a grim joke played on mankind by Fate.

  Which was how the majority of soldiers saw it. Of the many soldiers that I met only one was really self-expressed and self-fulfilled by war; was able to accept every aspect of it, unconditionally, as his native element; was at home in the war, as he could be nowhere else.

  I did not like him much. He was not the kind of man you could like much. He was irresponsive. “Friendship’s not my game,” he said to me once. He did not say what his real game was. I don’t know that he had one. He appeared to have no ambition beside a ruthless determination to get even with some force that was, he felt, working contrary to him. Fate had loaded the dice against him, but he was not going to be beaten, he was going to see it through.

  He was a man of about thirty. Tall, but without grace; his features regular but undistinguished. His voice was impersonal: it had a studied effect. You felt that he might be watching against a Cockney accent. His hands were his one attractive feature. They were compact, practical, small-boned with nicely rounded nails. Curiously enough, he was ashamed of them. He thought them effeminate. A bank clerk’s hands. He made a point of keeping them out of sight: in large, fur-lined gloves or driven deep into his breeches pockets. It was on account of his hands, I suspect, that he did not smoke.

  I met him in the autumn of 1917. I was with a Divisional Machine Gun Company and we had just come out of the line at Ypres. We had been there for eight days, had taken the remains of a village, a few kilometres of ruined land, and we had lost in our company four officers and more than fifty men. We had been hurried south and were waiting to take over a part of the line to the east of Bullecourt. We were in tents at the foot of a hill. The fierce October rains that turned Passendale into a swamp had broken over us. It was miserable.

  We sat in a leaking tent huddled round a wretched stove drinking hot whiskey and trying to be thankful that we had seen the last of the salient. Merriman, who had spent most of his life in China and could not bear the cold had wrapped his sleeping bag round his knees and was chanting a song that we had learnt from an Australian in an estaminet in Poperinghe the night after we had been relieved. We only knew the chorus: it went

  Cheerioh, cheeriay,

  and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.

  Cheerioh, cheeriay,

  and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.

  Cheerioh, cheeriay…

  Every few minutes he would pause, take a sip at his whiskey and mutter, “I expect that poor bastard is gathering moss himself now up in that bloody salient,” adding “and bloody well out of it, too, he is.” The rest of us joined in the chorus when we felt inclined.

  Then Morrison arrived. Just before tea time, a black figure against the night, he strolled into the tent, letting in the wind and the rain. He stood blinking at the candle. Merriman broke off his song to growl, “Who the hell is that?” over his shoulder.

  “It’s only me,” said Morrison, “I’ve just come to jo
in you. Let’s come near the fire. I’m damp.”

  He did not make a good first impression. Some men look right in uniform. Morrison looked as though he had called at an Army Ordnance Stores on his way, and asked for a stock size.

  We moved aside to make a place for him and he sat on the bench, his hands pressed forward, with the light from the open stove falling on his chest and knees, leaving his face in shadow.

  “Heavens, but this is good,” he said. “I had a job to get here from Bapaume. I don’t believe I’d ever have got here at all if I hadn’t bribed an A.S.C. wallah to drive me out in the town major’s car. I knew he wouldn’t think of moving on a day like this. It was a pity to see the old bus standing in a shed.”

  It is usual for subalterns who have just joined a unit to keep rather quiet in the mess at first, but Morrison didn’t stop talking till we had heard the account in its entirety of his journey from Grantham; how he had had a row with the R.T.O. at Boulogne, how he had managed to break his journey at Amiens, and how a fool of a sergeant at Bapaume had wanted him to come up and join us in the light railway.

  “The light railway!” he laughed. “I could see myself coming up in that damned thing. No cover to it, nothing to keep the rain off. Then I and my damned valise would have been dumped in one of these empty villages with no prospect of getting anywhere. I know that game!”

  We thought at first that he was merely the talkative ass who was anxious to make a good impression and was going the wrong way about it. We all rather looked forward to his first turn in the line. He would talk less when he had to go and inspect his guns along a communication trench that was being shelled. One has heard so much about the strong, silent man, that one invariably distrusts a voluble Englishman.

  I soon learnt, however, that there was a good deal in Morrison. He had been put in my section. The evening before we moved up to the line, my batman, Carter, came up to me with his features set in a serious expression.

  “That new officer, sir,” he said, “he’s got too much kit. He’ll have to dump some of it.”

  I was afraid of Carter. He was very respectful, very loyal, very efficient, but he never failed to notice a mistake. When I first joined the section I washed inside the tent and I heard afterwards that he had gone up to my section officer and said: “That new officer, sir, do you mind asking him not to wash inside the tent?”

  It was always “that new officer, sir.” Carter hated them; it took him a long time to get used to people and I looked forward to seeing how he would deal with Morrison.

  At that moment Morrison walked into the tent. He was just beginning a long story, something to do with the price of cigarettes at an Expeditionary Force canteen, when Carter interrupted him.

  “That kit of yours, sir, there’s too much of it. I can’t get it all on to the limber, sir; you’ll have to dump some of it.”

  Morrison turned round and looked at him.

  “My kit! But I am not going to dump it. Now, look here, my good man, you get along and pack it up at once.”

  Carter was not used to being addressed as ‘my good man.’ The expression on his face was respectful but obstinate.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do it; you’re the only officer in the company that’s brought a bed out with him; I can’t get it all in.”

  “Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to show you. Come along,” said Morrison. And, to my amazement, he had opened his valise out on the floor and began to pack it, talking at full pace all the time.

  “This hold-all, now, that goes in there; my boots here and be very careful that my boots don’t knock up against my shaving glass; my collars in here, that blanket there and my riding breeches here, then the bed in there, and the bucket there.”

  Within five minutes he had packed the whole thing, and strapped it up into the smallest valise I had ever seen.

  “There,” he said. “That’s the way to do it. If you know how the things fit in you can pack ’em away in your pocket. It’s only a question of method. I’ve thought it out very carefully. Now, just unpack it again so as to see if you know how it’s done.”

  And the great Carter dutifully unpacked the valise and packed it all again with Morrison standing there beside him talking to him the whole time.

  “Not so bad,” he said, when Carter had finished, “not perfect yet, not by a long chalk, but you’ll get the hang of it all right in time; it’s only a matter of practice.”

  From that moment I respected him. He is the only man I have ever seen who got the upper hand of Carter.

  §

  I saw a good deal of him during the next few weeks, but we never got intimate. He was a lonely man; the loneliest man I think that I have ever met. His extreme volubility masked a gloomy, taciturn nature. He was only concerned upon one point. He did not want to go back as a bank clerk afterwards.

  “I don’t know what I shall do after the war,” he used to say. “I can’t go back to that, I don’t see why I should. I’ve got no home, no one is dependent on me: it does not matter to anyone what happens to me. I don’t know how I managed to stand it for so long before. One drifts into habits. I had to, of course, while my father was alive and then afterwards—well, it’s hard to break a habit. I didn’t see what else I was to do: there was the club where I played billiards in the evenings; there was football every Saturday in the winter and cricket in the summer. Always some little thing to look forward to. Besides I always felt sure that something would turn up soon; that it could not go on like that for ever. But it does; that’s the mistake we all make, waiting for something to turn up instead of going out and finding it.

  “We are like people sitting in the stalls of a theatre waiting for the curtain to go up. We hear noises on the stage and we say to ourselves ‘it will start in five minutes’. But the five minutes pass and by the time we realise that there is not going to be a show it is too late to go anywhere else. That’s what would have happened to me but for the war. Some of us have good reason to be grateful to it.”

  He had, I soon found, a pretty hard side to his nature. He had a fierce will and, if he had once made up his mind, he let nothing stand in the way.

  Once we were taking over a section of line from the Australians. They had had rather a bad time; it was a filthy night of rain and mud; the officer whom Morrison was relieving had a bad cold. I think he had trench fever coming on. He asked if Morrison would mind being shown round the guns by the section sergeant.

  It was a point on which Headquarters had issued very strict instructions, but it was a rule that no one worried about very much. As far as I remember, Morrison nearly always sent his sergeant round himself. But, on this night, for some reason or other, he was determined that the officer should come round with him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but the captain’s strict on this. If anything went wrong there’d be the hell of a row. I’m afraid you’ll have to come round with me.”

  “But, my dear fellow, we never worry about that. My sergeant’s been round the guns as often as I have. He knows all there is to know about them. I got shown round by a sergeant when I took over.”

  “I don’t care about that. I’ve got my orders. Come along. I can’t wait here all night.”

  He was so truculent that the Australian got annoyed.

  “I’m damned if I’ll come. The sergeant can take you.”

  “All right then. Just as you like,” said Morrison. “But I shan’t sign the relief paper till you do.”

  They stood looking at each other. Morrison had every card in his hand.

  “It’s just as you like,” he said. “Either you show me round—”

  For a moment I thought the Australian was going to hit him, then he turned and pulled on his steel helmet.

  “Come on,” he said. All the way up the dug-out steps he coughed and choked.

  §

  In contrast Morrison included among his peculiarities a type of perverse chivalry that could be equally annoying. Right or wrong he a
lways backed the losing side. He stuck up for the Sein Feiners and the Boloists simply because we were against them. At the Café Royal he would, I know, have been equally violent as a militarist with overwhelming arguments in favour of the knockout blow. This was not in itself unusual. We all like to be martyrs in the abstract. But it is unusual to find anyone who puts the minority theory into practice. Morrison did.

  He was, for example, always extraordinarily courteous to German prisoners. On one occasion we were brewing a dixie of tea, when a Prussian officer who had just been captured was brought past us. We offered him a cup, but before he had time to drink it a shell pitched on the back of the trench and scattered mud all over us. The German’s tea was completely spoilt. It was a frequent tragedy of the trenches and usually an occasion for mirth. Morrison, however, had been sheltered by a traverse. Without a word he handed his cup over to his prisoner. He would not have done that for one of his own men under any conditions: “War is war,” he would have said.

  On another occasion a party of prisoners were being marched through Albert. A large heavy Frenchman stood in the doorway of his house shouting after them. Morrison walked up to him and said quite quietly:

  “Stop that now, we’ve had enough of that from you.”

  The Frenchman looked at him in aggrieved amazement, then turned and shouted again after the party:

  “A bas les Boches, les sales Boches.”

  Morrison did not say a word; he simply lifted his fist and knocked the Frenchman flat upon his back.

  “How would you like it if you had been taken prisoner.” he said, “and some dirty civilian who hadn’t been within thirty miles of the line began to jeer at you?”

  In the Company he got on pretty well; he was a good soldier who never shirked his work; he talked too much in the mess, but he was amusing and he was not a bad fellow to take with you for a week-end leave in Amiens. He enjoyed good food and carried his liquor well.