by Alec Waugh
Even if the war had lasted for another twenty years, I believe Mainz would have retained its impregnability. For the citadel had been constructed so as to resist the old-fashioned frontal assault, in which infantry without the aid of a barrage endeavoured to demolish vertical walls. Round the buildings ran stone battlements usually fifty feet high. At any point where it would be possible to jump down was stationed a sentry: between these battlements and the buildings were two distinct chains of wire netting that were continually patrolled.
A number of plans were hatched. But their chief allurement, I fancy, was the love of réclame. There was the excitement for the conspirators of standing in the centre of the stage. They liked to be talked about in undertones, to hear a whisper of “Don’t tell any one, but that fellow’s going to try and beat it to-morrow.” When their schemes began to ripen to maturity, they enveloped their actions in the theatrical paraphernalia of Arsène Lupin. It was wonderful what they made themselves believe. Spies were lurking everywhere; their every action had to be most carefully concealed. One officer, who thought he was being shadowed, disguised himself by shaving off his moustache and wearing a cap all day to hide the thinness of his hair.
One of the chief conspirators was in my room; he wore a perpetual air of mystery. In a far corner of the room he would be observed tracing maps of the various roads to the frontier. From time to time he would take me quietly aside.
“Don’t tell any one,” he said, “but I’m going to clear soon; I’m getting the maps. I tell you, of course, because—oh, well, you’re in my room, and all that. But keep it dark.”
He spoke like that to nearly all of his acquaintances. It is all very well to talk of breaking laws just for the fun of the thing, but one does want the rest of the world to know what a devil of a fellow one is.
One Sunday afternoon at school I cut the cord of the weight of the chapel organ, with the result that that evening the music suddenly stopped and the choir wrecked. It was an achievement that I surveyed with a justifiable pride. But I was not really satisfied till I had told the whole house about it; naturally, of course, swearing each individual to secrecy.
“Don’t tell a soul, of course, old man. I should get in a hell of a row if it was found out.”
In a similar spirit escape was plotted. The efforts that were made to avoid suspicion were elaborate. The conspirators felt that anything might give away their secret. Had not Sergeant Cuff found at one end of a chain of evidence a murderer and at the other a spot of ink on a green baize tablecloth? They left nothing to chance. A loose board beneath the stove served as a hiding-place for maps and plans. Our room, because it possessed such a board, was used as a general dump.
It was a great nuisance; the mystery business was so very thoroughly exploited. To open their underground cupboard a few nails had to be abstracted, and a few wedges applied. The resultant noise would have woken not the least suspicion in the most distrustful Teuton, and would have played a very insignificant part in the accumulated turmoil of the day. But no risks must be run. And so while the cupboard was being prized open, an operation that would sometimes take over ten minutes, one of us was detailed to stand outside and break up wood so as to disguise the noise. It was a deafening business which occurred two or three times each week; nor did it seem as if the contents of this cupboard demanded such strict secrecy. I once asked what they kept there.
“Only a few papers, a compass and provisions for the journey,” I was told.
That a compass, being contraband, should be carefully concealed, I could well understand. But the papers consisted of a field officer’s diary and a few maps abstracted from the backs of a German Grammar; while the bag of provisions contained only those delicacies that we received in parcels, of which chocolate formed the greater part. A more unhealthy place to store it would be hard to find.
“What’s the idea of keeping that chocolate there?” I asked, one day.
“To escape with, of course. Splendid stuff for giving staying power.”
“But why can’t the fellow keep it in his room?”
I was immediately fixed with that sort of look that seems to say, “Good Lord, do such fools exist!”
“My good man,” he said, “how could he keep it there? It would give the whole show away at once. What would you think, if you were a German officer, and found a big store of chocolate in one of the cupboards? What would you think of it?”
There was only one answer to that.
“That the ass didn’t like it, I suppose.”
But my remonstrance was useless, and soon I began to regard these noises and secrecies as part of the inevitable machinery of prison life.
§
I did not, as a matter of fact, spend a great deal of time in my own room.
The Future Career Society distributed among its various classes for certain hours of the day, such rooms as might be otherwise unoccupied. “To authors, architects and other students” it allotted a minute room called The Alcove. It was bright and airy with a long table running down its centre. It opened off the billiard-room. It gave upon a fowl-run. It was there that I spent most of my captivity.
External conditions make for less difference to one’s personal life than is supposed. People continue their ordinary lives through wars and revolutions, through pestilence and famine. They live on a different scale but that is all. Had there been no war I should at nineteen and a half have been an undergraduate at New College, playing football three days a week, reading the classics, writing verse, discussing literature and life with undergraduates. As it was I took my exercise walking for an hour and a half around a barrack square, read Balzac, Turgenev, Webster instead of Virgil, Homer and Catullus; wrote a novel instead of verse, discussed life and literature with Gerard Hopkins, Maurice Besley, Milton Hayes, Hugh Kingsmill and J. F. Holms. In essentials it came to the same thing. Perhaps the companionship of The Alcove was the more stimulating than that of dons and undergraduates would have been. Certainly it was more adult, and to me at that age, in consequence, of more service.
Hugh Kingsmill, Gerard Hopkins, Maurice Besley and Milton Hayes are today—Milton Hayes was then—familiar names. But J. F. Holms, who seemed to me infinitely the most potential, rests his reputation upon one short story in a short-lived minute-circulationed periodical, Hugh Kingsmill’s account of him in his prison book, and a fleeting appearance in William Gerhardi’s Memoirs of a Polyglot.
The portrait in the Memoirs is the most characteristic. I have not seen Holms for seven years. Possibly I should not recognise in him now the person I knew at Mainz. He had glamour then. At the age of twenty-one, he was one of the handsomest men I have even seen. He was very strong. His body had the grace of Greek sculpture. He had been third in the mile at Rugby when he was fifteen. A year later he was in the school fifteen. His hair was a brilliant red. Once when he was describing a woman, he said with the curious simplicity that is characteristic of him, “She has the most marvellous red hair. Even more marvellous than mine.” He had a fine brain. At a very early age he took an exhibition ship at Magdalen. He won the M.C. in the war. At Sandhurst, he was, I fancy, a cadet officer. In conversation he was spasmodically brilliant, rarely finishing his sentences, a trait in which perhaps lies his hesitance to self-expression; that is symptomatic of a lack of harmony, and fusion. He was always about to write. He saw himself from the point of view of his future biographers. “I shall shortly be embarking on my juvenilia.” In The Alcove a notebook held beneath his arm, gave the impression that he had either just risen from his labours or was about to seize the instant’s inspiration. But neither I nor anybody else ever actually saw him writing. His notebook purported to contain two complete poems and the tenth of a novel. But they were quite illegible. He has literature in him; whether it will emerge I do not know. The short story to which Gerhardi makes such amusing reference is still his one claim to authorship.
§
It was through me that Hugh Kingsmill and Gerhardi met each other.
At the moment Kingsmill is probably better known as a Gerhardi character than as the author of The Dawn’s Delay. The description of him in Pending Heaven and Memoirs of a Polyglot are so complete that to add to them is a work of supererogation, but it is difficult to resist an opportunity to write of him. Gerhardi maintains that he is a genius. Certainly he has genius. I have never liked a man so much. I have never been so stimulated by any company. He is like the sun shining on you. You become happy. The present is rich. The future radiant. You talk well. He has the supreme gift in personal contact not only of entertaining you but making you entertain him. You find yourself talking as fast, though not as loudly, as he does. He is Rabelaisian. He envelops you with warmth and friendliness.
In captivity he was the most companionable of men. He usually appeared in The Alcove at about ten o’clock, and observed a ritual that would with any one else have savoured of affectation, but was with him perfectly natural. Nature had endowed him with generous proportions, and he accentuated the natural roll of his gait by his strange footwear. A pair of field boots had been abbreviated into shoes by the camp cobbler in such a way as to admit of the insertion of two fingers between the leather and the instep. To keep them on his feet as he walked he had to resort to a straddle that was one of the features of camp life. He bulked largely in the door of The Alcove, marvellously shod, carrying under one arm a dictionary, a notebook and a Thesaurus; over the other a cardigan waistcoat and a green velvet scarf.
He flung his books noisily on the table and then proceeded to array himself for the ardours of composition. He first of all divested himself of his collar and tie, then wrapped round his throat the green velvet scarf, that would have lain more appropriately as a stole on the shoulders of an ecclesiastic than it did as a muffler on those of a prisoner, engaged on a psychological study of seduction. Next he removed his tunic, disclosing a woollen waistcoat, over which he proceeded to draw the second woollen coat that he had brought with him. He explained that they brought him physical ease.
“You see, old man, it’s not much use my mind being free if my limbs are encased in even the loosest of military tunics.”
He then proceeded to work.
Every writer, of course, has his own particular foible. Kingsmill’s was his accuracy in gauging the exact number of words that he had written. Most writers are content if they take that much trouble to add up the number of lines in a page, then find the average number of words in a line and multiply. But Kingsmill scorned such slipshod methods.
“On that principle, I suppose you’d call a line a line whether it goes right across the page or not?”
“Yes,” I confessed.
He gave a grunt of contempt.
“Be precise, old man, be precise.”
His precision, that contrasted so curiously with his clumsiness of appearance and of manner, was a mania with him. So much so, in fact, that he used to embark on long discussions as to the derivation of amalgamated words, as to whether “lunch-time” should count as two or one. For his rough draft he kept beside him a small slip of paper, on which at the end of each sentence he used to make mathematical calculations, that reminded me of school cricket, the scoring box, and the attempt to keep level with the tens.
Correction involved much labour. At the end of the sentence he might have noted down 277 words. Then he would revise; half a clause consisting of eight words would be omitted; on the slip of paper down went 269. Then a celibate noun called for an adjectival mate, the 270 was hoisted amid applause. It was an amusing game, but it took up a great deal of time. Very rarely did he produce more than 400 words as the result of three hours’ work, and his absolute maximum for a day was 1100.
“All great men work slowly,” he said. “Flaubert took seven years over Madame Bovary, and I shall take only a year over this.”
His whole day was mapped out, hour by hour. His life was so methodical that the period between 2:30 and 3:00 was sacred to “Sensual Reverie.” His life is, I am told, less methodical to-day.
I do not know if he will ever write a great book. Gerhardi maintains that he already has. But, myself, I feel that a man who expresses with such abundance in the ordinary contacts of life does not need the substitute of writing. I feel that writing is for him what living is for Gerhardi probably, for most big writers certainly, a sideshow.
§
A good many people from time to time looked into The Alcove for half an hour or so of talk. But the regular membership numbered only one who was quite definitely neither musician, architect, nor author, and whom it was difficult to include under the heading “other students.”
He was a man of about fifty, a Brigadier-General; short, sturdy, slightly bald, with thick black eyebrows and a very thick black moustache that sprouted forward over his upper lip. He was quiet in manner and appearance. During the early days of captivity when we only had the clothes we had been taken in, the camp presented sartorially a motley front. But though the sleeves of his tunic were ragged at the wrist and patched upon the elbow, he always looked not smart, but neat; with his tie knotted carefully; and the pin set unobtrusively in the collar. He spoke in an unassertive but by no means diffident voice. He did not suggest weakness. On the contrary, he seemed self-fulfilled: like a low-geared car that is content to be overtaken on the road by swifter engines.
In The Alcove he did not join in our conversations a great deal. He listened carefully while Kingsmill defended Frank Harris’ contention that Hamlet and Macbeth were really the same person. He never asked a question, and rarely interpolated an opinion; but when there was any doubt of the phrasing or origin of a quotation, it was usually he who corrected or informed us.
“Is there anything you haven’t read?” Hopkins asked him once.
“I’ve had longer to read than most of you,” he answered.
“Most men don’t read much after they’re twenty-five,” was Hopkins’ comment.
He, on the other hand, appeared to do little else. He took no part in the camp’s general life: the sports, the theatricals, the debates. The Alcove and a book were all he needed. He read voraciously; usually a serious book: a biography or a historical study. He read philosophy with the eagerness that is usually reserved for novels. He would read straight through a book, not skipping a line. When he had finished he would make a note of the book’s title, the date he had begun and the date he had finished it. He remembered what he had read; but he contributed nothing to his reading. He spent a week on the Platonic Dialogues in the Everyman edition. And his subsequent comments amounted to a précis of the preface. He did not seem to have a single original idea.
It was not till we had known him for three months that we discovered that he was a professional soldier; a discovery that might explain his lack of originality but certainly did not explain his choice of the army as a career.
“I’d give a lot to know that fellow’s history,” Hopkins said.
§
It was not till the last months of our captivity that I learnt it. The Allied troops were streaming forward, on a wave of victory, towards the Rhine. The Fourteen Points were being argued round. Peace could not be many days away. It was hard to believe that the day so long dreamed about was at hand. Life was prodigally potential.
Alone of us, the General who had so exercised our curiosity remained unmoved. He scarcely appeared to welcome his deliverance.
“One would almost think you were sorry to be going back,” I said to him, as we were sitting alone in The Alcove one afternoon.
“I haven’t a great deal to go back to,” he replied. “I’m a bachelor, and after a war like this, one can’t take the same interest in soldiering that one did. Besides, I’ve been very happy here with all of you. It’s the first time I’ve had anything like this: this talk about ideas and books. It’s the one thing I really care for. I have not done badly in the army; on the whole, I suppose that I have been happy there. But my bent isn’t really towards action. It has always been an effort for me to concentrate my at
tention on my army work. I should have preferred a life of study.” A look of wistful resignation crossed his face.
“I never wanted to go into the army,” he went on. “It was a question of money. I was an only child. My father,—he was a civil servant,—died when I was three years old. I was brought up by my mother. I never went to school. I had few friends. I used to sit and read for hours together; there was an idea of my going into the Church. But my mother died when I was fifteen years old. I went to live with an uncle, my father’s eldest brother. He was not well off. I doubt very much whether, even if he had wanted to, it would have been possible for him to send me to the University. But he never entertained the project. He did not regard the Church as a suitable career for a man, at any rate, not for his brother’s son. For a month or so after my mother’s death he was patient with me and sympathetic. But, when he thought the first grief had passed, he resumed his usual business manner. One morning after breakfast he asked me to come into his study.
“‘Come along, John,’ he said. ‘Bring your chair in front of the fire. Let’s have a chat about what’s going to happen to you!’
“I am sure that he did his best to understand me. He regarded me then, I know, for he has told me so since, as an absurd mollycoddle.
“‘You would not be the man you are now, John, if I hadn’t sent you into the army.’
“He said that to me only a few months ago. And I daresay he was right. I was not at all the type of boy that he admired. I must have been a great worry to him.”
“And he gave you no choice?” I said.
“Practically none. I was too miserable at that time to care greatly what happened to me. I sat in the armchair and said ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes.’ In twenty minutes the course of my life was settled. It is rather strange when you come to think of it. We live for seventy years. But everything that happens to us during those seventy years may be dependent on the course of a conversation lasting twenty minutes, that takes place before we have lived a quarter of our lives, when we have no experience of the world at all.