Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “I had a bad time at the beginning. It was, as my uncle called it, ‘a licking into shape.’ Sandhurst is no fun for a man who has never been to school. They gave me an ink-bath because I sat on the wrong side of the ante-room. I was no good at games, I could see how the staff-sergeants and officers despised me. But at last I managed to fit into my box.”

  He paused ruefully. I suggested that winning through against such odds, that making a success out of a career that was uncongenial, was no mean achievement.

  He seemed pleased with me for saying that.

  “Yes, I suppose I have made a success of it. It’s not been easy. It’s been against the grain, and I have had temptations, one big temptation.”

  “Yes?”

  “At least I suppose it was a big temptation. I suppose I did right in resisting it; I don’t know. I’ve never been able to decide. I should rather like…”

  He paused a little uncertainly, looking at me hard from beneath his great, heavy eyebrows.

  I said nothing.

  Sitting forward across the oil-clothed table I prepared myself for the usual story of some clash between love and duty. The wife of a brother officer; a scene of passion and resignation; and then the long regret, deepening with the years. But the General’s story of temptation was very different, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it was the same story seen from another side. It was a clash between honour and the thing that he valued most highly in the world. For he was the sort of man in whose life women play only a casual part. At any rate, this was his story as he told it to me.

  “It was out East,” he said. “I won’t tell you where. There was trouble. I won’t tell you what. It never got into the papers. That has nothing to do with the story. I was a fairly senior subaltern at that time. With half a company I was guarding the mouth of a small river. Our chief job was to see that no boats passed up it unsearched. It was a fairly lazy job; not very much anxiety, and there was a jolly little town three miles down the river, where I used to go in the evenings in mufti for a drink and a smoke. It was here that I met one evening one of those Europeans who have lived so long in the East they have lost their nationality. His face and hands were brown. He had not shaved for at least thirty-six hours. He looked dirty, and was without self-respect.

  “We talked for a little about indifferent things; all the time I felt him watching me closely with his crafty eyes. Then suddenly he asked me how old my mother was. I gave him a Masonic answer. He made a sign that I replied to. He gave a sigh of relief.

  “‘I had hoped so,’ he said, ‘but I was not certain; that makes everything so very much more simple. Now I can say what I like. It will be a secret between us. You will not break faith.’

  “I nodded.

  “He leaned forward across the table, his face framed in his hands.

  “‘You have seen a ship out to sea this morning?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘I am on that ship. I have some very important material that I wish to get through to this village. I cannot, because of your outposts.’

  “‘But we let all merchandise pass through after we have searched it.’

  “‘You will not allow passage to what I bring.’

  “‘Rifles?’

  “‘Opium. I have many thousand pounds’ worth of opium upon that ship. I cannot get it through to the interior.’

  “He expected me to show surprise, but I have played poker a good deal, and have learned not to let my face express emotion.

  “‘What’s it got to do with me?’ I said.

  “‘You can help me get it through.’

  “‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ and I prepared to rise.

  “‘No, no, sit down. Don’t be a fool. Hear me out.’

  “I looked at him straight for a moment.

  “‘I shan’t do what you want me to.’

  “‘If you will only listen.’

  “‘I don’t know what’s to prevent me walking across the room to that policeman, and having you arrested.’

  “‘Your oath.’ A smile glinted in his shifty eyes. ‘You would never break your oath as a Mason. I would not, and I should not call myself a man of honour. I know I am safe where a Mason is concerned.’ Leaning across the table he touched my sleeve, tugging it a little. ‘It will be so simple. There is only one sentry on the river. At five minutes to ten you go on your rounds. At ten o’clock the cook brings round a dixie full of cocoa. I could give you a little powder that you could drop in the sentry’s cup. He would faint. For an hour he would know nothing. In that time a boat could be brought up the river and taken away again. The sentry would recover. He would shake himself, would stand at his post again, and would say nothing. It is quite safe.’

  “‘It’s no good your talking. I shan’t do it.’

  “‘Why not? If you do not let me through, someone else will, farther up the coast. It is a question of waiting. I would prefer not to wait, but sooner or later I shall find my friend. One can do anything with five thousand pounds.’

  “‘Five thousand pounds!’

  “‘That is what I am offering. Big profits can be made in opium.’

  “‘You won’t be able to bribe a British officer.’

  “He laughed at that.

  “‘Every man has his price, and it was the Prime Minister of Great Britain who said it. Even British officers are glad of a little pocket money. Well?’

  “I said nothing. I picked up my hat and stick, and rose.

  “‘All right,’ he said, “but don’t be in a hurry; and remember, if you don’t, someone else will. Why should he have the money rather than you?’

  “I walked quickly out of the restaurant, but I had hardly gone a hundred yards when, putting my hand into my pocket for a box of matches, I felt my fingers touch a smooth leather purse. I took it out, opened it, and saw inside a small grey envelope. Inside the envelope was a reddish powder.

  “I shall never forget what I endured during the next few hours. I brought forward all the arguments that I could summon—duty, patriotism, my name, but there remained always at the back of my mind this thought: ‘Five thousand pounds means an income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. I can resign my commission, and spend the rest of my life in quiet study.’ In those days two hundred and fifty pounds was a reasonable sum of money. I began to picture the long evenings before a fire, with a lamp shedding a mild light upon my book; I contrasted it with the smoky atmosphere of the mess and the Colonel’s interminable anecdotes. There was no real reason why I should refuse this opportunity. Someone else would accept it. The opium was certain to be got through. This was the chance for which I had waited all my life: it would never come again.”

  “But you did refuse?” I said.

  “Yes. And to this day I do not know whether or not I did wisely. I went through agonies of mind. When my orderly came at half past nine to tell me that it was time for me to be starting on my rounds I knew that if I once got out there I should be unable to resist. So I took out a bottle of whisky, filled up my glass, spilt the powder into it, and before the red powder had had time to reach the bottom I had raised the glass to my mouth and emptied it.

  “It was a good drug for the purpose for which it was required. I sat down in my chair. I did not feel ill, or sick, or dizzy. I just went off. When I came round it was after half-past ten, and I was safe. I felt no ill effects.”

  “And that was the end of it?” I asked.

  “As far as I was concerned. Though the story does not end there really. I met the same man a couple of months later in another café a few miles farther up the coast. He looked cleaner and smarter than when I had seen him before. He greeted me effusively and stood me drinks. After a while he took me aside.

  “‘You were a fool,’ he said.

  “I shrugged my shoulders.

  “‘I’m glad I was.’

  “‘You were a fool,’ he repeated. ‘What has happened? You fling away five thousand pounds; someone else picks them up.
’

  “‘You got it through?’

  “‘Of course. What did I tell you? The world is not full of Josephs.’

  “Two weeks later one of the officers in my company applied for leave to go home and be married. We were all surprised, as he hadn’t much money, a small allowance only, and his pay, and had often been heard to lament the length of his engagement. When someone asked if his grandmother had died and left him a fortune, he blushed awkwardly, and said something about a bit of luck on horses.

  “He never rejoined us after his marriage.”

  He stopped. We looked at each other for a moment.

  “And you wonder whether what you did was right, or not?” I said.

  “Yes; I’ve been wondering that for twelve years, and I shall go on wondering it to the end. If I had given the powder to the sentry instead of to myself I could have spent the end of my life as I should like to spend it. I could have read. I could have written. I might have been a successful author. I’d have started a paper, perhaps. I’d have been able to do something I thought worth doing. I don’t know that it would have been wrong. I am inclined to think that the end justifies the means. The stuff was bound to be got through.”

  “But you’ve been happy in the army on the whole?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been happy enough, but it’s not the sort of life for which I was intended. It’s not easy to explain, but I feel that it could have so easily been so much more happy, if the rough edges had only been ever so slightly trimmed; that I could have made so much more of it.”

  For a long while he sat is silence. He was thinking no doubt of the quiet tragedy of a life lived happily but not intensely. But I thought of the kindly Providence that takes the handling of our destinies out of our control, that had saved this unimaginative man from a career of speculation that could have ended only in pathetic failure.

  Chapter III

  One morning as we were waiting outside our block for Roll Call, Gerard Hopkins remarked how amusing it would be if we could see ourselves as we had been four years earlier. There we stood, wearing the same uniforms, talking the same language, drawing the same pay. To the War Office we were so many identical cogs, performing identical functions, in a piece of highly complicated machinery. Yet heaven knew from what different conditions we had come to this seeming similarity. “It would be amusing to have a magician’s wand,” said Hopkins.

  “I’d rather see us as we’re going to be in four years’ time,” I answered.

  Hopkins shrugged his shoulders.

  “It would be instructive, but less amusing.”

  He was a better prophet than most of us. The abrupt adjustment to new conditions did not prove the easy business we had thought it would; Morrison was not alone in finding England a difficult place in the nineteen twenties.

  It was a question of contrast: of the surprise of contrast.

  Four years of unparalleled intensity were at an end; of an intensity concentrated not in France where the war was being fought, but in England where the spoils of it were being enjoyed. French life was nine-tenths of it sheer boredom; a wearisome routine of reliefs and fatigue parties and divisional rests. In itself and of itself the war was dull. But in England life was very full. Rarely in the big towns has gaiety been sustained at so constant and so high a pitch. Young men home on leave had money to spend and a few hours to spend it in. Restaurants, dancing clubs, theatres were packed with soldiers desperately anxious to make the most of such few hours as remained to them before they rejoined their regiments.

  But it was not only that.

  Never has England itself meant so much. The long line of the Downs, the thatched cottages of Wiltshire, the slow southern speech, the winding hedges, had a new meaning for men whose eyes for seven months had seen nothing but the long straight roads of northern France, the mudchurned wastes, the broken villages, whose eyes might be taking their last sight of England. Never had the fact of home meant so much; the return after loneliness to where one belonged, the contrast of kindliness, affection, warmth to the systematised routine of army life. Never had love meant so much. The one person written to, dreamed of, planned for; then after the months of separation, that little grace of an hour.

  For fifty months every moment of leave, every moment of freedom was untarnished gold. The conditions of civilian life presented themselves to the soldier’s imagination in terms of a prolonged week-end leave. He did not realise that those leaves had been so rich only because the remainder of his life had been so drab; that he had bought that one golden week at the expense of fifteen tawdry copper ones.

  The story of the first ten years of peace is, as regards the returned soldier, an account of the realisation that peace and leaves were very different things.

  It was a slow process.

  §

  Soldiers had enlisted for the “duration only.” They had thought in terms of the duration. But the bargains they had made during the war had to be carried with them into the changed conditions of peace. They had made those bargains believing that they would need the same things of their homes after the war as they had during the war. The young men who imagined that whole lives could be lived at the tension of a week-end have soon found they had set themselves a pace they could not maintain. While those other ones who had seen leaves in terms of rest, found they had set themselves a pace that was too slow. The majority returned with the idea of settling down. They saw peace in terms of quiet. They were tired of discomfort and discomposure; tired of moving at a moment’s notice from one camp to another, from one town to another, from one country to another, tired of waking in the morning without knowing where, if anywhere, they would sleep that night; tired of wire beds, of bully beef, of uncushioned chairs, of canvas hip baths; tired of noise and movement and agitation; tired men to whom the one desirable thing in life appeared to be an existence of smooth and undisturbed routine. To sleep in the same bed each night; to catch the same train to the office every morning; to sit day after day at the same desk in the same office; to eat their lunch at the same restaurant, buying their evening paper from the same paper boy; to catch the same train out of London in the evening; to play their Saturday game of golf on the same course; to take their holiday every year in the same month. Half the music-hall successes in the later years of the war turned upon this theme.

  “I’ve got a sneaking feeling round my heart

  That I want to settle down.

  So I’ll get my grip

  And take a trip

  To a good old southern town…”

  Five years of strain and worry and disturbance, five years of discipline and authority and rank, five years of formality in dress and in behaviour demanded a reaction. Life was to be henceforth calm, placid and informal. There was to be an end to the conventions of social life. People were not going to waste their afternoons leaving white slips of pasteboard on people they scarcely knew. There was to be an end of white waistcoats and stiff shirts. Comfort was to be put before appearance. The silk hat and the morning coat were doomed, the dinner jacket was the symbol of informality. Men would no longer be bothered to wear white gloves at dances. The uniformed discipline, the punctuality, the tedium, the meticulous observances of army life, there was to be no counterpart for them in this post-war world.

  Such an ideal was inevitably bound up with the idea of marriage. Without marriage, indeed, such a life is scarcely possible. Most older soldiers felt the need during the war of a wife to return to: or at any rate a home with a wife to plan for. They pictured themselves as married. But they did not picture the consequences of marriage. Their behaviour was somewhat that of the man who is seized with a sudden detestation of the town in which he lives; who feels he cannot endure for another hour the people and the streets he moves among, who rushes out of his house one morning with his bag half packed and his coat unbuttoned; who charges breathless, perspiring and exhausted up the station steps, does not wait to buy a paper, does not wait to buy a ticket, but just staggers along the
first platform and collapses into the corner seat of the first friendly-looking train he sees. As the train steams out of the station, his eyelids close in deep harmonious content.

  But he does not want to stay for ever in a train that was merely a means of extricating himself from conditions that had grown irksome. Now that he is away from them, and has recovered his breath, he wonders what is going to happen next. He walks out into the corridor and consults the guard. First stop Edinburgh, he is informed, a ten hour run. What! he shrieks, but I want to get out now. The guard looks at him, smiles sadly and passes on.

  That is rather what happened to the men who came back in 1919 to settle down. They were tired and hot and breathless. They jumped into the first train they saw. But as soon as they had recovered their breath, they wanted to begin again. But they could not. They were in a nonstop train, out of which they could only get expensively by pulling the communication cord, or dangerously by jumping through the window. So they sat down dejectedly in their corner seats, looking through the windows at the flying landscape. This is not what we meant at all, they said. This is not in the least what we wanted. Or rather, whatever we may have wanted then, when we were hot and exasperated and annoyed, we no longer want it, now that we are cool and comfortable and at ease. This is not what we meant at all.

  Their longing to settle down had been a reaction against the conditions of army life. That reaction was dying by the end of 1921; by the spring of 1923, it was laid out decently for burial. People no longer wanted to settle down; they wanted to be enjoying life. The silk hat returned and the morning coat, along with white ties, white waistcoats and white gloves. The business of leaving cards began again, and all the time, symbolically, people were pulling communication cords and jumping out of windows.

  §

  On all sides, through the first years of peace, war marriages were breaking down. I did not give Ackroyd Jeffries’ many months after I had been an hour in his house.