The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  After a few blank moments Phillip followed him into the garden.

  “I’m afraid I find that I have some urgent work to do, so will you make my apologies for absence to Pa at the dinner tonight, Ernest?”

  “Very well.”

  Feeling that he was destroying the last illusion of what had never really existed, Phillip walked up the lane and waited around the corner until the mutter of the Trojan’s exhaust faded in the distance, then he returned to the Works.

  A low sun shone across the railway cutting, lighting lathes, gas-engine, milling machine, tools scattered on benches, coke-stove with dribbles of rust running down the pipe from the roof. So Ernest had known about his legacy all the time; and had kept mum about it. Why hadn’t Lucy mentioned it? Was it a case of no imagination, a failure to connect—or what? Was it his attitude towards them? Didn’t they care—as Fiennes had said? Was he, not only in their eyes, but in truth, an interfering bore?

  Everything he had said to them, everything he had proposed, or tried to do, had been, to them, meaningless. Look at the condition of the Works—the untidiness—everything higgledy-piggledy—the wash-basins black-rimmed with oil—towels, as grimy as the basins, flung on the floor. The lavatory pans were pits of horror. He stood still, momentarily lost, all personality dissolved as a bleak, strained feeling possessed him like a petrifaction.

  After a while he moved away to the store-room, where stood a half-opened case of one gross tins of grease-solvent soap, sold to a compliant Tim by some commercial traveller telling a hard-luck story. He opened one, and started to clean the basins. There was no water in the tank. He went outside, found two pails by the kitchen door, emptied their rotting garbage on the ash-heap, and walked up the lane to draw water from the well. He borrowed a clean pitcher to dip in the water, and returned with full pails.

  Muttering to himself, he began to clean the lavatories. It took several pails of water to free the passages after removing wads of newsprint and scraping with a wire brush. Then the scouring with abrasive, while he kept all feeling under control, breathing steadily against a mounting sense of horror at the indifference, the neglect, the unawareness due to what seemed to be a total lack of sensibility—butterflies without antennae. It only wanted shellfire to complete in miniature the appearance of the Somme battlefield where all the underlying purpose of life—the created order and beauty of the species—had been denied; life working backwards to chaos, far beyond the simple, the natural order of death succeeding life.

  He could no longer control his feelings, he began to shout at himself. Taking a broom, he swept the floor of the machine room. The inner self collapsed; with a wild scream he went to the Office. Here was no relief; here everything was in chaos. A feeling of despair rushed out of him, leaving a sense of appalling lifelessness within. He stood still, knowing his real self to be destroyed beneath the personality he had assumed during the war, covering the distraught inner core of his earliest years. In a frenzy he struck the back of his right hand on the bench again and again until blood came from the base of the fingernails. In the flaring moment he saw the truth of his life which, despite all he did, could never change its pattern. He was done for. A man’s life, right through to its end, was as his beginning. He never had done what he wanted to do; it was always prostitution for others, who did not want his interference. Therein lay the truth; he was like Father, trying to change others, because he was weak and unable to change himself. He had always pretended with Lucy. What would become of him? Was he doomed to the same sort of misery all his life, always more or less at odds with those about him, always trying to explain, to make things clearer—Doris, Mother, Father, Cousin Arthur, the Coplestons—Uncle Hilary and his damning of the miners’ leaders—damning strikes which were only a mass demand for a decent life—damning the General Strike in the spring. A European generation had died upon the battlefields in vain.

  No, that was not true. He saw Hilary’s point of view. It was realistic, as he, and the Boys, were unrealistic. They had tried to make a boyhood dream come true. So had he; so had Hilary.

  Again, he had accused Lucy, in manner if not with words, of being insensitive to the point of stupidity in not remembering the legacy left to Ernest. He was becoming unfair, intolerant. Good intentions paved the way to hell. He must be only a writer, in detachment from life. A writer must, with his last breath, strive for clarity; he must never damn anyone, but see all human, all natural events, ‘as a child, or an idiot, sees them’. Conrad knew.

  He sat down, telling himself that the fault lay in himself because his intelligence had been clouded by feeling: he had been dictatorial, withholding himself from the Boys: he had camouflaged his fear of them, and of Pa. Lucy was balanced: had she not said, in her mild way, ‘Bother the Boys, why can’t they look after themselves,’ which really meant, ‘Why can’t you allow them to look after themselves?’

  His entire attitude towards the Boys had been wrong. They were easy-going, and natural: he drove himself, and was unnatural. Feeling clearer, he resumed the sweeping of the workshop floor, and recovered himself in steady progression. He would not touch the office; if they liked to file their papers in the basket and upon the floor, let them. If Fiennes wanted to leave off the telephone receiver, let him. While Ernest solemnly read, with inner glee, Cohen on the Telephone.

  *

  Miss Calmady, the optimistic cook, had heard the shouting from the kitchen and came out, dirty apron and untidy hair, wondering what he was about. This queen of the greasy pot and bubbling garbage pails spent most of her evenings down the lane with the Collies, small-holders whose secret ambition it was to own Down Close and its garden, three parts wasted, when ‘Colonel Coperston’ died. The hamlet always referred to him as ‘Colonel Coperston’ ever since, as a man of forty years, courting Miss Margaret Chychester at Tarrant, he had taken part in amateur theatricals at the Gaiety Theatre in The Yeoman of the Guard.

  “I thought I ’eard a noise,” she said.

  “Yes, I was rehearsing my part of the idiot in a play, Miss Calmady. Now I must pick up Mr. Smith at Ruddle Stones and take him to the pictures.”

  *

  The Gaiety Theatre had been built on the site of the Assembly Rooms, which had been burnt down during the reign of Edward the Seventh. Now the theatre was a picture palace.

  While Phillip stood beside ‘Mister’ just inside the door, waiting for Pa and the Boys, children began to file past, ushered by school teachers to the front rows. The local committee of the Junior Imperial League had arranged for the audience of children; while in the centre of the hall old soldiers of the British Legion, some with artificial legs, eyes, and arms, were already seated.

  There was a gallery above the entrance; here on the front rows of tiered seats sat local dignitaries with superior, long-established tradesmen of the town who considered themselves to be ‘just below the professions and the county,’ said ‘Mister’.

  “My dear Phil and ‘Mister’, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you both!” exclaimed Tim, his face showing pleasure. Pa said, “Ha. You missed an excellent dinner.” Then seeing ‘Mister’, “Hullo. You here too?”

  The film began well, with shots of the dumps, new roads, etc., and the preliminary bombardment taken by official photographers in the early summer of 1916. There the marching columns were, waving, smiling, and cheering as exhorted by the camera-men of those sweltering June days. There were the howitzers in their chalk pits, firing in recoil; the field-gunners; piles of plum-pudding mortar bombs; strings of mules being watered in long lines at canvas troughs; the Leaning Virgin of the basilica of Albert above the horse and lorry traffic of the Ancre valley. The night-marching scenes of the boys going up the line were fine and true against the light-play, like continuous summer lightning, of horizon gun-flashes. But the attack at 7.30 a.m. on Z morning was nothing like it; and spoiled by the incessant shrill cheering of children. There was a moving roll-call scene, when, in pauses of silence while the platoon sergeant looked
around, one saw the unanswering names hanging on barbed wire, or lying sprawled upon the pitted downland sward.

  Then the film took an ugly turn. The Germans were portrayed as fat and cowardly creatures; some of them almost Billy Bunters of the ha’penny poor-boys’ ‘libraries’ of before the war, always running away. The misery of deep mud and hopeless cold of winter rain was made light of by the antics of a comic cockney actor floundering about before the camera in a new tunic with sharply creased trousers—straight out of the Ordnance Stores at Pimlico.

  Phillip felt that he could not remain beside a passive Lucy as the shrill cries of the children changed to a terrible booing of everything German; the feeling became anguish, equal to that felt during the first hours of the opening battle when his platoon had been cut down by machine guns and he had lain in a shell-hole unable to help with two bullets through his left leg, when the children cheered in crescendo as a young German soldier, going through the British barrage to get water for a wounded comrade, was killed by a bursting shell. But he sat through it to the end and God Save Our Gracious King, while thinking of Willie, dead these three years, who had prophesied that unless a change of thought came to Europe, and particularly to Britain, the war would come again.

  He must delay his book no longer. When he had taken ‘Mister’ back to Ruddle Stones he returned to the farmhouse, and putting a pile of logs on one side of the little open hearth of his study, and drawing a pint of beer from the 4½-gallon ‘pin’ from the one-man brewery in Shakesbury on the other side, sat down to finish the introduction to his war book.

  The bells cease to hum in their cage, the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, ‘Oh, the War! A tragedy—best forgotten. No use dragging in the skeleton to the feast,’ or, ‘There always will be a war: it’s deep in human nature.’ They may give me a friendly hint, ‘Don’t talk about the War before my boy, old chap, if you don’t mind. I don’t want him unsettled: you know what youngsters are—very impressionable. And after all there is such a thing as loyalty to one’s country, you know.’ This last remark was once made to me after I had said that the Germans were brave soldiers, and fighting for the same ‘ideals’ as we were.

  Sometimes it seems even more hopeless, as when one hears a hundred or so school-children, marched to the local picture palace for patriotic purposes, cheering and booing a film which only at times suggests reality, called The Somme, frantically cheering the ‘British heroes’ in their immaculate uniforms, and booing the ‘German cowards’ who always seem to be hurrying away from the British (O wraiths of the 8th Division before La Boisselle). They booed even when one poor lad in feldgrau, who went to fetch water for a dying comrade, was knocked over by a shell.

  The children, I know, are but mirrors of the mental attitudes of their parents, of their school and religious teachers, but surely, after the bitter waste and agony of a lost European generation, it is time that these people should begin to ‘know what they do’.

  Lucy had told Mrs. Rigg, who came in during the day to help with the work, that they would not be home again until lunch time the next day; but there was a light on in the master’s room. As she told Lucy next day—“Whinivver I poked me ’ade up out of the badeclothes, I zeed the light still on, and I zaid to me ’usband, ‘’Arry,’ I says, ‘whathivver be’m about, a proper ould oyl he be, ’a zaith, workin’ by day and by night. Whathivver be’m up to, ’a zaith, ’tes this yurr writin’ that he be ut, ’a zaith.’”

  Mrs. Rigg went on to say that she went over early, and cooked the master some eggs and bacon, he looked very happy, and not a bit like a weary man, she declared.

  “’A was smilin’ like someone had gived he a present, ma’m.”

  I must return to my old comrades of the Great War—to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders—to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands above the river Somme—for I am dead with them, and they live again in me. There in the beautiful desolation of rush and willow in the forsaken tracts I will renew the truths which have quickened out of their deaths; that human virtues are superior to those of national idolatry, which do not arise from the Spirit: that the sun is universal, and that men are brothers made for laughter one with another: that we must free the child from all things which maintain as pre-eminent the ideal of a commercial nationalism, the ideal which inspired and generated the barrages in which ten million men of my generation, their laughter corrupted, perished.

  I have a little boy now, an innocent who laughs in the sunshine; he sings and smiles when he hears the bells on the wind. Must he, too, traverse a waste place of the earth: must the blood and sweat of his generation drip in agony, until the sun darken and fall down the sky, and rise no more upon his world?

  “We’ll have to leave the ploughing of the Big Field until after the shoot,” said Mr. Hibbs, the manager of Fawley Estate Farms, Ltd. “I’ve left you alone, as there was little I could do, while you were carrying on with the seasonal jobs. But looking round with Haylock I see you’ve had Johnson’s Iron Horses to do the ploughing for you. He went a bit deep, didn’t he? I doubt if anything will grow in that rank soil. When we ploughed deep for beet-sugar during the war we found that an extra inch was all that was practicable, and every fourth year afterwards we could bring up, with safety, another inch. That gives the rank soil a chance to weather, and be assimilated. I fancy you’ll have to reverse the process, and put back the meat-soil on your ninety odd acres, Captain Maddison.”

  “Oh. It was pretty awful before, you know.”

  “Yes, it was sucked out all right. Haylock is pleased, there are several coveys on the furrows. He plans to bring them down from the top fields and line his guns behind the hedge across the road from the southern boundary of the Big Field. There will be stops out, of course, and a gun on either flank, to prevent the birds from breaking back and veering off. I suppose you’ll be one of the flanking guns, sir?”

  “I don’t shoot, Mr. Hibbs.”

  “A man with a walking stick will be enough to keep them from veering. Sir Hilary, I understand, wants to shoot over our other farms the first day, and get the birds on to your land for the final battue. Haylock reckons there are between three and four hundred brace o’ partridges; we’d’ve had more, except for that storm at the end of May which killed a lot of chicks just as they were hatching.”

  “I remember that storm, Mr. Hibbs—it was my wedding day.”

  *

  Hilary and his guests stayed at the Royal Hotel in Shakesbury. He had arranged for luncheon to be delivered by van, with a waiter, to the keeper’s hut beside one of the rides in Turk Wood, about a mile from Rookhurst. There on the trestle table was a large steak-and-kidney pudding around the basin of which a deftly folded table napkin was tucked; potatoes baked in the jackets; a ham; an apple pie, a plum cake, bowl of cream, Stilton cheese. There was whisky, claret, and coffee. Among the guests was a large florid man who had been the commodore of the Mackarness Line; he couldn’t shoot for toffee. Hilary wasn’t much good, either, thought Phillip, drinking his fifth glass of claret. One wasn’t so bad, he was something on the staff of the Governor-General of Australia. Except for this man, Phillip regarded them as a lot of profiteers. When, after lunch, the talk came to the trouble in the coal-fields he made an excuse to go out and see if the beaters were getting their bread and cheese and beer.

  There they were, sitting in line, a lot of oddmedodds wearing calico smocks as much for their own safety as for scaring birds, happy that they were being paid to enjoy themselves, with a couple of rabbits from ‘bird kipper’ Haylock thrown in at the end of the day. Most of them were labourers on the farms, others were out-of-works collected by the under-keeper.

  The next day stops were put out before dawn—men in smocks carrying sticks to which white pieces of cloth were
tied—along the eastern boundary of Skirr Farm, which adjoined the property of Sir Roland Tofield. After three stands near and around the various coppices and woods, the plan was to walk up the stubbles and leys and put the birds into a 20-acre field of roots near the western boundary of the farm.

  While the guns were getting into position behind the farther hedge, the beaters were already walking in line across the swedes. Next to this plot were ten acres of beet-sugar. A score of pheasants, many hares, and a few brace of partridges were laid in the game cart from this stand.

  Then a buffet luncheon in the billiard room at Fawley, a table cloth covering the faded baize and perished cushions. Lucy had gone up with Mrs. Rigg previously to clean out what had been a lumber room, unused for play since Uncle John’s wife had died towards the end of the nineteenth century. Once again the caterers from Colham provided the food and drink.

  Now for the big drive of the day, which would end the shoot.

  The beaters were already on their way to the beech hanger under the down. There was no wind; the original plan was unchanged: south through the trees to the ploughed work; cross it in line, Haylock with a gun on one flank, the under-keeper on the other flank with Phillip, now carrying a gun, to deal with any birds breaking back. The advance was to be gradual, not to panic the birds, but to ‘lift’ them off the arable and so to the Big Wheatfield which adjoined the Shakesbury road.

  Hilary led the way to the village, past the church and through the thatched cottages to the Shakesbury road and the line of hazel-sticks topped by numbered white cards lining the hedge across the turnpike road. There, as they sat on their shooting-sticks, sixty yards apart, some with Newfoundland retrievers on leash in front of their feet, while the game-cart waited well to the flank, Hilary blew a long note on the horn.

  They waited. Tiny white figures came out from among the beech trees. They moved forward, and went out of sight in the dip under the crest of Lobbett’s.