“Also we get three pairs of socks. We work pretty hard. We don’t know how to darn socks. When the heels wear through, come blisters. Bad blisters disable a man. Of the million of surplus women (see above) the government has not had the intelligence to get any to darn our socks. So a certain percentage of us go lame. And so on. And so on.
“You will think all this is awful grousing, but the point I want to make—I hereby to ease my feelings make it now in a fair round hand—is that all this business could be done far better and far cheaper if it wasn’t left to these absolutely inexperienced and extremely exclusive military gentlemen. They think they are leading England and showing us all how; instead of which they are just keeping us back. Why in thunder are they doing everything? Not one of them, when he is at home, is allowed to order the dinner or poke his nose into his own kitchen or check the household books. … The ordinary British colonel is a helpless old gentleman; he ought to have a nurse. … This is not merely the trivial grievance of my insulted stomach, it is a serious matter for the country. Sooner or later the country may want the food that is being wasted in all these capers. In the aggregate it must amount to a daily destruction of tons of stuff of all sorts. Tons. … Suppose the war lasts longer than we reckon!”
From this point Hugh’s letter jumped to a general discussion of the military mind.
“Our officers are beastly good chaps, nearly all of them. That’s where the perplexity of the whole thing comes in. If only they weren’t such good chaps! If only they were like the Prussian officers to their men, then we’d just take on a revolution as well as the war, and make everything tidy at once. But they are decent, they are charming. … Only they do not think hard, and they do not understand that doing a job properly means doing it as directly and thought-outly as you possibly can. They won’t worry about things. If their tempers were worse perhaps their work might be better. They won’t use maps or time-tables or books of reference. When we move to a new place they pick up what they can about it by hearsay; not one of our lot has the gumption to possess a contoured map, or a Michelin guide. They have hearsay minds. They are fussy and petty and wasteful—and, in the way of getting things done, pretentious. By their code they’re paragons of honour. Courage—they’re all right about that; no end of it; honesty, truthfulness, and so on—high. They have a kind of horsy standard of smartness and pluck, too, that isn’t bad, and they have a fine horror of whiskers and being unbuttoned. But the mistake they make is to class thinking with whiskers, as a sort of fussy sidegrowth. Instead of classing it with buttoned-upness. They hate economy. And preparation. …
“They won’t see that inefficiency is a sort of dishonesty. If a man doesn’t steal sixpence, they think it a light matter if he wastes half a crown. Here follows wisdom! From the point of view of a nation at war, sixpence is just a fifth part of half a crown. …
“When I began this letter I was boiling with indignation, complicated, I suspect, by this morning’s ‘stew’; now I have written thus far I feel I’m an ungenerous grumbler. … It is remarkable, my dear Parent, that I let off these things to you. I like writing to you. I couldn’t possibly say the things I can write. Heinrich had a confidential friend at Breslau to whom he used to write about his Soul. I never had one of these Teutonic friendships. And I haven’t got a Soul. But I have to write. One must write to some one—and in this place there is nothing else to do. And now the old lady downstairs is turning down the gas; she always does at half-past ten. She didn’t ought. She gets— ninepence each. Excuse the pencil. …”
That letter ended abruptly. The next two were brief and cheerful. Then suddenly came a new note.
“We’ve got rifles! We’re real armed soldiers at last. Every blessed man has got a rifle. And they come from Japan! They are of a sort of light wood that is like new oak and art furniture, and makes one feel that one belongs to the First Garden Suburb Regiment; but I believe much can be done with linseed-oil. And they are real rifles, they go bang. We are a little light-headed about them. Only our training and discipline prevent our letting fly at incautious spectators on the sky-line. I saw a man yesterday about half a mile off. I was possessed by the idea that I could get him—right in the middle. … Ortheris, the little beast, has got a motor-bicycle, which he calls his ‘b——y oto’— no one knows why—and only death or dishonourable conduct will save me, I gather, from becoming a corporal in the course of the next month. …”
§ 4
A subsequent letter threw fresh light on the career of the young man with the “oto.” Before the rifle and the “oto,” and in spite of his fights with some person or persons unknown, Ortheris found trouble. Hugh told the story with the unblushing savoir-faire of the very young.
“By-the-by, Ortheris, following the indications of his creator and succumbing to the universal boredom before the rifles came, forgot Lord Kitchener’s advice and attempted ‘seduktion.’ With painful results which he insists upon confiding to the entire platoon. He has been severely smacked and scratched by the proposed victim, and warned off the premises (licenced premises) by her father and mother—both formidable persons. They did more than warn him off the premises. They had displayed neither a proper horror of Don Juan nor a proper respect for the King’s uniform. Mother, we realise, got hold of him and cuffed him severely. ‘What the ’ell’s a chap to do?’ cried Ortheris. ‘You can’t go ’itting a woman back.’ Father had set a dog on him. A less ingenuous character would be silent about such passages—I should be too egotistical and humiliated altogether—but that is not his quality. He tells us in tones of naïve wonder. He talks about it and talks about it. ‘I don’t care what the old woman did,’ he says, ‘not—reely. What ’urts me about it is that I jest made a sort of mistake ’ow she’d tike it. You see, I sort of feel I’ve ’urt and insulted ’er. And reely I didn’t mean to. Swap me, I didn’t mean to. Gawd ’elp me. I wouldn’t ’ave ’ad it ’appen as it ’as ’appened, not for worlds. And now I can’t get round to ’er, or anyfing, not to explain. … You chaps may laugh, but you don’t know what there is in it. … I tell you it worries me something frightful. You think I’m just a little cad who took liberties he didn’t ought to. (Note of anger drowning uncharitable grunts of assent.) ’Ow the ’ell is ’e to know when ’e didn’t ought to? . … I swear she liked me. …’
“This sort of thing goes on for hours—in the darkness.
“ ‘I’d got regular sort of fond of ’er.’
“And the extraordinary thing is it makes me begin to get regular fond of Ortheris.
“I think it is because the affair has surprised him right out of acting Ortheris and Tommy Atkins for a bit, into his proper self. He’s frightfully like some sort of mongrel with a lot of wire-haired terrier and a touch of Airedale in it. A mongrel you like in spite of the flavour of all the horrid things he’s been nosing into. And he’s as hard as nails and, my dear daddy! he can’t box for nuts.”
§ 5
Mr. Britling, with an understanding much quickened by Hugh’s letters, went about Essex in his automobile, and on one or two journeys into Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, and marked the steady conversion of the old pacific countryside into an armed camp. He was disposed to minimise Hugh’s criticisms. He found in them something of the harshness of youth, which is far too keen-edged to be tolerant with half performance and our poor human evasion of perfection’s overstrain. “Our poor human evasion of perfection’s overstrain”; this phrase was Mr. Britling’s. To Mr. Britling, looking less closely and more broadly, the new army was a pride and a marvel.
He liked to come into some quiet village and note the clusters of sturdy khaki-clad youngsters going about their business, the tethered horses, the air of subdued bustle, the occasional glimpses of guns and ammunition trains. Wherever one went now there were soldiers and still more soldiers. There was a steady flow of men into Flanders, and presently to Gallipoli, but it seemed to have no effect upon the multitude in training at home. He was pleasantly excited by the evident
increase in the proportion of military material upon the railways; he liked the promise and mystery of the long lines of trucks bearing tarpaulin-covered wagons and carts and guns that he would pass on his way to Liverpool Street station. He could apprehend defeat in the silence of the night, but when he saw the men, when he went about the land, then it was impossible to believe in any end but victory. …
But through the spring and summer there was no victory. The “great offensive” of May was checked and abandoned after a series of ineffective and very costly attacks between Ypres and Soissons. The Germans had developed a highly scientific defensive in which machine-guns replaced rifles and a maximum of punishment was inflicted upon an assaulting force with a minimum of human loss. The War Office had never thought much of machine-guns before, but now it thought a good deal. Moreover, the energies of Britain were being turned more and more towards the Dardanelles.
The idea of an attack upon the Dardanelles had a traditional attractiveness for the British mind. Old men had been brought up from childhood with “forcing the Dardanelles” as a familiar phrase; it had none of the flighty novelty and vulgarity about it that made an “aerial offensive” seem so unwarrantable a proceeding. Forcing the Dardanelles was historically British. It made no break with tradition. Soon after Turkey entered the war British submarines appeared in the Sea of Marmora, and in February a systematic bombardment of the Dardanelles began; this was continued intermittently for a month, the defenders profiting by their experiences and by spells of bad weather to strengthen their works. This first phase of the attack culminated in the loss of the Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvet, when on the 17th of March the attacking fleet closed in upon the Narrows. After an interlude of six weeks to allow of further preparations on the part of the defenders, who were now thoroughly alive to what was coming, the Allied armies gathered upon the scene, and a difficult and costly landing was achieved at two points upon the peninsula of Gallipoli. With that began a slow and bloody siege of the defences of the Dardanelles, clambering up to the surprise landing of a fresh British army in Suvla Bay in August, and its failure in the battle of Anafarta, through incompetent commanders and a general sloppiness of leading, to cut off and capture Maidos and the Narrows defences. … Meanwhile the Russian hosts, which had reached their high-water mark in the capture of Przemysl, were being forced back first in the south and then in the north. The Germans recaptured Lemberg, entered Warsaw, and pressed on to take Brest Litowsk. The Russian lines rolled back with an impressive effect of defeat, and the Germans thrust towards Riga and Petrograd, reaching Vilna about the middle of September. …
Day after day Mr. Britling traced the swaying fortunes of the conflict, with impatience, with perplexity, but with no loss of confidence in the ultimate success of Britain. The country was still swarming with troops, and still under summer sunshine. A second hay-harvest redeemed the scantiness of the first, the wheat-crops were wonderful, and the great fig-tree at the corner of the Dower House had never borne so bountifully nor such excellent juicy figs. …
And one day in early June while those figs were still only a hope, Teddy appeared at the Dower House with Letty, to say goodbye before going to the front. He was going out in a draft to fill up various gaps and losses; he did not know where. Essex was doing well but bloodily over there. Mrs. Britling had tea set out upon the lawn under the blue cedar, and Mr. Britling found himself at a loss for appropriate sayings, and talked in his confusion almost as though Teddy’s departure was of no significance at all. He was still haunted by that odd sense of responsibility for Teddy. Teddy was not nearly so animated as he had been in his pre-khaki days; there was a quiet exaltation in his manner rather than a lively excitement. He knew now what he was in for. He knew now that war was not a lark, that for him it was to be the gravest experience he had ever had or was likely to have. There were no more jokes about Letty’s pension, and a general avoidance of the topics of high explosives and asphyxiating gas. …
Mr. and Mrs. Britling took the young people to the gate.
“Good luck!” cried Mr. Britling as they receded.
Teddy replied with a wave of the hand.
Mr. Britling stood watching them for some moments as they walked towards the little cottage which was to be the scene of their private parting.
“I don’t like his going,” he said. “I hope it will be all right with him. … Teddy’s so grave nowadays. It’s a mean thing, I know, it has none of the Roman touch, but I am glad that this can’t happen with Hugh——” He computed. “Not for a year and three months, even if they march him into it upon his very birthday. …
“It may all be over by then. …”
§ 6
In that computation he reckoned without Hugh.
Within a month Hugh was also saying “Goodbye.”
“But how’s this?” protested Mr. Britling, who had already guessed the answer. “You’re not nineteen.”
“I’m nineteen enough for this job,” said Hugh. “In fact, I enlisted as nineteen.”
Mr. Britling said nothing for a little while. Then he spoke with a catch in his breath. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “It was— the right spirit.”
Drill and responsibilities of non-commissioned rank had imposed a novel manliness upon the bearing of Corporal Britling. “I always classified a little above my age at Statesminster,” he said as though that cleared up everything.
He looked at a rosebud as though it interested him. Then he remarked rather casually:
“I thought,” he said, “that if I was to go to war I’d better do the thing properly. It seemed—sort of half and half—not to be eligible for the trenches. … I ought to have told you. …”
“Yes,” Mr. Britling decided.
“I was shy about it at first. … I thought perhaps the war would be over before it was necessary to discuss anything. … Didn’t want to go into it.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Britling as though that was a complete explanation.
“It’s been a good year for your roses,” said Hugh.
§ 7
Hugh was to stay the night. He spent what seemed to him and every one a long, shy, inexpressive evening. Only the small boys were really natural and animated. They were much impressed and excited by his departure, and wanted to ask a hundred questions about the life in the trenches. Many of them Hugh had to promise to answer when he got there. Then he would see just exactly how things were. Mrs. Britling was motherly and intelligent about his outfit. “Will you want winter things?” she asked. …
But when he was alone with his father after every one had gone to bed they found themselves able to talk.
“This sort of thing seems more to us than it would be to a French family,” Hugh remarked, standing on the hearth-rug.
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Britling. “Their minds would be better prepared. … They’d have their appropriate things to say. They have been educated by the tradition of service—and ’71.”
Then he spoke—almost resentfully.
“The older men ought to go before you boys. Who is to carry on if a lot of you get killed?”
Hugh reflected. “In the stiffest battle that ever can be the odds are against getting killed,” he said.
“I suppose they are.”
“One in three or four in the very hottest corners.”
Mr. Britling expressed no satisfaction.
“Every one is going through something of this sort.”
“All the decent people, at any rate,” said Mr. Britling. …
“It will be an extraordinary experience. Somehow it seems out of proportion——”
“With what?”
“With life generally. As one has known it.”
“It isn’t in proportion,” Mr. Britling admitted.
“Incommensurables,” said Hugh.
He considered his phrasing. “It’s not,” he said, “as though one was going into another part of the same world, or turning up another side of the world one was used to. It is jus
t as if one had been living in a room and one had been asked to step outside. … It makes me think of a queer little thing that happened when I was in London last winter. I got into Queer Company. I don’t think I told you. I went to have supper with some students in Chelsea. I hadn’t been to the place before, but they seemed all right—just people like me—and everybody. And after supper they took me on to some people they didn’t know very well; people who had to do with some School of Dramatic Art. There were two or three young actresses there and a singer and people of that sort, sitting about smoking cigarettes, and we began talking plays and books and picture-shows and all that stuff; and suddenly there was a knocking at the door and some one went out and found a policeman with a warrant on the landing. They took off our host’s son. … It had to do with a murder. …”
Hugh paused. “It was the Bedford Mansions mystery. I don’t suppose you remember about it or read about it at the time. He’d killed a man. … It doesn’t matter about the particulars anyhow, but what I mean is the effect. The effect of a comfortable well-lit orderly room and the sense of harmless people—and then the door opening and the policeman and the cold draught flowing in. Murder! A girl who seemed to know the people well explained to me in whispers what was happening. It was like the opening of a trap-door going down into some pit you have always known was there, but never really believed in.”
“I know,” said Mr. Britling. “I know.”
“That’s just how I feel about this war business. There’s no real death over here. It’s laid out and boxed up. And accidents are all padded about. If one got a toss from a horse here, you’d be in bed and comfortable in no time. … And there; it’s like another planet. It’s outside. … I’m going outside. … Instead of there being no death anywhere, it is death everywhere, outside there. We shall be using our utmost wits to kill each other. A kind of reverse to this world.”
Mr. Britling Sees It Through Page 31