“I hold no brief for Lloyd George, Phillip, but according to the House of Commons debate in May, following the German break-through——”
“The Germans didn’t break through, Father——”
“As I was saying, I seem to remember reading in the paper that the Prime Minister refuted what you now say, by giving the figures supplied by the head of the War Office, General Maurice, who wrote that letter to The Times. As I said, I hold no brief for ‘Loud Jaws,’ but when he quoted General Maurice’s own figures, given by General Maurice himself, to the Cabinet before the debate in the House of Commons, his whole case, prompted by Asquith and others, collapsed. For the figures given to the Cabinet proved that there were nearly a quarter of a million more men in France at the beginning of 1918, than there were at the corresponding time in 1917.”
“Well, Father, that simply isn’t true!”
“Of course, if you know better than the Government, there’s nothing more to be said!”
“Well, I do know a little about it, Father. At the beginning of 1917 all our infantry brigades were composed of four battalions. Every infantry brigade in the B.E.F. in January 1918 was cut down to three battalions, the fourth battalion being disbanded to feed the other three. Even then, most battalions were far under strength, while a million and a half men were kept back in England. They were withheld because Mr. George wanted to get rid of Haig. The war was very nearly lost owing to the vindictiveness of an outsider for a soldier and gentleman.”
“Well, I suppose that settles the matter? You know more than the authorities!”
“The civilian mind invented propaganda, Father, so it is quite capable of faking information from the War Office. What General Maurice said was this: The Prime Minister read to the House of Commons a wrong set of figures, the first set that Maurice had sent him. General Maurice sent a corrected set of figures before the debate, but Lloyd George quoted the first set. He must have deliberately suppressed the second set.”
“I can tell you one thing, Phillip, and that is that Lloyd George is going to lose us the peace, in my opinion!” Richard went on vehemently, “I tell you that we should have gone on with the war until we had got to Germany, to give them a taste of what they have given France! In yesterday’s Trident there is an account of para-military forces being assembled in Berlin, to march through the streets—tens of thousands of them!—with bands and flags, defying the Occupation authorities! ‘They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!’, as Castleton is always trying to drive home to us. I tell you that we should not have agreed to an Armistice a year ago, but finished the destruction of Prussian militarism once and for all!”
Richard waited as though expecting agreement. Phillip sat still, exhausted. “Well, have you nothing to say further?” as his son put down his knife and fork.
“You are a curious chap,” went on Richard. “I can never quite make you out. You have hardly said a blessed word before or since leaving the army, unless, I might add, it was something to the advantage of the King’s enemies.”
“You mean those in the House of Commons, Father?”
Anxious to change a dangerous turn in the conversation, Hetty said brightly, “Where are you going for your walk this afternoon, Phillip? Do eat your dinner, dear, before it gets cold.”
Phillip sat so still that the cat was emboldened to jump upon his lap, and begin to pound with clawed feet. Phillip lifted it up and dropped it on the floor, where it stood still, mewing faintly.
“Poo-or Zippy,” crooned Richard. “At least you have a tongue in your head, haven’t you, Zippy?”
“I’m rather lucky to have a tongue in my head, too, sir. At least it isn’t hanging out all the time.”
Richard put down his knife and fork. “I don’t quite see what that means, unless you are deliberately trying to be offensive?”
“Oh, I’m sure Phillip did not mean anything of the sort, Dickie!”
“Ah, I was forgetting,” said Richard. “You, too, like to take the contrary view to what is generally accepted, don’t you, Hetty? You, too, have a soft spot for mice, encouraging them in your kitchen by not seeing that it is kept as it should be. Zippy is wrong to catch mice, and I am wrong for standing up for my country.” He pushed back his chair, and looked at Phillip. “Having made that clear, may I ask what you meant by your remark about my tongue just now? I warn you to be careful in choosing your words this time, for I intend to put up with no further rudeness, even if I am only a despised civilian!”
“I merely said, Father, that I was lucky to have a tongue in my head. I was thinking of one of Wilde’s Rifles, of the Lahore division at Messines in 1914. This sepoy, or whatever he was, wandered into our lines at twilight, still wearing his turban, but with his tongue hanging on his tunic, since his lower jaw had been shot away that morning. He tried to tell our Colonel something, with signs, and cheered up no end when the Colonel spoke a few words in Hindustani.”
“Whatever has that got to do with what we were talking about, I’d like to know?”
“Those sort of things, which were the real war, never got into the papers, Father.”
“Isn’t Phillip awful?” cried Elizabeth. “He’s not like any of the other men in the office! He talks like that to upset everybody!”
“Elizabeth, do please be quiet! Now, Phillip, tell us where you are going for your walk this afternoon,” pleaded Hetty. “I suppose you wouldn’t like Doris to go with you? The walk would do her good, she has been working so hard.”
“I’m going with Ching, Mother.”
“I knew it!” cried Elizabeth, turning unnaturally bright eyes to her mother. “Why does he choose such awful people for his friends? If it isn’t Ching, it’s Warbeck, both of them rotters, if you ask me!”
“That reminds me, my girl!” said Richard. “Did you take my November Nash’s Magazine with you out of the house yesterday evening? You did! Then kindly do not do so again! I do not take your things, why should you take mine?”
“Elizabeth only borrowed it for a little while Dickie, to show Nina something. She did ask me first, so it is my fault entirely.”
“There you go again! Always condoning what is wrong!”
“Elizabeth, please do not forget to bring back your Father’s magazine by tea-time!”
Phillip said to the tablecloth. “Father—please listen. If some student of the future had only Nash’s and other popular magazines as evidence for a historical study of the war, he would be utterly in the dark to know how our fellows really got across to the German trenches during the Somme—or how Ypres was really held in 1914—or Passchendaele reached in 1917. He would have no idea of what the war was really like—minute by minute—hour by hour—day after night—night after day—week after week—month after month——” He looked at his father’s face, and quickly down again at the table-cloth—“or how it happened that hundreds of thousands of faceless bloody half-sacks were left lying near spectral spinneys—rifles swaying in the wind on bayonets—he would learn nothing! nothing! nothing!!!” he cried, getting to his feet.
“What’s he going to do now, attack Father?” cried Elizabeth. “What’s he saying it all for? Is he mad?”
“Go on, Phil,” said Doris quietly.
“Doris, how dare you!” said Hetty, ineffectually.
“Well, I must say I don’t altogether like your attitude or your language,” said Richard, in a strained voice. “Also, I do not see what all this has to do with what I asked you. Of course men get killed in war—just as we stay-at-homes sometimes got killed in air-raids—the effects of which aren’t pleasant, to say the least of it! But the Germans began it, and we had to finish it! I said, and I still say!—that we should have carried fire and sword into Germany, to give them a taste of what they gave others!!”
“The Germans were the same as ourselves, Father.”
“Oh! Have you read, by any chance, the Bryce Report on atrocities?”
“There were blackguards in every army, Father. But the great
majority of the Germans were brave, decent, humane soldiers.”
“You can sit there, and talk like that?”
“Yes, I can!” cried Phillip, starting up again. “Brave!—brave!!—brave!!! Decent!—decent!!—decent!!! Their Government didn’t fight with lies! Their newspapers didn’t slander Englishmen with print in order to make people sleeping in beds at night determined to keep the war going!”
“If you keep on like this, I shall not answer for the consequences! I warn you——!”
“Have you heard about the German Corpse Factory, Father? Do you know where it went to work, tieing up the corpses ‘in bundles of four’! In Fleet Street! Only they were in bundles of twelve, for the newsboys to carry under their arms, and they were called Daily Tridents!”
“What are you saying? Are you tipsy again?”
Phillip took a deep breath, and said quietly: “Father, I saw some beautiful German graveyards, with carved stones, when we advanced over green country to the Hindenburg Line! I sent Mother some pansies growing on the graves, didn’t I, Mother? Not one British soldier who was there believed in the Corpse Factory idea. It was one of a lot of false reports. Incidentally, the British soldiers did some pretty dirty things in France, you know. Did you ever read Willie’s letter, which I showed Mother, about the British bombardment, exactly at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, 1915, German midnight—blowing poor little devils in mouse-grey uniforms to hell while they were singing carols—and about to come out in No-man’s-land to offer us presents of cigars and sausages, as they did in 1914? You never read about that British ‘atrocity’ in The Daily Trident, or any other British paper or magazine, did you? It was always the Huns who were unhumorous and atrocious, and always the British who were chivalrous and humorous, in our newspapers and magazines!”
Richard left the room. He came back to say, “If you keep on in this strain, I shall say something to you for which I might be sorry afterwards!”
“Please sit down, and eat your food, Dickie! Phillip, please do not say things to annoy your father!”
“But, Mother, I am only telling what every soldier out there knew at the time! There can never be real peace in the world until we understand other people’s points of view! For instance, it is a fact that our Guards Division seldom brought back any prisoners! If they did happen to have some ‘Huns’ surrendering, the aforesaid ‘Huns’ were put conveniently in a communication trench and treated to a present of Mills bombs lobbed in, accidentally on purpose.”
“What are you saying?” cried Richard. “Are you in your right senses?”
“I’m telling you about our ‘frightfulness,’ sir! At Cambrin, near Loos, in 1915, the Coldstream band played in the trenches, the Germans being thirty yards away. A very pleasant concert, Germans soon singing away, and asking for German tunes. The next evening, the same concert, plenty of Hans’ and Carls’ and Heinrichs cheering the Coalie band. But they didn’t cheer for long, for they lay in bloody rags under a rain of sporting hand grenades. Hubert Cakebread told me that himself! He was there!”
Richard was white in the face.
“I repeat: If you go on like this I may find myself calling you a name that you will not like!”
“Please don’t go on, Phillip,” said Hetty. “Please stop—for my sake——”
“It’s rather late in the day for you to talk like that!” cried Richard, turning on his wife. “It was your doing in the first place that made the boy grow up as he did, neither one thing nor the other! It’s all coming out in the wash, now! Everything I tried to tell the boy, you invariably countered!”
“You’ve made my Mother cry!” said Doris, in a firm voice, staring at her father.
“Mother, don’t cry,” said Phillip. “I know exactly what Father means, only it wasn’t, the war, I mean, as he imagines. No doubt he thinks that my mind is warped by my Jewish streak, but the finest General in the war was an Australian Jew called Monash!”
“I have not said so,” replied Richard. “But from the trend of your remarks, it is plain to me that in your eyes the fault can be laid entirely at my door! You who as a boy showed yourself to be untruthful, cowardly, and a sneak-thief, not to mention a bully!”
“Yes, you are entirely right there, Father. You see, when I left home to go into the Army, I had to learn, or rather to unlearn, all over again. I had to start from scratch. The first thing I had to realise, was that men who bullied others did so from fear in their own souls. They used scapegoats, in other words. I found out that the really brave man was a calm man, and he was calm because he had grown up in a calm household, and not been bully-ragged, as you used to say. I found out that men who came from loving homes were invariably steady and courageous, in other words that a sense of honour came from love. I learned this from a Roman Catholic priest, and saw again and again that it was true.”
“A Roman Catholic priest!” Richard sat down. “Well, that could explain quite a lot! About your muddled ideas, I mean. But even your Mother’s persuasion towards Roman Catholicism would hardly explain how it happened that you came to command a battalion!”
“I also failed to understand many things, until I tried to shed my own preconceived notions, Father.”
“Well, that is an admission for which I suppose I should be grateful? What do you think of that, Hetty? Your best boy admits that there are some things that he does not understand!”
“Father,” said Phillip, looking at him steadily. “Father, I wish you could believe me that I do not mean to be personal, when I say this——”
“Oh no, you are not being personal! Not in the very least! You are merely criticising me in my own house, after living in it for two months, the while more or less treating me as if I did not exist—getting up in the morning late, presumably to be waited on hand and foot by your Mother—in whose eyes you can never do wrong, it would appear—coming home usually nearer midnight than any other hour—in fact, treating the place like an hotel! Now let me tell you this!” cried Richard, rising to shake a warning finger at Phillip. “I have said very little to you in this matter, but if you think I have not known what is going on, you deceive yourself! You seem to think that those whom you despise, or consider your inferiors, have deluded themselves by doing nothing but read magazines during the past four years——”
“I’m sorry, Father, I should not have said that. I was rather intolerant——”
“Perhaps you will allow me to finish saying something I have wanted to say for a long time? It is this! I am tired of being treated in my own house as though I have no right to exist in it! And I will tell you this—it is fully time that you thought of finding a home of your own!”
“Oh, Dickie, please—Phillip is not well——”
“And whose fault is that, pray?” Rising indignation caused a rise in pitch of his voice. “If you think that I have not been aware of what has been going on, you are entirely mistaken, let me tell you! It never occurred to you, I suppose, that innocent people might have been made to suffer because of your condition, to put it at its mildest possible aspect? Yes, you know what I mean, I think!”
“What does he mean, Mother?” asked Elizabeth. “What is Father talking about? What has Phillip been doing?”
“Oh, do please be quiet, Elizabeth! What your Father says to Phillip is nothing to do with you!”
“Well, what have you to say?” cried Richard to his son, now silent again. “You don’t answer! Very well, I now make a formal request to you that you leave this house by this evening! If you do not leave, if you are on these premises tomorrow night at the latest, I shall have no alternative but to summon you for trespass! Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Father,” replied Phillip, getting up and leaving the room.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Hetty, in tears.
Chapter 22
BY A DYING STREAM
As he turned the corner he waved to Mrs. Neville sitting at her window, Sprat with cocked ears by her side. It was twenty past one; he had forty min
utes before Ching, who would be coming down Ivy Lane, was due to meet him at the junction with Charlotte Road.
He felt thirsty, and thought to go into the Randiswell for a pint of mild ale, and perhaps some bread and cheese. One pint of mild, and no more. But he reckoned without Dr. Dashwood, who put his bulk between Phillip and the bar counter, saying, “I insist, my dear Middleton, in doing the honours!”
“Thank you, doctor, may I have a pint of mild ale, please? I’m not awfully well at the moment.”
“My dear Middleton, good beer is much less likely to upset one, than swipes! And as your honorary medical adviser, who has your welfare very close to his heart, I suggest the best Burton. A pint of your best Burton, and the usual for me, please, Mrs. Purvis! Well, Middleton, I must congratulate you——”
It seemed ungracious to refuse the dark brown ale, which soon induced freedom from tension. Returning the compliment, Phillip put down another pint. Then Ching came in, having come from the Bereshill Jack, so named because Jack Cade, a peasant leader in revolt, had assembled his men there for the final march upon London. Ching had been drinking rum since opening time at noon. Now, in the Randiswell, there was a party; and at closing time, with three quarters of a gallon of strong ale to walk off, Phillip led the way to the Recreation Ground, a place trodden dead under gravel paths: of black patches, wide and bare, in the grass; sooted trees, and tarred railings; a slow-moving, poisoned river.
Ching was making an effort to appear sober; Phillip strode on fast in front, dreading a return of Ching’s wallowing self-depreciation, which was somewhow in keeping with the L.C.C. park enclosed by ghastly brick houses.
It was not easy going, after they had left Fordesmill Bridge, on the broken-bottled and old-iron’d banks of a narrowing stream which now moved below back-gardens, sheds, and commercial buildings. Soon they were leaping across the bends, once landing short in the water, Phillip to scramble out laughing at the muddy streaks on his own face and that of Ching, who began to look doleful.
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