A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Yes. About ten pounds. Also I’ve written articles for their weekly paper, and spoken at meetings.”

  “You’ve been to Germany, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever received money from anyone in Germany?”

  “Yes.”

  The half-dozen men seemed to be more casual than before. He felt as he did when lecturing, or speaking before an unreceptive or unsure public; his voice felt to be thin, no assurance behind his words.

  “What was the money for?”

  “Royalties from translations of my books.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I once received money from the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin.”

  “Will you say how and when?”

  “Certainly. Someone from the Ministry once gave me a hundred and fifty marks to buy a ticket to fly from Berlin to Croydon. I’d spent all my reichmarks. I’d been a guest of the German government, along with several other Englishmen, most of them journalists. Their fares home had been paid, too, I believe. Later I returned the hundred and fifty reichmarks to the official who had lent it to me. It was never acknowledged.”

  “Why did you return it?”

  “I didn’t think it was quite the thing to borrow money from a host; but when I had to, I asked my Berlin publishers to return it out of book royalties when they became due. They did so.”

  “You have over two thousand small-arms rifle ammunition, a thousand 12-bore cartridges, five hundred 20-bore cartridges, as well as a small arms rifle and a .410 shot-gun, on your farm premises. What do you keep them for?”

  “The rifle and ammunition are for rabbits. I have a police permit to possess them. The other guns and cartridges are for shooting game in season. I have a game licence.”

  The pink-faced president held out a brass cartridge, green with verdigris, set with a big lead bullet. “What is it for?”

  “I think it must be a relic of my wife’s father’s tiger-shooting expedition in India sometime during the ’eighties of the last century. Some of his old possessions are stored in the workshop.”

  “And what is this?”

  He pushed over a paper cartridge half-filled with a waxen substance.

  “I don’t know. It may be bee’s-wax, or resin. It was his, too.”

  “And you have several pounds of black gunpowder and fuses. Have you a licence to buy and keep gunpowder?”

  “No.”

  “What is it for?”

  “I used it to blast chalk from the quarry, under the Land Fertility Scheme.”

  “And you haven’t a licence to keep gunpowder?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you buy it?”

  “In an ironmongers of Great Wordingham.”

  The pink-faced man wrote for a minute or so.

  “Well, I cannot say what will happen to you, but you need not worry yourself unduly. I think I understand your idealism. I used to have ideals once, but I found they didn’t get me anywhere. I’ve told your wife, by the way, that she may come and see you. Any letters you receive or send must be submitted first to the sergeant in charge. That is one of the regulations.”

  He was taken back and locked in the cell. He lay down on the planks, to relax. Ever since the break-away from his father’s home, he reflected, he had always made his own patterns of life or living, though most of them had been irregular or haphazard; but now the pattern was being made for him. He could feel his mind being deprived of its function. Its horizon was gone; a peculiar feeling of helplessness, impotence, bewilderment, and oh damn it—a sense of claustrophobia. As the light declined he felt the walls shutting in on him, he saw himself pushing with his arms until they broke. He could not imagine anything beyond the actual straining against small confined space. To counter this weak feeling he began to breathe deeply, but that was no good, so he began walking up and down, feeling that he was beginning to behave in the stereotyped manner of prisoners.

  What rot it all was! Yet it was also alarming, for it showed that Britain was likely to be invaded. Before, he hadn’t taken the war seriously; now, confined in the white-washed cell, the thought of invasion began to grow upon him. If troop-carriers and tens of thousands of parachute troops could land in Holland and France they could also land in England. But Hitler would not give the order just yet. He was sure he wouldn’t give it. Hitler’s attitude would be, Let’s stop this war, let’s create a United States of Europe with work for all, and you Englanders make your Empire into your export commercial-travellers’ and architect-planners’ dream. It was logical, and sensible. Hitler admired England, and had always hoped against hope that it would not come to war. If the white races clashed to their limits of strength, Asia would spread over their exhausted territories. If Britain refused Hitler’s logical request for the war to end, it would be the final one: and if it happened that England were devastated and subdued, the war would go on, perhaps from Africa, with the Navy operating from Canada, blockading all Europe and the British Isles.

  He recalled what an Air Vice Marshal of the R.A.F. in 1938 had said to him at a party at George Abeline’s house in mid-Norfolk. If war came (and the senior officer had considered it to be inevitable) then it was to be hoped that Italy would not remain neutral. ‘We’ll get at Germany that way. We’d tear off the Italian booted leg.’

  In 1938 that had seemed cynical, even cruel; although his acquaintance had been speaking in detachment only as a strategist, and from the viewpoint of Great Britain surviving as a major maritime trading nation.

  The key banged in the lock. The door opened.

  “A lady to see you!”

  Behind the sergeant stood Lucy, smiling, with flushed face. He got off the plank-bed and said “Hullo.”

  “Hullo,” said Lucy. She had two pillows in her arms.

  “It’s against the regulations for visitors to enter the cells,” said the sergeant, “but you can speak with your wife in the yard outside. A constable will remain with you according to regulations.”

  Outside, to Phillip’s surprise, it was still a fine June day.

  “Well, how are you?”

  “All right.”

  The constable was standing in the doorway, trying to look as though he were thinking of his allotment.

  “I hope the hay won’t get burnt up.”

  “I told Luke about it.”

  The constable came nearer, to examine mortar between the bricks of the wall.

  “Oh, damn. I quite forgot it was Friday. The wages!”

  “I’ve paid them.”

  “Thanks so much. I’m sorry to give you all this trouble.”

  “Oh, it’s no trouble, my dear. By the way, Luke says the hay isn’t fit to be cocked yet. I’ve looked at it, and it’s still sappy.”

  “Ah, that’s good then! Look, he ought to bring Beatrice and fetch the elevator from the station tomorrow.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, perfectly. How are you?”

  “Oh, the same. How are the children?”

  “All right.” She did not say that Peter had come home from the village school with a bloody nose, after being mobbed because his father, they said, was a German spy.

  “I brought the newspapers. And these pillows.”

  “Oh, good. By the way, you have power to sign cheques you know. In case I don’t come back.”

  The constable said suddenly, “You’ll go back!” He spun round on a heel and looked at Phillip. “I’ll bet you five bob you’ll be back inside a week!”

  Feeling happy, Phillip exclaimed, “I’ll take that bet!”

  “And within a fortnight we’ll all be doing this!” The constable shot his arm into the air and grinned.

  Was it a trap, or a joke? Phillip took it as a joke. “Don’t forget we’ve got a Navy!” To Lucy, “Did you come in the Silver Eagle?”

  “Yes. It was rather a bother to start, that’s why I’m so late.”

  “The fl
ywheel cogs are worn, they stick on the starter pinion.”

  “We all had to push it in the end.”

  “The other day I found another Silver Eagle in a knacker’s yard and wondered if I should buy it, for spares. Have the sheep broken out again?”

  “I don’t think so. They were all grazing happily on the Home Hills when I left.”

  “No fly on them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I wonder if they’ve oiled the hay-tedder machine.”

  “I must try to remember to ask.”

  That seemed to be the end of the conversation.

  “Is there anything special you want?” she said. “Oh, I’ve brought you a book to read.”

  “Thanks. What is it?”

  “The Road to En-dor—the escape book, you remember you said you’d like to read it again.”

  Phillip said to the constable, “Sounds suspicious, doesn’t it? As though I were planning to involve the police here in spiritualism. You’ve read The Road to En-dor?”

  “Yes, sir. My wife got it out of the County Library.”

  “It’s a wonderful book.” To Lucy, “How are the children?”

  “Quite well.”

  “How are the sheep?”

  “They seemed all right.”

  “Still avoiding the fly on the Home Hills, I hope,” said the constable, staring at the wall intently.

  “Ah, we’re talking in code,” said Phillip. “For sheep read bows and arrows. For further ‘information’, read ‘Tiny Tinribs’ Weekly.”

  “Things move faster than that nowadays,” remarked the constable. “Six weeks, and Poland’s down. Three days, and Holland’s out. Three weeks, and Belgium’s down. A month, and France is as good as out. And our Defence Volunteers ain’t got any rifles. But we’ve got one thing Jerry hasn’t got. As you said, a Navy! If little ole Hitler comes, he won’t get back.”

  “Well, I’d better be getting back now,” said Lucy.

  *

  With the two pillows the bed was comfortable, but as he lay and tried to read that evening his eye would not fasten on the printed page but travelled inwardly to known fields and cottages, to children’s faces in the shock and delirium of bombs and shell-fire, to ruined towns and starvation and desolation, to prisoners’ camps filled with soldiers and volunteers whose only weapons were shot-guns, the Government gone to Canada and declaiming over the radio that anyone who tried to keep life going in Britain was a quisling, a traitor: and thus fratricidal civil war and sabotage. All this montage of thoughts was cohering and assembling within his mind to the old idea: he must try to stop the war for the people’s sake.

  It must be possible to transmute un-understanding into clarity: clarity for all points of human feeling, whether of Jew or German, Finn or Russian, Communist or Jehovah’s Witness, Catholic or Fascist, labourer or industrial boss: to resolve for all men of goodwill, of honour, this frightful deadlock of ideas. It must be possible. The people of all nations and creeds yearned for justice, for appreciation, for hope, for clarity.

  Again and again during the sleepless night the hare-fleeing mind returned to its basic thought: if only Hitler, at this crisis in the world’s portending misery, were shown some sign of friendliness, some understanding of his spiritual gifts, for so long frustrated and therefore sometimes turned to poison within his being—driving him to do the opposite of his idealistic nature. If only his magnanimity could be set free by friendship with the country and nation he admired—Britain—his true inner self might be brought forth as a light uncovered. The French premier had said he believed in miracles, but he meant something to cause sudden devastating defeat of the Germans. There was no hope that way, especially if it were to happen. What was needed was a true miracle, for an exposition so clear that all men would understand it.

  It was possible.

  He now had pencil and paper.

  As soon as it was light enough to see he got up and, sitting on the edge of the plank-bed, began to write an article which he must smuggle out somehow and get to Chettwood even if it was to be his last act on earth.

  *

  After the article had been written he hid it in one of the two pillows under his head and tried to sleep, but his mind would not stop racing.

  They key rattled in the lock. There stood the war-reserve constable, regimental and erect, an old Coldstreamer. Again the politeness of a trained soldier was integrating.

  “Would you care to wash and shave, sir? I have some warm water. And can you eat egg and bacon for breakfast, or would you prefer fish? The sergeant’s wife regrets she has no coffee, but will you take tea, sir?”

  “Thank you, and good-morning, constable. I would like some fish. I’ll wash now, thank you. Another fine day.”

  “Yes, sir. The French seem to be knocked out of the war. The Germans are in Paris.”

  He spoke with a confident impartiality: no wonder, thought Phillip, that the Guards in the 1914–18 war never failed to take their objectives—except once, when they had been given the impossible task of making a salient out of a salient at Bourlon Wood.

  What a splendid fellow he was, this old Lilywhite. Iron, in fire, had become steel. Duty, honour, truth were in his bearing. The sort of fellow who, were he a German and this a German prison, would blow out his brains if his prisoner managed to escape. Though such a thought as escape never occurred to Phillip. If the door had been open, and no one there, he would have considered himself, in the emergency, as sole authority for law and order, and would have remained there in charge of himself.

  “I’ll have to lock the door while I go for the water, sir.”

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  Certainly they were model gaolers. He ought really not to attempt to smuggle out the manuscript. It would not be quite the thing.

  The rest of the day passed with aimlessness, until the time for Lucy to visit him. This time the sergeant accompanied her.

  “Were the pillows comfortable?”

  “Yes, thank you. Afraid I haven’t got very far along the road to En-dor. Oh sergeant, do you believe in spiritualism?”

  “It all depends, sir, by what you mean by spiritualism.”

  Phillip decided not to pursue the joke. “How’s the elevator?”

  “I got Luke to bring it back. It looks lovely. I fancy he didn’t like bringing it back on a Saturday afternoon, but I persisted.”

  “Good for you. Don’t forget his overtime.”

  “I wrote it down in the farm diary. I brought your post, by the way, it’s in the office. I opened the letters first. Well, don’t worry about the farm, we’ll manage somehow.”

  “We’ll have to see all your letters before you see them, sir.”

  “Yes, of course, sergeant. The news looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  “It don’t look too good, sir. But old England’s been in a tight corner before, and got out of it.”

  “Yes, indeed.” To Lucy, “How’s the village? Full of rumours?”

  “Yes, they seem at last to have some excitement. But don’t think they all think alike. Far from it.”

  When Lucy had gone he lay on the bed reading the papers she had brought. Afterwards he dozed, and at ten o’clock undressed and tried to sleep. In the morning, after washing and shaving, he had breakfast and was pacing the cell when the door opened and the sergeant, looking grim, entered and told him to pack his bag. His heart began to beat faster. He was told to wait in the office beside several uniformed policemen. There was a copy of The Daily Crusader lying on the desk. He read the banner-line across the front page in heavy black type.

  FRANCE SURRENDERS

  So it was going to be prison, or the Isle of Man, for the rest of the war. The property he had signed for—string, button, matches, halfpenny—was checked and put back into the canvas bag. His suitcase was taken outside to where a closed car stood. He got in, followed by two policemen who sat themselves on either side of the prisoner. The windows were closed. It was a fine sunny day seen thro
ugh glass. He did not like to ask for a window to be opened. The driver at the wheel had a black holster strapped to his waist.

  The car drove out of Crabbe, down the road he had travelled several times, and then entered a lane which he did not know. The image of Codreanu, the Rumanian National-Socialist peasant party leader, in white embroidered peasant cloak, came to him. Codreanu had been ‘shot while attempting to escape’ with a dozen of his followers in a Rumanian forest. How remote from peaceful English life that murder had seemed a few years ago; how remote, too, from an England where one could say what one liked. He was a political prisoner guarded by three armed policemen, in a motor moving swiftly past fields of growing wheat and oats and barley; past fields where mowing machines moved, elevators worked, stacks of dark green clover hay were rising; past gangs of hoers moving with bent backs in line down pale green thread-lines of sugar-beet. All looked up as the car moved past, and stared.

  He did not like to ask where they were going. Indeed he could not have asked out of this low point of life’s loneliness. For nearly twenty years he had known and seen the pattern of his actions; now he was intellectually blind, deprived of that which for nearly twenty years had been his life’s aim and purpose. It was as though the sinews had been taken out of the body. He was a man invisibly bound, knowing not where he was going, prepared only for the sight of a railway station, stares of the curious on the platform as between two policemen and perhaps handcuffed to one he would be taken to a railway carriage and locked in behind drawn blinds. At Liverpool Street Station there would be further gazings of the curious, a step up into a Black Maria’s windowless ride and then perhaps through the gateway of the Scrubs and a cell door closing behind him.

  If the Germans invaded England successfully—and by the look of things there were few men and little equipment in the country—he had foreseen the possibility of himself, with others, being summarily shot in cells, attempting to escape. Would Tim join Lucy, and help her run the farm with Billy?

  And looking at the sunlit scenes of hay-rake and hoe through glass he wondered how the hay of Steep Field would fare. Poor Lucy. Perhaps the War Agricultural Committee would farm the land.