A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip said softly, “Can you see how it is thinking to reach the beam above, in the enclosed space? Its wings are beating rapidly to delay progress until it has gauged the distance and gotten confidence to alight. Ah, it has dropped away and gone. You see, Jonny, it isn’t easy to enter a space of less than half a cubic yard, to pause, and then to fly up at an angle of sixty degrees, slowly, and so to perch on a length of wood the top of which is less than an inch and a half from the sloping plaster ceiling. The older birds, if you notice, swoop up; they know to half a wing-and tail-brake what momentum is needed to bring them to the moment of stillness opposite the beam. Now let’s stand still, for that little fellow will be back again soon, I fancy.”

  The young bird seemed timorous. It came in, hesitated, lost confidence, turned, and perched itself on Phillip’s shoulder.

  “O,” cried Jonathan, his eyes wide. He kept still like his father. They were part of the landscape. An old swallow flew in, saw what had happened, circled noiselessly, then flew out, uttering a ringing Phil-lip!

  Phillip said softly, “The father bird should have known better than that, I think, Jonny. Do you think that alarm was necessary? After all, my name hereabouts is MUD, and that should be a homely enough association for swallows.”

  “He’s talking to you, Dad!”

  Phil-lip, cried the old bird outside, as another fledgling flipped in, hesitated, and perched itself beside its brother. A moment later both parents returned, with what the children called the Uncle Swallow.

  “‘Ah yes, my dear, it is the man whose name is MUD, but after all he is scarcely human,’ they are saying. Don’t move, Jonny,” as the three adult birds pitched on the purlin above and peered down at the two young ones. Phillip moved his head slowly to touch one flightling with the lobe of his ear. With a soft throw of wings it was gone, followed by its brother.

  The sight of the swallows made the meal one of ease and happiness in the parlour. The children sitting at table twittered like swallows.

  “Isn’t it perfect weather?” said Lucy.

  “Indeed,” said Phillip. “It is what for some years now in Germany has been called Hitler weather. Dr. Goebbels has exploited even the elements to be working for the Führer’s cause. It certainly seemed like it, often enough. During the mammoth parades and rallies the sun shone and the rain kept away. For millions of ordinary Germans, with shining eager faces as they spoke of the man they loved, Hitler could do no wrong. I saw them at Nürnberg and elsewhere. To them his intuition was that of the spirit of all beauty and art in Western culture renaissant. Providence blessed him, they believed. There would never be another war. Hitler would always be so that no war could break out. All the lost German comrades would return to the Reich, and without a drop of blood being spilled. That is what nearly all the German youths and young men and women believed, all those I met, anyway. They—and I —believed him to be the only true pacificist in Europe. He had freed the farmers from the mortgages which drained the land, cleared the slums, inspired work for all the seven million unemployed, got them to believe in their greatness, each one a German to do his utmost in whatever was his work—in the Arbeitsdienst draining swampy land or making Europe’s new autobahnen, stripped to the waist—the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the sun-tan, the clear eye, the broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being. All creative, strong, natural, plain truth: Hitler weather, lovely weather! I could sense it everywhere. And when I returned to Croydon by air from Germany, I felt like weeping, to see the faces of my own countrymen in London and the suburbs. It was like coming out of sunlight into shadow. I felt that the international financial masters of this country were trying to destroy that renaissance.”

  The children sat in silence.

  “Then,” he went on, “the man who was two men, the true man and also the self-built man, suddenly lost his head, and started the war. Hitler betrayed his true self—the man who did not drink or smoke, who loved nature and wild birds—the man who loved swallows.”

  He got up, and walked about the room.

  “At the same time, he knew he was faced with more than negation. He had put his country on its feet after the horrors of defeat in nineteen-eighteen; but he had no money. So he was forced to burst out. But I wish he had not. He told his nation that ‘Germany must export or die, and Germany shall not die!’ Or rather he screamed it. Even so, it was true. No one would buy their manufactured goods. Their barter system failed. If massed unemployment returned, there would be a Communist revolution and Germany would have civil war. So he went East over the border in a big way.”

  A swallow flew through the open door, circled the room, and flew out again.

  “Now for us Hitler weather means a daily, hourly dread of invasion. Oh, God, what a tragedy.”

  “Have your breakfast, my dear,” said Lucy.

  “I cannot eat,” he said, and left the room.

  When he came in to supper that evening, he said, “The spirit of fear flees over the land like a hare with the head of a tortoise. The entire company of Local Defence Volunteers has proposed resigning in protest against my release by the Chief Constable. The argument, propagated by Horatio Bugg, goes something like this: Aren’t we fighting for freedom and free speech, for the liberty of the individual? If we are, then why isn’t the quisling-spy, this gauleiter locked up? ‘Ah,’ says Horatio, ‘the police are too afraid to hold him, for his master Hitler will have them all shot when he comes!

  “Do eat your omelette before it gets cold,” said Lucy.

  “Newsprint is the fodder of the tortoise-head. In terms of the newspapers these people read, I am a fake farmer and a spy. I drive a long black car of the kind gauleiters drive in Germany. I have made a special road leading to the upland fields where aircraft carrying parachute troops and special vehicles can alight. My money must have come from Germany for it didn’t come from the farm, and all my talk of farming was a bluff. Ah, says Horatio, the police didn’t find any maps on the premises, but why? Because he had already burned them! Well, if the police won’t do their duty, why should you fellows serve in the Defence Volunteers? Where is the sense of that? So they have called a meeting about it in the wooden hut. They’re in there now. I think I’ll go and address them.”

  The resolution died in an empty stomach. Later, Mrs. Valiant came with the news that those who had enrolled in the local company had agreed to sign a round-robin and send it to Mr. Churchill.

  “Horatio told Matt that you had told him, sir, that when Hitler came you were to be paid six pounds a week for life.”

  “‘Six pounds a week for life,’ Mrs. Valiant? I suppose that is Horatio’s idea of wealth.”

  *

  The Rector who had been a chaplain in the Royal Navy preached a sermon in church on the following Sunday when the Volunteers paraded there for service. His theme was that to continue to believe or to spread rumours about one of their own countrymen whose name and character had been cleared by the police, and one who moreover had in youth fought for his country, was to continue to help the enemy by creating Alarm and Despondency.

  The Rector was in pain from arthritis, but he found time to say to Phillip, as he stood by the Church door after the service, “Things will come right in the end.” Phillip was so moved that he could say only, “Thank you, Rector.”

  Once more in the parlour, he recovered his tongue, and addressed the assembled family at Sunday dinner.

  “Our local worthy, Horatio Bugg, does not, apparently, want to take advantage of events today to gain the experience of military or naval service that he avoided as a young man during the Great War. As he is not a church-goer, he has missed the Rector’s sermon. Apart from his A.R.P. arm-band, he pursues his war-aims alone, giving advice to all and sundry who will listen to him as he leans against the wall of his old desiccated property.”

  “Do eat your mutton, it is so tender‚” said Lucy.

  “Alarm and Despondency are now the twin bogies stalking th
roughout England behind the tortoise-head of the hare. Even an ordinary non-political fellow has to be very careful what he says, lest some patriotic busybody report his words. One farmer in Lincolnshire, according to the newspapers, has been fined one hundred pounds for saying in a pub ‘I reckon we’ve lost this ’ere war’.”

  “The late Arnold Bennett,” he went on, looking at Lucy, “was said to have received as much as four shillings a word for some of his articles, but a phrase like the one I’ve just quoted nowadays has to be paid for by that Lincolnshire farmer at the rate of twelve pounds ten shillings a word. By jove, as Tim would say, this food is good, Lucy!”

  *

  As service in the L.D.V. was denied Phillip he joined the local Air Raid Precautions unit, with sign of A.R.P. outside its headquarters at the Rectory. After fitting anti-arsenical-dust cartons to gas-masks in a few cottages at night, he received a letter from Area Headquarters saying tersely that his services were no longer required.

  Meanwhile he had got in the hay of his second stack. The ryegrass was a bit too mature, perhaps, but still grey-green, with sugar to be tasted at the knot. Bullocks would grow into beef from that in the coming winter.

  The skies of late June, and all July, were empty of aircraft. The Rector said, “What does it all mean, this pause in the war? Can you tell me, Squire?”

  “Hitler wants to stop the war, Rector. He wants to expand East, to get new commercial travellers’ territory for his exports. Let us call off the war, then he will leave France, and we can build a great new civilisation in our Empire.”

  “Ah,” said the Rector, “Churchill has warned us of a peace offensive coining from Hitler. We won’t fall into that trap! You will be careful what you say, won’t you?”

  “I will do nothing to injure my country.”

  *

  Phillip told Lucy a week or two later, in the presence of the children—who now, with the exception of Billy, went to the village school—that they must all take the greatest care about lights at night, now that Hitler’s peace offer had been scorned. Churchill had sent the R.A.F. bombers into Germany to anger Hitler, and retaliation might begin very soon. If the least light were to be seen from any of their windows, they would all be in danger, not from the enemy, but from the windy ones in the village.

  “So no lights at all must be used in the bedrooms at night.”

  The little boys looked solemnly at him, and said obediently, “Yes, sir.”

  It would be best, he said to Lucy, if all the electric bulbs were removed from the sockets in all the bedrooms. There was enough light from the summer sky to go to bed with. Was that clear?

  Lucy said it should be done.

  *

  The first deep brrr-brrr of enemy bombers was heard in the height of the pale summer night sky. A few distant bombs caused the bedrooms to rattle. They felt them through the great frame of the refectory table when they could not be heard outside. After one alarm, as Phillip walked down from Matt’s cottage about 9 p.m., he saw a group of men outside his cottage. The now-familiar brrr-brrr, the nodes and anti-nodes of twin engines not perfectly synchronised, was coming from among the stars. He heard, also, voices before him, near the dark walls of the cottage.

  “He’s signalling!”

  “A few shots through the window is what he deserves!”

  “Give it to the bastard!”

  “Fifth columnist! There’s the proof!”

  Six or seven men stood there in the starlight. One of them was the camp canteen-manager who had made the ‘ceaselessly blaspheming’ accusation before the assembled volunteers in the village hut before Phillip’s arrest.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, suddenly coming among them.

  It appeared that Horatio Bugg had been fetched from the bridge near his yard by Jackie Bird, who had been one of Phillip’s fellow A.R.P. Wardens before Phillip was sacked. Jackie Bird was what Billy called ‘a little old totty man’. Being only 4 ft. 8 inches tall, Jackie was too small to work as farm labourer. He picked up a living on the cockle beds, and did odd jobs in the village. He was not married, but lived cheerfully alone in a 2-roomed cottage in Horatio’s Yard, paying a shilling a week rent to the landlord.

  Apparently Jackie Bird was on duty that night, and seeing a dimness, over the window lintel, reflected from the ceiling and seeping through half an inch of space between wall and blackout curtain, had shouted Put that light out!, and then, alarmed by his own voice, had taken to his heels down the street to the safety of the Yard. There others had been standing, including Horatio and some soldiers.

  Phillip realized at once that up in the second room of his cottage Peter was reading in bed. Peter, the ex-choir-school boy, was eleven years old, and partly deaf. One ear-drum had been perforated ever since he had had bronchial-pneumonia as a baby, when pus had choked the ear and nearly spread into the brain. Lucy had sat up nine nights with Peter and saved the little skeleton’s life. The ear troubled Peter at times even now, but he was generally a healthy, if slender, boy.

  He was an avid reader, and at the moment of Jackie Bird’s shout had been enthralled in a fantastic book about spies, death rays, heroes, fists smashed into faces and other stock-in-trade of the panders of print. Peter was not supposed to read in bed, having been asked not to do so, for two reasons, both of which had been explained to him several times: the one, for his health’s sake, the other for his father’s sake. However, with candle and book and blanket-covered head Peter was deep in the literature of the Conglomerated Press, E.C.2.

  “What’s the matter?” Phillip repeated.

  “You’re showing a light!” cried the portly, squeaky-voiced canteen-manager. “Want to get us all bombed,” said Bugg. “They’re after property.”

  “I had no idea there was a light behind the blackout. Anyway, it’s very faint, and indirect, and doesn’t show upwards.”

  “Report him,” cried the canteen-manager to Jackie Bird. “We all know what he is!” to a little group of soldiers. “It’s a signal, and it’s in direct line with our camp.”

  Some of the men in the camp were Scotsmen from Glasgow. One, muttering about his pals at Dunkirk, had come to the farmhouse door a day or two before, saying he’d like to run his bayonet through the bastard fifth-column traitor. On that occasion Phillip had guessed who had been priming him; and he knew that none of the Glasgow recruits had been out of England. Angered by the stupidity of it, he had pointed to the telephone and ordered the soldier to make a report immediately to the police. That had made the fellow hesitate. Then Phillip had asked for his identity card, saying he must report him to the police, for he was creating not only Alarm, and Despondency, but also Dyspepsia.

  “I’ll telephone the police, and tell them that you are a veteran of Dunkirk!”

  The youth had backed out and gone away at once.

  Brrr-brrr, brrr-brrr high in the starry sky. The twin-engined Dorniers were passing from east to west in half sections.

  “If they bomb the camp and kill our lads,” cried the canteen-manager, “it will be because of that light you’re showing.”

  Phillip said distinctly, controlling his anger, “There’s a small boy up there, probably reading in bed. Come up with me and see him. Come on, Jackie Bird, do your duty, you are the A.R.P. Warden. Come on! Make your investigation, and then do your duty and report the light. Come with me now! If you don’t report me, I shall report you all for creating Alarm and Despondency.”

  He shouted under the window for all to hear, “Peter, I told you, no reading in bed! Put that light out, you little idiot!” The pale line of light disappeared.

  Footfalls came up the road. The newcomer, a fellow known by Phillip to poach regularly in his end wood by the river, joined the group, and proceeded to give him a lecture on the danger of showing even a cigarette glow.

  “What about that red light on the nightcart?” asked Phillip. “That’s a signal, surely, of our decadent democracy?”

  The lugubrious horse which drew, once a
week, that vehicle of slop, clank, and smell up the village street was approaching, with melancholy clops of feet. Its fetlocks were swelled and greasy with permanent infestations of mites since the ’twenties. It was an aged, grey-muzzled gelding, dutiful and resigned.

  “Come, you said I was signalling, while I was sitting with Matt in his cottage. Be fair. British justice, you know.”

  “Do we get justice, with you in our midst? What are you doing here, that’s what we want to know? You ought to be locked up, and that’s too good for your sort!” cried the canteen manager.

  “Yus, nah yer talkin’,” said one of the soldiers, who was apparently not from Glasgow. “If I see any fookin light again, I’ll fookin shoot fust and arst fookin questions arterwards.”

  “And murder a small child reading in bed?”

  “Anyway,” protested the canteen-manager. “What you said to me before the war was bad enough, about the Old Country. If it isn’t good enough for you, why don’t you go and live elsewhere? We don’t want your sort around here.”

  “I’ve never spoken to you in my life,” retorted Phillip. “I heard what you said at the Local Defence Volunteers meeting, and I’m not sure it isn’t a slander and defamation of character. I think I’ll give you an opportunity of justifying your remarks in a court of law. I have plenty of witnesses.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” the other protested, weakening, “we don’t want our lads in the camp bombed.”

  “And I don’t want my lad up there shot by fookin rowdies with fookin wind-up, either!”

  The incident dissolved before the imminence of the malodorously slopping nightcart.

  *

  Later that night, as he lay drowsing in his bed by the long window, he was awakened by shouts of the searchlight team behind the woods. There was the drone of aircraft. White rhomboids in the sky moved, collapsed, built up again. The valley was suffused with spectral lilac light. An aircraft passed over low down, and he rose on an elbow to hear a series of crackling reports and see white spots of light burning on the grass of the Home Hills and the higher land of his neighbour’s farm to the west.