‘I really ought to kill this man, not to guard him.
‘Why?’
‘Because, according to the Great Pyramid, he is going to start the Great War of 1914.’
It seems to me quite impossible reasonably to believe in the prophecies of the Great Pyramid, and yet it is equally impossible for me to deny that Sidney was always right about it. He believed in it implicitly, though he did not always agree with other people’s readings of its meaning. He preferred to work out his own calculations from the complicated measurements of those galleries and chambers and tunnels; and he came to very precise conclusions.
In September 1914, when this first prophecy of his had been so direfully fulfilled, and my brother Harold had already been killed on the Aisne, I asked Sidney what he could foretell as to the length of the war.
‘I can’t say exactly,’ he said. ‘ But it won’t be over by Christmas as you all imagine. It can’t possibly last beyond December 31st, 1918, but the end won’t be more than a month or two before that.’
We could not then believe him.
War is now like a wolf at the door, and we for ever hear it growling. It is to-day the world’s obsession, and before 1914 it was seldom in the mind of an ordinary person as an actual possibility. The word war conjured up pictures of the Battle of Waterloo, of Florence Nightingale, or perhaps of South Africa. We could most of us remember that last war, but it seemed to have been a very hole-and-corner affair, affecting our daily lives very little. It did not seem then so remarkable that Jane Austen should have lived through the Napoleonic Era without so much as mentioning the war in her novels.
Yet Wiltshire was probably looked upon, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as an especially military area. The Southern Command Headquarters was at Salisbury, and there were always troops training on the Plain. When we sat in the garden on hot summer mornings, we often heard the distant boom of big guns. It did not seem a warlike sound. It came associated with gardening and with the scent of flowers; and that long soft sustained rumble was in itself drowsy and peaceful. It belonged to happy summer days.
For most English people living in the first fourteen years of the century, the prospect of war was thus remote and unrealizable. It did not seem a thing which could ever actually enter into our lives. We laughed at my brother Harold for the sulky expression on his face in a newspaper picture which showed him at Tilbury, seeing off the German Emperor after his last visit to England.
Harold said: ‘ Of course I look sulky. He’ll kill me someday.’
This was a joke at the time, but those words came true in the very first month of the war.
Then Henry Newbolt wrote to me.
‘This war is going to change the world for us all. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
Once again I could not believe him. In those first months of the war, it seemed that the only people for whom the world must be for ever changed, were those who had lost someone they loved. But this is the least of the effects of the war. ‘Pre-war’ and ‘post-war’ are as distinct from each other as are two Geological Periods; and the lost lives which meant so much to us, are, for the new generation, merely like fossils indicating the separate strata of that (to them) pre-historic epoch. The war is now studied in its broad effect on western civilization. What that effect really was it is hard as yet to say; but what strikes me personally, perhaps more than anything else, is that it has made our civilization self-conscious, and vocally self-conscious. Before the war we were quite satisfied that modern progress was taking its course and that all was improving with the world. We did not think overmuch about this and we lived our lives and enjoyed them. But now, from morning to night, we discuss ourselves, our predecessors, and our possible successors, and most of this discussion is profoundly pessimistic. I think this is a very outstanding characteristic of to-day as compared with yesterday.
In 1914, we had for two years been living in The Close. Then, as now, its walls held peace as in a cup. The great elms had not then been felled; and their broad shadows lay gently upon the grass which surrounded the cathedral like a flat green pool. Many visitors came in summer; and in the afternoons, nurses brought children to play upon the grass. The voices of visitors and of children alike were always subdued by their consciousness of the beneficent though resolute presence of the Close constable, who moved about near by, watching their doings with a disapproval which was never altogether unfriendly. At night, when the Close gates had been locked, and the Compline bell had sounded from the Chapels of the Palace and of the Theological College, the Close was lulled into a complete silence. The guests coming home from a Canon’s dinner party always took care to step very quietly through the Close, much as people, coming late into their houses, tiptoe past bedroom doors so as not to awake the sleeping family. For the Close was a family party. We all knew if people were going out late, and if we were awake we listened to hear them come home; but if we were asleep, we were annoyed when they woke us up. The city outside the Close walls seemed very far away; and when we sat in the garden on summer nights, my father often remarked that it was almost incredible that twenty thousand people could be living a few hundred yards away.
On the first Sunday in August 1914, this perpetual peace of the Close was broken by the constant reiteration of the word ‘War’. All through the previous week, that ugly word had prowled about outside, like a black panther trying to get in. Staff officers had hurried to and fro looking serious, but the Close took no more interest in Balkan affairs than did the rest of England. Few people even knew the name of the murdered Archduke, and nobody wanted to go to war about him.
Then, on that Sunday, the panther was inside the Close and at our doors. The wild beast had leapt across Europe, and was now, not in the Balkans, but in Belgium. In these after-days, people sometimes speak as if the country had been hurried into war by newspaper propaganda inspired from above; but nothing could be less true. To begin with, propaganda, as we know it today, is one of the horrid legacies of the war. As was the case with barbed-wire, in pre-war days people hardly knew what it meant. But, also, the newspapers were taken by surprise. They were busy with Irish affairs. The Government could not dictate a policy to them, for the Government itself was not agreed, and the Cabinet was divided until the very day that war was declared.
The country made up its mind first of all. As a whole it knew little of foreign politics, less about the military strength of the various powers, and least of all about the possibilities of modern warfare. Its first desire was to be let alone. But in some forgotten corner of his memory, every Englishman knew that we had pledged our word to protect the neutrality of Belgium; and from those forgotten corners there now sprang the consciousness that in honour we must now keep that pledge. We might dread the suffering and the sacrifice of war, but unexpectedly we found ourselves dreading even more the possibility that the Government might fail in what we could not doubt was our duty. On Sunday morning the Press seemed to think that we might keep out, and then young officers on the Plain talked of sending in their papers and of joining the French Army should we fail to keep our word; while my brother Sidney was so disgusted at the suggestion that such a thing could be possible, that he took the Sunday newspapers out into his garden and burnt them on the lawn. The attitude of mind of these days seems largely to have been forgotten, but I find it expressed very clearly in my journal.
On Monday it seemed as if the war was within our very gates. The green shade of the Close was unexpectedly invaded by swarms of dusty, exhausted soldiers. They lay about upon the grass as if they had come from some far-off battlefield and now could go no farther. Who could they be? Rumours fluttered out from every door. And with them there fluttered out too the Canons’ wives and the old ladies, all followed by neat maidservants carrying trays of tea to the tired soldiers. Thus the Close reacted to the trumpets of war. With cups of tea.
Our troops proved to be more thirsty for tea than for blood, and more accustomed to it. They were our own local
Territorials, youths from the neighbouring villages, on their march to the Plain, where they had been ordered to take the place of regiments leaving for France. They had tramped into Salisbury to learn that their camps were not yet ready for them; and the Dean had found them resting on the pavements in the dusty streets. He at once gave them the freedom of the Close; and there they stayed till night, lying on the grass, singing songs, and enjoying the tea and fruit which was lavished on them from every house. No one then believed that these irregular troops were destined to go overseas. We all thought the war would easily finish without them.
So it began in an uprush of idealism and ignorance. We did not hate the Germans; and when we heard that they were singing a ‘Hymn of Hate’, directed specially against the English people, we only laughed and said that like other foreigners they had no sense of humour. Like Mrs. Partington with her broom, we faced the World War with cups of tea and a sense of humour. These had hitherto settled most of the emergencies of our generation.
Thus unprepared, undisciplined, and ingenuous, with what patience and endurance did the youth of that day face the miseries of those eternal four years. They were braver than soldiers had ever before been asked to be; for they fought with unseen enemies who showered disease from the sky; they lived for months like moles and rats in dug-outs underground; they died slowly on barbed-wire entanglements amid seas of mud.
In the Close we were very far from these war horrors, yet the war invisibly regulated all our lives. Outwardly, no place changed less. It remained as quiet as before, though the Salisbury streets roared with lorries carrying war material, and were crowded with soldiers from every part of the British Empire. Yet within the Close walls, we still heard only the clock which chimed the hours, various bells tolling as usual for the services, and the floods of music which twice a day gushed out through the open windows of the cathedral. This unaltered peace was the chief gift which Salisbury had to give to the soldiers who passed through the city on their way to and from the Front. All through the war they continued to come through the Close gates to drink in this miracle of celestial quietude. Dean Page Roberts had always considered hospitality to be the first virtue of a Dean, and now he welcomed to the Deanery, the Close and the Cathedral, any who cared to come from among the many thousands of lonely strangers who in those years found themselves stranded in Salisbury.
On Sundays, the cathedral was crowded from the choir to the west doors with soldiers in uniform. At the far end, they could hardly hear one word of the service, for some of the canons had very old and cracked voices, and then the men pulled newspapers from their pockets and read them. But there always came a moment when every one of these was folded up and put away. This was when the Dean began to read the Lesson. He had a magnificent voice and a great sense of rhythm; and all through those years he insisted that no one but he should read these grand passages from the Old Testament. He always used the Authorized Version although there was a copy of the Revised Version provided on the lectern; and every man in the farthest corner of the cathedral seemed to listen spellbound while that fine voice rolled forth the glorious poetry which the Dean loved so much himself.
On Sunday evenings, he instituted a ‘Popular Service’ in the cathedral for the benefit of this huge passing population. He did not wish to call upon the cathedral choir for this extra service, so he asked me to collect an amateur choir to lead the singing. We only had to sing a very few notes before the whole congregation took up the tune and carried it along at its own pace. Our little choir was placed on two rows of chairs facing north and south at the top of the nave. On the first Sunday, when the service was over, the Dean stopped when he reached our seats on his way to the vestry, and he very ceremoniously bowed to me. For a moment I did not know how to take this; but then I dropped a low curtsey, and the other women bobbed too, while the men solemnly bowed from the waist. After this, we went through this little ceremony every Sunday night, and the Colonials believed it was a quaint old Salisbury custom.
All the big Wiltshire houses—Wilton, Longford, Longleat—were soon turned into hospitals and nearly all the girls became V.A.D.s. Lady Bath told me a very strange story about the Longleat hospital. She had been an invalid for years, and had to be nearly always on her back; but she generally got off her sofa and joined the family when they were about half-way through dinner, making her way alone through the house and leaning on her two sticks. One evening, a year or two before the war, she came out of her sitting-room alone and was about to pass through the hall, where the great staircase was very dimly lit, for there was then no electric light at Longleat. As she approached she saw to her horror that the staircase seemed to be enveloped in smoke and that many people were escaping obviously from a fire. Men were stumbling down the stairs, wearing a light blue uniform which was quite unknown to her. Stretcher bearers seemed to be carrying out dead bodies. Vivid as this scene was, Lady Bath also realized at once that it was unreal and she stepped back and watched it till it faded out. That night she told her daughter what she had seen, and three years later the dreamlike episode actually took place exactly as she had seen it. Longleat was by then being used as a hospital and the patients wore the blue uniforms which Lady Bath had foreseen, but which, at the time she saw it, had not been designed. A fire broke out in the house and the patients hastily escaped down the staircase, and Lady Bath saw, once more, the stretcher bearers of her dream carrying out the men who were too ill to walk.
By the way, Longleat is the only house in which I ever slept with the words ‘Out of Bounds’ inscribed above my bedroom door. Practically the whole house had been given over to the hospital, leaving very few rooms for the family and their guests; and these private rooms, which were scattered about in different parts of the house, were all thus distinguished.
During the first year of the war, the resources of the country were organized under a hybrid system which was partly voluntary and partly compulsory. In the long run the compulsory method (which, with spiteful affection, was named D. O.R.A.) was destined to win, though nothing could have been more alien to the spirit of this country. By degrees our whole mode of life was changed. In the first three days after war was declared, the banks were closed all over the country, to give time for the hasty printing of £1 and 10s. notes. On August 8th, we saw in Salisbury for the first time that paper currency with which the present generation has grown up. Till then I had looked with some scorn upon the dirty little notes for small sums which were circulated in foreign countries; but when they were introduced here, we accepted them as one of the unpleasant things which, as patriots, we were bound to endure in our country’s time of stress. We did not then believe that sovereigns and half-sovereigns were gone for ever. Prices went up, though not startlingly; and at first the slight difference in the cost of things acted as a kind of automatic rationing. One was obliged to buy less, in order to keep the books near their previous level. Till then our tradesmen had always called for orders, which were given to them by the cook at the door; but now I decided to go myself to the market and shops to see what was obtainable every day and at what cost. I found that I saved about £4 a month by this system and I rather enjoyed it. It made keeping house far more amusing for the housekeeper, whatever the unhappy members of the household may have thought about it. The papers were full of economy hints, and we were taught to make marmalade from carrots, butter from potatoes, and cabbage from rhubarb leaves. This last proved to be a particularly deadly poison, and it was generally discontinued after a few deaths had been definitely traced to this charming little economy.
One economy which I personally enjoyed very much was bread-making. As soon as bread was rationed, we found that we were allowed the same weight per head of bread or of flour and could draw our ration in which ever we chose. I decided that I would make all the bread which should be eaten in our house. Before I began, I went to consult Mr. Bowle, the Salisbury miller, about the various kinds of flour. He told me such wonderful things about his trade that it seemed t
hat anyone who could not be a poet should certainly be a miller. There must always be something magical in living in a mill house over the millrace with the mill-wheel turning day and night; but there is more romance than that to be found in a mill. The grain itself is full of character. It goes on living after it has been harvested, and it does not even die when it has been crushed between the millstones. It for ever continues to feel changes of climate and to show changes of temper. Mr. Bowie said that the flour would always vary with the course of the stars under which it was milled. Having learnt thus that flour is erratic enough to excuse any faults of the bread-maker, I started on my new career and baked three times a week, using a great variety of different recipes. My bread was quite delicious and I was not the only person who thought so. I soon found that the only secret of bread-making is sufficient kneading, and I pummelled away for nearly an hour each time, always learning a Sonnet of Shakespeare as I worked. By the end of the war I knew them all, but now I can’t remember one. I once asked Pamela Grey how she and Lord Grey succeeded in keeping in mind the great quantity of poetry which they could always say by heart. She said that they took much trouble about it, constantly reciting poetry to each other, when they were travelling by motor or in the train, or wherever they found a free half-hour.
When we were at Weymouth in August 1915, we steamed round the harbour and saw the hull of the old battleship, Hood, which had been partly sunk at the entrance to Portland Harbour to act as a defence against submarines. She was lying keel uppermost and was a most wonderful colour, burnished yellow and gold. The sailors at Weymouth were then discussing all possible reasons for the sinking of the Lusitania. She seemed to have been very far from her prescribed zigzag course, and if she had kept to it she would have been safe.
It was just at this time that a ‘National Register’ was instituted. This was a kind of voluntary conscription. Everyone between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five was asked to enrol in it and to say what their usual employment was and what they were willing to do. My father was then eighty-four, but he insisted on enrolling. He knew that there was no chance of his being accepted as a chaplain at the Front and he reluctantly contented himself with volunteering to take the place of a younger clergyman who might be sent there.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 15