Chapter 5

“PERHAPS THE ROAD UP ILSLEY WAY,THE OLD RIDGE-TRACK, WILL BE MY WAY” (p. 76)

When I next come down to Marlborough it shall be an entry worthy of the place and of the enterer. Not in khaki, with gloves and a little cane, with creased trousers from Aldershot—“dyed garments from Bozrah”—but in grey bags, an old coat and a knapsack, coming over the downland from Chiseldon, putting up at the Sun! Then after a night there and a tattered stroll through the High Street, feeling perhaps the minor inconveniences of complete communion with Nature, I should put on a gentlemanly suit and crave admittance at your door, talk old scandal, search old Housebooks, swank in Court and sing in Chapel and be a regular O.M.: retaining always the right on Monday afternoon (it always rains on Mondays in Marlborough) to sweat round Barbury and Totter Down, what time you dealt out nasty little oblong unseens to the Upper VI. This would be my Odyssey. At present I am too cornered by my uniform for any such luxuries. (May 1915.)

There is really very little to say about the life here. Change of circumstance, I find, means little compared to change of company. And as one has gone out and is still with the same officers with whom one had rubbed shoulders unceasingly for the last nine months, and of whom one had acquired that extraordinarily intimate knowledge which comes of constant συυουσία, one does not notice the change: until one or two or three drop off. And one wonders why.

They are extraordinarily close, really, these friendships of circumstance, distinct as they remain from friendships of choice.... Only, I think, once or twice does one stumble across that person into whom one fits at once: to whom one can stand naked, all disclosed. But circumstance provides the second best: and I’m sure that any gathering of men will in time lead to a very very close half-friendship between them all (I only say half-friendship because I wish to distinguish it from the other). So there has really been no change in coming over here: the change is to come when half of this improvised “band of brothers” are wiped away in a day. We are learning to be soldiers slowly—that is to say, adopting the soldierly attitude of complete disconnection with our job during odd hours. No shop. So when I think I should tell you “something about the trenches,” I find I have neither the inclination nor the power.

This however. On our weekly march from the trenchesback to our old farmhouse a mile or two behind, we leave the communication-trench for a road, hedged on one side only, with open ploughland to the right. It runs a little down hill till the road branches. Then half left up over open country goes our track, with the ground shelving away to the right of us. Can you see it? The Toll House to the First Post on Trainers Down on a small scale. There is something in the way that at the end of the hedge the road leaps up to the left into the beyond that puts me in mind of Trainers Down. It is what that turn into unhedged country and that leap promises, not what it achieves, that makes the likeness. It is nothing when you get up, no wildness, no openness. But there it remains to cheer me on each relief....

I hear that averyselect group of public schools will by this time be enjoying the Camp “somewhere in England.” May they not take it too seriously! Seein’ as ’ow all training is washed out as soon as you turn that narrow street corner at Boulogne, where some watcher with a lantern is always up for the English troops arriving, with a “Bon courage” for every man.

A year ago to-day—but that way madness lies. (4 August 1915.)

CAMBRIDGE:PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M. A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Odyssey,IV, 193, 194.[2]Odyssey,IV, 193, 194.[3]Ibid.,IX, 27, 28.[4]Faust,II, 6820-3.[5]Faust,II, 6944-7, 6820-3.[6]Iliad,XXI, 107.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]Odyssey,IV, 193, 194.

[2]Odyssey,IV, 193, 194.

[3]Ibid.,IX, 27, 28.

[4]Faust,II, 6820-3.

[5]Faust,II, 6944-7, 6820-3.

[6]Iliad,XXI, 107.

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