JAN ISSEL.
In the month of August 1914 Mr. Haseldine of Culme House in South Devon was as clearly persuaded as every other patriotic Briton that we had got to beat the Germans, cost what it might, and what it might chance to cost him individually he well knew, his only son being an officer in the Guards. So he was scarcely disposed to sympathise with a man who, having no less than four sons, made it a great grievance that the youngest of them was threatening to enlist.
‘What do you expect me to say to the lad, Issel?’ he asked of the ruddy, grey-bearded tenant who had come to beg his aid. ‘I can’t tell him he is wrong if he wants to fight for his country.’
‘Aw, ’tidden that, Squire,’ returned Farmer Issel, shaking his head. ‘I don’t b’lieve as Jan feels a call to go an’ fight no more’n what his brothers du; but a’s that quare an’ opinionated us can’t make nothin’ of un. Can’t spare un nayther, with harvest comin’ on an’ all, that’s the trewth.’
It was certainly the truth that labour was scarce and that the moment was ill chosen for withdrawing a pair of strong arms from Bratton Farm. Moreover, those were the early days of the war, when it had not yet become apparent that England must raise and equip a huge force. Therefore, after some further parley, Mr. Haseldine promised that he would give young John Issel a word or two of sound advice, and, with that end in view, he suggested to his daughter Mildred, a few hours later, that they should make Bratton Farm the object of their customary afternoon ride.
It was beautiful, hot weather, promising well for the approaching harvest, and as Mr. Haseldine jogged through the lanes, on either side of which were broad fields of ripening oats and barley, he remarked to his companion, with a laugh and a sigh, that some people didn’t know when they were well off. Patriotism was right enough, and he would be the last to discourage it; yet before a man decided to plunge into all the trials and miseries of a campaign he ought at least to make sure that his duty did not lie nearer home.
And something of that sort was what the Squire presently said to a slim, dark-eyed young man who, turning round at the sound of the horses’ hoofs, raised his arms from the gate over which he had been leaning and touched his hat. Jan Issel listened respectfully,appeared to be a little troubled, and had no very definite answer to make. What could be gathered was that his mother had been pressing him hard, that he did not want to vex her—nor yet nobody else—but that he reckoned he would have to go all the same. Oh, not until after harvest, for sure; he had given a promise to that effect and would keep it.
‘Quite right, my boy,’ said Mr. Haseldine, gathering up his reins. ‘Think it well over; don’t be in a hurry. You may be wanted at the front by-and-by, and so may your brothers; we don’t any of us know yet what lies before us. But for the present it seems to me that you’re more wanted where you are. Now, Mildred, if you’ll wait here for me, I’ll be with you again in a few minutes. I must just see Issel and tell him about several things that I forgot to mention this morning.’
Thus Miss Haseldine was left in the company of a youth of whose existence she had hitherto been but vaguely aware, but whose handsome face and great sad eyes made appeal to her. She began to question him, and, either because her pretty face and kindly blue eyes made appeal to him or because of some subtle suggestion of sympathy in her voice, he spoke with a good deal more ease and openness than he had shown in replying to her father. It was not only the outbreak of war, he confessed, that had put it into his head to take up soldiering. Many and many a time before had he thought of that way of escape from Bratton—because it was from Bratton that he yearned to escape. No, he hadn’t no trouble, without you could call it trouble to be uneasy in your mind; only he felt as if he must get away.
‘I couldn’t explain it to you, miss; I haven’t no power o’ language. Happen I’m unrasonable, as mother says. Dick and Tom and Bob they don’t ask no better’n to plough an’ sow an’ reap year in, year out; but with me ’tis different. Reckon as I’d go mazed if I was to stop home for always.’
‘I know what is the matter with you,’ said Miss Haseldine, smiling; ‘you’re bored.’
Well, that might be. The word was not included in Jan’s slender vocabulary, but perhaps he was capable of the sensation. Miss Haseldine told him that she was and that a vast number of persons were similarly afflicted. The recognised remedy was work; but, for obvious reasons, that was not applicable to his case. How about reading as a diversion? Did he ever open a book?
This chance shot unexpectedly scored. Jan’s big brown eyeslightened up as he answered that he loved nothing in the world so much as books to read. Unfortunately, he had exhausted the literature of Bratton Farm, which consisted of the Bible, sundry theological works, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ an anthology entitled ‘Pearls from the Poets,’ and a few dilapidated volumes of theFamily Herald.
Miss Haseldine said she could introduce him to a rather wider circle of writers than that. ‘Come up to the house after dinner this evening and I’ll lend you all the books you care to carry away.’
Jan was almost as grateful to the young lady as a starving man would have been for a loaf of bread; yet it was perhaps rather her looks and her voice than her kind offer that compelled his gratitude. Hitherto nobody had understood him—which was the less surprising because he had some difficulty in understanding himself—and he had observed a general disposition to treat him with the indulgence accorded to the mentally deficient. But here at last was a beautiful, beneficent being who not only did not call him a fool but clearly showed, without actually saying so, that she entered into his feelings and shared them. He had often seen her before, in church and elsewhere, but did not remember ever to have heard her speak. After she and her father had ridden away, he dropped his elbows upon the gate once more and for some time thought about her dreamily, with a pleasantly warmed heart, wondering why he had never before noticed her physical beauty. Then he stretched himself and strode off to get the cows in for milking.
Mildred Haseldine, if scarcely beautiful, was as pretty as golden hair, forget-me-not blue eyes, and neat little features could make her. Beneficent she might fairly be called, inasmuch as she was always glad to do a good turn to her neighbours, and this farm lad, with his odd craving for mental nourishment and his rebellion against the monotony of agricultural life, interested her. So as soon as she reached home she laid the library shelves under contribution, selecting ‘Ivanhoe,’ Tennyson’s Poems, Carlyle’s ‘Past and Present’ and Fitchett’s ‘Deeds that Won the Empire,’ as being a sufficiently comprehensive batch to begin with, and handed the volumes to her maid Judith, with instructions that they were to be given to young John Issel, if he should call for them. She observed that Judith blushed; but the circumstance made no impression upon her, Judith’s blushes being frequent and for the most part devoid of cause.
As a matter of fact, Judith Combe had some excuse for exhibitingself-consciousness at the sound of Jan Issel’s name. Not very much, it is true; for in her class of life the fact of ‘walking out’ with a young man on Sunday afternoons is not held to commit either of the walkers to subsequent matrimony, and certainly Jan did not consider himself in any way pledged to Judy Combe, whom he had chosen merely because, like his brothers and everybody else, he had to have a female companion of some sort. He liked the gentle, demure lass, was indifferently aware that she was nice-looking (she was in reality decidedly prettier than Miss Haseldine), and even supposed that he might marry her some day. But that, of course, would only be if he should stay at Bratton, instead of going out into the wide world—a contingency which he never cared to contemplate.
An access of shyness led him to ask for Judith when he went up to the great house that evening; but he was just a trifle disappointed when she joined him, bearing the promised armful of literature, and when he realised that he was not to see his benefactress. Nothing, however, forbade him to talk about her, nor did he say much about anybody or anything else during an interview which took place by starlight in the stable-yard. Judith, who was greatly attached to her mistress, was as laudatory as could be wished, if not particularly informing. Miss Mildred was always doing kind things; so Judith did not think it strange that she should lend books to Jan Issel if he wanted them; though it was perhaps rather strange that he should want them. She timidly intimated as much, but received no answer. It was, of course, impossible to explain to Judy Combe what the printed page meant to one who was consumed with curiosity respecting the world in which we dwell and who had no opportunities of coming into contact with a verbal interpreter. It would likewise have been difficult to bring home to her the motives that such a man might have for adopting the profession of arms; so that subject also was left untouched. For the rest, Jan was eager to say good-night, being still more eager to discover what Miss Mildred thought him capable of appreciating.
Miss Mildred, it may be conjectured, had not given a great deal of thought to the matter; but she bestowed quite as much pleasure upon herprotégéas if she had. That night and on several successive nights Jan sat up, devouring the volumes by the light of a single candle long after all the other inmates of the farm were asleep. ‘Ivanhoe,’ which was pretty plain sailing, delighted him, as did also Fitchett’s stirring and admirably related yarns. If he could not always make out what Tennyson was driving at, he loved therhythm and melody of his verse, just as he loved the sonorous grandeur of certain chapters in Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, the meaning of which was completely hidden from him. In like manner thousands of people derive genuine enjoyment from listening to a symphony, although they are ignorant of the structure of such compositions and cannot really follow them. But, oddly enough, it was with Carlyle that Jan was best pleased. The bygone abuses and social anomalies against which ‘Past and Present’ thunders naturally said nothing to him, nor could he trace much connection between them and the chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond. It must also be admitted that he skipped a good many pages. What roused him to enthusiasm was not the writer’s theme but his mastery of language and the magnificent, disdainful carelessness with which he displayed it, as though feeling himself big enough to be independent of all rules. Jan Issel, it must be supposed, possessed the literary sense—which indeed, like every other artistic sense, is inborn, not to be acquired. When he went to Culme House to return the books and beg for more, he tried, not over-successfully, to express to Miss Mildred (who received him this time and took him into the library) the intensity of his admiration for a philosopher who is commonly considered to be above the heads of the simple.
‘A girt man, miss,’ he said—‘a powerful man!’
‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Mildred, surprised and amused, ‘he’s—picturesque. Hardly at his best in “Past and Present,” though. I’ll lend you his “French Revolution,” which is much more interesting.’
Most leisured readers require a considerable length of time to assimilate that work; Jan, who had practically no leisure between sunrise and sunset, got through it in a week. He read it, as he read most works, with only a dim comprehension but with great contentment. Contentment, in fact, was the blessing bestowed upon him by Miss Haseldine’s happy inspiration; so that he spoke no more of joining the Army, while she was rewarded by the respectful thanks of his parents. From Jan himself she received something more than thanks and respect. It was, no doubt, natural enough that his imagination, fired by the novels and plays which she prescribed as occasional alternatives to historical study, should clothe her with the attributes of a heroine of romance. His contentment, for that matter, was perhaps as much the outcome of talks with Miss Mildred as of communings with authors who by themselves might rather have tended to increase the latentdisquietude which they were supposed to have allayed. These talks became frequent during the autumn weeks, occasion for them being willingly supplied by a young lady who could not help finding Jan Issel unusual and interesting. He came out, every now and then, with the quaintest, the most original, the most poetical remarks, and if his hearer sometimes had a little inward laugh, she was very careful not to let her features betray her; because his sensitiveness was no less manifest than his timid devotion. To inspire devotion—especially when it is timid—is seldom disagreeable to any young lady; so Miss Mildred often overtook Jan in the lanes or summoned him to the house; and this was really kind of her, seeing that she, who had so much to fill her thoughts just then, might well have been excused if she had forgotten all about a queer, dreamy farm lad. For those were the days in which the long battle of the Aisne was developing, and although her brother Frank had thus far escaped death or wounds, bad news of him and others might come at any moment.
In Jan’s thoughts there was not much room for the war and its vicissitudes. There would have been no room in them at all for Judith Combe if she had not enjoyed the proverbial privilege of living near the rose, which entailed the more dubious one of hearing the rose extolled without intermission during those Sunday walks which at an earlier period had been so largely taciturn. But Judith was a long-suffering little soul, and it was only after much hesitation that she ventured to ask:
‘Bain’t ’ee gettin’ tu fond of her, Jan?’
Jan reddened all over his face and neck. ‘Tu fond o’ Miss Mildred! What be dramin’ about then? Do ’ee think a dog can get tu fond o’ the sun? You’m talkin’ proper nonsense, Judy.’
Nevertheless, Judith’s words came to him as a shock and a revelation, over which he pondered for hours afterwards. At first he was ashamed of his audacity and felt as if he had been guilty of some unpardonable outrage; but by degrees he arrived at a different view of the matter. What if he did love a human goddess? When all was said, he could not help it. The veriest cur, according to his own homely metaphor, may bask in the sun, and she could not be displeased by what would certainly never be revealed to her. It was his secret, which he was surely free to cherish, without the least shadow of hope, much as certain sixteenth-century poets cherished a passion for Queen Elizabeth, or said they did. But the fact of being without shadow of hope—as of course he was—didnot preclude indulgence in ecstatic visions. His mobile imagination enabled him to see himself earning literary renown (like the peasant Robert Burns, perhaps), rising by virtue of the same to a position of admitted equality with the highest in the land and stripping the laurels from his brow to lay them at Mildred’s feet. Such things could not come to pass, and he knew that they could not; yet he liked to picture them and might plead that his fancies were as harmless as his love.
Harmless both may have been; only both contributed to bring about a return of his old restlessness. He was now embarrassed in conversing with Miss Mildred; he could not get rid of a haunting dread that she might suspect his sentiments (she was perhaps not so far from suspecting them as he thought), and then how would he ever dare to look her in the face again? More and more evident was it to him that he must leave the farm, that he would have to go some day and that he had better go soon. Added to this, his brothers were beginning to talk about donning khaki. Without saying anything to their father, they discussed the question amongst themselves and agreed that if ‘th’ old war’ was going to last another year, as the newspapers said it was, they could not decently keep out of it. It was impossible for all of them to go, that was certain; but one, or even two, of them might. The youngest they excluded, not only because ‘mother wouldn’t niver part with ’un,’ but because he was understood to have been cured of military hankerings. Thus it became plain that procrastination would only place fresh obstacles in Jan’s path.
It was on a grey morning in October that he was accosted by a recruiting sergeant at Exeter, whither he had been sent to dispose of some steers, and there was no need to impress upon him that Flanders was the right place for a likely young chap without encumbrances. He intimated that that was his own view and asked whether he could have a couple of days ‘to wind up like.’ Three, if he chose, the pleased sergeant replied; but he said two would be enough. They might even be excessive, he thought, for although old Mrs. Issel was a fond mother, she had a ‘tarrible power o’ spache’ when aggrieved; but he could not go off to the wars without taking leave of Miss Mildred, and he wanted to make sure of a farewell audience. More with that end in view than because he recognised any claim that Miss Mildred’s maid might have upon him, he marched up to Culme House the same evening and briefly informed Judith that he had taken the King’s shilling.
‘Aw, ma dear soul!’ cried the girl, throwing up her hands in dismay, ‘what iver did ’ee du that vur?’
It was a thing, Jan answered, that had to be done—a thing that every young man in England would be doing before long, by what he had heard tell. He further attempted to explain why for him in particular it was essential to break fresh ground; but, not making much of a success of this and noticing, moreover, that Judith was not listening, he desisted.
Judith was crying softly, and that gave him a pain at his heart. His mother also, instead of scolding him, as he had expected her to do, had wept, throwing her apron over her head and rocking herself to and fro, while his father, after one short, angry outburst, had abruptly fallen silent and had walked out of the house with bowed shoulders. It is cruel to have to hurt people like that; but—what can one do? He did his best to comfort poor little Judy, who was afraid ‘they pesky Germans’ would kill him—which indeed did not seem unlikely—but who tried to recover a cheerful countenance and assured him that she understood everything. He could not, of course, believe that she did, and would have been quite sorry if she had; still he was grateful to her for being so brave about it and for readily promising to deliver a message to Miss Mildred.
He had thought—perhaps half hoped—that Miss Mildred would reproach him a little for having so suddenly taken a step from which he had been dissuaded by her; but when she met him on the morrow she did nothing of the kind. Circumstances alter cases; the country now needed all who were fit to serve; she assumed that Jan had been actuated by patriotic motives and had only praise and congratulations for him.
‘How proud we shall all be of you if you come back with a V.C. or an officer’s commission!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nothing is impossible in war time, you know.’
Jan smiled and shook his head, but, he often thought of her words afterwards and made them the nucleus of innumerable day-dreams. What he longed for at the time was some hint of regret on her part, some intimation that she would miss him a little. However, she did not seem to think that there was anything to regret, and it was absurd to suppose that his departure could make any difference to her. Why should it? One thing, at any rate, she said which was as delightful as it was unforeseen.
‘You must let me hear from you, John. Write often and atgreat length, please, and tell me exactly how everything strikes you. Answer? Oh, of course I will, and I’ll send you socks and mufflers and things, not to mention books.’ She added, after a moment, ‘I was thinking of giving you something now, only I don’t know what you would like to have.’
Jan knew very well what he would like to have: whether he might dare to ask for it was another question. However, he was going away and it was probable enough that he would see her no more; so he screwed up courage to confess that the most welcome gift she could bestow upon him would be something that had belonged to herself—maybe the little silver pencil-case which he had so often seen her use.
She presented it to him with a bright smile and with no appearance of thinking him presumptuous. Then she frankly shook him by the hand, wished him the best of luck and left him beside the gate leading up to Bratton Farm, where their colloquy had been held. At the bend of the road she turned to wave him a last farewell and so disappeared into the misty twilight.
Jan raised the precious pencil-case to his lips, pushed it into his waistcoat pocket and was happy. He even told himself in so many words that he was happy; which is an experience of such rarity that those to whom it has once come never quite forget it. Jan thought that if he were to be shot the next week, he would still have had as good a moment as three score years and ten of life could bring him.
But of course there was no question of his being shot the next week or for a great many weeks to come. The training process through which he and other recruits had to go might have been tedious if he had not accepted it as an indispensable means towards an end, and if he had not, rather unexpectedly, found a certain pleasure in it. The monotony of drill was at least a novel species of monotony; his comrades were for the most part cheery, companionable fellows, many of whom differed sufficiently from the types hitherto known to him to stimulate his ever alert curiosity; the sergeant who instructed them in the use of the bayonet had semi-jocular anecdotes of his own experiences to relate which exhibited the grim visage of war as wreathed in smiles. Even the very real hardships and discomforts of camp life under persistent, pitiless rain were made light of by Jan, who felt himself developing into an efficient soldier day by day and who indeed was often singled out for commendation. He wrote regularly, if briefly, to the oldpeople at the farm, regretting that there was so little to say; yet he found plenty to say to Miss Mildred. Had she not bidden him to write ‘at great length’? Those carefully composed epistles of his, which were couched in a queer mixture of dialect and high-flown language and in which words (culled from the works of some more competent manipulator of them) were occasionally used in a sense unrecognised by the dictionary, were not without pathos, as showing forth a poor mortal brimming over with ideas and impressions and struggling hard to be articulate. Let us hope that their recipient so interpreted them. Her replies, at any rate, laconic though they were, gave the utmost satisfaction to a worshipper who was duly sensible of her graciousness in deigning to reply at all.
What was not very satisfactory to Jan was that there was no talk of the battalion to which he belonged proceeding to the front. Some of the men professed to doubt whether they would ever leave the country; others had heard that they were to get marching orders in the coming summer; all were agreed that they would have to make the best of their sodden camp for several months yet. But no such trial of patience awaited Jan, who was despatched to France with a draft at very short notice early in February and who was not long left in his first halting-place some distance behind the fighting line. His impressions of life in the flooded trenches and of what it felt like to be under fire were given with great simplicity, though not without here and there a graphic touch, in the letters which he afterwards found time to write to Mildred. This war, he said, was not like any other war that he had ever heard or read of. It had had its glories, but it did not seem as if it was going to have any more. Your enemies were close at hand, but you couldn’t get at them, nor yet they couldn’t get at you. So, taken as a whole, it was not exciting. The worst part of it was the awful noise of the guns and the bursting shells, which he found more trying than the wet and cold and the ugly sights about which he was sure that his correspondent would not wish him to say much. The desolation of the ravaged country, the wrecked villages and farmhouses, the homeless peasants, the poor wandering dogs and cats—he dwelt on these and said that he seemed to be witnessing all the horrors and miseries of war without any of its grand spectacular effects. (‘Where in the world did he get “spectacular effects” from?’ Mildred smilingly wondered when she read this sentence.)
‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘it’s a singular thing that I never felt atpeace like I do now. I don’t know as I can make you understand, Miss—I’m so bad at setting my meaning down—but it keeps coming over me that all’s as it should be. Particular at nights, when the clouds blow away and I can look up at the stars. This planet we live on isn’t but a very small speck, and we, scrambling about in our trenches, as it might be so many emmets, what matter how soon we’re gone and forgotten? Years and centuries pass and everything is forgotten. So why worry? And then the chaps alongside of me. We don’t talk except about common things, only I know they’re feeling the same as I do, which draws us together like. Maybe it’s because of death being always round the corner. Do you mind that poem of Kipling’s, calledThe Return, in one of the books you lent me? It’s wonderful true what he says⸺
“So much more near than I ’ad known,So much more great than I ’ad guessed—And me, like all the rest, alone—But reachin’ out to all the rest!”
“So much more near than I ’ad known,So much more great than I ’ad guessed—And me, like all the rest, alone—But reachin’ out to all the rest!”
“So much more near than I ’ad known,So much more great than I ’ad guessed—And me, like all the rest, alone—But reachin’ out to all the rest!”
“So much more near than I ’ad known,
So much more great than I ’ad guessed—
And me, like all the rest, alone—
But reachin’ out to all the rest!”
That’s just the way it strikes me, and somehow it seems to make for peace, though I couldn’t say why.’
If Jan had probed and analysed the serenity of spirit which he strove to define, he might have discovered that it arose simply from a sense that he was doing his duty; but he never quite arrived at that conclusion. What he did conclude—and found humorously puzzling—was that the place into which he had dropped was the right place for him, that he must always have been meant to be a soldier, not a poet nor an imaginative writer nor any of the fine things that he would have liked to be, but just a private in an infantry regiment. Well, even so, ambition need not be banished, and his chance of earning what Miss Mildred had said would make her proud might come any day.
He did, as the weeks slipped on, obtain sundry occasions of proving himself a capable fighter; but the affairs in which he was concerned were not important enough for public record. Save for these sporadic attacks upon the enemy, which for the most part resulted only in the loss of a considerable number of lives, there was no break in the regular routine of so many days in the trenches, followed by a period of rest in billets, whence he despatched his letters, writing them invariably with the pencil which was his most treasured possession.
It was on a cold, frosty night in spring that two staff officers,passing along his trench, halted beside him, and one of them called out:
‘Hullo!—hanged if it isn’t John Issel! Well, Jan, ’tis a wisht poor job sodgerin’, sure enough. Bain’t it now?’
Jan, standing at the salute, had a broad smile for the handsome young fellow who accosted him in the dialect of which he had lately been endeavouring to rid himself. He did not know much of Captain Haseldine, but he was proud and pleased to be recognised, and he made reply that he had nothing to complain about. Campaigning, he added, was teaching him a lot of new things.
‘Oh, it’s doing that for most of us,’ Frank Haseldine observed, laughing. ‘Even for some of our Generals.’
He went on talking for a few minutes about home affairs, remarking in an explanatory parenthesis to his companion, ‘Issel comes from our parish.’ Then he said to Jan ‘You’ll see Captain Bernard again one of these days, I hope, if we all pull through. Captain Bernard is engaged to be married to my sister Mildred.’
It was a little like being hit by a bullet—a sudden thump which made your heart stand still, yet left you erect and with an instant feeling that your first duty was to show no sign of distress. Jan showed none, and presently the two officers moved on, leaving him free to think what he would beneath his friends the blinking stars. These gave him such comfort as they had it in their power to bestow. They said it did not matter, because nothing really matters, and to that view in the abstract he could assent. But to affirm that so long as his little life might last it would not matter that somebody—he had scarcely looked at the man—was going to marry his goddess was quite vain. If the stars had asked whether he had ever imagined that he himself could marry Miss Mildred, he would naturally have answered ‘Of course not’; yet, however ridiculous and insane it might be, the truth was that he could not bear the idea of her belonging to anybody else. So what it came to, and what it had doubtless been bound to come to from the outset, was that he could not bear conditions which were altogether right, reasonable and inevitable. Jan Issel was not the first to find himself in that forlorn plight. In extreme cases it has been known to lead to suicide; in the vast majority it entails submission, more or less facile, to the decrees of destiny; for Jan it translated itself into a very fervent and genuine hope that the Germans might wipe him out. He saw now—it may have been illogical, but that made no difference to the fact—that his visions had been utterly childish,that he, an uneducated yokel, had no future and could have none, that it would be far better for him to end out there in Flanders than to be confronted some day with the dire prospect of a return to tilling the Devon fields and herding the Devon cattle.
This mood, it is true, did not endure; for he became hazily conscious that there was something contemptible in it and that a young, strong man has no business to wish himself extinguished. Nevertheless, he had more difficulty than usual in composing his next letter to Mildred, in which he made no allusion to her engagement, thinking that it would be bad manners to do so, since she had not mentioned it to him. At the end he remarked:
‘We lose men most days, and maybe my turn will come. It is good to be alive, because the world is beautiful and wonderful and because of some of the people in it; but I don’t think there can be many so happy that they should mind dying, for I can’t believe but what death means rest.’
With such persuasions he was well prepared to face what was in store for him when at length his battalion was told off to join in an engagement on a large scale. They knew very little about it beyond the fact that the British forces, after a rather prolonged spell of inaction, were about to resume the offensive and that their own special job would be to take a position facing them which was said to have been mined. That it had been mined with success was evidenced towards evening by a series of terrific explosions which seemed simply to annihilate the enemy’s defensive works; but the infantry were held back until a deluge of shell had been poured into the ruins. Then Jan and his comrades got the order to go, and away they went through the twilight smoke and dust, meeting with no opposition from the apparently broken foe. The distance that separated them from the first line of hostile trenches was traversed in no time, and that first line, or what remained of it, was occupied with ease; but in the communication trenches the Germans made a stand which resulted in hand-to-hand fighting of a really desperate nature. Of what was taking place amidst that tumult and welter and in the falling dusk Jan had only a confused notion; he supposed he must be performing his share of the task all right, because somebody sang out, ‘Well done, Issel!’ He was aware of being wounded, for the warm blood was trickling down his leg and soaking through his putties; but he felt neither pain nor weakness. Finally there came an abrupt lull. The bearded, grey-coated Germans had vanished, and he realised thatthe next line of trenches had been carried. He realised also, for the second time in his life, that he was quite happy. When he fell in, forming up with the remnants of his shattered battalion, he heard himself laughing aloud in sheer glee—he was as happy as that!
Was it a victory? It seemed so; yet a sudden and violent fusillade, opening upon them from their left, caused him to glance interrogatively at his neighbour. The man answered his unspoken query with a muttered ‘Enfiladed, by God!’ and immediately afterwards fell forward, groaning and swearing. But no groan came from Jan Issel, whom a bullet struck full in the heart; so that he dropped and never stirred again—only one amongst thousands who were delivered that night from the complications and bewilderments of a sick world.
To fall fighting for England in the full tide of life, to fall, shot through the heart, without a pang and in a moment of supreme exaltation is to finish gloriously, enviably. We all know this and we all say it, though some of us perhaps may feel that our own hearts are none the less broken for that. However, it was not to be expected that Mildred Haseldine should be broken-hearted when the news came to Culme House. She was much distressed; still she could not but recognise that there were compensating circumstances, and she went over at once to Bratton Farm to impart some of these to the poor lad’s parents. If her condolences were not received in quite as grateful a spirit as they might have been, she could and did make allowances for the grief-stricken farmer and his wife. Old Issel scarcely listened to what she was saying, and cut her short by calling out in a loud, harsh voice:
‘What did ’a want to go and get hisself killed vur? Darn they foul Germans! Yes, Miss, I don’t doubt but you’m sorry, but it bain’t your sorrow as’ll bring my boy back.’
With that he stumped out of the kitchen, leaving Mildred to do what she could with Mrs. Issel, which was an even more difficult matter. For Mrs. Issel, dry-eyed and despairing, had some rather unkind and irrational things to say. When, for instance, she was gently told that her visitor had strong personal reasons for sympathising with all to whom the war was bringing anxiety or loss, it was not very generous to rejoin that the young lady need not fret. ‘They staff officers don’t niver take no hurt, so I’ve heerd tell.’ But what was really too unjust to be endured without protest was the assertion that it was Miss Mildred more than anybodywho had driven Jan away to distant battlefields by ‘putting a passel of foolish notions into his head.’ In self-defence, Mildred had to remind the old woman that, so far from having encouraged Jan to enlist, she had tried, by providing him with other interests, to deter him from so doing. As for his actual enlistment, she had only heard of it after it had become an accomplished fact. This being undeniably true, Mrs. Issel made no reply and remained silent while it was represented to her that we can never be sure whether an early death is a misfortune or not. No living being can hope to escape sorrow and suffering, and Mildred, for her part, did not think that poor Jan’s temperament was of the kind that tends towards happiness.
Probably that also was true. It would hardly have made Jan happy to discover—as he might have done—that he had mistaken an entirely commonplace young woman for a divinity nor to realise—as he must have done—that he was too heavily weighted in life’s handicap to emerge from the ruck where he was so ill at ease. Judith Combe, while brushing her mistress’s hair that evening, said of him with unexpected sagacity that maybe Providence had ‘served him kind’ by taking him out of this world, seeing that he would always have been set upon what was beyond his reach.
Judith herself was so set upon obtaining something for which she was more than a little afraid to ask that she decided to take the risk of making her desire known. Could Miss Mildred spare one of Jan’s letters? He had not written to her at all, and she would like very much, if she might, to have a page or two from his own hand. ‘Because we was in a manner friends, you see, Miss.’
Mildred looked inquiringly at her sedate handmaid and smiled. ‘I am not sure that it would be quite fair to the poor boy,’ she answered. ‘He says some things which many people would think rather comic, and perhaps I oughtn’t.... However, you wouldn’t understand. Oh, well, yes, Judith—take them all, if you care to have them. I think I can find the whole collection.’
So the whole collection became the property of Judith, who spent many an hour over it and stained some of its leaves with her tears. It is by no means certain that she did not understand Jan’s flights of fancy and diction. It may even have constituted one of the unnumbered ironies of human experience that Jan himself should have been more nearly understood by the illiterate Judith than by Mildred Haseldine or by anybody else.
W. E. Norris.