EPILOGUE

LIEUTENANT CÆSAR

Now in the names of all the gods at once,Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed,That he is grown so great?

Now in the names of all the gods at once,

Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed,

That he is grown so great?

When the war is over and tens of thousands of young men, who have drunk deep of the wine of life, are thrown back upon ginger ale, what will be the effect upon their heads and stomachs? I do not know; I have no data, except in the one instance of my friend, Lieutenant Cæsar, R.N.V.R.

I must write of him with much delicacy and restraint, for his friendship is too rich a privilege to be imperilled. His sense of humour is dangerously subtle. Cæsar is twenty-three, and I am—well, fully twice his age—yet he bears himself as if he were infinitely my senior in years and experience. And he is right. What in all my toll of wasted years can be set beside those crowded twenty-two months of his, now ended and done with? The fire of his life glowed during those months with the white intensity of an electric arc; in a moment it went black when the current was cut off; he was left groping in the darkness for matches and tallow candles. I dare not sympathise with him openly, though I feel deeply, for he would laugh and call me a silly old buffer—a term which I dread above all others.

The variegated career of Lieutenant Cæsar fills me with the deepest envy. When the war broke out he was a classical scholar at Oxford, one of the bright spirits of his year. His first in Greats, his prospects of the Ireland, his almost certain Fellowship—he threw them up. The Army had no interest for him, but to the Navy he was bound by links of family association. To the Navy therefore he turned, and prevailed upon a somewhat reluctant Admiralty to gazette him as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. “A classical scholar,” argued Whitehall, “is about as much use to us as a ruddy poet. What can this young man do away from his books?” Cæsar rapidly marshalled his poor accomplishments. He could row—no use, we are in the steam and petrol age; he had been a sergeant of O.T.C.—no thanks, try the Royal Naval Division; he could drive a motor-car and was a tolerable engineer. At last some faint impression was made. Did he understand the engines of a motor-boat? It appeared that he did; was, in fact, a mildly enthusiastic member of the Royal Motor Boat Club at Southampton. “Now you’re talking,” said Whitehall. “Why didn’t you say this at once instead of wasting our time over your useless frillings?” The official wheels stirred, and within two or three weeks Cæsar found himself gazetted, and dropped into a fine big motor patrol boat, which the Admiralty had commandeered and turned to the protection of battleships from submarines. At that time we had not a safe harbour anywhere except on the South Coast, where they did not happen to be wanted. For many months Cæsar patrolled by night and day deep cold harbours on the east coast of Scotland, hunting periscopes. It was an arduous but exhilarating service. His immediate chief, a Lieutenant R.N.V.R., was a benevolent American, the late owner of the boat. He had handed her over without payment in return for a lieutenant’s commission. “I was once,” he declared, “a two-striper in Uncle Sam’s Navy. I got too rich for my health, chucked the Service, and have been eating myself out of shape. Take the boat but, for God’s sake, give me the job of running her. She’s too pretty for your thumb-crushing blacksmiths to spoil.” When reminded that he was an alien, he treated the objection as the thinnest of evasive pleas. “King George is my man; there are no diamonds in his garters,” he wrote.

The Lords of the Admiralty, who never in their sheltered lives had read such letters as now poured in upon them, gasped, collapsed, and gave to the benevolent neutral all that he asked.

Cæsar worshipped the big motor-boat and her astonishing commander. His first love wrapped itself round the twin engines, two of them, six-cylinders each, 120 horse-power. They were ducks of engines which never gave any trouble, because Cæsar and the two American engineers—I had almost written nurses—were always on the watch to detect the least whimper of pain. But though he never neglected his beloved engines, the mysterious fascinations of the three-⁠pounder gun in the bows gradually vanquished his mature heart. Her deft breech mechanism, her rapid loading, the sweet, kindly way she slipped to and fro in her cradle, became charms before which he succumbed utterly. Cæsar and the gun’s high-priest, a petty officer gunlayer, became the closest of friends, and the pair of them would spend hours daily cleaning and oiling their precious toy. The American lieutenant had his own bizarre notions of discipline—he thought nothing of addressing the petty officer as “old horse”; but he worked as hard as Cæsar himself, kept everyone in the best of spirits through the vilest spells of weather, and was a perpetual fount of ingenious plans for the undoing of Fritz. TheMighty Buzzer—named from her throbbing exhaust—was a happy ship.

TheBuzzer’scareer as a king’s ship was brief, and her death glorious. One night, or rather early morning, she was far out in the misty jaws of a Highland loch, within which temporarily rested many great battle-cruisers. Cæsar despised these vast and potent vessels. “What use are they?” he would ask of his chief. “There is nothing for them to fight, and they would all have been sunk long ago but for us.” Fast motor-boats, with 120 horse-power engines, twenty-five knots of speed—thirty at a pinch, untruthfully claimed the Lieutenant—and beautiful 3-⁠pounder guns were in Cæsar’s view, the last word in naval equipment. The Lieutenant would shake his head gravely at his Sub’s exuberant ignorance. “They are gay old guys just now,” he would reply, “and feeling pretty cheap. But some day they will get busy and knock spots off Fritz’s hide. You Britishers are darned slow, but when you do fetch a gun it’s time to shin up trees. The Germs have stirred up the British Lion real proper and, I guess, wish now they’d let him stay asleep.”

TheBuzzerhad chased many a German submarine, compelling it to dive deeply and become harmless, but never yet had Cæsar been privileged to see one close. Upon this misty morning of her demise, when he gained fame, she was farther out to sea than usual, and was cruising at about the spot where enterprising U-⁠boats were wont to come up to take a bearing. I am writing of the days before our harbour defences had chilled their enterprise into inanition. Cæsar was on watch, and stood at the wheel amidships. The petty officer and a blue-jacket were stationed at the gun forward. Our friend’s senses were very much alert, for he took his duties with the utmost seriousness. Near his boat the sea heaved and swirled, and as he saw a queer wave pile up he became, if possible, even more alert and called to his watch to stand by. The sea went on swirling, the surface broke suddenly, and up swooped the hood and thin tube of a periscope. It was less than fifty yards away, and for a moment the lenses did not include theBuzzerwithin their field of vision. For Cæsar, his watch on deck, and the sleepers below, the next few seconds were packed with incident. Round came theBuzzerpointing straight for the periscope, the exhaust roared as Cæsar called for full speed, and the gun crashed out. Away went periscope and tube, wiped off by the spreading cone of the explosion, as if they were no more substantial than a bullrush, and up shot theBuzzer’sbows as Cæsar drove her keel violently upon the top of the conning tower of the rising U-⁠boat. Keel and conning-tower ripped together; there was a tremendous rush of air-bubbles, followed by oil, and the U-⁠boat was no more. She had gone, and theBuzzer, with six feet of her tender bottom torn off, was in the act to follow. As she cocked up her stern to dive after her prey there was just time to get officers and crew into lifebelts and to signal for help. Cæsar met in the water his commanding officer, who, though nearly hurled through his cabin walls by the shock, and entirely ignorant of the cataclysm in which he had been involved, was cheerful as ever. “Sakes,” he gasped, when he had cleared mouth and nose of salt water, “when you Britishers do get busy, things—sort of—hum.”

A destroyer rushing down picked up the swimmers and heard their story. The evidence was considered sufficient, for oil still spread over the sea, and there were no rocks within miles to have ripped out theBuzzer’skeel, so another U-⁠boat was credited to the Royal Navy and Cæsar became a lieutenant. It was a proud day for him.

But he had lost his ship, and was for a time out of a job. The new harbour defences were under way and fast motor-boats were for a while less in demand. The Admiralty solved the problem of his future. “This young man,” it observed, “is nothing better than a temporary lieutenant of the Volunteer Reserve, but he is not wholly without intelligence and has a pretty hand with a gun. We will teach him something useful.” So the order was issued that Lieutenant Cæsar should proceed to Whale Island, there to be instructed in the mysteries of naval gunnery. “You will have to work at Whale Island,” warned the captain of his flotilla, “and don’t you forget it. It is not like Oxford.” This to reduce Cæsar to the proper level of humility.

Up to this stage in his career Lieutenant Cæsar, though temporarily serving in the Royal Navy, knew nothing whatever about it. His status was defined for me once by a sergeant of Marines: “A temporary gentleman, sir, ’ere to-day and gone to-morrow, and good riddance, sir.” Upon land the corps and regiments have been swamped by temporaries, but at sea the Regular Navy remains in full possession. In the barracks at Whale Island, where Cæsar was assigned quarters, he felt like a very small schoolboy newly joining a very large school. His fellow-pupils were R.N.R. men, mercantile brass-bounders with mates’ and masters’ certificates, and R.N.V.R.’s drawn from diverse classes. To him they seemed a queer lot. He lay low and studied them, finding most of them wholly ignorant of everything which he knew, but profoundly versed in things which he didn’t. The instructors of the Regular Service gave him his first definite contact with the Navy. “My original impression of them,” he told me, laughing, “was that they were all mad. I had come to learn gunnery, but for a whole week they insisted upon teaching me squad drill, about the most derisory version of drill which I have ever seen. Picture us, a mob of mates out of liners and volunteers out of workshops and technical schools, trailing rifles round the square at Whale Island, feeling dazed and helpless, and wondering if we had brought up by mistake at a lunatic asylum. After the first week, during which Whale Island indulged its pathetic belief that its truemétieris squad drill, we were all right. We got busy at the guns, and found plenty to learn.” It was at Whale Island that he received the name of Cæsar, the one Latin author of which his messmates had any recollection. During the first month of his training he daily cursed Winchester and Oxford for the frightful gaps which they had left in his educational equipment. He could acquire languages with anyone, but mathematics, that essential key to the mysteries of gunnery, gave him endless trouble. But he had a keenly tempered brain and limitless persistence. Slowly at first, more rapidly later, he made up on his contemporaries, and when after two months of the toughest work of his life he gained a first-class certificate, he felt that at last he had tasted a real success.

Time brings its revenges. As a Sub in a motor-boat he had affected to think slightingly of the great battle-cruisers which his small craft protected, but now that he was transferred to one of the new Cats of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron his views violently changed. Battleships were all very well, they had huge guns and tremendous armour, but when it came to speed and persistent aggressiveness what were these sea monsters in comparison with the Cats? Why nothing, of course. Which shows that Cæsar was becoming a Navyman. Put a naval officer into the veriest tub which can keep herself afloat with difficulty, and steam five knots in a tideway, and he will exalt her into the most efficient craft beneath the White Ensign. For she is His Ship.

Lieutenant Cæsar very quickly became at one with his new ship, and entered into his kingdom. Whether upon the loading platform of a turret or in control of a side battery, he serenely took up his place and felt that he had expanded to fill it adequately. His tone became obtrusively professional. When I asked for some details of his hardships and his thrills, he sneered at me most rudely. “There are no hardships,” he declared; “we live and grow fat, and there is not a thrill to the whole war. My motor-boat was a desperate buccaneer in comparison with these stately Founts of Power. Every week or two we do a Silent Might parade in the North Sea, but nothing ever happens.” This was after the Dogger Bank action for which he was too late, and before the Jutland Battle. He wrote to me many veiled accounts of the North Sea stunts upon which the battle-cruisers were persistently engaged, but always insisted that they were void of excitement.

“Dismiss from your landsman’s mind,” he would write—Cæsar was now a sailor among sailors—“all idea of thrills. There aren’t any. When the hoist Prepare to Leave Harbour goes up on the flagship, and black smoke begins to pour from every funnel in the Squadron, there is no excitement and no preparation—for we are already fully prepared. We go out with our attendant destroyers and light cruisers and scour at will over the ‘German Ocean’ looking for Fritz, that we may fall upon him. But he is too cunning for us. I wish that we had some scouting airships.”

This wish of Lieutenant Cæsar is, I believe, shared by every officer in the Grand Fleet from the Commander-in-Chief downwards. Airships cannot fight airships or sea ships, and are of very little use as destructive agents, but they are bright gems in the firmament of scouts.

I asked Cæsar why he did not keep notes of his manifold experiences. “It is against orders,” answered he sorrowfully. “We are not allowed to keep a diary, and I have a rotten memory for those intimate details which give life to a story. If I could keep notes I would set up in business as a naval Boyd Cable.” But I am afraid that Cæsar was reckoning without the Naval Censor, a savage, hungry lion beside whom his brother of the Military Department is a complacent lamb. Cæsar has a pretty pen, but his hands are in shackles.

Cæsar bent his keen eyes upon those with whom he was associated, studied their strength and weakness, and delivered judgment, intolerant in its youthful sureness.

“The young lieutenants,” he wrote, “are wonderful. Profoundly and serenely competent at their own work, but irresponsible as children in everything else. Their ideas of chaff and ragging never arise above those of the fifth form. Whenever they speak of the Empire they mean the one in Leicester Square. Shore leave for them means a bust at the Trocadero, with a music-hall to follow, preferably with a pretty girl. Their notions of shore life are of the earth earthy, not to say fleshy, but at sea work they approach the divine. There is not a two-striper in my wardroom who could not with complete confidence and complete competence take the Grand Fleet into action. But of education, as you or I understand the word, they have none. The Navy has been their strictly intensive life since they left school at about thirteen. Of art, or literature, or music—except in the crudest forms—they know nothing, and care nothing. And this makes their early retirement the more tragical. They go out, nine-tenths of them, before they reach forty without mental or artistic resources. The Navy is a remorseless user up of youth. Those who remain afloat, especially those without combatant responsibilities, tend to degenerate into S.O.B.s.”

I will not translate; Cæsar is too young and too clever to be sympathetic towards those of middle age.

One afternoon in spring Lieutenant Cæsar was plunged without warning into the Jutland Battle. He and his like were placidly waiting at action stations in their turrets, when the order came to put live shell into the guns. For six hours he remained in his turret, serving his two 13.5-⁠inch guns, but seeing nothing of what passed outside his thick steel walls. When I implored him to recount to me his experiences, he protested that he had none.

“You might as well ask a sardine, hermetically sealed in a tin, to describe a fire in a grocer’s shop,” wrote he. “I was that sardine, and so were nearly all of us. Those in the conning tower saw something, and so did the officers in the spotting top when they were not being smothered by smoke and by water thrown up by bursting shells. But as for the rest of us—don’t you believe the stories told you by eye-witnesses of naval battles. They are all second or third hand, and rubbish at that. When I have sorted the thing out from all those who did see, and collated the discrepant accounts, I will give you my conclusions, but I shall not be allowed to write them. For a literary man the Navy is a rotten service.”

Cæsar at this time wrote rather crossly. He had, I think, visualised himself as the writer some day of an immortal story of the greatest naval battle in history. Now that he had been through it, he knew as little of it at first hand as a heavy gunner in France does of the advancing infantry whose path forward he is cutting out.

The isolation of a busy turret in action may be realised when one learns that Cæsar knew nothing of the loss of theQueen Mary,Indefatigable, orInvincibleuntil hours after they had gone to the bottom. He had heard nothing even of damage suffered by his own ship until, a grimy figure in frowsy overalls, he crawled through the roof of his big sardine tin and met in the darkness one of his friends who had been in the spotting top.

“There was a frightful row going on as we sat there on the turret’s roof,” wrote Cæsar to me. “Our destroyers were charging in upon Fritz’s flying ships, which with searchlights and guns of all calibres were seeking to defend themselves. We could not fire for our destroyers were in the way. The horizon flamed like the aurora borealis, and now and then big shells, ricochetting, would scream over us. I enjoyed myself fine, and had no wish to seek safety in my turret, of which I was heartily sick. That is the only part of the action which I saw, and the details were buried in confusion and darkness. All the rest of the day I had been serving two hungry guns with shells and cordite, and firing them into unknown space. I was too intent on my duties to be bored, but I did not get the least bit of a thrill until I climbed out on the roof. Still I am glad to have been in the Battle, and, I love my big wise guns.”

It was while his battle-cruiser was being refitted, and when he had just returned from a few days’ leave, that the wheel of his destiny made another turn. He was hauled struggling and kicking out of his turret as one plucks a periwinkle from its shell, and cast into a destroyer attached to the North Sea patrol. He had, as I have told, an easy knack of picking up languages. To a solid knowledge of German he had added in past vacations more than a speaking acquaintance with the Scandinavian tongues—Norse, Danish, and Swedish—and his industry was now turned to his undoing. Naval gunners were more plentiful than boarding officers who could converse with the benevolent and unbenevolent neutral, and Cæsar’s unfortunate accomplishments clearly indicated him for a new job. At first he was furious, but became quickly reconciled. For, as he argued, fighting on a grand scale is over, Fritz has had such a gruelling that he won’t come out any more; North Sea stunts will seem very tame after that day out by the Jutland coast; patrolling the upper waters of the North Sea cannot be quite dull, and cross-examining Scandinavian pirates may become positively exciting. So Cæsar settled down in his destroyer, in so far as any one can settle down in such an uneasy craft.

Cæsar now formed part of the inner and closer meshes of the North Sea blockade designed to intercept those ships which had penetrated the more widely spread net outside. Many of the masters whom he interviewed claimed to have a British safe-conduct, but Cæsar was not to be bluffed. With a rough and chocolate-hued skin he had acquired the peremptory air of a Sea God.

“It is rather good fun sometimes,” he wrote to me. “We can’t search big ships on the high seas at all thoroughly, and we don’t want to send them all into port for examination, so we work a Black List. I have a list from the War Trade Department of firms which are not allowed to ship to neutral countries, and of all suspected enemy agents in those countries. The Norse, Danish and Dutch skippers are very decent and do their best to help, but the Swedes are horrid blighters. Whenever there is any doubt at all we send ships into port to be thoroughly examined there. You may take it that not much gets through now. Next to a complete blockade of all sea traffic for neutral ports—which I don’t suppose the politicians can stomach—our Black List system seems to be the goods. I get good fun with these merchant skippers, and am becoming quite a linguist, but the work is less exciting than I had hoped. It is amusing to see a 7,000-⁠ton tramp escorted into port by a twenty-foot motor-boat which she could sling up on her davits, but even this sight becomes a matter of course after a while. I have seen something of war from three aspects, and seem to have exhausted sensations. They are greatly overrated.”

But Lieutenant Cæsar was destined to have one more experience before war had used him up and relaid him upon the shelf from which he was plucked in September, 1914. A destroyer upon patrol duty is still a fighting vessel, and fights joyfully whenever she can snatch a plausible opportunity. Cæsar had sunk a submarine, served through the Jutland Battle, and assisted to stop the holes in the British blockade, but he had not yet known what fighting really means. That is reserved for destroyers in action. One afternoon he was cruising not far from the Dogger Bank, when the sound of light guns was heard a few miles off towards the east. The Lieut.-Commander in charge of our unit in H.M.S.Blockadeobeyed the Napoleonic rule and steered at once for the guns. In about ten minutes a group of small craft wreathed in smoke, lighted up at short intervals by gun flashes, appeared on the horizon, and roaring at her full speed of 34 knots the British destroyer swept down upon them. Presently seven trawlers were made out firing with their small guns at two German torpedo boats, which with torpedo and 23-⁠pounder weapons were intent upon destroying them. One trawler was blown sky-high while Cæsar’s ship was yet half a mile distant, and another rolled over shattered by German shell. “It was a pretty sight,” said Cæsar, when I visited him in hospital, and learned to my deep joy that he was out of danger. “When we got within a quarter of a mile we edged to starboard to give the torpedo tubes a clear bearing on the port bow. A shell or two flew over us, but the layers at the tubes took no notice. They waited till we were quite close, not more than two hundred yards, and then loosed a torpedo. I have never seen anything so quick and smart. I saw the mouldy drop and start, and then a huge column of water spouted up, blotting out entirely the nearest German boat. The water fell and set us tossing wildly, but I kept my feet and could see that German destroyer shut up exactly like a clasp-knife. She had been bust up amidships, her bow and stern almost kissed one another, and she went down vertically. The other turned to fly, firing heavily upon us, but our boys had her in their grip. We had three fine guns, 4-⁠inch semi-automatics. We hit her full on the starboard quarter as she turned, and then raked her the whole length of her deck. I did not see the end, for earth and sky crashed all round me, and I went to sleep. When I awoke I was lying below, my right leg felt dead, but there was no pain, and from the horrid vibration running through the vessel I knew that we were at full speed.

“ ‘Did we get the other one?’ I asked of my servant, whom I saw beside me. ‘She sunk proper, sir,’ said he. ‘You, sir, are the only casualty we ’ad.’ It was an honour which I found it difficult to appreciate. ‘What’s the damage?’ I muttered. ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ he replied diffidently, ’that your right leg is blowed away.’ Then I fainted, and did not come round again till I was in hospital here. My leg is gone at the knee; I lost a lot of blood, and should have lost my life but for the tourniquet which the Owner himself whipped round my thigh. They have whittled the stump shipshape here, and I am to have a new leg of the most fashionable design. The doctors say that I shall not know the difference when I get used to it, and shall be able to play golf and even tennis. Golf and tennis! Good games, but they seem a bit tame after the life I’ve led for the last two years.” Cæsar fell silent, and I gripped his hand.

“It isn’t as if you were in the Regular Service,” I murmured. “It isn’t your career that’s gone. That is still to come. You’ve done your bit, Cæsar, old man.”

His eyes glittered and a tear welled over and rolled down his cheek. That was all, the only sign of weakness and of regret for the lost leg and the lost opportunities for further service. When he spoke again it was the old cheerful Cæsar whom I knew. “It seems funny. A month or two hence I shall be back at Oxford, reading philosophy and all sorts of absurd rubbish for my First in Greats. From Oxford I came, and to Oxford I shall return; these two years of life will seem like a dream. A few years hence I shall have nothing but my medal and my wooden leg to remind me of them. It has been a good time, Copplestone—a devilish good time. I have done my bit, but I wasn’t cut out for a fighting man. There is too much preparation and too little real business. I should have exhausted the thing and got bored. In time I should have become an S.O.B. like some of those others. No, Copplestone, I have nothing to regret, not even the lost leg. It is better to go out like this than to wait till the end of the war, and then to be among the Not Wanteds.”

“They’ve made you a Lieutenant-Commander,” I said slowly.

“Two and a half stripes,” he murmured. “They look pretty, but they are only the wavy ones, not the real article. I was never anything but a ‘tempory blighter, ’ere to-day and gone to-morrow, and good riddance.’ It was decent of them to think of me, but stripes are no use to me now. I shall be at Oxford with the other cripples, and the weak hearts, and the aliens, and the conscientious objectors—what do the dregs of Oxford know of stripes?”

I saw as much as I could of Cæsar during the weeks that followed. His mental processes interested me hugely. He has an enviable faculty of concentrating upon the job in hand to the complete exclusion of everything outside. He forgot Oxford in the Service, and now seemed to have almost forgotten the Service in his return to Oxford, and to what he calls civilisation. He was greatly taken up with the design for his wooden leg. I met him after his first visit to Roehampton to be measured, and found him bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Such legs and arms!” cried he. “They are almost better than meat and bone ones. I saw a Tommy with a shorter stump than mine jumping hurdles and learning to kick. He was a professional footballer once. Another with a wooden arm could write and even draw. In a month or two’s time, when my stump is healed solid and I have learnt the tricks of my new leg, it will be a great sport exercising it and trying to find out what it can’t do. A new interest in life.”

“You seem rather to like having a leg blown off,” I said, wondering.

He is extraordinarily exuberant. I looked for depression after a month in hospital, but looked in vain. He builds up a future with as much zest as a youthful architect executes his first commission. The First in Greats is “off”; Cæsar says that he has not time to bother about such things. “I shall read History and modern French and Russian literature. History will do for my Final Schools, and Literature for my play. I shall learn Russian. Then when I have taken my degree I shall go in for the Foreign Office. My wooden leg will actually help me to a nomination, and the exam. is nothing. It’s not a bad idea; I thought of it last night.”

“You don’t take long over a decision,” I remarked.

“I never did,” said he calmly.

When he returned to Oxford early in November he urged me to pay him a visit. I was in London a week or two later and having twenty-four hours to spare ran up to Oxford, established myself at the Clarendon, and summoned Cæsar to dine with me. All through the meal wonder grew upon me. For my very charming guest was an undergraduate in his fourth year, bearing no trace of having been anything else. We talked of Balzac, Anatole France, and Turgeniev. I listened politely to Cæsar’s views upon German and Russian Church music. I learned that the scarcity of Turkish cigarettes was causing him distress, that his rooms were delightful, and that Oxford was a desert swept clear of his old friends. The war was never once referred to. His conversation abounded in slang with which I was not familiar—I come from the other shop. It was an insufferable evening, and I saw Cæsar hobble away upon his crutches with positive relief. He could use his leg a little, but the stump was still rather sore. That hobble was the one natural and human thing about him.

I passed a wretched night, came to a desperate resolution early in the morning, and carried it out about nine o’clock. Cæsar was in his “delightful rooms.” They certainly had a pleasant aspect, but the furniture disgusted me; it might have been selected by a late-Victorian poet. I looked for a book or a picture which might connect Cæsar with the R.N.V.R., and looked in vain. He was busy trampling upon the best two years of his life and forgetting that he had ever been a man. It should not be. Presently he came in from his bedroom and began to talk in the manner of the night before but I cut him short. “Cæsar,” I said brutally, “you are no better than an ass. Look at these rooms. Is this the place for a man who has lived and fought in a motor-boat, a battle-cruiser, and a T.B.D.? You have sunk a German submarine, served in the Jutland Battle, and lost a leg in your country’s service. Hug these things to your soul, don’t throw them away. Brood upon them, write about them, for the love of Heaven don’t try to forget them.”

I saw his eyes light up, but he said nothing. His lips began to twitch and, knowing him as I did, I should have heeded their warning. But unchecked I drivelled on:

“Are you the man to shrink from an effort because of pain? Did you grouse when your leg was blown off? Wring all you can out of the future. Read History, join the F.O., study Russian. But do these things in a manner worthy of Lieutenant-Commander Cæsar, and don’t try to revive the puling Oxford spark that you were two years ago before the war came to sweep the rubbish out of you.”

He gave a clumsy leap, tripped over his new leg, and fell into a chair. Lying there he laughed and laughed and laughed. How he laughed! Not loud, but deeply, thoroughly, persistently, as if to make up for a long abstinence.

“Confound you!” I growled. “What the deuce are you laughing at?”

“You,” said Cæsar simply.

At the word the truth surged over me in a shameful flood. That preposterous dinner with its babble of Balzac and Turgeniev, Church music, and Turkish cigarettes. These rooms stripped of all reminders of two strenuous years of war. That Oxford accent and the intolerable Oxford slang. “Cæsar,” I shouted, joining in his exuberant laughter, “you have been pulling my leg all the time.”

“All the time,” said he. “My bedroom is full of stuff that I cleared out of here. Last night, Copplestone, your ever-lengthening face was a lovely study, and I have wondered ever since how I kept in my laughter.”

“You young villain,” cried I, overjoyed to find that Cæsar was still my bright friend of the R.N.V.R. “How shall I ever get even with you?”

“I owe you some reparation,” said he, “and here it is.” He hobbled over to his desk and drew out a great roll of paper. “This is the first instalment; there are lots more to come. For the last month I have been trying to remember, not to forget. I am writing of everything that I have done and seen and heard and felt during those two splendid years. Everything. It will run to reams of paper and months of time. When it is finished you shall have it all. Take it, saturate yourself in it, add your spells to it. We will stir up the compound of Copplestone and Cæsar until it ferments, and then distil from the mass a Great Work. It shall be ours, Copplestone—yours and mine. Will you have me as your partner.”

“With the greatest pleasure in life,” I cried.

We discussed our plans in full detail, and parted the best of friends. Cæsar is rekindling the ashes of a life which I had thought to be extinguished; soon there will be a great and glowing fire of realised memory which will keep warm the years that are to come. He has solved the problem of his immediate future. But what of those others, those tens of thousands, who when the war is over will seek for some means to keep alive the fires which years of war have lighted in their hearts? Are they to be merged, lost, in the old life as it was lived before 1914? Are they to degenerate slowly but surely into S.O.B.s, intent only upon earning a living somehow, playing bad golf, or looking on at football matches? I do not know, I have no data, and it is rather painful to indulge oneself in speculation.

This sketch was published a year ago. Two months after I had visited Cæsar at Oxford he called upon me in London. He was in uniform, and explained that he had quickly grown tired of sick leave and had recalled himself to Service. “I can’t go to sea again,” said he, “with this timber toe, but I am at least good for an office job ashore.” But Cæsar was not made to fit the stool of any office, and when I last heard from him was an observer in the R.N.A.S.

In this fashion he has rounded off his experiences, and basely failed me, his friend and biographer, of the scanty data with which to answer the question set forth in the first sentence of this chapter.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained.

Some illustrations moved to facilitate page layout.

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