PART THREE‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,That it will flourishagain. . .But man dieth and wasteth away; yea, manGiveth up the ghost, and where is he?’—Jobxiv. 7.PART THREEION the date that the Archduke was assassinated, we were dining at Campden Hill Square. Guy and Hugo were there, and George and Mollie, and Ralph Freeman, who was back from Vienna now, in the Foreign Office again.It was a party like old times, and I liked it. I was so happy to be about again and to have my baby; for Eleanor was incredibly precious to me at that time.I was glad to see them all again, and I felt somehow that I had come back to life; that I wanted to do so much that I had not been able to do during the last months.There was a new pleasure in moving, and in eating, and in being alive.‘They will all be there,’ I said to Walter, as we were getting ready to go. ‘We have not been all together like that since we were married, for Hugo went away so soon.’Walter smiled, but I knew he was not pleased. He was tying his black tie, and he always tied his ties badly. He disliked dressing for dinner, and never did so, if he could avoid it.‘You must like them,’ I said. ‘Please try to like them. You see I do so much.’And he looked suddenly sorry, and stopped pulling at his tie.‘Yes, you do. I know that, and I ought not to mind,’ he said, ‘but I can’t help it. They make me feel a fool, those friends of yours, and I amnota fool, and I am always afraid that you will think of me as they do, when they are there. I suppose I am jealous of them.’And he gave a laugh.I said:‘You need not be; it is different, and I want them to like you too; they will, if you are nicer to them.’He said:‘You are mine now, not theirs. I need not be afraid of them now.’I laughed, but I said:‘You old goose, you will be late, if you don’t get dressed; Grandmother does not like people to be late.’And I tied his tie for him; I nearly always did in the end.IIGeorge and Hugo were in the drawing-room with Grandmother when we arrived. They were talking about Dostoievski. Grandmother did not like the Russian novelists.‘My dear, a lunatic asylum,’ she said once. ‘It may be very true to life, of a sort, as you say, but I do not enjoy the society of lunatics.’Hugo was saying:‘We are all like that really, Aunt Gerry, only we don’t realize it, incredibly weak, and uncertain, and yet sometimes a bit heroic, only we don’t like to think we are like that, so we don’t think it.’‘I certainly do not think it, Hugo. I hope that you are not like that, and I know that I am not.’She laughed, and turning to us, held out her hands.‘Here she is!’ she said, as though they had been speaking about me. I realized that evening how much she cared for me, and felt grateful to her. I bent down and kissed her, and shook hands with George and Hugo. I did not feel shy of Hugo now; it seemed, here in this room, just as it used to be.George gave me his chair, and we all sat down.‘How is my great-granddaughter?’ asked Grandmother, and I said she was very well.George said:‘I can’t imagine you with a daughter.’Then Guy and Mollie came in together. They looked happy, and I thought:‘They will be married soon,’ and I was glad.Mollie said:‘We have run all the way from Notting Hill Gate, we thought we should be late.’Guy said:‘Ralph is later. A diplomat should know better.’‘Does Ralph count as a diplomat now?’ asked Mollie.Guy said:‘Yes, of the fifteenth class, I believe.’And every one laughed, for it was a joke against Ralph Freeman that he was very punctilious.Then he came in.He apologized to Grandmother. He said he had been kept at the Office; there was anxiety over the murder of Franz Ferdinand.‘Franz Ferdinand,’ repeated Hugo, ‘who on earth is he?’‘The Austrian Archduke. Francis Joseph’s heir, you know. Haven’t you seen the paper?’Guy said:‘I saw something about it. Herzegovina, wasn’t it?’‘Yes, and Austria is sure to suspect Serbian influence.’George said:‘Trouble in the Balkans. Do you remember Old Moore’s prediction?’Mollie said:‘That was last year.’George said:‘Every year.’Grandmother said:‘I read about it this morning. The young man and his wife were both shot in their carriage—a very horrid affair.’Ralph said:‘My chief takes an exceedingly grave view of the situation.’The dinner was ready and we went into the dining-room. When we had all sat down, Ralph began again.‘You see,’ he said to Grandmother, ‘the tension between Vienna and Belgrade has been growing more acute every year. It was amazing to hear the Austrians talk, when I was out there. They would believe anything of the Serbs.’‘No doubt the crime was political,’ Grandmother observed. ‘It is something to be truly thankful for that we have outgrown political crimes in this country; they are always futile.’‘This may be worse than futile,’ said Ralph. He was looking serious and excited, and we felt amused; Ralph was always proud of his inside information.‘Well, yes, worse than futile for the dozen poor devils who are put to death because of it,’ said George. ‘They have not got the man who threw the bomb, I see. There will have to be a demonstration.’‘They are saying at the Office that it may mean War.’‘War? between Austria—Hungary and Serbia?’‘That would be short and decisive. I should think.’Guy wrinkled his forehead.‘You forget Serbia’s relation to Russia,’ Ralph put in; ‘we might very easily have war between Russia and Austria over this.’Mollie said:‘It all seems very remote.’Grandmother said:‘In Eastern Europe they are always fighting. I remember so many wars—Russo-Turkish, Bulgaro-Turkish, Russo-Japanese, Græco-Turkish and the Balkan Wars. One cannot feel as distressed, as no doubt one ought. If the Russians are all like Hugo’s friends they should not prove very formidable to Austrian troops. I used to know a good many Austrian officers—very charming people.’We all had an impulse to rag Ralph Freeman. He took himself and his news so seriously, it made us want to take it lightly.Hugo said:‘Russian Ballet versus Hungarian Band. Much more “life force” in the Ballet.’‘It is all very well to joke,’ protested Ralph, ‘but this may be the beginning of a European War.’‘How often have we heard that, Ralph?’ asked Guy. ‘Everything may be the beginning of a European War—Dogger Bank, Agadir, Morocco—but fortunately, it does not begin.’‘Sophia belongs to a society which shows European War to be impossible,’ said Mollie. ‘Economically impossible, in a modern world like ours, because of international trade, credit, and so on, and international banking. I went to some of the meetings with her once.’‘I wish it were impossible,’ said Ralph portentously, and we all felt sure that he was very glad it was not impossible.‘Russia and France,’ said George abruptly, ‘Austria and Germany—My God!’ Then he laughed. ‘It is fantastic,’ he said. ‘Why,wehave an entente with France and Russia!’‘Exactly,’ said Ralph.I said:‘You are talking like the Navy League, George.’‘I know,’ said George. ‘I suddenly thought, Supposing the damned fools were right.’Walter said:‘It is quite inconceivable, I think, that Great Britain should be involved in a European War.’He spoke with a note of exasperation in his voice, as though every one were being silly. I thought they could not all be silly, for they were saying different things.‘It is inconceivable we could keep out,’ said Guy, ‘if France and Germany were at War.’‘Come, come,’ said Grandmother, ‘don’t try to make my flesh creep, young people. I think we can trust the Austrians to settle up their own affair; it was all in their own country after all.’She turned to Walter, who was on her other side, and asked him how his book was getting on; and after that we talked about plays, the Vedrenne Barker Season at the Savoy and Rheinhardt’s production of Œdipus. I had seen none of them, nor Walter of course, for we seldom went to plays, but all the others had, and I liked to hear about them.After dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room; then Grandmother went to her memoirs, in her sitting-room upstairs, and we played Demon Pounce with two card tables joined together and five packs of cards. We called it Prawn Eye, and we often used to play it.Guy generally won, and sometimes George; Hugo and Walter were the worst. Hugo laughed and looked across at Walter.‘You and I are competing for the Donkey prize,’ he said.Walter tried to laugh too, but he looked worried; I could see that he thought it a silly game, and that spoilt the fun for me.I had to go home early to feed Eleanor. The others stayed on to play longer. I ran upstairs to Grandmother to say ‘good night.’ She was sitting by the fire, for she always had a fire in her room, with her book on her knee and her spectacles on the table by her side. She was not reading, and she looked very tired. I realized, with a sudden shock, that she was old.She started when I came in, and then smiled.‘I have come to say “good night,” Grandmother,’ I said.She put both her hands on my shoulders, as I stooped down.She said:‘Dear child, bless you. I am happy about you.’I said:‘I am happy too, Grandmother.’I waited; I wanted to say more, but I did not know what to say. I felt then that she was old, and perhaps lonely. It had not occurred to me before that my marriage had left her all alone. I wondered what it would be like to be old.I thought:‘We shall all be old some day, Guy and Hugo, and George, and Mollie and Walter, and I; how strange that is; quite certainly some day we shall be old.’But it was not real to me even then.‘Can I do anything for you, Grandmother?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you another book?’‘No, dear, no; I shall go to bed soon. Are the other young people still there?’I said, yes, they were going on with their game.‘Say “good night” to them for me,’ she said; ‘they need not come up’; and she kissed me ‘Good night.’I went downstairs slowly.Walter was waiting in the hall.There was a taxi at the door to take us home; Grandmother had arranged that. She would pay for it, she had said.I ran back to the drawing-room to say ‘Good-bye.’Hugo came with me into the hall, and George came out on to the steps.‘When shall we meet again?’ he said. ‘Are you going away soon?’I said:‘Next week we are going, up to the Wall again. We shall be back in September.’George said:‘Good-bye, then, till September.’He was smiling his wide, delightful smile.I said:‘What a nice evening it has been.’George said:‘Yes. Hasn’t it been jolly?’Yet something in his face made me wonder.I thought:‘Is George not happy? Can something be worrying George?’I never saw him again.IIIWalter was annoyed about the taxi; he felt it a waste of money, when we might have gone in the tube, and he did not like Grandmother to pay it, for he liked to pay everything himself. I knew very well by now when Walter was annoyed; I could tell by the way he sat, by the way he fidgeted with his hands, even when he said nothing at all.He said nothing this time, and I said nothing. I felt very tired now, and then, I was frightened. It was as though I had been asleep, and dreaming, and contented, and now suddenly I had woken up; as though everything had become intense, and alive, and somehow emotional. I felt as though tremendous things were happening, all round us, everywhere; as though we were a tiny island in a great space.I put out my hand and touched Walter’s arm; it was dark in the taxi and I could hardly see him.‘Walter,’ I said, ‘do you feel as if something dreadful were going to happen?’He turned sharply.‘No,’ he said. ‘What do you mean? What should happen?’I said:‘Oh, I don’t know exactly; I suppose it is silly; I feel as though this couldn’t last, as though something were going to break.’‘It is that silly talk about a war that has upset you,’ he said. ‘People ought not to talk like that.’I said:‘No; I wasn’t thinking about a war; I had forgotten that; but I feel afraid of something, I don’t know what. I believe George felt it too.’He said:‘Nonsense, you are tired, that is all; it is awfully tiring going out in the evening; I am tired too.’He put his arm round me and drew me close to him. I wanted to feel near to him, but I did not; I felt a long way off.Two days later, we went up to Northumberland, to the farm-house on the Roman Wall, where we had stayed before.We had a great deal of luggage, a cot and a pram, and a baby’s bath. I felt very proud of travelling with those things, but Walter did not like it.‘It is awful,’ he said, ‘this family luggage. I suppose it will be like this now—for years!’I minded that. It seemed to me sometimes that he resented Eleanor, that he would almost rather she were not there; I had hoped he would be pleased with her, as I was.At the farm it was better; Walter liked being there; he went for long walks again, as we had done on our honeymoon. I could not go with him now, when he went a very long way, but I was happy at home with my baby.IVIt seems like a dream now, that beginning of war; like something remembered very long ago, much longer ago than it really is. I cannot even remember, at what moment we realized, Walter and I, that war was coming, a war that would involve our country, I mean; that it would involve us personally, as individuals, we did not realize at that time at all; that came much later, gradually and painfully, step by step.We were, of course, far away in the physical sense; six miles away from the nearest village of any size, with a post only three times a week. We saw nobody who understood what was happening better than ourselves, and we read the newspaper when it came so little. Walter had always an aversion for newspapers, I never quite knew why, and I was so absorbed in Eleanor, and the new life with her, that the outer world seemed to have slipped right away, when we got into the train at Euston.The stages in these weeks that one now knows were turning points in the catastrophe escaped us then with a completeness that seems amazing.The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, when it came, meant nothing at all. I remember Walter reading it aloud at breakfast, in the farm parlour; even now the smell of hot coffee and bacon brings that morning back to me, which is odd, considering how little we realized its importance.The paper had come the evening before, but we had not opened it. Walter liked a paper at breakfast, not at other times. He opened it and read it carelessly, not caring much what he found there. He said:‘There seems to be a dustup in the Balkans after all, over that man being killed. Here is an Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia,’ and he read a few lines of it aloud.‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? going on like that at this time of day. It seems to belong to the eighteenth century or perhaps the seventeenth.’And I said:‘I suppose they are a century or two behind us over there.’And we did not bother about it any more. We went a long walk that day and came back rather tired, and hungry; and in the afternoon it rained, and we could not read our Gibbon out of doors, as we had meant to. I remember that we followed what happened in the newspaper with a certain interest; it gave one something to look for among the rather dull collection of Parliamentary Debates and Home affairs, but it was an impersonal interest.I remember one day thinking about it, and being shocked with myself for minding it so little. That must have been some days later, when Russia and Germany seemed to be coming in. I went up on the hill behind the house, by myself, and sat down on the grass, and tried to realize what was happening. I remember trying to picture the Russian soldiers, and the Austrian soldiers, and to think what it meant; those hundreds and thousands of people leaving their homes, and going to fight.‘Hundreds of them will be killed,’ I thought, ‘perhaps thousands, and yet I don’t really mind; it doesn’t really affect me, just because I don’t know them, and they live in countries that I don’t know’; and it seemed to me dreadful that one’s sympathy should be so limited.And then another time, I did realize it for a bit; that was after the German mobilization, when the French reservists were called up; we had read the paper when it came that day, in the evening after dinner, and somehow by that time, it had begun to seem terrible; we had begun, I think, though very dimly, to feel the trouble closing in all round.We lay a long time awake that night, Walter and I, not speaking to each other. The night was hot and oppressive, the darkness seemed to press upon us like a weight.I thought of the French and German homes where people were lying in bed, awake too, and thinking about the next day, when the men must go out to the army; and it became suddenly real to me; perhaps because I had been in France and Germany, and knew some French and German people, and understood that they were just people like us.And that made the others seem more real too, and I felt the immensity of what was happening; I realized, dimly, the masses of people in Austria and in Russia too.And then a sense of unreality came over me. I felt myself a long way off; looking on, as though I were disembodied; I seemed to hear a great throbbing, very far away, a strange pulsating sound, as though it were the heart of all the world; I suppose it was really my own heart. I thought of birds in a storm, of clouds gathering, of the lines in ‘In Memoriam’ about the rooks, of the Dynasts and the Pities and Powers; and an acute, quite impersonal sense of loss and desolation came over me.Walter said suddenly:‘This may be the end of Europe, of European civilization.’I said:‘I was thinking about the people saying Good-bye; sleeping together like us, only for the last time, people just like us, and I thought, “Supposing it was you and me?” ’Walter said:‘I know.’.He held me tight, and I pressed close up to him. The beating of his heart throbbed through me again, like the pulse of the world. And all I had, seemed dearer than ever before, as I realized that it could be lost.I said:‘Oh, Walter, do they love as we do? Do you think, many of them do?’And he answered very softly:‘Yes. Hundreds of thousands of them do.’VThe next morning Walter walked over to Alston for more news. He brought back more papers, but nothing definite besides. The people in the town were talking about war, he said, telegrams were put up outside the Town Hall. Two days later he went over to Alston again. The exact moments at which it became credible, probable, inevitable, that England would fight too, I cannot remember at all.The postman, who brought the post on Monday, stopped me at the gate with news of the Advance into Belgium.‘Two million Germans on the march,’ he said. He smiled a twisted sort of smile, and added, ‘And I’m in the front line.’It took me several moments to realize that he meant that he was a reservist.I never saw him again.When the British Declaration of War came, it made hardly a sensation. We had known it must come for so many hours, and hours during these days were like months.VIWe went back to London at the end of August. We had talked of going for over a week before, but there seemed to be no trains. The reservists were called up everywhere; the shepherd from the farm was called up, and the cowman. They were in what was called ‘The Wagon Reserve.’Walter said at first that we must go back to London at once, then that we had no right to crowd up trains, when all space was needed for troops.In London, the excitement of war was everywhere; marching men, army wagons, lorries, bugle calls, persistent, repeated, practised over and over again. There was an open space not far from our house; it had been a playing field for a school, and recruits were drilling there all the day long; sharp loud sounds of the sergeants’ orders, more bugle calls, marching men, and more marching men; the pathetic sentimental marching songs, the dark blue uniforms and convict-like caps of Kitchener’s Army; everything passed through the untraceable stages from strangeness to familiarity, and the war news mingled in a confused, disjointed way with the daily sights and sounds.The Belgian resistance; Liège; the fall of Liège; the first accounts of German atrocities; the occupation of Brussels; the burning of Louvain; fighting in the streets of Charleroi, where the dead bodies pressed each other too closely to fall down, and the ranks of the dead stood upright; that in particular brought the horror of it home to me, I know.Stories of crucifixion, of bayoneted women, of children with their hands cut off; and the first inrush of Belgian refugees. How the days passed, merged into one another, obliterated one another, I do not know; the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence. I was caught for a time by the general excitement, and so was Walter. He bought war maps and pinned them to the doors, marking the progress of the armies each morning and evening with little coloured flags on pins.Mr. Harland, a colleague of Walter’s who lived in Hampstead too, used to come in and talk to Walter. He kept a chart with coloured maps as well.Then came dismay at the retreat from Mons; suddenly one day as he was tracing out the line of ‘position in the rear,’ Walter stood still, and they stared at each other.‘By Jove!’ said Mr. Harland.And Walter said, ‘Good Lord!’‘Will they get to Paris?’‘Will they break through?’I sat and watched them, and the new consternation was as unreal to me as the War itself had been at first.Life went on for me, in a way, unbroken by the catastrophic events all round. My own life seemed to reassert itself from the general earthquake; my baby was as adorable, as absorbing as ever, and I enjoyed being back in my own home.I remembered the South African War; it had been very sad, very terrible; my uncle Everard had been killed in it, he had been a soldier, but it was always remote; I could not believe Walter and Mr. Harland when they talked of an invasion of England, bombardment by air, cutting off of the food supplies.I wondered often during those first weeks what Guy and Hugo were thinking of it all. They were at Yearsly, I believed, and George and Mollie; they had been going down there too. Ralph had been right, after all, that evening at Grandmother’s, and we had all laughed at him. It seemed odd already, that we had not understood what that Archduke’s murder would bring.Guy had paid some attention, and George; George most, I thought. I wondered very much what George would be thinking now.My grandmother had been at Bath; she had gone to see a cousin who lived at Bath. She did not come back till late in September. I went to see her then and she told me that Guy and Hugo had volunteered.VIII was bewildered at first; I could not understand at all. I had seen the posters calling for recruits; I had seen the recruits drilling; but that too had seemed in its way remote; it had not occurred to me somehow that people of my own might go. I remember being glad, in the first days of all, that I had no one in the army. It had once been thought of for Guy, and I thought, ‘what a good thing Guy is not a soldier’; and then I felt ashamed at my own selfishness, for other people were soldiers, who mattered really as much.And now I thought, it seems dreadful to say it, but I thought,‘How silly of Guy and Hugo!’And I thought:‘That is just the side of them that Walter doesn’t like—fantastic—out of touch with reality.’And I thought:‘It is play acting, a little bit, and I always denied they did that. It would be much better if Hugo got a sensible job at last, and if Guy stuck to his law; he was getting on very well.’I was not anxious about them. I did not believe they would ever be sent out to fight. They were only in training now; they were in camp somewhere, Grandmother had said, Hugo in Essex, and Guy on Salisbury plain. I knew it took months to train soldiers, and they were officers; that took several years; the War would be over before they were ready to go out; that made it so silly. But I was disturbed and unhappy all the same.When I got home I told Walter. I expected him to say too that it was foolish but he didn’t.He was sitting at his writing-table in the study. He gave a sort of groan and buried his face in his hands.‘We shall all have to go before it is done,’ he said, and then abruptly:‘I don’t suppose I shall finish my book now—that is all wasted.’My heart seemed to stand still. I felt as though I was in a nightmare suddenly trying to wake up; or as though I had woken up, very early, in the dark, and thought of death; a helpless desperate feeling, as though the earth were slipping away, as though one were going to fall into infinite space. . .and then I recovered; normality came back, and I was sure that Walter too was hysterical and unhinged.I tried to laugh.‘You are an old goose, Walter,’ I said, and I put my arm round him and kissed the top of his head.He did not look up. He was looking straight in front of him.He said:‘I was thinking before you came in of the Germans who will be killed; of the German scholars. They are doing work which no one else has ever done. If German scholarship is stamped out, scholarship throughout Europe will die. My work is useless, if the Germans are killed.’I said:‘But the Germans areconscripts⸺’It answered my own thought, not his, and I knew that, as soon as I had said it.‘We may all be conscripts too, before we are done,’ he answered. ‘It will not matter much by then.’I asked:‘Do you think Guy and Hugo were quite right to go?’And he nodded.The next day I heard from Mollie that George had got a Commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and about a week later Freddy Furze joined a Welsh Regiment.VIIII wrote to Cousin Delia, and to Hugo, and to Guy. I meant to write to George too, but there was an interruption, I forget now what it was, and I put it off, and put it off again, and did not write at all in the end.Cousin Delia answered me first.‘Yes, they are both gone,’ she said, ‘they had to go; there was, of course, no choice. Guy will find something he has wanted, I believe. I am more afraid for Hugo,’ and then she gave me their addresses (though I had got them already from Grandmother) and said she would like to see me soon; nothing about the War, or what she felt about it all; that was like Cousin Delia too.‘We have offered the house as a hospital, if they want it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they will. . .’Guy’s letter, too, was like himself.‘Dear Helen,’ hewrote,—‘Many thanks for yours. Yes, here we are really in for it at last, or so it seems. I am having no end of a time at present. My men are simply topping; makes one proud of one’s country, and all that sort of thing, to see what its “men in the street” are like. Funny too, to be doing the thing in earnest now, after playing at it so often. We ought to get out fairly soon, as our battalion was nominally on a war footing before, but you never know. The beastly show may be over before we actually get there; I should be sorry to miss it all now I’ve got so far.’‘Poor old Hugo doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself much, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he got out before us all the same. The best chance is to be drafted out into the regular battalions, I believe. You know George is down at Aldershot. I haven’t heard from him since he got there. . .’Hugo did not write for ten days; then it was a long letter.‘Dear Helen,—‘I was glad to get your letter. I have wondered how the War took you. I am glad that you have stayed sane, and that you prefer your baby to the world. That is as it ought to be after all.‘We have most of us lost our heads, and what will come of it all I don’t know. I feel a fraud drilling my wretched platoon, inspecting their kit, seeing if they have tooth-brushes, that they have polished their buttons, and mine too. I wonder what it is all for, what it will all lead to. We say “for King and Country”; we tell the poor beggars that, and they are as keen as mustard, most of them, like children playing at a game; only it is more than that, for they feel elated somehow, and raised out of themselves, at least some of them do—I did at first too, thought about being killed, and felt heroic. I don’t now; danger seems very remote and discomfort very present, and I can’t believe we shall ever get beyond this.‘It is muddy here; all mud and flat dull fields, and when it rains, as it did last week, the wet comes through the roof, and we are uncomfortable and cross. It is an odd life. I don’t know what to talk about; the Colonel is a regular, and so is one Lieutenant; all the other officers are either recruits like me or Territorial Reserve. They seem keen about everything, and the battalion in particular, and they are most of them pleasant fellows enough, but they make one feel a fool, and I don’t like the way they talk; their values are so odd.‘Guy is enjoying himself on Salisbury Plain. I haven’t heard from George lately.’I could picture Hugo better after reading it. He was still alone, detached, half way between my attitude and Guy’s. I felt sorry for him in his wet tent, inspecting tooth-brushes.IXMrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’; ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts and bandages and socks.She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a help to me at all to say more than that.‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic to say anything like that.‘When our own boys are fighting in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You surprise me, Helen.’Maud was much worse. She was not content with praising our own Army and Navy, she kept on abusing the others. She came to stay with us in the Christmas holidays, and told a great many stories of German atrocities. In every case she would begin:‘I know for a fact,’ or, ‘I have it on excellent authority’; but when I asked her how she knew, or on whose authority, she would get angry and did not explain.She would say that the Germans must be taught a lesson. . . .No civilized nation had ever behaved as they did. . .They were ‘unique in history.’‘This policy of frightfulness is unparalleled,’ she said, ‘absolutely unparalleled. They have forfeited their right to existence as an independent nation.’She had dismissed the German teacher in her school, and two little German girls were excluded also. ‘Feeling runs too high,’ she said. ‘I could not, in the circumstances, countenance their remaining. I hope that German will be a dead language before long.’XAutumn passed into winter. The fall of Antwerp; escape of theGoebenandBreslau; Declaration of War with Turkey; the bombardment of Scarborough and West Hartlepool these were landmarks in the sea of events.People had begun to accept the War as a natural state, to cease expecting a sudden dramatic finish.Mollie finished her three months’ training, and was drafted to a War Hospital in Wales. She came to see me before she went. She was serious and intent.‘I wish I could do more,’ she said. ‘I hate to be safe, when the others are in danger, don’t you feel that, Helen? I do hope they will send me to the front.’I said:‘You are doing much more than I am. You are in it, not outside, like me.’Mollie said:‘Yes. I am sorry for you, Helen. It must be terrible for you to be outside, and not able to help. Of course you can’t,’ she added quickly, ‘your work is just as important really, more perhaps,’ and she smiled her delightful smile that was like George’s.‘I feel,’ she went on earnestly, ‘that I can never do enough, if I worked myself to the bone, when I think what the men out there are going through already; what is waiting for George, and Guy, and Hugo, when they go out. It seems horrible to me to sit safe at home when they go, just nursing in a hospital.’I said:‘It will be pretty ghastly in a hospital if the War goes on,’ and I was surprised at myself; I had not thought consciously about the wounded men before.Mollie shuddered.‘I know,’ she said. ‘I have seen some of it already. There were some my first month—blinded—it seemed so soon.’And I thought:‘Could Hugo be blinded?’I was glad to have seen Mollie. She brought the War home to me more clearly than anything else had done. She understood what it meant, how dreadful it was, and yet she was sane. I wondered if I could help in a Hospital too; but I was nursing Eleanor still, and very much tied.I went for a time with Mrs. Sebright and sewed shirts; then I did bandages myself, at home, instead.In January, Guy crossed to France; George Addington sailed for Gallipoli in April; Hugo’s battalion went out as a reinforcement in the second battle of Ypres.I did not see any of them before they went.XIThat Easter we went away for a week. Walter was so tired, I was anxious about him. He had extra work at the University, for several of the lecturers had gone to the War, the young unmarried ones, and he was working at his book on inscriptions as well, in the evenings chiefly. He would go straight upstairs to the study after dinner and work till late.‘I may not have time to finish it,’ was all he said when I urged him not to. ‘I must work while I can.’We went up to the Wall. The weather was bad, and Walter could not leave the War behind him; he seemed obsessed by it; he could talk of nothing else all the time.I tried to cheer him up, to tease him a little, and make fun and play as we used to at first; he had liked me to before, but he did not care for it now. He smiled rather absently, and turned back to his book; when he spoke it was only of the advance in Gallipoli.I felt that it was my fault that I could not cheer him up. I could not feel gay myself; I could not make spontaneous fun, and so it was no good, and I worried about my baby, left for the first time. I kept imagining disasters that were not probable at all. One night I woke up in a fright, and thought that the nurse might have left the tap of the gas fire half on, and the gas be escaping; and another time, I thought that a cat might have jumped into the cot, and the nurse not noticed it. I was jumpy and nervy, I knew it, and so no use to Walter. I thought about Hugo and Guy in France, and George in Gallipoli; and that made it worse.We sat one day on the hill-side beyond the Wall, where we had often sat before, and looked out to the North. We could see the place when we had walked together, that first day when we had met at the camp and I had gone down with Walter, into the barbarians’ country. It seemed a long time ago. I remembered how exciting it had been, and how I had felt that I had begun to know Walter, and understand him. I knew him much better now, but did I understand him? I slipped my hand through his arm and laid my cheek against his.‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened to us both? Why are we so dull and sad?’Walter looked round at me slowly.‘We are tired, I think,’ he said. ‘That is all and we can’t rest; nobody can rest just now.’I stroked his hand, I remember; I felt very sorry for Walter; I felt that, perhaps, I had not thought of him enough, in thinking of Eleanor so much. He looked so tired and unhappy now.‘It would be easier for you if you could fight,’ I said.He flushed and looked away.‘I know,’ he said shortly, ‘it would, but I can’t.’I was astonished at the sharpness of his tone.I said:‘Of course not, Walter, nobody thought of it.’He said:‘I have.’And I felt a cold shiver run through me. I had not thought of it, and yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, this terror had been there. I held my breath and waited. I could hear the sheep cropping the rough grass a hundred yards away.Then I said:‘Yes? Do you really want to go?’And Walter nodded his head.‘I would give anything to go,’ he said intensely. ‘When Harland was coming home last week a girl gave him a white feather.’I tried to laugh:‘But that is absurd,’ I said. ‘Surely he didn’t mind?’‘He did mind,’ said Walter.He kept his eyes to the ground; he was tearing up the grass into little tufts and throwing it away.‘I don’t suppose I should be any use even if I wasn’t married,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they would pass me at the Medical Board, but I hate to stay behind! It makes me ashamed of myself, and I am not used to feeling ashamed.’I tried to think clearly and dispassionately, but I couldn’t. My impulse was to plead with him, to implore him not to leave me, not to go to the War, but I checked it. I felt that he would go, that it was inevitable, that I had known all the time that he would, and that I could do nothing.‘You know,’ I said, ‘it seems to me almost braver not to go; just to go on doing dull essential work, that somebody must do. All the sentiment and enthusiasm goes to soldiers, but “they also serve”. . .?’ I felt sobs in my throat. I stopped short.Walter said:‘Yes, I know that too; I know I ought to stay; that my duty is with you, and my mother; I am not free to choose, but even my students are going, and those friends of yours have gone.’I said:‘That was different; they were not married,’ and then I thought of Cousin Delia, and Mollie.‘Dear, I won’t keep you if you want to go,’ I said, and I suddenly cried.He put his arms round me and kissed me, again and again.‘I know you wouldn’t, my darling,’ he said, ‘but I can’t go.’And I felt him nearer and more precious than before, and I thought he felt me so.‘My poor, poor dear,’ he said, ‘if only the War would end soon.’And I said:‘It must end soon. I am sure it will.’XIIWalter said we must cut down expenses, and put all possible money into War Loan. It was the least we could do, he said. So Eleanor’s nurse was dismissed. I would look after Eleanor myself; I was glad to do something definite, and enjoyed looking after my baby for a time.It was a wet summer; from all sides came complaints of the floods; crops ruined, cattle drowned, people suffering already from the strain and anxiety of war longed in vain for sunshine and kindly weather.‘It is the guns,’ they said, ‘the big guns cause the rain.’Rachel was coming now. I tried to look forward to her as I had to Eleanor, but I could not. I thought again and again:‘How shall I manage two children, who am so pressed with one?’Eleanor would wake up early in the morning; she would talk and jump and keep us both awake, and she was getting very heavy to push in her perambulator. By the end of the day I was very tired. When she was in bed I could not think or read; I would drop down on the sofa and wait for Walter to come home.I thought:‘It cannot go on much longer now; it is bound to end very soon.’XIIIIn October Walter volunteered under the Derby scheme. He told me before he went out that he should not be taken.‘I know they will not pass me,’ he said. ‘I know I am a crock’; but his voice was excited, and his eyes very bright. I knew that he hoped, in spite of what he said, that he might be taken.All that afternoon while he was out at the Recruiting Office I sat indoors with Eleanor and tried to sew. It was a wet afternoon, and I could not face the heavy perambulator walk, pushing up hill to the Heath through the mud and rain.I sat in the nursery with her, and she played on the floor. She had a cart on wheels that she pushed up and down, the wheels squeaked; I remembered that I had meant to oil them, but the oilcan was downstairs in the kitchen. I was too tired to go down and fetch it, and come back up all the stairs.Eleanor made a great deal of noise; she upset chairs, and banged on the floor with bricks; she unwound reels of cotton, with which I was trying to sew; then she upset a bowl of flowers, and I had to go down to the bathroom and fetch a towel; and she screamed and screamed, though I had not scolded her at all. Her shrill, piping little voice pierced through my head like needles. I felt that I must scream or hit her, if she would not be quiet.Then I thought:‘How horrible that I should feel like this about my baby! I should not have believed, a year ago, that I could feel like this.’At six o’clock, Walter came in.I stood up and waited. I heard the front door slam, and then I heard him moving about in the hall. He opened the drawing-room door and looked in, and then I heard him coming up the stairs.He opened the nursery door and stood still in the door way; and I stood still too, and looked at him.There was an odd confused expression on his face that I could not make out. I did not know if he was glad or sorry; relieved or disappointed. He came in and threw a bunch of papers on the table in front of me.‘C3!’ he said, with a laugh. ‘We need not have bothered!’ and it seemed to me as though my heart had stopped beating, and now suddenly it began with a rush.And I said:‘Oh, Walter, are you sorry?’He sat down in the chair beside him, and faced me across the table.He said:‘Sorry? I don’t know; nobody likes to be C3, I suppose. Thank you for nothing—that is aboutall⸺’I said:‘I can’t be sorry. I can only be glad,’ and I put out both my hands to him, across the table.‘It isn’t your fault,’ I said, ‘you have done your best. I think I may be glad.’His eyes were fixed on the table, and he did not answer me; then he pulled his hands away, and buried his face.‘I am not sorry either,’ he said huskily, ‘that is what is so awful. I thought I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to prove, to myself and every one else, that I could fight, and be a fine fellow. I made myself believe it, but it wasn’t true. I know now that I was afraid all the time!’I went round beside him and kneeled on the floor and I leaned my cheek against his arm. I felt as though he were a child, as though he were much younger than me, and weaker, as I used sometimes to feel with Hugo, when we were children.I said:‘Dearest, does that matter? Isn’t every one afraid? It is the people who are afraid and go, that are the bravest; and you tried to go.’He said:‘Yes; but I haven’t gone. I don’t suppose now that I shall.’Eleanor pushed herself against his knees.She called:‘Dadda, Dadda,’ and beat him with her brick.At last he noticed her and picked her up on to his knee.‘Well, Baby,’ he said, ‘are you glad that Dadda is not going to the War?’‘Dadda dee-ar,’ Eleanor repeated; she laughed and grabbed at his glasses.Walter put her down again and she began to scream.Walter put his hands to his head and stood up.‘Do make her be quiet, Helen,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the noise.’I tried to quiet Eleanor, but she went on crying. Walter made for the door, distractedly, and went out.When at last I had pacified Eleanor, I sat down again in my chair and tried to think; but I could not. It seemed to me then, that I was too tired even to realize my own relief. I felt numb and stupid.Then Eleanor stumbled over a footstool, and fell, and again she began to scream. I looked at the clock on the chimney-piece; it was bedtime, past bedtime. I picked Eleanor up, but she was angry; she kicked me, and went quite stiff. I struggled with her and carried her off to bed.XIVWalter got work at the Admiralty. He deciphered telegrams. He went there immediately after breakfast, and did not come home till eight or half-past eight. He made a point of arriving sooner than the other people in his room, and of leaving after they did. He was paid much less than his University salary, and that he would not take.His College offered to pay him some proportion of his salary while he was at Government work, but he refused it.‘It is the least I can do,’ he said. ‘Other men have to leave their work, whatever it is, and lose everything. We must manage to live more cheaply.’We decided to do without the gardener who came one day a week; I said that I would keep the garden tidy.Walter said he would dig on Sundays.XVJust after Christmas Guy was wounded, and came home for six weeks. He was shot in the shoulder; it was not dangerous. He was sent to a hospital at Southampton. Cousin John applied for leave to have him at Yearsly, a private hospital now, but that was against the regulations.Cousin Delia went down to Southampton and stayed in an hotel. I went down to see him one day, before he went back.He was sitting with Cousin Delia, and his arm was in a sling. They were in a little room with a balcony looking out on to the sea. Guy was laughing when I came in I saw his face sideways against the light, and I thought:‘How dear he is, and how just the same as before.’ I don’t know why exactly, but I had been afraid of his seeming different.We had tea together, Cousin Delia and Guy and I, and we were very happy. The War seemed a long way off; we did not talk about it. Guy had another month ahead of him before he need go back. He went to Yearsly at the end of his leave; he had a fortnight there, but I did not see him again that time.XVIMaud was running a Canteen at the Station at Lessingham.Troop trains came through there every day, and very often at night. She took the night shifts as a rule, and did her school work by day. That was like Walter.‘One likes to do one’s bit, you know,’ she said.She talked a great deal about the ‘Tommies.’ What fine fellows they were; what splendid single-hearted fellows. It was true no doubt, and any way, even if they were not, it was a good thing to give them cakes and hot coffee; they were unfortunate enough, poor things, and I admired Maud for her work for them, and yet somehow, when she praised them, I wanted to run them down. I felt so sure that she did not understand in the least what they were like; difficult, intricate creatures, part noble, part ignoble, just as we all are; some brave, some cowardly, some understanding what they were doing, others not understanding at all; and Maud lumped them all together as ‘fine fellows,’ just because they were English soldiers, and we were at War; and I knew she would have called them that, whatever they were like.Miss Mix used to visit the wounded soldiers in the London Hospital; she read to them, and wrote letters for them, and she took blinded soldiers out for walks. Good old Miss Mix; she too thought them all splendid, but it was quite different with her.She said to me one day:‘They have all done what I could not do. They have been through things I know I could not stand; and it is partly for my sake, for lots of old women like me, who seem not much use in the world, that they have done it; and it makes me very grateful to them, that is all I know.’I went with Miss Mix several times, and wrote letters and read to them too, but I could not leave Eleanor much, now I had no nurse. Louise took her out for me then, but after Christmas Louise left us, and went into a Munition factory, and for several weeks I could get no one in her place. When I got another maid, she was very incompetent, and Sarah, the cook, did not like her at all. They quarrelled, and complained about each other a great deal; and then Sarah gave notice. She too went to work at Munitions; it was natural, I suppose, for they earned much higher wages. Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, cooked for us for a time, and at last I got a cook who was very old and deaf, and could not cook very much; but I was glad to get her, and she stayed for some time.There was no time to do anything else while this was going on. I did part of the housework even then, for the old cook couldn’t, and the young maid was very slow. I did it badly, and it took me, too, a long time. I hated the housework; I hated the brooms and dusters; dreamed about them at night; and about the kitchen sink, where I had helped to wash up, while we had no cook. The brooms were kept in the bathroom, for we had no other place to keep them. There were pegs for them there to hang on, and a shelf I for polishes and dusters. I began to hate the bathroom too. It was a squalid bathroom, with a painted bath, that was painted green, and was chipped.We had meant to put in a new bath, later on; but now of course we could not. The green bath worried me, and the paint wearing off; it seemed to get worse week by week, and the wall where the brushes hung was dirty.Walter worked always in the evenings now. It was the only time he got for working at his book.‘If I leave that altogether,’ he said, ‘I can’t live. It is the only thing that takes me away from the War.’While he worked in his study, I sat downstairs and sewed. There was always mending to be done, and I mended. I did not mend well either; it seemed to me, at this time, that I could do nothing well.And then, at the end of March, George Addington was killed.XVIII heard the news from Mollie, in a letter. The letter came at midday, by an unusual post, and I thought:‘A letter from Mollie. How nice to hear from her!’And I took it upstairs with me to read. Eleanor was asleep in her pram.I sat down on my bed, and opened the letter. I thought of Mollie and how much I should like to see her.‘George was killed on Wednesday,’ she wrote. ‘Shot through the head, leading an attack. He was killed instantaneously, and probably did not know that he was hit. I have had a telegram, that is all, from the War Office. It will be a long time before I can hear any more; three weeks at least, the letters take from there.‘I can’t believe he is dead. It seems so strange, that one knew nothing about it on Wednesday, that one had no dream, no premonition nor anything. Oh, Helen, I wrote to him yesterday, and he was dead already⸺I should be glad, I know, that he was killed at once. It would be worse, much worse, if he were wounded and missing, as it might well have been; I keep telling myself that. I have written to Hugo at Ypres, to tell him of it. He will be badly cut up, I am afraid. He loved George very dearly; but he is bound to know soon; and to Guy too. I wish for Hugo’s sake, they were together.’I sat a long time with the letter in my hand. I had not expected this, I had not somehow envisaged it at all. It seemed to me impossible, and not to be borne.‘George dead! George killed!’ I repeated the words over and over to myself, and they had no meaning; and then I thought:‘I shall never see George any more; never as long as I live; no one will see him any more.’And then I thought:‘I was unkind to George.’I thought of George as I had last seen him, on the doorstep at Campden Hill Square. How he had come out with us, to say good-bye, and how he had smiled, that wide delightful smile, and yet he had looked sad; and how I had wondered what was the matter, and whether he had known the War would come.And then I had not written to him when he joined the Army. I had written to Hugo, and to Guy, but not to him. I had meant to, of course. I had kept on meaning to, and putting it off, and then it had been too late.I had written since, of course; I had written twice, and sent him a parcel of food; but that was not enough in a year and a half, I had meant to write oftener; he had said he enjoyed getting letters; I had meant to write regularly, but I was always bad at writing letters, and little things had got in the way.Eleanor was asleep in the garden in her perambulator. I left her and went out; up the road, towards the Heath.The road seemed full of soldiers, blue wounded soldiers. All roads were full of them at this time and when I came nearer I saw that they were blind. I dreaded the blinded soldiers; I hated to see them, for I had an idea, somehow, I don’t know why, that Hugo might be blinded. I passed the blinded soldiers, and got beyond them to the Heath. The trees were coming out; light green buds on the branches; and there were crocuses in the grass.The sun came down through the branches, and shone on the crocuses. It was a fine day, and warm for March. I sat on a seat, and thought about George, and I thought:‘It is all very well for the flowers, and for the buds on the trees; they come again after the winter; they are born again. There will be other boys growing up, and other men, but never George again. If the world goes on for millions of years, there will never be anyone who is what he was.’And a sense of wild anger and indignation possessed me. I felt:‘This is wrong and wicked and a horrible mistake, this War that has killed George. What is it worth? What is it for? What can it ever achieve that will make up for him?’And I felt:‘It must be stopped. I have been asleep and woken up. I can’t let this War go on that has killed George.’‘George killed! Georgedead!’ I repeated the words again. I felt as though the world had begun to reel, as though the foundations of my life had begun to crumble.‘What next?Guy too and Hugo. . . .’The encroaching reality of the War struck through my last defences. I felt that I understood what it was, for the first time.A clock in a church struck one, and I went home again. Eleanor would be waking up; she would be crying for me. I must hurry; I would be late, and all the way home I was thinking:‘What can I do? I must do something to stop this War.’Eleanor was awake and screaming. I went to her and got her up from her perambulator, and washed her, and gave her her dinner; and after dinner, I dressed her to go out, and put her back in the perambulator, and pushed her out on to the Heath. I had no time to think any more, for she kept talking to me in her insistent baby way, that in my heart I loved, but to-day, I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to get away somewhere and think. I felt excited, elated, somehow, as though I had discovered a truth of immense importance; something that was the key to all our trouble.‘The War must be stopped. We must stop it now.’The words kept repeating themselves through my head all the afternoon, and I felt that in a moment, if only I could get away by myself and be quiet, I should know how this could be done.When Eleanor was in bed I could be quiet, and think about it. It would not be long now till she was in bed.And then when I got her into bed, Walter came home.He was unusually early, more than an hour before his time. He had such a headache, he said, he could not work any longer, and so he had come home. I was up in our bedroom when he came in, tucking Eleanor up. I sang to her always when she was in bed. She did not understand very much what I sang, so I sang all sorts of songs, and to-night I was singing theAgnus Deithat Guy and Cousin Delia used to sing. It seemed to fit in with what I felt to-night; the sins of the world; our sins; and the hope that help was at hand.Walter came in heavily, and sat down on the bed.‘Daddy came,’ said Eleanor, and popped up her head.I looked round at Walter, surprised to see him there so soon. And then he told me about his headache. I could not take in what he said; it seemed unimportant and trivial; little things about some one a long way off.I said:‘George is killed,’ and stood looking at him, across Eleanor’s little cot.He drew in his breath sharply, and put his hands up to his head. That was a gesture of his, familiar to me now.I gave him Mollie’s letter, and he read it in silence.‘For you’—he said at last, ‘and forme⸺’And he dropped his hands limply on his knee.I was astonished at the expression of acute personal sorrow on his face; he had not seemed to care much for George when he was alive. I went across to him, and sat beside him on the bed. I stroked his shoulder, I know, and tried to console him. I don’t know what I said. It happened like this so often now; these fits of despondency, almost of remorse, and my attempts to encourage him. It had become in a sense automatic. It seemed to me, at times, that I had no more to give; that I was drawing water from a well that was dry; but to-night it was different; I felt somehow beyond all that. I did not speak to him of my conviction, of what I felt myself about George, and George’s death. It was no use speaking to Walter of things like that, I knew.We went to bed early on account of Walter’s headache. I, too, was glad to go.‘Now I can be quiet and think,’ I said to myself.And I lay awake a long time after Walter was asleep and looked up into the darkness.And I thought:‘What is it I must do? What is it I am just going to understand?’It was very quiet in our road. There was no sound of traffic; only a dog in a garden not far off barked for a little while, and a cat called somewhere from a roof. A taxi hooted turning a corner at the end of the road, then it changed gear for going up the hill; there was a grating, grinding noise as it changed gear, and then that passed out of hearing. Some one walked past on the pavement, a man it seemed to be, walking very fast. Then again there were cats, and again a taxi horn, and after that for a long time, it was quite quiet.And as I lay still and listened to the noises in the night, all my excitement seemed to ebb away, and I understood that I had discovered nothing, and that there was nothing I could do.I could not stop the War, and nobody could. We were caught in it all of us, all nations, all people in the nations; it would go on, and more and more people would be killed; hundreds and thousands of people would be killed every day, and I could do nothing at all, and I understood too that George was dead, and that I had loved him dearly, and that he who was so full of promise, such a fine, splendid nature, would do nothing with his life; he was just at the beginning, and there would be no more.
‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,That it will flourishagain. . .But man dieth and wasteth away; yea, manGiveth up the ghost, and where is he?’—Jobxiv. 7.
‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,That it will flourishagain. . .But man dieth and wasteth away; yea, manGiveth up the ghost, and where is he?’—Jobxiv. 7.
‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,
That it will flourishagain. . .
But man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man
Giveth up the ghost, and where is he?’
—Jobxiv. 7.
PART THREE
ON the date that the Archduke was assassinated, we were dining at Campden Hill Square. Guy and Hugo were there, and George and Mollie, and Ralph Freeman, who was back from Vienna now, in the Foreign Office again.
It was a party like old times, and I liked it. I was so happy to be about again and to have my baby; for Eleanor was incredibly precious to me at that time.
I was glad to see them all again, and I felt somehow that I had come back to life; that I wanted to do so much that I had not been able to do during the last months.
There was a new pleasure in moving, and in eating, and in being alive.
‘They will all be there,’ I said to Walter, as we were getting ready to go. ‘We have not been all together like that since we were married, for Hugo went away so soon.’
Walter smiled, but I knew he was not pleased. He was tying his black tie, and he always tied his ties badly. He disliked dressing for dinner, and never did so, if he could avoid it.
‘You must like them,’ I said. ‘Please try to like them. You see I do so much.’
And he looked suddenly sorry, and stopped pulling at his tie.
‘Yes, you do. I know that, and I ought not to mind,’ he said, ‘but I can’t help it. They make me feel a fool, those friends of yours, and I amnota fool, and I am always afraid that you will think of me as they do, when they are there. I suppose I am jealous of them.’
And he gave a laugh.
I said:
‘You need not be; it is different, and I want them to like you too; they will, if you are nicer to them.’
He said:
‘You are mine now, not theirs. I need not be afraid of them now.’
I laughed, but I said:
‘You old goose, you will be late, if you don’t get dressed; Grandmother does not like people to be late.’
And I tied his tie for him; I nearly always did in the end.
George and Hugo were in the drawing-room with Grandmother when we arrived. They were talking about Dostoievski. Grandmother did not like the Russian novelists.
‘My dear, a lunatic asylum,’ she said once. ‘It may be very true to life, of a sort, as you say, but I do not enjoy the society of lunatics.’
Hugo was saying:
‘We are all like that really, Aunt Gerry, only we don’t realize it, incredibly weak, and uncertain, and yet sometimes a bit heroic, only we don’t like to think we are like that, so we don’t think it.’
‘I certainly do not think it, Hugo. I hope that you are not like that, and I know that I am not.’
She laughed, and turning to us, held out her hands.
‘Here she is!’ she said, as though they had been speaking about me. I realized that evening how much she cared for me, and felt grateful to her. I bent down and kissed her, and shook hands with George and Hugo. I did not feel shy of Hugo now; it seemed, here in this room, just as it used to be.
George gave me his chair, and we all sat down.
‘How is my great-granddaughter?’ asked Grandmother, and I said she was very well.
George said:
‘I can’t imagine you with a daughter.’
Then Guy and Mollie came in together. They looked happy, and I thought:
‘They will be married soon,’ and I was glad.
Mollie said:
‘We have run all the way from Notting Hill Gate, we thought we should be late.’
Guy said:
‘Ralph is later. A diplomat should know better.’
‘Does Ralph count as a diplomat now?’ asked Mollie.
Guy said:
‘Yes, of the fifteenth class, I believe.’
And every one laughed, for it was a joke against Ralph Freeman that he was very punctilious.
Then he came in.
He apologized to Grandmother. He said he had been kept at the Office; there was anxiety over the murder of Franz Ferdinand.
‘Franz Ferdinand,’ repeated Hugo, ‘who on earth is he?’
‘The Austrian Archduke. Francis Joseph’s heir, you know. Haven’t you seen the paper?’
Guy said:
‘I saw something about it. Herzegovina, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, and Austria is sure to suspect Serbian influence.’
George said:
‘Trouble in the Balkans. Do you remember Old Moore’s prediction?’
Mollie said:
‘That was last year.’
George said:
‘Every year.’
Grandmother said:
‘I read about it this morning. The young man and his wife were both shot in their carriage—a very horrid affair.’
Ralph said:
‘My chief takes an exceedingly grave view of the situation.’
The dinner was ready and we went into the dining-room. When we had all sat down, Ralph began again.
‘You see,’ he said to Grandmother, ‘the tension between Vienna and Belgrade has been growing more acute every year. It was amazing to hear the Austrians talk, when I was out there. They would believe anything of the Serbs.’
‘No doubt the crime was political,’ Grandmother observed. ‘It is something to be truly thankful for that we have outgrown political crimes in this country; they are always futile.’
‘This may be worse than futile,’ said Ralph. He was looking serious and excited, and we felt amused; Ralph was always proud of his inside information.
‘Well, yes, worse than futile for the dozen poor devils who are put to death because of it,’ said George. ‘They have not got the man who threw the bomb, I see. There will have to be a demonstration.’
‘They are saying at the Office that it may mean War.’
‘War? between Austria—Hungary and Serbia?’
‘That would be short and decisive. I should think.’
Guy wrinkled his forehead.
‘You forget Serbia’s relation to Russia,’ Ralph put in; ‘we might very easily have war between Russia and Austria over this.’
Mollie said:
‘It all seems very remote.’
Grandmother said:
‘In Eastern Europe they are always fighting. I remember so many wars—Russo-Turkish, Bulgaro-Turkish, Russo-Japanese, Græco-Turkish and the Balkan Wars. One cannot feel as distressed, as no doubt one ought. If the Russians are all like Hugo’s friends they should not prove very formidable to Austrian troops. I used to know a good many Austrian officers—very charming people.’
We all had an impulse to rag Ralph Freeman. He took himself and his news so seriously, it made us want to take it lightly.
Hugo said:
‘Russian Ballet versus Hungarian Band. Much more “life force” in the Ballet.’
‘It is all very well to joke,’ protested Ralph, ‘but this may be the beginning of a European War.’
‘How often have we heard that, Ralph?’ asked Guy. ‘Everything may be the beginning of a European War—Dogger Bank, Agadir, Morocco—but fortunately, it does not begin.’
‘Sophia belongs to a society which shows European War to be impossible,’ said Mollie. ‘Economically impossible, in a modern world like ours, because of international trade, credit, and so on, and international banking. I went to some of the meetings with her once.’
‘I wish it were impossible,’ said Ralph portentously, and we all felt sure that he was very glad it was not impossible.
‘Russia and France,’ said George abruptly, ‘Austria and Germany—My God!’ Then he laughed. ‘It is fantastic,’ he said. ‘Why,wehave an entente with France and Russia!’
‘Exactly,’ said Ralph.
I said:
‘You are talking like the Navy League, George.’
‘I know,’ said George. ‘I suddenly thought, Supposing the damned fools were right.’
Walter said:
‘It is quite inconceivable, I think, that Great Britain should be involved in a European War.’
He spoke with a note of exasperation in his voice, as though every one were being silly. I thought they could not all be silly, for they were saying different things.
‘It is inconceivable we could keep out,’ said Guy, ‘if France and Germany were at War.’
‘Come, come,’ said Grandmother, ‘don’t try to make my flesh creep, young people. I think we can trust the Austrians to settle up their own affair; it was all in their own country after all.’
She turned to Walter, who was on her other side, and asked him how his book was getting on; and after that we talked about plays, the Vedrenne Barker Season at the Savoy and Rheinhardt’s production of Œdipus. I had seen none of them, nor Walter of course, for we seldom went to plays, but all the others had, and I liked to hear about them.
After dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room; then Grandmother went to her memoirs, in her sitting-room upstairs, and we played Demon Pounce with two card tables joined together and five packs of cards. We called it Prawn Eye, and we often used to play it.
Guy generally won, and sometimes George; Hugo and Walter were the worst. Hugo laughed and looked across at Walter.
‘You and I are competing for the Donkey prize,’ he said.
Walter tried to laugh too, but he looked worried; I could see that he thought it a silly game, and that spoilt the fun for me.
I had to go home early to feed Eleanor. The others stayed on to play longer. I ran upstairs to Grandmother to say ‘good night.’ She was sitting by the fire, for she always had a fire in her room, with her book on her knee and her spectacles on the table by her side. She was not reading, and she looked very tired. I realized, with a sudden shock, that she was old.
She started when I came in, and then smiled.
‘I have come to say “good night,” Grandmother,’ I said.
She put both her hands on my shoulders, as I stooped down.
She said:
‘Dear child, bless you. I am happy about you.’
I said:
‘I am happy too, Grandmother.’
I waited; I wanted to say more, but I did not know what to say. I felt then that she was old, and perhaps lonely. It had not occurred to me before that my marriage had left her all alone. I wondered what it would be like to be old.
I thought:
‘We shall all be old some day, Guy and Hugo, and George, and Mollie and Walter, and I; how strange that is; quite certainly some day we shall be old.’
But it was not real to me even then.
‘Can I do anything for you, Grandmother?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you another book?’
‘No, dear, no; I shall go to bed soon. Are the other young people still there?’
I said, yes, they were going on with their game.
‘Say “good night” to them for me,’ she said; ‘they need not come up’; and she kissed me ‘Good night.’
I went downstairs slowly.
Walter was waiting in the hall.
There was a taxi at the door to take us home; Grandmother had arranged that. She would pay for it, she had said.
I ran back to the drawing-room to say ‘Good-bye.’
Hugo came with me into the hall, and George came out on to the steps.
‘When shall we meet again?’ he said. ‘Are you going away soon?’
I said:
‘Next week we are going, up to the Wall again. We shall be back in September.’
George said:
‘Good-bye, then, till September.’
He was smiling his wide, delightful smile.
I said:
‘What a nice evening it has been.’
George said:
‘Yes. Hasn’t it been jolly?’
Yet something in his face made me wonder.
I thought:
‘Is George not happy? Can something be worrying George?’
I never saw him again.
Walter was annoyed about the taxi; he felt it a waste of money, when we might have gone in the tube, and he did not like Grandmother to pay it, for he liked to pay everything himself. I knew very well by now when Walter was annoyed; I could tell by the way he sat, by the way he fidgeted with his hands, even when he said nothing at all.
He said nothing this time, and I said nothing. I felt very tired now, and then, I was frightened. It was as though I had been asleep, and dreaming, and contented, and now suddenly I had woken up; as though everything had become intense, and alive, and somehow emotional. I felt as though tremendous things were happening, all round us, everywhere; as though we were a tiny island in a great space.
I put out my hand and touched Walter’s arm; it was dark in the taxi and I could hardly see him.
‘Walter,’ I said, ‘do you feel as if something dreadful were going to happen?’
He turned sharply.
‘No,’ he said. ‘What do you mean? What should happen?’
I said:
‘Oh, I don’t know exactly; I suppose it is silly; I feel as though this couldn’t last, as though something were going to break.’
‘It is that silly talk about a war that has upset you,’ he said. ‘People ought not to talk like that.’
I said:
‘No; I wasn’t thinking about a war; I had forgotten that; but I feel afraid of something, I don’t know what. I believe George felt it too.’
He said:
‘Nonsense, you are tired, that is all; it is awfully tiring going out in the evening; I am tired too.’
He put his arm round me and drew me close to him. I wanted to feel near to him, but I did not; I felt a long way off.
Two days later, we went up to Northumberland, to the farm-house on the Roman Wall, where we had stayed before.
We had a great deal of luggage, a cot and a pram, and a baby’s bath. I felt very proud of travelling with those things, but Walter did not like it.
‘It is awful,’ he said, ‘this family luggage. I suppose it will be like this now—for years!’
I minded that. It seemed to me sometimes that he resented Eleanor, that he would almost rather she were not there; I had hoped he would be pleased with her, as I was.
At the farm it was better; Walter liked being there; he went for long walks again, as we had done on our honeymoon. I could not go with him now, when he went a very long way, but I was happy at home with my baby.
It seems like a dream now, that beginning of war; like something remembered very long ago, much longer ago than it really is. I cannot even remember, at what moment we realized, Walter and I, that war was coming, a war that would involve our country, I mean; that it would involve us personally, as individuals, we did not realize at that time at all; that came much later, gradually and painfully, step by step.
We were, of course, far away in the physical sense; six miles away from the nearest village of any size, with a post only three times a week. We saw nobody who understood what was happening better than ourselves, and we read the newspaper when it came so little. Walter had always an aversion for newspapers, I never quite knew why, and I was so absorbed in Eleanor, and the new life with her, that the outer world seemed to have slipped right away, when we got into the train at Euston.
The stages in these weeks that one now knows were turning points in the catastrophe escaped us then with a completeness that seems amazing.
The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, when it came, meant nothing at all. I remember Walter reading it aloud at breakfast, in the farm parlour; even now the smell of hot coffee and bacon brings that morning back to me, which is odd, considering how little we realized its importance.
The paper had come the evening before, but we had not opened it. Walter liked a paper at breakfast, not at other times. He opened it and read it carelessly, not caring much what he found there. He said:
‘There seems to be a dustup in the Balkans after all, over that man being killed. Here is an Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia,’ and he read a few lines of it aloud.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? going on like that at this time of day. It seems to belong to the eighteenth century or perhaps the seventeenth.’
And I said:
‘I suppose they are a century or two behind us over there.’
And we did not bother about it any more. We went a long walk that day and came back rather tired, and hungry; and in the afternoon it rained, and we could not read our Gibbon out of doors, as we had meant to. I remember that we followed what happened in the newspaper with a certain interest; it gave one something to look for among the rather dull collection of Parliamentary Debates and Home affairs, but it was an impersonal interest.
I remember one day thinking about it, and being shocked with myself for minding it so little. That must have been some days later, when Russia and Germany seemed to be coming in. I went up on the hill behind the house, by myself, and sat down on the grass, and tried to realize what was happening. I remember trying to picture the Russian soldiers, and the Austrian soldiers, and to think what it meant; those hundreds and thousands of people leaving their homes, and going to fight.
‘Hundreds of them will be killed,’ I thought, ‘perhaps thousands, and yet I don’t really mind; it doesn’t really affect me, just because I don’t know them, and they live in countries that I don’t know’; and it seemed to me dreadful that one’s sympathy should be so limited.
And then another time, I did realize it for a bit; that was after the German mobilization, when the French reservists were called up; we had read the paper when it came that day, in the evening after dinner, and somehow by that time, it had begun to seem terrible; we had begun, I think, though very dimly, to feel the trouble closing in all round.
We lay a long time awake that night, Walter and I, not speaking to each other. The night was hot and oppressive, the darkness seemed to press upon us like a weight.
I thought of the French and German homes where people were lying in bed, awake too, and thinking about the next day, when the men must go out to the army; and it became suddenly real to me; perhaps because I had been in France and Germany, and knew some French and German people, and understood that they were just people like us.
And that made the others seem more real too, and I felt the immensity of what was happening; I realized, dimly, the masses of people in Austria and in Russia too.
And then a sense of unreality came over me. I felt myself a long way off; looking on, as though I were disembodied; I seemed to hear a great throbbing, very far away, a strange pulsating sound, as though it were the heart of all the world; I suppose it was really my own heart. I thought of birds in a storm, of clouds gathering, of the lines in ‘In Memoriam’ about the rooks, of the Dynasts and the Pities and Powers; and an acute, quite impersonal sense of loss and desolation came over me.
Walter said suddenly:
‘This may be the end of Europe, of European civilization.’
I said:
‘I was thinking about the people saying Good-bye; sleeping together like us, only for the last time, people just like us, and I thought, “Supposing it was you and me?” ’
Walter said:
‘I know.’.
He held me tight, and I pressed close up to him. The beating of his heart throbbed through me again, like the pulse of the world. And all I had, seemed dearer than ever before, as I realized that it could be lost.
I said:
‘Oh, Walter, do they love as we do? Do you think, many of them do?’
And he answered very softly:
‘Yes. Hundreds of thousands of them do.’
The next morning Walter walked over to Alston for more news. He brought back more papers, but nothing definite besides. The people in the town were talking about war, he said, telegrams were put up outside the Town Hall. Two days later he went over to Alston again. The exact moments at which it became credible, probable, inevitable, that England would fight too, I cannot remember at all.
The postman, who brought the post on Monday, stopped me at the gate with news of the Advance into Belgium.
‘Two million Germans on the march,’ he said. He smiled a twisted sort of smile, and added, ‘And I’m in the front line.’
It took me several moments to realize that he meant that he was a reservist.
I never saw him again.
When the British Declaration of War came, it made hardly a sensation. We had known it must come for so many hours, and hours during these days were like months.
We went back to London at the end of August. We had talked of going for over a week before, but there seemed to be no trains. The reservists were called up everywhere; the shepherd from the farm was called up, and the cowman. They were in what was called ‘The Wagon Reserve.’
Walter said at first that we must go back to London at once, then that we had no right to crowd up trains, when all space was needed for troops.
In London, the excitement of war was everywhere; marching men, army wagons, lorries, bugle calls, persistent, repeated, practised over and over again. There was an open space not far from our house; it had been a playing field for a school, and recruits were drilling there all the day long; sharp loud sounds of the sergeants’ orders, more bugle calls, marching men, and more marching men; the pathetic sentimental marching songs, the dark blue uniforms and convict-like caps of Kitchener’s Army; everything passed through the untraceable stages from strangeness to familiarity, and the war news mingled in a confused, disjointed way with the daily sights and sounds.
The Belgian resistance; Liège; the fall of Liège; the first accounts of German atrocities; the occupation of Brussels; the burning of Louvain; fighting in the streets of Charleroi, where the dead bodies pressed each other too closely to fall down, and the ranks of the dead stood upright; that in particular brought the horror of it home to me, I know.
Stories of crucifixion, of bayoneted women, of children with their hands cut off; and the first inrush of Belgian refugees. How the days passed, merged into one another, obliterated one another, I do not know; the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence. I was caught for a time by the general excitement, and so was Walter. He bought war maps and pinned them to the doors, marking the progress of the armies each morning and evening with little coloured flags on pins.
Mr. Harland, a colleague of Walter’s who lived in Hampstead too, used to come in and talk to Walter. He kept a chart with coloured maps as well.
Then came dismay at the retreat from Mons; suddenly one day as he was tracing out the line of ‘position in the rear,’ Walter stood still, and they stared at each other.
‘By Jove!’ said Mr. Harland.
And Walter said, ‘Good Lord!’
‘Will they get to Paris?’
‘Will they break through?’
I sat and watched them, and the new consternation was as unreal to me as the War itself had been at first.
Life went on for me, in a way, unbroken by the catastrophic events all round. My own life seemed to reassert itself from the general earthquake; my baby was as adorable, as absorbing as ever, and I enjoyed being back in my own home.
I remembered the South African War; it had been very sad, very terrible; my uncle Everard had been killed in it, he had been a soldier, but it was always remote; I could not believe Walter and Mr. Harland when they talked of an invasion of England, bombardment by air, cutting off of the food supplies.
I wondered often during those first weeks what Guy and Hugo were thinking of it all. They were at Yearsly, I believed, and George and Mollie; they had been going down there too. Ralph had been right, after all, that evening at Grandmother’s, and we had all laughed at him. It seemed odd already, that we had not understood what that Archduke’s murder would bring.
Guy had paid some attention, and George; George most, I thought. I wondered very much what George would be thinking now.
My grandmother had been at Bath; she had gone to see a cousin who lived at Bath. She did not come back till late in September. I went to see her then and she told me that Guy and Hugo had volunteered.
I was bewildered at first; I could not understand at all. I had seen the posters calling for recruits; I had seen the recruits drilling; but that too had seemed in its way remote; it had not occurred to me somehow that people of my own might go. I remember being glad, in the first days of all, that I had no one in the army. It had once been thought of for Guy, and I thought, ‘what a good thing Guy is not a soldier’; and then I felt ashamed at my own selfishness, for other people were soldiers, who mattered really as much.
And now I thought, it seems dreadful to say it, but I thought,
‘How silly of Guy and Hugo!’
And I thought:
‘That is just the side of them that Walter doesn’t like—fantastic—out of touch with reality.’
And I thought:
‘It is play acting, a little bit, and I always denied they did that. It would be much better if Hugo got a sensible job at last, and if Guy stuck to his law; he was getting on very well.’
I was not anxious about them. I did not believe they would ever be sent out to fight. They were only in training now; they were in camp somewhere, Grandmother had said, Hugo in Essex, and Guy on Salisbury plain. I knew it took months to train soldiers, and they were officers; that took several years; the War would be over before they were ready to go out; that made it so silly. But I was disturbed and unhappy all the same.
When I got home I told Walter. I expected him to say too that it was foolish but he didn’t.
He was sitting at his writing-table in the study. He gave a sort of groan and buried his face in his hands.
‘We shall all have to go before it is done,’ he said, and then abruptly:
‘I don’t suppose I shall finish my book now—that is all wasted.’
My heart seemed to stand still. I felt as though I was in a nightmare suddenly trying to wake up; or as though I had woken up, very early, in the dark, and thought of death; a helpless desperate feeling, as though the earth were slipping away, as though one were going to fall into infinite space. . .and then I recovered; normality came back, and I was sure that Walter too was hysterical and unhinged.
I tried to laugh.
‘You are an old goose, Walter,’ I said, and I put my arm round him and kissed the top of his head.
He did not look up. He was looking straight in front of him.
He said:
‘I was thinking before you came in of the Germans who will be killed; of the German scholars. They are doing work which no one else has ever done. If German scholarship is stamped out, scholarship throughout Europe will die. My work is useless, if the Germans are killed.’
I said:
‘But the Germans areconscripts⸺’
It answered my own thought, not his, and I knew that, as soon as I had said it.
‘We may all be conscripts too, before we are done,’ he answered. ‘It will not matter much by then.’
I asked:
‘Do you think Guy and Hugo were quite right to go?’
And he nodded.
The next day I heard from Mollie that George had got a Commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and about a week later Freddy Furze joined a Welsh Regiment.
I wrote to Cousin Delia, and to Hugo, and to Guy. I meant to write to George too, but there was an interruption, I forget now what it was, and I put it off, and put it off again, and did not write at all in the end.
Cousin Delia answered me first.
‘Yes, they are both gone,’ she said, ‘they had to go; there was, of course, no choice. Guy will find something he has wanted, I believe. I am more afraid for Hugo,’ and then she gave me their addresses (though I had got them already from Grandmother) and said she would like to see me soon; nothing about the War, or what she felt about it all; that was like Cousin Delia too.
‘We have offered the house as a hospital, if they want it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they will. . .’
Guy’s letter, too, was like himself.
‘Dear Helen,’ hewrote,—
‘Many thanks for yours. Yes, here we are really in for it at last, or so it seems. I am having no end of a time at present. My men are simply topping; makes one proud of one’s country, and all that sort of thing, to see what its “men in the street” are like. Funny too, to be doing the thing in earnest now, after playing at it so often. We ought to get out fairly soon, as our battalion was nominally on a war footing before, but you never know. The beastly show may be over before we actually get there; I should be sorry to miss it all now I’ve got so far.’
‘Poor old Hugo doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself much, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he got out before us all the same. The best chance is to be drafted out into the regular battalions, I believe. You know George is down at Aldershot. I haven’t heard from him since he got there. . .’
Hugo did not write for ten days; then it was a long letter.
‘Dear Helen,—
‘I was glad to get your letter. I have wondered how the War took you. I am glad that you have stayed sane, and that you prefer your baby to the world. That is as it ought to be after all.
‘We have most of us lost our heads, and what will come of it all I don’t know. I feel a fraud drilling my wretched platoon, inspecting their kit, seeing if they have tooth-brushes, that they have polished their buttons, and mine too. I wonder what it is all for, what it will all lead to. We say “for King and Country”; we tell the poor beggars that, and they are as keen as mustard, most of them, like children playing at a game; only it is more than that, for they feel elated somehow, and raised out of themselves, at least some of them do—I did at first too, thought about being killed, and felt heroic. I don’t now; danger seems very remote and discomfort very present, and I can’t believe we shall ever get beyond this.
‘It is muddy here; all mud and flat dull fields, and when it rains, as it did last week, the wet comes through the roof, and we are uncomfortable and cross. It is an odd life. I don’t know what to talk about; the Colonel is a regular, and so is one Lieutenant; all the other officers are either recruits like me or Territorial Reserve. They seem keen about everything, and the battalion in particular, and they are most of them pleasant fellows enough, but they make one feel a fool, and I don’t like the way they talk; their values are so odd.
‘Guy is enjoying himself on Salisbury Plain. I haven’t heard from George lately.’
I could picture Hugo better after reading it. He was still alone, detached, half way between my attitude and Guy’s. I felt sorry for him in his wet tent, inspecting tooth-brushes.
Mrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’; ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts and bandages and socks.
She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.
I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a help to me at all to say more than that.
‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic to say anything like that.
‘When our own boys are fighting in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You surprise me, Helen.’
Maud was much worse. She was not content with praising our own Army and Navy, she kept on abusing the others. She came to stay with us in the Christmas holidays, and told a great many stories of German atrocities. In every case she would begin:
‘I know for a fact,’ or, ‘I have it on excellent authority’; but when I asked her how she knew, or on whose authority, she would get angry and did not explain.
She would say that the Germans must be taught a lesson. . . .
No civilized nation had ever behaved as they did. . .They were ‘unique in history.’
‘This policy of frightfulness is unparalleled,’ she said, ‘absolutely unparalleled. They have forfeited their right to existence as an independent nation.’
She had dismissed the German teacher in her school, and two little German girls were excluded also. ‘Feeling runs too high,’ she said. ‘I could not, in the circumstances, countenance their remaining. I hope that German will be a dead language before long.’
Autumn passed into winter. The fall of Antwerp; escape of theGoebenandBreslau; Declaration of War with Turkey; the bombardment of Scarborough and West Hartlepool these were landmarks in the sea of events.
People had begun to accept the War as a natural state, to cease expecting a sudden dramatic finish.
Mollie finished her three months’ training, and was drafted to a War Hospital in Wales. She came to see me before she went. She was serious and intent.
‘I wish I could do more,’ she said. ‘I hate to be safe, when the others are in danger, don’t you feel that, Helen? I do hope they will send me to the front.’
I said:
‘You are doing much more than I am. You are in it, not outside, like me.’
Mollie said:
‘Yes. I am sorry for you, Helen. It must be terrible for you to be outside, and not able to help. Of course you can’t,’ she added quickly, ‘your work is just as important really, more perhaps,’ and she smiled her delightful smile that was like George’s.
‘I feel,’ she went on earnestly, ‘that I can never do enough, if I worked myself to the bone, when I think what the men out there are going through already; what is waiting for George, and Guy, and Hugo, when they go out. It seems horrible to me to sit safe at home when they go, just nursing in a hospital.’
I said:
‘It will be pretty ghastly in a hospital if the War goes on,’ and I was surprised at myself; I had not thought consciously about the wounded men before.
Mollie shuddered.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I have seen some of it already. There were some my first month—blinded—it seemed so soon.’
And I thought:
‘Could Hugo be blinded?’
I was glad to have seen Mollie. She brought the War home to me more clearly than anything else had done. She understood what it meant, how dreadful it was, and yet she was sane. I wondered if I could help in a Hospital too; but I was nursing Eleanor still, and very much tied.
I went for a time with Mrs. Sebright and sewed shirts; then I did bandages myself, at home, instead.
In January, Guy crossed to France; George Addington sailed for Gallipoli in April; Hugo’s battalion went out as a reinforcement in the second battle of Ypres.
I did not see any of them before they went.
That Easter we went away for a week. Walter was so tired, I was anxious about him. He had extra work at the University, for several of the lecturers had gone to the War, the young unmarried ones, and he was working at his book on inscriptions as well, in the evenings chiefly. He would go straight upstairs to the study after dinner and work till late.
‘I may not have time to finish it,’ was all he said when I urged him not to. ‘I must work while I can.’
We went up to the Wall. The weather was bad, and Walter could not leave the War behind him; he seemed obsessed by it; he could talk of nothing else all the time.
I tried to cheer him up, to tease him a little, and make fun and play as we used to at first; he had liked me to before, but he did not care for it now. He smiled rather absently, and turned back to his book; when he spoke it was only of the advance in Gallipoli.
I felt that it was my fault that I could not cheer him up. I could not feel gay myself; I could not make spontaneous fun, and so it was no good, and I worried about my baby, left for the first time. I kept imagining disasters that were not probable at all. One night I woke up in a fright, and thought that the nurse might have left the tap of the gas fire half on, and the gas be escaping; and another time, I thought that a cat might have jumped into the cot, and the nurse not noticed it. I was jumpy and nervy, I knew it, and so no use to Walter. I thought about Hugo and Guy in France, and George in Gallipoli; and that made it worse.
We sat one day on the hill-side beyond the Wall, where we had often sat before, and looked out to the North. We could see the place when we had walked together, that first day when we had met at the camp and I had gone down with Walter, into the barbarians’ country. It seemed a long time ago. I remembered how exciting it had been, and how I had felt that I had begun to know Walter, and understand him. I knew him much better now, but did I understand him? I slipped my hand through his arm and laid my cheek against his.
‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened to us both? Why are we so dull and sad?’
Walter looked round at me slowly.
‘We are tired, I think,’ he said. ‘That is all and we can’t rest; nobody can rest just now.’
I stroked his hand, I remember; I felt very sorry for Walter; I felt that, perhaps, I had not thought of him enough, in thinking of Eleanor so much. He looked so tired and unhappy now.
‘It would be easier for you if you could fight,’ I said.
He flushed and looked away.
‘I know,’ he said shortly, ‘it would, but I can’t.’
I was astonished at the sharpness of his tone.
I said:
‘Of course not, Walter, nobody thought of it.’
He said:
‘I have.’
And I felt a cold shiver run through me. I had not thought of it, and yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, this terror had been there. I held my breath and waited. I could hear the sheep cropping the rough grass a hundred yards away.
Then I said:
‘Yes? Do you really want to go?’
And Walter nodded his head.
‘I would give anything to go,’ he said intensely. ‘When Harland was coming home last week a girl gave him a white feather.’
I tried to laugh:
‘But that is absurd,’ I said. ‘Surely he didn’t mind?’
‘He did mind,’ said Walter.
He kept his eyes to the ground; he was tearing up the grass into little tufts and throwing it away.
‘I don’t suppose I should be any use even if I wasn’t married,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they would pass me at the Medical Board, but I hate to stay behind! It makes me ashamed of myself, and I am not used to feeling ashamed.’
I tried to think clearly and dispassionately, but I couldn’t. My impulse was to plead with him, to implore him not to leave me, not to go to the War, but I checked it. I felt that he would go, that it was inevitable, that I had known all the time that he would, and that I could do nothing.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘it seems to me almost braver not to go; just to go on doing dull essential work, that somebody must do. All the sentiment and enthusiasm goes to soldiers, but “they also serve”. . .?’ I felt sobs in my throat. I stopped short.
Walter said:
‘Yes, I know that too; I know I ought to stay; that my duty is with you, and my mother; I am not free to choose, but even my students are going, and those friends of yours have gone.’
I said:
‘That was different; they were not married,’ and then I thought of Cousin Delia, and Mollie.
‘Dear, I won’t keep you if you want to go,’ I said, and I suddenly cried.
He put his arms round me and kissed me, again and again.
‘I know you wouldn’t, my darling,’ he said, ‘but I can’t go.’
And I felt him nearer and more precious than before, and I thought he felt me so.
‘My poor, poor dear,’ he said, ‘if only the War would end soon.’
And I said:
‘It must end soon. I am sure it will.’
Walter said we must cut down expenses, and put all possible money into War Loan. It was the least we could do, he said. So Eleanor’s nurse was dismissed. I would look after Eleanor myself; I was glad to do something definite, and enjoyed looking after my baby for a time.
It was a wet summer; from all sides came complaints of the floods; crops ruined, cattle drowned, people suffering already from the strain and anxiety of war longed in vain for sunshine and kindly weather.
‘It is the guns,’ they said, ‘the big guns cause the rain.’
Rachel was coming now. I tried to look forward to her as I had to Eleanor, but I could not. I thought again and again:
‘How shall I manage two children, who am so pressed with one?’
Eleanor would wake up early in the morning; she would talk and jump and keep us both awake, and she was getting very heavy to push in her perambulator. By the end of the day I was very tired. When she was in bed I could not think or read; I would drop down on the sofa and wait for Walter to come home.
I thought:
‘It cannot go on much longer now; it is bound to end very soon.’
In October Walter volunteered under the Derby scheme. He told me before he went out that he should not be taken.
‘I know they will not pass me,’ he said. ‘I know I am a crock’; but his voice was excited, and his eyes very bright. I knew that he hoped, in spite of what he said, that he might be taken.
All that afternoon while he was out at the Recruiting Office I sat indoors with Eleanor and tried to sew. It was a wet afternoon, and I could not face the heavy perambulator walk, pushing up hill to the Heath through the mud and rain.
I sat in the nursery with her, and she played on the floor. She had a cart on wheels that she pushed up and down, the wheels squeaked; I remembered that I had meant to oil them, but the oilcan was downstairs in the kitchen. I was too tired to go down and fetch it, and come back up all the stairs.
Eleanor made a great deal of noise; she upset chairs, and banged on the floor with bricks; she unwound reels of cotton, with which I was trying to sew; then she upset a bowl of flowers, and I had to go down to the bathroom and fetch a towel; and she screamed and screamed, though I had not scolded her at all. Her shrill, piping little voice pierced through my head like needles. I felt that I must scream or hit her, if she would not be quiet.
Then I thought:
‘How horrible that I should feel like this about my baby! I should not have believed, a year ago, that I could feel like this.’
At six o’clock, Walter came in.
I stood up and waited. I heard the front door slam, and then I heard him moving about in the hall. He opened the drawing-room door and looked in, and then I heard him coming up the stairs.
He opened the nursery door and stood still in the door way; and I stood still too, and looked at him.
There was an odd confused expression on his face that I could not make out. I did not know if he was glad or sorry; relieved or disappointed. He came in and threw a bunch of papers on the table in front of me.
‘C3!’ he said, with a laugh. ‘We need not have bothered!’ and it seemed to me as though my heart had stopped beating, and now suddenly it began with a rush.
And I said:
‘Oh, Walter, are you sorry?’
He sat down in the chair beside him, and faced me across the table.
He said:
‘Sorry? I don’t know; nobody likes to be C3, I suppose. Thank you for nothing—that is aboutall⸺’
I said:
‘I can’t be sorry. I can only be glad,’ and I put out both my hands to him, across the table.
‘It isn’t your fault,’ I said, ‘you have done your best. I think I may be glad.’
His eyes were fixed on the table, and he did not answer me; then he pulled his hands away, and buried his face.
‘I am not sorry either,’ he said huskily, ‘that is what is so awful. I thought I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to prove, to myself and every one else, that I could fight, and be a fine fellow. I made myself believe it, but it wasn’t true. I know now that I was afraid all the time!’
I went round beside him and kneeled on the floor and I leaned my cheek against his arm. I felt as though he were a child, as though he were much younger than me, and weaker, as I used sometimes to feel with Hugo, when we were children.
I said:
‘Dearest, does that matter? Isn’t every one afraid? It is the people who are afraid and go, that are the bravest; and you tried to go.’
He said:
‘Yes; but I haven’t gone. I don’t suppose now that I shall.’
Eleanor pushed herself against his knees.
She called:
‘Dadda, Dadda,’ and beat him with her brick.
At last he noticed her and picked her up on to his knee.
‘Well, Baby,’ he said, ‘are you glad that Dadda is not going to the War?’
‘Dadda dee-ar,’ Eleanor repeated; she laughed and grabbed at his glasses.
Walter put her down again and she began to scream.
Walter put his hands to his head and stood up.
‘Do make her be quiet, Helen,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the noise.’
I tried to quiet Eleanor, but she went on crying. Walter made for the door, distractedly, and went out.
When at last I had pacified Eleanor, I sat down again in my chair and tried to think; but I could not. It seemed to me then, that I was too tired even to realize my own relief. I felt numb and stupid.
Then Eleanor stumbled over a footstool, and fell, and again she began to scream. I looked at the clock on the chimney-piece; it was bedtime, past bedtime. I picked Eleanor up, but she was angry; she kicked me, and went quite stiff. I struggled with her and carried her off to bed.
Walter got work at the Admiralty. He deciphered telegrams. He went there immediately after breakfast, and did not come home till eight or half-past eight. He made a point of arriving sooner than the other people in his room, and of leaving after they did. He was paid much less than his University salary, and that he would not take.
His College offered to pay him some proportion of his salary while he was at Government work, but he refused it.
‘It is the least I can do,’ he said. ‘Other men have to leave their work, whatever it is, and lose everything. We must manage to live more cheaply.’
We decided to do without the gardener who came one day a week; I said that I would keep the garden tidy.
Walter said he would dig on Sundays.
Just after Christmas Guy was wounded, and came home for six weeks. He was shot in the shoulder; it was not dangerous. He was sent to a hospital at Southampton. Cousin John applied for leave to have him at Yearsly, a private hospital now, but that was against the regulations.
Cousin Delia went down to Southampton and stayed in an hotel. I went down to see him one day, before he went back.
He was sitting with Cousin Delia, and his arm was in a sling. They were in a little room with a balcony looking out on to the sea. Guy was laughing when I came in I saw his face sideways against the light, and I thought:
‘How dear he is, and how just the same as before.’ I don’t know why exactly, but I had been afraid of his seeming different.
We had tea together, Cousin Delia and Guy and I, and we were very happy. The War seemed a long way off; we did not talk about it. Guy had another month ahead of him before he need go back. He went to Yearsly at the end of his leave; he had a fortnight there, but I did not see him again that time.
Maud was running a Canteen at the Station at Lessingham.
Troop trains came through there every day, and very often at night. She took the night shifts as a rule, and did her school work by day. That was like Walter.
‘One likes to do one’s bit, you know,’ she said.
She talked a great deal about the ‘Tommies.’ What fine fellows they were; what splendid single-hearted fellows. It was true no doubt, and any way, even if they were not, it was a good thing to give them cakes and hot coffee; they were unfortunate enough, poor things, and I admired Maud for her work for them, and yet somehow, when she praised them, I wanted to run them down. I felt so sure that she did not understand in the least what they were like; difficult, intricate creatures, part noble, part ignoble, just as we all are; some brave, some cowardly, some understanding what they were doing, others not understanding at all; and Maud lumped them all together as ‘fine fellows,’ just because they were English soldiers, and we were at War; and I knew she would have called them that, whatever they were like.
Miss Mix used to visit the wounded soldiers in the London Hospital; she read to them, and wrote letters for them, and she took blinded soldiers out for walks. Good old Miss Mix; she too thought them all splendid, but it was quite different with her.
She said to me one day:
‘They have all done what I could not do. They have been through things I know I could not stand; and it is partly for my sake, for lots of old women like me, who seem not much use in the world, that they have done it; and it makes me very grateful to them, that is all I know.’
I went with Miss Mix several times, and wrote letters and read to them too, but I could not leave Eleanor much, now I had no nurse. Louise took her out for me then, but after Christmas Louise left us, and went into a Munition factory, and for several weeks I could get no one in her place. When I got another maid, she was very incompetent, and Sarah, the cook, did not like her at all. They quarrelled, and complained about each other a great deal; and then Sarah gave notice. She too went to work at Munitions; it was natural, I suppose, for they earned much higher wages. Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, cooked for us for a time, and at last I got a cook who was very old and deaf, and could not cook very much; but I was glad to get her, and she stayed for some time.
There was no time to do anything else while this was going on. I did part of the housework even then, for the old cook couldn’t, and the young maid was very slow. I did it badly, and it took me, too, a long time. I hated the housework; I hated the brooms and dusters; dreamed about them at night; and about the kitchen sink, where I had helped to wash up, while we had no cook. The brooms were kept in the bathroom, for we had no other place to keep them. There were pegs for them there to hang on, and a shelf I for polishes and dusters. I began to hate the bathroom too. It was a squalid bathroom, with a painted bath, that was painted green, and was chipped.
We had meant to put in a new bath, later on; but now of course we could not. The green bath worried me, and the paint wearing off; it seemed to get worse week by week, and the wall where the brushes hung was dirty.
Walter worked always in the evenings now. It was the only time he got for working at his book.
‘If I leave that altogether,’ he said, ‘I can’t live. It is the only thing that takes me away from the War.’
While he worked in his study, I sat downstairs and sewed. There was always mending to be done, and I mended. I did not mend well either; it seemed to me, at this time, that I could do nothing well.
And then, at the end of March, George Addington was killed.
I heard the news from Mollie, in a letter. The letter came at midday, by an unusual post, and I thought:
‘A letter from Mollie. How nice to hear from her!’
And I took it upstairs with me to read. Eleanor was asleep in her pram.
I sat down on my bed, and opened the letter. I thought of Mollie and how much I should like to see her.
‘George was killed on Wednesday,’ she wrote. ‘Shot through the head, leading an attack. He was killed instantaneously, and probably did not know that he was hit. I have had a telegram, that is all, from the War Office. It will be a long time before I can hear any more; three weeks at least, the letters take from there.
‘I can’t believe he is dead. It seems so strange, that one knew nothing about it on Wednesday, that one had no dream, no premonition nor anything. Oh, Helen, I wrote to him yesterday, and he was dead already⸺I should be glad, I know, that he was killed at once. It would be worse, much worse, if he were wounded and missing, as it might well have been; I keep telling myself that. I have written to Hugo at Ypres, to tell him of it. He will be badly cut up, I am afraid. He loved George very dearly; but he is bound to know soon; and to Guy too. I wish for Hugo’s sake, they were together.’
I sat a long time with the letter in my hand. I had not expected this, I had not somehow envisaged it at all. It seemed to me impossible, and not to be borne.
‘George dead! George killed!’ I repeated the words over and over to myself, and they had no meaning; and then I thought:
‘I shall never see George any more; never as long as I live; no one will see him any more.’
And then I thought:
‘I was unkind to George.’
I thought of George as I had last seen him, on the doorstep at Campden Hill Square. How he had come out with us, to say good-bye, and how he had smiled, that wide delightful smile, and yet he had looked sad; and how I had wondered what was the matter, and whether he had known the War would come.
And then I had not written to him when he joined the Army. I had written to Hugo, and to Guy, but not to him. I had meant to, of course. I had kept on meaning to, and putting it off, and then it had been too late.
I had written since, of course; I had written twice, and sent him a parcel of food; but that was not enough in a year and a half, I had meant to write oftener; he had said he enjoyed getting letters; I had meant to write regularly, but I was always bad at writing letters, and little things had got in the way.
Eleanor was asleep in the garden in her perambulator. I left her and went out; up the road, towards the Heath.
The road seemed full of soldiers, blue wounded soldiers. All roads were full of them at this time and when I came nearer I saw that they were blind. I dreaded the blinded soldiers; I hated to see them, for I had an idea, somehow, I don’t know why, that Hugo might be blinded. I passed the blinded soldiers, and got beyond them to the Heath. The trees were coming out; light green buds on the branches; and there were crocuses in the grass.
The sun came down through the branches, and shone on the crocuses. It was a fine day, and warm for March. I sat on a seat, and thought about George, and I thought:
‘It is all very well for the flowers, and for the buds on the trees; they come again after the winter; they are born again. There will be other boys growing up, and other men, but never George again. If the world goes on for millions of years, there will never be anyone who is what he was.’
And a sense of wild anger and indignation possessed me. I felt:
‘This is wrong and wicked and a horrible mistake, this War that has killed George. What is it worth? What is it for? What can it ever achieve that will make up for him?’
And I felt:
‘It must be stopped. I have been asleep and woken up. I can’t let this War go on that has killed George.’
‘George killed! Georgedead!’ I repeated the words again. I felt as though the world had begun to reel, as though the foundations of my life had begun to crumble.
‘What next?
Guy too and Hugo. . . .’The encroaching reality of the War struck through my last defences. I felt that I understood what it was, for the first time.
A clock in a church struck one, and I went home again. Eleanor would be waking up; she would be crying for me. I must hurry; I would be late, and all the way home I was thinking:
‘What can I do? I must do something to stop this War.’
Eleanor was awake and screaming. I went to her and got her up from her perambulator, and washed her, and gave her her dinner; and after dinner, I dressed her to go out, and put her back in the perambulator, and pushed her out on to the Heath. I had no time to think any more, for she kept talking to me in her insistent baby way, that in my heart I loved, but to-day, I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to get away somewhere and think. I felt excited, elated, somehow, as though I had discovered a truth of immense importance; something that was the key to all our trouble.
‘The War must be stopped. We must stop it now.’
The words kept repeating themselves through my head all the afternoon, and I felt that in a moment, if only I could get away by myself and be quiet, I should know how this could be done.
When Eleanor was in bed I could be quiet, and think about it. It would not be long now till she was in bed.
And then when I got her into bed, Walter came home.
He was unusually early, more than an hour before his time. He had such a headache, he said, he could not work any longer, and so he had come home. I was up in our bedroom when he came in, tucking Eleanor up. I sang to her always when she was in bed. She did not understand very much what I sang, so I sang all sorts of songs, and to-night I was singing theAgnus Deithat Guy and Cousin Delia used to sing. It seemed to fit in with what I felt to-night; the sins of the world; our sins; and the hope that help was at hand.
Walter came in heavily, and sat down on the bed.
‘Daddy came,’ said Eleanor, and popped up her head.
I looked round at Walter, surprised to see him there so soon. And then he told me about his headache. I could not take in what he said; it seemed unimportant and trivial; little things about some one a long way off.
I said:
‘George is killed,’ and stood looking at him, across Eleanor’s little cot.
He drew in his breath sharply, and put his hands up to his head. That was a gesture of his, familiar to me now.
I gave him Mollie’s letter, and he read it in silence.
‘For you’—he said at last, ‘and forme⸺’
And he dropped his hands limply on his knee.
I was astonished at the expression of acute personal sorrow on his face; he had not seemed to care much for George when he was alive. I went across to him, and sat beside him on the bed. I stroked his shoulder, I know, and tried to console him. I don’t know what I said. It happened like this so often now; these fits of despondency, almost of remorse, and my attempts to encourage him. It had become in a sense automatic. It seemed to me, at times, that I had no more to give; that I was drawing water from a well that was dry; but to-night it was different; I felt somehow beyond all that. I did not speak to him of my conviction, of what I felt myself about George, and George’s death. It was no use speaking to Walter of things like that, I knew.
We went to bed early on account of Walter’s headache. I, too, was glad to go.
‘Now I can be quiet and think,’ I said to myself.
And I lay awake a long time after Walter was asleep and looked up into the darkness.
And I thought:
‘What is it I must do? What is it I am just going to understand?’
It was very quiet in our road. There was no sound of traffic; only a dog in a garden not far off barked for a little while, and a cat called somewhere from a roof. A taxi hooted turning a corner at the end of the road, then it changed gear for going up the hill; there was a grating, grinding noise as it changed gear, and then that passed out of hearing. Some one walked past on the pavement, a man it seemed to be, walking very fast. Then again there were cats, and again a taxi horn, and after that for a long time, it was quite quiet.
And as I lay still and listened to the noises in the night, all my excitement seemed to ebb away, and I understood that I had discovered nothing, and that there was nothing I could do.
I could not stop the War, and nobody could. We were caught in it all of us, all nations, all people in the nations; it would go on, and more and more people would be killed; hundreds and thousands of people would be killed every day, and I could do nothing at all, and I understood too that George was dead, and that I had loved him dearly, and that he who was so full of promise, such a fine, splendid nature, would do nothing with his life; he was just at the beginning, and there would be no more.