XVII

A pencilled scrawl despatched from a mushroom camp in the Home Counties told Edith Haynes that William was at last a soldier; it was brief, written shakily by a man tired in body but uplifted in spirit, informed her that he had just been absorbed into a London battalion, that he had not yet got his uniform, was sleeping in a barn and drilling hard and concluded with the words “Thank God!” She answered the scrawl by return of post and a few weeks later, hearing nothing, wrote again; but, in spite of her request for further news, for month after month she waited in vain for a successor to the shaky scribble.

When it came the war had been in progress a couple of years and the address was a procession of letters⁠—whereof the three last were the B.E.F. that denoted service over-Channel. It was a restrained and correct little letter, on the face of it uninteresting and not much longer than the last, but differing from it in that it was written in ink and in the tidy, clerical hand which William had acquired in the days of his boyhood for the use of the insurance office. It expressed regret for his lengthy silence, but did not attempt to explain it; and went on to relate that before coming to France he had been an orderly-room clerk, that he was at present at an advanced base⁠—he must not of course give its name⁠—where he was employed in office work, principally the typewriting of letters. It concluded with an assurance that he had not forgotten her kindness and a hope she would write to him again⁠ ⁠… and she read and reread the polite little missive, half-guessing what lay between its lines.

It had been written in an interval of that typing of local official communications which was Private Tully’s daily contribution to the waging of the European War; and it had not been written earlier because Private Tully was too sullen of heart to write.

For a few weeks only he had known what it was to be a soldier of England in the making; he had drilled, he had marched, he had learned to hold a rifle and his body had ached with the discipline. He had lain down at night so weary that he could not sleep, and he had risen giddily in the morning in fear of the day that was coming. Other men filled out and hardened with their training, grew healthy, muscular and brown⁠—and he set his teeth and argued with himself that this stage of sick exhaustion was only a stage and in time he would be even as they. What he lacked in strength he made up in fiery willingness, overtaxing his energy by dogged efforts to keep level with broader shouldered, tighter muscled men, and steadfastly refusing to admit that his bodily misery was more than a passing discomfort. More than once a good-natured comrade suggested a visit to the doctor⁠—whereat William would flush as at an insult and turn on the meddler almost savagely.

He held on longer than he could have done unaided, by virtue of much kindly help. Once, in a sudden need for sympathy he had told to one of his fellows the story of Griselda and his own conversion to militarism; and, unknown to himself, the story went the round of his mess. From the beginning the men had treated him with the instinctive kindness that the stronger feels for the weakling, but from that time forth their kindness was more than instinctive; they ranged themselves tacitly on the weakling’s side in his struggle with his own deficiencies. Little odd jobs of cleaning and furbishing were done for him⁠—often secretly, he knew not by whom⁠—and no man was ever too weary to take on work that would spare him. They were in a conspiracy to save him from blunders⁠—to warn him or shield him from consequences, and as far as camp life permitted they coddled him, with something of the sweet roughness wherewith Nelson was coddled by his captains.

All the same, and in spite of coddling, the breakdown came as it was bound to do in the end; the doctor who refused had been wiser than the man who passed him. There was nothing urgently or seriously wrong with his health; but he was not made soundly enough to stand the violent and sudden change from a sedentary life to a life of unceasing exertion. He had never taken much out-of-door exercise; had always trained or bussed it rather than travel afoot; and of late his days had been spent entirely between the four walls of his Camden Town sitting-room.

It was on the homeward stretch of a route march that his strength failed him suddenly and he knew that he could do no more; his pack was a mountain, his body was an ache, and a blackness closed upon his eyes. He fought very gallantly to save himself and, by the dogged effort of his will, kept going for a few minutes more. “I can do ten steps,” he told himself and counted each step as he took it; then, the first ten accomplished, “Now I can do ten more.” So he kept going for a few yards more and dragged foot after foot till he had reached the tale of two hundred; at which point⁠—twenty tens⁠—he staggered, fell out of the ranks in a faint and was brought back to camp on a stretcher.

That was the end of his soldiering with pack and rifle; from the day of his breakdown on the route march his platoon knew him no more and when he came out of hospital, some three weeks later, he was put on to clerical duties. As orderly-room clerk he handled a typewriter instead of a bayonet, and handled it steadily as the months lengthened into years. Others, his contemporaries, completed their training, left the camp, and went off to the front; he remained, at first savagely resentful and later sullenly resigned.

His conception of soldiering, derived as it was from his own brief and fiery experience in Belgium, from the descriptive articles of war correspondents and his reading of bygone campaigns, had never included the soldier who was merely a clerk. He had never realized that a man in uniform was not necessarily a man of blood; the revelation came to him only when he copied letters and routine orders, filed papers and, for all practical purposes, was back at his desk in the insurance office. His daily duties mocked and derided the hopes and ambitions wherewith he had joined the Army; and, ticking at his typewriter, he contrasted, half-ashamedly, the blank reality with the strenuous and highly coloured dream. One phase of that dream⁠—inspiring then, ridiculous now⁠—had shown him to himself as the hero of some bloody enterprise and the central figure of such a scene as he had read of in Napoleonic history; a scene of be-medalling and public praise in token of duty bravely done. He had pictured it often, awake and asleep⁠ ⁠… and fancied Griselda looking down.

Slowly, under the benumbing influence of office routine, his revengeful ambitions faded, and with them his half-acknowledged hope of emulating Murat and Augereau. His interest in the war had been fundamentally a personal interest, and though there had grown up in him, by force of circumstance, a tardy consciousness of his Englishry, it was hardly strong enough to inspire him with pride in a humble and wearisome duty done in the name of England. Be it said in excuse for him that few men could feel pride in the labour of dealing with daily official communications⁠—the duty of copying out vain repetitions and assisting in the waste of good paper. The stilted uselessness of half the documents was evident even to William; and there were moments when he told himself, in savage discontent, that he would have been less unprofitable in civilian idleness than busied in promoting futility.

For a time he was jolted out of his rut by his transfer to France in the August of 1916. He was drafted out, at a few hours’ notice, with a batch of men destined for clerical duties, and found himself planted in a small French town round which camps were spreading in a fringe of tent and hutment, and where house after house was being rapidly annexed for the service of the British Army. But, save for change of scene and country, the new rut into which he had been jolted was twin to his old rut in England. It was the same clerk’s life⁠—this time in the office of a military department⁠—but with longer and more irregular hours than fall to the lot of the ordinary civilian clerk, and with restrictions on personal freedom unknown since his days in the City. The Army kept him as tightly as his straitlaced mother; demanded as regular hours and refused, as steadfastly as she had done, to let him wander o’ nights.

He filed, he copied, he ate his rations⁠—and from the beaten track of his everyday life, the war seemed very far away. Sometimes in his off-hours, afternoon or evening, he would tramp up the hills that held the little town as in a cup to a point where, looking eastward, he could see the sudden flashes of the guns. The bright, fierce flashes in the evening sky were war, real war made visible and wickedly beautiful; such war as he had seen in the Ardennes village, and such as he had dreamed of fighting when he first donned his khaki tunic. And instead a chair and a typewriter in the Rue Ernest Dupont, the papers to be filed that a girl might have filed, the round of safe and disciplined monotony. That was war as he knew it: an office with flashes in the distance.

For a few days after his arrival in France his new surroundings interested him⁠—the cobbled roads, the build of the houses, the sound of French in the streets; but once their strangeness had worn off he accepted and ceased to notice them. He was not sufficiently educated, sufficiently imaginative or observant, to take at anything beyond their face-value the various and incongruous types of humanity with which he was brought into contact. The strange life of Northern France affected him only where it touched him personally, and to him the sight of a turbaned brown trooper bargaining in the marketplace with a swift-spoken, bareheaded Frenchwoman was an oddity and nothing more; just as the flamboyant façade of the great church of St. Nicholas was an oddity, a building unlike, in its mass and its detail of statuary, to the churches he knew of in London. He came across many such oddities⁠—and having no meaning for him, they made but a passing impression. After a week or two he no longer turned his head at the sight of a gang of Annamite labourers or the passing of a detachment of heavy-booted German prisoners marched campwards at the end of their day; these things, like the ambulances crawling in a convoy from the station, like the shuttered French houses built squarely round courtyards, became part of the background of his daily life and he ceased to wonder or reflect on them. Perhaps his contact with alien races, with strange buildings and habits once unknown, may have increased his vague sense of the impossibility of fitting all men to one pattern, and of solving the problems of human misgovernment and government by means of the simple and sweeping expedients he had once been so glib in upholding; but on the whole it left him unaffected because little interested. His course of Free Library reading had placed him in possession of certain scattered facts concerning France, facts dealing chiefly with the First Napoleon and the German War of 1870; but for all the hot interest they had stirred in him once, they gave him small insight into the forces that had gone to the making of the country in which his life was spent wearily. He was lacking entirely in the historical sense, the sense that makes dead men alive; thus, in connection with the doings of present-day Frenchmen, his odds and ends of historical reading had little more meaning to him than the Late Gothic carving on the ornate portal of St. Nicholas.

The phase of warfare with which France familiarized him was not only secure and uneventful; as far as the native was concerned it was likewise prosperous. The town where he plodded through his daily toil was blessed as never before in the matter of trade and turnover; commercially it blossomed and bore good fruit in the deadly shade of the upas tree. The camps and the offices meant custom to its citizens, and, whatever the toll in the blood of its sons, it gained in its pocket by the war. The Germans, in 1914, had threatened but barely entered it; it had neither damage to repair nor extorted indemnity to recoup, and money flowed freely to the palms of its inhabitants from the pockets of the British soldier. Its neighbours, a few miles away, lay in hopeless ruin, their industries annihilated, their inhabitants scattered, their very outlines untraceable⁠—beaten to death by that same chance of war which had spared the city in the cup of the hills and exalted her financial horn. Here were neither misery nor shell-holes; the local shopkeeper was solidly content, the local innkeeper banked cheerfully and often, the local farmer sold his produce to advantage and the volume of trade in the district expanded and burst new channels. Eating-houses broke out into English announcements concerning eggs, fried potatoes, and vegetables; English newspapers were plentiful as French in the shops and small boys cried them in the streets; and when the weekly market gathered in the shadow of St. Nicholas, to the stalls for hardware, fruit and cheap finery were added the stalls that did a roaring business in “souvenirs” for the English markets.

His days were steadfastly regular and steadfastly monotonous. Each morning by half-past eight he was seated in the office in the Rue Ernest Dupont; in a roomy house, most provincially French, built round a paved courtyard and entered from the street by an archway. A projecting board at the side of the archway bore the accumulation of letters which denoted the department by which the house had been annexed, and on the door of the room where William laboured was the legend “Letters and Enquiries.” At half-past twelve he knocked off for dinner and was his own master till three; then the office again till supper and after supper⁠—with good luck till ten, with bad luck indefinite overtime. On Sundays he was his own master for the space of an afternoon, and now and again there were parades and now and again the “late pass” that entitled to an evening at liberty. When he first arrived he was fed and roofed in one of the camps on the borders of the little city; later, with half-a-dozen fellows, he slept and messed in the upper rooms of the building in which he did his daily work.⁠ ⁠… It was a life of bleak order and meticulous, safe regularity, poles apart from his civilian forecast of the doings of a man of war. There was small thrill of personal danger about its soldiering; the little city at the “Front” was far less exposed to the malice of enemies than London or the East Coast of England: and almost the only indication of possible peril was the occasional printed notice displayed in a citizen’s window to the effect that within was a cellar “at the disposition of the public in case of alarm”⁠—from aircraft. Once or twice during the first year that William dwelt there the antiaircraft section grew clamorous on its hills and spat loudly at specks in the blue⁠—which, after a few minutes, receded to the east while the city settled down without injury. The men in the town and quartered in the camps outside it were for the most part office-workers, men of the A.S.C., of Labour companies or Veterinary service; to whom the monotony of daily existence was a deadlier foe than the German.

His life had been unusually clean; partly, no doubt, from inclination to cleanliness, but partly through influence of circumstance. While his mother lived he had small opportunity for dissipation even of the mildest variety; and hard on her death had come the great new interests which his friendship with Faraday opened to him. Those interests had been so engrossing that he had little energy to spare from them; all his hopes and pleasures were bound up in his “causes,” and the very violence of his political enthusiasms had saved him from physical temptation. Thus he had come to Griselda heart-whole and sound, and, even when his causes and his wife were lost, the habit of years still clung to him and the follies that came easily to others would have needed an effort in him.

Once or twice, in the soddenness of his discontent, he was tempted to turn to the gross pleasures of drink and worse in which others found distraction from their dullness; but the temptation was never an urgent one and there was no great merit in his resistance. One night he overdrank himself in a deliberate attempt at forgetfulness⁠—whereupon he was violently sick, crawled to bed throbbing with headache, and did not repeat the experience.

He felt himself drifting mentally, and, to his credit, made efforts to save himself; tried to awaken an interest in the French language, bought a dictionary and phrase-book and attended biweekly classes in a neighbouring Y.M.C.A. hut. He spent a certain amount of his leisure in the Y.M.C.A. hut; borrowing books from its library, listening to its concerts, and now and again making one at a game of draughts. He made no real friends⁠—probably because he was not in the mood for making any; with his comrades of the office he got on well enough, but there was no such tie between him and them as had existed between him and the men of his mess in the days when he first donned his uniform. The hope deferred that had sickened his heart had driven him in upon himself; then his desk-work was obviously well within his powers and outwardly there was nothing about him to call for special sympathy and kindliness. His fellows mostly looked on him as a harmless, uncompanionable chap who preferred to be left to himself.

By degrees William Tully was moulded to the narrow little life departmental and lived through its duties and hours of leisure taking not much thought for the morrow; in the Rue Ernest Dupont the war seemed much smaller, much farther away, than it had seemed at home in England, and, absorbed in its minor machinery, he could no longer consider it as a whole. The office and the daily details of the office, the companions he worked with, disliked and liked, loomed larger in his eyes than the crash of armies or the doings of men at the front. As a civilian he had wrestled with strategy and pored over maps; as a soldier of England he could not see the wood for the trees. And if he did not fall mentally to the level of that species of surgeon to whom war is an agency for the provision of interesting cases, it was merely because, unlike the surgeon, he had little enthusiasm for his work.

Inevitably, with the passing of month after month, the memory of Griselda grew less poignant; and with the soothing of his sense of loss there came about, also inevitably, a cooling of his fury for instant and personal revenge. He had not forgiven and would never forget, but he no longer agonized at his helplessness to strike a blow; in part, perhaps, because the discipline under which he lived had weakened his power of initiative. Though he chafed under discipline he learned to depend on it and became accustomed to the daily ordering of his life; and his early training in the insurance office stood him in good stead, so that he performed his duties with the necessary efficiency and smartness.⁠ ⁠… What remained with him, long after the memory of his dead wife had ceased to be an ever-present wound, was the sense of having been fooled by he knew not whom, of having been trapped and held by false pretences. The fact that his grievance was vague did not lessen its bitterness; it lay too deep for the grousing that he heard from others, and for the most he nursed it in silence, the silence of smouldering rebellion.

There were moments when his face must have been more communicative than his tongue; for one Sunday, an early spring Sunday as he sat on a hill above the town and stared vaguely at the skyline, a man addressed him with, “Are you feeling like that, mate?” and squatted on the grass beside him: a lean young man with a worn brown face⁠—deeply lined on the forehead and with eyes, like a sailor’s, accustomed to looking at distances.

“I’m like it myself,” he went on without waiting for an answer, and stretched himself out on to his elbow. “These last few days it’s been almost beyond holding in; it’s the spring, I suppose, the good road weather and the sun. I don’t mind it so much when there’s mud and the country doesn’t grin at you; I can stand it well enough then.”

Lying stretched on his elbow he began to talk about himself. He was English-born and he had begun his career at a desk⁠—staying there just long enough to save up his fare and a few pounds to start him in Canada. After that came a farm⁠—to his thinking but a shade less narrow than the office; to be left for the rolling, the shifting life, the only life worth living. He had had his ups, he had had his downs⁠—but always with his eyes on the distance. Ten fine years of it, American, African, Australian; the life independent where you shouldered your pack and gave men the go-by when you were sick of them. And then, in the summer of 1914, a fancy to see the Old Country. He had worked his passage homeward in a short-handed tramp and arrived at Tilbury on the day the Kaiser’s government sent its ultimatum to Russia. Four days later he was a soldier in the British Army, and a year or so later had a kneecap damaged and a shoulder put out of action. They had patched him up carefully, made quite a decent job of him, and he walked and moved his left arm with comfort; but, adjudged unfit for the fighting line, he had done with the trenches for good. Permanent base now, with a cushy job at the office of the D.D. of Works. Filing and copying documents relating to hut construction; he had been fool enough to let out that he had had some small training as a clerk.

“In a way,” he said, chewing at a long blade of grass, “it’s a good thing I’ve got my stiff knee. If I could put the miles under me as I used to, I believe⁠—I believe I’d go. It would come over me and I’d go. Not that I want to desert, but it might be too strong for me; I’ve always been my own master and I’ve always wanted to know what was on the other side of the hill. Straight on”⁠—he pointed southward⁠—“straight on, anywhere. The road⁠—if you’ve once tramped it⁠ ⁠…” He broke off and stared with his eyes on the distance and beyond it.

After a minute or two of silence he asked William suddenly what had made him join the Army; and William gave him confidence for confidence, attracted he knew not why. The man’s craving for loneliness and bodily exertion was something he could not understand; but they were on common ground in their mutual rebellion against the weariness of daily life. They talked with long silences in between their speech, telling out their hearts to each other; or rather finding in each other’s presence an excuse for speaking their hearts. Later it seemed odd to William that though they spoke freely of their lives and their griefs it had never struck either of them to ask of the other his name.

“So you joined up because of your wife,” said the man who lay on his elbow.

“Yes,” William answered him, “I thought⁠—” He did not finish the sentence; it wearied him now to remember what he had thought.

“Sometimes,” the other broke the silence, “I ask myself why I joined up. Don’t see how it could have been patriotism; England hadn’t been anything to me for years. My sister died soon after I left it and I hadn’t anyone else. So far as I can make out it never was much to me; I was always unhappy in England, hated school and office and towns⁠—I lived in a town. Never knew what life could be till I got away from it. Say the Germans had won and dominated the earth! They wouldn’t have dominated my earth. I could always have made myself a campfire where they wouldn’t have wanted to follow me. If they’d sacked London and swallowed up New York I could have lain out under the stars at night and laughed at ’em. So what made me?⁠ ⁠… Some say man’s a fighting animal.”

He pulled a fresh grass-blade to chew and rolled over on his chest till his chin rested on his hands.

“I knew I should hate soldiering⁠—I made no mistake about that. The regularity⁠—shipboard’s too regular for me. I’ve tried it more than once for the sake of getting somewhere, and before the voyage was half over I’d always had more than enough. I knew I should hate it, but I joined up straight and away.⁠ ⁠… I’ve lost everything that made life good to me. Other chaps⁠—blind chaps and crippled⁠—might think I’d got off easily. So I have, I daresay; but then it isn’t everyone whose life was in moving on. Often when I was alone I’ve shouted and laughed just to feel how my legs moved under me.⁠ ⁠… It’s the devil⁠—this compound⁠—but even if I were out of it, I’m a lame thing. When the war ends I’m a lame thing. Not what most people would call crippled, of course; I can walk a few miles and feed myself, and to look at me you wouldn’t know there was anything at all the matter. If I were a townsman it wouldn’t make very much difference; if I’d stayed a clerk I could go on being a clerk. But I can’t be⁠ ⁠… what I was. I’ve lost everything that made life good to me. What for?

“I can’t remember exactly the feeling I had about it when I enlisted⁠—what made me do it. So many things have happened since then. But I know I didn’t think about it long; so far as I remember I didn’t hesitate, not for a minute. I went straight off the morning after war was declared. Midnight, fourth, we were at war, and midday, fifth, I was a soldier. Must have been some sort of instinct.⁠ ⁠… Sometimes I tell myself what a blazing fool I am.

“That’s sometimes. Other times⁠—”

He was silent for so long that William concluded the flow of his confidence had ceased.

“When you live in a crowd,” he said at last, “you can always make excuses for yourself. Most likely you don’t need to. If you’re a fool or a coward you herd with a lot of other fools and cowards, and you all back each other up. So you never come face to face with yourself.”

The idea was new to William, and a year or two ago he would have repelled it because it was new; now he turned his eyes from the horizon, curiously, to the lean brown face at his elbow.

“No?” he said interrogatively.

“If,” said the other, “if I had gone back⁠ ⁠… it wouldn’t have been the same. It couldn’t have been.⁠ ⁠… If you live that way there’s two things you can’t do without: a good strong body to stand rain and wind and work, and a mind you’re not afraid to be alone with. When you’re miles from anyone, in the woods at night, you want to be good company for yourself. If I’d turned my back on it all, I mightn’t have been very good company. I’ve done plenty of things to set the parsons praying over me if I told ’em; I’ve been a fool times out of mind and ashamed of it afterwards; but⁠—”

He slid into a silence that lasted until William took up the word; not in answer or argument but irrelevantly, so that he, too, might talk out his heart.

“Do you know what I think I am sometimes? a rat in a trap⁠—or a squirrel spinning round in a cage. Very busy doing nothing.⁠ ⁠… I’ll tell you one of the things I’ve been doing lately⁠—every word of it truth. I’ve been typing a long correspondence about a civilian⁠—a worker in one of the religious organizations who came into the town, ten miles by train, to get stores he wanted for his hut. The rule is, civilians mustn’t travel by train without a movement order from the A.P.M.; there isn’t an A.P.M. in the place he comes from, so he went to the military and got an ordre de service. He came all right, but it’s irregular⁠—an ordre de service should only be given to a soldier. One of the M.P.’s on duty at the station reported it⁠—and there’s been strafing and strafing and strafing. Reams written about it⁠—I’ve written ’em. Not only about the ordre de service but about who the correspondence is to go through⁠—the A.P.M.’s office or the Base Commandant or someone else. After three or four weeks it was referred to G.H.Q. and someone there wrote to the secretary of the organization asking for an explanation⁠—and naturally he answered the letter. Well, that was irregular too; he oughtn’t to have answered because the matter should have been dealt with locally⁠—‘gone through the proper channels.’ So more correspondence and strafing.⁠ ⁠… Sheets of paper⁠—reams of it⁠—and they say it’s scarce! And in the end, nothing⁠—just nothing. When the wretched people wrote and asked exactly what they were to do⁠—how they were to get a movement order from an A.P.M. when there wasn’t an A.P.M. to give it, we wrote back and said, ‘This correspondence must now cease.’ I ticked it out on my typewriter.”

“I believe you,” the other nodded, “I’ve seen something of that sort myself.⁠ ⁠… And the papers say, ‘Your country wants you’!”

“And it goes on,” said William, “day after day. I’m always busy⁠—about nothing. ‘Attention is directed to G.R.O. 9999. The Return called for in the form shown as the third appendix⁠—’ ”

“Good Lord,” cried the other, “stop it. That’s just what maddens me⁠—I don’t want to think of it.”

William laughed sullenly with his chin resting on his hand.

“I’ve not much else to think of,” he said.

He watched the lean man down the hill till a winding of the road hid him; and then he too rose, in his turn, and went back to the town⁠—to the rattrap wherein he made war!