Part 25

I grew tired of this idleness and arranged to be transferred to the Sixteenth Officer Cadet Battalion in another part of the same camp. It was the same sort of work that I had done at Oxford, and I was there from February 1918 until the Armistice in November. Rhyl was much healthier than Oxford and I found that I could play games without danger of another breakdown. A job was found for Nancy at a market-gardener’s near the camp, so she came up to live with me. A month or two later she found that she was to have a baby and had to stop land work; she went back to her drawing.

None of my friends had liked the idea of my marriage, particularly to anyone as young as Nancy; one of them, Robbie Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, whom I had met through Siegfried and who had been very good to me, had gone so far as to try to discourage me by hinting that there was negro blood in the Nicholson family, that it was possible that one of Nancy’s and my children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried found it difficult to accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he had not met, but he still wrote. After a few months at Craiglockhart, though he in no way renounced his pacifist views, he decided that the only possible thing to do was, after all, to go back to France. He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again had made him more restless than ever. Hospital life was nearly unbearable; the feeling of isolation was the worst. He had had a long letter from Old Joe to say that the First Battalion had just got back to rest from Polygon Wood; the conditions and general situation were more appalling than anything he had yet seen—three miles of morasses, shell-holes and dead men and horses through which to get the rations up. Siegfried said that he would rather be anywhere than in hospital; he couldn’t bear to think of poor Old Joe lying out all night in shell-holes and being shelled (several of the ration party were killed, but at least, according to Joe, ‘the battalion got its rations’). If only the people who wrote leading articles for the _Morning Post_ about victory could read Joe’s letter!

It was about this time that Siegfried wrote the poem _When I’m asleep dreaming and lulled and warm_, about the ghosts of the soldiers who had been killed, reproaching him in his dreams for his absence from the trenches, saying that they had been looking for him in the line from Ypres to Frise and had not found him. He told Rivers that he would go back to France if they would send him, making it quite clear that his views were exactly the same as they had been in July when he had written the letter of protest—only more so. He demanded a written guarantee that he would be sent back at once and not kept hanging about in a training battalion. He wrote reprehending me for the attitude I had taken in July, when I was reminding him that the regiment would only understand his protest as a lapse from good form and a failure to be a gentleman. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he said, to identify oneself in any way with good form or gentlemanliness, and if I had real courage I wouldn’t be acquiescing as I was. He pointed out that I admitted that the people who sacrificed the troops were callous b——s, and that the same thing was happening in all countries except parts of Russia. I forget how I answered Siegfried. I might have pointed out that when I was in France I was never such a fire-eater as he was. The amount of Germans that I had killed or caused to be killed was negligible compared with his wholesale slaughter. The fact was that the direction of Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed with his environment; he varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist. His poem:

To these I turn, in these I trust, Brother Lead and Sister Steel; To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust....

was originally written seriously, inspired by Colonel Campbell, v.c.’s bloodthirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army school. Later he offered it as a satire; and it is a poem that comes off whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less heroic than Siegfried.

I have forgotten how it was worked and whether I had a hand in it, but he was sent to Palestine this time. He seemed to like it there, and I was distressed in April to have a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim,’ that the division was moving to France. He wrote that he would be sorry to be in trenches, going over the top to take Morlancourt or Méaulte. Seeing that we had recaptured Morlancourt had brought it home to him. He said that he expected that the First and Second Battalions had about ceased to exist by now for the _n_th time. I heard again from him at the end of May, from France. He quoted Duhamel. ‘It was written that you should suffer without purpose and without hope, but I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss.’ Yet he wrote the next paragraph in his happy-warrior vein, saying that his men were the best that he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. I mightn’t believe it, but he was training them bloody well. He couldn’t imagine whence his flamelike ardour had come, but it had come. His military efficiency was derived from the admirable pamphlets that were now issued, so different from the stuff we used to get two years before. He said that when he read my letter he began to think, damn Robert, damn every one except his company, which was the smartest turn-out ever seen, and damn Wales and damn leave and damn being wounded and damn everything except staying with his company until they were all melted away. (Limping and crawling across the shell-holes, lying very still in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.) I was to remember this mood when I saw him (_if_ I saw him) worn out and smashed up again, querulous and nerve-ridden. Or when I read something in the casualty list and got a polite letter from Mr. Lousada, his solicitor. There never was such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six months it would have ceased to exist.

Nancy’s brother, Tony, was also in France now. Nancy’s mother made herself ill with worrying about him. Early in July he was due to come home on leave; I was on leave myself at the end of one of the four-months’ cadet courses, staying with the rest of Nancy’s family at a big Tudor house near Harlech. It was the most haunted house that I have ever been in, though the ghosts were invisible except in the mirrors. They would open and shut doors, rap on the oak panels, knock the shades off lamps, and drink the wine from the glasses at our elbows when we were not looking. The house belonged to an officer in the Second Battalion whose ancestors had most of them died of drink. There was only one visible ghost, a little yellow dog that appeared on the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it one day.

This was the time of the first Spanish influenza epidemic and Nancy’s mother caught it, but she did not want to miss Tony when he came on leave. She wanted to go to theatres with him in London; they were devoted to each other. So when the doctor came she reduced her temperature with aspirin and pretended that she was all right. But she knew that the ghosts in the mirrors knew. She died in London on July 13th, a few days later. While she was dying her chief feeling was one of pleasure that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account. (Tony was killed two months later.) Nancy’s mother was a far more important person to her than I was, and I was alarmed of the effect that the shock of her death might have on the baby. A week later I heard that on the day that she had died Siegfried had been shot through the head while making a daylight patrol through long grass in No Man’s Land. And he wrote me a verse letter which I cannot quote, though I should like to do so. It is the most terrible of his war-poems.

And I went on mechanically at my cadet-battalion work. The candidates for commissions we got were no longer gentlemen in the regimental sense—mostly Manchester cotton clerks and Liverpool shipping clerks—but they were all experienced men from France and were quiet and well behaved. We failed about one in three. And the war went on and on. I was then writing a book of poems called _Country Sentiment_. Instead of children as a way of forgetting the war, I used Nancy. _Country Sentiment_, dedicated to her, was a collection of romantic poems and ballads. At the end was a group of pacifist war-poems. It contained one about the French civilians—I cannot think how I came to put so many lies in it—I even said that old Adelphine Heu of Annezin gave me a painted china plate, and that her pride was hurt when I offered to pay her. The truth is that I bought the plate from her for about fifteen shillings and that I never got it from her. Adelphine’s daughter-in-law would not allow her to give it up, claiming it as her own, and I never got my money back from Adelphine. This is only one of many of my early poems that contain falsities for public delectation.

In November came the Armistice. I heard at the same time news of the death of Frank Jones-Bateman, who had gone back again just before the end, and of Wilfred Owen, who often used to write to me from France, sending me his poems. Armistice-night hysteria did not touch the camp much, though some of the Canadians stationed there went down to Rhyl to celebrate in true overseas style. The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battle-field, the Flodden of Wales) cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.

XXVI

In the middle of December the cadet-battalions were wound up and the officers, after a few days’ leave, were sent back to their units. The Third Battalion of the Royal Welch was now at Limerick. I decided to overstay my leave until Nancy’s baby was born. She was expecting it early in January 1919, and her father had taken a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny was born on Twelfth Night. She was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had had no foreknowledge of the experience—I assumed that she knew—and it took her years to recover from it. I went over to Limerick; the battalion was at the Castle Barracks. I lied my way out of the over-staying of leave.

Limerick was a Sinn Fein stronghold, and there were constant clashes between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish got on well together, as inevitably as Welsh and Scottish disagreed. The Royal Welch had the situation well in hand; they made a joke of politics and used their entrenching-tool handles as shillelaghs. It looked like a town that had been through the war. The main streets had holes in them like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. I was told by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into another. He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia. Life did not start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house was flung open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, then a nearly naked child, which sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for dirty pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. Ireland was exactly as I had pictured it. I felt its charm as dangerous. Yet when I was detailed to take out a search-party in a neighbouring village for concealed rifles I asked the adjutant to find a substitute; I said that I was an Irishman and did not wish to be mixed up in Irish politics.

I realized too that I had a new loyalty, to Nancy and the baby, tending to overshadow regimental loyalty now that the war was over. Once I was writing a rhymed nonsense letter to Nancy and Jenny in my quarters overlooking the barrack square:

Is there any song sweet enough For Nancy or for Jenny? Said Simple Simon to the Pieman: ‘Indeed, I know not any.’

I have counted the miles to Babylon, I have flown the earth like a bird, I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross, But no such song have I heard.

At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with _The British Grenadiers_. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. _The British Grenadiers_ succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem:

Some speak of Alexander, And some of Hercules,

but were driven out:

But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny, Where are there any like these?

I had ceased to be a British grenadier.

So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.

I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in 1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice.

The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in _Julius Cæsar_. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible. Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as _The Handcuff King_; he got away safely to America.

I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent. Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there. The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested, but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present state.

I had to think quickly. I decided to make a run for it. The orderly-room sergeant had made my papers out on receipt of the telegram. I had all my kit ready packed. There only remained two things to get: the colonel’s signature to the statement that I had handled no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which only the battalion demobilization officer could supply—but he was hand-in-glove with the adjutant, so it was no use asking him for them. The last train before demobilization ended was the six-fifteen from Limerick the same evening, February 13th. I decided to wait until the adjutant had left the orderly room and then casually ask the colonel to sign the statement, without mentioning the adjutant’s objection to my going. The adjutant remained in the orderly room until five minutes past six. As soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the colonel’s signature, saluted, hurried out to collect my baggage. I had counted on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but none was to be seen. I had about five minutes left now and the station was a good distance away. I saw a corporal who had been with me in the First Battalion. I shouted to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men. I’ve got _my ticket_ and I want to catch the last train back.’ Summers promptly called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it, left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it was moving out of the station and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers. ‘Good-bye, corporal, drink my health.’

But still I had not my demobilization code-marks and knew that when I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon they would refuse to pass me out. I did not care very much. Wimbledon was in England, and I would at least have my influenza out in an English and not an Irish hospital. My temperature was running high now and my mind was working clearly as it always does in fever. My visual imagery, which is cloudy and partial at ordinary times, becomes defined and complete. At Fishguard I bought a copy of the _South Wales Echo_ and read in it that there would be a strike of London Electric Railways the next day, 14th February, if the railway directors would not meet the men’s demands. So when the train steamed into Paddington and while it was still moving I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up and ran across to the station entrance, where, in spite of competition from porters—a feeble crew at this time—I caught the only taxi in the station as its fare stepped out. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford to waste no time getting to Wimbledon. I brought my taxi back to the train, where scores of stranded officers looked at me with envy. One, who had travelled down in my compartment, had been met by his wife. I said: ‘Excuse me, but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I only need go as far as Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ They were delighted; they said that they lived out at Ealing and had no idea how to get there except by taxi. On the way to Waterloo he said to me: ‘I wish there was some way of showing our gratitude. I wish there was something we could do for you.’ I said: ‘Well, there is only one thing in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me, I’m afraid. And that,’ I said, ‘is the proper code-marks to complete my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’ He rapped on the glass of the taxi and stopped it. Then he got down his bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. He said: ‘Well, I happen to be the Cork District Demobilization Officer and I’ve got the whole bag of tricks here.’ So he filled my papers in.

At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for nine or ten hours as I had expected, I was given priority and released at once; Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’ and demobilization from theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. So after a hurried visit to my parents, who were living close by, I continued to Hove, arriving at supper-time. When I came in, I had a sudden terror that made me unable to speak. I seemed to see Nancy’s mother. She was looking rather plump and staid and dressed unlike herself, and did not appear to recognize me. She was sitting at the table between Nancy and her father. It was like a bad dream; I did not know what to say or do. I knew I was ill, but this was worse than illness. Then Nicholson introduced me: ‘This is Nancy’s Aunt Dora, just over from Canada.’

I warned them all that I had influenza; and hurried off to bed. Within a day or two everybody in the house had caught it except Nicholson and the baby and one servant who kept it off by a gipsy’s charm. I think it was the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new epidemic as bad as the summer one had started; there was not a nurse to be had in Brighton. Nicholson at last found two ex-nurses. One was competent, but frequently drunk, and when drunk she would ransack all the wardrobes and pile the contents into her own bags; the other, sober but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of the open window, spread out her arms, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me.’ The husband, by the way, was not drowned, merely unfaithful. A doctor, found with difficulty, said that I had no chance of recovering; it was septic pneumonia now and both my lungs were affected. But I had determined that, having come through the war, I would not allow myself to succumb to Spanish influenza. This, now, was the third time in my life that I had been given up as dying, and each time because of my lungs. The first occasion was when I was seven years old and had double-pneumonia following measles. Yet my lungs are naturally very sound, possibly the strongest part of me and, therefore, my danger mark. This time again I recovered and was up a few weeks later in time to see the mutiny of the Guards, when about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp and paraded through the streets of Brighton in protest against camp discipline.