Part 39

Peter and his friends were so accustomed to jeer at the dignitaries of church and state and at kings and politicians that they could not realize that such dwarfish and comic characters could launch disaster upon a whole world. They sat about a little table in a twilit arbour on the way down from Bel-Alp—Peter was to leave the climbers and join the Italian party at Brigue—and devoured omelette and veal and drank Yvorne, and mocked over the Swiss newspapers.

“Another ultimatum!” said one cheerful youth. “Holland will get it next.”

“He’s squirting ultimatums. Like a hedgehog throwing quills.”

“I saw him in Berlin,” said Peter. “He rushed by in an automobile. He isn’t a human being. He’s more like Mr. Toad in _The Wind in the Willows_....”

“All the French have gone home; all the Germans,” said Troop. “I suppose we ought to go.”

“I’ve promised to go to Italy,” said Peter.

“War is war,” said Troop, and stiffened Peter’s resolution.

“I’m not going to have my holidays upset by a theatrical ass in a gilt helmet,” said Peter.

He got down to Brigue next day, and the little town was bright with uniforms, for the Swiss were mobilizing. He saw off his mountaineering friends in the evening train for Paris. “You’d better come,” said Troop gravely, hanging out of the train.

Peter shook his head. His was none of your conscript nations. No....

He dined alone; Hetty and her two friends were coming up from Lausanne next day. In the reading-room he found the _Times_ with the first news of the invasion of Belgium. Several of the villagers of Visé had turned out with shot guns, and the Germans had performed an exemplary massacre for the discouragement of franc-tireurs. Indignation had been gathering in Peter during the day. He swore aloud and flung down the paper. “Is there no one sane enough to assassinate a scoundrel who sets things loose like this?” he said. He prowled about the little old town in the moonlight, full of black rage against the Kaiser. He felt he must go back. But it seemed to him a terrible indignity that he should have to interrupt his holiday because of the ambition of a monarch. “Why the devil can’t the Germans keep him on his chain?” he said, and then, “Shooting the poor devils—like rabbits!”

Hetty and her friends arrived in the early train next morning, all agog about the war. They thought it a tremendous lark. They were not to get out at Brigue, it was arranged; Peter was to be on the platform with his rucksack and join them. He kept the appointment, but he was a very scowling Peter in spite of the fact that Hetty was gentle and tremulous at the sight of him in her best style. “This train is an hour late,” said Peter, sitting down beside her. “That accursed fool at Potsdam is putting all our Europe out of gear.”...

For three days he was dark, preoccupied company. “Somebody ought to assassinate him,” he said, harping on that idea. “Have men no self-respect at all?”

He felt he ought to go back to England, and the feeling produced a bleak clearness in his mind. It was soft sunshine on the lake of Orta, but east wind in Peter’s soul. He disliked Hetty’s friends extremely; he had never met them before; they were a vulgar brace of sinners he thought, and they reflected their quality upon her. The war they considered was no concern of theirs; they had studio minds. The man was some sort of painter, middle-aged, contemptuous, and with far too much hair. He ought to have been past this sort of spree. The girl was a model and had never been in Italy before. She kept saying, “O, the _sky_!” until it jarred intolerably. The days are notoriously longer on the lake of Orta than anywhere else in the world; from ten o’clock in the morning to lunch time is about as long as a week’s imprisonment; from two to five is twice that length; from five onward the course of time at Orta is more normal. Hetty was Hetty, in the tradition of Cleopatra, but could Cleopatra hold a young man whose mind was possessed by one unquenchable thought that he had been grossly insulted and deranged by an exasperating potentate at Potsdam who was making hay of his entire world, and that he had to go at once and set things right, and that it was disgraceful not to go?

He broached these ideas to Hetty about eleven o’clock on their first morning upon the lake. They were adrift in a big tilted boat in the midst of a still, glassy symmetry of mountain-backed scenery and mountain-backed reflections, and the other couple was far away, a little white dot at the head of a V of wake, rowing ambitiously to the end of the lake.

“You can’t go,” said Hetty promptly....

“But I have come all the way to Italy for you!” cried Hetty....

This was a perplexing problem for the honour of a young man of one-and-twenty. He argued the case—weakly. He had an audience of one, a very compelling one. He decided to remain. In the night he woke up and thought of Troop. Old Troop must be in England by now. Perhaps he had already enlisted. Ever since their school days he and Troop had had a standing dispute upon questions of morals and duty. There was something dull and stiff about old Troop that drove a bright antagonist to laxity, but after all——? Troop had cut off clean and straight to his duty.... Because Troop wasn’t entangled. He had kept clear of all this love-making business.... There was something to be said for Troop’s point of view after all....

The second day Peter reopened the question of going as they sat on a stone seat under the big, dark trees on the Sacro Monte, and looked out under the drooping boughs upon the lake, and Hetty had far more trouble with him. He decided he could not leave her. But he spent the hours between tea and dinner in reading all the war news he could find—translating the Italian with the aid of a small conversation dictionary. Something had happened in the North Sea, he could not make out exactly what it was, but the Germans had lost a ship called the _Königin Luise_, and the British a battleship—was it a battleship?—the _Amphion_. Beastly serious that!—a battleship. There was something vague, too, about a fleet encounter, but no particulars. It was a bore getting no particulars. Here close at hand in the Mediterranean there had been, it was said, a naval battle in the Straits of Messina also; the _Panther_ was sunk; and the Germans had had a great defeat at Liége. The British army was already landing in France....

Upon his second decision to remain Peter reflected profoundly that night.

The standing dispute between him and Troop upon the lightness or seriousness of things sexual returned to his mind. Troop, Peter held, regarded all these things with a portentous solemnity, a monstrous sentimentality. Peter, Troop maintained, regarded them with a dangerous levity. Troop declared that love, “true love,” was, next to “honour,” the most tremendous thing in life; he was emphatic upon “purity.” Peter held that love was as light and pleasant and incidental a thing as sunshine. You said, “Here’s a jolly person!” just as you said, “Here’s a pretty flower!” There had been, he argued, a lot of barbaric “Taboos” in these matters, but the new age was dropping all that. He called Troop’s idea of purity “ceremonial obsession.” Both talked very freely of “cleanness” and meant very different things: Troop chiefly abstinence and Peter baths. Peter had had the courage of his opinions; but once or twice he had doubted secretly whether, after all, there weren’t defilements beyond the reach of mere physical cleansing. One dismissed that sort of thing as “reaction.” All these disputes were revived now in his memory in the light of this one plain, disconcerting fact: Troop had gone straight home to enlist and he himself was still in Italy. Weakening of moral fibre? Loss of moral fibre?

The next day, in the boat, Peter reopened the question of his departure.

“You see, Hetty,” he said, “if there was conscription in England—I shouldn’t feel so bound to go.”

“But then you would be bound to go.”

“Well, then I could be a decent deserter—for love’s sake. But when your country leaves it to you to come back or not as you think fit—then, you know, you’re bound—in honour.”

Hetty dabbled her hand over the side of the boat. “Oh—_go_!” she said.

“Yes,” said Peter over the oars, and as if ashamed, “I must go—I must. There is a train this afternoon which catches the express at Domo d’Ossola.”

He rowed for a while. Presently he stole a glance at Hetty. She was lying quite still on her cushion under the tilt, staring at the distant mountains, with tears running down her set face. They were real tears. “Three days,” she said choking, and at that rolled over to weep noisily upon her arms.

Peter sat over his oars and stared helplessly at her emotion.

A familiar couplet came into his head, and remained unspoken because of its striking inappropriateness:

“I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

Presently Hetty lay still. Then she sat up and wiped at a tear-stained face.

“If you must go,” said Hetty, “you must go. But why you didn’t go from Brigue——!”

That problem was to exercise Peter’s mind considerably in the extensive reflections of the next few days and nights.

“And I have to stick in Italy with those two Bores!”...

But the easy flexibility of Hetty’s temperament was a large part of her charm.

“I suppose you ought to go, Peter,” she said, “really. I had no business to try and keep you. But I’ve had so little of you. And I love you.”

She melted. Peter melted in sympathy. But he was much relieved....

She slipped into his bedroom to help him pack his rucksack, and she went with him to the station. “I wish I was a man, too,” she said. “Then I would come with you. But wars don’t last for ever, Peter. We’ll come back here.”

She watched the train disappear along the curve above the station with something like a sense of desolation. Then being a really very stout-hearted young woman, she turned about and went down to the telegraph office to see what could be done to salvage her rent and shattered holiday.

And Peter, because of these things, and because of certain delays at Paris and Havre, for the train and Channel services were getting badly disorganized, got to England six whole days later than Troop.

§ 2

This passion of indignation against Germany in which Peter enlisted was the prevailing mood of England during the opening months of the war. The popular mind had seized upon the idea that Europe had been at peace and might have remained at peace indefinitely if it had not been for the high-handed behaviour, first of Austria with Serbia, and then of Germany with Russia. The belief that on the whole Germany had prepared for and sought this war was no doubt correct, and the spirit of the whole nation rose high and fine to the challenge. But that did not so completely exhaust the moral factors in the case as most English people, including Peter, supposed at that time.

Neither Peter nor Joan, although they were members of the best educated class in the community and had been given the best education available for that class, had any but the vaguest knowledge of what was going on in the political world. They knew practically nothing of what a modern imperial system consisted, had but the vaguest ideas of the rôle of Foreign Office, Press and Parliament in international affairs, were absolutely ignorant of the direction of the army and navy, knew nothing of the history of Germany or Russia during the previous half-century, or the United States since the Declaration of Independence, had no inklings of the elements of European ethnology, and had scarcely ever heard such words, for example, as Slovene, or Slovak, or Ukrainian. The items of foreign intelligence in the newspapers joined on to no living historical conceptions in their minds. Between the latest history they had read and the things that happened about them and in which they were now helplessly involved, was a gap of a hundred years or more; the profound changes in human life and political conditions brought about during that hundred years by railways, telegraphs, steam shipping, steel castings and the like, were all beyond the scope of their ideas. For Joan history meant stories about Joan of Arc, Jane Shore, the wives of Henry the Eighth, James I. and his Steenie, Charles the Second, and suchlike people, winding up with the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay; Peter had ended his historical studies when he went on to the modern side at Caxton—it would have made little difference so far as modern affairs were concerned if he had taken a degree in history—and was chiefly conversant with such things as the pedigree of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the Constitutions of Clarendon, the statute of Mortmain, and the claims of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth to the crown of France. Neither of them knew anything at all of India except by way of Kipling’s stories and the Coronation Durbar pictures. If the two of them had rather clearer ideas than most of their associates about the recent opening up and partition of Africa it was because Oswald had talked about those things. But the jostling for empire that had been going on for the past fifty years all over the world, and the succession of Imperialist theories from Disraeli to Joseph Chamberlain and from Bismarck to Treitschke, had no place in their thoughts. The _entente cordiale_ was a phrase of no particular significance to them. The State in which they lived had never explained to them in any way its relations to them nor its fears and aims in regard to the world about it. It is doubtful, indeed, if the State in which they lived possessed the mentality to explain as much even to itself.

How far the best education in America or Germany or any other country was better, it is not for us to discuss here, nor how much better education might be. This is the story of the minds of Joan and Peter and of how that vast system of things hidden, things unanalysed and things misrepresented and obscured, the political system of the European “empires” burst out into war about them. The sprawling, clumsy, heedless British State, which had troubled so little about taking Peter into its confidence, displayed now no hesitation whatever in beckoning him home to come and learn as speedily as possible how to die for it.

The tragedy of youth in the great war was a universal tragedy, and if the German youths who were now, less freely and more systematically, beating Peter by weeks and months in a universal race into uniform, were more instructed than he, they were also far more thoroughly misinformed. If Peter took hold of the war by the one elemental fact that Belgium had been invaded most abominably and peaceful villagers murdered in their own fields, the young Germans on the other hand had been trained to a whole system of false interpretations. They were assured that they fought to break up a ring of threatening enemies. And that the whole thing was going to be the most magnificent adventure in history. Their minds had been prepared elaborately and persistently for this heroic struggle—in which they were to win easily. They had been made to believe themselves a race of blond aristocrats above all the rest of mankind, entitled by their moral and mental worth to world dominion. They believed that now they did but come to their own. They had been taught all these things from childhood; how could they help but believe them?

Peter arrived, tired and dirty, at Pelham Ford in the early afternoon. Oswald and Joan were out, but he bathed and changed while Mrs. Moxton got him a belated lunch. As he finished this Joan came into the dining-room from a walk.

“Hullo, Petah,” she said, with no display of affection.

“Hullo, Joan.”

“We thought you were never coming.”

“I was in Italy,” said Peter.

“H’m,” said Joan, and seemed to reckon in her mind.

“Nobby is in London,” she said. “He thinks he might help about East Africa. It’s his country practically.... Are you going to enlist?”

“What else?” said Peter, tapping a cigarette on the table. “It’s a beastly bore.”

“Bunny’s gone,” said Joan. “And Wilmington.”

“They’ve written?”

“Willy came to see me.”

“Heard from any of the others?”

“Oh!... Troop.”

“Enlisted?”

“Cadet.”

“Any one else?”

“No,” said Joan, and hovered whistling faintly for a moment and then walked out of the room....

She had been counting the hours for four days, perplexed by his delay; his coming had seemed the greatest event in the world, for she had never doubted he would come back to serve, and now that he had come she met him like this!

§ 3

They dressed for dinner that night because Oswald came back tired and vexed from London and wanted a bath before dining. “They seemed to be sending everybody to East Africa on the principle that any one who’s been there before ought not to go again,” he grumbled. “I can’t see any other principle in it.” He talked at first of the coming East African campaign because he hesitated to ask Peter what he intended to do. Then he went on to the war news. The Germans had got Liége. That was certain now. They had smashed the forts to pieces with enormous cannon. There had been a massacre of civilians at Dinant. Joan did not talk very much, but sat and watched Peter closely with an air of complete indifference.

There was a change in him, and she could not say exactly what this change was. The sunshine and snow glare and wind of the high mountains had tanned his face to a hard bronze and he was perceptibly leaner; that made him look older perhaps; but the difference was more than that. She knew her Peter so well that she could divine a new thought in him.

“And what are you going to do, Peter?” said Oswald, coming to it abruptly.

“I’m going to enlist.”

“In the ranks, you mean?” Oswald had expected that.

“Yes.”

“You ought not to do that.”

“Why not?”

“You have your cadet corps work behind you. You ought to take a commission. We shan’t have too many officers.”

Peter considered that.

“I want to begin in the ranks.... I want discipline.”

(Had some moral miracle happened to Peter? This was quite a new note from our supercilious foster brother.)

“You’ll get discipline enough in the cadet corps.”

“I want to begin right down at the bottom of the ladder.”

“Well, if you get a rotten drill sergeant, I’m told, it’s disagreeable.”

“All the better.”

“They’ll find you out and push you into a commission,” said Oswald. “If not, it’s sheer waste.”

“Well, I want to feel what discipline is like—before I give orders,” said Peter. “I want to be told to do things and asked why the devil I haven’t done ’em smartly. I’ve been going too easy. The ranks will brace me up.”

(Yes, this was a new note. Had that delay of four or five days anything to do with this?... Joan, with a start, discovered that she was holding up the dinner, and touched the electric bell at her side for the course to be changed.)

“I suppose we shall all have to brace up,” said Oswald. “It still seems a little unreal. The French have lost Mulhausen again, they say, but they are going strong for Metz. There’s not a word about our army. It’s just crossed over and vanished....”

(Queer to sit here, dining in the soft candlelight, and to think of the crowded roads and deploying troops, the thudding guns and bursting shells away there behind that veil of secrecy—millions of men in France and Belgium fighting for the world. And Peter would go off tomorrow. Presently he would be in uniform; presently he would be part of a marching column. He would go over—into the turmoil. Beyond that her imagination would not pass.)

“I wish I could enlist,” said Joan.

“They’re getting thousands of men more than they can handle as it is,” said Oswald. “They don’t want you.”

“You’d have thought they’d have had things planned and ready for this,” said Peter.

“Nothing is ready,” said Oswald. “Nothing is planned. This war has caught our war office fast asleep. It isn’t half awake even now.”

“There ought to be something for women to do,” said Joan.

“There ought to be something for every one to do,” said Oswald bitterly, “but there isn’t. This country isn’t a State; it’s a crowd adrift. Did you notice, Peter, as you came through London, the endless multitudes of people just standing about? I’ve never seen London like that before. People not walking about their business, but just standing.”...

Peter told of things he had seen on his way home. “The French are in a scowling state. All France scowls at you, and Havre is packed with bargains in touring cars—just left about—by rich people coming home....”

So the talk drifted. And all the time Joan watched Peter as acutely and as unsuspectedly as a mother might watch a grown-up son. Tomorrow morning he would go off and join up. But it wasn’t that which made him grave. New experiences always elated Peter. And he wouldn’t be afraid; not he.... She had been let into the views of three other young men who had gone to war already; Troop had written, correctly and consciously heroic, “_Some of the chaps seem to be getting a lot of emotion into it_,” said Troop. “_It’s nothing out of the way that I can see. One just falls into the line of one’s uncles and cousins._”

Wilmington had said: “I just wanted to see you, Joan. I’m told I’ll be most useful as a gunner because of my mathematics. When it comes to going over, you won’t forget to think of me, Joan?”

Joan answered truthfully. “I’ll think of you a lot, Billy.”

“There’s nothing in life like you, Joan,” said Wilmington in his white expressionless way. “Well, I suppose I’d better be going.”

But Bunny had discoursed upon fear. “_I’ve enlisted_,” he wrote, “_chiefly because I’m afraid of going Pacifist right out—out of funk. But it’s hell, Joan. I’m afraid in my bones. I hate bangs, and they say the row of modern artillery is terrific. I’ve never seen a dead body, a human dead body, I mean, ever. Have you? I would go round a quarter of a mile out of my way any time to dodge a butcher’s shop. I was sick when I found Peter dissecting a rabbit. You know, sick, à la Manche. No metaphors. I shall run away, I know I shall run away. But we’ve got to stop these beastly Germans anyhow. It isn’t killing the Germans I shall mind—I’m fierce on Germans, Joan; but seeing the chaps on stretchers or lying about with all sorts of horrible injuries._”

Sheets of that sort of thing, written in an unusually bad handwriting—apparently rather to comfort himself than to sustain Joan.

Well, it wasn’t Peter’s way to think beforehand of being “on stretchers or lying about,” but Bunny’s scribblings had got the stretchers into Joan’s thoughts. And it made her wish somehow that Peter, instead of being unusually grave and choosing to be a ranker, was taking this job with his usual easy confidence and going straight and gaily for a commission.

After dinner they all sat out in garden chairs, outside the library window, and had their coffee and smoked. Joan got her chair and drew it close to Peter’s. Two hundred miles away and less was battle and slaughter, perhaps creeping nearer to them, the roaring of great guns, the rattle of rifle fire, the hoarse shouts of men attacking, and a gathering harvest of limp figures “on stretchers and lying about”; but that evening at Pelham Ford was a globe of golden serenity. Not a leaf stirred, and only the little squeaks and rustlings of small creatures that ran and flitted in the dusk ruffled the quiet air.

Oswald made Peter talk of his climbing. “My only mountain is Kilimanjaro,” he said. “No great thing so far as actual climbing goes.” Peter had begun with the Dolomites, had gone over to Adelboden, and then worked round by the Concordia Hut to Bel Alp. “Was it very beautiful?” asked Joan softly under his elbow.

“You could have done it all. I wish you had come,” said Peter.

There was a pause.

“And Italy?” said Joan, still more softly.