Gilbert Frankau

“ Began too, for Peter Jameson, a new life—the life which every untrained gentleman of the Empire who could spoof a recruiting doctor into passing him young enough or fit enough for service, was then living. A life neither of comfort nor—as many wrote and made much money by their writing—of good humour. A life of adults gone back to the irritation of school: save that for school-house they had sodden camps; for dining-hall, a draughty tent where fleecing contractors served half-cold meals; for schoolmasters, the incompetence of brave fellows wrongly employed. ”

“ She felt immensely sorry for him. She understood; and vowed to save him from the fears which—now that her mind had been opened—she saw behind his eyes. But she could not, at the outset, quite keep the word “madness” out of her thoughts. Mad! Supposing Peter were to go mad?
Nor, in her heart of hearts, could she quite help despising him for his fears—even as she despised Francis Gordon for his idleness. Peter was no longer a Man, her husband, some one to be looked up to, leaned on, consulted in emergencies—but a weakling, a creature to be protected. ”

“ In the scullery, Miss Tebbits was washing up: Peter could hear the trickle of water, the clink of crockery, as he stood gazing down on the gnarled happy face. “Thus, men should die,” thought Peter “not. . . .” Old pictures came crowding on his mind; he saw other faces, dreadful faces, faces of young men who should have been alive. . . .
Charlie Tebbits, summoned from Arlsfield, stalked hatless into the room. “He was a good father,” said Charlie, “I’ve no complaint to make about him.”
Peter wanted to get away, to leave these two alone with their dead. He held out his hand to Charlie. ”

“ Not the words of any fool-god, but the words of a cripple—a cripple who knew that there was neither god nor devil, but only Man, man and the Beast. . . .
And suddenly a Voice spoke to Francis Gordon, a stern clear Voice from the heart of the sunset: “Thou Fool,” cried the Voice. “Thou blind Fool! If the Beast perish, man also perishes. For this is God’s Purpose.”
But the mind of the man answered the Voice out of the sunset: “There is no God. I, a cripple, am greater than any god. In mine own mind, have I renounced Thee. Thou art the Liar of the World. There is no god save Man.” ”

“ Patricia laughed incredulously. In spite of all she had just heard, she could not yet bring herself to believe Peter afraid of anything. “Afraid to consult you?”
“Yes, afraid to consult me. Scared to death! Don’t you see, Pat, that the whole trouble lies in that one word, ‘Fear’? Do you think that your so-called ‘heroes’ aren’t afraid? Of course they are—otherwise they wouldn’t be heroes. The hero is the man who controls fear—not the man who doesn’t feel it. But the process of controlling fear can’t go on indefinitely. Every man has his limit. ”

“ Turkovitch, even in those early days, found Peter,—with his ideas of press-advertising, of new machinery, of up-to-dateness generally,—rather terrifying: but in the end, pressed by many long-suffering creditors, he yielded.
To Peter, the new concern grew swiftly from a mere plaything into a passion. He felt, for the first time, the real zest of commerce, the creative joy of it. This was no inherited money-making machine; but a task that needed a man’s every thought, all his energy: uphill work, worthy of accomplishment. ”

“ Peter went back to his telephonist.
Now, the glimmer of dawn turned to a faint dark blue radiance. Nothing stirred on the plain below. Light grew; revealing the silent village street, the churchyard, the ruined chapel of “Our Lady of Consolation” battered among her poplars, the long tree-girt stretch of the Hulluch Road. Beyond, like a dun still sea streaked with unmoving foam, lay the trenches. Beyond them, mist.
Peter drew out his map; unslung his glasses; threw away the stump of his cigar. ”

“ For the moment, the reticences of civilized life were in abeyance. Each of these two knew, as he crouched over the bacon-box in the sodden broken chalk-trench, that he was hanging on by the eye-teeth to his last remnant of sanity.
Each still saw the same bestial vision: smashed pit, half-buried gun, slithering soil, mangled men writhing and groaning, mangled men lying deadly still, Charlie Straker’s face white and drawn in the light of the hurricane-lamp—and the Head that watched him, the Head that still grinned under its shrapnel-helmet, the Head which had been Pettigrew. . . . ”

“ In the fighting-zone itself, boredom followed fear, fear boredom, with monotonous and unending regularity. There were some days when never a rifle cracked, never a gun barked: others—as that Sunday which saw Stark’s headquarters moved to the Ramparts—when unanswered salvos rained on ruined streets, on gun-positions, and cross-roads, on stumbling fatigue-parties and sentries acrouch behind sandbags; when the very breastworks heaved and blew skyward, crashing down in mud and mine-débris on the corpses of the men who had inhabited them. ”

“ Here, there, everywhere, yellow and blue, the hidden pits flamed and screamed. Thin smoke rose from them; drifted back in a faint breeze. (“Hope to God, we’re not going to use our gas,” thought Peter.) Behind him, he heard the sharp clang of French heavies; the deep note of Granny, the huge howitzer in Sailly La Bourse.
He looked towards the trenches; saw single shrapnel bursting orange to fleecy puffs. The puffs blended to a sea of white, flooding out the trenches. ”

“ Upstairs at the villa, Patricia could hear Alice sobbing gently, and Stark’s deep voice, the parade-rasp clean gone out of it, “Don’t cry, sweetheart. For God’s sake, don’t cry.” . . .
“I mustn’t cry for Peter. Not until he’s gone,” thought Patricia. She tip-toed upstairs; slipped into a cloak; stole out of the house.
The night had cleared; stars twinkled through the fir-trees as she made her way down the sandy road. From the General’s house and the big Mess Hut, lights streaked thinly; she could hear men’s voices. A soldier was singing, far off, up the hillside towards Blackdown. ”

“ Of the men who had served those guns so blithely under the trees of Neuve Eglise barely one-third remained. Sergeant Ackroyd was dead, breast riven by direct hit of a gas-shell; Sergeant Duncan was dead, blown to bits as he ran for shelter; Corporal Haviland’s body lay drilled with machine-gun bullets in the No Man’s Land beyond Arrowhead Copse; seven signallers were dead, five they had watched hobble, one by one, up the sodden path to the dressing-station in Montauban. Now this ultimate horror had screamed down upon them out of the night, tearing the last veils between them and Hell. ”

“ Patricia looked round the auditorium. Everywhere, she saw excited men, smiling women. Once she had envied such joyous couples. Now she only wondered, if, like herself, all the women were hiding, stifling, drugging-away somewhere, the sorrows at their heart. “But we must laugh,” she said to herself. “They mustn’t think of us as unhappy.”
And again, as on that last day at Deepcut, Patricia played out her comedy to the end. But for the first time in her life—she admitted as much to her father after Peter had gone—she let alcohol share her troubles. ”

“ And among those men—a dozen confided stories leaped to mind—were plenty who had sacrificed not half an inherited fortune, but everything: men with assured positions, skilled mechanics, dock-foremen, master-printers, who had thrown up fine jobs, whose wives struggled along on ludicrous separation allowances, because. . . . “Because of what?” asked thought. And reason answered thought in one clear sentence: “Because they were men!”
Evening had come as he dawdled. Twilight brooded over London. But now no twilight brooded over the soul of Peter Jameson. ”

“ Sound swept back, as a wave sweeps, leaping down the valley towards them—horns shrieked, gongs dinned, whistles blew: rifle-fire crackled, burst to a roar: guns boomed dully from beyond the horizon; they caught the far crash of shell-fire. The sky blazed with electric flashes, with whitely-soaring lights, with orange hints of machine-gun flame. Hedges, trees, crest-line, sprang from shadow into silhouette. And suddenly, near and high above the silhouetted valley, soared the crimson rockets of the S.O.S. station on Hill 63; hung a moment; waking pandemonium as they drooped to ground. ”

“ Peter, wheels almost on turf, was aware of a Rolls-Royce bonnet, of a dark-blue car sweeping by; caught a glimpse of Arthur, in sky-blue Air Service uniform, sitting rigid at the wheel. . . .
Crossley gathered way; Klaxon barked furiously; Rolls-Royce swerved; Peter, grin on his face, shot past. Beatrice, peering over the back of the cabriolet, saw Arthur’s eyes light; saw his hand move slowly on the wheel. Then the Rolls-Royce was on them; creeping up, effortless, silent. . . . Honk, honk, honk. “Drat the fellow,” muttered Peter. ”

“ By now, nearly half the horses had been decanted, protesting vigorously, at Shoreham Siding; were picketed out in long lines on the flat ground below the hutments: and Patricia grew to love those sounds no horse-soldier ever forgets—the whickering and the whinnying which follows the command “Feed,” the tossing of head-collars and stamp of hooves on turf as nose-bag slings are slid over laid-back ears; the deep snuffle of nostrils as muzzles plunge to corn.
Good days indeed! For already the formless mob which Stark had led out from billets in Brighton took shape under his hand. ”

“ Peter dismounted; surveyed the country. In front of him the road dipped to a level-crossing; rose again. In the hollow, stood a red-and-yellow château, forlorn among dank gardens. Along the railway, to the left of the road, showed a line of dug-outs—gigantic molehills, brown and shapeless.
“Seems safe enough,” he said to his groom: but even as he spoke, there came the ominous whistle, the double crash of a five-nine shell, the black spattered fountain of it among the trees on the crest in front. ”

“ Their life—from the front-line infantry, frozen blue or blown to bits between rotting sandbags, to the drivers in the swamped horse-lines where the dumb beasts stood all day, tail to storm, fetlock-deep in mud, and whence men and beasts sallied forth every night up that road of death between the scarred poplars—was indescribably foul, a reversion to conditions at which an aristocratic caveman might well have jibbed. ”

“ Officers everywhere, some ensconced at the end of deep burrows, peering out over the plain; some clambering up the pathways at the back; some standing about at the mouths of their caves; and at the very top, thirty feet above Peter’s head, among a perfect jumble of wires, two Frenchmen—operators for the heavy battery just visible on the plain below, gesticulating and shouting at their strange-looking telephone. ”

“ Let the old, the emasculate, the pimps and the panderers haggle in their market-places, babble at their talking-shops: his path led clean away from their market-places and their talking-places, clean across the seas into that other country where neither his money nor his talk but only a man’s manhood availed him: a loathsome and a desolate country, a country of fear and mud and boredom intolerable, of maiming and of death: yet a country above whose desolation shone always the one clear light—the Light of Duty! ”

“ But between the narrow brown cleft and the white molehills, lay the sunken road which had so often defied assault. At that distance it was hardly visible; showed only as a discolouration on the drab landscape—a discolouration which ended at skyline in the three-cornered bush-clump of Arrowhead Copse. Right of the Copse—our ground—rose the trees of Trônes Wood: left of it, beyond sunk road and white molehills, the enemy’s territory stretched in colourless desert tossed to occasional fountains by long-range shell-fire. ”

“ Finally, he decided to talk the whole thing out with Harry. If Harry would come into partnership; if Harry would listen to reason. . . . For already the business-man in Peter had realized that farming on Tebbits lines was a thing of the past; a picturesque anachronism.
“Farming”—Peter must have said this to himself at least a hundred times during those few days—“isn’t just a business. It’s the business. And like all businesses it’s got to be big. All this talk about small holdings is blather. The small-holder works himself to death for less wages than a dock-labourer.” ”