IV
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.’