VI
We went back to London at the end of August. We had talked of going for over a week before, but there seemed to be no trains. The reservists were called up everywhere; the shepherd from the farm was called up, and the cowman. They were in what was called ‘The Wagon Reserve.’
Walter said at first that we must go back to London at once, then that we had no right to crowd up trains, when all space was needed for troops.
In London, the excitement of war was everywhere; marching men, army wagons, lorries, bugle calls, persistent, repeated, practised over and over again. There was an open space not far from our house; it had been a playing field for a school, and recruits were drilling there all the day long; sharp loud sounds of the sergeants’ orders, more bugle calls, marching men, and more marching men; the pathetic sentimental marching songs, the dark blue uniforms and convict-like caps of Kitchener’s Army; everything passed through the untraceable stages from strangeness to familiarity, and the war news mingled in a confused, disjointed way with the daily sights and sounds.
The Belgian resistance; Liège; the fall of Liège; the first accounts of German atrocities; the occupation of Brussels; the burning of Louvain; fighting in the streets of Charleroi, where the dead bodies pressed each other too closely to fall down, and the ranks of the dead stood upright; that in particular brought the horror of it home to me, I know.
Stories of crucifixion, of bayoneted women, of children with their hands cut off; and the first inrush of Belgian refugees. How the days passed, merged into one another, obliterated one another, I do not know; the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence. I was caught for a time by the general excitement, and so was Walter. He bought war maps and pinned them to the doors, marking the progress of the armies each morning and evening with little coloured flags on pins.
Mr. Harland, a colleague of Walter’s who lived in Hampstead too, used to come in and talk to Walter. He kept a chart with coloured maps as well.
Then came dismay at the retreat from Mons; suddenly one day as he was tracing out the line of ‘position in the rear,’ Walter stood still, and they stared at each other.
‘By Jove!’ said Mr. Harland.
And Walter said, ‘Good Lord!’
‘Will they get to Paris?’
‘Will they break through?’
I sat and watched them, and the new consternation was as unreal to me as the War itself had been at first.
Life went on for me, in a way, unbroken by the catastrophic events all round. My own life seemed to reassert itself from the general earthquake; my baby was as adorable, as absorbing as ever, and I enjoyed being back in my own home.
I remembered the South African War; it had been very sad, very terrible; my uncle Everard had been killed in it, he had been a soldier, but it was always remote; I could not believe Walter and Mr. Harland when they talked of an invasion of England, bombardment by air, cutting off of the food supplies.
I wondered often during those first weeks what Guy and Hugo were thinking of it all. They were at Yearsly, I believed, and George and Mollie; they had been going down there too. Ralph had been right, after all, that evening at Grandmother’s, and we had all laughed at him. It seemed odd already, that we had not understood what that Archduke’s murder would bring.
Guy had paid some attention, and George; George most, I thought. I wondered very much what George would be thinking now.
My grandmother had been at Bath; she had gone to see a cousin who lived at Bath. She did not come back till late in September. I went to see her then and she told me that Guy and Hugo had volunteered.