VII
I was bewildered at first; I could not understand at all. I had seen the posters calling for recruits; I had seen the recruits drilling; but that too had seemed in its way remote; it had not occurred to me somehow that people of my own might go. I remember being glad, in the first days of all, that I had no one in the army. It had once been thought of for Guy, and I thought, ‘what a good thing Guy is not a soldier’; and then I felt ashamed at my own selfishness, for other people were soldiers, who mattered really as much.
And now I thought, it seems dreadful to say it, but I thought,
‘How silly of Guy and Hugo!’
And I thought:
‘That is just the side of them that Walter doesn’t like—fantastic—out of touch with reality.’
And I thought:
‘It is play acting, a little bit, and I always denied they did that. It would be much better if Hugo got a sensible job at last, and if Guy stuck to his law; he was getting on very well.’
I was not anxious about them. I did not believe they would ever be sent out to fight. They were only in training now; they were in camp somewhere, Grandmother had said, Hugo in Essex, and Guy on Salisbury plain. I knew it took months to train soldiers, and they were officers; that took several years; the War would be over before they were ready to go out; that made it so silly. But I was disturbed and unhappy all the same.
When I got home I told Walter. I expected him to say too that it was foolish but he didn’t.
He was sitting at his writing-table in the study. He gave a sort of groan and buried his face in his hands.
‘We shall all have to go before it is done,’ he said, and then abruptly:
‘I don’t suppose I shall finish my book now—that is all wasted.’
My heart seemed to stand still. I felt as though I was in a nightmare suddenly trying to wake up; or as though I had woken up, very early, in the dark, and thought of death; a helpless desperate feeling, as though the earth were slipping away, as though one were going to fall into infinite space . . . and then I recovered; normality came back, and I was sure that Walter too was hysterical and unhinged.
I tried to laugh.
‘You are an old goose, Walter,’ I said, and I put my arm round him and kissed the top of his head.
He did not look up. He was looking straight in front of him.
He said:
‘I was thinking before you came in of the Germans who will be killed; of the German scholars. They are doing work which no one else has ever done. If German scholarship is stamped out, scholarship throughout Europe will die. My work is useless, if the Germans are killed.’
I said:
‘But the Germans are conscripts⸺’
It answered my own thought, not his, and I knew that, as soon as I had said it.
‘We may all be conscripts too, before we are done,’ he answered. ‘It will not matter much by then.’
I asked:
‘Do you think Guy and Hugo were quite right to go?’
And he nodded.
The next day I heard from Mollie that George had got a Commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and about a week later Freddy Furze joined a Welsh Regiment.