II
It was at the end of this month or the beginning of April that Loring's battalion went to the Front. They had, like almost everyone else, had one or two false alarms, but this time the order was not countermanded. After taking leave of his wife he hurried up to town and dined with me his last night in England.
"According to the statistics I've got about another sixteen days of life," he observed, as we left the Admiralty and walked along the Mall to the Club. "Second Lieutenants seem to last as much as a fortnight sometimes."
"Then I hope you'll get rapid promotion," I said. "The sooner you cease to be a Second Lieutenant the better."
He laughed a little bitterly.
"My dear George, it's only a question of time. I may get wounded, of course, but otherwise all this year's vintage will be destroyed. You've been snatching at straws of hope—the Russian steam-roller, the Italian diversion in the south, the starvation of Germany, the socialist revolution, the smash up of credit ... what's the latest? Oh, the capture of Constantinople. That's not going to end the war. You'll only get peace by killing Germans, and they'll kill as many of you as you kill of them. The people who may possibly survive will be the fellows who enlist about two years hence. If you've got a cigarette, I'll steal it."
I handed him my case.
"You're tolerably cheerful about it," I remarked.
As he paused to light the cigarette, the flare of the match showed nothing but an expression of mild boredom.
"I'm neither one thing nor the other," he said. "I simply don't think about the war, it's too absurd! Millions of men, thousands of millions of money, chucked away in a night. And why? Because Germans breed like rabbits, scamper outside their own country and want still to be called Germans; and we won't let 'em. There's no quarrel between individual Germans and individual British—or wasn't, till they made swine of themselves in Belgium. It's the stupidest war in history. However, we're in and we must come out on top, otherwise our wives and sisters will be cut open. Hallo! here's the Club." He flung away his cigarette and stood for a moment looking up at the lighted doorway. "I wonder if I shall ever come here again?"
"Many times, I hope," said I, and with an indulgent smile he accompanied me in to dinner.
As we went upstairs to the smoking-room an hour later he told me—what indeed I had already heard from my sister Beryl—that Violet was expecting a child.
"I hope it's a boy," he said, cutting his cigar with a good deal of deliberation. "They have the best time—or did in the old days. I wonder what your new After-the-War world is going to be like. You're a lucky man, George; you'll have known life before and after the Flood; you'll be able to tell the kid what sort of animal his father was." He handed me a match and then lit his own cigar. "Jove, we've known each other a devil of a long time, George."
"And an uncommon good time it was. We haven't seen the end of it yet."
He seemed to think the point hardly worth contesting and paced restlessly to and fro, until he came to a standstill by the window.
"Come here, George," he said, after a moment's contemplation of the scene without.
I crossed the room and looked into the darkened street. A shaded lamp threw its foggy circle of light on to the pavement and house-front of the opposite side. A party of men and girls were walking down the road with arms linked: as they came under the light the left-flank man shouted, "Left wheel!" and the line swung round on to the pavement and stood marking time before a row of recruiting posters pasted against the wall. Two of the men were in uniform, three in mufti; all were hilarious, and, as the line wheeled back and resumed the march down the street, the sound of an untuneful voice, encouraged by shrill, unrestrained laughter, floated up to the window.
"It's a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart's—right there."
Loring let fall the blind and returned to his chair.
"England at war!" he remarked.
"Try to understand the people you're dealing with," I said. "A million men have enlisted to that tune."
"I'm not complaining. I dislike all popular songs. 'Lillibullero' drove my king out of Ireland, and the 'Marseillaise' drove the Church out of France. Democracy in the ascendant has a taste for songs, and I don't like democracy in the ascendant. But that's all by the way. I'm thinking of the comedy of life—Germany with her 'Wacht am Rhein' prodding her soldiers into battle with a bayonet, and ourselves with our own methods. A pretty scene, you know: five men and four women—all drunk. Three of the men plastered with the penny flags of the patriotic life, two of them actually in uniform and ready to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and avenge Louvain—who'd heard of Louvain before it was sacked?—the women all drunk on a separation allowance. And they stand nine abreast, shouting a music-hall song and looking at a poster that says, 'Women of England, is your best boy in khaki?' If you're fool enough ever to fight, I suppose you're doubly a fool for trying to keep some dignity in the business." He sighed perplexedly. "I dare say it's no worse than the 'Wacht am Rhein' and the bayonet—material absolutism against uneducated democracy."
"Is there anything in the world you think worth fighting for?" I asked, as I handed him his coffee.
"Any ideal."
"The democracy won't always be uneducated."
"It will as long as you and I have anything to do with it," he answered. "As a caste we're played out, George, and our only hope of power is to keep people's stomachs full and their heads empty. For God's sake don't perpetrate the hypocrisy of imagining we're an intelligenza with those posters in sight. I've been thinking a bit in camp lately, George."
"Do you fire these views off in mess?" I asked.
"To a handful of schoolboys who think war's the greatest fun in the world? No! But it makes you think when you see a pasty-faced clerk dragged from his office-stool, given a chest, turned into a man and then flung across the Channel to be blown limb from limb. I don't think it's worth it unless we've got some ideal—hardly worth praying to be 'slightly wounded,' which, I understand, is the ambition of every man over thirty. I see the opportunity, but I don't see anyone ready to grasp it."
"A lot depends on the length of the war," I suggested.
I had in mind the lessons of South Africa and the incorrigible buoyancy of the English temperament. If the war ended in a week, there would be found jaunty spirits to explain that their victory was won without preparation, all in the day's work, that they had pottered over to the Front to kill time before the opening of the London Season. In their rush back to the old life they would be accompanied by everyone who boasted what he would do or buy a drink on the day peace was signed. A longer war with its swelling casualty lists might chasten the temper of England, or equally it might provoke a Merveilleuses reaction and set men harking back to the fashions of "the good old days" before the fourth of August.
"It's a gloomy look out either way," said Loring when we parted that night. "Good-bye old man. We meet in heaven if not before."
Three days later I received a call from Sonia. Since my bout of influenza she had formed the habit of coming in three or four times a week when her work at the hospital was over, and we used to talk for an hour and exchange letters from friends and relations at the Front. On this occasion she arrived earlier than her wont and sent a message that she wished to see me at once. Hurriedly finishing my dressing, I went in and found her standing in front of the fire, very pale and with eyes red with weeping.
"I hope nothing's wrong ..." I began.
She gave a little choking sob and stumbled into my arms.
"Tom's killed!" she cried.
"Sonia!"
She nodded convulsively. "Father's just heard from the War Office. He wired to me. It was two days ago."
I led her to a sofa and tried to say something that would not sound too hackneyed. Tom and I had drifted apart, but for five years we had shared a study at school, and I knew the loss that his death would bring to the family. The Dainton history, as I read it, was one of successive failures. With the accepted ingredients of happiness in their possession, Sir Roger had never been allowed to live the unobtrusive country life of his ambition, Lady Dainton never quite achieved the social conquest of her dreams, Tom had married a wife who disappointed his parents, and Sonia had not married at all. The only one who seemed to get the best out of existence was Sam, equally at home with his regiment in India and in London, and entirely unaffected by the pretentious schemings of Crowley Court.
"I want you to lend me some money," Sonia went on, as the first passion of weeping spent itself. "I haven't enough to get home, and I want to be with mummie."
I emptied my note case on to the table.
"Have you dined?" I asked.
She shook her head as though the mention of food nauseated her, but I insisted on her eating a cutlet and drinking a little wine. When my uncle came in, she made an effort to calm herself and, as we drove to Waterloo and travelled down to Melton, she was able to speak composedly of the days of twenty years before when we played and fought together in our school holidays.
"You're going to be brave, Sonia?" I asked, as the train steamed into the station.
"I shan't cry any more," she promised, giving my hand a little squeeze.
"And you will give your mother some message of sympathy from me?"
"But you're coming up to the house?"
"You'll both find it easier to meet if I'm not there," I said. "There's a train back soon after one."
She flung her arm suddenly round my neck.
"George, I feel I was always such a beast to him!" she whispered.
A day or two later the official announcement appeared in the Press, and within a fortnight a less than usually belated dispatch gave an account of the fighting in which he had met his end. A British trench had been lost, regained and once more lost. As our troops fell back the first time, Captain Dainton stayed to assist a wounded subaltern, and it was as the two struggled from the trench into the open that a bullet passed through Tom's heart. Thanks to his assistance, the subaltern, Lieutenant Longton, had regained the British lines, and the name of Captain Dainton was included in the list of recommendations at the end of the dispatch.
Sonia came round the same evening and asked me to accompany her the following Sunday to a private hospital in Portland Place. Longton had been invalided home and was anxious to see any relations of the man who had saved his life. Lady Dainton had already called, but Sonia wanted a first-hand account of her brother's last engagement.
We were unable to add very much to the information given us in the dispatch. It was an affair of seconds—an arm stretched out, a hoist on to the shoulders, a few yards zigzag running, a sudden fall. Longton had crawled back on all fours to his own trench, with a rain of bullets piercing his clothes and furrowing the earth all round him.
"Are you badly hit?" I asked him, when his story was told.
There was a bandage round his head, but he seemed in the finest health and spirits.
"It just touched the skull," he told me. "I think I must have had a moment of concussion. I remember feeling a twenty-ton weight hit me on the top of the head, then a complete blank. The next thing was the feeling that I was being picked up, and I found myself being trotted back with my arms round Dainton's neck. I was perfectly all right by the time I got back to our reserve trench and when the counter-attack started I went along with the rest of them. It was only when we'd been beaten back a second time that I thought I'd better be cleaned up before I got any dirt into the wound."
"Are you in much pain?" Sonia asked.
"I get a bit of a headache sometimes, but I feel as fit as ten men. That's what makes it so sickening to lie here. I want to go out again."
He was a good-looking, fair-haired boy of nineteen, with blue eyes and a ready smile. His face, neck and hands were tanned deep brown with exposure to the sun and wind. He gave me the impression of not having a nerve in his body.
"As you want to get back," I said, "there's no harm in my telling you you're the first man I've heard say that."
The smile died from his eyes and his whole expression hardened.
"I want to kill some more of the beggars," he said, "before I can die happy." He broke off suddenly with an unexpected laugh. "Lord! if my father heard me! I'm the son of a parson, you know; I'm supposed to be taking orders some time or other. But first of all I must get level over your brother, Miss Dainton, and another man."
"Who's the other man?" Sonia asked. "I may know him if he was a friend of my brother's."
"Oh, he wasn't in our battalion at all. When we got to the reserve trenches I found him sitting very comfortably on someone else's overcoat: he'd lost his way in the retreat and seemed inclined to stay with us. I didn't mind—we were too much thinned out for that; besides, I couldn't make out if he'd been hit or what, he was staring all about him and jumping at every sound. I think he must have been wounded, 'cause when we started our counter-attack he staggered out and came a cropper over the wire and everything else. Awful plucky thing to do, you know; some of our fellows weren't half keen on attacking—nerve a bit shaken, you know. I gave the order, and for a second or two nothing happened. Then this chap shouted out, 'Come on, you men!' and went over the top of the trench like a two-year-old. The others followed after that, but I couldn't drag them out, myself. The fellow must have been pretty bad from the way he kept going over. I tried to send him back, but it was no use."
"Was he killed?" I asked, as Longton paused.
"I'm not sure it wasn't worse. We got dear old Seven Dials——"
"Got what?" I asked.
"That was the name of the trench," Longton explained. "We held it for a bit, and then the Bosches shelled us out again. They got hold of this chap, and when we made our second counter-attack that evening we found him hanging from the supports of a dug-out, with his feet six inches off the ground and a bayonet through either hand. Crucified." He drew breath and burst out with concentrated fury, "My God! those devils!... I was in hospital by that time; I never saw him. If I had ...! We met on the ambulance train, and he was raving with delirium. I did what I could for the poor brute.... He was too bad; I couldn't make out what he wanted." He sat up in bed with blazing eyes, as the picture repainted itself in his memory, then with a sudden shiver seemed to recall where he was. "I'm sorry, Miss Dainton. These are the things one's supposed to forget when one comes back to England. But—well, it might have been me but for your brother, and I'm going to make somebody pay for it."
"But—what happened to him?" Sonia asked, with horror in her eyes. "Where is he?"
Longton shook his head.
"I should think it's long odds he's dead. All the way back to Boulogne he was raving ... oh, Lord! Here comes the sister! It's all right Sister; I'm not getting excited!"
Sonia bade him good-bye and clutched my arm until we got out into the street.