1
After twelve months in an Austrian internment camp, the roar and movement, the familiar smell and glare of London streets were stupefying.
I had arrived in Vienna a week before the mobilisation order was issued; my mission was to secure the services of certain physicians and surgeons for a new hospital which I had in contemplation, and, though I was conscious of unwonted restlessness, though my young friends in the Chancery were kept working late, the recent ultimatum to Servia could never, I felt, involve England in war. So time went by, the hotels emptied, but I preferred to trust my own judgement and went on trusting it until war had been declared. I knew Vienna so well, I had lived there so long and made so many friends from my earliest days at the Embassy that I am afraid I continued to trust my judgement and to back my luck even after I had become technically scheduled as an enemy alien; and, when the reluctant authorities more in sorrow than anger placed me under surveillance, we all felt that a mistake had been made and that I should have only to ask for my release to obtain it. Was I not well over the most extravagant military age? Was I not physically unfit to bear arms? Could I not at any time have left Vienna with the Embassy Staff?
I was to find from August, 1914, until July, 1915, that the aspirations of the Litany for the well-being of prisoners and captives were neutralised by the reluctance of constituted authority to disturb the status quo. I was secure in my loose-box on a race-course five miles from Vienna; wire entanglements discouraged my comings and goings, arc-lamps laid me bare to the vigilance of the sentries; what good purpose could be served by setting me at large? My brother made the one appearance of his life in the House of Lords to raise me as an issue and to urge the exchange of civilian prisoners; memorials were presented to the Foreign Office; I am sorry to say that in the first convulsion of war I and my few thousand fellow prisoners did not matter.
I was interned for a twelvemonth. And, writing now in the third year of the war, I doubt whether I shall ever make good the knowledge which was then withheld from me. The newspapers were censored or inspired for purposes of propaganda; my colourless letters from England were enriched by half-page smears of indelible black. Between ignorance of what they might say and what I might receive, my correspondents confined themselves to business discussions and bald family history. My brother wrote of his son Archie's death in the retreat from Mons; my niece Yolande Manisty told me that she and her husband had moved into my house in Pont Street and were attending to my affairs as best they might. A further letter brought me the shocking news of Deryk Lancing's death on the eve of war, with consequences to myself which I required many weeks to digest.... After that there were guarded and bewildered little notes from Felix Manisty, who is a greater archaeologist than man of affairs; there were voluminous technical enquiries from Hatherly, my solicitor, a weekly budget from Yolande and sporadic outbursts from friends who had heard of my internment and felt constrained to write one letter to cheer my loneliness.
In July, after a year of false starts, an exchange of prisoners was finally arranged; in the last week of the month I returned deviously through Switzerland and France, landed in a most unrecognisable England, reported myself at an equally unrecognisable Foreign Office and then stood, much as I had stood forty years earlier with a crowd of other shy new boys at Eton, wondering what I was expected to do next. In the roar and movement, the smell and glare of London streets, I had ceased to have any property. The people were different, there was an incredible number of soldiers about. And everyone seemed to have been getting on very satisfactorily without me....
I remember walking a few steps towards the House of Commons, but I did not know whether the House was sitting; I turned back to Trafalgar Square with some idea of taking a train to Hampstead and visiting my office, but I had abandoned it for twelve months. If I called on Hatherly in Lincoln's Inn Fields, I should be told that he was at Ripley Court; if I went home, I should find that Yolande and Felix were both out.... It was salutary, I am sure, to find the measure of my importance, but it left me very lonely, I felt for some reason that not only was I not wanted but that I had no right to be there. England seemed to have been taken over as a going concern by a new management, which was in a great hurry....
I passed through the Admiralty Arch and looked round me. New Zealanders and Australians, bronzed and big-boned in summer khaki, South Africans, with their hats pinched to a point, were strolling up and down the Strand, in twos and threes, gravely smoking cigarettes; a slow-speaking Canadian enquired of me the way to Westminster Abbey; in St. James' Park two brakes passed me filled with Indian troops, turbaned, silent and undemonstrative. I remember that certain German prints had described the British Army as a menagerie....
Through the Arch, I could see a stream of motor omnibuses hurrying into Trafalgar Square and displaying long posters in a red and white streak—"LORD KITCHENER WANTS YOU," "LEND YOUR STRONG RIGHT ARM"—on the Horse Guards' Parade recruits were waiting their turn by the long wooden sheds at the Downing Street end; the finished soldier came swinging down the Processional Avenue to the music of a drum and fife band, watched a little wistfully by a knot of men in service caps, blue jackets, loose red ties and grey trousers, sometimes pinned emptily at ankle, knee or hip. Standing on the kerb, a girl of twenty in deep mourning completed scene and sequence.
I was still gaping like a yokel, when I heard my name called and found my hand wrung by an officer in unfamiliar naval uniform; and, though we had sat and voted side by side during his short term in the House, though I had shot with him a dozen times at his place in Ireland, I had to look twice before I recognised him as George Oakleigh. We stood shaking hands, laughing, talking both at once and shaking hands again until he suggested that I should come into his room at the Admiralty for a cigarette and a talk. George, whom I had known as a dilettante journalist and political wire-puller, explained parenthetically that he had for a year been one of innumerable auxiliary civil servants; I did not need to be told that he was tired, overworked and vaguely, sullenly bitter.
"Fancy people going out and trying to slaughter one another on a day like this!" he cried, looking with pink-lidded eyes at the sparse trees and scanty shade amid the white flood of sunshine.
"Well, you'd go out, if you had the chance," I said.
"And hate it like Hell all the time!" he murmured reflectively, as he mechanically took a salute. "I've seen enough people in the casualty lists to realise that war is a dangerous occupation, Stornaway; and I've met enough fellows home on leave.... You know Jim Loring's gone, by the way?" His teeth grated together. "This—this is the very thing that my uncle Bertrand and I spent half-a-dozen years trying to avert! Well, I must be getting back to work. If this war's done nothing else, at least it's cured me of the conventional, twelve-to-three-with-two-hours-off-for-luncheon view of Government offices. With me it's nine-thirty to eight, six days' holiday in twelve months and about one week-end in three."
As I would not come into his office and waste his time there, we wasted it for a few moments more by the Cook monument. George tried to give me my bearings, interrupting himself to ask jerkily, "I suppose you've heard that Jack Summertown's dead? He was knocked out at the same time as your nephew. And Val Arden?..."
I had an additional tragedy in which Oakleigh did not share, for we were almost within sight of the house which poor Deryk Lancing had so proudly adorned: on such another day he had taken me over it, room by room; I had heard that he died on the very evening that war was declared, yet I suppose he only anticipated what would have come to anyone of his age in six months' time.
"I suppose you can't imagine what all this looks like to a man who's seeing it for the first time," I said. "All this drilling and training. How many of these fellows will come back, d'you suppose? And what are we going to get in return?"
He smiled wistfully.
"A lasting peace, I hope. It can never happen again, you know."
"I never thought it could happen this time," I said.
"Well, this is going to prove that war is a failure. Perhaps we needed the proof.... You'll find that after the war people will begin to do what we—you and Bertrand and I and a thousand more—tried to make them do before—remove the incentive to war and the means of making war. There must be a general disarmament, the military machine must be broken. You'll find that Germany will be a confederated republic within twelve months—we can never make peace while there's a Hohenzollern at large. You know, Stornaway, this war's given us the opportunity of healing the sore places of Europe, and there's only one way to do it; when the peace conference begins to sit, it has got to divide the world according to nationalities. Belgium and France will have to be cleaned up first of all, and after that we must let the world go as it wants to go. Alsace-Lorraine will return to France; you'll find north and south Germany separating; Poland must be reconstituted; Italy will get back the Trentino and Trieste, though, of course, that leaves Austria without a port.... But you'll find Austria-Hungary splitting into a thousand pieces as soon as you apply the principle of nationality. I'm not sure about Constantinople, but I'm inclined to give it to Russia.... It's worth some sacrifice to clean up the international anomalies of the world and to make an end of war."
"It's going to be a big business, George, and a long business," was all that I would say.
"We're in sight of doing it," he asserted. "The moment we get within range of Constantinople, Turkey goes out of the war; she's on her last legs now. Then with Russia bursting in on the southeast and Italy pressing up from the south, Austria will be the next to go. People who know tell me she's on the verge of starvation. Then next spring we shall be bringing off a big offensive on the west. We're so frightfully handicapped now by lack of shells." He paused and looked at his watch. "By Jove, I must fly!" he exclaimed. "When shall I see you again? I'm dining with the Maurice Maitlands to-night and I happen to know that the Manistys are going to be there. Why don't you invite yourself? You're a lion, you know; and Connie Maitland will never forgive you, if anyone else catches hold of you first."
Leaving him to hurry into the Admiralty, I went slowly on foot to Pont Street. England was an armed camp and munition factory, London a gigantic General Headquarters. And George, with his rimless eye-glasses enthusiastically askew and a normally pale face ecstatically flushed, was throwing corps here and divisions there, dividing the map of the world by the test of nationality.... I felt giddy.
There was no one at home, when I reached Pont Street, and I explored the havoc of war as it had invaded the house of a man to whom personal comfort means much. My butler, footman and chauffeur had enlisted, my car was wearing itself out in the service of an elderly general; the ground-floor gave office-room to a railway canteen organisation administered by my niece, and the rest of the house, when not allocated to herself or her husband, provided temporary accommodation for derelict officers and nurses. Never have I felt less wanted.
"But, darling uncle, there's so little that we can do!" Yolande exclaimed, trying to combine apology and self-defence. "I feel that if we don't pinch and scrape and slave.... And everyone's in the same boat.... I bought one black frock when Archie was killed, and I'm not going to buy another stitch till the war's over. I don't dine out once a month; and then I don't usually have time to dress."
She was looking a little thin and white-faced; for some reason the auburn hair which I loved had been cropped short, but she was undaunted and self-reliant, one of a hundred thousand women to whom the war was bringing that opportunity for service for which they had so long pined.
The emergence of my nephew Felix from a War Office car completed the sense of revolution and unreality. That least military of archaeologists was now arrayed in a staff captain's uniform, which accorded ill with his glasses and bald head, for duty behind a string of letters and a telephone extension at the War Office.
"You'll get used to it in time," Yolande laughed, as we set out on foot for Eaton Place.
My sense of not being wanted certainly evaporated in the warmth of Lady Maitland's greeting. One of her sons was home on leave from the Front, and the familiar, red-lacquer drawing-room was filling with a party of twenty-four, each of whom was acclaimed at a distance, introduced, epitomised and enlisted for charity or intrigue before he had fairly crossed the threshold.
"Yolande! My dear, I got your note and I've put off the committee till Friday," she cried, when our turn came and my niece surrendered to a resonant kiss on either cheek. "And dear Captain Manisty—there was something I wanted to see you about.... It'll come back to me. And Mr. Stornaway!" She surveyed me for a moment with her handsome square head on one side, then turned to a little group behind her. "My dears, we all thought he was dead! Mr. Stornaway, I want you all to myself, you're going to tell me all about your terrible hardships and, before you're a day older, you're going on my Prisoners of War Relief Committee." She turned again to explain me to the room. "This is Mr. Stornaway who's been interned in Austria all this time. He's going to tell us all about it.... Mr. Stornaway, it's a scandal, we can't get the Government to act. Now here's Mr. Deganway—you know him?—he's in the Foreign Office and he tells me that the question of the prisoners——"
She broke off to welcome two new arrivals with a surprised cry of "Lord Pentyre! And my dear Sir Harry Mordaunt!" as though she had not invited them. I shook hands with Maitland and was trying to see whom else I knew, when she returned and remorselessly introduced me to Vincent Grayle, with whom I have sat in the House for a dozen years. He was leaning on a stick, and I learned in a galloping exchange of biography that he had had one knee shattered in the Antwerp expedition and was now at the War Office, "cleaning up the mess made by the professional soldiers."
"But what were you doing out there at all?" I asked, clinging to him for a moment before Lady Maitland could present me to anyone else. We had been contemporaries, if not friends, at Eton and Trinity, which meant that he was past fifty.
"Much too good a war to miss!" he answered with a laugh, hobbling away to be introduced to a young bride in half-mourning who had already collected two young Maitlands, Pentyre, Deganway and George Oakleigh.
"I expect you find everything a bit changed," said Maitland earnestly, glancing at his own uniform and speaking as though the war were a secret in which he was doubtfully initiating me.
"Grayle's much the same," I answered, looking enviously after the viking figure with the blue eyes, pink and white cheeks and corn-coloured hair.
There was a moment's silence, as my hostess mentally called the roll and I strolled away before her husband was ready with another platitude.
"Eleanor Ross is always late!" she complained. "Well, you haven't altered much, Mr. Stornaway."
Nor had she, I answered. The war seemed only to have turned her tireless energy into new channels. Whereas she had once called for the heads of Nationalists, strike leaders and, indeed, anyone with whom she chanced to be in temporary disagreement, she would now, I gathered, be content with the public execution of the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Sir Ian Hamilton. She seemed the motive power of as many committees as ever; her house was the meeting-place of as many incongruities as before, and she was prepared to yoke the meanest of us to one or other of her charities.
"We must have a talk about the Prisoners," she said, with one eye on the door. "The Government will do nothing, but what do you expect?"
Lowering her voice, she confided that three Ministers, of whom I knew one to be a bachelor, were married to German wives, while a fourth was discovered to have arms stacked in his cellar and a wireless installation on his roof. She told me, further, that we had had enough of these lawyer-politicians, that the country needed a Man, because the young shirkers that you met in the street were stealing the work of those who had patriotically enlisted; the Press, she went on to say, was a public danger (only exceeded in imbecile virus by the Press Bureau) and it was high time that in the matter of war we sat at the feet of Germany. She barely had time to weaken her last effect by declaring the German military machine, for all its forty years' perfection, to be the greatest imposture in history, before the Duchess of Ross was announced.
"Odious painted creature. And always late!" Lady Maitland whispered to me, as she hurried forward with both hands outstretched.
"You look giddy," Yolande murmured.
"And what do you think of England after a year of war?" Eleanor Ross cried over her shoulder, as we went down to dinner.