But war isn’t like that. It doesn’t let you forget. It gives you a few days, or weeks, and then takes some one else. “Old Thing” was the next, in the middle of a shoot in a front line O.P.
I was lying on my bed playing with a tiny kitten while the third subaltern at the ’phone passed on the corrections to the battery. Suddenly, instead of saying “Five minutes more right,” he said, “What’s that?—Badly wounded?” and the line went.
I was on the ’phone in a flash, calling up battalion for stretcher bearers and doctors.
They brought me his small change and pencil-ends and pocketbook,—and the kitten came climbing up my leg.
The Major came back from leave—which he had got on the Colonel’s return—in time to attend Old Thing’s funeral with the Colonel and myself. Outside the cemetery a football match was going on all the time. They didn’t stop their game. Why should they? They were too used to funerals,—and it might be their turn in a day or two.
Thanks to the Major my leave came through within a week. It was like the answer to a prayer. At any price I wanted to get away from the responsibility, away from the sight of khaki, away from everything to do with war.
London was too full of it, of immaculate men and filmy girls who giggled. I couldn’t face that.
I went straight down to the little house among the beeches and pines,—an uneasy guest of long silences, staring into the fire, of bursts of violent argument, of rebellion against all existing institutions.
But it was good to watch the river flowing by, to hear it lapping against the white yacht, to hear the echo of rowlocks, flung back by the beech woods, and the wonderful whir! whir! whir! of swans as they flew down and down and away; to see little cottages with wisps of blue smoke against the brown and purple of the distant woods, not lonely ruins and sticks; to see the feathery green moss and the watery rays of a furtive sun through the pines, not smashed and torn by shells; at night to watch the friendly lights in the curtained windows and hear the owls hooting to each other unafraid and let the rest and peace sink into one’s soul; to shirk even the responsibility of deciding whether one should go for a walk or out in the dinghy, or stay indoors, but just to agree to anything that was suggested.