A "Temporary Gentleman" in France

by A. J. Dawson

In the case of the Service Battalion officer of Britain's New Army who, with humorous modesty, signs himself "Your 'Temporary Gentleman,'" what is there behind that enigmatic signature that his letters do not tell us? The first of these homely epistles shows their writer arriving with his Battalion in France; and the visit is evidently his first to that fair land, since he writes: "I wonder if I should ever have seen it had there been no war!" That exclamation tells a good deal.

But of the man and his antecedents prior to that moment of landing with his unit in France, the letters tell us nothing; and if it be true that the war has meant being "born again" for very many Englishmen, that frequently quoted statement at all events points to the enjoyment of some definite status before the war.

Inquiry in this particular case speedily brings home to one the fact that one is investigating the antecedents of a well-recognised New Army type, a thoroughly representative type, as well as those of an individual. In his antecedents, as in the revolutionary development which the war has brought to him, this "Temporary Gentleman" is clearly one among very many thousands who have, so to say, passed through the same crucibles, been submitted to the same standard tests, and emerged in the trenches of France and Flanders, in Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, in Africa, and in other places in which the common enemy has endeavoured to uphold his proposed substitution of Kultur for civilisation, as we understand it.

In the year 1896 there died, in a south-western suburb of London, a builder and contractor in a small, suburban way of business. An industrious, striving, kindly, and honourable man, he had had a number of different irons in the fire, as the saying goes, and some of them, it may be, would have provided a good reward for his industry if he had lived. As the event proved, however, the winding-up of his affairs produced for his widow a sum representing no more than maintenance upon a very modest scale of a period of perhaps three years. The widow was not alone in the world. She had a little daughter, aged five, and a sturdy son, aged eight years. Nineteen years later that boy, into whose youth and early training not even the mention of anything military ever crept, was writing letters home from fire trenches in France, and signing them "Your 'Temporary Gentleman.'"

For seven years after his father's death the boy attended a day school in Brixton. The tuition he there received was probably inferior in many ways to that which would have fallen to his lot in one of the big establishments presided over by the County Council. But his mother's severely straitened circumstances had rather strengthened than lowered her natural pride; and she preferred to enlarge the sphere of her necessary sacrifices, and by the practice of the extremest thrift and industry to provide for the teaching of her two children at private schools. The life of the fatherless little family was necessarily a narrow one; its horizon was severely restricted, but its respectability was unimpeachable; and within the close-set walls of the little Brixton home there never was seen any trace of baseness, of coarseness, or of what is called vulgarity. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of reticence and modesty, in which the dominant factors were thrift, duty, conscientiousness, and deep-rooted family affection.

The first epoch of his fatherless life closed when our "Temporary Gentleman" left school, at the age of fifteen, and mounted a stool in the office of a local auctioneer and estate agent, who, in the previous decade, had had satisfactory business dealings with the youth's father. This notable event introduced some change into the quiet little mother-ruled ménage; for, in a sense, it had to be recognised that, with the bringing home of his first week's pay, the boy threatened to become a man. The patient mother was at once proud and a little disconcerted. But, upon the whole, pride ruled. The boy's mannishness, brought up as he had been, did not take on any very disconcerting shapes, though the first cigarette he produced in the house, not very long after the conclusion of the South African War, did prove something of a disturbing element just at first.

The South African War affected this little household, perhaps, as much as it would have been affected by a disastrous famine in China. It came before the period at which the son of the house started bringing home an evening newspaper, and while the only periodicals to enter the home were still The Boy's Own Paper and a weekly journal concerned with dressmaking and patterns. As a topic of conversation it was not mentioned half a dozen times in that household from first to last.

The next really great event in the life of the auctioneer's clerk was his purchase of a bicycle, which, whilst catastrophic in its effect upon his Post Office Savings Bank account, was in other respects a source of great happiness to him. And if it meant something of a wrench to his mother, as a thing calculated to remove her boy a little farther beyond the narrow confines of the sphere of her exclusive domination, she never allowed a hint of this to appear. Her son's admirable physique had long been a source of considerable pride to her; and she had wisely encouraged his assiduity in the Polytechnic gymnasium of which he was a valued supporter.

For the youth himself, his bicycle gave him the key of a new world, whilst robbing the cricket and football clubs to which he belonged of a distinctly useful member. He became an amateur of rural topography, learned in all the highways and by-ways of the southern Home Counties. His radius may not have exceeded fifty miles, but yet his bicycle interpreted England to him in a new light, as something infinitely greater and more beautiful than Brixton.

Quietly, evenly, the years slid by. The boy became a youth and the youth a man; and, in a modest way, the man prospered, becoming the most important person, next to its proprietor, in the estate agent's business. The mother's life became easier, and the sister (who had become a school-teacher) owed many little comforts and pleasures to the consistent kindliness of one who now was admittedly the head of the little household and its chief provider. He never gave a thought to the State or felt the smallest kind of interest in politics; yet his life was in no way self-centred or selfish, but, on the contrary, one in which the chief motive was the service of those nearest and dearest to him. Whilst rarely looking inward, his outward vision was bounded by the horizon of his well-ordered little home, of the Home Counties he had learned to love, and of the south-coast seaside village in which the family spent a happy fortnight every summer.