A "Temporary Gentleman" in France

by A. J. Dawson

They were in that little seaside village when the Huns decreed war and desolation for Europe in August, 1914, and the three were a good deal upset about the whole business, for it interfered with the railway service, and broke in very unpleasantly upon the holiday atmosphere, which, coming as it did for but one fortnight in each year, was exceedingly precious to the little family. However, with the Englishman's instinct for clinging to the established order, with all the national hatred of disturbance, they clung as far as possible to the measured pleasantness of their holiday routine, and, after a week, returned to the workaday round of life in Brixton.

Then began a time of peculiar stress and anxiety for the little household, the dominating factor in which was the growing strangeness, as it seemed to them, of its actual head and ruler; of the man in the house. At first he talked a great deal of the war, the overpowering news of the day, and he passed many scathing criticisms upon the conduct of the authorities in their handling of the first stages of the monstrous work of preparation. He had much to say of their blunders and oversights; and somewhat, too, of what he called their criminal unpreparedness. He stopped talking rather abruptly at breakfast one morning; and one of the headlines which subsequently caught the eyes of his sister, in the newspaper her brother had propped against the coffee-pot, put this inquiry, in bold black type:

"WHOSE FAULT IS IT, MR. CITIZEN, THAT THE COUNTRY IS UTTERLY UNPREPARED FOR WAR?"

Those nightmarish early days of the great war slowly succeeded one another, and the mother and daughter grew perturbed over the change they saw creeping over their man. He talked hardly at all now. All the old cheery, kindly good humour which had provided half the sunshine of their lives seemed to be disappearing and giving place to a queer, nervous, morose sort of depression. It was as if their man lived a double life. Clearly he was much affected, even absorbed, by some mental process which he never so much as mentioned to them. Morning and evening they saw him, and yet it was as though he was not there, as though he lived and had his being in some other world, aloof from the old cosy, familiar, shared world in which they had always been together. The house-wifely eye of his mother noted with something like alarm that his bedroom candlestick required a fresh candle every day. One had been wont to serve him for a fortnight. Always, she thought he would unburden himself when he kissed her good-night. But he said never a word; and the nerve strain in the little household, which had been so quietly happy and bright, became almost unendurable.

Then the end came, with the beginning of the third week in September. The evening was extraordinarily peaceful and fine. The sister and a girl friend were at the little cottage piano. The visitor had a rather rich contralto voice, and sang with considerable feeling. In the middle of her third song the master of the house rose abruptly and walked out of the room, closing the door sharply behind him. The song was one of those called a "recruiting song." Late that night, when the visitor had departed, the brother apologised to his mother and sister for leaving them so abruptly, and spoke of a sudden headache. And the next evening he brought home the devastating news that he had enlisted, and would be leaving them next day for a military depot.

The news was received in dead silence. In some mysterious way neither of the women had contemplated this as possible. For others, yes. For their man—the thing was too wildly, remotely strange to be possible. There was his business; and, besides—It was merely impossible. And now he was an enlisted soldier, he told them. But, though they hardly suspected it, not being given to the practice of introspection, their man was not the only member of the little household in whom a fundamental and revolutionary change had been wrought by the world-shaking news of the past six weeks. In the end the women kissed their man, and the central fact of his astounding intelligence was not discussed at all. They proceeded direct to practical, material arrangements. But when the time came for her good-night kiss, the mother said, very quietly, "God bless you, dear!"; and the sister smiled and showed a new pride through the wet gleam of her eyes.

And then the auctioneer's clerk disappeared from the peaceful purlieus of Brixton and went out alone into an entirely new world, the like of which had never presented itself to his fancy, even in dreams. He became one of fifteen men whose home was a bell tent designed to give easy shelter to perhaps half that number. He began to spend his days in a routine of drill which, even to him with his gymnasium training, seemed most singularly tiresome and meaningless—at first.

At the end of four weeks he returned home for a Saturday night and Sunday in the Brixton house; and he wore one stripe on the sleeve of his service jacket. To his intelligence there now was nothing in the whole intricate round of section, platoon, and company drill which was meaningless, however wearing it might sometimes seem. There was a tan on his cheeks, a clear brightness in his eyes, an alert swing in his carriage, and a surprisingly crisp ring in his voice which at once bewildered and delighted his womenfolk. He seemed not so much a new man as the man whom they had always loved and respected, in some subtle way magnified, developed, tuned up, brought to concert pitch.

In November he was advised by his Company Commander to apply for a Commission. The officer badly wanted him for a Sergeant, but this officer had long since learned to place duty first and inclination a long way behind; and it was apparent to him that in this tall, alert Lance-Corporal of his, as in so many hundreds of other men in the ranks, there was the making of a good officer.

Shortly before Christmas, 1914, he was gazetted a Second Lieutenant, and on New Year's Day he found himself walking across a parade ground to take his place in front of the platoon he subsequently led in France, after long months of arduous training in several different English camps.