If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

In his intensity he had extended his left hand and was beating his points into it with the handle of his stick. "See that?"

Sabre was not in the mood to see anything. He only wanted to be away.

"No, I'm dashed if I do. What are we going to fight on the Continent for—supposing we ever do have to fight anywhere?"

The stick hammered away again. "Because we've got obligations there. We've got to defend Belgium, for one. And if we hadn't—if we hadn't any obligations we'd pretty soon, we'd damn soon find them as soon as ever Germany breaks loose. That's what these National Service Johnnies ought to tell the people, that's what Bobs ought to tell them, that's what these blasted politicians ought to tell them: you don't want National Service to defend your perishing homes. The Navy's going to do that. You want it like hell because you've got to defend your lives—out there." He waved his stick towards "out there." "My God!" he said. He was consumed with the intensity of his own emotions. "My God!"

Despite himself, Sabre was impressed. The man would have impressed anybody. His eyes were extraordinarily penetrating. There actually were tiny little points of perspiration about his nose.

"I never thought about that," Sabre said doubtfully. "I never thought there were any obligations. I doubt any member of the Government would admit there were any."

"I know damn well they wouldn't," Otway declared. "And they'd be helped to deny it, or to evade it, by the howl of laughter there'd be in the Commons if any one had the guts to get up and ask if we had any obligations. There's no joke goes down like that sort of joke. Well—" His manner changed. He tucked his stick under his arm and took out a silver cigarette case. "Cigarette? Well—they'll laugh the other side of their chuckle heads one of these days."

Sabre took a cigarette. "You're pretty sure there's going to be a war, aren't you?"

The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. "Sure? My God, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure—you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields. We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes. Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'—not 'if we fight you'—'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows—every soldier who's keen—that it's going to be out there. In Europe." He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match. "Sabre, why the hell aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their shores when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their shores? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these bloody politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives? Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be damned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-snatcher all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times—that's what you're going to live and do in lean. Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire."

"I'm with you there," Sabre said. He did not believe half this intense man said, but he conceived a sudden and great admiration for his intensity. And he had had no idea that a soldier ever thought so far away from his own subject—which was sport and one chance in a million of fighting—as to produce aphorisms on habit and development. "But you know, Otway," he said, "it's jolly hard to believe all this inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the—well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments strike me as absolutely sound."