William—An Englishman

by Cicely Hamilton

One was a short and rotund little man who might have been sixty to sixty-five and might have been a local tradesman—nearly bald and with drooping moustaches, rather like a stout little seal. Essentially an ordinary and unpretentious creature, he was obviously aiming at dignity; his chin was lifted at an angle that revealed the measure of the roll of fat that rested on his collar, and he walked almost with a strut, as if he were attempting to march. Afterwards William remembered that he had seen on the little man's portly stomach some sort of insignia or ribbon; at the time it conveyed nothing to him, but he was told later that it was the outward token of a mayor. He remembered also that the little man's face was pale, with a sickly yellow-grey pallor; and that as he came down the steps with his head held up the drooping moustache quivered and the fat chin beneath it twitched spasmodically. There was something extraordinarily pitiful about his attempt at a personal dignity which nature had wholly denied him; William felt the appeal in it even before he grasped the situation the meaning and need of the pose.

The man who walked on his left hand was taller and some years younger—middle-aged, slightly stooping and with slightly grizzled hair and beard. He belonged to an ordinary sedentary type, and William, thinking him over later, was inclined to set him down a schoolmaster, or perhaps a clerk. He wore steel-rimmed eye-glasses and his black coat was shiny on the back and at the elbows; he had none of his fellow's pomposity, and walked dragging his feet and with his eyes bent on the ground. He raised them only when, as they halted in the middle of the road, the respectable woman in black called out something—one word, perhaps his name—came up to him and caught him by the shoulder. He answered her quickly and very briefly—with hardly more than a word—and for a second or two after he had spoken she stood quite still, with her hand resting on his shoulder. Then, suddenly, her sallow face contorted, her thin mouth writhed and from it there came a cry that was too fierce to be called a groan and too hoarse to be called a scream; she flung herself forward on the neck of the grizzled man and her lean black arms went round it. He tried to speak to her again, but she silenced him by drawing down his head to her breast; she held it to her breast and pressed it there; she rocked and swayed a little from side to side, fondling the grizzled hair and kissing it to a stream of broken endearment. Her grief was animal, alike in its unrestraint and its terrible power of expression; convention fell away from her; in her tidy dress and with her dowdy hat slipping to one shoulder she was primitive woman crooning over her dying mate.... When she was seized and drawn away from her man, her curved fingers clung to his garments. Two soldiers held her and she writhed between them choking out a hoarse incoherent appeal to the officer standing in the frame of the doorway with his hand on the hilt of his sword; she went on crying herself hoarser as her captors urged her further down the street and at last, in mercy to those who looked on, out of sight through an open doorway. William had his hands to his ears when the door shut. No one, in spite of the persistence of her cries, came out into the street to inquire the cause of her grief; but it seemed to William afterwards that he had been aware here and there of furtive faces that appeared at upper windows.

While they forced the dowdy woman away from him her man stood motionless, turned away from her with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, so that he started when a soldier came up behind him and tapped him sharply on the arm. The soldier—he had stripes on his sleeve and seemed a person of authority—held a handkerchief dangling from his hand; and, seeing it, the grizzled-haired captive removed his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

"Don't look," said William under his breath. "Griselda, don't look."

For the first time mortal fear had seized him by the throat and shaken him. He knew now that he stood before death itself, and the power to inflict death, and his heart was as water within him. His wife was beside him—and when he realized (as he did later on with shame) that the spasm of terror in those first moments of comprehension had been stronger than the spasm of pity, he excused it by the fact of her presence. His fear in its forecast of evil took tangible shape. Griselda at his elbow had her eyes and her mouth wide open; she was engrossed, fascinated—and he was afraid, most horribly afraid, that in her amazement, her righteous pity, she might say or do something that would bring down wrath upon them. He remembered how bold she had been in the face of a crowd, how uplifted by sacred enthusiasm! ... He plucked her by the sleeve when he whispered to her not to look—but she went on staring, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, for the first time unresponsive to his touch and the sound of his voice.

They bandaged the eyes of the two prisoners—the rotund pompous little mayor and the man who might have been a schoolmaster. All his life William remembered the look of the rotund mayor with a bandage covering him from forehead to nose-tip and his grey moustache quivering beneath it—a man most pitifully afraid to die, yet striving to die as the situation demanded. And he remembered how, at the moment the bandage was knotted on the mayor's head, there stepped up to him quietly the stout old woman who had stood praying on the further side of the road with her eyes fixed upon the door. She held up a little crucifix and pressed it to the quivering grey moustache.... Griselda clutched William by the wrist and he thought she was going to cry out.

"Don't, darling, don't!" he whispered. "Oh, darling, for both our sakes!" ...

He did not know whether it was his appeal or her own terror and amazement that restrained her from speech—but she stood in silence with her fingers tightened on his wrist. He wished she would look away, he wished he could look away himself; he tried for an instant to close his eyes, but the not-seeing was worse than sight, and he had to open them again. As he opened them a car roared by raising a smother of dust; but as the cloud of its passage settled he saw that the two blindfolded men were standing with their backs to a blank wall—a yellow-washed, eight-foot garden wall with the boughs of a pear-tree drooping over it. It was opposite the yellow-washed wall, across the road, that the file of soldiers was drawn up; the captives were facing the muzzles of their rifles and the red-faced boy-officer had stationed himself stiffly at the farther end of the file. The dust settled and died down—and there followed (so it seemed to William) an agony of waiting for something that would not happen. Long beating seconds (three or four of them at most) while two men stood upright with bandaged eyes and rifles pointed at their hearts; long beating seconds, while a bird fluted in the pear-tree—a whistle-note infinitely careless.... And then (thank God for it!) a voice and a report that were as one.... The man with the grizzled hair threw out an arm and toppled with his face in the dust; the mayor slid sideways against the wall with the blood dribbling from his mouth.

CHAPTER VIII

Fundamentally William was no more of a coward than the majority of his fellow-men, and, put to it, he would have emulated the shivering little mayor and tried to strut gamely to his end; it was as much sheer bewildered amazement as the baseness of bodily terror that had him by the throat when he saw the hostages done to death—sickening and shaking him and, for the moment, depriving him of self-control. Never before, in all his twenty-eight years, had he seen a man come to his end; so far death had touched him only once, and but slightly, by the unseen passing of a mother he had not loved; thus the spectacle of violent and bloody dying would of itself have sufficed to unnerve and unman him. To the natural shrinking from that spectacle, to his natural horror at the slaying of helpless men, to his pity and physical nausea was added the impotent, gasping confusion of the man whose faith has been uprooted, who is face to face with the incredible. Before his eyes had been enacted the impossible—the ugly and brutal impossible—and beneath his feet the foundations of the earth were reeling. The iron-mouthed guns and the marching columns which had hitherto passed him as a dusty pageant took life and meaning in his eyes; they were instruments of the ugly impossible. There was meaning too in the lonely grave and in the lonely house—whence men had fled in terror of such scenes as his eyes had witnessed. So far, to him, the limit of human savagery had been the feeding through the nose of divers young women who, infected with the virus of martyrdom, demanded to be left to die—and now he had witnessed the killing of men who desired most greatly to live. At the time he did not—because he could not—analyse either the elements of the situation or his own attitude towards it; but he knew afterwards, vaguely but surely, that in that one bewildering and ruthless moment the heart of his faith was uprooted—his faith in that large vague entity the People, in the power of Public Opinion and Talk, in the power of the Good Intention.... Until that moment he had confounded the blunder with the crime, the mistaken with the evilly intentioned. It had not seemed to him possible that a man could disagree with him honestly and out of the core of his heart; it had not seemed to him possible that the righteous could be righteous and yet err. He knew now, as by lightning flash, that he, Faraday, a thousand others, throwing scorn from a thousand platforms on the idea of a European War, had been madly, wildly, ridiculously wrong—and the knowledge stunned and blinded him. They had meant so well, they had meant so exceedingly well—and yet they had prophesied falsely and fact had given them the lie. Until that moment he had been in what he called politics the counterpart of the Christian Scientist, despising and denying the evil that now laughed triumphant in his face. With its triumph perforce he was converted. War was: men were shot against walls. Converted, though as yet he knew not to what form of unknown faith.