William—An Englishman

by Cicely Hamilton

Edith Haynes knew her way about Paris; and the little hotel in a quiet side-street, where a taxi deposited herself and her companion, was one that had sheltered her in days less eventful and strenuous, and where Madame, in consequence, was compassionate and not contemptuous at being asked to shelter two late arrivals in the last stage of dirt and untidiness. William, before he sat down to eat, had exchanged his torn garments for the suit of an absent son, called up on the first day of mobilization; and for all his ache and dull stupor of sorrow, he knew something of the blessing of bodily relief when he washed in hot water and was clean. He had had no real sleep since the night before Griselda died; now the need for it came down on him like a heavy cloud and, great as was also his need for food, he could hardly keep his eyes open through supper. When he woke next morning it was nearing midday and he had more than slept the clock round.

He pressed the bell as he had been told to do when he woke; and with the coffee and rolls that arrived at the summons came a pencilled note from his mentor. She had gone out to look up her relatives, and also to inquire about the time and manner of the journey from Paris to London; she wrote that she might not be back at the hotel for some hours, but the envelope that enclosed her communication enclosed likewise a tactfully proffered loan for the immediate needs of her fellow-traveller's wardrobe. But for the reminder it would have hardly occurred to him that his wardrobe was in need of renewal; he had grown so accustomed in the last long days to being ordered, guided, or driven that he had lost the habit of directing his own doings. As it was, he breakfasted, dressed himself again in the suit of Madame's absent son, and was instructed by Madame herself where to find a barber for an overdue shave and an outfitter capable of English. Thither he went, made his purchases mechanically and returned to the hotel with his new suit of black in a parcel. It seemed to him, as he walked the Paris streets, as he bought and paid and spoke of things that did not matter, that his sense of loss and his longing for Griselda was stronger even than in the first hours after her death. It was accentuated by his contact with the civilized, the normal; by the sights and sounds of the everyday world to which Griselda belonged. She had had no place in the strange French village where she died, no place in the misery and dirt of the crowded truck; but here where life, to all seeming, was as usual, where the streets were like enough to English streets to produce, after country solitude and the savagery of bloodshed, the illusion of dear familiarity: here she should have walked with her arm in his. Here she would have chatted, have gazed in shop windows and bargained ... and long years faced him with their deadly never as he went his way without her.

Later, when he had returned to the hotel and changed into his new black suit, a wild fit of useless rage came over him—and alone in his third-floor bedroom he cursed the devils who had killed his wife, the devils who had made the war. Under his breath, lest he should be heard in the corridor, he called down the vengeance of God on their evil heads, breaking inevitably, as his own store of invective gave out into lyrical reminiscence of that Biblical lore with which his mother had imbued him through Sunday after Sunday of his childhood; believing in the God whose existence he had usually ignored (and often doubted) because of his need of an avenger and a present help in his trouble. In that moment the God whom he sought—and it may be found—was the Lord God of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Who was wont to strike the wicked and spare not; and the desire of his shaken and rebellious soul was even as the desire of him who sang out his hatred by the alien waters of Babylon. The hotel chambermaid put an end to his whispered prayer and anathema by tapping on the door to inform him that lunch was waiting on the table.

Edith Haynes, when she returned in the late afternoon with news that the journey could be made on the following day by way of Dieppe and Folkestone, found him clad in his new-bought mourning for Griselda and poring over English newspapers. His eyes were still haggard and moved her to pity, but she took it as a good sign that his stupor of grief had passed and that he had begun (as his first question told her) to feel a need for more information which might bridge the month's gap in his knowledge of the outer world. She gave him, with such detail as she had in her possession, the story of the outbreak of war and the causes thereof: and from her he learned for the first time of the ultimatum to Servia, and the tension thereby created; of the political consequences of the invasion of Belgium, and the feverish days of hesitation in England that had ended, on the Fourth of August, with the formal declaration of war. He listened, sometimes puzzled but always intent, from time to time putting a question that revealed his blank ignorance of the network of European politics; to which she replied as clearly as she could, showing him maps and talking on in the hope of distracting him from the thoughts behind his haggard eyes. By degrees she gleaned, from his hesitating queries and disconnected comments, some understanding not only of his profound ignorance of the forces that had brought about the war, but of the upheaval of his mind and soul which was the direct and inevitable consequence of the loss of his former faith. Once or twice as they talked he quoted her scraps and jerks of anti-militarist propaganda—from Faraday, from orators of the Trades Union Congress, from a speech of Philip Snowden's in Parliament urging the reduction of the Navy—and she saw that he was trying to justify to himself his attitude and creed of yesterday. In the midst of a quotation from Faraday on the general strike as a certain preventive of war, he broke off suddenly to appeal to her with: "Every one thought he was right. He seemed so sure. I didn't see how he could be wrong!"

She noticed that, wherever their talk might stray, he came back, time and again, to his central fact—that the blankly impossible had happened and the jest was a brutal truth. That, in the beginning, was all his mind had laid hold of; now, the first stage of amazement over, he was groping instinctively, and perhaps unconsciously, after rights and wrongs of quarrel, and striving to understand how the impossible had come into existence. Edith Haynes had not passed her life in the atmosphere of Internationalism, and would have been more than human had she been an impartial guide to him where the causes of war were concerned—just as he would have been more than human had he been capable of impartial guidance. What he lacked in patriotism he made up in personal suffering; he hated the German because he had been robbed of his wife, and it added but little to the fire of his hatred to learn of faith broken with Belgium. If he listened intently when she told of it, if he pored over newspaper paragraphs dealing with German cruelty to the conquered, it was because they fitted with his mood and justified the loathing in his soul.

It was his persistent poring over English newspapers that brought him in the end the salvation of a definite purpose. An article in The Daily Chronicle—some days old—described the beginning of the recruiting campaign for the raising of Kitchener's Army; he read it as he read everything else that explained or described the war. At first the article was nothing but news to him, a mere statement of facts; but as he read further a meaning flamed into the news. Bereft as he was of guidance, his mind swinging rudderless in chaos, he was waiting unconsciously for the man or the impulse that could seize on his helpless emotion and give purpose and direction to his life; thus the journalist's vigorous appeal to the nation's patriotism was driven home by the force of his own experience and became an appeal to himself. The writer had illustrated his argument in the obvious manner, by reference to the condition of invaded Belgium and the suffering of her people under the hand and heel of the enemy; he wrote of women outraged, of hostages killed, of cities laid waste, and of houses fired with intention. He was spurred by indignation, by pity and a natural patriotism, and had laid on his colours—to all but William—with a vivid and forcible pen. To William, as he read, the result seemed lame and pitiful, an inadequate babbling of the living horrors that had burned themselves into his soul; but for all its weakness—perhaps because of it—the article gave him the impulse for which he had been waiting in torment. It may have been his very sense of the inadequacy with which it described what he had known that set his imagination to work, that drove home its purport and made of it a lead to his blind and whirling emotions. He read and re-read while he quivered with impatience at its failure; if the man had seen what he had seen, if the man had lost what he had lost, he could not have argued so tamely. His pen would have been dipped in fire; he would have written so that all men reading him would have rushed to arms. The paper dropped from his hands to the table and he sat staring at a picture of his own making—of a crowd bitter and determined, moved by the tale of wrongdoing to a righteous and terrible wrath. He saw it setting forth to execute justice and avenge innocent blood ... and himself one of it, spurring and urging it on. So he first visualized himself as a soldier—an unscientific combatant of the Homeric pattern, but nevertheless a soldier. The vision thrilled and inspired him, and out of the deep waters of his impotent misery he clutched at the knowledge that he could act, resent, resist; that, ceasing to suffer as the slave suffers, he could give back blow for blow.

There was enough of the old leaven in him to bring him up suddenly, and with something like a round turn, as he realized that the act of striking blow for blow against the German would involve the further act of enlistment and the wearing of the King's uniform. His first mental vision of his warrior crowd had been vague as well as Homeric; he had only seen faces uplifted by courage, not the khaki and buttons below them—seeing himself rather as an avenger of Griselda than as a soldier of the British Empire. But it was only for a moment that he shied Like a nervous horse at the bogey of the "hired assassin." The prophets from whom he had learned his one-time contempt for the soldier were no longer prophets to him, and his conversion was the more thorough from his ingrained and extremist conviction that the opposite of wrong must be right. Conversion, in the sense in which the word is employed by the religious, describes most clearly the process through which he had passed: conviction of ignorance, the burden of Christian; a sense of blind longing and humiliated confusion—and now, at the end, light flashed on him suddenly, salvation figured by the sword.... It was, so to speak, but a partial salvation. He had lost his capacity for absolute faith, for the rapture that comes of infallibility; but he was of all men the last who could live without guidance, and his new creed had at least this merit—it was supported by his own experience. Its articles, had he formulated them, would have been negative rather than assertive—I have ceased to believe in the old, rather than I believe in the new; but it gave him that working hypothesis without which Life to him was impossible.

When he took his seat, next morning, in the train bound for Dieppe, his mind was made up—made up fiercely and definitely—on his future course of action; and as a result something that was by comparison peace had succeeded to the chaos and dazed rebellion of his first few hours of loss. His companion noticed the change in his manner and bearing; it was not that he seemed more resigned, but that he had ceased to drift—his eyes were as haggard as yesterday, but not so vague and purposeless. So far during their brief but close acquaintance she had treated him perforce as she would have treated a child—providing for his bodily and mental needs and giving him kindly orders; now, ignorant and obedient as he still was in the matter of foreign travel, he was once more a reasonable being. He was still for the most part sunk in his own thoughts, but not helplessly and endlessly so; he was capable of being roused and at intervals he roused himself. Once when they halted she was struck by the intentness with which he gazed at a trainload of soldiers in khaki—new come from England and moving up from Havre to the front. They crossed at a wayside station, and the two trains stood side by side for some minutes while William craned out of the window to stare at the brown young faces that were thrust from the opposite carriages. The sight moved him, if not in the same fashion as it moved his companion; he felt no tightening of the throat and no pride in the men themselves. What kept his head at the window till the train moved off was chiefly the thought that soon he would be even as these sunbrowned men of war, the personal desire to know what manner of men they were, how they lived and moved and had their daily military being. Hitherto a soldier of the home-grown variety had been to him nothing more definite than an impression of uniform, khaki and occasionally red; now, with the eyes of his newborn interest, he became aware of detail that had formerly escaped him, and compared him in figure, in face and garment, with Heinz and Heinz's companions. These hot-faced lads smoking pipes and calling jests would be his own comrades in days to come; thus he studied their features, their dress, their manner, as a small boy scans and studies the bearing of his future schoolfellows. If he did not thrill at the sight of young men about to die, he sent with them (remembering Griselda) his strong desire for their great and terrible victory.

Those were the days just before Mons was fought, when France (and others with her) was hopeful of a war that would end at her frontier and beyond it; when, whatever her wiser soldiers may have known, her people in general had no premonition of the coming retreat of the Allied Armies and the coming peril of the capital. There were still some ignorant and optimistic days to live before France as a whole would be stunned by the curt official admission that the enemy was well within her borders—since his battle-line stretched across the country from the Vosges mountains to the Somme. As for railway communication on the western lines, the rush of returning tourists that had followed on the outbreak of war was over, and the rush from Paris that began with the new threat of Kluck's advance was as yet a thing of the future. Thus William and his companion, though they travelled slowly and with lengthy halts, travelled in comparative comfort—finding in unpunctuality and a measure of overcrowding but little to grumble at after their journey by cattle-truck to Paris.

Rouen kept them waiting an hour or two, and there was another long, purposeless halt on the boat in Dieppe Harbour; so that it was nigh upon sundown when they slipped into the Channel and headed north-westward for Folkestone. The day, very calm with the stillness of perfect summer, was even as that day but a month ago when William and his little bride had steamed away from Dover, sitting deck-chair to deck-chair, touching hands when they thought no one saw them. And remembering the fading of those other white cliffs, William's heart cried out against God.