William—An Englishman

by Cicely Hamilton

A near-by gun beat down his voice but did not stop it—"at Dunkirk. I was buried two hours: two mortal hours before they got me out—and when I was in hospital he came over and bombed us again. He got one right on to us, and I was blown out of bed, and the men at the other end of the ward were in pieces. In pieces, I tell you—beastly bits of flesh——"

William tried to stand it—realizing that the man must cling and gibber to some one as a child clings and wails to its nurse. They had turned into a room on the ground floor—there were no cellars, but it was esteemed the safest place in the building by reason of the comparative absence of glass—and the pair of them stood backs against the wall. When Wright stopped talking—which was not often—William could hear his breath as it came whining through his teeth; and he remembered that the man wore the ribbon of the D.C.M.—a man who had once had nerve and to all appearance was sound, but who had not sufficient hold on himself to keep his terror from his tongue. He spoke of it unceasingly; whenever the sounds without died down William could hear him whispering—now of the night when he was bombed in hospital and now of the building they were in. It was no good as a shelter—would crumble like a house of cards. Nothing was any good but a cellar or trenches—there should have been trenches. And they were so damnably close to the station, and the station was just what those devils were trying to hit. There came a moment when William could bear it no more, and wrenched himself free of the clawing fingers on his sleeve; he dared not feel them longer, lest his heart also melted within him.

His nervousness took the form of a difficulty in keeping still, and he fidgeted about the darkened room; but the room was fairly full, and he could not move far—after a step or two this way and a step or two that, he was brought up by a solid group that stretched from the wall to a table. He came to a standstill on the edge of the group and tried to listen to their talk; forced himself to listen to it—and all the time straining his ears through the murmur for the droning of the Gotha engines. He fought with himself and fought more manfully than he knew; striving to thrust out of his mind Wright's phrase about the "beastly bits of flesh," and to fasten his hearing, to the exclusion of all else, on the voice of a man, his neighbour in the darkness, who had lately seen a German aeroplane brought down, and, having apparently some mechanical knowledge, was describing its points and its engines. They, the engines, were first-rate, he said, waxing technical; but even if he had not been told it, he should have guessed from the fittings of the plane that Jerry was getting a bit scarce in his stock of rubber and leather. What he was using—— Here the windows rattled loudly and drowned him. "That's pretty close," some one commented, and William moved a restless step away. Once it had seemed to him an easy thing to follow Griselda and die; now all the moral strength he possessed went into the effort not to shrink, to be master of his body, to behave decently and endure. That was all that seemed to matter—to be steady and behave decently—so that, for all his fear of instant death, he never turned his thoughts to God.... He had not known how beautiful silence could be till it came almost suddenly, like a flood of clear, cool water; when some one, muttering that it seemed to be over, opened the door and went out into the courtyard, he followed and stood there feeling the silence as something clean, exquisite and grateful. His hands were wet and hot, and he stretched them out to the air; if he had not prayed when he was under the spell of fear, his heart, at his release from it, was filled with something like praise.

"Listen," said a voice in his ear. It was Wright, his face uplifted in the moonlight and disfigured by ugly twitchings. "Listen," he said, "they're coming back." ... William shrank from him irritably, but the man had not spoken particularly to him, and, having spoken, turned swiftly and went back into the house. He had been the first to catch the double-noted drone which as they stood and listened grew nearer.

"That's him, sure enough," another voice agreed. "Coming up in relays. He'll be out to make a night of it—I thought we'd got rid of him too quickly."

A searchlight wheeled and the anti-aircraft spoke on the word; some one cried, "Got 'im," and pointed, and for an instant William had sight of a wicked thing caught in the ray and rushing upwards. Battery and machine-gun gave tongue at the sight, but in a flash the climbing devil had vanished and the searchlight wheeled after it fruitlessly. As they stood and watched it wheeling, a voice called, "Come in, men," and they went back perforce within their walls.

The first attack had lasted not much over half an hour; this time the ordeal by darkness and waiting was longer. William held himself tightly, ashamed of the weakness with which Wright had infected him and keeping it doggedly at bay; he talked when he could think of anything to talk about—odd irrelevant fragments of whatever came into his head, anything to keep himself from listening. At one time he made a conscious and determined effort to turn his talk and his mind with it to something unconnected with air-raids; but always his speech, like that of his companions, came back to the thought of the moment.

"Do you remember," he asked a man beside him, "what a fuss there was about the first Channel flight? I forget the fellow's name—a Frenchman?"

Some one supplied the name, "Bleriot," out of the darkness.

"Yes, Bleriot—that's it.... Queer when you think of it. Nobody had any idea then what it would mean—getting into cellars and hiding in the dark. If they had"—he forced an attempt at a laugh—"they wouldn't have been so pleased."