The Human Boy and the War

by Eden Phillpotts

"What the dickens are you always wanting time to pass for, so that you may be grown up? I can tell you it isn't all beer and skittles being a man. At any rate, I've often heard my father say he wishes he was young again."

"He may," answered Wundt. "You've told me your father was an 'International' and a 'Blue,' and no doubt he'd like to excel at football again. But I despise games, and I've got very good reasons for wanting to grow up, which are private."

Of course, he didn't put it in such good English as that, but that was the sense of it.

He wasn't what you call a success generally, for he didn't like work, except history; and he hated our history, and there wasn't much doing at Merivale in the matter of German history. But he took to English well, and would always talk it if he could get anybody to listen, which wasn't often. He said it was all rot about English being a difficult language. He thought it easy and feeble at best. All his people could speak it--in fact, everybody in Germany could, when it suited them to do so.

As for games, he had no use for them; but he was sporting in his own way. His favourite sport consisted in going out of bounds; and he showed very decent strategy in doing so, and gave even Norris and Booth a tip or two. Norris and Booth had made a fair art of trespassing in private game preserves, at the Manor House and other such places round about Merivale. In fact, game preserves were just common or garden Sunday walks to them. But they had been caught by a gamekeeper once and both flogged; and Wundt showed them how a reverse like that need never have happened. He could turn his coat inside out, and do other things of that sort, which were very deceptive even to the trained gamekeeper eye; and, finding a scarecrow in a turnip field, he took it, and as it consisted of trousers and coat and an old billycock hat, Wundt was now in possession of a complete disguise. He hid the things in a secret haunt, that really belonged to Norris and Booth; and they liked him at first and helped him a good deal; but finally they quarrelled with him, because he said England was a swine's hole, and told them that a time was coming--he hoped not till he grew up--when England would simply be a Protectorate of Germany, whatever that is. So they invited him to fight whichever he liked of them, and when he refused, though just the right weight, they smacked his head and dared him to go to their secret cave again.

When they smacked his head, his eyes glittered and he smiled, but nothing more. He never would fight with fists, because he said only apes and Englishmen fought with Nature's weapons. But at single-stick he was exceedingly good, and, in fact, better than anybody in the school but Forrester. He much wished we could use swords and slash each other's faces, as he hoped to do when he became a student in his own country, and he said it was a mean sight to see old Dunston and Brown and Manwaring and Hutchings and the other masters all without a scratch. He said in Germany every self-respecting man of the reigning classes was gashed to the bone; and decent people wouldn't know a man who wasn't, because he was sure to be a shopkeeper or some low class thing like that. As to games, he held them in great contempt. It seems people of any class in Germany only play one game and that's the war game--Kriegspiel, he called it.

I said: "What the deuce is the good of always playing the war game if you're not going to war?"

And he said: "Ach!"

It was a favourite word of his, and he used it in all sorts of ways with all sorts of expressions. Forbes, who, like me, had a kind of interest in Wundt that almost amounted to friendship, asked him if women played the war game, and he said he didn't know what they played except the piano. All women were worms, in his opinion. Of course, he gassed about everything German, and said that, from science and art and music to matchboxes and sausages, his country was first and the rest nowhere. He joined our school cadet corps eagerly, and became an officer of some sort in a month; but he was fearfully pitying about it, and said that English ways of drilling were enough to make a cat laugh, or words to that effect. After he became an officer, he put on fearful side, though as just one of the rank and file he'd been quite humble; and then, when he ordered Saunders, who wasn't an officer, to do something out of drill hours, and Saunders told him to do it himself, he turned white and dashed at Saunders, who, of course, licked him on the spot and made his nose bleed. He was properly mad about that, and said that if it had happened in Germany, Saunders would have been shot; but as it happened in England, of course Saunders wasn't. Travers major tried to explain to Wundt that we weren't real soldiers, and that, when not with the cadet corps, he was no better than anybody else, but he couldn't see this. He said that in his country if you were once an officer, you were always an officer, and that there was a gulf fixed between the men and their officers; and he called Saunders "cannon fodder" to Batson; and when Batson told Saunders, Saunders made Wundt carry him on his back up to the gym., and there licked him again and made his nose bleed once more, much to his wrath.

On the whole, owing to his ideas, which he wouldn't keep to himself, Wundt didn't have too good a time at Merivale. He couldn't understand us, and said we were slackers and rotters, and that our mercenary army was no good, and that Germany was the greatest country in the world, and we'd live to know it--perhaps sooner than we thought. Travers major tried hard to explain to him how it was, but he couldn't or wouldn't understand.