He went on in a very matter-of-fact voice: “I couldn’t stick Winborough this term. Just knowing.—It’s absurd—I was as keen to lick the Germans as ever—but how could I join in when the fellows jawed about Huns and wiping ’em off the face of the earth.... I felt crimson inside—beastly—as though I were there on false pretences. And all the chaps of my age were preparing to join up next year ... last term I was still one of them. They couldn’t understand why.... It had to come out at last—the Head knew all along, naturally. But we were playing the Meltonians in their own field, twelve miles away—and I had to register and get permission, show my photograph—all that mush. Like a ticket-of-leave man. The fellows were awfully decent. They didn’t even cut me. Harrison, speaking for the majority, went so far as to say it was rough luck, and they knew I couldn’t help it”—Richard’s underlip twisted sardonically. “But they weren’t quite sure, after that, what ought to be said in front of me ... dead pauses when I strolled up to one group or another.... I came home at half-term, last Monday, and I’m not going back.”
“So you’re out of it,” whispered David, still staring as though fascinated at his boots. “Out of the fighting, and the need of fighting, and the need to choose ... you lucky beggar. Oh, you lucky beggar....”
“I realize the fact that I’m out of it, thanks. But I don’t quite follow your congratulations.”
“It’s that ... I’ve been in Germany, two or three times, once for six months, and—Oh, Richard, what has happened to the old Germany, the Germany we knew, to change it so? I simply can’t realize that they commit atrocities in Belgium and sink hospital ships and mutilate children, and are bragging and swaggering and blood-letting all over Europe.... I can only remember the little things—the silly, comfortable little things.... You follow the stream, and in a clearing in the heart of the great blue pinewood you come bang on the sturdy old forest-house, with antlers branching over the wooden doorway, and the coat-of-arms of some royalty ... perhaps you may catch a glimpse of him in his green hunting-coat ... tables with check blue and red cloths, and saucers of wood-strawberries like tiny drops of blood—do you know the smell and flavour of wood-strawberries?—and a flaxen peasant child who watches you with enormous solemn eyes while you eat, and curtseys by clockwork for hours after you’ve left her.... And all over the country the ridiculous wooden signposts that say on one arm ‘Zum Biergarten,’ and on the other ‘Zum Aussichtspunkt,’ and never get tired of it—and you never get tired of it either. Or of leaning out of your window in the early morning to hear them play the Chorale, slow and pure and stately—and the ground is a mist of blue bilberries—and the Rhine legends jostle each other on your excursion, and you send off postcards on which everybody signs their names—and everyone says good-day—and everyone is musical.”
“Good God, how awful,” was Richard’s sotto voce comment on this list of blisses.
David heard, and said rather impatiently: “You’ve been to Germany, haven’t you? Can’t you understand what I mean?”
Richard ransacked his memory for a single incident or aspect of Dorzheim which had found tender home in his heart, and discovered not one.
“All the little things ...” David murmured again, hands clasped behind his head, and eyes mournfully brooding on the past. “Oh, I know I’m a sentimental idiot, but I can’t shake it all off to command. Not at once.”
“If you feel like that, I don’t honestly see why you need join up. ’Tisn’t compulsory.”
“I’ve got to ... there’d be such a fuss with father—and he would never forgive me. Max can’t, and Hardy’s married.... There’s only Con and me. Con—well, you know him—he rings British wherever you sound him.... I’ve seen mother look at him as though wondering how he could ever have happened to be her son. I don’t want Con to despise me—he’s always been ripping to us younger ones. And then—oh, just because there’s a doubt about us all, we can’t afford, as a family, to have a slacker about. If our name had always been Redbury”—again that melancholy smile and shrug of the shoulders, so typically Jewish.