Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

Came the crash. Hot irons, it seemed, assailed his leg and his shoulder and neck. He crumpled up on the ground in an agony, and the parachute, with slow and elegant gestures, folded down on the top of his floundering figure....

The gunners who ran to help him found him, enveloped in silk, bawling and weeping like a child of four in a passion of rage and fear, and trying repeatedly to stand up upon a blood-streaked leg that gave way as repeatedly. “Damn!” cursed Peter in a stifled voice, plunging about like a kitten in a sack. “Damn you all! I tell you I will use my leg. I will have my leg. If I bleed to death. Oh! Oh!... You fool—you lying old humbug! You!”

And then he gave a leap upward and forward, and fainted and fell, and lay still, with his head and body muffled in the silk folds of his parachute.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
OSWALD’S VALEDICTION

§ 1

It was the third of April in 1918, the Wednesday after Easter, and the war had now lasted three years and eight months. It had become the aching habit of the whole world. Throughout the winter it had been for the most part a great and terrible boredom, but now a phase of acute anxiety was beginning. The “Kaiser’s Battle” was raging in France; news came through sparingly; but it was known that General Gough had lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns, and vast stores of ammunition and railway material. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide. But the standards of Tory England differ from those of Japan. Through ten sanguinary days, in a vaster Inkerman, the common men of Britain, reinforced by the French, had fought and died to restore the imperilled line. It was by no means certain yet that they had succeeded. It seemed possible that the French and British armies would be broken apart, and Amiens and Paris lost. Oswald’s mind was still dark with apprehension.

The particular anxieties of this crisis accentuated the general worry and inconveniences of the time, and deepened Oswald’s conviction of an incredible incompetence in both the political and military leadership of his country. In spite of every reason he had to the contrary, he had continued hitherto to hope for some bright dramatic change in the course of events; he had experienced a continually recurring disappointment with each morning’s paper. His intelligence told him that all the inefficiency, the confusion, the cheap and bad government by press and intrigue, were the necessary and inevitable consequences of a neglect of higher education for the past fifty years; these defects were now in the nature of things, almost as much as the bleakness of an English February or the fogs of a London November, but his English temperament had refused hitherto to accept the decision of his intelligence. Now for the first time he could see the possibility of an ultimate failure in the war. To this low level of achievement, he perceived, a steadfast contempt for thought and science and organization had brought Britain; at this low level Britain had now to struggle through the war, blundering, talking, and thinking confusedly, suffering enormously—albeit so sound at heart. It was a humiliating realization. At any rate she could still hope to struggle through; the hard-won elementary education of the common people, the stout heart and sense of the common people, saved her gentlefolk from the fate of their brother inefficients in Russia. But every day he fretted afresh at the costly and toilsome continuance of an effort that a little more courage and wisdom in high places on the allied side, a little more knowledge and clear thinking, might have brought to an entirely satisfactory close in 1917.

For a man of his age, wounded, disappointed, and a chronic invalid, there was considerable affliction in the steadily increasing hardships of the Fourth Year. A number of petty deprivations at which a healthy man might have scoffed, intensified his physical discomfort. There had been a complete restriction of his supply of petrol, the automobile now hung in its shed with its tyres removed, and the railway service to London had been greatly reduced. He could not get up to London now to consult books or vary his moods without a slow and crowded and fatiguing journey; he was more and more confined to Pelham Ford. He had been used to read and work late into the night, but now his home was darkened in the evening and very cheerless; there was no carbide for the acetylene installation, and a need for economy in paraffin. For a time he had been out of coal, and unable to get much wood because of local difficulties about cartage, and for some weeks he had had to sit in his overcoat and read and write by candlelight. Now, however, that distress had been relieved by the belated delivery of a truckload of coal. And another matter that may seem trivial in history, was by no means trivial in relation to his moods. In the spring of 1918 the food supply of Great Britain was at its lowest point. Lord Rhondda was saving the situation at the eleventh hour. The rationing of meat had affected Oswald’s health disagreeably. He had long ago acquired the habit of living upon chops and cutlets and suchlike concentrated nourishment, and he found it difficult to adapt himself now to the bulky insipidity of a diet that was, for a time, almost entirely vegetarian. For even fish travels by long routes to Hertfordshire villages. The frequent air raids of that winter were also an added nervous irritation. In the preceding years of the war there had been occasional Zeppelin raids, the Zeppelins had been audible at Pelham Ford on several occasions and once Hertford had suffered from their bombs; but those expeditions had ended at last in a series of disasters to the invaders, and they had never involved the uproar and tension of the Gotha raids that began in the latter half of 1917. These latter raids had to be met by an immense barrage of anti-aircraft guns round London, a barrage which rattled every window at Pelham Ford, lit the sky with star shells, and continued intermittently sometimes for four or five hours. Oswald would lie awake throughout that thudding conflict, watching the distant star shells and searchlights through the black tree boughs outside his open window, and meditating drearily upon the manifest insanity of mankind....

He was now walking up and down his lawn, waiting until it should be time to start for the station with Joan to meet Peter.

For Peter, convalescent again and no longer fit for any form of active service—he was lamed now as well as winged—was to take up a minor administrative post next week at Adastral House, and he was coming down for a few days at Pelham Ford before carrying his wife off for good to a little service flat they had found in an adapted house in the Avenue Road. They had decided not to live at The Ingle-Nook, although Arthur had built it to become Peter’s home, but to continue the tenancy of Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. They did not want to disturb those two ladies, whose nervous systems, by no means stable at the best of times, were now in a very shaken condition. Aunt Phyllis was kept busy restraining Aunt Phœbe from inflicting lengthy but obscure prophetic messages upon most of the prominent people of the time. To these daily activities Aunt Phœbe added an increasing habit of sleep-walking that broke the nightly peace of Aunt Phyllis. She would wander through the moonlit living rooms gesticulating strangely, and uttering such phrases as “Blood! Blood! Seas of blood! The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; or “Murder most foul!”