Young Clatworthy was in the sulks, and sat very silent during all this badinage.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, and he confided to me his conviction, while he passed the salt, that “life was a rummy game.”
“Hipped?” I said, and his answer was, “Fed up to the back teeth!”
That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat, under cover of the Colonel’s conversation, which was holding the interest of the mess.
“We’re living unnaturally,” he said. “It’s all an abnormal show, and we pretend to be natural and normal, when everything that happens round us is fantastic and disorderly.”
“What’s your idea?” I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.
“Hard to explain,” he said. “But take my case to-day. This morning I went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W’s.” (He meant prisoners of war). “A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car, the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over his steering-wheel, with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it’s the first time I’ve seen blood!”
He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt—one of three left alive in his company.
“We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He had been married in ’16, after the Somme, and hadn’t seen his wife since. Said her letters made him ‘uneasy.’ Thought she was drinking, because of the loneliness. Well, there he was—finished—and a nasty sight. I went off to the P.O.W. cage, and examined the beggars—one of them, as usual, had been a waiter at the Cecil, and said ‘How’s dear old London?’—and passed the time of day with Bob Mellett. You know—the one-armed lad. He laughed no end when he heard of my narrow squeak. So did I—though it’s hard to see the joke. He lent me his car on the way back, and somewhere outside Courtrai we bumped over a dead body, with a queer soft squelch. It was a German—a young ’un—and Bob Mellett said, ‘He won’t be home for Christmas!’ Do you know Bob?—he used to cry at school when a rat was caught. Queer, isn’t it? Now here I am, sitting at a white table-cloth, listening to the Colonel’s talk, and pretending to be interested. I’m not a bit, really. I’m wondering why that bit of shell hit Saunders and not me. Or why I’m not lying in a muddy road as a bit of soft squelch for staff-cars to bump over. And on top of that I’m wondering how it will feel to hang up a bowler hat again in a house at Wimbledon, and say ‘Cheerio, Mother!’ to the mater (who will be knitting in the same arm-chair—chintz-covered—by the piano) and read the evening paper until dinner’s ready, take Ethel to a local dance, and get back into the old rut of home life in a nice family, don’t you know? With all my memories. With the ghosts of this life crowding up. Ugly ghosts, some of ’em! Dirty ghosts!... It’s inconceivable that we can ever go back to the funny old humdrum! I’m not sure that I want to.”
“You’re hipped,” I told him. “You’ll be glad to get back all right. Wimbledon will be Paradise after what you’ve been through.”