The crime at Vanderlynden's

by R. H. Mottram

Dormer had not been home on leave since early spring, and the leave that he got for convalescence gave him not only some idea of the vast changes going on in England, while he, in France, had been engaged in the same old War, but a notion of changes that had gone on in that old War without his having perceived them. He was let loose from Hospital just before Christmas, at that unfortunate period when the public at home were still feeling the reaction from the Bell-ringing of Cambrai, were just learning the lengths to which the collapse of Russia had gone and were to be confronted with the probable repercussion of that collapse upon the prospects of the campaign in the West. There was no escaping these conclusions because his own home circumstances had so changed as to throw him back completely on himself. His father having died while he was in France, his mother had taken a post under one of the semi-official War organizations that abounded. The old home in which he had grown up had been dispersed, and he found his only near relative in his native town was his sister, a teacher by profession, who had moved the remnants of the old furniture and his and her own small belongings to a new house in one of the high, healthy suburbs that surrounded the old town. She was, however, busy all day, and he fell into the habit, so natural to anyone who has lived in a Mess for years, of dropping in at one of the better-class bars, before lunch, for an apéritif, and a glance at the papers. Here he would also pickup some one for a round of golf, which would keep him employed until tea-time, for he could not rid himself of the War-time habit of looking upon each day as something to be got through somehow, in the hopes that the morrow might be better.

These ante-prandial excursions were by far the closest contact he had had with anything like a normal, representative selection of his fellow-countrymen, since they and he had become so vitally altered from the easy-going, sport-loving England of pre-War, and he had to readjust his conception considerably. He soon grasped that there was a lot of money being made, and a lot of khaki being worn as a cover for that process. There was plenty of energy, a good deal of fairly stubborn intention to go on and win, but a clear enough understanding that the War was not going to be won in the trenches. And when he had got over some little spite at this, his level habit of mind obliged him to confess that there was a good deal in it. There were many signs that those who held that view were right.

Sipping his drink, smoking and keeping his nose carefully in his newspaper, in those bars lighted by electric light, in the middle of the dark Christmas days, he listened and reflected. The offensives he had seen? How had they all ended? How did he say himself they always must end? Exactly as these chaps had made up their minds! Would he not see if there did not remain some relative who could get him one of these jobs at home, connected with supplying some one else with munitions? No, he would not. He understood and agreed with the point of view, but some very old loyalty in him would keep him in France, close up to the guns, that was the place for him. He had no illusions as to that to which he was returning. He knew that he had never been appointed to Divisional Staff, had merely been attached. There was no “establishment” for him, and directly he had been sent down as sick, his place had been filled, some one else was doing “head housemaid” as he had been called, to young Vinyolles, and he, Dormer, would go shortly to the depôt of his regiment, from thence to reinforcement camp, and thus would be posted to any odd battalion that happened to want him. The prospect did not worry him so much as might have been supposed. He felt himself pretty adept at wangling his way along, and scrounging what he wanted, having had a fine first-hand experience of how the machinery worked. He did not want to go into the next offensive, it was true, but neither did he want the sort of job he had had, and even less did he want to be at Base, or in England. Boredom he feared almost as much as physical danger. Accustomed to having his day well filled, if he must go to War he wanted to be doing something, not nothing, which was apparently a soldier’s usual occupation. But he did not feel his participation in the next offensive very imminent. He had heard them all talking about “Not fighting any more,” and now here was Russia out of it and America not yet in, and Peace might be patched up.

The most striking thing therefore that he learned was this new idea of the Bosche taking the initiative, and attacking again. A new army officer, his knowledge of the Western Front dated from Loos, and was of allied offensives only. He had never seen the earlier battles of Ypres, the retreat from Mons was just so much history to him. When he heard heated arguments as to which particular point the Bosche would select for their offensive, in France, or (so nervous were these people at home) in England even, he was astonished, and then incredulous. The level balance of his mind saved him. He had no superfluous imagination. He had never seen a German offensive, didn’t want to, and therefore didn’t think he would. As usual, the bar-parlour oracles knew all about it, gave chapter and verse, could tick off on their fingers how many German Divisions could be spared from the Eastern Front. He had heard it all before. He remembered how nearly the cavalry got through after Vimy, how Moorslede Ridge was to give us command of the country up to Courtrai, how Palestine or Mespot were to open an offensive right in the Bosche rear, not to mention all the things these Russians had always been said to be going to do. This might be another of what the French so well called “Canards”—Wild Ducks. He would wait and see.

He was impressed in a different way by the accounts that now began to filter through, of what had been happening in Russia. Officers shot, and regiments giving their own views on the campaign. That was what happened when the Headless Man got loose! No doubt the Russians, from all he had heard, had suffered most, so far as individual human suffering went. And then, Russians were, to him, one of these over-brainy people. Had anyone acquainted with his ruminations taxed him to say if English people were under-brainy, he would have said no, not necessarily, but brainy in a different way. Left to himself he felt that all the opinions he had ever formed of the Russians were justified. Look at their Music. Some of it was pretty good, he admitted, but it was—awkward—beyond the reach of amateurs, in the main. This appeared to him, quite sincerely, to be a grave defect. He was conscious—more, he was proud—of being an amateur soldier, and knowing himself to be modest, he did not fear any comparison between the actual results obtained by English amateurs like himself, and the far more largely professional armies of other countries. And now these over-brainy ones had gone and done it. He knew as well as anyone the hardships and dangers of soldiering, had experienced them, shared them with the ranks, in the trenches. Why even in this beastly Vanderlynden affair, it would have puzzled him to say if he were more sorry than glad that the private soldier had never been brought to Justice. But English—and even Frenchmen—as he had seen with his own eyes, if they mutinied, got over it, and went on. It was only people like the Russians that went and pushed things to their logical conclusion.

He had a hatred of that, being subconsciously aware that the logical conclusion of Life is Death. Naturally, from his upbringing and mental outlook, he had no sympathy with the alleged objects and achievements of the Russian Revolution. He could not see what anyone wanted with a new social order, and as for the domination of Europe by the Proletariat, if he understood it, he was all against it in principle. He was against it because it was Domination. That was precisely the thing that had made him feel increasingly antagonistic to Germany and German ideas. It had begun long ago, during brief continental holidays. He had met Germans on trains and steamers, in hotels and on excursions. He had grudged them their efficient way of sight-seeing, feeding and everything else. But he had grudged them most their size and their way of getting there first. If it had not been for that, he had a good deal more sympathy with them, in most ways, than with the French. Subsequently he had found Germans infringing on the business of his native town, selling cheaper, better-tanned hides than its tanners, more scientifically compounded manures than its merchants. Then they invaded politics and became a scare at election times. And after the false start of 1911, in 1914 they had finally kicked over the tea-table of the old quiet comfortable life. He did not argue about this. He had felt it simply, truly, directly. Under all the hot-air patriotism and real self-sacrifice of August, 1914, it had been this basic instinct which had made him and all his sort enlist. The Germans had asked for it, and they should darn-well have it. If they didn’t they would go on asking. They were after Domination.

That craze had started something that would be difficult now to stop. Dormer saw very well that other people besides Russians might find grievances and the same wrong-headed way of venting them. The Russians would probably go on with their propaganda, all over the world. The Germans, on the other hand, had probably set the Japanese off. And so we should go on, all the aristocratic classes calling for Domination by their sort, all the ultra-brainy democracies calling for their particular brand.

So when he was passed as fit and told to rejoin the depôt of his regiment, at a seaport town, he went without any panic fear of the future, German or otherwise. He went with a deep conviction that whatever happened, life had been cheapened and vulgarized. It was not by any means mere theory. He had seen what sort of a home he might hope to make after the Peace, with his mother or sisters, or if, conceivably, he married. Not a bad home, his job would always be there, and certain remnants of that bourgeois comfort that had grown up in all the old quiet streets of the provincial towns of England during the nineteenth century, privileged, aloof from the troubles of the “continent,” self-contained. But remnants only, not nearly enough. He and all his sort had been let down several pegs in the social scale. Without any narrow spite, or personal grievance, he felt that the Germans had caused this upset and the Russians had put the finishing stroke to it, made it permanent, as it were. He happened to be opposite the Germans in the particular encounter that was not yet ended, and he was able to draw upon an almost inexhaustible supply of obstinate ill-will.

He went to the depôt in its huts on a sandy estuary. It was commanded by a Major of the usual type, and no one knew better than Dormer how to keep on the right side of such a one. He was, of course, a Godsend to the Major. He had all the practical experience and none of the fussiness. He merely wanted the job finished. That suited the Major exactly, who didn’t want it to finish in a hurry, but wanted even less to have to find ideas for training troops. Dormer, with his two and a half years in France, was the very man. He looked trustworthy. He was set to instructing the raw material, of which the camp was full. He disliked it intensely, but, as always, took what was given him in his sober fashion and did his limited best with it. He was amazed to find such reserves of men still untouched. His own recollections of early 1915 were of camps filled with an eager volunteer crowd of all ages and conditions, who were astounded when it was suggested to them that certain of them ought to take a commission. Now he found that his sort went a different way, direct to O.T.C. or Cadet Corps. There was a permanence about the camp staff that he had never seen in the old days. But most of all he was impressed with the worn appearance of the camp. Thousand after thousand had passed through it, been drafted overseas, and disappeared. Thousand after thousand had followed. In the town and at the railway, there were no longer smiles and encouragement. People had got painfully used to soldiers, and from treating them as heroes, and then as an unavoidable, and profitable incident, had come to regard them chiefly as a nuisance. He forgot how he had wondered if the men would stand it, he forgot how often he had heard the possibility of an early Peace discussed. He began to wonder now if people at home would stand it—the lightless winter nights, the summer full of bombing, the growing scarcity of comforts, the queues for this, that, and the other, the pinch that every gradually depleted family was beginning to feel, as one after another of its members had to go. He had been so long out of all this, up against the actual warfare, glad enough of small privileges and of the experience that enabled him to avoid the more onerous duties, the worst sorts of want, that he only now began to realize what he had never grasped, in his few short leaves, that there was still quite a considerable, probably the greater portion of the nation, who did not share his view of the necessity of going on. Another avenue of speculation was opened to him. What if all the people at home made Peace behind the backs of the Armies. Yet, being Dormer, he did not submit to this home-grown philosophy. He just went on and did the next thing that his hand found to do.

Of one thing he became pretty certain. All these people at home had “got the wind up.” He didn’t know which were the worst, the lower middle class, who were beginning to fear invasion, as a form of damage to their shops and houses. He thought of those ten departments of France that were either occupied by, or shot over, by the Germans. Or again the newspapers, with their scare-lines, their everlasting attempt to bring off this or that political coup. Or again the people in power, who were keeping this enormous number of troops in England, presumably to defend the beaches of the island from an armed landing. He had become during the three years that had contained for him an education that he could not otherwise have got in thirty, a more instructed person.