When my cousin Greville Hunter-Oakleigh went out with the Expeditionary Force, Violet made me promise to write and keep him posted in all that was going on in England. It was not till the end of April that a stray shrapnel bullet sent him to join the rest of his battery, and in the intervening nine months I wrote never less than twice a week. After his death his effects were sent to his mother, and she forwarded me a sealed packet. I was surprised and not a little touched to find that he had kept all my letters—grimy, sodden with water and tied up in the remains of an old puttee, but—so far as I could remember—a complete series.
It was a strange experience to sit down and read them all over again. I had written discursively and promiscuously—anything that came into my head, anything that I thought would amuse him. There was the rumour of the hour, the joke of the day, an astonishing assortment of other people's opinions and prophecies, and a make-weight of personalia about our common friends. So strange did I find my own words that I would have denied authorship, were it not for the writing. The jokes of the day died in their day, and the rumours endured until they were contradicted: I cannot now believe I ever felt the spirits in which I wrote, or believed the mushroom prophecies that cropped up in the night.
Yet I am glad to have the letters again in my possession. I keep no diary, and this rambling chronicle has to take its place in showing me the things we said and did in the first months of the war, not as we should like to reconstruct them in our wisdom after the event, but as they were thought or felt or done in all our folly and shortsightedness and want of perspective. The old world had passed away, and these letters show me the state of mind in which we sat up for the dawn.
Bertrand and I moved from Princes Gardens to a flat in Queen Anne's Mansions, and the house, used temporarily for the reception of refugees, was gradually transformed into a hospital as soon as we obtained recognition from the War Office. I must insert a parenthesis to express my admiration for my uncle at this time. In his eightieth year, and, at the end of a generation of luxurious living, he spent his day raising funds for the Red Cross, and his evenings as a Special Constable in Knightsbridge. Like many another he felt that without incessant work the war would be too much for him.
It is with the coming of the refugees that the letters to my cousin Greville begin. Every morning we looked at our maps to find the black line of the German advance thrust an inch or two nearer Paris: wild stories of incredible cruelties were passed from lip to lip: our flash of hope at the resistance of Liège died away with the fall of Namur. The short-memoried Press told us later that we were too resolute to feel panic or lose heart, but not one man in a hundred believed that our Army could extricate itself from the German grip. By the rules of war the retreat from Mons was an impossibility. We were driven to the outskirts of Paris, the French Government transferred itself to Bordeaux; some talked of gathering together the fragments on the Pyrenees, others whispered that the French would make a separate peace.
And scattered before the conqueror like chaff or crawling maimed and crushed between his feet, came the population of a prosperous and independent kingdom. Night after night Bertrand and I waited at Charing Cross or Victoria to meet the refugee trains; we watched the crowded carriages emptying their piteous burden and saw the dazed, lost look on the white faces of the draggled, black-clad women. So the slums of San Francisco may have appeared in her last earthquake: an unreal, nightmare crowd hurrying to and fro with a child in one arm and a hastily tied bundle in the other, while the lamps of the station beat down like limelight on their faces and showed in their eyes the terror that drives men mad.
The Belgian exodus revealed to England one facet of modern war. Recruits poured in by the hundred thousand, and hardly a village was too poor to take upon itself the support of some of the refugees. We listened to the broken tales of their endurance, and our thoughts went back to the land they had left. For North France was sharing the fate of Belgium: our armies retreated and still retreated.... I remember Bertrand pacing up and down the dining-room and repeating the one word, "Men, Men, Men!"
Then without warning the men seemed found. I left the Admiralty one day to call on my solicitor with a bundle of O'Rane's papers, but, instead of discussing business, he said, "What's all this about the Russian troops? A client of mine in Birmingham tells me there's been an enormous number of Russians passing through the Midlands. What's it all about?"
I thought for a moment and then asked for an atlas. We had heard nothing of the story in Whitehall, but the world was apparently humming with the talk of Russian millions, and an army corps or so flung in to reinforce our western troops might save the day. Together we traced a route from Archangel to Scotland.
"What about the ice?" asked my solicitor.