1
After twelve months in an Austrian internment camp, the roar and movement, the familiar smell and glare of London streets were stupefying.
I had arrived in Vienna a week before the mobilisation order was issued; my mission was to secure the services of certain physicians and surgeons for a new hospital which I had in contemplation, and, though I was conscious of unwonted restlessness, though my young friends in the Chancery were kept working late, the recent ultimatum to Servia could never, I felt, involve England in war. So time went by, the hotels emptied, but I preferred to trust my own judgement and went on trusting it until war had been declared. I knew Vienna so well, I had lived there so long and made so many friends from my earliest days at the Embassy that I am afraid I continued to trust my judgement and to back my luck even after I had become technically scheduled as an enemy alien; and, when the reluctant authorities more in sorrow than anger placed me under surveillance, we all felt that a mistake had been made and that I should have only to ask for my release to obtain it. Was I not well over the most extravagant military age? Was I not physically unfit to bear arms? Could I not at any time have left Vienna with the Embassy Staff?
I was to find from August, 1914, until July, 1915, that the aspirations of the Litany for the well-being of prisoners and captives were neutralised by the reluctance of constituted authority to disturb the status quo. I was secure in my loose-box on a race-course five miles from Vienna; wire entanglements discouraged my comings and goings, arc-lamps laid me bare to the vigilance of the sentries; what good purpose could be served by setting me at large? My brother made the one appearance of his life in the House of Lords to raise me as an issue and to urge the exchange of civilian prisoners; memorials were presented to the Foreign Office; I am sorry to say that in the first convulsion of war I and my few thousand fellow prisoners did not matter.
I was interned for a twelvemonth. And, writing now in the third year of the war, I doubt whether I shall ever make good the knowledge which was then withheld from me. The newspapers were censored or inspired for purposes of propaganda; my colourless letters from England were enriched by half-page smears of indelible black. Between ignorance of what they might say and what I might receive, my correspondents confined themselves to business discussions and bald family history. My brother wrote of his son Archie's death in the retreat from Mons; my niece Yolande Manisty told me that she and her husband had moved into my house in Pont Street and were attending to my affairs as best they might. A further letter brought me the shocking news of Deryk Lancing's death on the eve of war, with consequences to myself which I required many weeks to digest.... After that there were guarded and bewildered little notes from Felix Manisty, who is a greater archaeologist than man of affairs; there were voluminous technical enquiries from Hatherly, my solicitor, a weekly budget from Yolande and sporadic outbursts from friends who had heard of my internment and felt constrained to write one letter to cheer my loneliness.
In July, after a year of false starts, an exchange of prisoners was finally arranged; in the last week of the month I returned deviously through Switzerland and France, landed in a most unrecognisable England, reported myself at an equally unrecognisable Foreign Office and then stood, much as I had stood forty years earlier with a crowd of other shy new boys at Eton, wondering what I was expected to do next. In the roar and movement, the smell and glare of London streets, I had ceased to have any property. The people were different, there was an incredible number of soldiers about. And everyone seemed to have been getting on very satisfactorily without me....
I remember walking a few steps towards the House of Commons, but I did not know whether the House was sitting; I turned back to Trafalgar Square with some idea of taking a train to Hampstead and visiting my office, but I had abandoned it for twelve months. If I called on Hatherly in Lincoln's Inn Fields, I should be told that he was at Ripley Court; if I went home, I should find that Yolande and Felix were both out.... It was salutary, I am sure, to find the measure of my importance, but it left me very lonely, I felt for some reason that not only was I not wanted but that I had no right to be there. England seemed to have been taken over as a going concern by a new management, which was in a great hurry....
I passed through the Admiralty Arch and looked round me. New Zealanders and Australians, bronzed and big-boned in summer khaki, South Africans, with their hats pinched to a point, were strolling up and down the Strand, in twos and threes, gravely smoking cigarettes; a slow-speaking Canadian enquired of me the way to Westminster Abbey; in St. James' Park two brakes passed me filled with Indian troops, turbaned, silent and undemonstrative. I remember that certain German prints had described the British Army as a menagerie....
Through the Arch, I could see a stream of motor omnibuses hurrying into Trafalgar Square and displaying long posters in a red and white streak—"LORD KITCHENER WANTS YOU," "LEND YOUR STRONG RIGHT ARM"—on the Horse Guards' Parade recruits were waiting their turn by the long wooden sheds at the Downing Street end; the finished soldier came swinging down the Processional Avenue to the music of a drum and fife band, watched a little wistfully by a knot of men in service caps, blue jackets, loose red ties and grey trousers, sometimes pinned emptily at ankle, knee or hip. Standing on the kerb, a girl of twenty in deep mourning completed scene and sequence.
I was still gaping like a yokel, when I heard my name called and found my hand wrung by an officer in unfamiliar naval uniform; and, though we had sat and voted side by side during his short term in the House, though I had shot with him a dozen times at his place in Ireland, I had to look twice before I recognised him as George Oakleigh. We stood shaking hands, laughing, talking both at once and shaking hands again until he suggested that I should come into his room at the Admiralty for a cigarette and a talk. George, whom I had known as a dilettante journalist and political wire-puller, explained parenthetically that he had for a year been one of innumerable auxiliary civil servants; I did not need to be told that he was tired, overworked and vaguely, sullenly bitter.