Читать книгу Death of a Hero - Richard Aldington - Страница 12
ОглавлениеPROLOGUE
MORTE D’UN ERÖE
allegretto
THE casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice – last spasms of Europe’s severed arteries. Of course, nobody much bothered to read the lists. Why should they? The living must protect themselves from the dead, especially the intrusive dead. But the twentieth century had lost its Spring with a vengeance. So a good deal of forgetting had to be done.
Under the heading “Killed in Action,” one of these later lists contained the words:
“Winterbourne, Edward Frederick George, A/Capt., 2/9 Battn. R. Foddershire Regt.”
The small interest created by this item of news and the rapidity with which he was forgotten would have surprised even George Winterbourne; and he had that bottomless cynicism of the infantry subaltern which veiled itself in imbecile cheerfulness, and thereby misled a good many not very acute people. Winterbourne had rather hoped he would be killed, and knew that his premature demise in the middle twenties would be borne with easy stoicism by those who survived him. But his vanity would have been a little shocked by what actually happened.
A life, they say, may be considered as a point of light which suddenly appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a luminous geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as suddenly disappears. (Interesting to have seen the lights disappearing from Space-Time during one of the big battles – Death dowses the glims.) Well it happens to us all; but our vanity is interested by the hope that the rather tangled and not very luminous track we made will continue to shine for a few people for a few years. I suppose Winterbourne’s name does appear on some War Memorial, probably in the Chapel of his Public School; and, of course, he’s got his neat ration of headstone in France. But that’s about all. Nobody much minded that he was killed. Unassertive people with no money have few friends; and Winterbourne hadn’t counted much on his scanty flock, least of all on me. But I know – because he told me himself – that he had rather relied on four people to take some interest in him and his fate. They were his father and mother, his wife and his mistress. If he had known what actually occurred with these four at the news of his death I think he would have been a little shocked, as well as heartily amused and perhaps a bit relieved. It would have freed him from certain feelings of responsibility.
Winterbourne’s father, whom I knew slightly, was an inadequate sentimentalist. Mild, with an affection of gentility, incompetent, seffishily unselfish (i.e. always patting himself on the back for “renouncing” something he was afraid to do or be or take), he had a genius for messing up other people’s lives. The amount of irreparable harm which can be done by a really good man is astounding. Ten astute rogues do less. He messed up his wife’s life by being weak with her; messed up his children’s lives by being weak and sentimentalish with them and by losing his money – the unforgivable sin in a parent; messed up the lives of his friends and clients by honestly losing their money for them; and messed up his own most completely. That was the one thing he ever did with complete and satisfactory thoroughness. The mess he got his life into would have baffled an army of psychologists to unravel.
When I told Winterbourne what I thought of his father, he admitted it was mostly true. But he rather liked the man, probably disarmed by the mildness, and not sufficiently hard to his father’s soft, selfish sentimentality. Possibly old Winterbourne would have felt and have acted differently in his reactions to George’s death, if circumstances had been different. But he was so scared by the war, so unable to adjust himself to a harsh, intruding reality – he had spent his life avoiding realities – that he took refuge in a drivelling religiosity. He got to know some rather slimy Roman Catholics, and read the slimy religious tracts they showered on him, and talked and sobbed to the exceedingly slimy priest they found for him. So about the middle of the war he was “received,” and found – let us hope – comfort in much prayer and Mass-going and writing rules for Future Conduct and rather suspecting he was like François de Sales and praying for the beatification of the super-slimy Thérèse of Lisieux.
Old Winterbourne was in London, “doing war work,” when the news of George’s death came. He would never have done anything so positive and energetic if he had not been nagged and goaded into it by his wife. She was animated less by motives of disinterested patriotism than by exasperation with him for existing at all and for interrupting her love affairs. Old Winterbourne always said with proud, sad dignity that his “religious convictions forbade” him to divorce her. Religious convictions are such an easy excuse for being nasty. So she found a war job for him in London, and put him into a position where it was impossible for him to refuse.
The telegram from the War Office – “regret to inform… killed in action… Their Majesties’ sympathy…” – went to the home address in the country, and was opened by Mrs. Winterbourne. Such an excitement for her, almost a pleasant change, for it was pretty dull in the country just after the Armistice. She was sitting by the fire, yawning over her twenty-second lover – the affair had lasted nearly a year – when the servant brought the telegram. It was addressed to Mr. Winterbourne, but of course she opened it; she had an idea that “one of those women” was “after” her husband, who, however, was regrettably chaste, from cowardice.
Mrs. Winterbourne liked drama in private life. She uttered a most creditable shriek, clasped both hands to her rather soggy bosom, and pretended to faint. The lover, one of those nice, clean, sporting Englishmen with a minimum of intelligence and an infinite capacity for being gulled by females, especially the clean English sort, clutched her unwillingly and automatically but with quite an Ethel M. Dell appearance of emotion, and exclaimed:
“Darling, what is it? Has he insulted you again?”
Poor old Winterbourne was incapable of insulting any one, but it was a convention always established between Mrs. Winterbourne and her lovers that Winterbourne had “insulted” her, when his worst taunt had been to pray earnestly for her conversion to the True Faith, along with the rest of “poor misguided England.”
In low moaning tones, founded on the best tradition of sensational fiction, Mrs. Winterbourne feebly ejaculated:
“Dead, dead, dead!”
“Who’s dead? Winterbourne?”
(Some apprehension perhaps in the attendant Sam Browne – he would have to propose, of course, and might be accepted.)
“They’ve killed him, those vile, filthy foreigners. My baby son.”
Sam Browne, still mystified, read the telegram. He then stood to attention, saluted (although not wearing a cap), and said solemnly:
“A clean sportin’ death, an Englishman’s death.”
(When Huns were killed it was neither clean nor sportin’, but served the beggars – (“buggers,” among men) sob – right.)
The tears Mrs. Winterbourne shed were not very natural, but they did not take long to dry. Dramatically, she ran to the telephone. Dramatically, she called to the local exchange:
“Trrrunks. (Sob.) Give me Kensington 1030. Mr. Winterbourne’s number, you know. (Sob.) Our darling son – Captain Winterbourne – has been killed by those (Sob) beasts. (Sob. Pause.). Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Crump, I knew you would feel for us in our trouble. (Sob. Sob.) But the blow is so sudden. I must speak to Mr. Winterbourne. Our hearts are breaking here. (Sobissimo.) Thank you. I’ll wait till you ring me.”
Mrs. Winterbourne’s effort on the telephone to her husband was not unworthy of her:
“Is that you, George? Yes, Isabel speaking. I have just had rather bad news. No, about George. You must be prepared, darling. I fear he is seriously ill. What? No. George. GEORGE. Can’t you hear? Yes, that’s better. Now, listen, darling, you must prepare for a great shock. George is seriously ill. Yes, our George, our baby son. What? Wounded? No, not wounded, very dangerously ill. No, darling, there is little hope. (Sob.) Yes, darling, a telegram from the King and Queen. Shall I read it? You are prepared for the shock, (sob) George, aren’t you? ‘Deeply regret killed in action… Their Majesties’ sympathy (Sob. Long pause.) Are you there, George? Hullo, hullo. (Sob.) Hullo, hullo. HULLO. (Aside to Sam Browne.) He’s rung off! How that man insults me! how can I bear it in my sorrow? After I had prepared him for the shock! (Sob. Sob.) But I have always had to fight for my children, while he squatted over his books – and prayed,”
To Mrs. Winterbourne’s credit, let it be said, she had very little belief in the value of prayer in practical affairs. But then, her real objection to religion was founded upon her dislike for doing anything she didn’t want to do, and a profound hatred for everything distantly resembling thought.
At the fatal news Mr. Winterbourne had fallen upon his knees (not forgetting, however, to ring off the harpy), ejaculating: “Lord Jesus, receive his soul!” Mr. Winterbourne then prayed a good deal, for George’s soul, for himself, for “my erring but beloved spouse,” for his other children, “may they be spared and by Thy Mercy brought to the True Faith,” for England (ditto), for his enemies, “though Thou knowest, Dear Lord Jesus, the enmity was none of my seeking, sinner though I be, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Ave Maria…
Mr. Winterbourne remained on his knees for some time.
But, as the hall tiles hurt his knees, he went and knelt on a hassock at the prie-dieu in his bedroom. On the top of this was an open Breviary in very ecclesiastical binding with a florid ecclesiastical book-marker, all lying on an ecclesiastical bit of embroidery, the “gift of a Catholic sister in Christ.” Above, on a bracket, was a coloured B.V.M. from the Place St. Sulpice, holding a nauseating Infant Jesus dangling a bloody and sun-rayed Sacred Heart. Over this again was a large but rather cheap-looking imitation bronze Crucifix, with a reproduction (coloured) of Leonardo’s Last Supper to the right, and another reproduction (uncoloured) of Holman Hunt’s (heretical) Light of the World to the left. All of which gave Mr. Winterbourne the deepest spiritual comfort.
After dinner, of which he ate sparingly, thinking with dreary satisfaction how grief destroys appetite, he went round to see his confessor, Father Slack. He spent a pleasantly emotional evening. Mr. Winterbourne cried a good deal, and they both prayed; Father Slack said perhaps George had been influenced by his father’s prayers and virtues and had made an act of contrition before he died; and Mr. Winterbourne said that although George had not been “received” he had “a true Catholic spirit” and had once read a sermon of Bossuet; and Father Slack said he would pray for George’s soul, and Mr. Winterbourne left £5 for Masses for the repose of George, which was generous (if foolish), for he didn’t earn much.
And then Mr. Winterbourne used to pray ten minutes longer every night and morning for George’s soul, but unfortunately he went and got himself run over just by the Marble Arch as he was meditating on that blessed martyr, Father Parsons, and that other more blessed martyr, Father Garnet of Gunpowder fame. So, as the £5 was soon exhausted, there was nobody to pray for George’s soul; and for all the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church knows or cares, poor old George is in Hell, and likely to remain there. But, after the last few years of his life, George probably doesn’t find any difference.
So much for George’s father and George’s death. The “reactions” (as they are called) of Mrs. Winterbourne were different. She found it rather exciting and stimulating at first, especially erotically stimulating. She was a woman who constantly dramatized herself and her life. She was as avid of public consideration as an Italian lieutenant, no matter what the quality of the praise. The only servants who ever stayed more than a trial month with her were those who bowed themselves to an abject discipline of adulation for Mrs. Winterbourne, Mrs. Winterbourne’s doings and sayings and possessions and whims and friends. Only, since Mrs. Winterbourne was exceedingly fickle and quarrelsome, and was always changing friends into enemies and vowed enemies into hollow friends, a more than diplomatic suppleness was exacted of these mercenary retainers, who only stayed with her because she gave them presents or raised their wages whenever the praise was really gratifying.
Although a lady of “mature charms,” Mrs. Winterbourne loved to fancy herself as a delicious young thing of seventeen, passionately beloved by a sheik-like but nevertheless “clean” (not to say “straight”) Englishman. She was a mistress of would-be revolutionary platitudes about marriage and property (rather like the talk of an “enlightened” parson), but, in fact, was as sordid, avaricious, conventional, and spiteful a middle-class woman as you could dread to meet. Like all her class, she toadied to her betters and bullied her inferiors. But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite. In her kittenish moods, which she cultivated with a strange lack of a sense of congruity, she liked to throw out hints about “kicking over the traces.” But, as a matter of fact, she never soared much above tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs with bounderish young men, whom only her romantic effrontery could have dared describe as “clean and straight,” although there was no doubt whatever about their being English, and indeed sportin’ in a more or less bounderish way.
She had had so many of these clean, straight young sheiks, that even poor Mr. Winterbourne got mixed up, and when he used to write dramatic letters beginning,
“Sir, – You have robbed me of my wife’s affection like a low hound – be it said in no un-Christian spirit,” the letters were always getting addressed to the penultimate or antepenultimate sheik, instead of the straight, clean one of the moment. However, rendered serious by the exhortations of the war Press and still more by the ever-ripening maturity of her charms, Mrs. Winterbourne made an instinctive and firm clutch at Sam Browne – so successfully that she clutched the poor devil for the remainder of his abbreviated life. (She did the abbreviation.) Sam Browne, of course, was almost too good to be true. If I hadn’t seen him myself I should never have believed in him. He was an animated – and not so very animated – stereotype. His knowledge of life was rudimentary to the point of being quadruped, and intelligence had been bestowed upon him with rigid parsimony. An adult Boy Scout, a Public School fag in shining armour -the armour of obtuseness. He met every situation in life with a formula, and no situation in life ever reached him except in the shape imposed upon it by the appropriate and predetermined formula. So, though he wasn’t very successful at anything, he got along all right, sliding almost decorously down grooves which had nothing ringing about them. Unless urged, he never mentioned his wound, his decoration, or the fact that he had “rolled up” on August 4th. The modest, well-bred, etcetera, English gentleman.
The formula for the death of a married mistress’s son was stern heroism, and gentle consolation to the wounded mother-heart. Mrs. Winterbourne played up at first -it was the sort of thing that the sheik always did with his passionate but tender love. But the effect of George’s death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic. The war did that to lots of women. All the dying and wounds and mud and bloodiness – at a safe distance – gave them a great kick, and excited them to an almost unbearable pitch of amorousness. Of course, in that eternity of 1914-18 they must have come to feel that men alone were mortal, and they immortals; wherefore they tried to behave like houris with all available sheiks – hence the lure of “war work” with its unbounded opportunities. And then there was the deep primitive physiological instinct – men to kill and be killed; women to produce more men to continue the process. (This, however, was often frustrated by the march of Science, viz. anti-conceptives; for which, much thanks.)
So you must not be surprised if Mrs. Winterbourne’s emotion at the death of George almost immediately took an erotic form. She was lying on her bed in an ample pair of white drawers with very long ruffles and a remarkably florid, if chaste, chemise. And the sheik, strong, silent, restrained, tender, was dabbing her forehead and nose with eaude-cologne, while she took large sips of brandy at increasingly frequent intervals. It was, of course, proper and even pleasant to have her grief so much respected; but she did wish Sam hadn’t to be poked always into taking the initiative. Couldn’t the man see that tender nerves like hers needed to be soothed with a little Real Love at once?
“He was so much to me, Sam,” she said in low, indeed tremulous tones, subtly calculated. “I was only a child when he was born – a child with a child, people used to say – and we grew up together. I was so young that I did not put up my hair until two years after he was born.” (Mrs. Winterbourne’s propaganda about her perennial youth was so obvious that it would hardly have deceived the readers of “John Blunt” – but the sheiks all fell for it. God knows how young they thought she was – probably imagined Winterbourne had “insulted” her when she was ten.)
“We were always together, such pals, Sam, and he told me everything.”
(Poor old George! He had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn’t seen her five times in the last five years of his life. And as for telling her anything – why, the most noble of noble savages would immediately have suspected her. She had let George down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside, and couldn’t give confidence to his wife or his mistresses or a man.)
“But now he’s gone” – and somehow Mrs. Winterbourne’s voice became so erotically suggestive that even the obtuse sheik noticed it and was vaguely troubled – “now he’s gone, I’ve nothing in the world but you, Sam. You heard how that vile man insulted me on the telephone today. Kiss me, Sam, and promise you’ll always be a pal, a real pal.”
Active love-making was not in the sheik’s formula for that day; consolation there was to be, but the “sacredness” of mother-grief was not to be profaned by sexual intercourse; although that too, oddly enough, was “sacred” between a “clean” Englishman and a “pure” woman who had only had one husband and twenty-two lovers. But what can the Sam Brownes of the world do against the wills, especially the will to copulate, of the Mrs. Winterbournes? He rose – if the expression may be allowed – powerfully to the situation. He, too, found a certain queer, perverse satisfaction in honeying and making love over a nasty corpse; while, if he had been capable of making the reflection, he would have realized that Mrs. Winterbourne was not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one.
In the succeeding weeks George’s death was the source of other, almost unclouded, joys to Mrs. Winterbourne. She pardoned –, temporarily – the most offending of her enemies to increase the number of artistically tearblotched letters of bereavement she composed. Quite a few of the nearly gentry, who usually avoided Mrs. Winterbourne as a particularly virulent specimen of the human scorpion, paid calls – very brief calls – of condolence. Even the Vicar appeared, and was greeted with effusive sweetness; for though Mrs. Winterbourne professed herself a social rebel and an “Agnostic” (not, however, until she had been more or less kicked out of middle-class and Church society), she retained a superstitious reverence for parsons of the Established Church.
Another joy was squabbling with Elizabeth Winterbourne, George’s wife, about his poor little “estate” and military effects. When George joined up, he thought he had to give his father as his next-of-kin. Later, he found his mistake, and when he went out to France the second time he gave his wife. The War Office carefully preserved both records, either under the impression that there were two George Winterbournes, or because the original record was never erased and so became law. At any rate, some of George’s possessions were sent to the country address, and, although directed to his father, were unscrupulously seized by his mother. And the remainder of his military kit and the pay due him went to his wife. Old Mrs Winterbourne was fearfully enraged at this. Stupid red tape, she said it was. Why! wasn’t her baby son hers? Hadn’t she borne him, and therefore established complete possession of him and his for the rest of her natural life? What can any woman mean to a Man in comparison with his Mother? Therefore, it was plain that she was the next-of-kin and that all George’s possessions, including the widow’s pension, should come to her and her only: Q.E.D. She bothered her harassed husband about it, tried to stimulate Sam Browne to action – but he evaporated in a would-be straight, clean letter to Elizabeth, who knocked him out in the first round – and even consulted a lawyer in London. Old Mrs Winterbourne came back from London in a spluttering temper. “That man” (i.e. her husband) had “insulted” her again, by timidly stating that all George’s possessions ought to be given to his wife, who would doubtless allow them to keep a few “mementoes.” And the lawyer – foul brute – had unsympathetically said that George’s wife had a perfect right to sue her mother-in-law for detaining her (Elizabeth’s) property. George’s will was perfectly plain – he had left everything he had to his wife. However, that small amount of George’s property which his mother got hold of she kept, in defiance of all the King’s horses and writs. And she took, she embraced, the opportunity of telling “that woman” (i.e. Elizabeth) what she thought of her – which, if believed, meant that poor Elizabeth was a composition of Catherine of Russia, Lucrezia Borgia, Mine de Brinvilliers, Moll flanders, a tricoteuse, and a hissing villainess from the Surrey side.
But George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement for about two months. Just as the quarrel with Elizabeth reached stupendous heights of vulgar invective (on her side), old Winterbourne got himself run over. So there was the excitement of the inquest and a real funeral, and widow’s weeds and more tear-blotched letters. She even sent a tear-blotched letter to Elizabeth, which I saw, saying that “twenty years” – it was really almost thirty – “of happy married life were over, both father and son were now happily united, and, whatever Mr. Winterbourne’s faults, he was a gentleman.” (Heavily underlined and followed by several exclamation marks, the insinuation being apparently that Elizabeth was no lady.)
A month later Mrs. Winterbourne married the sheik – alas! no sheik now – at a London registry office, whence they departed to Australia to live a clean sportin’ life. Peace be with them both – they were too clean and sportin’ for a corrupt and unclean Europe.
George’s parents, of course, were grotesques. When, in a mood of cynical merriment, he used to tell his friends the exact truth about his parents, he was always accused – even by quite intelligent people – of creating a monstrous legend. Unless all the accepted ideas about heredity and environment are false – which they probably are – it is a regular mystery of Udolpho how George managed to be so different from his parents and the family milieu. Physically he looked like them both – in every other respect, he might have dropped from the moon for all the resemblance he had to them. Perhaps they seemed so grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never perceived it. They only worried about their rations. Old Winterbourne also worried a good deal about “the country”, and wrote letters of advice to The Times (which didn’t publish them), and then rewrote them on Club notepaper to the Prime Minister. They were invariably politely acknowledged by a secretary. But Mrs. Winterbourne only cared spasmodically about “the country”. Her view of the British Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the extermination of all “filthy vile foreigners”, making the world safe for straight, clean sheiks and pure, sweet, kittenish Englishwomen of fifty. Grotesques indeed, fanciful, unbelievable, like men’s fashions of 1840. To me, who only saw them a few times, either in company with George or as his executor, they seemed as fantastic, as ridiculous, as prehistoric as the returning émigrés seemed to Paris in 1815. Like the Bourbons, the elder Winterbournes learned nothing from the war, and forgot nothing. It is the tragedy of England that the war has taught its Winterbournes nothing, and that it has been ruled by grotesques and a groaning Civil Service of disheartened men and women, while the young have simply chucked up the job in despair. Gott strafe England is a prayer that has been fully answered – by the insanity of retaining the old Winterbourne grotesques and pretending they are alive. And we go on acquiescing, we go on without even the guts to kick the grotesque Aunt Sallies of England into the limbo they deserve. Pero, paciencia. Mañana. Mañana…
I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don’t mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing. The situation he had got into with Elizabeth and Fanny Welford was not inextricable, but it would have needed a certain amount of patience and energy and determination and common sense to put right. But by November ’18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops were after six months in the line. Since Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves, and when I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October ’18 he struck me as a man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn’t see how he would face another barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle. We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth, until it was such a nightmare, such a portentous House of Atrides tragedy, that I began to think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering to each other – or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried to interrupt and couldn’t. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were certainly all to pieces.
Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, etcetera. Such wise young women, you thought, no sentimental nonsense about them. No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come their way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship”, nothing could break it. Jealousy? it was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand tricks? insulting to make such a suggestion. No, no. Men must be “free” and women must be “free’
Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth must know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence”. So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually antipathetic”. That was just before the war. But in 1914 something went wrong with Elizabeth’s period, and she thought she was going to have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more talk of “freedom” then! If she had a baby, her father would cut off her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn’t be asked to Lady Saint-Lawrence’s dinners, she… Well, she “went at” George in a way which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on a special licence, and they were married at a Registry office in the presence of Elizabeth’s parents, who were also swept bewildered into this sudden match, they knew not how or why. Elizabeth’s father had feebly protested that George hadn’t any money, and Mrs. Winterbourne senior wrote a marvellous tear-blotched dramatic epistle, in which she said that George was a feeble-minded degenerate who had broken his mother’s tender heart and insultingly trampled upon it, in a low, sensual lust for a vile woman who was only “after” the Winterbourne money. As there wasn’t any Winterbourne money left, and the elder Winterbournes lived on tick and shifts, the accusation was, to say the least, fanciful. But Elizabeth bore down all opposition, and she and George were married.
After the marriage, Elizabeth breathed again and became almost human. Then and only then did she think of consulting a doctor, who diagnosed some minor female malady, told her to “avoid cohabitation” for a few weeks, and poofed with laughter at her pregnancy. George and Elizabeth took a flat in Chelsea, and within three months Elizabeth was just as “enlightened” as before and fuller of “freedom” than ever. Relieved by the doctor’s assurance that only an operation could enable her to have a child, she “had an affair” with a young man from Cambridge, and told George about it. George was rather surprised and peeved, but played the game nobly, and most gallantly yielded the flat up for the night whenever Elizabeth dropped a hint. Of course, he didn’t suffer as much deprivation as Elizabeth thought, because he invariably spent those nights with Fanny.
This went on until about the end of 1915. George, though attractive to women, had a first-rate talent for the malapropos in dealing with them. If he had told Elizabeth about his affair with Fanny at the moment when she was full-flushed with the young man from Cambridge, she would no doubt have acquiesced, and the thing would have been smoothed over. Unluckily for George, he felt so certain that Fanny was right and so certain that Elizabeth was right. He was perfectly convinced that Elizabeth knew all about him and Fanny, and that if they didn’t speak of it together the only reason was that “one took such things for granted”, no need to “cerebrise” about them. Then one night, when Elizabeth was getting tired of the young man from Cambridge, she was struck by the extraordinary alacrity George showed in “getting out”.
“But, darling,” she said, “isn’t it very expensive always going to a hotel? Can we afford it? And don’t you mind?”
“Oh no,” said the innocent George; “I shall run round and spend the night with Fanny as usual, you know.”
Then there was a blazing row, Elizabeth at George, and then Fanny at George, and then – epic contest – Elizabeth at Fanny. Poor old George got so fed up, he went off and joined the infantry, fell into the first recruiting office he came to, and was whisked off to a training camp in the Midlands. But, of course, that didn’t solve the situation. Elizabeth’s blood was up, and Fanny’s blood was up. It was Achilles against Hector, with George as the body of Patroclus. Not that either of them so horribly wanted George, but it was essential to each to come off victorious and “bag” him, with the not improbable epilogue of dropping him pretty quickly after he had been “bagged” away from the other woman. So they each wrote him tender and emotional and “understanding” letters, and sympathized with his sufferings under military discipline. Elizabeth came down to the Midlands to bag him for week-ends; and then one week when she was “having an affair” with a young American in the Flying Corps, George got his “firing leave” and spent it with Fanny. George was a bit obtuse with women. He was very fond of Elizabeth, but he was also very fond of Fanny. If he hadn’t been taken in with the “freedom” talk and had kept Elizabeth permanently in the dark about Fanny, he might have lived an enviable double life. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t, and never did, see that the “freedom” talk was only talk with the two women, although it was real enough to him. So he wrote them both the most imbecile and provocative letters, praised Elizabeth to Fanny, and Fanny to Elizabeth, and said how much he cared for them both; and he was like Shelley, and Elizabeth was like Mary, and Fanny was like Emilia Viviani. And he went on doing that even in France, right up to the end. And he never even suspected what an ass he was.
Of course, George had not set foot on the boat which took him to the Boulogne Base-Camp for the first time, before both Elizabeth and Fanny had become absorbed in other “affairs”. They only fought for George in a desultory way as a symbol, more to spite each other than because they wanted to saddle themselves with him.
Elizabeth was out when her telegram came from the War Office. She did not get it until nearly midnight, when she came back to the flat with a fascinating young Swedish painter she had met at a Chelsea “rag” that evening. She was a bit sozzled, and the young Swede – tall, blond and handsome – was more than a little fired with love and whisky. The telegram was lying on the door-mat with two or three letters. Elizabeth picked them up, and opened the telegram mechanically as she switched on the electric light. The Swede stood watching her drunkenly and amorously. She could not avoid a slight start, and turned a little pale.
“What’s the matter?”
Elizabeth laughed her high little nervous laugh, and laid the telegram and letters on the table.
“The War Office regrets that my husband has been killed in action.”
It was now the Swede’s turn to be startled.
“Your husband?… Perhaps I’d better…”
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” said Elizabeth sharply; “he went out of my life years ago. She’ll mind, but I shan’t.”
She cried a bit in the bathroom, however; but the Swede was certainly a very attentive lover. They drank a good deal of brandy, too.
Next day Elizabeth wrote to Fanny the first letter she had sent her for months:
“Only a line, darling, to tell you that I have a telegram from the W.O. to say George was killed in France on the 4th. I thought it would be less of a shock for you to hear it from me than acci-dentally. Come and see me when you get your weeps over, and we can hold a post-mortem.”
Fanny didn’t reply to the letter. She had been rather fond of George, and thought Elizabeth heartless. But Elizabeth too had been fond of George; only, she wasn’t going to give it away to Fanny. I saw a good deal of Elizabeth while settling up George’s scanty estate – mostly furniture and books in the flat, his credit at Cox’s, a few War Bonds, a little money due to him from civilian sources, and Elizabeth’s pension. However, it meant a certain amount of letter-writing, which Elizabeth was glad to have me do. I also saw Fanny once or twice, and took her the trifles George had left her. But I never saw the two women together – they avoided each other; and when my duties as executor were done, I saw very little of either. Fanny went to Paris in 1919, and soon married an American painter. I saw her in the Dome one night in 1924, pretty well rouged and quite nicely dressed, with a party. She was laughing and flirting with a middle-aged American – possibly an art patron – and didn’t look as if she mourned much for George. Why indeed should she?
As for Elizabeth, she rather went to pieces. With her father’s allowance, which doubled and became her own income when he died, and her widow’s pension, she was quite well off as poor people of the “artistic” sort go. She travelled a good deal, always with a pretty large brandy-flask, and had more lovers than were good for her – or them. I hadn’t seen her for years, until about a month ago I ran into her on the corner of the Piazzetta in Venice. She was with Stanley Hopkins, one of those extremely clever young novelists who oscillate between women and homosexuality. He had recently published a novel so exceedingly clever, so stupendously smart and up-to-date and witty and full of personalities about well-known people, that he was quite famous, especially in America, where all Hopkins’s brilliantly quacking and hissing and kissing geese were taken as melodious swans and (vide Press) as a “startling revelation of the corruption of the British Aristocracy.” We went and had ices together, all three, at Florian’s; and then Hopkins went off to get something, and left us together for half an hour. Elizabeth chattered very wittily – you had to be witty with Hopkins or die of shame and humiliation – but never mentioned George. George was a drab bird from a drab past. She told me that she and Hopkins would not marry; they had both determined never to pollute themselves with the farce of “legalized copulation”, but they would “probably go on living with each other.” Hopkins, who was a very rich young man as well as a successful novelist, had settled a thousand a year on her, so that they could both be “free”. She looked as nearly un-miserable as our cynical and battered generation can look; but she still had the brandy-flask.
Like a fool, I allowed myself to be persuaded to drink liqueur brandies after dinner that evening; and paid for it with a sleepless night. No doubt it was the unexpected meeting with Elizabeth which made me think a lot about George during those ghastly wakeful hours. I can’t claim that I had set up any altar to the deceased George in my heart, but I truly believe that I am the only person left alive who ever thinks of him. Perhaps because I was the only person who cared for George for his own sake, disinterestedly. Naturally, his death meant very little to me at the time – there were eighty deaths in my own battalion on the day George was killed, and the Armistice and getting out of the blasted Army and settling my own problems and starting civilian life again and getting to work, all occupied my attention. In fact, it was not until two or three years after the war that I began to think much, if at all, about George. Then, although I didn’t in the least believe in it, I got a half-superstitious, half-sentimental idea that “he” (poor old bag of decaying bones) wanted me to think about him. I half-knew, half-guessed that the people on whom he had counted had forgotten him, at least no longer cared that he had existed, and would have been merely surprised and rather annoyed if he had suddenly come back, like one of those shell-shocked heroes of fiction who recover their wits seven years after the Armistice. His father had taken it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in “unlicensed copulation” and brandy, and Fanny in tears and marrying a painter. But I hadn’t taken it out in anything, I hadn’t been conscious that George’s death meant anything in particular to me; and so it was waiting inside patiently to be dealt with in due course.
Friendships between soldiers during the war were a real and beautiful and unique relationship which has now entirely vanished, at least from Western Europe. Let me at once disabuse the eager-eyed Sodomites among my readers by stating emphatically once and for all that there was nothing sodomitical in these friendships. I have lived and slept for months, indeed years, with “the troops”, and had several such companionships. But no vaguest proposal was ever made to me; I never saw any signs of sodomy, and never heard anything to make me suppose it existed. However, I was with the fighting troops. I can’t answer for what went on behind the lines.
No, no. There was no sodomy about it. It was just a human relation, a comradeship, an undemonstrative exchange of sympathies between ordinary men racked to extremity under a great common strain in a great common danger. There was nothing dramatic about it. Bill and Tom would be in the same section, or Jones and Smith subalterns in the same company. They’d go on fatigues and patrols together, march behind each other on trench reliefs, booze at the same estaminet, and show each other the “photos” of “Ma” and “my tart”, if Tommies. Or they’d meet on trench duty, and volunteer for the same trench raid, and back up each other’s lies to the inspecting Brigadier, and share a servant, and stick together in a battle, and ride together when on rest and talk shyly about their “fiancées” or wives in England, if officers. When they separated, they would be glum for a bit, and then, in the course of a month or two or three, strike up another friendship. Only, the companionship was generally a real one, pretty unselfish. Of course, this sort of friendship was stronger in France than in England, more vivid in the line than out of it. Probably a man must have something to love – quite apart from the “love” of sexual desire. (Prisoners are supposed to love rats and spiders.) Soldiers, especially soldiers overseas in the last war, entirely cut off from women and friends, had perforce to love another soldier, there being no dogs available. Very few of these friendships survived the Peace.
After several months in France and a month’s leave, I felt pretty glum when I was sent to an Officers’ Training Camp in a beautiful but very remote part of Dorset. I was mooning about in a gloomy way before my first dinner as a potential though temporary gentleman, when I ran into another fellow similarly mooning. He was George, who had been seen off that day from Waterloo by Elizabeth and Fanny (although I did not then know it), and who was also feeling very glum about it. We exchanged a few words, found we were both B.E.F. (most of the others were not) and that we were allotted to the same barrack-room. We found we had certain tastes in common, and we became friends.
I liked George. For one thing, he was the only person in the whole of that hellish camp with whom I could exchange one word on any topic but booze, “tarts”, “square-pushing”, smut, the war, and camp gossip. George was very enthusiastic about modern painting. His own painting, he told me, was “pretty dud”, but in peace time he made a good living by writing art criticism for various papers and by buying modern pictures, chiefly French and German, on commission for wealthy collectors. We lent each other books from our scanty store, and George was quite thrilled to know that I had published one or two little books of poetry and had met Yeats and Marinetti. I talked to him about modern poetry, and he talked to me about modern painting; and I think we helped to keep each other’s “souls” alive. In the evenings we played chess or strolled about, if it was fine. George didn’t go square-pushing with tarts, and I didn’t go square-pushing with tarts. So on Saturday afternoons and Sundays we took long walks over that barren but rather beautiful Dorset down country, and had a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine in one or other of the better country inns. And all that kept up our own particular “morale”, which each of us had determined not to yield to the Army swinishness. Poor George had suffered more than I. He had been more bullied as a Tommy, had a worse time in France, and suffered horribly from that “tightness” inside, that inability to confide himself, induced by his singular home life and appalling mother. I feel quite sure he told me more about himself, far more, than he ever told any one else, so that eventually I knew quite a lot about him. He told me all about his parents and about Elizabeth and Fanny, and about his childhood and his life in London and Paris.
As I say, I liked George, and I’m grateful to him because he helped me to keep alive when a legion of the swine were trying to destroy me. And, of course, I helped him. He had a strong dose of shyness – his mother had sapped his self-confidence abominably – which made him seem rather conceited and very aloof. But au fond he was extraordinarily generous, spontaneous, rather Quixotish. It was that which made him so helpless with women, who neither want nor understand Quixotic behaviour and scrupulousness, and who either think they mean weakness or are veils for some devilish calculation. But with another man, who wanted nothing from him but a frank exchange of friendliness, he was a charming and inexhaustible companion. I was damned glad to get my commission and leave that stinking hole of a Camp, but I was really sorry to part from George. We agreed to write, and applied for commissions in the same regiment. Needless to say, we were gazetted to completely different regiments from those we had applied for. We exchanged one or two letters while waiting in depots in England, and then ceased writing. But by an odd freak of the War Office we were both sent to different battalions in the same Brigade. It was nearly two months before we found this out, when we met by accident at Brigade Headquarters.
I was rather startled at George’s appearance, he looked so worried and almost scared. I saw him on reliefs or at Brigade H.Q. or at Divisional Rest Camp several times. He looked whacked in May ’18. In July the Division moved down to the Somme, but George’s company front was raided the night before we left, and he was badly rattled by it. I had watched the box barrage from the top of Battalion H.Q. dugout (I was then signal officer), but I never thought that George was in it. He lost several men as prisoners, and the Brigadier was a bit nasty about it, which made George more rattled and jumpy than ever. I told him then that he ought to apply for a rest, but he was in an agony of feeling that he was disgraced and a coward, and wouldn’t listen to me.
The last time I saw him was at Herinies, in October ’18, as I mentioned before. I had come up from a course and found George had been “left out” at Divisional Rest Camp for that tour. There were some sacking beds in the Orderly room, and George got me one. He talked on in the dark for what seemed hours during the air-raids, and I really thought he was demented. Next morning we rejoined our battalions, and I never saw him again.
George was killed soon after dawn on the 4th November, 1918, at a place called Maison Blanche, on the road from Le Cateau to Bavay. He was the only officer in his battalion killed in that action, for the Germans surrendered or ran away in less than an hour. I heard about it that night, and, as the Brigade was “resting” on the 5th, I got permission from my Colonel to ride back to George’s funeral. I heard from George’s Colonel that he had got enfiladed by a machine-gun. The whole of his company were lying down, waiting for the flying trench-mortar squad to deal with the machine-gun, when for some unexplained reason George had stood up, and a dozen bullets had gone through him. “Silly ass,” was the Colonel’s comment, as he nodded and left me.
No coffins were available, so they wrapped George in a blanket and the Union Jack. The parson stood at the head of the grave, a mourning party of Tommies and N.C.O.s from his company on one side, and, facing them, the officers of his battalion. I was on the extreme left of the line. The Chaplain read the military burial service in a clear voice, and read it well. There was very little artillery fire. Only one battery of our own heavies, about a mile nearer the enemy, was shelling at regular intervals like a last salute. We stood to attention and the body was lowered. Each of the officers in turn stepped up to the graveside, saluted and turned away. Then the battalion buglers blew that soul-shattering, heart-rending Last Post, with its inexorable chains of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails. I admit I did a lot of swallowing those few minutes. You can say what you like against the Army, but they treat you like a gentleman, when you’re dead… The Tommies were numbered, formed fours, right turned and marched away; and the officers strolled over to the mess for a drink…
The death of a hero! What mockery, what bloody cant! What sickening putrid cant! George’s death is a symbol to me of the whole sickening bloody waste of it, the damnable stupid waste and torture of it. You’ve seen how George’s own people – the makers of his body, the women who held his body to theirs – were affected by his death. The Army did its bit, but how could the Army individually mourn a million “heroes”? How could the little bit of Army which knew George mourn him? At dawn next morning we were hot-foot after the retreating enemy, and did not pause until the Armistice and then we had our own lives to struggle with and disentangle. That night in Venice, George and his death became a symbol to me – and still remain a symbol. Somehow or other we have to make these dead acceptable, we have to atone for them, we have to appease them. How, I don’t quite know. I know there’s the Two Minutes’ Silence. But after all, a Two Minutes’ Silence once a year isn’t doing much – in fact, it’s doing nothing. Atonement – how can we atone? How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood? Something is unfulfilled, and that is poisoning us. It is poisoning me, at any rate, though I have agonized over it, as I now agonize over poor George, for whose death no other human being has agonized. What can we do? Headstones and wreaths and memorials and speeches and the Cenotaph – no, no, it has got to be something in us. Somehow we must atone to the dead – the dead, murdered, violently-dead soldiers. The reproach is not from them, but in ourselves. Most of us don’t know it, but it is there, and poisons us. It is the poison that makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless – us the war generation, and the new generation too. The whole world is blood-guilty, cursed like Orestes, and mad, and destroying itself, as if pursued by an infinite legion of Eumenides. Somehow we must atone, somehow we must free ourselves from the curse – the blood-guiltiness. We must fpind – where? how? – the greater Pallas who will absolve us on some Acropolis of Justice. But meanwhile the dead poison us and those who come after us.
That is why I am writing the life of George Winterbourne, a unit, one human body murdered, but to me a symbol. It is an atonement, a desperate effort to wipe off the blood-guiltiness. Perhaps it is the wrong way. Perhaps the poison will still be in me. If so, I shall search for some other way. But I shall search. I know what is poisoning me. I do not know what is poisoning you, but you are poisoned. Perhaps you too must atone.
