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Ihave previously remarked that I would give a good deal for a few gramophone records of my “interchanges of ideas” with Rivers. I now reiterate the remark because at the moment of writing I feel very much afraid of reporting our confabulations incorrectly. In later years, while muddling on toward maturity, I have made it my business to find out all I can about the mechanism of my spontaneous behaviour; but I cannot be sure how far I had advanced in that art—or science—in 1917. I can only suggest that my definite approach to mental maturity began with my contact with the mind of Rivers.

If he were alive I could not be writing so freely about him. I might even be obliged to call him by some made-up name, which would seem absurd. But he has been dead nearly fourteen years now and he exists only in vigilant and undiminished memories, continuously surviving in what he taught me. It is that intense survival of his human integrity which has made me pause perplexed. Can I hope to pass the test of that invisible presence, that mind which was devoted to the service of exact and organized research? What exactitude would he find in such a representation of psychological experience as this, and how far would he approve my attempt to describe him? Well, I can only trust that he would smile at my mistakes and decide that I am tolerably accurate about the essentials of the story.

Of one thing, at any rate, I can be certain.

In 1917 the last thing he expected me to be capable of saying to him was—“Such knowledge as I have of the why and wherefore of this War is only enough to make me feel that I know nothing at all.” He would have said it of himself, though, since he was merely a plain scientist, and not an omniscient politician or political writer. And he would have added that it pained him deeply to feel that he was “at war” with German scientists. (At that time I did not know that he had studied at Heidelberg.)

As regards the “larger aspects” of the War, my method was to parade such scraps of information as I possessed, always pretending to know more than I did. Even Rivers could not cure me of the youthful habit (which many people never unlearn at all) of being conversationally dishonest. All he could do was to make me feel uncomfortable when I thought about it afterwards—which was, anyhow, a step in the right direction. For instance, he would be saying something about the Franco-Prussian War, and I would bluff my way through, pretending to know quite a lot about the Alsace-Lorraine question, (though all I knew was that I’d once been introduced to a prebendary called Loraine, who subsequently became a canon, and who had prepared Aunt Evelyn for confirmation somewhere about the year 1870). Worse still, I would talk about some well-known person as if I knew him quite well instead of having only met him once. Since then I have entirely altered my procedure, and when in doubt I pretend to know less than I really do. The knowledge thus gained is part of my indebtedness to Rivers.

***

In 1917 it did not occur to me that golf would one day be regarded as a predominant national occupation rather than a pastime. Nevertheless I did not like the game to be treated with levity; in fact I played it somewhat seriously. (My friend Cromlech had once insisted on trying to defeat me in a game in which he used nothing but a niblick and to my great annoyance he performed such astonishing feats with it as to cause me some disquietude, though I won quite comfortably in the end.)

When played seriously, even golf can, I suppose, claim to be “an epitome of human life.” Anyhow, in that fourth October of the War I was a better golfer than I’d ever been before, and, I may add, a better one than I’ve ever been since.

I must admit, though, that I wasn’t worrying much about the War when I’d just hit a perfect tee-shot up the charming vista which was the fairway to the first green at Mortonhall. How easy it felt! I scarcely seemed to be gripping the club at all. Afternoon sunshine was slanting through the golden-brown beeches, and at last I knew what it was like to hit the ball properly. “I suppose I’m getting too keen on the game,” I thought, as I bicycled home to the hydro at the end of some such afternoon, when I’d been sampling one of the delightfully unfrequented links which the War had converted into Arcadian solitudes. It was all very well, but this sort of thing couldn’t go on for ever. Sooner or later I must let Rivers know my intentions. Had I been an ordinary patient I should have been due for a Medical Board long before now, and even Rivers couldn’t postpone it indefinitely. And if I were to refuse to go before a board the situation would become awkward again. He had allowed me to drift on for twelve weeks, and so far he hadn’t asked me what I intended to do or put the slightest pressure on me about it. Now that he was back from leave he would probably tackle the question. Perhaps he would do so that very evening.

Meanwhile I went up to my room and sat there cleaning my clubs. After a bit the Theosophist came in to smarten himself up before going into Edinburgh for dinner. When in good spirits he had a habit of addressing me in literary language, usually either tags of Shakespeare or locutions reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s romances. If I remarked that the way the windows rattled and creaked was enough to keep one awake all night, he would reply, “True, O King,” or “Thou hast uttered wise words, O great white chief.” He now informed me, while rubbing his face with a towel, that he had been engaged on “enterprises of great pith and moment.”

“To-day, toward the going down of the sun, O Sherston, the medicine men put forth their powers upon me, and soothfully I say unto you, they have passed me for permanent home-service.” Where would he go to, I enquired.

“I shall sit in an office, O man of little faith, wearing blue tabs upon my tunic and filling in Army Forms whereof no man knoweth the mysterious meaning,” he replied, and left me wondering what occupation I ought to find for my disillusioned self.

***

Writing about it so long afterwards, one is liable to forget that while the War was going on nobody really knew when it would stop. For ordinary infantry officers like myself there was always what we called “a faint bloody hope that it may be over in six months from now.” And at Slateford there was always a suppressed awareness which reminded me that I was “shortening the War” for myself every week that I remained there. No one but an expert humbug would now deny that some such awareness existed in most of us who were temporarily “out of it” but destined sooner or later to find ourselves in a front-line trench again.

While I continued to clean my clubs, some inward monitor became uncomfortably candid and remarked, “This heroic gesture of yours—‘making a separate peace’—is extremely convenient for you, isn’t it? Doesn’t it begin to look rather like dodging the Kaiser’s well-aimed projectiles?” Proper pride also weighed in with a few well-chosen words. “Twelve weeks ago you may have been a man with a message. Anyhow you genuinely believed yourself to be one. But unless you can prove to yourself that your protest is still effective, you are here under false pretences, merely skrimshanking snugly along on what you did in the belief that you would be given a bad time for doing it.”

Against this I argued that, having pledged myself to an uncompromising attitude, I ought to remain consistent to the abstract idea that the War was wrong. Intellectual sobriety was demanded of me. But the trouble was that I wasn’t an “intellectual” at all; I was only trying to become one. I was also, it seemed, trying to become a good golfer. Rivers had never played golf in his life, though he approved of it as a healthy recreation. It would mean nothing to him if I told him that I’d been round North Berwick in one under bogey (which I hadn’t done). There were many other subjects we could discuss, of course, but after the first six weeks or so there had seemed less and less to be said about my “mental position.” And it was no use pretending that I’d come to Slateford to talk to him about contemporary novelists or even the incalculability of European Chancelleries. Sooner or later he would ask me straight out what I intended to do. My own reticence on the subject had been caused by the fact that I hadn’t known what I did intend to do.

I was now trying to find out, while rubbing away, with oil and sandpaper, at an obstinate patch of rust on my niblick....

At this point in my cogitations there was a commotion of thudding feet along the passage past my door, and I heard a nurse saying, “Now, now, you mustn’t get upset like this.” The sound of someone sobbing like a child receded and became inaudible after the shutting of a door. That sort of thing happened fairly often at the hydro. Men who had “done their bit in France” crying like children. One took it for granted, of course; but how much longer could I stay there among so many haunted faces and “functional nervous disorders”? Outwardly normal though a lot of them were, it wasn’t an environment which stimulated one’s “intellectual sobriety”!

I felt in my pocket for a little talisman which I always carried about with me. It was a lump of fire opal clasped on a fine gold chain. Someone whose friendship I valued highly had given it to me when I went to France and I used to call it “my pocket sunset.”

I had derived consolation from its marvellous colours during the worst episodes of my war experiences. In its small way it had done its best to mitigate much squalor and despondency. My companions in dismal dugouts had held it in their hands and admired it.

I could not see its fiery colours now, for the room was almost dark.

But it brought back the past in which I had made it an emblem of successful endurance, and set up a mood of reverie about the old Front Line, which really did feel as if it had been a better place than this where I now sat in bitter safety surrounded by the wreckage and defeat of those who had once been brave.

Had I really enjoyed those tours of trenches up in the Bois Français sector? For it was that period, before the Somme battles began, which now seemed to have acquired an insidious attractiveness. No; in their reality I had intensely disliked those times—except, perhaps, the excitement of my night patrols. It hadn’t been much fun when we relieved the Manchesters—sploshing and floundering up “the Old Kent Road” at midnight; posting the sentries and machine-gunners and that bombing post at the end of the sap; taking over the familiar desolation of soggy fire steps and sniped-at parapets and looking out again across that nothing-on-earth-like region beyond the tangled thickets of wire. And then diving under the gas blanket in the doorway of our dugout and groping down the steps to find Barton sitting moodily at the table with his bottle of whiskey, worrying over his responsibilities while his batman cooked him some toasted cheese in the smoky recess which served as a kitchen. Up there we had arrived at the edge of the world and everything pleasant was far behind us. To be dozing doggedly on the mud-caked sandbags of a wire-netting bunk, with bits of chalk falling on one’s face, was something achieved for King and Country, but it wasn’t enjoyable. There was no sense, I thought, in allowing oneself to sentimentalize the smells of chloride of lime and dead rats, or in idealizing the grousings of Ormand and Mansfield because the jam ration was usually Tickler’s, seldom Hartley’s, and never Crosse and Blackwell’s. But we’d all done our best to help one another, and it was good to remember Durley coming in with one of his wry-faced stories about a rifle grenade exploding on the parados a few yards away from him—Durley demonstrating just how he’d dodged it, and creating an impression that it had been quite a funny German practical joke. Yes, we’d all of us managed to make jokes—mostly family jokes—for a company could be quite a happy family party until someone got killed. Cheerfulness under bad conditions was by no means the least heroic element of the War. Wonderful indeed had been that whimsical fortitude of the men who accepted an intense bombardment as all in the day’s work and then grumbled because their cigarette ration was one packet short! But C Company Mess, as it was in the first half of 1916, could never be reassembled. Its ingredients were now imbued with ghostliness. Mansfield and Durley were disabled by wounds, and Ormand was dead. Barton was the only one of us who was functioning at the Front now; he’d gone back last spring and had survived the summer and autumn without getting a scratch. Poor old devil, I thought, he must be qualifying for a spell at Slateford by now, for he’d been out there eighteen months before he was wounded the first time.... No, there wasn’t much sense in feeling exiled from a family party which had ceased to exist; and the Bois Français sector itself had become ancient history, as remote and obsolete as the first winter of the War. Everything would be different if I went back to France now—different even from what it was last April. Gas was becoming more and more of a problem—one might almost say, more of a nightmare. Hadn’t I just spent an afternoon playing golf with a man who’d lost half his company in a gas bombardment a couple of months ago? ... It seems to amount to this, I ruminated, twirling my putter as I polished its neck—that I’m exiled from the troops as a whole rather than from my former fellow officers and men. And I visualized an endless column of marching soldiers, singing “Tipperary” on their way up from the back areas; I saw them filing silently along ruined roads, and lugging their bad boots through mud until they came to some shell hole and pillar-box line in a landscape where trees were stumps and skeletons and no Quartermaster on earth could be certain of getting the rations up.... “Out of the sun into the sunless land.” ... The idea of going back there was indeed like death.

I suppose I ought to have concluded my strenuous woolgatherings by adding that death is preferable to dishonour. But I didn’t. Humanity asserted itself in the form of a sulky little lapse into exasperation against the people who pitied my “wrongheadedness” and regarded me as “not quite normal.” In their opinion it was quite right that I should be safely out of it and “being looked after.” How else could I get my own back on them but by returning to the trenches? Killed in action in order to confute the Under-Secretary for War, who had officially stated that I wasn’t responsible for my actions. What a truly glorious death for a promising young Pacifist! ...

By these rather peculiar methods I argued it out with myself in the twilight. And when the windows were dark and I could see the stars, I still sat there with my golf bag between my knees, alone with what now seemed an irrefutable assurance that going back to the War as soon as possible was my only chance of peace.

***

As I went along to see Rivers that evening I felt rather as if I were about to make a grand gesture. I may even have felt like doing it in the grand manner. Anyhow I was full of bottled-up emotion and conscious of the significance of the occasion. Looking back from to-day, however, I am interested, not in what my own feelings were, but in what Rivers had been thinking about the decision which he had left me so entirely free to make. Had he been asked, he would probably have replied, in his driest manner, that he considered it to be his duty, as an army medical officer, to “cure me of my Pacifist errors,” (though one of our jokes had been about the humourous situation which would arise if I were to convert him to my point of view). Whatever he had been thinking while away on leave, he was there, with his gentle assurance of helpfulness, and all my grand gesture exuberance faded out at once. It was impossible not to be natural with Rivers. All I knew was that he was my father-confessor, as I called him, and that at last I really had got something to tell him which wasn’t merely a discussive amplification of my “marking time for a few weeks” policy. As a “lead-up” to a more definite disclosure I began by telling him about the odd experience I’d had during the night before he went on leave. I knew that he was scientifically sceptical about psychic phenomena, so I laid stress on the fact that it was probably a visual delusion caused by thinking about the Western Front in stormy weather. Though I described it diffidently, the strong emotion underlying my narrative must have been apparent. But I was so full of myself and my new-made determination that I was quite surprised when I saw that my story had affected him strongly, and that it had caused him to remove his spectacles and rub them rather more than was necessary. He said little, however, and waited for me to continue. With a bumping heart I asked him what would happen if I persisted in my Pacifist attitude.

“You will be kept here until the end of the War,” he replied quietly. I then asked what would happen if I went before a board for reconsideration of my “mental condition.” “I could only tell them that you are not suffering from any form of psycho-neurosis,” he answered, adding, that if I asked for permanent home-service I should probably get it. I then overheard myself—as though I were a third person in the room—saying, rather hurriedly and not at all in the grand manner—“I was getting things into focus a bit while you were away and I see now that the only thing for me to do is to get back to the Front as quick as I can. But what worries me is that I’m afraid of the War Office doing me down somehow and shunting me off on to some home-service job, and if I can’t be passed for G.S. I won’t be passed for anything at all.” I could see that he was pleased; but he said that I must think it over and make quite sure that I meant it. We could then discuss our plan of campaign to wangle things with the War Office.

(He didn’t actually use the word “wangle,” but he implied that it might not be altogether easy to “work it” for me.) We then talked for a bit about other things and did our best to forget that there was a war on.