The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (36 page)

It was all very sad. The war had been terrible, terrible. Going to see
Journey's End
¹
with Margaret last month had brought it all back to her. She had been thinking about that play all through the service; about poor young Stanhope, drinking like that, and the funny servant; but most of all about that queer, tense, terrifying yet exciting call, ‘Stretcher-bearer! Stretcher-bearer!' in the last act. It had a curious effect upon her, as though it almost, but not quite, released the secret of a hidden fear.

Well, she was tired now. Those new patent-leather shoes were not really comfortable. It had been a relief to get into slippers again. Thank goodness there was still half an hour before lunch-time in which she could rest and look at
The Times
. Arthur had left it on the sofa as usual. He had not looked very well that morning; but then, who could look well every morning? When you were eighty-two. Why, she hadn't felt any too well herself, and she was nearly nine years younger. She sat down in the big arm-chair and stretched out her feet towards the dancing fire.

Of course, it wasn't as if she had had boys herself. With Arthur too old really, even to be a special constable, and the girls doing a little light secretarial and orderly work at the local hospital, she had never been able to feel that she was really in
the war. She had done her bit, rolled bandages, and knitted socks, and served on the Refugees Committee, and rationed her own household so sternly that two of her best maids left; but that had not been quite the same thing. And she had always hated to feel out of anything – of the best set in the town, or the Hospital Ball, or the craze for roller-skating – or even the war. She had read the Casualty List every morning carefully, and written sympathetic, admiring notes to those other women whose husbands and sons were among the wounded or the fallen; but she could not sometimes help wishing that her own situation was a little more heroic. Those Wonderful Mothers Who Gave Their Sons held an immense moral advantage over the ordinary women who only coped with a sugar shortage and the servant problem, and the regulations about darkening windows. When Nellie Goodson's only son was killed, she had felt almost envious, of the boy for his Glorious End, of the mother for her honourable grief. Her sin had always been to covet honour.

During the ten years following the war, she had nearly forgotten this strange feeling of envy, just as she had forgotten the taste of lentil cutlets and the fuss about meat cards. There had been so much to think about, Margaret's wedding to her smart young Deryck, and Celia's wedding to Dr Studdley. Funny she could never think of him as Eric – always as Dr Studdley – and the grand-children, and the new bathroom, and Arthur's operation, and putting in Central Heating and her own neuritis. Life had been very full and complicated and busy, for Arthur's business had not done so badly during the war, and though of course he had retired, he still drew dividends.

It was a pity that she had never been able to persuade him to settle anything on the girls. That night she stayed with Margaret to go to
Journey's End
she remembered the girl, already in her becoming blue theatre frock, setting the grapefruit glasses on the polished table – for she was always up to date although she kept only a day-woman – and sighing, ‘If only we had a little capital.' If Deryck had had a little capital, perhaps they would have felt that they could afford a baby. These modern ways were all wrong, thought Mrs Lancing. And yet, when she
remembered Celia and her four, and another coming, and the untidiness of the Studdleys' little house, with one meal always on top of the next, she could not reproach Margaret. It seemed a pity, perhaps, that young people needed the money, while old people always had it.

Of course she had paid for the theatre seats and taxis and everything. She had not really wanted to see
Journey's End
, but everyone had been talking about it, and she felt so silly when she said she had only listened in on Arthur's wireless. She really liked a nice, amusing play, something you could laugh over, with a little love story and pretty frocks. Still, Margaret had seemed quite glad to take her, and it had been a change from hurrying back after visiting poor Nancy.

Once a month since Nancy's second stroke, Mrs Lancing had gone up to town to see her sister. She was astonished at the difference that Nancy's illness made to her. The sisters had never been deeply devoted to each other, and for many years their relationship had been one of mutual tolerance and irritation. Yet ever since Mrs Lancing had seen Nancy lying in bed, between the chintz curtains covered with hollyhocks, her poor mouth twisted and her speech all thick and blurred, she had been afraid. The weeks passed, and a sudden ringing of the telephone had only meant that the butcher could not send the kidneys in time for dinner, or that the Burketts wanted a fourth for bridge; but still Mrs Lancing was afraid. They said that the third stroke was always fatal, and Mrs Lancing did not want her sister to die. For when she had gone there would be no one left to share those memories of her childhood which grew more vivid with each passing year. There was no one else who remembered the hollow at the roots of the weeping ash-tree, that had made a beautiful kitchen range whenever they had played at Keeping House. No one else remembered poor Miss Wardle, the governess, who had lost the third finger of her left hand and spoke with a lisp. And no one else remembered that exciting night when the wheel came off the brougham driving home from the Hilaries, and they had to walk in their party slippers through the snow.

Even Rita Washburn, naughty little Rita who came over from
the Rectory to do lessons with them, was dead now. Only two months ago Mrs Lancing had covered the blue front of her black dress with a scarf, before she set off to Golders Green Cemetery for Rita's funeral.

Perhaps it would be as well to ask Madame Challette to make her next dress with two detachable fronts, one black, and one coloured. For in these days one never knew. Every time Mrs Lancing picked up
The Times
she looked down the Deaths' Column with apprehension. She never knew who might go next. Why, there were hardly any of the old Bromley people left. That was the worst of being the baby of a set. Everyone else seemed to grow old so soon. Mrs Lancing did not feel old at all, only sometimes she got a little tired, and always nowadays she was conscious of that lurking fear.

She picked up
The Times
and held it between her and the fire. Well, there was one comfort, she would never see Nancy's death there, as she had seen their father's, because she was on holiday in Scotland with Arthur and they had not known where to find her. She had made arrangements with Nancy's household now to telephone to her at once if anything happened, because she knew so well how, in the confusion of death, important things were neglected.

She knew so well. She had become quite expert recently in the technicalities of sudden illness, death and funerals. There had been her mother, her elder brother Henry, cousin Jane, and her great friend, Millie Waynwright. Millie's children had both been abroad when it happened, and she had had to arrange everything. Somehow it was just like Millie to give everyone as much trouble as possible. Dear, wayward, lovely, petulant Millie, a spoiled pretty woman to the end, her white hair waved and shingled, her neck tied up with pale mauve tulle, and fresh flowers brought by her husband every day. But she had never really got over Roddie's death. He had been killed accidentally by a bomb exploding in England, and somehow that was really worse than if it had happened in France.

Mrs Lancing picked up
The Times
and looked at the Deaths' Column in the front page. ‘Adair, Bayley, Blaynes, Brintock, Carless.' Frederick Carless – now, would that be Daisy's husband?
Seventy-five – why, not so much older than she was. Mrs Lancing had begun to count her friends' ages eagerly, finding comfort in her own comparative youth. ‘Davies, Dean, Dikes.' It was a heavy list to-day. There must have been an offensive.

How absurd. She was thinking of it as though it were a casualty list; but this was peacetime. The war had been over for more than ten years. It was Armistice Day, the day on which the nation thought proudly of its glorious dead.

We who are left grow old, thought Mrs Lancing. The years condemn us. We fall in a war with Time which knows no armistice. This column in
The Times
is the Casualty List.

She looked up at the scarlet silk poppies in the vase. In Flanders fields the poppies grow,
³
because the young men died, so the Rector had said only an hour ago, in order that the world might be a better place for those who stayed behind. But the old who died because the years condemned them, was there no honour in their going? Of course, they had to pass on some time, and leave the world to the young. Mrs Lancing thought of Margaret, and her sigh, ‘If only we had a little capital!' breathed without malice and without intention. She did not mean to hint anything to her mother, but of course she knew that when her parents went, there would be £12,000 each for her and Celia. The old must pass on. The young must inherit.

The shadow of death darkened the world when one was over seventy; yet save for one fear it was not unfriendly; it was not dishonourable. It was just part of life. Only she had not liked the look of Arthur's face that morning and she did wish that his heart was stronger.

The sudden opening of the drawing-room door roused her. She sat up, and saw the scared, white face of the young parlourmaid.

‘Oh, please, 'm, will you come? The master's had a fainting attack or something in the smoking-room.'

Arthur's heart. Of course. It had to come.

As though with her bodily ears, Mrs Lancing heard ringing through the house the queer, exciting, alarming, sinister cry of ‘Stretcher-bearer! Stretcher-bearer!'

She knew that this was the fear she had not dared to face, that this was the hour she had awaited with unspoken terror. Yet now that it had come, she was unshaken.

She rose quietly from her chair, placed
The Times
again upon the sofa, said to Ethel, ‘Very well. I will come at once. Please telephone to Dr Burleigh.' And with a steady step walked to the door.

She was not out of it this time. This was her war, and she had learned how to behave.

Stan's got a bagful of big, noble ideas; all schemed out carefully, with what he calls ‘captions' attached.

Well, I can't say nothing against big, noble ideas. I was a red-hot Labour-man myself for a time, forty years ago now, when the Kayser's war ended and the war-profiteers began treading us ex-heroes into the mud. But that's all over long ago – in fact, Labour's got a damn sight too respectable for my taste! Worse than Tories, most of their leaders is now – especially them that used to be the loudest in rendering ‘We'll Keep the Red Flag Flying Still'.
¹
They're all Churchwardens now, or country gents, if they're not in the House of Lords.

Anyhow, yesterday Stan came around, about a big Ban-the-Bomb march all the way across England to Trafalgar Square. And couldn't I persuade a few of my old comrades to form a special squad with a banner marked ‘First World War Veterans Protest Against the Bomb'? He wanted us to head the parade, ribbons, crutches, wheel-chairs and all.

I put my foot down pretty hard. ‘No, Mr Stanley,' I said politely, ‘I regret as I can't accept your kind invitation.'

‘But why?' says he. ‘You don't want another war, Grandfather, do you? You don't want mankind to be annihilated? This time it won't be just a few unlucky chaps killed, like Uncle
Arthur in the First War, and Dad in the Second… It will be all mankind.'

‘Listen, young 'un,' I said. ‘I don't trust nobody who talks about mankind – not parsons, not politicians, nor anyone else. There ain't no such thing as “mankind”, not practically speaking there ain't.'

‘Practically speaking, Grandfather,' says young Stan, ‘there
is
. Mankind means all the different nations lumped together – us, the Russians, the Americans, the Germans, the French, and all the rest of them. If the bomb goes off, everyone's finished.'

‘It's not going off,' I says.

‘But it's gone off twice already – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,' he argues, ‘so why not again? The damage will be definitely final when it
does
go off.'

I wouldn't let Stan have the last word. ‘In the crazy, old-fashioned war in which I lost my foot,' I said, a bit sternly, ‘the Fritzes used poison gas. They thought it would help 'em to break through at Wipers. But somehow the line held, and soon our factories were churning out the same stinking stuff for us to use on them. All right, and now what about Hitler's war?'

‘What about it?' Stan asks.

‘Well,' I says, ‘everyone in England was issued an expensive mask in a smart-looking case against poison-gas bombs dropped from the air – me, your dad, your ma, and yourself as a tiny tot. But how many poison-gas bombs were dropped on London, or on Berlin? Not a damned one! Both sides were scared stiff. Poison-gas had got too deadly. No mask in the market could keep the new sorts out. So there's not going to be no atom bombs dropped neither, I tell you, Stanley my lad; not this side of the Hereafter! Everyone's scared stiff again.'

‘Then why do both sides manufacture quantities of atom bombs and pile them up?' he asks.

‘Search me,' I said, ‘unless it's a clever way of keeping up full employment by making believe there's a war on. What with bombs and fall-out shelters, and radar equipment, and unsinkable aircraft-carriers, and satellites, and shooting rockets at the moon, and keeping up big armies – takes two thousand quid nowadays to maintain a soldier in the field, I read the other day
– what with all that play-acting, there's full employment assured for everyone, and businessmen are rubbing their hands.'

‘Your argument has a bad flaw, Grandfather. The Russians don't need to worry about full employment.'

‘No,' said I, ‘perhaps they don't. But their politicians and commissars have to keep up the notion of a wicked Capitalist plot to wipe out the poor workers. And they have to show that they're well ahead in the Arms Race. Forget it, lad, forget it! Mankind, which is a term used by maiden ladies and bun-punchers, ain't going to be annihilated by no atom bomb.'

Stan changed his tactics. ‘Nevertheless, Grandfather,' he says, ‘we British want to show the Russians that we're not engaged in any such Capitalist plot. All men are brothers, and I for one have nothing against my opposite number in Moscow, Ivan Whoever-he-may-be… This protest march is the only logical way I can show him my dislike of organized propaganda.'

‘But Ivan Orfalitch
²
ain't here to watch you march; nor the Russian telly ain't going to show him no picture of it. If Ivan thinks you're a bleeding Capitalist, then he'll go on thinking you're a bleeding Capitalist; and he won't be so far out, neither, in my opinion. No, Stan, you can't fight organized propaganda with amachoor propaganda.'
³

‘Oh, can it, Grandfather!' says Stan. ‘You're a professional pessimist. And
you
didn't hate the Germans even when you were fighting them – in spite of the newspapers. What about that Christmas Truce?'

Well, I'd mentioned it to him one day, I own; but it seems he'd drawn the wrong conclusions and didn't want to be put straight. However, I'm a lucky bloke – always being saved by what other blokes call ‘coincidences', but which I don't; because they always happen when I need 'em most. In the trenches we used to call that ‘being in God's pocket'. So, of course, we hear a knock at the door and a shout, and in steps my old mucking-in chum Dodger Green, formerly 301691, Pte Edward Green of the 1st Batt., North Wessex Regiment – come to town by bus for a Saturday-night booze with me, every bit of twenty miles.

‘You're here in the exact nick, Dodger,' says I, ‘as once before.' He'd nappooed
⁴
a Fritz officer one day when I was
lying with one foot missing outside Delville Wood,
⁵
and the Fritz was kindly putting us wounded out of our misery with an automatic pistol.

‘What's new, Fiddler?' he asks.

‘Tell this lad about the
two
Christmas truces,' I said. ‘He's trying to enlist us for a march to Moscow, or somewhere.'

‘Well,' says Dodger, ‘I don't see no connexion, not yet. And marching to Moscow ain't no worse nor marching to Berlin, same as you and me did – and never got more nor a few hundred yards forward in the three years we were at it. But, all right, I'll give him the facts, since you particularly ask me.'

Stan listened quietly while Dodger told his tale. I'd heard it often enough before, but Dodger's yarns improve with the telling. You see, I missed most of that first Christmas Truce, as I'll explain later. But I came in for the second; and saw a part of it what Dodger didn't. And the moral I wanted to impress on young Stan depended on there being
two
truces, not one: them two were a lot different from one another.

I brings a quart bottle of wallop from the kitchen, along with a couple of glasses – not three, because young Stan don't drink anything so ‘common' as beer – and Dodger held forth. Got a golden tongue, has Dodger – I've seen him hold an audience spellbound at The Three Feathers from opening-time to stop-tap, and his glass filled every ten minutes, free.

‘Well,' he says, ‘the first truce was in 1914, about four months after the Kayser's war began. They say that the old Pope suggested it, and that the Kayser agreed, but that Joffre,
⁶
the French C-in-C wouldn't allow it. However, the Bavarians were sweating on a short spell of peace and goodwill, being Catholics, and sent word around that the Pope was going to get his way. Consequently, though we didn't have the Bavarians in front of us, there at Boy Greneer,
⁷
not a shot was fired on our sector all Christmas Eve. In those days we hadn't been issued with Mills bombs,
⁸
or trench-mortars, or Very pistols, or steel helmets, or sandbags, or any of them later luxuries; and only two machine-guns to a battalion. The trenches were shallow and knee-deep in water, so that most of the time we had to crouch on the fire step. God knows how we kept alive and smiling
… It wasn't no picnic, was it, Fiddler? – and the ground half-frozen, too!

‘Christmas Eve, at seven thirty p.m., the enemy trenches suddenly lit up with a row of coloured Chinese lanterns, and a bonfire started in the village behind. We stood to arms, prepared for whatever happened. Ten minutes later the Fritzes began singing a Christmas carol called “Stilly Nucked”.
⁹
Our boys answered with “Good King Wenceslas”, which they'd learned the first verse of as Waits, collecting coppers from door to door. Unfortunately no one knew more than two verses, because Waits always either get a curse or a copper before they reach the third verse.

‘Then a Fritz with a megaphone shouts, “Merry Christmas, Wessex!”

‘Captain Pomeroy was commanding us. Colonel Baggie had gone sick, second-in-command still on leave, and most of the other officers were young second-lieutenants straight from Sandhurst – we'd taken such a knock, end of October. The Captain was a real gentleman: father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served in the Wessex. He shouts back: “Who are you?” And they say that they're Saxons, same as us, from a town called Hully in West Saxony.
¹⁰

‘“Will your commanding officer meet me in no man's land to arrange a Christmas truce?” the Captain shouts again. “We'll respect a white flag,” he says.

‘That was arranged, so Captain Pomeroy and the Fritz officer, whose name was Lieutenant Coburg, climbed out from their trenches and met half-way. They didn't shake hands, but they saluted, and each gave the other word of honour that his troops wouldn't fire a shot for another twenty-four hours. Lieutenant Coburg explained that his Colonel and all the senior officers were back taking it easy at Regimental HQ. It seems they liked to keep their boots clean, and their hands warm: not like our officers.

‘Captain Pomeroy came back pleased as Punch, and said: “The truce starts at dawn, Wessex; but meanwhile we stay in trenches. And if any man of you dares break the truce tomorrow,” he says, “I'll shoot him myself, because I've given
that German officer my word. All the same, watch out, and don't let go of your bundooks.”
¹¹

‘That suited us; we'd be glad to get up from them damned fire steps and stretch our legs. So that night we serenaded the Fritzes with all manner of songs, such as “I want to go Home!”
¹²
and “The Top of the Dixie Lid”,
¹³
and the one about “Old Von Kluck, He Had a Lot of Men”;
¹⁴
and they serenaded us with “
Deutschland Über Alles
”,
¹⁵
and songs to the concertina.

‘We scraped the mud off our puttees and shined our brasses, to look a bit more regimental next morning. Captain Pomeroy, meanwhile, goes out again with a flashlight and arranges a Christmas football match – kick-off at ten thirty – to be followed at two o'clock by a burial service for all the corpses what hadn't been taken in because of lying too close to the other side's trenches.

‘“Over the top with the best of luck!” shouts the Captain at eight a.m., the same as if he was leading an attack. And over we went, a bit shy of course, and stood there waiting for the Fritzes. They advanced to meet us, shouting, and five minutes later, there we were…

‘Christmas was a peculiar sort of day, if ever I spent one. Hobnobbing with the Hun, so to speak: swapping fags and rum and buttons and badges for brandy, cigars and souvenirs. Lieutenant Coburg and several of the Fritzes talked English, but none of our blokes could sling a word of their bat.

‘No man's land had seemed ten miles across when we were crawling out on a night patrol; but now we found it no wider than the width of two football pitches. We provided the football, and set up stretchers as goalposts; and the Reverend Jolly, our Padre,
¹⁶
acted as ref. They beat us three–two, but the Padre had showed a bit too much Christian charity – their outside-left shot the deciding goal, but he was miles offside and admitted it soon as the whistle went. And we spectators were spread nearly two deep along the touch-lines with loaded rifles slung on our shoulders.

‘We had Christmas dinner in our own trenches, and a German bugler obliged with the mess call – same tune as ours. Captain Pomeroy was invited across, but didn't think it proper
to accept. Then one of our sentries, a farmer's son, sees a hare loping down the line between us. He gives a view halloo, and everyone rushes to the parapet and clambers out and runs forward to cut it off. So do the Fritzes. There ain't no such thing as harriers in Germany; they always use shot-guns on hares. But they weren't allowed to shoot this one, not with the truce; so they turned harriers same as us.

‘Young Totty Fahy and a Saxon corporal both made a grab for the hare as it doubled back in their direction. Totty catches it by the forelegs and the Corporal catches it by the hindlegs, and they fall on top of it simultaneous.

‘Captain Pomeroy looked a bit worried for fear of a shindy about who caught that hare; but you'd have laughed your head off to see young Totty and the Fritz both politely trying to force the carcase on each other! So the Lieutenant and the Captain gets together, and the Captain says: “Let them toss a coin for it.” But the Lieutenant says: “I regret that our men will not perhaps understand. With us, we draw straws.” So they picked some withered stems of grass, and Totty drew the long one. He was in our section, and we cooked the hare with spuds that night in a big iron pot borrowed from Duck Farm; but Totty gave the Fritz a couple of bully-beef tins, and the skin. Best stoo I ever ate!

‘We called 'em “Fritzes” at that time. Afterwards they were “Jerries”, on account of their tin hats. Them helmets with spikes called
Pickelhaubes
was still the issue in 1914, but only for parade use. In the trenches caps were worn; like ours, but grey, and no stiffening in the top. Our blokes wanted
pickelhaubes
badly to take their fiancêes when they went home on leave; but Lieutenant Coburg says, sorry, all
pickelhaubes
was in store behind the lines. They had to be content with belt-buckles.