A Solitary War (40 page)

Be still, and know that I am God. Be still, my son. I am not afraid, Mother; but I am just a little sad.

Keys rattled. The door opened. The sergeant’s face appeared. “I’ll be bringing you some tea shortly,” he said. “And my wife thought you might care to see a newspaper.”

His friendliness meant much when the door was locked again. Phillip lay back on the bed and opened the paper.

On one page was an account of Fifth Column Activities in Belgium. ‘Spies’ and ‘traitors’ had been seen flashing lights in hotels at night during the German advance to attract German bombers.

Because next door to the Army Pay Corps? Or the Socks
Washing
Outfit had opened an emergency depot there? Or some
Railway
Transport Officer had been eating a hasty meal of eggs and chips with O.K. Sauce?

Of course the reporters, fed mentally on their own fiction called news-stories, didn’t really believe that a spy would signal to a bomber at five thousand feet to release bombs which to strike near the signaller would have to be released anything up to a mile before being directly overhead the target.

The Fleet Street skite-hawks didn’t really believe that the Jerry  pilots could only operate with the help of pocket torches flashed from temporary bedrooms in hotels. They probably knew that the refugee torch-flashers were only seeking another kind of jerry under the bed.

But perhaps they did believe the stories they telegraphed, of spies descending under parachutes dressed as priests, ice-cream vendors, dirty-postcard-sellers, and whatnot floating to earth in British, French, and Belgian uniforms?

How many sweat-soaked Allied pilots, baling out, had been lynched by fear-mad mobs and the ‘news’ reported or misreported as Fifth Column Activity?

These skite-hawks were the real Fifth Column, helping the enemy with rumours in print.

But what was shocking was an account of Belgian farmers who had been shot by a Guards Brigade. According to the account several farmers had betrayed British gun-positions to the Germans—gun-positions which had been hastily taken up behind the Dial
line. There, farmers had started to cut their hay in the fields before the new gun-positions. This had been seen from the air and the farmers had ‘paid a summary penalty for their treachery’. O Jesu, those inexperienced rookies had shot those poor little helpless Belgian farmers.

The scene could be imagined. Terse questions asked by some townee soldier with no perspective beyond Chelsea, Caterham, Mayfair, and the Stock Exchange, conditioned by reading
pre-war
spy-fiction: townees in uniform who hadn’t the slightest idea of the misery of any farmer in a war seeing his vital hay about to be trampled by troops, any troops. In God’s name, what decent farmer wouldn’t start to cut his hay at once, before it was
hopelessly
mucked up—hay vital for his stock during the dreaded months of February and March, when the beasts, all imported foods stopped, began to ‘blaw’ because their bellies were not filled.

The hare of his mind began to run in circles. Can’t you see it is 1914 all over again? Listen to me Chettwood, Ruche, and you, star-writer of that picture paper who in 1938 wrote that you hoped that a young English lady, friend of Germany, would be
manhandled
by a crowd of men in Hyde Park one afternoon in 1938. Listen, blast your stupidity, you who were little boys or babies when my generation was dunging with rotten death these same farmers’ fields. In those days the current-fiction was the Flemish spy ploughing his field with white horses, ploughing
an
arrow
pointing to the position of gun-pits two or three fields away! Taube pilots, flying overhead, followed the arrow-pointing furrows and so observed the gun-pits: and the next minute Jack Johnsons and Coalboxes had blown the guns to hell. All lies, concocted into a short story by ‘Sapper’. But this is not even stuff for ‘a poet’s tearful fooling’, is it, Wilfred Owen? Where now, my wraith, is your heroic humanitarian stand for truth and beauty? Several little semi-inarticulate Flemish farmers have been shot peremptorily because they cut their hay before it was spoiled by scrounging soldiers. So logical in a world wherein the murder-mystery or ‘thriller’ is the favourite literature of parsons and politicians! Cobbett dropped into the waste-paper basket.

Telling himself to keep calm, Phillip sat on the trestle wishing he were in France, under the rain of Stuka bombs, upon a field of wheat sprung from the compost of his generation, there to join them forever away from this bloody world. ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

A key was thrust into the door.

A face he knew, above a war-reserve police uniform, smiled at him. Where had he seen that face before? Ah, the man who had taken his sugar-beet last winter from the farm to Crabbe Station! The owner-driver of a small lorry. He wore the ribbon of the Military Medal.

“Is there anything you want, sir?”

“Not at the moment, thanks.”

“Please to call me when you do, sir. I’m only in the next room. The sergeant will be back soon. He told me to get you anything you asked for, sir.”

“That is most kind of you. I am quite happy at the moment, thank you.”

“I’m sure I’m very sorry to see you here, sir.”

“The police must do their duty. I’m sorry they’ve been bothered so much. It must be tiresome for them.”

“Well, you will call me, won’t you?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Closing the door quietly, and locking it as delicately as the big key and cumbrous lock permitted, the honest face withdrew. The prisoner felt lighter in spirit, and got back on the trestle-bed. Thinking of General Gough, his old Army commander, he tried to pretend to himself that if he spent the rest of the war in prison, it would enable him to write all the books which had been waiting so long behind his eyes.

*

As he lay there he became aware of voices and footfalls in the room beyond the passage. Through the small square of the
peephole
he saw movement passing to and fro. Part-seen men were carrying something unseen by himself. For about half an hour the footfalls passed and returned, then they ceased. In the
succeeding
quiet he heard voices in conversation down the other end of the the passage, with clipping noises. The noises continued for some time, and he realised that they were counting something. What was it?

He hopped off the trestle-bed, and listened by the peep-square, where a cool wind drew past his nose. He heard after a pause the sound of a box being wrenched open—the splitting of wood. An interval for lighting cigarettes, then the leisurely counting and clipping noises returned. He went back to the trestle, wondering what was happening.

Soon afterwards the key in the lock, the door opening. Bearing tray with teapot, cup, bread and butter neatly cut, jam and cake, the police sergeant entered. He explained that his wife had
insisted
on giving him the best they had, although the scale of rations did not strictly permit such things. He was duly grateful, and asked the sergeant to thank her on his behalf. He praised the cell, saying it was cool and quiet, and most restful. The sergeant responded by saying that he hoped he would ask for anything he required. Phillip asked if he might have pen and paper, they were in his bag. He wanted to write an epigraph to a book he had written about farming, he told him. It was against the regulations, the sergeant replied, but perhaps there was no harm in it. He would let him know later.

In the meantime Phillip made the journey to a privy in the little high-walled yard at the end of the corridor. He was accompanied by the policeman on duty who did not let him out of his sight. The door of the privy remained open, a reminder to the prisoner that his body no longer belonged to himself but to the Government. This was slightly disheartening although it was logical; fortunately it did not inhibit intestinal motion. A soldier’s body did not belong to him in wartime. At the best, it belonged to the corporate spirit, to his friends and fellows; at the worst, if he were offset from the community feeling he was a lonely, unhappy being doomed to bear the entire war in the prison of his mind.

To correct any feeling of self-pity in the matter, Phillip thought of the battle now ending in France, and how the defeated soldiers must be feeling, and told himself that his own immediate plight was negligible.

Also, it was logical. It was right that all suspected persons should be examined in this national crisis. Did he not believe in discipline in its only true form,
esprit
de
corps
?

Later in the afternoon the door opened again, and the sergeant came in with a constable.

“Will you step this way, please.”

An ordered body and caged mind followed them into the room where his belongings had been checked in the early afternoon. The pink-faced detective-sergeant who had arrested him now sat in a chair before the desk. Half-a-dozen other men were ranged around him. He was told to sit down and to reply to questions.

“You admit that you are a member of the Imperial Socialist Party?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you join?”

“I wanted to see the money-power controlled by the
Government
, for the good of the British people in these islands. That is, no capital to be taken out of the country to build factories in
Bombay
, or Shanghai, using cheap sweated labour to undercut our home industries.”

“Have you ever given money or other help to the funds of the Imperial Socialist Party?”

“Yes. About ten pounds. Also I’ve written articles for their weekly paper, and spoken at meetings.”

“You’ve been to Germany, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever received money from anyone in Germany?”

“Yes.”

The half-dozen men seemed to be more casual than before. He felt as he did when lecturing, or speaking before an unreceptive or unsure public; his voice felt to be thin, no assurance behind his words.

“What was the money for?”

“Royalties from translations of my books.”

“Anything else?”

“I once received money from the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin.”

“Will you say how and when?”

“Certainly. Someone from the Ministry once gave me a
hundred
and fifty marks to buy a ticket to fly from Berlin to Croydon. I’d spent all my reichmarks. I’d been a guest of the German government, along with several other Englishmen, most of them journalists. Their fares home had been paid, too, I believe. Later I returned the hundred and fifty reichmarks to the official who had lent it to me. It was never acknowledged.”

“Why did you return it?”

“I didn’t think it was quite the thing to borrow money from a host; but when I had to, I asked my Berlin publishers to return it out of book royalties when they became due. They did so.”

“You have over two thousand small-arms rifle ammunition, a thousand 12-bore cartridges, five hundred 20-bore cartridges, as well as a small arms rifle and a .410 shot-gun, on your farm premises. What do you keep them for?”

“The rifle and ammunition are for rabbits. I have a police permit to possess them. The other guns and cartridges are for shooting game in season. I have a game licence.”

The pink-faced president held out a brass cartridge, green with verdigris, set with a big lead bullet. “What is it for?”

“I think it must be a relic of my wife’s father’s tiger-shooting expedition in India sometime during the ’eighties of the last century. Some of his old possessions are stored in the workshop.”

“And what is this?”

He pushed over a paper cartridge half-filled with a waxen substance.

“I don’t know. It may be bee’s-wax, or resin. It was his, too.”

“And you have several pounds of black gunpowder and fuses. Have you a licence to buy and keep gunpowder?”

“No.”

“What is it for?”

“I used it to blast chalk from the quarry, under the Land Fertility Scheme.”

“And you haven’t a licence to keep gunpowder?”

“No.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“In an ironmongers of Great Wordingham.”

The pink-faced man wrote for a minute or so.

“Well, I cannot say what will happen to you, but you need not worry yourself unduly. I think I understand your idealism. I used to have ideals once, but I found they didn’t get me anywhere. I’ve told your wife, by the way, that she may come and see you. Any letters you receive or send must be submitted first to the
sergeant
in charge. That is one of the regulations.”

He was taken back and locked in the cell. He lay down on the planks, to relax. Ever since the break-away from his father’s home, he reflected, he had always made his own patterns of life or living, though most of them had been irregular or haphazard; but now the pattern was being made for him. He could feel his mind being deprived of its function. Its horizon was gone; a peculiar feeling of helplessness, impotence, bewilderment, and oh damn it—a sense of claustrophobia. As the light declined he felt the walls shutting in on him, he saw himself pushing with his arms until they broke. He could not imagine anything beyond the actual straining against small confined space. To counter this weak feeling he began to breathe deeply, but that was no good, so he began walking up and down, feeling that he was beginning to behave in the stereotyped manner of prisoners.

What rot it all was! Yet it was also alarming, for it showed that
Britain was likely to be invaded. Before, he hadn’t taken the war seriously; now, confined in the white-washed cell, the thought of invasion began to grow upon him. If troop-carriers and tens of thousands of parachute troops could land in Holland and France they could also land in England. But Hitler would not give the order just yet. He was sure he wouldn’t give it. Hitler’s attitude would be, Let’s stop this war, let’s create a United States of Europe with work for all, and you Englanders make your Empire into your export commercial-travellers’ and architect-planners’ dream. It was logical, and sensible. Hitler admired England, and had always hoped against hope that it would not come to war. If the white races clashed to their limits of strength, Asia would spread over their exhausted territories. If Britain refused Hitler’s logical request for the war to end, it would be the final one: and if it happened that England were devastated and subdued, the war would go on, perhaps from Africa, with the Navy operating from Canada, blockading all Europe and the British Isles.