Death of a Hero (7 page)

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.

PART I

vivace

1

A
VERY different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. In some ways so fabulous, so remote from us; in others so near, terrifyingly near and like us. An England morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The wealth of that England, the maritime power of that England, its worse than R. L. S. optimism, its righteous cant! Victoria, broad-bottomed on her people's will; the possessing class, heavy-bottomed on the people's neck. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still Moody and Sankeyish, still under the Golden Rule of “Ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern.” The middle classes, especially the traders, making money hand over fist, and still “praying that our unexampled prosperity may last.” The aristocracy still pretty flip, keeping its tail up. Still lots of respect for Rank and Property – Dizzy not long dead, and his novels not yet grotesques, not yet wholly a fossil parody. The intellectuals aesthetic and Oscarish, or aesthetic and Burne-Morrisy, or Utilitarian and Huxley-Darwinish.

Come where the booze is cheaper.

Where I could live on a pound a week in lux-u-ry.

The world is so full of a number of things, I am
sure
we should ALL be as Happy as KING.

Consols over par.

Lord Claud Hamilton and White at the Admiralty, building, building, building.

Building a majestic ruin.

George Moore an elegant scandal in a hansom; Hardy a rural atheistic scandal, not yet discovered to be an intolerable bore; Oscar prancing negligently, O so clever, O so lad-di-dah.

Rummy old England. Pox on you, you old bitch, you've made worms' meat of us. (We've made worms' meat of ourselves.) But still, let me look back upon thee. Timon knew thee.

The Winterbournes were not gentry, but nourished vague and unfounded traditions of past genteel splendours. They were, however, pretty comfortable middle-class. Worcestershire, migrated to Sheffield. Methodist on female side; C. of E. on the Winterbourne side. Young George Augustus – father of our George – was pretty comfortable. His mother was a dominating old bitch who destroyed his initiative and courage, but in the eighties hardly any one had the sense to tell dominating bitch-mothers to go to hell. George Augustus didn't. At fifteen he wrote a Nonconformist tract (which was published) expressing nothing but his dear Mamma's views. He became top of his school, in conformity with dear Mamma's views also. He did not go to Oxford, as he wanted, because dear Mamma thought it unpractical. And he did pass his examinations as a lawyer, because dear Mamma thought it so eminently right that he should have a profession and that there should be a lawyer in the family. George Augustus was a third son. The eldest son became a Nonconformist parson, because dear Mamma had prayed for guidance on her marriage night and during her first pregnancy (only, she never mentioned such horrid occurrences, even to her husband, but – she had “prayed for guidance”), and it had been revealed to her that her firstborn must take up The Ministry. And take it up, poor devil, he did. The second son had a little bit of spunk, and his dear Mamma made him a waster. Remained George Augustus, dear Mamma's darling chick, who prayed at her knee, and was flogged regularly once a month by dear Papa, because the Scripture says: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Dear Papa had never done anything in particular, lived on his “means”, was generally rather in debt, and spent the last fifteen years of his life praying to the C. of E. God in the garden, while dear Mamma prayed to John Wesley's God in her bedroom. Dear Mamma admired dear pious Mr. Bright and grand Mr. Gladstone; but dear Papa recollected and even read all the Works of the Right Hnble. the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G.