Grace Hardie (19 page)

‘But if they hit!' Kenneth shivered at the picture conjured up by his imagination. ‘Just think of all the men up there falling to earth in flames.'

‘If they came to kill, they deserve to be killed,' David replied briskly. ‘You should keep your sympathy for the English men and women who are lying dead or injured now.'

‘Well, I feel that as well, naturally. But the Germans are human beings too. The gunners must have in their minds a picture of men burning all the time they're firing.'

‘Their picture is of their own families, innocent targets. In any case, they're not likely ever to
see
their victims.'

‘But they must know … David, do women ever give you white feathers?'

‘No. I've noticed, it's only men who look half ashamed of themselves who get them. If you walk confidently, like someone who knows that he's making his own contribution to the war, you don't get pestered.'

‘And
do
you feel that?' asked Kenneth. ‘That you're contributing?'

‘If the war ever ends, this country will need qualified professional men to manage it. It's my opinion that our generals are incompetents. They appeal for more men without having the least idea what use to make of them – except to replace other men who have been unnecessarily killed. I don't care to see myself as cannon fodder. It would have been foolish to enlist in the middle of my training, and even now that I've finished with examinations, I need practical experience. I consider that I'm more use to the country as a qualified solicitor than as an incompetent second-lieutenant.'

The explosion of another bomb, nearer than the last, made the building around them shudder and checked their conversation for a moment. As they walked briskly westward towards David's lodgings, Kenneth continued to nag at the subject of enlistment.

‘Three white feathers I was given today,' he said. ‘The pleasure these women take … I'm determined not to go. But it seems likely that there will be conscription sooner or later. Ever since we all had to register, people have been talking. I had a letter from a recruiting officer this week, David. “I am only waiting the word to call up every man of eligible age and, as you see, I have you on my list.” There was a lot more about how much worse it would be for me if I waited to be fetched instead of enlisting voluntarily.'

‘He had no legal authority to write such a letter,' said David bluntly. ‘If you don't want to join the army, then my advice to you would be to get married. You're right to
believe that conscription must come. But the government has pledged that no married man will be forced to enlist until the whole pool of unmarried men has been absorbed.'

Kenneth was tempted to reply that he was too young to marry, that he could not afford to keep a wife, and that he had not yet met any girl with whom he would want to spend his life. But instead, he looked aghast at his brother.

‘David! That's not why you're marrying Sheila!'

‘Of course not.' David had known his fiancée for two years and, as the daughter of the senior partner in his law firm, she was an eminently suitable match for an ambitious man. ‘Although,' he added more honestly, ‘since we were already engaged it seemed a good reason for not delaying the wedding. In normal circumstances I suppose we might have waited until I was older. So as from tomorrow I shall have a wife dependent on me, as well as a mother and a family business.'

‘Mother! You can hardly claim –'

‘Can I not?' David spoke with unusual vigour as he turned to face his twin. ‘Father has gone off and left her unprotected. After so long a silence, we must begin to fear that he may be dead. Certainly he's not at hand to manage affairs. He expected Frank to take his place as head of the family. Frank and Philip have the noblest of reasons for leaving home; but the effect is that she's left with all the responsibility of running Greystones without the support of either her husband or her eldest sons. There must be one member of the family ready to give advice and practical help.'

Kenneth, though not convinced by this argument, was impressed by his brother's confidence. His own certainty that conscription must come soon filled him with alarm.

‘They can't make a man fight against his will,' he said, talking more to himself than to his brother. ‘There will
have to be some kind of alternative service. I could become a medical orderly, perhaps, or a stretcher bearer.'

David failed to offer the reassurance for which he hoped. ‘I'd have thought you'd enjoy the adventure of fighting, Kenneth. You don't give the impression of finding your work of much interest.'

‘That's true enough. But – do you remember Pepper, David?'

‘Pepper?'

‘Grace's cat.'

David frowned with the effort to remember. ‘A sort of tabby, was it?'

The appearance of the cat was the least important thing about it. ‘You shot it in the eye with an arrow,' Kenneth reminded him.

‘Oh yes.' David, recalling the incident, shrugged it away as unimportant. ‘That was a long time ago. What's that got to do with the war?'

Kenneth had been about to explain, but sensed that his brother would not understand. They had never experienced the intense sympathy and wish to share that people seemed to take for granted in twins. Perhaps it was because they were not identical. He felt no closer to David than to any of his other brothers – and yet, perversely, he looked to David for an empathy which he would not have expected from anyone else.

‘Nothing,' he said untruthfully. But even as he brushed the subject away he recognized that the time might come when he would have to explain himself more coherently and to an even less sympathetic audience.

Even before his name was called, Kenneth knew that his appearance before the tribunal in the summer of 1916 would be a waste of time. Conscription had come and was being enforced with little sympathy for individual cases. Each man who went before him into the village hall was absent for only a few minutes – a contemptuously short time to decide a matter of life and death. And each, when he reappeared, was pale-faced with anger or despair as he was marched away under military escort. Kenneth's heart sank as his turn approached.

‘Mr Kenneth Hardie.'

He stood up. He was wearing his usual business clothes, and the high, stiff collar choked him as he tried to swallow the lump in his throat. Not since the day he was summoned to his headmaster's study for a beating had he felt like this, for he had never before needed to submit himself to an interview of any kind.

The hostility as he walked the length of the hall was unmistakable. The four members of the tribunal – three in civilian clothes and one in uniform – were seated behind a table on a low platform, looking down on him in a manner which reinforced that old memory of the headmaster's study. Their chairman and spokesman was a retired colonel and a magistrate. It was a trial he was conducting now, with the verdict almost a foregone conclusion.

‘Your name?'

‘Kenneth Hardie.'

‘Age?'

‘Twenty-one.'

‘Married?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Dependants?'

‘I have a mother and a young brother and sister.'

‘Father?'

‘Missing, believed dead.' Kenneth used the military phrase deliberately. Although misleading, it was the truth.

‘In what sense is your mother dependent on you? Do you provide her sole source of income?'

‘Her income derives from a family business. With my father missing and my two elder brothers both serving at the front, it's my responsibility to keep the business going.' This second misleading statement was further from the truth than the first. It was Will Witney on whom The House of Hardie depended.

‘An older man, or a disabled one, could do that.' The military representative was entering the interrogation. ‘So you've got two brothers doing the decent thing, eh? What do they think of someone who stays at home while they're risking their lives?'

Kenneth paused before answering. It was true that Frank – although careful not to spoil his home leaves by quarrelling about it – found it hard to understand why his twin brothers did not join up. But he believed that an unwilling soldier was a bad soldier, and had never attempted to press them into a change of mind.

Philip, by contrast, was disgusted with the war. He wished he had never volunteered, and lived for the day when he could return to civilian life. He regarded his younger brothers as showing greater sense than himself in keeping their distance from the army for as long as possible.

‘They are glad to feel that our mother can rely on my support,' said Kenneth firmly.

The military man, a major, looked disbelieving, whilst the chairman resumed his questioning.

‘Are you a Socialist?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Religion?'

‘Church of England.' Kenneth knew that this answer would do him no good. In the church which he attended whenever he spent a weekend at Greystones, every sermon was a recruiting speech. Only a man who could prove that he had been a Quaker since before the beginning of the war could call on his faith to support his stance.

‘On what grounds, precisely, are you claiming exemption from military service?'

‘On the grounds that I'm incapable of killing anyone.'

‘I don't understand you,' said one of the other members of the tribunal; a tall man, cadaverously thin, who had the look of a retired schoolmaster. Less aggressive than the two who had taken the lead in asking questions, he gave the impression of wanting to understand the answers. ‘You mean that you are a pacifist, holding all life sacred?'

Kenneth wondered whether it would be sensible to accept the suggestion which had been offered, but chose to repeat the truth, ‘I mean that I'm not able to take life. If I attempted it, my hands would not obey me.'

‘Now come, really.' The chairman was back in action again. ‘If a mosquito landed on your skin, you'd squash it before it bit you.'

‘No, sir. I would brush it away, but not kill it.'

‘And suppose you saw this mother who depends on you, or your young sister, about to be ravished by some filthy Hun – and it will happen, mark my words, unless we all close ranks to keep the invader at bay – what would you do then? You can't “brush away” a Hun.'

‘I would do my best to defend them, naturally, by wrestling with him and giving them time to get away.'

‘Where could they run to, if the country was swarming with Jerries?'

‘If the country was swarming with Germans, then killing one of them would have little effect.' He knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that it was a mistake to argue.

‘You're assuming that every other Englishman would behave like you. Other women would have protectors who wouldn't shirk the task, and we'd soon have the Hun on the run. We're fortunate that at the moment the enemy isn't on British soil. But the principle's the same. We're fighting to defend our wives and daughters and mothers and sisters. Other men are fighting for you. Give me one good reason why you shouldn't take your place beside them.'

‘They would find me an unreliable companion. Even if I came face to face with an enemy and recognized that he was dangerous – even if I forced myself to hate him – I still couldn't kill him.'

‘It would be his life or yours.'

‘That might be the easiest situation. What you're asking me to consider is the possibility of it being his life or that of my comrade-in-arms. But it wouldn't make any difference. If I was asked to stick a bayonet into his body' – for a second Kenneth closed his eyes, made faint merely by the thought – ‘I couldn't do it.'

‘You may think that now,' said the thin man. Once again his voice conveyed a hint of sympathy. ‘You've had a soft upbringing, no doubt. But in the heat of battle –'

‘If I were talking of some rational decision, sir, I'd agree that in a confused and dangerous situation I might behave irrationally. But I'm talking about instinct, not will. I'm not saying that I refuse to kill, but that I'm incapable of killing.'

‘Never heard such nonsense in my life,' exclaimed the
chairman. ‘Part of the natural order of things. All living creatures kill. Cats kill mice, foxes kill hens, men kill their enemies. What d'you know about it, anyway?'

‘Twelve years ago,' began Kenneth – but he was not allowed to finish the sentence.

‘Twelve years ago you were only a boy. You're living in a man's world now. If you've nothing more to say …' He looked to his left and his right and received a nod of support from the thin man and another from the third civilian member of the tribunal, who had not opened his mouth. ‘Exemption refused.'

Kenneth set his dismay to one side of his mind while he made the all-important request. ‘In that case I would like to apply for non-combatant duties.'

‘You're in no position to ask favours.' The major had been given his man and spoke contemptuously. ‘If you'd done the decent thing and volunteered you'd have been allowed to express a preference. But now –'

‘I understand that there are forms of alternative service open to conscientious objectors.'

‘You're not recognized as a conscientious objector. Your objection has been over-ruled. From now on you'll go where you're sent and obey the orders you're given. And let me tell you this, young man. You'll be sent to France as soon as you're trained, and if you disobey an order once you're across the Channel, the penalty is death. Just think about that. Right, corporal, take him away.'

For a moment Kenneth was unable to move. What a fool he had been to tell the truth! And how much more foolish he would have sounded if he had come out with the whole truth and said: ‘Sir, twelve years ago I killed my sister's cat because it was in pain. I smashed in its head. Its blood and brains spattered over my boot. I looked at my sister, and it's because of the horror and grief I saw in
her eyes then that I shall never again be able to take life and bring such anguish to a living person.'