Mr. Britling Sees It Through (26 page)

“Every man would turn out and take a shot at them,” said Letty.

“But there's no rifles!”

“There's shotguns.”

“That's exactly what I'm afraid of,” said Mr. Direck. “They'd massacre. …

“You may be the bravest people on earth,” said Mr. Direck, “but if you haven't got arms and the other chaps have—you're just as if you were sheep.”

He became gloomily pensive.

He roused himself to describe his experiences at some length, and the extraordinary disturbance of his mind. He related more particularly his attempts to see the sights of Cologne during the stir of mobilisation. After a time his narrative flow lost force, and there was a general feeling that he ought to be left alone with Cissie. Teddy had a letter that must be posted; Letty took the infant to crawl on the mossy stones under the pear-tree. Mr. Direck leaned against the window sill
and became silent for some moments after the door had closed on Letty.

“As for you, Cissie,” he began at last, “I'm anxious. I'm real anxious. I wish you'd let me throw the mantle of Old Glory over you.”

He looked at her earnestly.

“Old Glory?” asked Cissie.

“Well—the Stars and Stripes. I want you to be able to claim American citizenship—in certain eventualities. It wouldn't be so very difficult. All the world over, Cissie, Americans are respected. … Nobody dares touch an American citizen. We are—an inviolate people.”

He paused. “But how?” asked Cissie.

“It would be perfectly easy—perfectly.”

“How?”

“Just marry an American citizen,” said Mr. Direck, with his face beaming with ingenuous self-approval. “Then you'd be safe, and I'd not have to worry.”

“Because we're in for a stiff war!” cried Cissie, and Direck perceived he had blundered.

“Because we may be invaded!” she said, and Mr. Direck's sense of error deepened.

“I vow——” she began.

“No!” cried Mr. Direck, and held out a hand.

There was a moment of crisis.

“Never will I desert my country—while she is at war,” said Cissie, reducing her first fierce intention, and adding as though she regretted her concession, “Anyhow.”

“Then it's up to me to end the war, Cissie,” said Mr. Direck, trying to get her back to a less spirited attitude.

But Cissie wasn't to be got back so easily. The war was already beckoning to them in the cottage, and drawing them down from the auditorium into the arena.

“This is the rightest war in history,” she said. “If I was an American I should be sorry to be one now and to have to stand out of it. I wish I was a man now so that I could do something for all the decency and civilisation these Germans have outraged. I can't understand how any man can be content to keep out of this, and watch Belgium being destroyed. It is like looking on at a murder. It is like watching a dog killing a kitten. …”

Mr. Direck's expression was that of a man who is suddenly shown strange lights upon the world.

§ 16

Mr. Britling found Mr. Direck's talk indigestible.

He was parting very reluctantly from his dream of a disastrous collapse of German imperialism, of a tremendous, decisive demonstration of the inherent unsoundness of militarist monarchy, to be followed by a world conference of chastened but hopeful nations, and—the Millennium. He tried now to think that Mr. Direck had observed badly and misconceived what he saw. An American, unused to any sort of military occurrences, might easily mistake tens of thousands for millions, and the excitement of a few commercial travellers for the enthusiasm of a united people. But the newspapers now, with a kindred reluctance, were beginning to qualify, bit by bit, their first representation of the German attack through Belgium as a vast and already partly thwarted parade of incompetence. The Germans, he gathered, were being continually beaten in Belgium; but just as continually
they advanced. Each fresh newspaper name he looked up on the map marked an oncoming tide. Alost—Charleroi. Farther east the French were retreating from the Saales Pass. Surely the British, who had now been in France for a fortnight, would presently be manifest, stemming the onrush; somewhere perhaps in Brabant or East Flanders. It gave Mr. Britling an unpleasant night to hear at Claverings that the French were very ill-equipped; had no good modern guns either at Lille or Maubeuge, were short of boots and equipment generally, and rather depressed already at the trend of things. Mr. Britling dismissed this as pessimistic talk, and built his hopes on the still invisible British army, hovering somewhere——

He would sit over the map of Belgium, choosing where he would prefer to have the British hover. …

Namur fell. The place names continued to shift southward and westward. The British army or a part of it came to light abruptly at Mons. It had been fighting for thirty-eight hours and defeating enormously superior forces of the enemy. That was reassuring until a day or so later “the Cambrai-Le Cateau line” made Mr. Britling realise that the victorious British had recoiled five-and-twenty miles. …

And then came the Sunday of
The Times
telegram, which spoke of a “retreating and a broken army.” Mr. Britling did not see this, but Mr. Manning brought over the report of it in a state of profound consternation. Things, he said, seemed to be about as bad as they could be. The English were retreating towards the coast and in much disorder. They were “in the air” and already separated from the French. They had narrowly escaped “a Sedan” under the fortifications of Maubeuge. … Mr. Britling was stunned. He went to his study and stared helplessly at maps. It was as if David had flung his pebble—and missed!

But in the afternoon Mr. Manning telephoned to comfort his friend. A reassuring despatch from General French had been published and all was well—practically—and the British had been splendid. They had been fighting continuously for several days round and about Mons; they had been attacked at odds of six to one, and they had repulsed and inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. They had established an incontestable personal superiority over the Germans. The Germans had been mown down in heaps; the British had charged through their cavalry like charging through paper. So at last and very gloriously for the British, British and German had met in battle. After the hard fighting of the 26th about Landrecies, the British had been comparatively unmolested, reinforcements covering double the losses had joined them and the German advance was definitely checked. … Mr. Britling's mind swung back to elation. He took down the entire despatch from Mr. Manning's dictation, and ran out with it into the garden where Mrs. Britling, with an unwonted expression of anxiety, was presiding over the teas of the usual casual Sunday gathering. … The despatch was read aloud twice over. After that there was hockey and high spirits, and then Mr. Britling went up to his study to answer a letter from Mrs. Harrowdean, the first letter that had come from her since their breach at the outbreak of the war, and which he was now in a better mood to answer than he had been hitherto.

She had written ignoring his silence and absence, or rather treating it as if it were an incident of no particular importance. Apparently she had not called upon the patient and devoted Oliver as she had threatened; at any rate there were no signs of Oliver in her communication. But she reproached Mr. Britling for deserting her, and she clamoured for his presence and for kind and strengthening words. She was, she said, scared by this war.
She was only a little thing, and it was all too dreadful, and there was not a soul in the world to hold her hand, at least no one who understood in the slightest degree how she felt. (But why was not Oliver holding her hand?) She was like a child left alone in the dark. It was perfectly horrible the way that people were being kept in the dark. The stories one heard, “
often from quite trustworthy sources
,” were enough to depress and terrify any one. Battleship after battleship had been sunk by German torpedoes, a thing kept secret from us for no earthly reason, and Prince Louis of Battenberg had been discovered to be a spy and had been sent to the Tower. Haldane too was a spy. Our army in France had been “practically
sold
” by the French. Almost all the French generals were in German pay. The censorship and the press were keeping all this back, but what good was it to keep it back? Such folly not to trust the people! But it was all too dreadful for a poor little soul whose only desire was to live happily. Why didn't he come along to her and make her feel she had protecting arms round her? She couldn't think in the daytime; she couldn't sleep at night. …

Then she broke away into the praises of serenity. Never had she thought so much of his beautiful “Silent Places” as she did now. How she longed to take refuge in some such dreamland from violence and treachery and foolish rumours! She was weary of every reality. She wanted to fly away into some secret hiding-place and cultivate her simple garden there—as Voltaire had done. … Sometimes at night she was afraid to undress. She imagined the sound of guns, she imagined landings and frightful scouts “in masks” rushing inland on motor bicycles. …

It was an ill-timed letter. The nonsense about Prince Louis of Battenberg and Lord Haldane and the torpedoed battleships annoyed Mr. Britling extravagantly. He had just sufficient disposition to believe such tales to find their importunity
exasperating. The idea of going over to Pyecrafts to spend his days in comforting a timid little dear obsessed by such fears attracted him not at all. He had already heard enough adverse rumours at Claverings to make him thoroughly uncomfortable. He had been doubting whether after all his “Examination of War” was really much less of a futility than “And Now War Ends”; his mind was full of a sense of incomplete statement and unsubstantial arguments. He was indeed in a state of extreme intellectual worry. He was moreover extraordinarily out of love with Mrs. Harrowdean. Never had any affection in the whole history of Mr. Britling's heart collapsed so swiftly and completely. He was left incredulous of ever having cared for her at all. Probably he hadn't. Probably the whole business had been deliberate illusion from first to last. This “dear little thing” business, he felt, was all very well as a game of petting, but times were serious now, and a woman of her intelligence should do something better than wallow in fears and elaborate a winsome feebleness. A very unnecessary and tiresome feebleness. He came almost to the pitch of writing that to her.

The despatch from General French put him into a kindlier frame of mind. He wrote instead briefly but affectionately. As a gentleman should. “How could you doubt our fleet or our army?” was the gist of his letter. He ignored completely every suggestion of a visit to Pyecrafts that her letter had conveyed. He pretended that it had contained nothing of the sort. … And that she passed out of his mind again under the stress of more commanding interests. …

Mr. Britling's mood of relief did not last through the week. The defeated Germans continued to advance. Through a week of deepening disillusionment the main tide of battle rolled back steadily towards Paris. Lille was lost without a struggle.
It was lost with mysterious ease. … The next name to startle Mr. Britling as he sat with newspaper and atlas following these great events was Compiègne. “Here!” Manifestly the British were still in retreat. Then the Germans were in possession of Laon and Rheims and still pressing south. Maubeuge, surrounded and cut off for some days, had apparently fallen. …

It was on Sunday, September the 6th, that the final capitulation of Mr. Britling's facile optimism occurred.

He stood in the sunshine reading
The Observer
which the gardener's boy had just brought from the May Tree. He had spread it open on a garden table under the blue cedar, and father and son were both reading it, each as much as the other would let him. There was fresh news from France, a story of further German advances, fighting at Senlis—“But that is quite close to Paris!”—and the appearance of German forces at Nogent-sur-Seine. “Sur Seine!” cried Mr. Britling. “But where can that be? South of the Marne? Or below Paris perhaps?”

It was not marked upon
The Observer's
map, and Hugh ran into the house for the atlas.

When he returned Mr. Manning was with his father, and they both looked grave.

Hugh opened the map of northern France. “Here it is,” he said.

Mr. Britling considered the position.

“Manning says they are at Rouen,” he told Hugh. “Our base is to be moved round to La Rochelle. …”

He paused before the last distasteful conclusion.

“Practically,” he admitted, taking his dose, “they have got Paris. It is almost surrounded now.”

He sat down to the map. Mr. Manning and Hugh stood regarding him. He made a last effort to imagine some
tremendous strategic reversal, some stone from an unexpected sling that should fell this Goliath in the midst of his triumph.

“Russia,” he said, without any genuine hope. …

§ 17

And then it was that Mr. Britling accepted the truth.

“One talks,” he said, “and then weeks and months later one learns the meaning of the things one has been saying. I was saying a month ago that this is the biggest thing that has happened in history. I said that this was the supreme call upon the will and resources of England. I said there was not a life in all our empire that would not be vitally changed by this war. I said all these things; they came through my mouth; I suppose there was a sort of thought behind them. … Only at this moment do I understand what it is that I said. Now—let me say it over as if I had never said it before; this
is
the biggest thing in history, that we
are
all called upon to do our utmost to resist this tremendous attack upon the peace and freedom of the world. Well, doing our utmost does not mean standing about in pleasant gardens waiting for the newspaper. … It means the abandonment of ease and security. …