My Father and Myself (7 page)

He was fond and proud of me and thought me a being far superior to himself, a genius. We never quarrelled over anything that I can recall, and in all our seventeen or eighteen years together I remember only two occasions when he displayed anger with me, both times for moaning. The first time, which I can relate here, was when I was twelve years old and had a pain in my bowels which the doctors could not for some time diagnose. It was a bad pain, indeed it almost killed me, for it ended in an operation for peritonitis, and I lay moaning in bed day after day for I don't remember how long while doctors came and stuck their fingers up my bottom but did not reach my pain. It was the sound of my moaning that my brother could not stand, and one day he shouted at me for God's sake to shut up, I was upsetting the whole house, said he, and even if I did have a pain there was no reason to kick up such an infernal shindy about it. I was so startled by this heartless attack upon me, for he had never spoken to me in such a way before, that I stopped moaning at once and found he was perfectly right, I did not need to be moaning at all; I had got into the habit of it, I suppose, and it had turned into a kind of self-pitying croon. He apologized afterwards; but later still when he himself lay in the agony of a mastoid he did not utter a sound. He belonged in this respect upon my father's proud “stiff upper lip” side: “I hope I can bear a little pain with the best of ‘em.” Of this I shall have more to say later, but one other revolting instance of it may be recorded here. From sculling on the river at Richmond where we lived, my brother developed blisters on the palm of one hand, and my father, in whom the original guardsman persisted, told him that the best way to harden blisters was to rub one's own urine into them. This barrack-room remedy resulted in a badly poisoned hand, the whole of the palm oozed with pus. Dr. Wadd was summoned and said, “You can bear a spot of pain, Pete old lad, can't you, or do you want an anaesthetic?” I myself would firmly have demanded an anaesthetic, total if possible, local (if invented then) at least, whatever the expression on my father's face might have been, but my brother said, “Go ahead.” Wadd then borrowed a pair of scissors from my mother and slit the whole puffed-up palm across. My brother did utter a gasp, turned green and almost fainted; but it was what my father would have called a “jolly good show.”

My brother was deservedly popular wherever he went, on account of his good nature and his entertainment value, the versatility of his histrionic talent and his readiness to display it. Besides his skill with the bones and his true tenor voice, which was later to keep audiences of soldiers spell-bound with such songs as “The Trumpeter,” “Soldier Boy,” “The Mountains of Mourne,” and “Where'er You Walk,” he was a good tap-dancer and a natural comedian. He would, I think, have been wasted in my father's business. A few physical details return to my memory: his straight dark brows that almost met, his narrow palate and weak over-crowded teeth, the brownish stain round his loins from the leather of his truss when he took it off to go to the baths at school, the yellow mark just above the cleft of his thin white buttocks where the wash-leather pad rested, and his abnormally long dark cock, longer than my own or any other I had seen. I remember feeling rather ashamed of it when we went to the baths together, and wondered how he could expose it as he did with such seeming indifference and what the other boys must think. Unspectacular though my own was I always shielded it modestly from view with my towel, like a Japanese. I recollect that I had a feeling of distaste for his thin sallow body, and believe that he had no such unfriendly thoughts about mine, which was always erupting in cysts and boils.

Having been sent to school two years in advance of me, owing to my peritonitis, thereby paving a pleasanter way for me by being there to welcome and protect me when I came, for no boys held me down on my back and spat or poured ink into my mouth as they had done with him, he left a year earlier than I and went to Germany to learn the language in preparation for my father's business. His return thence, just before the outbreak of war, impressed upon my memory his first appearance as a man. He was smoking one of my father's Gentleman cigars and wearing an Edward VII grey felt hat, a heavy reddish-purple overcoat with a belt, patent leather shoes and a monocle. He carried a slender cane like Charlie Chaplin and was beginning to spot round the mouth. I thought he looked an awful ass and rather a cad; not of course foreseeing that in a few years' time I myself might be sighted in London dressed in a voluminous black carabiniero's cloak, cast over one shoulder in the Byronic manner, and trailed by children calling out rude remarks.

After that I remember nothing more about my brother until our last melodramatic meeting. This was in a dugout in France, in a ditch called the Boom Ravine.

BECAUSE OF HIS rupture my brother entered the war a good deal later than I. He was posted to a battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers. This unit, however, seemed stuck in England, and my brother, chafing to “do his bit,” got himself transferred to my battalion, the 8th East Surreys, in which I had been serving in France since the summer of 1915. He did not join me there until the Christmas of 1916, after my return from England where I had spent a few months recuperating from wounds. By this time, although he was my senior in age, I was his senior in rank, a captain and company commander, while he was still a second lieutenant in charge of a platoon. He therefore had to salute me, which he did gladly and conscientiously. Let me not appear to boast however; my promotion was not due to any military proficiency I possessed or any distinctions gained, but simply to the fact that most of the other officers in my battalion had been killed on July 1, 1916, the action in which I received my wounds.

These wounds of mine are not without interest, at any rate to me. They showed me something which I was to notice often again in my character, that I have a fairly well-developed instinct for self-preservation, both physical and moral. If the old campaigner of Tel-el-Kebir had known as much about my wounds as I did, what would he have thought of me? The Battle of the Somme, Sir Douglas Haig's masterly operation, has often been described. This vast, full-scale attack was prepared for by an incessant bombardment of the German lines, prolonged over many days and so heavy that, we were told, all resistance would be crushed, the enemy wire destroyed, their trenches flattened, and such Germans as survived reduced to a state of gibbering imbecility. It would be, for us, a walk-over. Very different was our reception. The air, when we at last went over the top in broad daylight, positively hummed, buzzed, and whined with what sounded like hordes of wasps and hornets but were, of course, bullets. Far from being crushed, the Germans were in full possession of senses better than our own; their smartest snipers and machine-gunners were coolly waiting for us. G.H.Q., as was afterwards realized, had handed the battle to them by snobbishly distinguishing us officers from the men, giving us revolvers instead of rifles and marking our rank plainly upon our cuffs. The “gibbering imbeciles” confronting us were thus enabled to pick off the officers first, which they had been carefully instructed to do, leaving our army almost without leadership.

Many of the officers in my battalion were struck down the moment they emerged into view. My company commander was shot through the heart before he had advanced a step. Neville, the battalion buffoon, who had a football for his men to dribble over to the “flattened and deserted” German lines and was then going to finish off any “gibbering imbecile” he might meet with the shock of his famous grin (he had loose dentures and could make a skull-like grimace when he smiled), was also instantly killed, and so was fat Bobby Soames, my best friend. I had spent the previous evening with him and he had said to me quietly, without emotion, “I'm going to be killed tomorrow. I don't know how I know it but I do.” How far I myself got I don't remember; not more than a couple of hundred yards is my guess. I flew over the top like a greyhound and dashed forward through the wasps, bent double. Squeamish always about blood, mutilations and death, averting my gaze, so far as I could, from the litter of corpses left lying about whenever we marched up to the line through other regiments' battle-fields, never hurrying when word was passed down to me, as duty officer in the trenches, that someone had been killed or wounded, in the hope that, if I dawdled, the worst of the mess might be cleared up before I arrived, my special private terror was a bullet in the balls, which accounts psychologically, for it was, of course, unavailing physically, for the crouched up attitude in which I hurled myself at the enemy. The realization that I was making an ass of myself soon dawned; looking back I saw that my platoon was still scrambling out of the trench, and had to wait until they caught up with me. My young Norfolk servant, Willimot, who then walked at my side, fell to the ground. “I'm paralyzed, sir,” he whimpered, his face paperwhite, his large blue ox-like eyes terrified. A bullet, perhaps aimed at me with my revolver and badges, had severed his spine. My platoon-sergeant, Griffin, lifted him into a shell-hole and left him there. Then I felt a smack on my left upper arm. Looking down I saw a hole in the sleeve and felt the trickling of blood. Then my cap flew off. I picked it up and put it on again; there was a hole in the crown. Then there was an explosion in my side, which sent me reeling to the ground. I lay there motionless. Griffin and one of the men picked me up and put me in a deep shell-hole. Griffin then tried to unbutton my tunic to examine and perhaps dress my wound. I was not unconscious, only dazed, and I had by now a notion of what had happened. It was another instance of the credulity of the time—my company commander's contribution—that we officers had been told to carry a bottle of whisky or rum in our haversacks for the celebration of our victory after the “walk-over.” Some missile had struck my bottle of whisky and it had exploded. Of this I became dimly aware when Sergeant Griffin moved me; I felt the crunch of broken glass in the sack beneath my arm. What precisely had occurred I did not know; besides the smarting that had now started in my arm I had a sensation of smarting in my side, so I was damaged there also, though by what or how much I could not tell. What I do remember perfectly well is resisting Griffin's attempts to examine me. I lay with my eyes closed and my wounded arm clamped firmly to my wounded side so that he could not explore beneath my tunic. I did not want to know, and I did not want
him
to know, what had happened to me. I did not feel ill, only frightened and dazed. I could easily have got up, and if I could have got up I should have got up. But I was down and down I stayed. Though my thoughts did not formulate themselves so clearly or so crudely at the time, I had a “Blighty” one, that sort of wound that all the soldiers sighed and sang for (“Take me back to dear old Blighty”), and my platoon, in which I had taken much pride, could now look after itself.

My injuries were indeed of shamefully trivial nature; a bullet had gone through the flesh of my upper arm, missing the bone, and a piece of shrapnel or bottle glass (I can't remember which) had lodged beneath the skin of my side above the ribs. The explosion must therefore have been fairly violent to have driven this object through my tunic and shirt. I was welcomed home like a conquering hero and was disinclined to exhibit my wounds when requested by sympathetic admirers to do so, though not disinclined to give the impression that the exploding bottle had entirely deprived me of my senses. Yet so strange are we in our inconsistencies that I was not happy in Blighty and, in a few months' time, got myself sent back to France. I was at once promoted to the rank of captain. Soon afterwards my brother joined me.

The reunion of two brothers in such circumstances might be thought a memorable occasion, yet even thirty years ago, only some sixteen years after the event, when I first attempted to sketch this history, I found I could remember of it nothing at all, nothing about my brother except—and that indistinctly—our last meeting. Doubtless my conscious mind had been dealing with it in a convenient way, for why otherwise should I remember so much more clearly the events which preceded and immediately followed it? Yet a certain measure of vagueness may be permitted, for the situation of our being together in the same regiment lasted only two months, we were in different companies, the battalion was on trench duty for part if not all of the time, my own “F” Company was actually up in the front line, my brother's company, “C,” in which he commanded No. 11 Platoon, was in reserve. Besides being thus separated, we were doubtless much occupied with our personal commands and problems; yet I must have welcomed him when he came, introduced him to my friends and met him on other occasions—but of all that I recall nothing whatever.

In front of my trenches, some four or five hundred yards away and slightly to the left, there was a bulge or salient in the German lines known as Point 85. It was a tiresome object, for it commanded a dangerous enfilading position down the trenches of the battalion next door. In February, 1917, our brigadier decided to have it and instructed my colonel to detail a platoon to capture it. It fell upon “C” Company in reserve to provide this platoon and my brother got the job. Did he actually volunteer for it? It is one of the many things I am not clear about, but I fancy that he did. At any rate it is the sort of thing he would have done—and the very thing he wanted. Having at last reached France, the goal of his ambitions, two years after the start of the war, he must have been longing to prove himself, and here was a situation which would have appealed to the actor in him, drama indeed, the lime-lit moment, himself in the leading role, all eyes on him. At all events, the result was that I had to make arrangements for him and his platoon to take off from my front line. Was there not a conference? The Colonel would surely have summoned us both to Battalion Headquarters for discussion and orders. I remember nothing about it. My brother's assignment was what we called a “stunt,” a common affair, in this case important if only because the Brigadier had set his heart on it. Was it for this reason that the Colonel detailed his second-in-command, Major Wightman, to supervise it and keep him and the Brigadier in touch with the course of events?