The Stars Look Down (47 page)

Barras leaned across the table to Captain Douglas. They had a lengthy conference, then Douglas nodded his head with an approving look, squared his shoulders and rapped sharply with his knuckles on the table.

The last whispers of conversation in the gallery and body of the hall died out and a tense silence succeeded. Douglas let his gun-metal eyes travel slowly round, embracing the audience, the press reporters and Arthur in one firm and comprehensive glance, then he faced his colleagues at the table. He spoke loudly so that everyone could hear.

“This is a particularly painful case,” he said, “in so far as it concerns the son of our esteemed chairman who has already done such yeoman service on this Tribunal here. The facts are clear. This young man, Arthur Barras, holds a redundant position at the Neptune pit and is eligible for combatant service. I need not repeat what you already know. But before we open the case I must affirm my personal admiration for Mr. Barras senior, who with wholehearted courage and patriotism has not shirked his duty in the face of his own natural feelings. I think I am right in saying that we all respect and honour him for what he has done.” Here a burst of applause broke out in the court. No effort was made to restrain it and when it had ended Douglas continued: “Speaking in my capacity as representative of the military authorities I should like to advance the statement that we on our side are prepared to come half-way over this unhappy and distressing case. The applicant has only to accept his liability for combatant service and he will receive every consideration in the matter of regimental draft and training.”

He looked across the court at Arthur with his hard inquiring stare. Arthur moistened his dry lips. He saw that an answer was expected of him. Gathering himself, he said:

“I refuse combatant service.”

“But come now, you can’t be serious?”

“I am serious.”

There was an imperceptible pause, a further heightening of the tension. Douglas exchanged a quick glance with Barras as though expressing his inability to do more and James Ramage, thrusting his head forward pugnaciously, demanded:

“Why do you refuse to fight?” The examination had begun.

Arthur turned his eyes upon the thick-necked butcher
whose low brow and small deep-set eyes seemed to commingle the attributes of bull and pig. He answered in an almost inaudible voice:

“I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“Speak up,” shouted Ramage. “You couldn’t hear that below a bowl.”

Huskily, Arthur repeated: “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“But why?” Ramage persisted. He had killed a great many live things in his time. He could not understand this puzzling mentality.

“It’s against my conscience.”

A pause. Then Ramage said coarsely:

“Ah, too much conscience is bad for anybody.”

The Rev. Enoch Low hurriedly interposed. He was a tall thin cadaverous man with pinched nostrils and a poor stipend. James Ramage, the main adherent of his church, paid half that stipend and the Rev. Low could always be depended on to support Ramage and cover up his little pleasantries.

“Come now,” he addressed Arthur. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? There’s nothing in the Christian religion which prevents lawful killing in the service of your country.”

“There’s no such thing as lawful killing.”

The Rev. Low cocked his bony head.

“What do you mean?”

Arthur answered rapidly:

“I haven’t got any religion very much, not religion in your sense. But you talk about Christianity, the religion of Christ. Well, I can’t imagine Jesus Christ taking a bayonet in His hands and sticking it into the stomach of a German soldier or an English soldier either for that matter. I can’t imagine Jesus Christ sitting behind an English machine gun or a German machine gun mowing down dozens of perfectly guiltless men.”

The Rev. Low coloured with horror. He looked unutterably shocked.

“That’s blasphemy,” he muttered, turning to Ramage.

But Murchison would not allow the argument to lapse. The snuffy little grocer wanted to show his knowledge of Holy Writ. Bending forward, rather slyly, as though weighing a bare half pound of ham:

“Don’t you know that Jesus Christ said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?”

The Rev. Low looked more uncomfortable still.

“No,” cried Arthur, “He never said that.”

“He did, I tell you,” Murchison bellowed, “it’s in the Book.” He lay back, victorious, in his chair.

Bates the draper now interposed. He had one stock question, a question he never failed to put, and now he felt the time was ripe for it. Caressing his long drooping moustache he asked:

“If a German attacked your mother what would you do?”

Arthur made a hopeless gesture; he did not answer.

With another tug at his moustache Bates repeated:

“If a German attacked your mother what would you do?”

Arthur bit his trembling underlip.

“How can I explain what’s in my mind by answering a question like that! Perhaps they’re asking it in Germany, too. Don’t you see? About our soldiers.”

“Would you rather kill the German or let the German kill your mother?” Bates persisted ponderously.

Arthur gave it up. He did not answer and Bates, with an air of childish triumph, looked round at his colleagues.

There was a silence. Everyone at the table now seemed to wait on Barras. And Barras seemed to wait upon himself. He cleared his throat abruptly. His eye was bright and there was a slight flush on his high cheek-bones. He stared fixedly over the top of Arthur’s head.

“Do you refuse to admit the necessity of this great national emergency, this tremendous world conflict which demands sacrifices from us all?”

As his father spoke Arthur felt himself trembling again and a sense of his own weakness bound him pitifully. He longed for calmness and courage, for the power to express himself with resolution and eloquence. But instead his lips quivered, he could only stammer:

“I can’t admit the necessity for herding men together to slaughter one another nor the necessity for starving women and children all over Europe. Especially when no one really knows what it is all for.”

Barras’s flush deepened:

“This war is being fought to end war.”

“That’s what has always been said,” Arthur exclaimed with a rising inflexion in his voice. “It’ll be said in the same way to make people kill one another when the next war comes along.”

Ramage moved restlessly. He picked up the pen in front of him and began to stab it into the table. He was used to a
more forceful method in the Tribunal and this digression exasperated him.

“Stop the shilly-shally,” he threw out an irritable aside, “and let’s get on with the job.”

Barras, who in the past had always affected to despise Ramage, gave no sign of resenting the interruption. His expression remained statuesque. He began to drum with his fingers on the table.

“What is your real reason for refusing to join the army?”

“I’ve told you,” Arthur answered with a quick intake of his breath.

“Good God!” Ramage interjected again. “What is he talking about? What’s he talking round corners for? Let him speak plain or keep his mouth shut.”

“Explain yourself,” the Rev. Low said to Arthur with a sort of patronising pity.

“I can’t say any more than I have said,” Arthur replied in a suppressed voice. “I object to the unjust and unnecessary sacrifice of human life. I’ll be no party to it either in the war or out of it.” As he said these last words, Arthur kept his eyes fixed upon his father’s face.

“Good God,” Ramage groaned again. “What a bloody awful state of mind to be in.”

But here an interruption occurred. In the gallery a woman stood up, small, very matter of fact and composed. It was Mrs. Wept, and in a clear voice she called out: “He’s quite right and all the lot of you are wrong. Thou shalt not kill. Remember that and the war’ll end tomorrow.”

Immediately there was an uproar, a storm of protest. Several voices shouted:

“Shame!”

“Shut up!”

“Put her out!”

Mrs. Wept was surrounded, pushed towards the door and bundled violently from the court.

When order was restored, Captain Douglas rapped loudly on the table.

“Another interruption like that and I’ll order the court to be cleared.”

He turned to his colleagues. A moment arose in every case when it became necessary to concentrate the digressive forces of the committee and bring the situation rapidly to a head. And here matters had clearly gone too far. Douglas had listened to Arthur with ill-concealed contempt. He was a
dominating type, severe and illiterate, promoted after years of non-commissioned service, with a hard face, a tough hide and the proved mentality of the barrack square. He addressed Arthur curtly.

“Let’s take this another way if you don’t mind. You say you object to serve. But have you considered the alternative?”

Arthur went very pale, conscious of the dark current of animosity flowing from Douglas to himself.

“That won’t alter my attitude.”

“Quite so! But for all that you don’t want to be locked up for two or three years.”

Dead silence in court. Arthur felt the fascinated attention of the crowd upon him. He thought, I am not really here, in this horrible position. He said at last in a laboured voice:

“I don’t want to be locked up any more than most soldiers want to go to the trenches.” Douglas’s eye hardened. In a louder voice he declared:

“They go because they think it is their duty.”

“I may think it my duty to go to prison.”

A faint sigh went up from the crowd in the gallery. Douglas glanced upwards angrily; then he slewed round towards Barras. He shrugged his shoulders and at the same time flung his papers on the desk with a final gesture as if to say: “I’m sorry, but this is hopeless.”

Barras sat up very stiff and rigid in his chair. He passed his hand carefully across his brow. He appeared to listen to the low discussion which now went on amongst his colleagues round about him. Then he said formally:

“I see you are all of the same opinion as myself.” And he held up his hand for silence.

A minute’s interval occurred, then, in that same dead silence, still staring over Arthur’s head, Barras pronounced the verdict.

“The Tribunal have carefully considered your case,” he declared, using the precise, the habitual formula. “And they find that they cannot grant you any exemption.”

There was an immediate outburst of applause, loud prolonged cheers, which Rutter, the clerk, did not order to be suppressed. From the gallery a woman called out:

“Well done, Mr. Barras. Well done, sir.” Captain Douglas leaned across the table and offered his hand. The other members of the Tribunal did likewise. Barras shook hands with them all, his air impressive yet vaguely remote, his glance
directed towards the gallery from where the applause and the woman’s voice had come.

Arthur remained standing in the centre of the court, his features drawn and colourless, his head drooping. He seemed waiting for something to happen. He had an agonised sense of anti-climax. He raised his head as though endeavouring to catch his father’s eye. A shiver went over him. Then he turned and walked out of the court.

That evening it was late when Barras returned. In the hall he encountered Arthur. He paused and in that curious manner, half mortified and half bewildered, he suddenly said:

“You can appeal if you wish. You know you can appeal.”

Arthur looked steadily at his father. He felt himself calm now.

“You’ve driven me into this,” Arthur said. “I shan’t appeal. I shall go through with it.”

There was a pause.

“Very well,” Barras said, almost plaintively. “It’s on your own head.” He turned and went into the dining-room.

As Arthur went upstairs he was dimly conscious of the sound of Aunt Carrie weeping.

That night there was great excitement in the town. Barras’s action had caused a tremendous sensation. Patriotism rose to fever heat and a crowd of people marched down Freehold Street, waving flags and singing
Tipperary
. They broke the windows of Mrs. Wept’s house, then marched on Hans Messuer’s shop. For some time now old Hans had been suspect as an alien and in this access of patriotic zeal the suspicion was confirmed. His shop was wrecked, plate-glass window smashed, bottles broken, curtains slit, the red and blue striped pole—pride of old Messuer’s heart—snapped into bits. Hans, risen from his bed in a panic, was assaulted, and left senseless on the floor.

Two days later Arthur was arrested and taken to Tynecastle Barracks. It happened with perfect quietness and order. He was in the machine now, everything moved smoothly and independent of his own volition. At the Barracks he refused to accept uniform. He was immediately court-martialled, sentenced to two years’ hard labour and ordered to be removed to Benton Prison.

As he came out of this second court he wondered how it had all happened. And he had a queer memory of his father’s face: flushed, confused, vaguely bewildered.

The Black Maria stopped with a jerk outside Benton Prison and there was the sounds of bolts being withdrawn. Arthur sat up in his dark little stall, still trying dazedly to realise that he was here, inside this prison van.

The van jerked forward again and jerked to a stop. Then the door of the van was unlocked and thrown open, letting in a sudden rush of cool night air. From beyond the door a warder’s voice cried:

“Out.”

Arthur and four others rose from their narrow partitioned stalls and got out. It had been a long cramped journey from Tynecastle to Benton but now they were at the end of that journey and in the courtyard of the prison. The night was heavy and overcast and it was raining heavily, puddles of water lay in the depressions of the asphalt. Arthur looked about him hurriedly: high grey walls with a sharp castellated coping, row upon row of iron-barred clefts, warders in glistening oilskins, silence and a shapeless darkness relieved only by a weak blur of yellow from the light above the archway. The five prisoners stood in the streaming rain, then one of the warders shouted a command and they were marched through another door into a small whitewashed room, the brightness of which was dazzling to the eyes after that outer darkness. An officer sat at a table in this bare bright room with a number of papers and a register in front of him. He was an elderly man with a bald, shiny head.