Sleep in Peace (40 page)

The New Year opened badly. Grace had got a job in a large girls' high school in North London, went off in fairly good spirits, and wrote of establishing herself in a flat there; for the first time it dawned on Laura that Grace might actually go and live in some other town, and return to Hudley only rarely, for brief holidays. That they should be permanently separated in this way seemed to Laura inconceivable and altogether intolerable.

Her private affairs thus reflected the trouble so apparent in the general situation. It was only too clear that the War was certainly not over, as had been prophesied; both sides had dug themselves into the soil of France and Flanders, and whether any frontal attack could drive the German Army, so long prepared, so thoroughly disciplined, out of its well-made trenches, Laura gravely doubted. (One comfort was, however, reflected Laura sadly, that trench warfare would probably be easier than any other kind for Ludo. One hung on to trenches, one defended, one endured, one was patiently tenacious; Ludo could manage all that splendidly.…) A huge, cigar-shaped, silken airship of the kind perfected by Count Zeppelin came over East Anglia and dropped bombs; Germany declared a submarine blockade of England, and the name of Admiral von Tirpitz became infamous in this connection. Mr. Armistead began for the first time to take in
Punch
, because the men at the Club said the war cartoons were so good; and von Tirpitz and Neptune became visible to Laura in its pages, in deep
argument. The Army, it now appeared, called for three million men. Three
million!
Decidedly the war was not over; doubtless, as Laura had always thought possible, Kitchener had been right in requiring from recruits the oath for “three years or the duration of the war.” Recruiting rose to fever pitch; in the music-halls comediennes sang: “We don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go,” and somebody sent Frederick a white feather in an envelope on which was stuck an address in print, cut out, Laura thought, from the newspaper advertisement of the Neutrality League. Gwen showed this all round the family, urging each member to keep it secret from the rest; Laura could not shake off the horrible suspicion that she herself had sent it to her husband.

And now suddenly there was a gap in Ludo's letters. The lack of news was dreadful. Not that Ludo's letters ever told one much of an exciting nature; a series of scrappy little sentences, rounded off with some rather far-fetched joke, were what he sent to Laura twice a week—Mr. Armistead grumbled at their lack of interest, all the things they didn't tell. But at least they had come regularly, and to Laura they revealed Ludo's state of mind at the time when he wrote, which was what she wanted to know. Now there was a gap in their succession. And it appeared that there was similarly a gap in “a great many other families' letters in the West Riding; the rumour rose and spread that the Duke of Wellington's had gone to France. At last a letter came from Ludo; it was true; he was actually at the Front! The date was blacked out.
Dear Laura
, he wrote:

We are not far away from the firing line. We had a quick journey over. We were at Boulogne at
10
p.m. on the day we left England. We stayed the night there. Next day we travelled up country; we were only four hours in a cattle wagon, some people were twenty-four. The town where we are now stationed has been shelled. There are some mills here, tell Father, with looms standing and cloths in them still. People are not
so swanky now we are out here in the real thing. My address is: Headquarters, West Riding Division, B.E.F. With love to Father
,

Your loving brother,
Ludo
.

After that there was silence for a fortnight. Meanwhile Sir John French reported that the enemy had developed an attack on the French troops, who had been obliged to retire from the zone affected by gas fumes. The British front, however, he said, remained intact, except where the line had been slightly readjusted to conform with the new French line. Gas! Every pulpit, every newspaper in the country denounced this abominable transgression of the law of nations, and Laura began to feel a personal resentment, an individual hate, against a people which could do such things. Now the
Hudley News
burst suddenly into columns and columns of letters from local men at the Front, with pictures of those who had been killed, and letters of condolence from their captains. Mr. Armistead was a little grieved, as Laura could see, that Ludo sent home no descriptive material to figure there. Others, mere corporals and privates often, sent home vivid accounts of the flattish, rolling country, sparsely sprinkled with stumps of trees, of the night advance up to the firing line, the zig-zag route and canvas screens, the parapet seven feet high, the barbed wire, the dugouts; they mentioned that they had not had their boots off for seven days, that they wrote with their heads up a little tunnel, to escape shrapnel, “which is bursting hereabouts every few minutes,” that two days' rain had filled the trench with mud above their ankles. All these details Laura and Mr. Armistead devoured in the newspapers, trying to get a picture of the Front which had swallowed Ludo; but Ludo himself sent nothing, not even his former scrappy little sentences. Grace wrote to Laura that it seemed clear that a considerable battle was in progress at Ypres; but though Laura saw well enough that Grace was trying to prepare
her for bad news, she could not see the battle in progress at all. It was all so vague, so continuous, so devoid of definite result. A battle was surely either won or lost; one set one's teeth in defeat or rang bells in victory. But in this war the troops “readjusted their line” or “consolidated their position”; while letters from soldiers in the same battalion contradicted each other, some saving the trenches were “hell let loose”, others that they were as safe as the Bank of England. It was all terribly unsatisfactory; and meanwhile where, oh where, was Ludo? German submarines sank the
Lusitania;
a wave of deep anger rushed over England.

“If they think they're going to
frighten us
with this sort of thing,” began Laura.

“They'll find they're wrong, Miss Laura,” concluded Mildred, closing her thin lips firmly.

That night, towards the early hours of the morning, Laura suddenly awoke from a deep sleep, and discovered that she was, and had been for days, madly anxious about Ludo. Where was he? Why did he not write? Ludo, who was so considerate, so careful never to cause unnecessary worry, had left his family without news for fourteen days. People said that letters were delayed for censorship, not sent to England till their news was stale; but supposing that were so, the letters should still be regular. Ypres! It struck Laura suddenly that Edward had been killed at Ypres. At the thought she sprang out of bed, unable to lie still another moment. She switched on the light, threw on her dressing-gown, and paced with folded arms up and down her room. She saw Ludo in some terrible misery—not dead, but suffering; forced to do something which was beyond his powers. Failing, perhaps. Some of the letters spoke of bayonet charges. Would Ludo, Ludo who as Frederick said never hurt a fly, be obliged to climb that seven-foot parapet, rush across those two hundred yards of barbed wire swept by machine-guns, spring down into a trench and bayonet Germans? They deserved it, they deserved it richly,
thought Laura in anger, remembering the Belgians, the gas, the
Lusitania
, and her mental pictures changed to Ludo caught, entrapped, by bullying Germans. Oh! Ludo!

“Laura,” said Mr. Armistead's voice outside her door.

“Did I wake you, Papa? I'm so sorry,” said Laura remorsefully, admitting him.

“Is anything the matter?” enquired Mr. Armistead in a quiet, sleepy tone, enfolding himself more tightly in his dressing-gown.

“I was only thinking about Ludo,” replied Laura, averting her eyes.

Mr. Armistead sighed, and father and daughter stood for a moment silent and motionless.

“Well, we mustn't sap our
morale”
said Mr. Armistead at length. “We've got to win this war. But I'm afraid it's going to be a long business.”

They kissed quietly, and parted.

Next morning when Laura came down to breakfast, there lay on the table a letter from Ludo. With an inarticulate cry she snatched it and tore it open.
Dear Laura
, wrote Ludo in his usual tiny, spidery hand:

I have been admitted into hospital in Boulogne suffering from an attack of gas poisoning. It happened the first day we went into the real firing line, and we had only been in the trenches five or six hours. The Germans gassed us. It came rolling over in a sort of yellow fog, just at daylight. The green backs of Mother's little Testament which I had in my pocket were changed to a bright yellow, and all my buttons went black. If people knew what it was like out here, there would not be so many slackers at home. I am afraid Jesse Byram, Tom's youngest, got it rather badly, as he would not keep his pad over his nose. How are your Belgians? Do they still think marzipan tastes of pepper? Out here

With love to Father,
Your loving brother,
Ludo
.

Laura rushed joyously upstairs to Mr. Armistead, who was shaving. To her surprise his pleasure in the letter was very much less than her own.

“Gassed,” he said soberly.

“But he'll be safe, Papa,” urged Laura. “He won't be back in the trenches for quite a long time.”

“I wonder when this letter was written,” said Mr. Armistead, turning it about in his hands thoughtfully.

That, of course, was the snag, as Ludo himself would say. It was clear that communiques, letters, and newspaper reports gave one a hopelessly mixed account of what was happening, because it was impossible to sort them out into chronological order. So that as long as the War went on, even if one had had a letter an hour before, one could never be free from anxiety about Ludo.

Mr. Asquith now formed a Coalition Government, to include all parties, and a new Ministry, of Munitions, was established and handed to Mr. Lloyd George. Grace seemed to think that the second battle of Ypres, and the landing in Gallipoli (which in spite of the magnificent courage of the Anzacs and the Lancashires appeared not to be going very well), had something to do with these political changes; but then Grace lived in London and saw a great deal of the Duchays and Mr. Duchay was a Civil Servant—up here in Yorkshire one could not see things so clearly. Mr. Armistead was dumfounded by the appointment of Lloyd George, that little Englander, that Radical, that provider of rare and refreshing fruit out of other people's pockets; but as time went on he admitted reluctantly that there must be some good in him after all—in industry he was certainly making things hum.

For now the Government began to demand, from the West Riding, shells, machine tools, chemicals, cloth. The makers of the original Blackshaw gas-engines threw up extensions to their works as fast as the builders could put bricks on top of each other, and occupied them with machines before the mortar was dry in the walls. In the valleys, odd little sheds were dotted about, all separate,
so that if one blew up the next did not necessarily do the same; the walls of these sheds were yellow, and everything in their vicinity—stones, leaves, flowers, even the tail-feathers of hens, grew yellow too. Millions and millions of yards of cloth were required—khaki cloth, French grey cloth, pale blue cloth for the R.F.C.; cloth for sailors, soldiers, airmen; cloth for the forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, Serbia—as you were now asked to call Servia, thus turned Slav—and presently Italy too; cloth for Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand. Immense orders flew about Yorkshire; Mr. Armistead, who knew all the textile magnates, and had a lively engaging air and a nose for business, pulled into Blackshaw Mills a considerable share of them. At the same time a good many of his young employees left him to form part of the three million the Army required. As a result he was driven almost frantic by overwork. The mill ran night and day, with the consequent strain on men and machinery; his output was doubled, his workpeople halved; he scoured the country buying machinery and seeking skilled hands, then rushed back to Hudley to deal with Government inspectors who, as he said irascibly, didn't know woollen from worsted. In addition to this he had the whole of the Hinchliffe business on his hands. Mr. Hinchliffe was incapacitated, Frederick useless; if he wanted his own cloth to be properly dyed—and dyed to that most difficult and exasperating of all shades, khaki—and decently finished, he was obliged to cross the archway a dozen times a day to see that all was going on well in the Hinchliffe half of the building. He went to the mill early and stayed late; never did he have a meal at home without interruption from the telephone. At first he enjoyed all this activity, this dashing hither and thither, knowing his own capacity for swift negotiation and rejoicing to display it; but presently he grew so tired that one night's sleep could not restore him; his eyes looked over-bright, he lost weight, wore a permanently harassed expression, and began to doubt his own decisions. After loud, worried, angry conversations at the telephone
in the hall, he was wont to return to the table wearing a preoccupied frown, snatch a few hurried mouthfuls of food while he considered the problem which had arisen at the mill in his absence, then spring up and hasten to the telephone again to pour out his instructions. When he returned, his food in spite of Laura's efforts had grown cold; he waved his hands irritably over the plate and said: “Oh, take it away; there's no taste in it.”

At last there came an evening when, after two of these telephone interludes, he exclaimed despairingly:

“It's almost enough to make one wish Edward was at home; it really is.”

He pushed his plate aside as usual, and went and sat by the fire in his armchair, holding up his newspaper in a hand which shook, and looking, with his crooked pince-nez and his greying head, very miserable. Laura went to him and fussed over him a little to cheer him up, adjusting a cushion behind his back, kissing his cheek and offering to remove his boots. Mr. Armistead, grumbling that he would be sure to need them again, yielded, continuing to read, and Laura was just putting on his second slipper when he suddenly started up in his chair, threw down his newspaper with an air of decision and cried loudly: