Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (52 page)

Only a week later - the day after a strange early morning shock like an earthquake had shaken southern England with its sinister intimation of the terrific mine-explosion at Messines Ridge - my mother and I went to Chelsea to find the usually cheerful, encouraging Matron with a face grown suddenly grave and personal. There was an unexpected change, she said, in Victor that morning. He had told his nurse that during the night something had ‘clicked’ in his head, like a miniature explosion; since then he had gradually grown vaguer and stranger, and had begun to wander a little . . . She thought that perhaps it would be wise to send for his people.

We sent for them at once; and later that afternoon, when his father and aunt had come up from Brighton, we returned with them to the hospital. Physically, Victor was there as usual, but the real Victor, no longer restrained by rational probabilities, had meandered off through the grotesque bypaths of delirium. He was quite oblivious of our presence, and when for a moment we turned away from him to talk to his nurse, he plucked the clothes one by one from his bed with gentle deliberation.

We were sent away while he was tidied up and his bed was remade, and when we came back he seemed once more himself, courteous as ever and apologetic for having been so ‘queer’. Left alone with him for a few moments while the others went to see the Matron and the doctor, I looked down at his quiet, passive paleness with a sense of heavy finality. So much human wreckage had passed through my hands, but this . . . well, this was different.

‘Tah - dear Tah!’ I whispered, in sudden pitying anguish, and I took his fingers in mine and caressed and kissed them as though he had been a child. Suddenly strong, he gripped my hand, pressed it against his mouth and kissed it convulsively in return. His fingers, I noticed, were damp, and his lips very cold.

That night Victor’s relatives stayed with us in Kensington; the doctor had advised them not to risk returning to Sussex. Next day, just before breakfast, his father was summoned to the public telephone on the ground floor of the flats; my parents had not yet had a private telephone installed. The message was from the hospital, to say that Victor had died in the early hours of the morning. The Matron had tried to call us during the night, but could get no reply; apparently the night-porter’s attitude towards his duty was similar to that of my orderly in Malta.

I still remember that silent, self-imposed breakfast, and the dull stoicism with which we all tried to eat fried bread and bacon. Immediately afterwards we went down to Chelsea; on the way there the aunt and I bought a sheaf of lilies and white roses, for our minds were still too numbed to operate in any but the conventional grooves.

Victor’s body had already been taken to the mortuary chapel; although the June sunshine outside shone brilliant and cheerful, the tiny place was ice-cold, and grey as a tomb. Indifferently, but with the mechanical decorum of habit, the orderly lifted the sheet from the motionless figure, so familiar, but in its silent unfamiliarity so terrible an indictment of the inept humanity which condemned its own noblest types to such a fate. I had seen death so often . . . and yet I felt that I had never seen it before, for I appeared to be looking at the petrified defencelessness of a child, to whose carven features suffering and experience had once lent the strange illusion of adulthood. With an overwhelming impulse to soften that alien rigidity, I laid my fragrant tribute of roses on the bier, and went quickly away.

Back at home, the aunt, kind, controlled, too sensitive to the sorrows of others to remember her own, turned to me with an affectionate warmth of intimacy which had not been possible before and would never, we both knew, be possible again.

‘My dear, I understand what you meant to do for Victor. I know you’d have married him. I do wish you could have . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I wish I could have,’ but I did not tell her that the husband of my imagination was always Roland, and could never now be Victor. The psychological combats and defeats of the past two years, I thought, no longer mattered to anyone but myself, for death had made them all unsubstantial, as if they had never been. But though speech could be stifled, thought was less easy to tame; I could not cease from dwelling upon the superfluous torture of Victor’s long agony, the cruel waste of his brave efforts at vital readjustment.

As for myself, I felt that I had been malevolently frustrated in the one serious attempt I had ever made to serve a fellow-creature. Only long afterwards, when time had taught me the limits of my own magnanimity, did I realise that his death had probably saved us both from a relationship of which the serenity might have proved increasingly difficult to maintain, and that I had always been too egotistical, too ambitious, too impatient, to carry through any experiment which depended for its success upon the complete abnegation of individual claims.

When Victor’s young brother had been sent for from school and the family had gone back to Sussex, I wandered about the flat like a desolate ghost, unable to decide where to go or what to do next. Only when twilight came could I summon sufficient resolution to write to Edward in the dim drawing-room, and to copy into my quotation-book Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research’:

Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,
We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead,
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering, ghost-forgotten nook, and there
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

15

Five days afterwards Victor was buried at Hove. No place on earth could have been more ironically inappropriate for a military funeral than that secure, residential town, I reflected, as I listened with rebellious anger to the calm voice of the local clergyman intoning the prayers:

‘Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thine Eternal Rest to all those who have died for their country, as this our brother hath; and grant that we may so follow his good example that we may be united with him in Thine Everlasting Kingdom.’

Eternal Rest, I reflected, had been the last thing that Victor wanted; he had told me so himself. But if, thus prematurely, he had to take it, how much I wished that fate had allowed him to lie, with other winners of the Military Cross, in one of the simple graveyards of France. I felt relieved, as I listened to the plaintive sobbing of the ‘Last Post’ rising incongruously from amid the conventional civilian tombstones, that Edward had not been able to come to the funeral. The uncomprehending remoteness of England from the tragic, profound freemasonry of those who accepted death together overseas would have intensified beyond endurance the incommunicable grief which had thrust us apart.

But when, back in Kensington, I re-read the letter that he had written in reply to mine telling him of Victor’s death, I knew that he had never really changed towards me, and that each of us represented to the other such consolation as the future still held:

‘I suppose it is better to have had such splendid friends as those three were rather than not to have had any particular friends at all, but yet, now that all are gone, it seems that whatever was of value in life has all tumbled down like a house of cards. Yet in Tah’s case I will not, I cannot say that I wished from the bottom of my heart that he should live; I have a horror of blindness, and if I were blinded myself I think I should wish to die . . . I am so very glad that you were near him and saw him so nearly at the end; in a way too I am glad not to have been there; it is good to remember the cheerfulness with which he faced the living of a new life fettered by the greatest misfortune known to man.

‘Yes, I do say “Thank God he didn’t have to live it.” We started alone, dear child, and here we are alone again; you find me changed, I expect, more than I find you; that is perhaps the way of Life. But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother.

‘EDWARD.’

8

Between the Sandhills and the Sea

THE LAST POST

The stars are shining bright above the camps,
The bugle calls float skyward, faintly clear;
Over the hill the mist-veiled motor lamps
Dwindle and disappear.

The notes of day’s goodbye arise and blend
With the low murmurous hum from tree and sod,
And swell into that question at the end
They ask each night of God—

Whether the dead within the burial ground
Will ever overthrow their crosses grey,
And rise triumphant from each lowly mound
To greet the dawning day.

Whether the eyes which battle sealed in sleep
Will open to réveille once again,
And forms, once mangled, into rapture leap,
Forgetful of their pain.

But still the stars above the camp shine on,
Giving no answer for our sorrow’s ease,
And one more day with the Last Post has gone,
Dying upon the breeze.

V. B., Etaples, 1917. From
Verses of a V.A.D.

1

When Edward went back to France in the last week of June 1917, I did not go with him to Victoria, for I had come superstitiously to believe that a railway station farewell was fatal to the prospect of meeting again.

Instead, I waved to him from the window as his taxi rounded the corner of the square, and then helped my mother to wrap up his violin and put it away once more. In the dining-room hung his portrait by Graham Glen; painted while his wound was still painful, the face above the Military Cross ribbon looked pale and sad and retrospective, as it had been for many months after the Somme.

It was not an auspicious return. At Boulogne his valise, with its newly purchased trench equipment, unaccountably disappeared and was never recovered, and he was obliged to go on without even a revolver to protect him during the miserable process of getting re-acclimatised to the War. For the next two months his lack of possessions, and the exasperating endeavour to replace them through correspondence while the postal communications between England and France grew steadily worse, added immeasurably to the wretched discomfort of that menacing summer.

At the Base, to his bitter disappointment, he was ordered to join the 2nd (Regular) Sherwood Foresters at Lens instead of his own 11th Battalion. When he returned to the line on June 30th, a year, less one day, after he had left it, he found the unfamiliar regiment on the verge of going into action. All too soon, my habitual suspense was renewed by a melancholy letter telling me that he was ‘in for another July 1st. If it should be that “Ere the sun swings his noonday sword” I must say good-bye to all of this - then good-bye. You know that, as I promised, I will try to come back if I am killed. It is all very sudden and it is bad luck that I am here in time, but still it must be.’

I had to wait nearly a week before learning that he was still alive and unhurt. A letter dated July 3rd, and written with quite uncharacteristic indignation, describes how he was sent into an attack the moment that he arrived, without knowing officers or men or the ground itself. It reveals how ‘magnificently’ some of our actions were organised, and how wastefully courageous lives were placed in jeopardy, and often thrown away, as the result of the crudest and most elementary failures of intelligence.

‘When I reported my arrival on Saturday night, having only left Étaples in the morning, I was told that I was to go up with the company and that they were going to attack in the early morning. The whole thing was a complete fiasco; first of all the guide who was to lead us to our position went wrong and lost the way completely. I must tell you that the battalion had never been in the sector before and nobody knew the way at all. Then my company commander got lost and so there was only one other officer besides myself and he didn’t know the way. The organisation of the whole thing was shocking as of course the position ought to have been reconnoitred before and it is obviously impossible for anyone who has never seen the ground before to attack in the dark. After wandering through interminable trenches I eventually found myself with only five men in an unknown place at the time when our barrage opened. It was clearly no use attempting to do anything and I found a small bit of trench and waited there till it got light. Then I found one of our front posts (there was no proper front line) and there we had to stop till we were relieved last night. As you can imagine, we had a pretty rotten time altogether. I don’t think that I and the other officer who reported with me ought to have been rushed into the show like that after a tiring two days’ travelling and not knowing the map.’