XXVI
In the middle of December the cadet-battalions were wound up and the officers, after a few days’ leave, were sent back to their units. The Third Battalion of the Royal Welch was now at Limerick. I decided to overstay my leave until Nancy’s baby was born. She was expecting it early in January 1919, and her father had taken a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny was born on Twelfth Night. She was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had had no foreknowledge of the experience—I assumed that she knew—and it took her years to recover from it. I went over to Limerick; the battalion was at the Castle Barracks. I lied my way out of the over-staying of leave.
Limerick was a Sinn Fein stronghold, and there were constant clashes between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish got on well together, as inevitably as Welsh and Scottish disagreed. The Royal Welch had the situation well in hand; they made a joke of politics and used their entrenching-tool handles as shillelaghs. It looked like a town that had been through the war. The main streets had holes in them like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. I was told by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into another. He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia. Life did not start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house was flung open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, then a nearly naked child, which sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for dirty pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. Ireland was exactly as I had pictured it. I felt its charm as dangerous. Yet when I was detailed to take out a search-party in a neighbouring village for concealed rifles I asked the adjutant to find a substitute; I said that I was an Irishman and did not wish to be mixed up in Irish politics.
I realized too that I had a new loyalty, to Nancy and the baby, tending to overshadow regimental loyalty now that the war was over. Once I was writing a rhymed nonsense letter to Nancy and Jenny in my quarters overlooking the barrack square:
At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with The British Grenadiers. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. The British Grenadiers succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem:
but were driven out:
I had ceased to be a British grenadier.
So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.
I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in 1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice.
The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in Julius Cæsar. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible. Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as The Handcuff King; he got away safely to America.
I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent. Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there. The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested, but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present state.
I had to think quickly. I decided to make a run for it. The orderly-room sergeant had made my papers out on receipt of the telegram. I had all my kit ready packed. There only remained two things to get: the colonel’s signature to the statement that I had handled no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which only the battalion demobilization officer could supply—but he was hand-in-glove with the adjutant, so it was no use asking him for them. The last train before demobilization ended was the six-fifteen from Limerick the same evening, February 13th. I decided to wait until the adjutant had left the orderly room and then casually ask the colonel to sign the statement, without mentioning the adjutant’s objection to my going. The adjutant remained in the orderly room until five minutes past six. As soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the colonel’s signature, saluted, hurried out to collect my baggage. I had counted on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but none was to be seen. I had about five minutes left now and the station was a good distance away. I saw a corporal who had been with me in the First Battalion. I shouted to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men. I’ve got my ticket and I want to catch the last train back.’ Summers promptly called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it, left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it was moving out of the station and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers. ‘Good-bye, corporal, drink my health.’
But still I had not my demobilization code-marks and knew that when I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon they would refuse to pass me out. I did not care very much. Wimbledon was in England, and I would at least have my influenza out in an English and not an Irish hospital. My temperature was running high now and my mind was working clearly as it always does in fever. My visual imagery, which is cloudy and partial at ordinary times, becomes defined and complete. At Fishguard I bought a copy of the South Wales Echo and read in it that there would be a strike of London Electric Railways the next day, 14th February, if the railway directors would not meet the men’s demands. So when the train steamed into Paddington and while it was still moving I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up and ran across to the station entrance, where, in spite of competition from porters—a feeble crew at this time—I caught the only taxi in the station as its fare stepped out. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford to waste no time getting to Wimbledon. I brought my taxi back to the train, where scores of stranded officers looked at me with envy. One, who had travelled down in my compartment, had been met by his wife. I said: ‘Excuse me, but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I only need go as far as Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ They were delighted; they said that they lived out at Ealing and had no idea how to get there except by taxi. On the way to Waterloo he said to me: ‘I wish there was some way of showing our gratitude. I wish there was something we could do for you.’ I said: ‘Well, there is only one thing in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me, I’m afraid. And that,’ I said, ‘is the proper code-marks to complete my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’ He rapped on the glass of the taxi and stopped it. Then he got down his bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. He said: ‘Well, I happen to be the Cork District Demobilization Officer and I’ve got the whole bag of tricks here.’ So he filled my papers in.
At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for nine or ten hours as I had expected, I was given priority and released at once; Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’ and demobilization from theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. So after a hurried visit to my parents, who were living close by, I continued to Hove, arriving at supper-time. When I came in, I had a sudden terror that made me unable to speak. I seemed to see Nancy’s mother. She was looking rather plump and staid and dressed unlike herself, and did not appear to recognize me. She was sitting at the table between Nancy and her father. It was like a bad dream; I did not know what to say or do. I knew I was ill, but this was worse than illness. Then Nicholson introduced me: ‘This is Nancy’s Aunt Dora, just over from Canada.’
I warned them all that I had influenza; and hurried off to bed. Within a day or two everybody in the house had caught it except Nicholson and the baby and one servant who kept it off by a gipsy’s charm. I think it was the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new epidemic as bad as the summer one had started; there was not a nurse to be had in Brighton. Nicholson at last found two ex-nurses. One was competent, but frequently drunk, and when drunk she would ransack all the wardrobes and pile the contents into her own bags; the other, sober but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of the open window, spread out her arms, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me.’ The husband, by the way, was not drowned, merely unfaithful. A doctor, found with difficulty, said that I had no chance of recovering; it was septic pneumonia now and both my lungs were affected. But I had determined that, having come through the war, I would not allow myself to succumb to Spanish influenza. This, now, was the third time in my life that I had been given up as dying, and each time because of my lungs. The first occasion was when I was seven years old and had double-pneumonia following measles. Yet my lungs are naturally very sound, possibly the strongest part of me and, therefore, my danger mark. This time again I recovered and was up a few weeks later in time to see the mutiny of the Guards, when about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp and paraded through the streets of Brighton in protest against camp discipline.
The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’ mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’
When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered. I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it was always easier for me now when overtaken in any fault to lie my way out. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and lighting—each item was ticked off as satisfactory. And other loose habits of war-time survived, such as stopping passing motors for a lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever was about. And I retained the technique of endurance, a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But I modified my language, which had suddenly become foul on the day of Loos and had been foul ever since. The chief difference between war and peace was money. I had never had to worry about that since my first days at Wrexham; I had even put by about £150 of my pay, invested in War Bonds. Neither Nancy nor I knew the value of money and this £150 and my war-bonus of, I think, £250 and a disability pension that I was now drawing of £60 a year, and the occasional money that I got from poetry, seemed a great deal altogether. We engaged a nurse and a general servant and lived as though we had an income of about a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of her time drawing (she was illustrating some poems of mine), and I was busy getting Country Sentiment in order and writing reviews.
I was very thin, very nervous, and had about four years’ loss of sleep to make up. I found that I was suffering from a large sort of intestinal worm which came from drinking bad water in France. I was now waiting until I should be well enough to go to Oxford with the Government educational grant; it seemed the easiest thing to do. I knew that it would be years before I was fit for anything besides a quiet country life. There was no profession that I wished to take up, though for a while I considered school-mastering. My disabilities were many; I could not use a telephone, I was sick every time I travelled in a train, and if I saw more than two new people in a single day it prevented me from sleeping. I was ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy. I had been much better when I was at Rhyl, but my recent pneumonia had set me back to my condition of 1917.
Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as he was demobilized, expecting me to join him. But after being there for a term or so he became literary editor of the newly-published Daily Herald. He gave me books to review for it. In these days the Daily Herald was not respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British Fleet. The Versailles Treaty shocked me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared. When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s Atlantic flight and rescue, the marriage of Lady Diana Manners, and a marvellous horse called The Panther, which was the Derby favourite and came in nowhere. The Herald spoilt our breakfast for us every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country, due to the closing of munition factories, of ex-service men refused re-instatement in the jobs that they had left in the early stages of the war, of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news, too, of my mother’s relatives in Germany and the penury to which they had been reduced, particularly those who were retired officials and whose pension, by the collapse of the mark, was reduced to a few shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart; we now called ourselves socialists.
The attitude of my family was doubtful. I had fought gallantly for my country—indeed I was the only one of my father’s five sons of military age who had seen active service—and was entitled to every consideration because of my shell-shocked condition; but my socialism and sympathy for the Bolsheviks outraged them. I once more forfeited the goodwill of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over, reminding me that my brother Philip had once been a pro-Boer and a Fenian, but had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and come out all right in the end. Most of the elder members of my family were in the Near East, either married to British officials or British officials themselves. My father hoped that when I was recovered I would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family influence would be of great service to me, and there get over my revolutionary idealism. Socialism with Nancy was rather a means to a single end. The most important thing to her was judicial equality of the sexes; she held that all the wrong in the world was caused by male domination and narrowness. She refused to see my experiences in the war as in any way comparable with the sufferings that millions of married women of the working-class went through. This at least had the effect of putting the war into the background for me; I was devoted to Nancy and respected her views in so far as they were impersonal. Male stupidity and callousness became an obsession with her and she found it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men. It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population, or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.
It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized. My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy, finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes, refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances. At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson. This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy seemed merely eccentric.