My Year of the War | Page 6

That was all he knew.
These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.
Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.
Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever- deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.
They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining- room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.
Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others besides himself. Apprehended in "wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.
They attempted little flights of talk about everything except the war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she liked to eat, whilst she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn't he going "out there?" And out there he would have to live on army fare. It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning--she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.
One such incident does for all, whether the war be young or old. There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was rather glad that I did not know this pair. If I had known them I should be looking at the casualty list for his name and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of war, not of talk.
On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world. We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the war has developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.
"It's clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?" he said. Then he added quietly, after a pause: "This is a personal call for me. I'm going to enlist."
England's answer to that "bad knock" was out of her experience. She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last battle. The next day's news was