Told by an Idiot (33 page)

But to the majority in each country it was merely a catastrophe, like an earthquake, to be gone through blindly, until better might be.

Of the Garden family, Vicky was horrified but enthusiastically pro-war. Her two sons got commissions early, and she helped the war by organising bazaars and by doing whatever it was that one did (in the early stages, for in the later more of violence had to be done) to Belgian refugees. Maurice and his paper were violently pacificist, and became a byword. Rome saw the war and what had led up to it as the very crown and sum of human folly, and helped, very capably and neatly, to pack up and send off food and clothes to British prisoners. Stanley was caught in the tide of war fervour. She worked in a canteen, and served on committees for all kinds of good objects, and behaved with great competence and energy, her heart wrung
day and night with fear for Billy. In 1917 she caught peace fever, joined the peace party and the Women’s International League, signed petitions and manifestos in support of Lord Lansdowne, and spoke on platforms about it, which Billy thought tiresome of her.

Irving lent a car to an ambulance, and his services to the Ministry of Munitions, and became a special constable. Una sent cakes to her sons and farmhands at the front, and employed land-girls on the farm. She took the war as all in the day’s work; there had been wars before in history, and there would be wars again. It was awfully sad, all the poor boys being taken like that; but it sent up the price of corn and milk, and that pleased Ted, for all his anxiety for his sons.

The younger generation acted and reacted much as might be expected of them. Vicky’s Hugh, who joined the gunners, was interested in the business and came tolerably well through it, only sustaining a lame leg. Tony, his younger brother, was killed in 1916. Maurice’s Roger, whose class was B2, served in France for a year, and wrote a good deal of trench poetry. He was then invalided out, and entered the Ministry of Information, where he continued, in the intervals of compiling propaganda intended to interest the Greenland Esquimaux in the cause of the Allies, to publish trench poetry, full of smells, shells, corpses, mud and blood.

“I simply can’t read the poetry you write in these days, Roger,” his mother Amy complained. “It’s become too terribly beastly and nasty and corpsey. I can’t think what you want to write it for, I’m sure.”

“Unfortunately, mother,” Roger explained, kindly, “war
is
rather beastly and nasty, you know. And a bit corpsey, too.”

“My dear boy, I know that; I’m not an idiot.
Don’t, for goodness’ sake, talk to me in that superior way, it reminds me of your father. All I say is, why
write
about the corpses? There’ve always been plenty of them, people who’ve died in their beds of diseases. You never used to write about
them
.”

“I suppose one’s object is to destroy the false glamour of war. There’s no glamour about disease.”

“Glamour, indeed! There you go again with that terrible nonsense. I don’t meet any of these people you talk about who think there’s glamour in war. I’m sure
I
never saw any glamour in it, with all you boys in the trenches and all of us at home slaving ourselves to death and starving on a slice of bread and margarine a day. Glamour, indeed. I’ll tell you what it is, a set of you young men have invented that glamour theory, just so as to have an excuse for what you call destroying it, with your nasty talk. Like you’ve invented those awful Old Men you go on about, who like the war. I’m sick of your Old Men and your corpses.”

“I’m sick of them myself,” said Roger gloomily, and changed the subject, for you could not argue with Amy. But he went on writing war poetry, and gained a good deal of reputation as one of our soldier poets. On the whole, he was more successful as a poet than as a propagandist to the Esquimaux, a phlegmatic people, who remained a little detached about the war.

Stanley’s Billy hailed the outbreak of hostilities with some pleasure, and was among the first civilians to enlist. Here, he felt, was a job more in his line than being secretary to his Liberal cousin, which he had found more and more tedious as time passed. He fought in France, in Flanders, in Gallipoli, and in Mesopotamia, was wounded three times, and recovered each time to fight again. He was a cheerful, ordinary, unemotional young soldier, a good deal bored, after a bit, with the
war. On one of his leaves, in 1916, he married a young lady from the Vaudeville Theatre, whom Stanley could not care about.

“I know mother wanted me to marry a highbrow girl,” he confided to Molly. “Some girl who’s been to college or something. But I haven’t much to say to that sort ever, nor they to me. Now Dot . . .”

But even Molly had her misgivings about Dot. She was not sure that Dot would prove quite monogamous enough. And, as it turned out, Dot did not prove monogamous at all, but rather the contrary.

Molly herself had become an ambulance driver in France. She frankly enjoyed the war. She became engaged to officers, successively and simultaneously. She acted at canteen entertainments, and gained a charming reputation as a comedienne. At the end of the war she received the O.B.E. for her distinguished services.

Her mother knew about some of the engagements, and thought them too many, but did not know that Molly had for a time been more than engaged. She never would know that, for Molly kept her own counsel. Molly knew that to Stanley, with her idealistic view of life and her profound belief in the enduring seriousness of personal relations, it would have seemed incredibly trivial, light and loose to be a lover and pass on, to commit oneself so deeply and yet not count it deep at all, but emerge free and untrammelled for the next adventure. It had seemed incredible to Stanley in her husband; it would seem more incredible in her daughter.

“Mother’s so different,” thought Molly. “She’d never understand. . . . Aunt Rome’s different too, but she’d understand about me; she always understands things, even if she despises them. She
would
despise this, but she wouldn’t be surprised. . . .
Mother would be hurt to death. She must never, never guess.”

As to Vicky’s daughters, Phyllis was useful in some competent, part-time, married way that may be imagined. Nancy turned violently anti-war and became engaged to a Hungarian artist, who was subsequently removed from his studio in Chelsea and interned. Imogen was everything by turns and nothing long. The war very greatly discomposed her. It seemed to her a very shocking outrage both that there should be a war, and that, since there was a war, she should be found, owing to a mere fluke of sex, among the non-combatants. The affair was a horrid nightmare, which she had to stand and watch. People of her age simply weren’t non-combatants; that was how she felt about it. Strong, active people in the twenties; it seemed a disgrace to her, who had never before so completely realised that she was not, in point of fact, a young man. War was ghastly and beastly; but if it was there, people like her ought to be in it. However, since this was obviously impossible, she sulkily and simultaneously joined a pacificist league and became a V.A.D., in the hope of getting out to France. She was an infinitely incapable V.A.D., did everything with remarkable incompetence, and fainted or was sick when her senses and nerves were more displeased than usual by what they encountered, which was often. She was soon told that she had no gifts for nursing and had better stick to cleaning the wards. This she did, with relief, for some time, until her friends said, why not get a job in a government office, which was much more lucrative and amusing. Sick of hospitals, she did so. She was under no delusions as to the usefulness of any work she was likely to do in an office; but still, one had to do something. She could not write; her jarred, unhappy nerves sought and found a certain
degree of oblivion in the routine, the cameraderie, the demoralising absurdity, of office work, which was like being at school again. Also, it was paid, and, as she could not write, she must earn money somehow.

So, indolent, greedy, unbalanced, trivial and demoralised, Imogen, like many others, drifted through the great war. Two deaths occurred to her—the death of her brother and companion, Tony, which blackened life and made the war seem to her more than ever a hell of futile devilry; and the death of Neville, a young naval officer, to whom she had become engaged in 1915, and who was killed in 1916. It was a queer affair, born of the emotionalism and sensation-seeking that beset many people at that time. She had not known him long; she did not know him well. She was aware that it was ignominious of her to encourage him, merely on the general love she bore to the navy, a little flattered excitement, and a desire, new-born, to experience the sensation of engagement. They had few thoughts in common, but they could joke together, and talk of ships, and of how they loved one another, and about him was the glamour of the navy, and she felt, when he kissed her, that stimulation of the emotions and senses that passes for love. When they talked about things in general, and not about their love, she heard within her that cold voice that never lied saying, “You cannot live with this nice young naval man. You will tire each other.” Worse, they sometimes shocked one another. Could it be—disastrous thought—that she had outgrown the navy?

“You’re a rum kid, darling,” he said to her. “You and I disagree about nearly everything, it seems to me. We shall have a lively married life. . . . But I don’t care. . . .”

But he did care a little, all the same. Imogen sometimes suspected that, like herself, he had begun to think
they had made a mistake. But then he would take her in his arms, and when they embraced neither of them felt that they had made a mistake.

However, one is not embracing all the time, and Imogen slowly came to the point, between one leave and another, of deciding to end the affair. The navy and she had grown away from each other; there was no doubt about that.

But before they could discuss this point, Neville was killed at Jutland.

Imogen wept for him, and believed for a time that she loved him profoundly and missed him horribly. But the small, cold voice within her that never lied whispered, “You are only sorry that he is dead for his sake, because he loved being alive and ought to be alive. You sometimes miss his kisses and his love, but you are glad that you are free.”

She spent an unhappy week-end with his parents in the country. These did not very greatly care for her, only for Neville’s sake. Neville’s father was a rector, very simple and village, his mother a rector’s wife, very parochial and busy. With them, Imogen felt leggy and abrupt, and the wrong kind of girl. She couldn’t be articulate with them, or show them how bitterly she felt Neville’s death before he had properly lived. They were unhappy but not bitter; they said, “It was God’s will,” and she could not tell them that, in her view, they spoke inaccurately and blasphemed. Yet their hearts were (to use the foolish phrase) broken, and hers by no means. She caught Neville’s mother looking at her speculatively from behind her glasses, and wondered if she were wondering how much this gauche young woman had loved her boy. She wanted to beg her pardon and dash for the next train. They could not want her with them; to have her was a duty they thought they owed to Neville. “I’ve no right
here,” she cried to herself. “They loved him. I was only in love with his love for me. Their lives are spoilt, mine isn’t.”

She did not visit them again. That was over. Neville took his place in her memory, not as a personal loss, but as a gay, heartbreaking figure, a
tragic symbol of murdered, outraged youth.

But when Tony was killed, the world’s foundations shook. He was her darling brother, her beloved companion in adventure, scrapes and enterprises from their childhood up. She could by no means recover from the cruel death of Tony, which shattered the life of his home.

But daily work in an office, so cheerful, so fruitless, so absurd, was an anodyne. Offices were full of people who did not mind the war, who, some of them, rather enjoyed the war. There are no places more cynical than the offices of governments. Not parliaments in session, not statesmen in council, not cardinals in conclave, not even journalists emitting their folly in the dead of the night. Encased in an armour of this easy cynicism against the savage darts of the most horrid war, Imogen and many others drifted through its last years to the war’s cynical culmination, the horrid but welcome peace.

A Horrid peace it was and is. It is the fashion to say so, and, unlike most fashionable sayings, it is true. But at first the fact that it
was
peace, that people were not killing each other (in such large numbers and for such small reasons) any more, was enough, and made every one happy. A poor peace enough: but the fact remains that the worst peace is heaven compared with the best war. It was like the first return of chocolate éclairs. “They’re rather funny ones,” people said, “not quite like the old kind; but still, they
are
éclairs.” So peace. It was indeed a rather funny one, not quite like the old kind; but still, it was peace. And what, if you come to that, was the old kind, that any other should be compared unfavourably with it? The trouble is, perhaps, rather that this new variety
is
like it.

The Peace Treaty has been called all kinds of names—patchwork, violent, militarist, manufactured, makeshift, frail, silly, uneconomic, unstatesmanlike; and all the names except the last may be true. (Unstatesmanlike the treaty was certainly not; very few treaties drawn up by statesmen unfortunately are that; and, in fact, this word unstatesmanlike seems often to be curiously and thoughtlessly used, in a sense directly contrary to that which it should bear.) Well, even if nearly all these opprobrious names were true, it seems
a pity to be always discontented. Wiser were those who encouraged the infant, patted it on the back, and greeted the unseen with a cheer. Like beer, like shoe leather, it seemed costly and poor. But who were we, that we could afford to be particular?“ We’ve got,” said the resigned citizen, “to put up with these poor, nasty-looking things, that last no time at all. Beer it’s not, and shoe leather it’s not, and peace it won’t be, properly speaking. A kind of substitute they all are, like margarine. But what I say is, we’re lucky to get them.” So we were.