XVIII + 

The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare⁠—the whole of it if he would⁠—with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office, had been dreary enough in comparison with the homecomings of other men⁠—it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed that had prompted Edith’s invitation. She met him at the station and drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point where they had left it off. + 

The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her mother’s; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other’s company⁠—sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff’s duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two he was not communicative⁠—engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains, on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the aimlessness with which he plodded the pathway of his disciplined life. She knew him for a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days had died as completely as his faith in his prewar creed. Had the lot fallen to him he would not have shrunk from his turn in the trenches, and at the bottom of his heart, for Griselda’s sake, there was always a smoulder of hatred; but he had seen much of the war machine, had realized keenly his own unimportance therein, and he blushed when he remembered that he had once imagined that his one small arm and his private vengeance might be factors, and important factors, in the downfall of the German Empire. And the first mad impulse of agony, the impulse which would have sent him into battle single-handed, had passed as it was bound to pass. + 

If she suspected him at first of a drift towards his former “pacifism” she soon discovered her mistake; the one rock on which he stood fast was that conviction of error which had come to him in the Forest of Arden. He hated the war as it affected himself, was weary of the war in general; all he longed for was its ending, which meant his release from imprisonment; but neither hatred nor weariness had blinded his eyes to the folly of that other blindness which had denied that war could be. His contempt for his past dreams of a field-marshal’s baton was as nothing to his contempt for those further past dreams wherein fact was dispelled by a theory; and he had, in his own words, “no use for” a pacifist party which had never, as he had, made confession of its fundamental error. He was still in his heart a soldier, even though a soldier disillusioned; his weariness of the military machine, his personal grievance against it, were not to be compared to the fiery conversion that had followed on the outbreak of war. The one concerned matters of detail only; the other his fundamental faith.⁠ ⁠… So much Edith Haynes understood from their intimate fragmentary talks. + 

One change in himself he had not noticed till Edith, half jestingly, spoke of it: an affection that was almost a tenderness for the actual soil of England. More than once when he walked with her he contrasted the road or the landscape with those grown familiar in France; and the contrast was always in favour of the Somerset hills or the winding Somerset highway. Without ties as he was, without household, without family, she saw that he shrank from the idea of again leaving “home.” + 

“What shall you do when the war is over?” she asked him one evening as his leave neared its end, curious to know how he had planned to spend his arrested life. So far he had spoken of no future beyond the end of the war itself; and when she put to him the question direct he only shook his head vaguely. + 

“I don’t know. It may seem odd to you, but I haven’t thought much about it. In fact”⁠—he smiled apologetically⁠—“I don’t believe I’ve really thought at all.” + 

“No, I don’t think it odd,” she told him. “There are a good many like you⁠—I’m inclined to think that you’re only one of the majority. People whose business it is to reorganize industry⁠—I suppose they’re thinking ahead. One prays they are. But as for the rest of us⁠ ⁠… it’s difficult to think ahead because of the way it has broken up our lives and our plans. We’ve got used to its breaking them up.” + 

“That’s it,” he nodded back. “We’ve been made to do things for so long. Taken and made to do them.⁠ ⁠… Some have been taken and killed and some have been taken and crushed⁠—and some have only been made prisoners, like me. But we’ve all of us been taken⁠—and bent and twisted into things we never meant to be.⁠ ⁠… So we don’t plan⁠—what’s the use?⁠ ⁠… I might of course⁠—I’m not like the men in the trenches who may be killed any minute. I’m safe enough where I am⁠—safer than in London; but all the same I don’t.⁠ ⁠… I just wait to see what happens.” + 

For a week before William left England there had been expectation of coming developments at the front, and the papers had spoken of “considerable aerial activity,” on the enemy’s side as on ours. The developments commenced in earnest on the day of his return from leave; but his first personal experience of the increase in aerial activity was not for a few days later, when, as he was passing through the square in the centre of the town, a gun thudded out⁠—and then another. He stopped and made one of a little knot of khaki that was staring up into the blue, and whereof one of the component parts was a corporal who worked in his office. He himself could see nothing but a drift or two of smoke, but he gathered from the sharper-sighted corporal that there were two Fritz planes overhead, and he stood cricking his neck and blinking upwards in the strong sunlight while passersby made groups on the pavement and shopkeepers issued from their doors. He had seen the same thing happen before and quite harmlessly; no one around him seemed alarmed or disturbed, and in a few minutes the guns ceased firing as the aeroplanes passed out of range. + 

“Photographing,” said the corporal, as they walked away to the office. “He’s been over quite a lot the last week or two, and some time or other I suppose we shall have him in earnest. It’s a wonder to me he’s left us alone so long; it ’ud be worth his while coming even if he didn’t do more than drop a bomb or two on the A.H.T.D., and start a few hundred horses.” + 

“Yes,” agreed William, “I suppose it would.” He was not in the least alarmed as he settled down to his files; since he joined the Army he had never been exposed to danger, and security had become with him a habit. + 

That night there was a heavy post, and the office was kept working late; it was close on eleven when William was called upstairs to take down some letters from dictation. The officer who had sent for him was clearing his throat for the first sentence when the door opened for the announcement, “Local aircraft alarm, sir.” + 

“Oh, all right,” said the officer resignedly. “Go downstairs, Tully, and come up again when the lights go on. Probably only a false alarm⁠—we had two the other night. Just the sort of thing that would happen when we’re behindhand.” + 

He went out grumbling, and William followed him, feeling his way by the banisters, for the electric light was turned off while he was still on the upper landing; other men from all over the warren of a building were descending likewise, and they bumped and jostled each other in the sudden darkness on the stairs. There were jests as they bumped and much creaking of boots⁠—through which, while William was still a flight from the ground floor, came the first rapid thudding of “Archie.” On it, a moment later, an unmistakable bomb and the pattering outburst of machine-guns.⁠ ⁠… William listened curiously; it was his first experience of an air raid, and though the pace of his heart quickened, as yet there was no real fear in him; but a man pressed against him by the descending stream gasped audibly and clawed round William’s arm with his fingers. The action was fear made manifest in darkness, and William, instinctively knowing it infectious, repelled it and strove to free his wrist; but the shaking fingers, eloquent of terror, only clung more tightly to their hold. + 

“What is it?” William snapped. “What’s the matter?” + 

“It’s me⁠—Wright,” a voice whispered back in jerks. “I can’t help it⁠—the Lord knows I try, but I can’t. If it was shells I could stand ’em, but⁠—” + 

A nearby gun beat down his voice but did not stop it⁠—“at Dunkirk. I was buried two hours: two mortal hours before they got me out⁠—and when I was in hospital he came over and bombed us again. He got one right on to us, and I was blown out of bed, and the men at the other end of the ward were in pieces. In pieces, I tell you⁠—beastly bits of flesh⁠—” + 

William tried to stand it⁠—realizing that the man must cling and gibber to someone as a child clings and wails to its nurse. They had turned into a room on the ground floor⁠—there were no cellars, but it was esteemed the safest place in the building by reason of the comparative absence of glass⁠—and the pair of them stood backs against the wall. When Wright stopped talking⁠—which was not often⁠—William could hear his breath as it came whining through his teeth; and he remembered that the man wore the ribbon of the D.C.M.⁠—a man who had once had nerve and to all appearance was sound, but who had not sufficient hold on himself to keep his terror from his tongue. He spoke of it unceasingly; whenever the sounds without died down William could hear him whispering⁠—now of the night when he was bombed in hospital and now of the building they were in. It was no good as a shelter⁠—would crumble like a house of cards. Nothing was any good but a cellar or trenches⁠—there should have been trenches. And they were so damnably close to the station, and the station was just what those devils were trying to hit. There came a moment when William could bear it no more, and wrenched himself free of the clawing fingers on his sleeve; he dared not feel them longer, lest his heart also melted within him. + 

His nervousness took the form of a difficulty in keeping still, and he fidgeted about the darkened room; but the room was fairly full, and he could not move far⁠—after a step or two this way and a step or two that, he was brought up by a solid group that stretched from the wall to a table. He came to a standstill on the edge of the group and tried to listen to their talk; forced himself to listen to it⁠—and all the time straining his ears through the murmur for the droning of the Gotha engines. He fought with himself and fought more manfully than he knew; striving to thrust out of his mind Wright’s phrase about the “beastly bits of flesh,” and to fasten his hearing, to the exclusion of all else, on the voice of a man, his neighbour in the darkness, who had lately seen a German aeroplane brought down, and, having apparently some mechanical knowledge, was describing its points and its engines. They, the engines, were first-rate, he said, waxing technical; but even if he had not been told it, he should have guessed from the fittings of the plane that Jerry was getting a bit scarce in his stock of rubber and leather. What he was using⁠—Here the windows rattled loudly and drowned him. “That’s pretty close,” someone commented, and William moved a restless step away. Once it had seemed to him an easy thing to follow Griselda and die; now all the moral strength he possessed went into the effort not to shrink, to be master of his body, to behave decently and endure. That was all that seemed to matter⁠—to be steady and behave decently⁠—so that, for all his fear of instant death, he never turned his thoughts to God.⁠ ⁠… He had not known how beautiful silence could be till it came almost suddenly, like a flood of clear, cool water; when someone, muttering that it seemed to be over, opened the door and went out into the courtyard, he followed and stood there feeling the silence as something clean, exquisite and grateful. His hands were wet and hot, and he stretched them out to the air; if he had not prayed when he was under the spell of fear, his heart, at his release from it, was filled with something like praise. + 

“Listen,” said a voice in his ear. It was Wright, his face uplifted in the moonlight and disfigured by ugly twitchings. “Listen,” he said, “they’re coming back.⁠ ⁠…” William shrank from him irritably, but the man had not spoken particularly to him, and, having spoken, turned swiftly and went back into the house. He had been the first to catch the double-noted drone which as they stood and listened grew nearer. + 

“That’s him, sure enough,” another voice agreed. “Coming up in relays. He’ll be out to make a night of it⁠—I thought we’d got rid of him too quickly.” + 

A searchlight wheeled and the antiaircraft spoke on the word; someone cried, “Got ’im,” and pointed, and for an instant William had sight of a wicked thing caught in the ray and rushing upwards. Battery and machine-gun gave tongue at the sight, but in a flash the climbing devil had vanished and the searchlight wheeled after it fruitlessly. As they stood and watched it wheeling, a voice called, “Come in, men,” and they went back perforce within their walls. + 

The first attack had lasted not much over half an hour; this time the ordeal by darkness and waiting was longer. William held himself tightly, ashamed of the weakness with which Wright had infected him and keeping it doggedly at bay; he talked when he could think of anything to talk about⁠—odd irrelevant fragments of whatever came into his head, anything to keep himself from listening. At one time he made a conscious and determined effort to turn his talk and his mind with it to something unconnected with air-raids; but always his speech, like that of his companions, came back to the thought of the moment. + 

“Do you remember,” he asked a man beside him, “what a fuss there was about the first Channel flight? I forget the fellow’s name⁠—a Frenchman?” + 

Someone supplied the name, “Bleriot,” out of the darkness. + 

“Yes, Bleriot⁠—that’s it.⁠ ⁠… Queer when you think of it. Nobody had any idea then what it would mean⁠—getting into cellars and hiding in the dark. If they had”⁠—he forced an attempt at a laugh⁠—“they wouldn’t have been so pleased.” + 

“No,” his neighbour agreed with him jocularly; “they wouldn’t have been so pleased. We thought we was all going to flap about like birds⁠—and instead the most of us go scuttling into holes like beetles what the cook’s trying to stamp on. That’s flying⁠—for them as don’t fly.” + 

“Yes,” said William, “that’s flying.” The beetle simile caught his fancy oddly, and he found himself contrasting it with his old idea of a soldier. After all, the beetle-warrior was a new development⁠—it was impossible to think of Napoleonic heroes as beetles. Yet if they were alive they would have to scuttle too⁠—even Murat the magnificent, and Ney, the Red Lion⁠ ⁠… + 

“When the next war comes,” his jocular neighbour was continuing, “every man that ain’t in the R.F.C. ’ull be crawling at the bottom of a coal-mine. And I don’t mind mentioning in confidence that if I saw a coal-mine ’andy I wouldn’t mind crawling down it now.” + 

“No,” said William, for the sake of speaking, “I don’t suppose you would.” He was trying to think of something further to say when he felt the man on his other side start perceptibly and stiffen in attention. Something caught at his throat and he could only whisper, “What is it?” + 

“He’s stopping his engine,” said the other quietly; and before William had time to ask what he meant the next bomb fell in the courtyard. + 

There was only one man wholly uninjured⁠—the terror-haunted Wright, who ran out, splashed with other men’s blood, took screaming to his heels and collapsed a mile along the road. There he lay till long after the bell of St. Nicholas had rung an “All Clear” to the town⁠—until long after the ambulances telephoned for from the hospitals outside had loaded up in the streets across which cordons had been drawn by military police and French firemen. Men and fragments of men were taken from the ruins, some speedily, some after much search; and among them Private Tully, past terror, but breathing, still alive but only alive. + 

He spoke but a few times after the explosion had broken him, and the men who lifted him on a stretcher to the ambulance and out of it could see that he suffered not at all; the shifting and handling that was torture to others left his maimed and mauled body unaffected. The injury to the spine that was killing him had bereft him of the power of pain as well as of the power of movement, and in the hospital, where a few minutes’ drive from the ruins landed him, he lay quietly alive for a day or two, for the most part dumb and unconscious, but with intervals of sense and lucid speech. Once, in such an interval, he whispered to the nurse that his wife, too, was buried in France; whereby she saw that he knew he was about to die. + 

Later he asked that someone would write to Edith Haynes, and tried to explain who she was. “No relation⁠—just a lady I know.⁠ ⁠… I should like her to hear.” + 

The last person he spoke to was a chaplain, a young man making his round of the ward, who, seeing intelligence in the pale blue eyes, bent over the bed to ask if there was anything he wanted. The chaplain had been warned by a sister that here was a hopeless case, and he spoke very gently and bent very low for the answer. + 

It drifted out faintly in a slow and expressionless whisper. + 

“No, thank you,” said William. “I don’t seem to have been much good⁠ ⁠… but there comes a time⁠ ⁠… when nothing matters.” + 

“Not even,” asked the chaplain, feeling his way, “the sense that you have done your duty?” + 

“Most people do that,” said William. “The question is⁠ ⁠… if you’ve been much use when you’ve done it.” + 

The chaplain, puzzled, said something of infinite mercy and the standard of God not being as the standard of man. + 

“If you’ve done your best⁠ ⁠…” he suggested. + 

“Most people do that,” said William again⁠ ⁠… and slid back once more into silence. + 

He was buried without mourners, save those detailed for the duty; who, none the less, stiffened in salute of his coffin and called him farewell on the bugle. His death, duly entered in the hospital books, was reported to the Casualty Department; and the Graves Registration clerks took note of his burial and filed it for possible inquiries. + 