Back to Life - Philip Gibbs

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of life, the relation of Christianity to war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune, who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging, bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all, the Press, that most of his fellow officers—apart from Fortune—thought he went “a bit too far.”

      Dear old Harding, who was Tory to the backbone, with a deep respect for all in authority, accused him of being a “damned revolutionary,” and for a moment it looked as though there would be hot words, until Brand laughed in a good-natured way and said, “My dear fellow, I’m only talking academic rot. I haven’t a conviction. Ever since the war began I have been trying to make head or tail of things in a sea-fog of doubt. All I know is that I want the bloody orgy to end, somehow and anyhow.”

      “With victory,” said Harding solemnly.

      “With the destruction of Prussian philosophy everywhere,” said Brand.

      They agreed on that, but I could see that Brand was on shifting ground and I knew, as our friendship deepened; that he was getting beyond a religion of mere hate, and was looking for some other kind of faith. Occasionally he harked back, as on the day in Lille when I walked by his side.

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      I dined with him in his mess that evening, before going on with him to spend an hour or two with Eileen O’Connor, who had a room in some convent on the outskirts of Lille. The advanced headquarters of this little group of officers had been established in one of those big private houses which belong to the rich manufacturers and business people of Lille (rich before the war, but with desolate factories stripped of all machinery during the German occupation and afterwards), with large, heavily-furnished rooms built round a courtyard and barred off from the street by the big front door. There was a motor lorry inside the door, which was wide open, and some orderlies were unloading camp-beds, boxes of maps, officers’ kit, a mahogany gramophone, and other paraphernalia, under the direction of a young cockney sergeant, who wanted to know why the blazes they didn’t look slippy.

      “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” he asked a stolid old soldier—one of the heroes of Mons—who was sitting on a case of whisky, with a wistful look, as though reflecting on the unfair privileges of officers with so much wealth of drink.

      “War’s all right if you’re not too close to it,” said the Mons hero. “I’ve seen enough. I’ve done my bleeding bit for King and country. South Africa, Egypt——”

      “Shut your jaw,” said the sergeant. “And down that blarsted gramophone.”

      “Ah!” said the Mons hero. “We didn’t ’ave no blarsted gramophones in South Africa. This is a different kind of war. More comfort about it, if you’re not in the trenches.”

      Wickham Brand took me through the courtyard and mentioned that the colonel had come up from St. Omer.

      “Now we’re sure to beat the Boche,” he said. “Listen!”

      From a room to the left of the courtyard came the sound of a flute playing one of Bach’s minuets, very sweetly, with an old-fashioned grace.

      “A wonderful army of ours!” said Brand. “I can’t imagine a German colonel of the Staff playing seventeenth century music on a bit of ivory while the enemy is fighting like a tiger at bay.”

      “Perhaps that’s our strength,” I answered. “Our amateurs refuse to take the war too seriously. I know a young gunner major who travels a banjo in his limber, and at Cambrai I saw fellows playing chuck-penny within ten yards of their pals’ dead bodies—a pile of them.”

      The colonel saw us through his window and waved his flute at us. When I went into the room, after a salute at the doorway, I saw that he had already littered it with artistic untidiness—sheets of torn music, water-colour sketches, books of poetry, and an array of splendid shining boots, of which a pair stood on the mahogany sideboard.

      “A beautiful little passage this,” said Colonel Lavington, smiling at me over the flute, which he put to his lips again. He played a bar or two of old-world melody, and said, “Isn’t that perfect? Can’t you see the little ladies in their ^puffed brocades and high-heeled shoes!”

      He had his faun-like look, his clean-shaven face with long nose and thin, humorous mouth, lighted up by his dark smiling eyes.

      “Not a bad headquarters,” he said, putting down the flute again. “If we can only stay here a little while, instead of having to jog on again. There’s an excellent piano in the dining-room, German, thank goodness—and Charles Fortune and I can really get down to some serious music.”

      “How’s the war?” I asked.

      “War?” he said absent-mindedly. “Oh, yes, the war! That’s going on all right. They’d be out of Tournai in a few days. Perhaps out of Maubeuge and Mons. Oh, the game’s up! Very soon the intellectuals will be looking round for a living in dear old London. My goodness, some of us will find peace a difficult job! I can see Boredom approaching with its colossal shadow. … After all, it has been a great game, on the whole.”

      I laughed, but something stuck in my throat. Colonel Lavington played the flute, but he knew his job, and was in touch with General Headquarters and all its secret information. It was obvious that he believed the war was going to end—soon. Soon, O Lord, after all the years of massacre.

      I blurted out a straight question.

      “Do you think there’s a real chance of peace?”

      The colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with a la, la, la.

      “Another month and our job’s done,” he said. “Have you heard that bit of Gluck? It’s delicious.”

      I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.

      At the mess table that night Charles Fortune was in good form. We sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way, with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from requisition as family heirlooms), and some rather good portraits of a French family—from the eighteenth century onwards—on the panelled walls. The concierge had told us that it had been the mess of a German headquarters and this gave Fortune his cue, and he entertained us with some caricatures of German generals and officers, amazingly comic. He drank his soup in the style of a German general and ate his potato pie as a German intelligence officer, who had once been a professor of psychology at Heidelberg.

      The little American doctor, “Daddy” Small, as we called him, had been made an honorary member of the mess, and he smiled at Fortune through his spectacles, with an air of delighted surprise that such things should be.

      “You English,” he said in his solemn way, “are the most baffling people in the world. I have been studying you since I came to France, and all my preconceived ideas have been knocked on the head. We Americans think you are a hard, arrogant, selfish people, without humour or sympathy, made in set moulds, turned out as types from your university and public schools. That is all wrong. I am beginning to see that you are more human, more various, more whimsical than any race in the world. You decline to take life seriously. You won’t take even death seriously. This war—you make a joke of it. The Germans—you kill them in great numbers, but you have a secret liking for them. Fortune’s caricatures are very comical—but not unkind. I believe Fortune is a pro-German. You cannot laugh at the people you hate. I believe England will forgive Germany quicker than any other nation—far quicker than the Americans. France, of course, will never forgive.”

      “No,”

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