9
I have written so much of Uppingham Speech Day because it was the one perfect summer idyll that I ever experienced, as well as my last care-free entertainment before the Flood. The lovely legacy of a vanished world, it is etched with minute precision on the tablets of my memory. Never again, for me and for my generation, was there to be any festival the joy of which no cloud would darken and no remembrance invalidate.
To my last week of mathematics and Latin I returned apprehensively enough - the more so since Oxford had begun, dimly and for the first time, to represent something more than the object of unmitigated ambition. I even permitted myself, at the close of a long day’s work, to visualise a pair of dark, intent eyes examining with me the Joshua Reynolds windows in New College Chapel, and to picture a scholar’s gown swinging up St Giles’s on its way to Somerville.
On July 20th, exactly a fortnight before the world as I had known it crashed into chaos, I went to Leek to take my Oxford Senior. As in the case of the earlier examination, I had been obliged to ascertain for myself the various regulations and the localities at which the papers could be taken, and had chosen Leek because my father, who motored every day from Buxton into Staffordshire, could put me down there on his way to the mills.
After two years of having been (so to speak) ‘grown-up’, it felt strange and a little humiliating to be examined in the airless atmosphere of Leek Technical School, surrounded by rough-looking and distinctly odoriferous sixteen-year-olds of both sexes. It was not a heroic setting for the final stage of my prolonged battle with persons and circumstances, and I left Leek with a depressed sense that I had certainly failed.
War had already broken out, and the map of Europe was undergoing daily transformation, when I learnt, in the last week of August, that my papers had reached the ‘required standard’. But instead of arousing congratulations, this news, coming when it did, provoked one of those breakfast-table scenes which were once common in our household, though they have long become legendary. No sooner had I, for the moment completely forgetting the state of Europe, begun proudly to announce this final triumph, when my father - though he soon relented - gave way to an outburst of fury. It was useless for me, he thundered, to think of going to Oxford now this War was on; in a few months’ time we should probably all find ourselves in the Workhouse!
An unexpected scolding seemed a hard reward for a year’s steady work. For some moments a sharp family altercation ensued, I, fortified by my full share of the ancestral explosiveness, hotly pointing out how many obstacles I had surmounted, and my father - violent in speech though always generous in action when once convinced of its necessity - fulminating furiously against the Government, the Germans, the financial situation at the mills, and the trouble and expense that we were all causing him. The controversy ended, none too satisfactorily, with Edward remarking, placidly but firmly, that if I could not be sent to Oxford he wouldn’t go either.
For the time being I simmered wrathfully in anger and hopeless resentment. By means of what then appeared to have been a very long struggle, I had made for myself a way of escape from my hated provincial prison - and now the hardly-won road to freedom was to be closed for me by a Serbian bomb hurled from the other end of Europe at an Austrian archduke.
It is not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me an infuriating personal interruption rather than a world-wide catastrophe.
3
Oxford versus War
AUGUST, 1914
God said: ‘Men have forgotten Me;
The souls that sleep shall wake again,
And blinded eyes be taught to see.’
So, since redemption comes through pain,
He smote the earth with chastening rod,
And brought destruction’s lurid reign;
But where His desolation trod,
The people in their agony
Despairing cried: ‘There is no God !’
V. B. 1914. From Verses of a V.A.D.
1
My diary for August 3rd, 1914, contains a most incongruous mixture of war and tennis.
The day was Bank Holiday, and a tennis tournament had been arranged at the Buxton Club. I had promised to play with my discouraged but still faithful suitor, and did not in the least want to forgo the amusement that I knew this partnership would afford me - particularly as the events reported in the newspapers seemed too incredible to be taken quite seriously.
‘I do not know,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘how we all managed to play tennis so calmly and take quite an interest in the result. I suppose it is because we all know so little of the real meaning of war that we are so indifferent. B. and I had to owe 30. It was good handicapping as we had a very close game with everybody.’
In spite of my vague memories of the South African campaigns, Spion Kop and Magersfontein were hardly more real to me than the battles between giants and mortals in the Andrew Lang fairy-books that I began to read soon afterwards. My father had taken Edward and myself round Macclesfield in a cab on Mafeking Night, and I had a confused recollection of fireworks and bonfires and excited shouting which were never clearly distinguished in my mind from the celebrations for Edward the Seventh’s postponed coronation.
Throughout July, and especially after the failure of the Home Rule Conference and the agitation over the Dublin shooting, there had been prayers in all the churches for salvation from the danger of civil war in Ireland, and to those of us who, wrapped up in our careers or our games or our love-affairs, had paid no attention to the newspapers, the direction from which the storm was rolling was quite unexpected. At St Monica’s, Miss Heath Jones, with the accurate foresight of the vigilant, had endeavoured to prepare our sceptical minds for disasters that she believed to be very near; I remembered her gravity in 1911 at the time of the Agadir crisis, and the determination with which, when she and my aunt were visiting Buxton a year or two earlier, she had made me accompany her to the local theatre to see a play that I had thought crude and ridiculous, called An Englishman’s Home. At school we had treated her obsession with the idea of a European War as one of those adult preoccupations to which the young feel so superior. ‘She’s got her old German mania again,’ we said.
But when I arrived home warm and excited from the amusing stimulus of the tournament, the War was brought nearer than it had yet been by the unexpected appearance of Edward - whom I had supposed to be at Aldershot - still wearing his O.T.C. uniform.
The previous midnight, he told me, they had had orders from the War Office to disband and vanish as quickly as possible; the cooks and military apparatus were required for purposes more urgent than schoolboy manœuvres. He had made his way home between southern trains congested and disorganised by troops hastening to join their regiments, leaving a few seniors - such as Roland - to clear up the camp.
A sudden chill momentarily banished my self-satisfaction as I saw him looking so handsome and fit and efficient; that brief misgiving was my first realisation that a war of the size which was said to be impending was unlikely to remain excitingly but securely confined to the columns of newspapers. So I made myself face what seemed the worst that could possibly happen to us.
‘I was glad to see him back,’ I wrote of Edward that evening, ‘though if matters become extreme it is not impossible that he being a member of the O.T.C. may be called up for home defence.’
After that events moved, even in Buxton, very quickly. The German cousins of some local acquaintances left the town in a panic. My parents rushed over in the car to familiar shops in Macclesfield and Leek, where they laid in stores of cheese, bacon and butter under the generally shared impression that by next week we might all be besieged by the Germans. Wild rumours circulated from mouth to mouth; they were more plentiful than the newspapers, over which a free fight broke out on the station platform every time a batch came by train from London or Manchester. Our elderly cook, who had three Reservist sons, dissolved into continuous tears and was too much upset to prepare the
meals with her usual competence; her young daughter-in-law, who had had a baby only the previous Friday, became hysterical and had to be forcibly restrained from getting up and following her husband to the station. One or two Buxton girls were hurriedly married to officers summoned to unknown destinations. Pandemonium swept over the town. Holiday trippers wrestled with one another for the Daily Mail; habitually quiet and respectable citizens struggled like wolves for the provisions in the food-shops, and vented upon the distracted assistants their dismay at learning that all prices had suddenly gone up.
My diary for those few days reflects The Times in its most pontifical mood. ‘Germany has broken treaty after treaty, and disregarded every honourable tie with other nations . . . Germany has destroyed the tottering hopes of peace . . . The great fear is that our bungling Government will declare England’s neutrality . . . If we at this critical juncture refuse to help our friend France, we should be guilty of the grossest treachery.’
I prefer to think that my real sentiments were more truly represented by an entry written nearly a month later after the fabulously optimistic reports of the Battle of Le Cateau. I had been over to Newcastle-under-Lyme to visit the family dentist, and afterwards sat for an hour in a tree-shadowed walk called The Brampton and meditated on the War. It was one of those shimmering autumn days when every leaf and flower seems to scintillate with light, and I found it ‘very hard to believe that not far away men were being slain ruthlessly, and their poor disfigured bodies heaped together and crowded in ghastly indiscrimination into quickly provided common graves as though they were nameless vermin . . . It is impossible,’ I concluded, ‘to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilisation.’
Only that day I had heard from my dentist that a hundred thousand Russians had been landed in England; ‘a whole trainful of them,’ I reported, ‘is said to have passed through Stoke, so that is why the Staffordshire people are so wise.’ But when I returned to Buxton I learnt that a similar contingent had been seen in Manchester, and for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at every tea-table throughout the country.
By the time, however, that we started believing in Russians, England had become almost accustomed to the War. On the night that the British ultimatum to Germany expired, I went up to Higher Buxton for a meeting of the University Extension Committee, to which I had recently been elected; we took only a moment to decide to do nothing until the never very ardent local zest for learning re-emerged from its total eclipse by the European deluge, so I spent the rest of the evening in wandering round the town. I read, with a feeling that I had been transported back into an uglier century, the mobilisation order on the door of the Town Hall; I joined the excited little group round the Post Office to watch a number of local worthies who had suddenly donned their Territorial uniforms and were driving importantly about in motorcars with their wives or their chauffeurs at the wheel. Later, on my way home, I found the Pavilion Gardens deserted, and a depressed and very much diminished band playing lugubriously to rows of empty chairs.
My feet ached, and my head whirled dizzily from the vain endeavour to take in what was happening. To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books. In spite of the efforts of Miss Heath Jones and other intelligent teachers, ‘current events’ had remained for us unimportant precisely because they were national; they represented something that must be followed in the newspapers but would never, conceivably, have to be lived. What really mattered were not these public affairs, but the absorbing incidents of our own private lives - and now, suddenly, the one had impinged upon the other, and public events and private lives had become inseparable . . . Uneasily I recalled a passage from Daniel Deronda that I had read in comfortable detachment the year before:
‘There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives - when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war . . . Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested and . . . life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty.’
Edward, whose risks, whatever happened, were likely to be greater than mine, took the whole situation more calmly, as he always took everything. On that evening of August 4th he had gone serenely to the local Hippodrome with a Buxton friend, Maurice Ellinger, who had been with him at school. Maurice was a cousin of the musical comedy actress, Desirée Ellinger, who in those days often stayed in Buxton, a tiny dark doll of a girl about my own age. Her real name was Dorothy; she seemed very childish and often came to our house to sing, in the lovely young voice which she then intended for Grand Opera, Elizabeth’s Prayer from Tannhäuser or the Jewel Song from Faust to my capricious accompaniment.
Already the two boys were discussing, though quite vaguely, the possibilities of enlisting. When they returned from the Hippodrome they brought back a ‘Late Special’ which told us that no answer had been received from Germany, and Edward related, with much amusement, how he had seen a German waiter thrown over the wall of the Palace Hotel.
For the next few weeks we all suffered from the epidemic of wandering about that had seized everyone in the town. After the tearing-up of the ‘scrap of paper’, the Daily Mail had a heart-ravishing leader called ‘The Agony of Belgium’ which made us feel guilty and miserable. At home the atmosphere was electric with family rows, owing to Edward’s expressed wish to ‘do something’. The suggestions put forward with such authoritarian impressiveness by the Headmaster of Uppingham and the O.T.C. organisers had already served their purpose in the national exploitation of youth by its elders; the ‘Three Musketeers’, like so many others, were not only willing but anxious to risk their lives in order to save the face of a Foreign Secretary who had committed his country to an armed policy without consulting it beforehand.
My father vehemently forbade Edward, who was still under military age, to join anything whatsoever. Having himself escaped immersion in the public-school tradition, which stood for militaristic heroism unimpaired by the damping exercise of reason, he withheld his permission for any kind of military training, and ended by taking Edward daily to the mills to divert his mind from the War. Needless to say, these uncongenial expeditions entirely failed of their desired effect, and constant explosions - to which, having inherited so many of my father’s characteristics, I seemed only to add by my presence - made our house quite intolerable. A new one boiled up after each of Edward’s tentative efforts at defiance, and these were numerous, for his enforced subservience seemed to him synonymous with everlasting disgrace. One vague application for a commission which he sent to a Notts and Derby regiment actually was forwarded to the War Office - ‘from which,’ I related with ingenuous optimism, ‘we are expecting to hear every post.’
When my father discovered this exercise of initiative, his wrath and anxiety reached the point of effervescence. Work of any kind was quite impossible in the midst of so much chaos and apprehension, and letters to Edward from Roland, describing his endeavours to get a commission in a Norfolk regiment, did nothing to ease the perpetual tension. Even after the result of my Oxford Senior came through, I abandoned in despair the Greek textbooks that Roland had lent me. I even took to knitting for the soldiers, though only for a very short time; utterly incompetent at all forms of needlework, I found the simplest bed-socks and sleeping-helmets altogether beyond me. ‘Oh, how I wish I could wake up in the morning,’ concludes one typical day’s entry describing these
commotions, ‘to find this terrible war the dream it seems to me to be!’
2
Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to lie. By the end of August, when Lie‘ge and Namur had fallen, and the misfortunes of the British Army were extending into the Retreat from Mons, the ladies of the Buxton élite had already set to work to provincialise the War.
At the First Aid and Home Nursing classes they cluttered about the presiding doctor like hens round a barnyard cock, and one or two representatives of ‘the set’, who never learnt any of the bandages correctly themselves, went about showing everybody else how to do them. In order to have something to take me away from the stormy atmosphere at home, I went in for and passed both of these elementary examinations, at which stout ‘patients’, sitting on the floor with flushed and worried faces, were treated for various catastrophes by palpitating and still stouter ‘nurses’.
An hotel in the main street, Spring Gardens, was turned into a Red Cross Supply Depot, where ‘helpers’ went to listen to the gossip that would otherwise have been carried on more privately over tea-tables. They wasted so much material in the amateur cutting-out of monstrous shirts and pyjamas, that in the end a humble local dressmaker whom my mother employed for our summer cottons had to be called in to do the real work, while the polite female society of Buxton stalked up and down the hotel rooms, rolled a few bandages, and talked about the inspiration of helping one’s country to win the War. One or two would-be leaders of fashion paraded continually through the town in new Red Cross uniforms. Dressed in their most elaborate lace underclothing, they offered themselves as patients to would-be bandagers and bed-makers, and one of them disliked me intensely because, in a zestful burst of vigour, I crumpled the long frills of her knickers by tucking them firmly into the bed.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 11
