The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  You will shortly be hearing of that new school of psychology, or maybe you have heard of it already, which, after long and far-adventuring research and experiment, has established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient. Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in the world; they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that it was brainwashed out of us; for it is demanded of us by our immediate environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. Gradually, our know-all brain-cells are blacked out, although traces remain in some individuals in the form of ESP,1 and in the adults of some primitive tribes.

  It is not a new theory. Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof is now ready and to hand. Perhaps the final touches are being put to the new manifesto in some cell at Harvard University. Any day now it will be given to the world, and the world will be convinced.

  Let me therefore get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed by the curious behaviour of the two-legged mammals around me. There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost their sons. I slept a great deal. Let them go and find their sons. It was like the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated to my care was always losing. These careless women in black lost their husbands and their brothers. Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed over my cradle. I was not amused.

  ‘Babies never really smile till they’re three months old,’ said my mother. ‘They’re not supposed to smile till they’re three months old.’

  My brother, aged six, marched up and down with a toy rifle over his shoulder:

  The Grand old Duke of York

  He had ten thousand men;

  He marched them up to the top of the hill

  And he marched them down again.

  And when they were up, they were up.

  And when they down, they were down.

  And when they were neither down nor up

  They were neither up nor down.2

  ‘Just listen to him!’

  ‘Look at him with his rifle!’

  I was about ten days old when Russia stopped fighting. I tuned in to the Czar, a prisoner, with the rest of his family, since evidently the country had put him off his throne and there had been a revolution not long before I was born. Everyone was talking about it. I tuned in to the Czar. ‘Nothing would ever induce me to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk,’3 he said to his wife. Anyway, nobody had asked him to.

  At this point I was sleeping twenty hours a day to get my strength up. And from what I discerned in the other four hours of the day I knew I was going to need it. The Western Front on my frequency was sheer blood, mud, dismembered bodies, blistering crashes, hectic flashes of light in the night skies, explosions, total terror. Since it was plain I had been born into a bad moment in the history of the world, the future bothered me, unable as I was to raise my head from the pillow and as yet only twenty inches long. ‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird,’4 D. H. Lawrence was writing to somebody. Dreary old creeping Jesus. I fell asleep.

  Red sheets of flame shot across the sky. It was 21 March, the fiftieth day of my life, and the German Spring Offensive had started before my morning feed. Infinite slaughter. I scowled at the scene, and made an effort to kick out. But the attempt was feeble. Furious, and impatient for some strength, I wailed for my feed. After which I stopped wailing but continued to scowl.

  The Grand old Duke of York

  He had ten thousand men …

  They rocked the cradle. I never heard a sillier song. Over in Berlin and Vienna the people were starving, freezing, striking, rioting and yelling in the streets. In London everyone was bustling to work and muttering that it was time the whole damn business was over.

  The big people around me bared their teeth; that meant a smile, it meant they were pleased or amused. They spoke of ration cards for meat and sugar and butter.

  ‘Where will it all end?’

  I went to sleep. I woke and tuned in to Bernard Shaw who was telling someone to shut up.5 I switched over to Joseph Conrad who, strangely enough, was saying precisely the same thing. I still didn’t think it worth a smile, although it was expected of me any day now. I got on to Turkey. Women draped in black huddled and chattered in their harems; yak-yak-yak. This was boring, so I came back to home base.

  In and out came and went the women in British black. My mother’s brother, dressed in his uniform, came coughing. He had been poison-gassed in the trenches. ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’6 declaimed Marshal Foch, the old swine. He was now Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces. My uncle coughed from deep within his lungs, never to recover but destined to return to the Front. His brass buttons gleamed in the firelight. I weighed twelve pounds by now; I stretched and kicked for exercise, seeing that I had a lifetime before me, coping with this crowd. I took six feeds a day and kept most of them down by the time the Vindictive was sunk in Ostend harbour,7 on which day I kicked with special vigour in my bath.

  In France the conscripted soldiers leapfrogged over the dead on the advance and littered the fields with limbs and hands, or drowned in the mud. The strongest men on all fronts were dead before I was born. Now the sentries used bodies for barricades and the fighting men were unhealthy from the start. I checked my toes and my fingers, knowing I was going to need them. The Playboy of the Western World8 was playing at the Court Theatre in London, but occasionally I beamed over to the House of Commons, which made me drop off gently to sleep. Generally, I preferred the Western Front where one got the true state of affairs. It was essential to know the worst, blood and explosions and all, for one had to be prepared, as the Boy Scouts said. Virginia Woolf yawned and reached for her diary. Really, I preferred the Western Front.

  In the fifth month of my life I could raise my head from my pillow and hold it up. I could grasp the objects that were held out to me. Some of these things rattled and squawked. I gnawed on them to get my teeth started. ‘She hasn’t smiled yet?’ said the dreary old aunties. My mother, on the defensive, said I was probably one of those late smilers. On my wavelength Pablo Picasso was getting married9 and early in that month of July the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary10 was celebrated in joyous pomp at St Paul’s Cathedral. They drove through the streets of London with their children. Twenty-five years of domestic happiness. A lot of fuss and ceremonial handing over of swords went on at the Guildhall where the King and Queen received a cheque for £53,000 to dispose of for charity as they thought fit. Tout le monde à la bataille! Income tax in England had reached six shillings in the pound. Everyone was talking about the Silver Wedding, yak-yak-yak, and ten days later the Czar and his family, now in Siberia, were invited to descend to a little room in the basement.11 Crack, crack, went the guns; screams and blood all over the place, and that was the end of the Romanoffs. I flexed my muscles. ‘A fine healthy baby,’ said the doctor; which gave me much satisfaction.

  Tout le monde à la bataille! That included my gassed uncle. My health had improved to the point where I was able to crawl in my playpen. Bertrand Russell was still cheerily in prison for writing something seditious about pacifism.12 Tuning in as usual to the Front Lines it looked as if the Germans were winning all the battles yet losing the war. And so it was. The upper-income people were upset about the income tax at six shillings to the pound. But all women over thirty got the vote. ‘It seems a long time to wait,’ said one of my drab old aunts, aged twenty-two. The speeches in the House of Commons
always sent me to sleep which was why I missed, at the actual time, a certain oration by Mr Asquith13 following the Armistice on 11 November. Mr Asquith was a greatly esteemed former prime minister later to be an earl, and had been ousted by Mr Lloyd George. I clearly heard Asquith, in private, refer to Lloyd George as ‘that damned Welsh goat’.14

  The Armistice was signed and I was awake for that. I pulled myself on to my feet with the aid of the bars of my cot. My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table. One of my mother’s black-draped friends recited:

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  At some disputed barricade,

  When spring comes back with rustling shade

  And apple blossoms fill the air –

  I have a rendezvous with Death.15

  Most of the poets, they said, had been killed. The poetry made them dab their eyes with clean white handkerchiefs.

  Next February on my first birthday, there was a birthday-cake with one candle. Lots of children and their elders. The war had been over two months and twenty-one days. ‘Why doesn’t she smile?’ My brother was to blow out the candle. The elders were talking about the war and the political situation. Lloyd George and Asquith. Asquith and Lloyd George. I remembered recently having switched on to Mr Asquith at a private party where he had been drinking a lot. He was playing cards and when he came to cut the cards he tried to cut a large box of matches by mistake. On another occasion I had seen him putting his arm around a lady’s shoulder in a Daimler motor car,16 and generally behaving towards her in a very friendly fashion. Strangely enough she said, ‘If you don’t stop this nonsense immediately I’ll order the chauffeur to stop and I’ll get out.’ Mr Asquith replied, ‘And pray, what reason will you give?’ Well anyway it was my feeding time.

  The guests arrived for my birthday. It was so sad, said one of the black widows, so sad about Wilfred Owen who was killed so late in the war, and she quoted from a poem of his:

  What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.17

  The children were squealing and toddling around. One was sick and another wet the floor and stood with his legs apart gaping at the puddle. All was mopped up. I banged my spoon on the table of my high chair.

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

  At midnight in some flaming town;

  When spring trips north again this year,

  And I to my pledged word am true,

  I shall not fail that rendezvous.

  More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the Armistice were so apt…’

  They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’

  ‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.

  ‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! I recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part…”’18

  That did it. I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.

  ‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.

  The cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and house-trained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

  ROBERT GROSSMITH

  COMPANY

  Ever since the old woman, his niece, left the house and joined their vaporous host, he had spent the day idly wandering from room to room in the grip of ancient memories. Here was the room he was born in, here the attic he played in as a lad, the log cabin, crow’s nest, castle turret of his solitary, always solitary fantasies; here the bathroom where he passed a guilty adolescence poring over chiaroscuro nudes in fear and circumspection; here the room he died in, not yet a man, lungs full of mustard gas, already turning vaporous. They were all dead now of course, his mother, father, sisters, grandparents, even the old woman, his niece, all together again, though hardly a family. The blood-ties that had seemed to bind them while alive had loosened with the prospect of a common eternity, blood after all proving no thicker than air. No, it was the memories that held him, the memories he subsisted on, like a diet of ersatz foodstuffs, knowing he would never taste real nourishment again.

  It was therefore with something resembling a sense of physical pleasure that, sitting one day at the foot of the stairs gazing glumly at the worn patterns on the carpet, his attention was alerted by the bright metallic tinkling of a key in the lock. He looked up, doubting the evidence of his phantom senses. With an ill-fitting shudder the door burst open to admit a wedge of dusted sunlight and three haloed figures, almost transparent in the light.

  The corpulent sales-pitching estate agent – for such he took him to be – led the prospective buyers into the hall, a handsome smiling couple in their thirties. Ignoring the agent’s patter, they surveyed the gloomy baroque interior with a sceptical eye, taking in at a single glance the high dust-dark ceiling, the peeling paintwork, antique banister, heavy oak-panelled doors. Of course it needed some work doing on it, the old woman had let it get into quite a state as you could see, but nothing a good sweep and a few coats of paint wouldn’t fix.

  He stood up and joined the group in the kitchen, nodding his agreement. As for the structural condition of the building, it was really first-rate – well, the surveyor’s report would confirm that – and it couldn’t be better situated as far as local services were concerned. He followed the trio from room to room, admiring with them the view of the fens from the upstairs windows, echoing the estate agent’s paean to the housebuilders of yore, endorsing his exaggerated claims about the costs of heating and upkeep. It was surprising, they’d find the fuel bills were actually quite low, the walls retained the heat, you see, and –

  Well, they’d think about it. It was a bit bigger than they’d had in mind, they only had one child, a little girl (a little girl!), but on the other hand they had to admit they did like it, it had a sort of friendly lived-in feel, didn’t it, Clive?

  Time passed, the surveyor did his surveying, other viewers came to view, and somewhat to his surprise the couple returned, complete with rubber plants, budgie, colour TV, modern aluminium-frame furniture and their little girl, Angela, four. He took to her instantly, as she took to the house. The bright green, improbably large eyes, the head of dark ringlets that tumbled as she ran, the dimpled cheeks, the freckles, the busy legs pounding the stairs–‘It’s like a castle, Mummy!’–there was something in her so saturated with vibrancy, vitality, that one could almost have persuaded oneself that decay was an illusion. Who would dare predict that one day this hair would be white, these gums toothless, this delicate blooming skin as blotched and tough as old shoe leather? As his fondness for her grew and he began to appreciate the depths of emotional attachment of which he was still unexpectedly capable, it struck him that what he was experiencing was a kind of love; a chaste, fraternal or paternal love, as befitted his condition.

  At first he was conte
nt to remain in the role of onlooker. Settling below the ceiling in the corner of the room where she played, he would gratefully observe her solitary games, eavesdrop shamelessly on her conversations with her dolls, beguiled by her guileless charms. When bedtime came he would follow her upstairs, installing himself on top of her wardrobe or like a dog at the foot of her bed, watching over her through the night. It was as if, through her, he was able to live again, to recover a vicarious existence of his own. He waited impatiently for her return each day from school, cursed the sunshine that took her out to play in the garden, dreaded the inevitable summer holidays and impromptu weekends away that deprived him of her company, leaving him alone in the vast desert empire of his solitude, murdering time till her return. He was happiest when she was sick and forced to keep to her bed; nothing too serious, a chill would do, or a mild lingering tummy upset. Sometimes, when especially lonely and bold, he would sidle in beside her, nestling his formless form against her sleeping curves, enfolding her with his fleshless arms. He managed not to waste time dwelling on the future – her future of course, he had none, or rather too much of it – on what would happen when she grew up and – well, he managed not to think of such things.

  The idea took shape slowly. After all, he didn’t want to frighten her. Besides, he knew how the others scorned such diversions. Accept the facts, they said or seemed to imply (they seldom spoke), the world of the living is lost to you for ever, you have no place there, let it go. Most of the others had made the transition successfully. The earthly world had faded for them, dimmed, dissolved, grown remote and insubstantial, as spectral in their eyes as their world was to the living.

  But the idea would not go away, it pursued him, niggled at him, refused to let him rest. If only he could become her friend, her secret friend, no one else need know. They both needed a friend. What possible harm could there be in that?