A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “You’ll be allowed what is necessary.”

  He took pens—fortunately each was filled with its coloured ink, red, green, and brown—and paper, as they were necessary to him, and led the way downstairs.

  Outside in the road stood two large black saloon motor cars. The sergeant of the Crabbe police station stood by them. He wore a black holster at his waist, and looked smart and severe. He had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. P.C. Bunnied, the local policeman, stood beside him. Both avoided looking at him.

  Phillip had often discussed things with the local copper before the war. Recently P.C. Bunnied had reported that, in 1938, Capt. Maddison had told him the war would start in September, 1939. Phillip had merely repeated what Birkin had told him.

  Now P.C. Bunnied got in the back of the leading black car, to be followed by the prisoner and the sergeant. The plain-clothes men followed in the second car. Down the narrow village street, its shabbiness sliding back out of sight, to the cross-roads. There stood Horatio Bugg, his mouth open. Phillip flipped a hand at the familiar face, part of receding life.

  In his mind he saw Horatio hurrying to tell others, to be first with the news. He would feel important at last in the eyes of the village which did not think much of him, since he had let the rag, bone and rabbit skin business, inherited from an industrious father, go more or less to pot.

  The convoy drew up outside a sandbagged brick building in a lower street of Crabbe. A sense of unreality was now beginning to envelop the prisoner so that one or two people in the quiet sunlit street were seen as insubstantial figures, as flat surfaces without purpose in the eyes’ retinae. He hoped he was not looking white, that he would not turn dizzy as he passed through the door with several men enclosing him, depriving him of conscious being, detaching him from the light of the sky, himself motivated only by their will.

  If only he had rejoined the Gaultshires at the beginning of the war. Now he was standing by a varnished counter, emptying his pockets as he had been ordered to do—pulling forth a piece of string, a leather button, a magneto spanner, eight matches in a broken box, a halfpenny with a hole in it tied to a bootlace with which he sometimes played with kittens.

  He remembered the black-jack in the bottom drawer of the chest-of-drawers in his bedroom—a whippy affair of rubber and black leather covering a leaden knob, with a leather loop to fasten round the wrist. He had bought it for a joke, together with a silver bootlegging hip-flask, several years before. And would they find the white swastikas on the bonnet of the Alvis under the coat of black paint? Should he speak of them now? No, lest he involve ‘Boy’ Runnymeade.

  His bag was being turned out. Pyjamas, slippers, tooth-brush, shaving things, writing pad, three fountain pens and BBB pencil for sub-editing. The items were entered in the record book together with the piece of string, the button, the spanner, the box of matches, and the halfpenny with bootlace. A touch on the arm, and he followed his gaoler down a dark passage. Pause before door, while keys jingled and rattled. He entered, door was shut behind him, keys rattled again.

  Well, back again for more ‘porridge’. Would they have the record of that month of October 1919 in Wormwood Scrubs? He sat on a trestle bed and swung his legs. He told himself that the whole thing was amusing. Then to relax he made a pillow of the brown blanket and stretched himself on the boards, hands under head. Remain calm. Practise deep-breathing, induce slow rhythm to keep the mind from racing like a hare.

  Deep-breathing brought a feeling of giddiness so he got up and looked about him. The door was of rusty sheet-iron, covering wood. It appeared to have been kicked and banged many times. There was a square aperture about ten inches wide and deep in the top centre. An unpleasant door. In the corner beyond it was a cubic affair of tongue-and-grooved wood with a thicker wood lid in its centre, and probably a pail under it.

  The cell was vault-like with an arched brick roof from which hung an electric light bulb. The trestle-bed and the fixed commode were the only furniture. He walked about, and, inspection completed, lay down on the trestle again, closing his eyes to relax, trying to void himself of thought. He recalled the story of General Sir Hubert Gough awakened by an A.D.C. when the barrage first fell on the Fifth Army front at St. Quentin at 4.40 a.m. on the 21st March, 1918, to be told that von Hutier’s assault with six thousand guns had begun. He decided to sleep for the next five hours, knowing he could do nothing until reports from corps began to come in. Unflappable ‘Goughie’, faced with an overwhelming, out-numbering assault upon his few divisions, composed himself to sleep; and he did sleep—the last sleep for several days.

  *

  The prisoner tried to compose himself, to remain calm, and to ignore the hare-doubling mind. For about a minute he lay deliberately inert, then the whistle of a train made him remember that the new elevator was at Crabbe Station, the hay was lying in windrows on Bustard and Steep, the day was fine, the sun outside was shining, and who but himself would know when to pull the rows into heaps with the horse-toppler, to make those heaps into cocks when neither claggy nor bleached of their goodness. Nobody cared about his way in any big or small detail; not a soul inside or outside the family. Perhaps after all he was a man with a warped mentality.

  Yet he had only asked for things to be done in the spirit of truth. The Steep hay was fine hay, with plenty of bottom—red suckling and Dutch white clover—the only proper hay ever grown on the farm in years, properly drilled on a proper seed-bed—but at what nervous cost of opposition. The elevator, too, in the truck would be ‘subject to demurrage’—rent at perhaps 10s. a day while the truck in which it stood in the ‘goods’ siding remained idle. It was Friday, to-morrow was Saturday. Would Luke take the mare and bring it home? The cast-iron wheels must be oiled before the 4-mile journey. It was new, why should axles ever wear out if always properly oiled?

  Of course all this opposition was the effect of causes. From the beginning of conscious life the labourer’s child had learned to be evasive in order to avoid distress. Its mind was formed in an unreal world wherein most parsons preached what they did not practise, most schoolmasters uttered unlistenable stuff, and most people with money tried to get as much as they could out of the working man who was chucked out of work the moment he fell ill or some new bit of machinery came along to save labour.

  Poor Hodge. He thought that the masters didn’t care. A labouring man might starve for all they cared. Part of the bosses’ creed was to get labouring blokes to do all sorts of tiddling little things, to save labour, to get more money into their pockets. Luke’s point of view was logical. Wasn’t there enough hard graft about already without tiddling little things such as greasing this, oiling that, and wanting stables to look like a Heathmarket set-up?

  A £10 million loan to Rumania at the top, an ungreased axle at the bottom—that was the System. Dear Hereward Awake, imprisoned because he believed that machinery—some other man’s thought and heart made material—should be properly looked after: because he declared his belief that the man who worked it should also be properly looked after. Birkin who had said, ‘I cannot see my country sink without trace’: Birkin silent and still in a cell and nothing he could say or do now, nothing, nothing, NOTHING would alter that fact.

  Phillip paced up and down the cell telling himself to be quiet, to be like General Gough, who had been dismissed by Lloyd George from command of the Fifth Army after forty-seven German divisions under von Hutier had over-run eleven under-strength British divisions in line with only six divisions in reserve. A week of constant fighting across the old grass-grown Somme battlefield, the Red Fox dragging a mud-balled brush in retreat and then the Cur of Downing Street had done what the German hounds hadn’t be able to do—broken up the Red Fox—and ‘Goughie’, despite Haig’s protest, had been sent home.

  If ‘Goughie’ could remain calm under all that fell upon him, so could he: though mental anguish was perhaps worse in inaction than in action. In fact, there was no anguish in action, not for the troops, an
yway. Desperate tiredness, but no anguish.

  *

  Thus an idle mind harassed its physical vehicle all the afternoon, moving from cause to effect, from effect to cause, from trade-clash to bomb-crash, hovering over Vimy Ridge with its new dead, its crumpled German and English bodies lying as on that ninth day of April long ago, exposed grey belly-muscles bullet-ripped with ragged vest, some with shell-burnt tunics, others with dark red suffused bruises of the hurt-to-death bodies asprawl in the clover grass and wild wheat in the long and lark-flittering slope before Arras; and perhaps another poet of England lying dead, another mirror of England shattered.

  Be still, and know that I am God. Be still, my son. I am not afraid, Mother; but I am just a little sad.

  Keys rattled. The door opened. The sergeant’s face appeared. “I’ll be bringing you some tea shortly,” he said. “And my wife thought you might care to see a newspaper.”

  His friendliness meant much when the door was locked again. Phillip lay back on the bed and opened the paper.

  On one page was an account of Fifth Column Activities in Belgium. ‘Spies’ and ‘traitors’ had been seen flashing lights in hotels at night during the German advance to attract German bombers.

  Because next door to the Army Pay Corps? Or the Socks Washing Outfit had opened an emergency depot there? Or some Railway Transport Officer had been eating a hasty meal of eggs and chips with O.K. Sauce?

  Of course the reporters, fed mentally on their own fiction called news-stories, didn’t really believe that a spy would signal to a bomber at five thousand feet to release bombs which to strike near the signaller would have to be released anything up to a mile before being directly overhead the target.

  The Fleet Street skite-hawks didn’t really believe that the Jerry pilots could only operate with the help of pocket torches flashed from temporary bedrooms in hotels. They probably knew that the refugee torch-flashers were only seeking another kind of jerry under the bed.

  But perhaps they did believe the stories they telegraphed, of spies descending under parachutes dressed as priests, ice-cream vendors, dirty-postcard-sellers, and whatnot floating to earth in British, French, and Belgian uniforms?

  How many sweat-soaked Allied pilots, baling out, had been lynched by fear-mad mobs and the ‘news’ reported or misreported as Fifth Column Activity?

  These skite-hawks were the real Fifth Column, helping the enemy with rumours in print.

  But what was shocking was an account of Belgian farmers who had been shot by a Guards Brigade. According to the account several farmers had betrayed British gun-positions to the Germans—gun-positions which had been hastily taken up behind the Dial line. There, farmers had started to cut their hay in the fields before the new gun-positions. This had been seen from the air and the farmers had ‘paid a summary penalty for their treachery’. O Jesu, those inexperienced rookies had shot those poor little helpless Belgian farmers.

  The scene could be imagined. Terse questions asked by some townee soldier with no perspective beyond Chelsea, Caterham, Mayfair, and the Stock Exchange, conditioned by reading pre-war spy-fiction: townees in uniform who hadn’t the slightest idea of the misery of any farmer in a war seeing his vital hay about to be trampled by troops, any troops. In God’s name, what decent farmer wouldn’t start to cut his hay at once, before it was hopelessly mucked up—hay vital for his stock during the dreaded months of February and March, when the beasts, all imported foods stopped, began to ‘blaw’ because their bellies were not filled.

  The hare of his mind began to run in circles. Can’t you see it is 1914 all over again? Listen to me Chettwood, Ruche, and you, star-writer of that picture paper who in 1938 wrote that you hoped that a young English lady, friend of Germany, would be manhandled by a crowd of men in Hyde Park one afternoon in 1938. Listen, blast your stupidity, you who were little boys or babies when my generation was dunging with rotten death these same farmers’ fields. In those days the current-fiction was the Flemish spy ploughing his field with white horses, ploughing an arrow pointing to the position of gun-pits two or three fields away! Taube pilots, flying overhead, followed the arrow-pointing furrows and so observed the gun-pits: and the next minute Jack Johnsons and Coalboxes had blown the guns to hell. All lies, concocted into a short story by ‘Sapper’. But this is not even stuff for ‘a poet’s tearful fooling’, is it, Wilfred Owen? Where now, my wraith, is your heroic humanitarian stand for truth and beauty? Several little semi-inarticulate Flemish farmers have been shot peremptorily because they cut their hay before it was spoiled by scrounging soldiers. So logical in a world wherein the murder-mystery or ‘thriller’ is the favourite literature of parsons and politicians! Cobbett dropped into the waste-paper basket.

  Telling himself to keep calm, Phillip sat on the trestle wishing he were in France, under the rain of Stuka bombs, upon a field of wheat sprung from the compost of his generation, there to join them forever away from this bloody world. ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

  A key was thrust into the door.

  A face he knew, above a war-reserve police uniform, smiled at him. Where had he seen that face before? Ah, the man who had taken his sugar-beet last winter from the farm to Crabbe Station! The owner-driver of a small lorry. He wore the ribbon of the Military Medal.

  “Is there anything you want, sir?”

  “Not at the moment, thanks.”

  “Please to call me when you do, sir. I’m only in the next room. The sergeant will be back soon. He told me to get you anything you asked for, sir.”

  “That is most kind of you. I am quite happy at the moment, thank you.”

  “I’m sure I’m very sorry to see you here, sir.”

  “The police must do their duty. I’m sorry they’ve been bothered so much. It must be tiresome for them.”

  “Well, you will call me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Closing the door quietly, and locking it as delicately as the big key and cumbrous lock permitted, the honest face withdrew. The prisoner felt lighter in spirit, and got back on the trestle-bed. Thinking of General Gough, his old Army commander, he tried to pretend to himself that if he spent the rest of the war in prison, it would enable him to write all the books which had been waiting so long behind his eyes.

  *

  As he lay there he became aware of voices and footfalls in the room beyond the passage. Through the small square of the peephole he saw movement passing to and fro. Part-seen men were carrying something unseen by himself. For about half an hour the footfalls passed and returned, then they ceased. In the succeeding quiet he heard voices in conversation down the other end of the the passage, with clipping noises. The noises continued for some time, and he realised that they were counting something. What was it?

  He hopped off the trestle-bed, and listened by the peep-square, where a cool wind drew past his nose. He heard after a pause the sound of a box being wrenched open—the splitting of wood. An interval for lighting cigarettes, then the leisurely counting and clipping noises returned. He went back to the trestle, wondering what was happening.

  Soon afterwards the key in the lock, the door opening. Bearing tray with teapot, cup, bread and butter neatly cut, jam and cake, the police sergeant entered. He explained that his wife had insisted on giving him the best they had, although the scale of rations did not strictly permit such things. He was duly grateful, and asked the sergeant to thank her on his behalf. He praised the cell, saying it was cool and quiet, and most restful. The sergeant responded by saying that he hoped he would ask for anything he required. Phillip asked if he might have pen and paper, they were in his bag. He wanted to write an epigraph to a book he had written about farming, he told him. It was against the regulations, the sergeant replied, but perhaps there was no harm in it. He would let him know later.

  In the meantime Phillip made the journey to a privy in the little high-walled yard at the end of the corridor. He was accompanied by the pol
iceman on duty who did not let him out of his sight. The door of the privy remained open, a reminder to the prisoner that his body no longer belonged to himself but to the Government. This was slightly disheartening although it was logical; fortunately it did not inhibit intestinal motion. A soldier’s body did not belong to him in wartime. At the best, it belonged to the corporate spirit, to his friends and fellows; at the worst, if he were offset from the community feeling he was a lonely, unhappy being doomed to bear the entire war in the prison of his mind.

  To correct any feeling of self-pity in the matter, Phillip thought of the battle now ending in France, and how the defeated soldiers must be feeling, and told himself that his own immediate plight was negligible.

  Also, it was logical. It was right that all suspected persons should be examined in this national crisis. Did he not believe in discipline in its only true form, esprit de corps?

  Later in the afternoon the door opened again, and the sergeant came in with a constable.

  “Will you step this way, please.”

  An ordered body and caged mind followed them into the room where his belongings had been checked in the early afternoon. The pink-faced detective-sergeant who had arrested him now sat in a chair before the desk. Half-a-dozen other men were ranged around him. He was told to sit down and to reply to questions.

  “You admit that you are a member of the Imperial Socialist Party?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you join?”

  “I wanted to see the money-power controlled by the Government, for the good of the British people in these islands. That is, no capital to be taken out of the country to build factories in Bombay, or Shanghai, using cheap sweated labour to undercut our home industries.”

  “Have you ever given money or other help to the funds of the Imperial Socialist Party?”