by Philip Child
“The angels at Mons? Ah, yes, indeed. The fact is we had a subaltern who could never do anything right, Miss Burnet. He was wounded in the — ah — forgive me, dear Miss Burnet — he was shot from behind in the most curious and painful way. The doctors could scarcely believe their eyes, but I give you my word that what they finally wrote on his wound tag was bowshot wound in the — er — posterior anatomy.”
In October Charles Burnet left Wellington with his battery on the first stage of a well-trodden road.
“Are you glad you are going, Uncle?” asked Dan, for he really wanted to know.
And Charles answered, “It’s my chance, laddie.” But why it was his chance, and what for, he did not explain.
When the taxi came to take him to the station, Joanna burst into tears, but Charles exclaimed gaily, “No trumpets — by request.”
“Whatever happens to him,” thought Maud, “let him not be changed!”
He would not let them go to the train with him, and the last they saw of him was a hand wave from the taxi before it whisked him round the corner to France.
Dan and Alastair went back to college at the end of September. At first there were the usual number of undergraduates, but as the term wore on, first one by one and then in greater numbers, the older men exchanged the gown for a uniform.
Just before Christmas the St. Horatius old boys at college met in Alastair’s rooms.
“I wonder,” mused Flint, “how many of us will be back next term.”
Down the corridor the incoming freshmen were being drilled by seniors, as the custom was, in the college song, which says in Greek “after the dust and heat of conflict comes the laurel wreath.” Through the window opening upon the campus could be seen members of the Second Canadian Overseas Contingent performing their early and clumsy evolutions under the cynical eyes of NCOs who had been in the Regular Army; soon to go to Valcartier, then to England, then to France.
“Anyone eighteen yet?”
“Granny, your uncle’s a captain in the Wellington Battery, isn’t he? I suppose he’ll get you and Alastair commissions.… Any chance for me, I wonder?” Dan did not answer.
“I wonder who will go first. I know a fellow who was accepted at sixteen —”
“I bet on old Pill. He’s such a military looking chap!”
Everyone laughed; the thought of Quentin Thatcher in a uniform was vaguely funny, though no one was quite certain why.
“As a matter of fact,” said Quentin flicking his cigarette, “I enlisted today. Report for duty tomorrow.”
“Good man! How old are you, Quentin?”
“Eighteen.”
Dan with Quentin and Alastair came out of the room together and went downstairs to the entrance hall of the college. There they happened to meet Beatrice Elton who had come across the campus from the women’s college to post a letter.
“‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ Beatrice,” quoted Alastair flippantly. “We’ve just decided that there’s a war on, and — you never know, you know.”
Beatrice was unexpectedly serious. “It’s real enough. What are you so excited and — and pleased about? You’re such children!”
“Why, Beatrice! Where is that exquisite poise I’ve always admired in you, that sophisticated diablerie, that —”
“Shut up, Alastair,” Dan interrupted; “Beatrice is really upset.”
“I am upset. Matthew went to Valcartier yesterday. Of course, I didn’t let him see it, but I’m just afraid all the time. If anything happened, I’d be done for. It’s all or nothing with me.… Other people seem so much braver than I. Am I soft, Dan?”
Dan tried to soothe her. “You’re not taking it right, Beatrice. It’s an adventure. Everyone takes the same risk and has the same chance. Only about one in twenty got hurt in the Boer War. Matthew won’t be hurt.”
“I think he will,” said Beatrice soberly. “I feel it, I know it, somehow.”
She smiled ironically at their shocked expressions. “When I woke up this morning I suddenly realized what it might mean.… How do people manage to be brave, Dan?” she burst out wildly, “And why should they be! What do we care about Belgium! What business is it of ours?”
“Our own people are in it, Beatrice.”
“Oh, I know. And I’m ashamed to be talking like this. I suppose I shall get used to it — though I don’t believe I ever shall. I shan’t let Matthew know, though. He was always brave about things — about everything, and I was always a coward.”
“Is brave,” corrected Dan, but Beatrice simply stared at him strickenly without answering. Presently, she said in a low voice, “I’m sorry to be such a little beast. People say now that private lives don’t count anymore because the thing is more important than we are. But I don’t feel that way. What’s more important than my life and Matthew’s and yours and every other single person’s? … How do you keep from being afraid?”
Alastair answered seriously for once. “Listen, Beatrice, you work it like this. If you’re afraid, you fight. When you fight, you hate! When you hate, you forget about fear.”
“Sweet world!” murmured Quentin Thatcher.
She left them and Quentin whispered to Dan: “Come up to my room, Dan.” They went to Quentin’s room and sported the oak.
“You’re the first, Quentin.”
“Yes.”
They smoked in silence for several minutes. As usual, a book lay open on Quentin’s table.
Dan picked up the book. It was the Iliad . My goddess Mother, silver-footed Thetis , Dan read, warns me that fate lays two paths to bear me deathward. If I abide and fight before the walls of Troy, my return to Hellas is undone, but fame imperishable remains for me. If I return to my dear country then my good glory dies, but long life awaits me, nor will the term of death be hastened.
Quentin watched Dan read, and blew rings of smoke the while. “Odd sort of Achilles, I’d make?” said he with a wry smile. “The doom of Quentin Thatcher will bring no fame imperishable, eh?”
“Doom?”
“There’s only one way to go into this scrap, Dan, and that’s expecting to be killed: any other way would be obscene.”
Dan shook his head. “That’s beyond me, Quentin.”
“And mind you, I’m glad I’ve decided to. If you give up life beforehand then you’re strong as hell, I think; then they can’t hurt anything but your body.… Funny send off they give you in the army, Dan. You know Thetis gave Achilles a good send off by grabbing his heel and dipping him in the Styx to make him invulnerable. Instead of that they grabbed me — somewhere else and said, ‘cough and say ninety-nine .’ Not very heroic. And they thumped me and bumped me all over, and made me squat and jump up. I’m not absolutely fit in some ways, Dan. But it was easy to fool them. They were willing to be fooled. Then they mumbled the Oath of Allegiance — I suppose they’d probably said it so often that it had become a rigmarole to them — and I held the Bible and repeated it.… Strange beginning, somehow.”
In 1915 the first long casualty lists appeared in the papers, and people ceased to live the war in their minds and began to live it in their nerves. “Killed at St. Julien. Lieutenant Matthew Wilmot was the son of Dr. and Mrs. W.E. Wilmot of Wellington. He attended school at St. Horatius and was well-known in this city.…”
Pen Thatcher took the war hard. In place of a religious belief, he had always clung to a desperate faith in the good will of man whom he regarded as the sole inventor and upholder of right and wrong in a mechanical universe. This creative fiat of mankind which he had believed in — where was it? Yet him, too, the war had made illogical. He believed that this catastrophe had come of the false values of a mechanical civilization, and yet in the same angry breath, he lamented bitterly that war had made a scrapheap of that civilization.… So, austerely and tragically, justified to himself by a fatal
pride of intellect, he moved sternly toward his own destruction.
Dan felt unhappy and restless at college. He was still under the enlisting age, but already several of his friends younger than he had sworn to a false age and been accepted. During the Christmas holidays, he stood with his father and watched the passing of a military funeral for a returned veteran. The troops marched with arms reversed to the surging anguish of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” and to each slow step, a brazen note beat the air like a nail hammered into a coffin. The dead officer’s charger passed with empty saddle and boots reversed. A lump came into Dan’s throat, and he shook his head to master his emotion.…
Dan thought with a conviction deeper than reason, “There, someday, I shall march.” Pen watched the play of expression on his boy’s face and read it too clearly. As for himself, he knew he was in for an attack of angina, emotion sometimes brought it on, so he turned his face from Dan and stared into a shop window. As yet the family did not know of his ailment.
When he could speak, he said bitterly: “One needs an old head to resist this sort of thing.”
“We didn’t start it, Father. If a man hits you, you have to fight.”
“This isn’t a fist fight. All the marching and music, Dan, the bands swinging down the street, mean just one thing — killing people you’ve never seen before and whom you don’t even see die, killing them at three miles distance.”
“But, Father, a man has to be loyal to his country. You can’t sit back and let your friends fight for you.”
Pen was silent for a moment, then he said in a tone of absolute conviction: “You have other loyalties, Dan. Don’t you know that?”
The question flattened Dan’s elation instantly and left him angry and rebellious but bound. He knew what his father meant. It was not merely that Grandfather Thatcher had been a pacifist years ago before the word was invented, even — that Dan did not regard as his own affair at all. But — Joanna. Neither of his parents was in good health and soon, perhaps, someone would have to take care of her. To leave her for the rest of her life to the care of strangers was unthinkable. And there was no blinking the hard fact that he, Dan, was in a way responsible for her illness. That was not a fact that he was ever likely to forget.
Dan’s wounded pride spoilt everything between him and Cynthia. When he went for a walk with her and they passed soldiers of about his own age, his heart sank for shame and he wanted to turn his eyes away from them; but instead, he would stare at them aggressively, and sometimes stealing a look at them after they had passed, it seemed to him they, too, were looking back and jeering at him amongst themselves. He hated them, he hated himself, and the times were out of joint — but what could he do?
“What is the matter, Dan?” Cynthia protested. “You’re so strange. I felt as if I couldn’t reach you anymore.”
“Nothing!” said Dan in a gruff tone that warned her from dangerous ground.
One day Alastair said to Dan, “What would Father say if we went?”
“What about Joanna?”
“I’m going, Dan. I can get a commission in the battery. Of course, I understand how you feel about Jo. But that seems somehow more your job than mine. I mean, you’ve always looked out for her. Anyway, I’ve got to go! … Look here, Dan, tell Father for me, will you?”
Pen took this news well. He felt that Alastair was Maud’s boy — a Burnet, while Dan was his. “After all, everyone over seventeen is a man these days, and he must do as he thinks right.” And now, he wanted the Allies to win. The whole business was wicked! But the Allies must win. In this desire he was pure parent, it was inconsistent with his conscientious conviction that the enemy to be fought was not Germany but war itself.
Pen suspected that he was a man of tragedy. Too fast bound by duty; no time to sit down and simply live without feeling the past or fearing the future. In the last year he had retired from business, and he viewed the sterility of his life against the background of approaching old age with a kind of quiet despair. The prison of the fifties. Most people became reconciled to their futility, but he couldn’t.… Less resilience, habits harder to change, no soar to the mind. And failure shrinks your personality, steals your virtue, and makes you less of a man. For instance, the talents he had once had — unused they festered. “Thatcher’s an honest man,” people said, “but he doesn’t like his job.” … Must swallow my own smoke, though. I hate a man who is sorry for himself.
His own name always seemed to Pen the ultimate irony: Penuel, the mountain whence Moses caught a glimpse of the promised land. What promised land? What glimpse? If only life would make use of you to the top of your bent, not merely as a vessel for stale habits and baffled emotions.
Chapter V
I
O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through .…
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Pen was reading Thoreau and he put the book down in great excitement. Thoreau did not believe in supporting a government that permitted slavery, that waged war. What, then, did he do? He refused to pay his taxes and they imprisoned him.
Pen began to pace the study in great excitement. It seemed so simple, after all, that he wondered it had never occurred to him. He searched feverishly for pen and notepaper. He must act before the old habit of futile doubt got hold of him.
Sir,
I have the honour to inform you that I firmly refuse to pay taxes to the state for the purpose of waging war. Permit me to assert that I take this stand as the only effective means of opposing war at the disposal of a citizen at the present time.
I beg that you will bring this letter to the attention of the proper authorities that they may take whatever action they may deem appropriate.
I am, sir, yours faithfully,
Penuel Thatcher
II
After the Easter holiday Dan refused to go back to college. “I can’t do any work. It’s too unreal. I want a navvy’s job. The harder the work, the better.” So Pen got him a job at the steel company loading freight cars. The hard labour made him too tired to think much. This was a puritan’s first compromise with his conscience, and it did not satisfy him. It was merely the first stage of his journey to France, though he did not yet realize that fact.
He met Mr. Mandover on the street one day. The headmaster twisted his moustache and flourished his stick; remembered gesture! “How d’ye do, Thatcher? Glad to hear that your cousin Thatcher Maximus has won the Military Medal. I am glad to say, my dear boy, that every St. Horatius old boy with whom I have kept in touch is doing his bit; except, of course, those who are not physically fit.”
Dan neglected Cynthia and she was hurt. She wanted to be gay and have a good time, and Dan’s seriousness sometimes frightened her. If only Dan was more enthusiastic and winning — like Alastair, she thought.
“Your Cynthia is a flirt,” Alastair remarked casually to Dan, “but she’s good fun. Mind if I take her to a dance at the barracks, old man? She’d enjoy seeing them, I think.”
She went to a good many dances with that pleasant fellow, hiding from herself her reasons for doing so. One didn’t have to worry with Alastair, of course, or take him seriously. He was Dan’s brother.… And besides, if it made Dan a little jealous, all the better!
Alastair was never consciously a cad, but he was handsome and attractive and was possessed of what used to be called “air and countenance” in Jane Austen’s day, and he knew it too well for his own good. He was not deliberately selfish, but he took good care never to let an unpleasant sense of reality tarnish his illusions. “Cynthia ought to have some fun,” he said to himself, “and Dan’s such a stick-in-the-mud . And besides, a month from now, I’ll probably be in England.” He made a point of praising Dan to Cynthia, telling her how, at school, Dan had been the best shot with a Ross rifle.
One day, coming home from work, Dan met them on their way to a tea dance. Alastair saluted him gaily. “Hello, Granny. I’m taking your girl to meet some of the fellows. You don’t mind, do you? Lynch is coming and Jiffy Tripp will be there, too. Join us? You look all right, and you can clean up at the hotel. Do you good!” Cynthia put her hand on his sleeve and urged him: “Please come.”
To go in civvies among a crowd of officers with whom he had gone to school was, for Dan, an impossibility. It was a weakness to feel thus, he knew, but he simply could not bring himself to do it. He said gruffly: “Thanks awfully, but I can’t. I’ve been humping eighteen-pounder shells and I look like the devil.”
That evening Cynthia telephoned him, “Dan, I want to talk to you.”
Dan’s old fault of moroseness often got the better of him these days. He said: “I’m sorry, Cynthia. I’ve got to go on night shift at the mill.”
“Miss it for once. Please. They won’t care.… You didn’t mind my going with Alastair, did you? After all, he’s your brother.”
“It’s all right, Cynthia.… Why mention it?”
After a moment her voice came in a different tone. “Dan, why are you so beastly to me? I can’t understand you a bit!”
III
Having sent his letter of defiance to his majesty’s government, Pen waited on tenterhooks for a reply. Every morning he sorted the letters impatiently, looking for an envelope with the government’s frank on it.
But the sky took a long time to fall, for the mills of the gods, being enmeshed in red tape, ground slowly. At last he found himself staring at the official envelope he had been waiting for. He tore it open impatiently and, with trembling fingers, read the enclosure. It was a mimeographed notice, signed with an initial.
