‘Guns,’ said the Professor sadly, ‘have a vay of going off by themselves and vonce they bang there are always plenty of people to profit from refilling cartridge pouches! That has been my reading of history; it remains my greatest fear! Not a vor started by the Emperors or by the politicians or even the Junkers but those who profit by conflict!’
Neither Paul nor James took the Professor’s warnings very seriously, James because he was too deeply imbued by Westminster’s views that no power could afford to fight a modern war, Paul because he found it difficult to believe that anyone, even a crass idiot like the Kaiser, would, when it came to the touch, challenge the British Empire. He did not say this; it would have seemed to him a breach of good manners but he mentioned it to James after the Professor had gone home and they were smoking their last cigars in the library. James dismissed the Saxon’s fears as the result of studying the past at the expense of the present. ‘Even if the guns did go off by themselves, you can take it from me, Paul, that we should stay clear of it and I have that on the best authority—Asquith’s, Morley’s and even Grey’s! For your peace of mind we couldn’t get in even if we wanted to. The pacifist group in the Cabinet would resign in a body and we should lose the backing of the Labour Party. That would mean an election and by the time we had gone to the country it would be all over bar the shouting! So in case we don’t run our full term I advise you to concentrate on the Ulster question. That’s real enough and they mean to fight if they have to! A good many Tory MPs are egging them on and you can imagine how I feel when I see suffragettes sent to prison for long terms on charges of conspiracy when idiots like Carson are openly advocating armed rebellion!’
When at length he went to bed it was not of German aggression and Russian steamrollers that Paul thought but of women like Grace, Annie Kenney and the girl Davison, who had died under the hooves of a Derby horse the previous summer. James’ parting remarks robbed him of sleep for an hour or so, or it might have been the heavy meal and all the cigars they had smoked, for he lay awake beside Claire for a long time, wondering what had become of the woman who had entered and left his life so abruptly, so long ago it seemed that it might have happened in childhood. He thought, recalling the scenes they had witnessed outside the Houses of Parliament, ‘It’s their staying power that astonishes—that and their sense of dedication! But they don’t seem to be getting anywhere, poor devils, and now this Irish business has edged them out of the spotlight!’ When at last he fell asleep he had one of his meaningless dreams about her, a prolonged waiting in all manner of improbable places for Grace to keep a muddled rendezvous. If ever he did dream of Grace it was always along these lines.
In the decade after the Great War historians made play of the general anxiety caused by the shooting of Franz Ferdinand by a tubercular youth in Sarajevo that June but Paul, knowing the Valley and its people so well, never subscribed to this fiction. News of the Archduke’s death came and went but hardly anyone in the Sorrel district remembered the incident until it was thrust under their noses a month later and even then they looked on it as no more than a scuffle in a far-away country where the crack of the pistol and the roar of a home-made bomb were commonplace occurrences. Few in the Valley bought any newspaper but the County Press and although this publication carried a small section devoted to foreign news, its local readers did no more than glance at it before turning to the market section or columns dealing with county cricket.
There was one man, however, apart from the German professor, who was very much aware of the open door of the European powder magazine. Horace Handcock’s hatred of Germans dated from the day their Kaiser decided to compete with the British Navy and build himself a clutch of dreadnoughts. From then on Horace had waged a one-man campaign in the Valley, aimed at alerting his neighbours to the menace of Potsdam, and his warnings were so stark, and so original, that he was always able to enlist an audience in the Shallowford kitchen or the sawdust bar of The Raven. Horace appeared as a Solomon Eagle, preaching of wrath to come, and the regulars in the bar, seeking diversion, would sometimes encourage him to pronounce upon the latest forms of frightfulness Potsdam had in pickle for their British cousins. Nobody had ever discovered the source of Horace Handcock’s information, which was so extensive and so detailed, that the simple-minded among his listeners might have been forgiven for supposing him to have had access to the Wilhelmstrasse wastepaper baskets. He would talk of bombs disguised as marigolds dropped over agricultural districts by Zeppelins, of bags of poisoned sweets for unwary children delivered by the same agency and of giant howitzers planted as far away as the Baltic coast and capable of destroying half London. He was obsessed by the presence of cohorts of spies, landed nightly by submarine, to rendezvous a night or so later at deserted coves like Tamer Potter’s, east of the Bluff. To Horace every foreigner (Italian ice-cream vendors excepted) was in the pay of Von Moltke and quite aside from the personnel of German bands (spies to a man), he knew of at least two resident agents in the Valley, the mild-looking professor and his gentlemanly son, Gottfried. It was useless to point out to Horace that the professor himself was hostile to German militarists, or that he was on visiting terms with the Squire, Horace declared these instances typical examples of Teutonic guile and that they would not see the professor and his son in their true colours until the Kaiser’s fleet out-numbered the British by two ships to one. Then, one awful morning, they would find the German’s Coombe Bay house silent and shuttered, the occupants having been taken off by submarine the previous night in order to be spared the terrible naval bombardment that would follow and the sack of Paxtonbury and Whinmouth by field-grey hordes landed by fast torpedo boats, of which the Kaiser already had several thousand, with more building.
The only person agitated by these dire prophecies was Mrs Handcock, who was obliged to listen to them after everybody else had gone home to bed, and because she had always entertained a great respect for her husband’s erudition she had long since convinced herself that a German invasion of the coastal strip between Coombe Bay and Whinmouth was a virtual certainty. Fortunately for her, however, she was optimistic by nature and had made up her mind that the balance of naval power was unlikely to be tipped during her life-time, so there was really no point in worrying about it, especially as they were childless. And yet, in the end, Horace was caught on the hop just like everybody else for like a fool, he allowed the Mutiny at the Curragh to distract his attention during the critical months leading up to August, 1914. It was only when he learned of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, in late July, that he saw that events had overtaken him and by then it was too late to rouse the countryside.
The task would have been beyond him in any case for during the last few days of July, with hot weather continuing and the harvest upon them, the men of the Valley did not even pause to read the County Press. While the telegraph systems of Europe quivered under a ceaseless exchange of threats, proposals, counter-proposals, accusations, denials and politely-phrased disclaimers, the respective masters of Four Winds and Hermitage were bargaining over a Jersey bull, and Smut Potter was working sixteen hours a day in his greenhouses. Nearby his two sisters, burned almost black by the sun, were digging an irrigation channel across the cliff field under the threat of the Bideford Goliath’s hazel switch and all over the estate men and women were discussing such things as the fruit crop, water shortage, field pests and the likely price of cow fodder in the autumn. On the very day that the Tsar of All the Russias was posting his ukase to the remotest villages in his vast domains, Sam Potter was blazing the next belt of firs to be felled in the plantation behind his cottage and Sydney Codsall was taking a posy to old Mrs Earnshaw, who was ninety-eight and making a new will at the expense of a niece in New South Wales. Sydney was one of the few who was half-aware of a crisis but it did not seem to him anything like so important as the transfer of Mrs Earnshaw’s ropewalk to a company known as Coombe Bay Enterprises Ltd., who were offering hard cash for an enterprise that ha
d failed even before Mr Earnshaw was drowned at sea in the eighteen-eighties.
In only one kitchen in the Valley did the distant roll of kettle-drum cause dismay and this was at Periwinkle, on the edge of the moor, where hostilities had already begun in a sharp engagement between Will Codsall and his wife, Elinor. Like the bigger conflict over the sea the dispute had its origin in a scrap of paper, not a treaty exactly but a printed summons ordering Will to present himself at the Devon Yeomanry barracks within forty-eight hours, on pain of arrest.
The arrival of the summons stupefied Elinor. Until then she had looked upon Will’s territorial activities as a silly male game, for which, however (and she also considered this ridiculous), he had been paid a regular quarterly sum, ever since he had signed on the day of the Coronation Fête, in 1911. Will had been won over by the Yeomanry’s smart turnout on that occasion and in the refreshment tent after the tug-of-war he had got into conversation with a troop sergeant, who had pointed out the advantages of a Territorial engagement which required of a volunteer no more than one drill a week and a fortnight’s camp each summer. Will signed on the spot and had never regretted his impulsive act. He had enjoyed the drills and found the money useful for new stock, whereas the period in camp had been a welcome change from farm chores. It had never occurred to him that he might, at some time, be required under the terms of his engagement to fire a rifle in anger, and if anybody had told him there was the remotest possibility of his being transported across the seas he would have paid his solicitor brother to extricate him from such a menacing situation. Elinor, once the meaning of the summons was made known to her, flew into a temper that gave Will a foretaste of the drum-fire and box ban-ages he was soon to encounter near Armentieres. She stormed and raved for an hour, likening him to various vegetables of the coarser kind, and using phrases that would have stunned her lay-preaching father, mercifully at rest in the churchyard. Will reasoned and pleaded, pointing out that all Territorial units were earmarked for home service, for guarding viaducts and suchlike and that even if there was a war it was unlikely to last more than a month and that he would be paid for his time with the colours, just as he had for his periods in camp, but Elinor’s wrath continued to break over him in waves until at length he fled to the privy in the garden and locked the door against her. When it was dark he stole out and foraged around for his kit. It took him back a few years to be moving about a house with stealth as though, at any moment, he would hear the shrill voice of his mother, Arabella, but when Elinor found him packing in the kitchen he saw that her rage was spent, that her eyes were red and at once felt small, mean and wretched. He said, dismally, ‘You’ll get the separation allowance, Ellen, and I daresay tiz all a lot of ole nonsense and us’ll be ’ome be weekend,’ and he put his arms round her and kissed her as she wailed, ‘How be I goin’ to manage with harvest almost on us? What’s to become of everything we built up yerabouts if youm gone for months? Was ’ee mazed Will Codsall, to put us in this kind o’ fix for a few shillings?’ He admitted glumly that he must have been, as mazed as a March hare, adding that there was a possibility of him getting temporary exemption until the harvest was in, and after that he would see Squire and anyone else who could pull strings to prolong his deferment indefinitely. She cheered up a little at this and cooked his supper and afterwards, in the evening haze, they walked the boundaries of their eighty-acre holding and he issued his final instructions in case exemption took time to arrange. That night, while he slept, Elinor lay awake and her mind went back to the first night they had spent in this room after their wedding at the little chapel in Coombe Bay. They had, or so it seemed to her, achieved a great deal since then, enlarging what had been a ruined patch into a real farm, very small but prosperous. Then they had nothing but a few hens but now they had the biggest egg yield in the Valley, besides a cow, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and several acres of former heathland under the plough. Was this to be sacrificed because Will, almost an illiterate, had signed a paper he didn’t understand? It was a monstrous price to pay for a small mistake and what kind of soldier would he make anyway, despite a hulking frame and hardened muscles? He had never been able to bring himself to wring a fowl’s neck and all the killing was done by her. Perhaps they would find this out and send him back; perhaps, but somehow she thought it unlikely.
II
Will Codsall’s summons was the plucking of the first brick from the parochial wall. News that he had been hustled away overnight sobered the Valley and sent some of the more thoughtful to the foreign news section of the County Press. Henry Pitts, of Hermitage, was not among this minority, giving it as his opinion that the German Kaiser, long recognised as mad, had now degenerated into a homicidal maniac and that Will was fortunate in finding himself among those charged with hunting the lunatic down and packing him off to St Helena, which Henry regarded as the traditional lock-up of all unsuccessful challengers of British naval supremacy. It was an extravagant theory, and Henry’s father Arthur said there was surely more to it than that, for the British Army must have been very hard-pressed indeed to need the services of an amiable chap like Will. He was more inclined to think that the Yeomanry was being called out to replace regulars who had refused to bear arms against Ulster. Eveleigh, at Four Winds, being’ a more serious-minded man than either of the Pitts, was one of those who sought an answer in back numbers of the County Press, there to make what he could of newsletters published under such headings as ‘Austria Threatens Serbia!’ ‘Tsar Pledges Aid to Slavs’, and ‘Where Britain stands in Balkan Dispute’, but he soon lost his way in a maze of despatches from St Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Belgrade, suspending judgment until he could consult Horace Handcock, the Valley oracle on foreign affairs. Eveleigh was a practical man and found it very difficult to connect the sudden disappearance of one of his neighbours with revolver shots fired at a bulging-eyed foreigner in a town of which he had never heard.
When he entered the sawdust bar of The Raven about seven o’clock that evening he was amazed to find more than a score of the Valley men already assembled and all, it appeared, in search of the answers to the questions he had sought in vain in the newspapers. Rumours, some of them too absurd to be credited, converted the usually peaceful atmosphere of the bar into a Tower of Babel. Churchill, they said, was calling out the fleet; the King had written a strong letter to his crazy German cousin ordering him to back down at once; Kitchener had been recalled from Egypt and was standing by to land the Army on the Continent whereas Horace Handcock, his face the colour of a ripe cider apple proved quite unequal to the task of sieving through these rumours, having been so generously plied with brown ale that he could only babble incoherently of spies, Zeppelins and lethal marigolds. About eight o’clock Eveleigh left in disgust, none the wiser save for confirmation that Will Codsall had left the Valley in uniform.
He should have waited a little longer. About eight-thirty Smut Potter looked in on his way back from Sorrel Halt and in his pocket was a special edition of a London newspaper, thrown from the window of a through express. It told of troop movements all over Europe, of Germany’s pledge to—support Austria against Russia, and of France’s pledge to back Russia and Serbia against Germany and Austria. There was no mention of England’s involvement and this was a source of disappointment to those present, so much so that, as the evening progressed, and after a labourer who could actually vouch for Will Codsall’s departure arrived, Will’s stock declined, for it was thought discreditable on his part to have slunk away without a word to anyone, as though resolved to fight the Kaiser single-handed. Then, to everybody’s relief word was circulated that Squire was in the bar parlour with John Rudd and Sam Potter asked the landlord if he would convey their respects to Mr Craddock and ask for enlightenment. A moment or two later Paul appeared and damped everybody’s spirits by announcing that Mr Grenfell, who was surely in a position to know, had told him over the telephone earlier in the day that Great Britain was almost certain to remain neutral if war bro
ke out but that he, personally, did not think it would because the latest news in London was that the President of the United States and the Pope had offered their services as mediators. This information fell upon the heated company like a cold douche and Smut pinpointed the only consolatory crumb by saying, ‘Well, that’ll bring old Will home with his tail down, for it dom zeem as if any of us’ll get a crack at ’em!’ a remark that indicated to those who had known Smut in the old days that the poacher was not exorcised after all. Soon the forum broke up and the Valley men, their belligerence mellowed by beer and cider, dispersed, all but Horace Handcock who had progressed beyond the jovial stage and had to be forcibly restrained from staggering up the hill to denounce the German professor as a spy.
Paul was silent during the ride home and it was not until they were approaching the ford that he said, ‘Do you suppose I’m right, John? Are those idiots really disappointed with the prospect of us keeping clear of it?’ and John said that this was more than probable, for there wasn’t a man in the Valley apart from themselves who had ever been involved in a war. Paul digested this in silence but when they reached the end of the tow-path, said, suddenly, ‘It doesn’t make sense, John! What the devil would any of them get from war but death or wounds? And what would happen here if only the half of them rushed into uniform?’
‘I can’t answer that,’ John said philosophically, ‘but I can tell you this; there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t damned envious of Will Codsall and that’s ironic, if you like, for he’s probably the only one in the Valley who would prefer to be ordered about by his wife than by a sergeant-major!’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 82
