I conscientiously object:-
(Strike out any of the items which does not apply)
a) to being registered in the Military Service Register
b) to performing military service
c) to performing combatant duties
and apply to the Local Tribunal to be registered accordingly.
I declare that the foregoing information furnished by me is true.
*
Not bad. Not bad at all. Reading through his copy of the application, he was rather proud of the little flourishes here and there – ‘the pen is mightier . . .’ and so on. The tonic of romance still warmed him, and he easily dispelled any feelings of guilt. He had not exactly lied to Miriam. If everything went well, he would be allowed to serve in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, and that was as good an outfit as any of the ones she had in mind. There was no need to tell her about the details, about his objection and the tribunal; he would simply wait until he had his place with the Ambulance Unit, and she would probably think it was the same as being a stretcher-bearer with the army anyway.
‘There’s only one thing to remember.’ His father coughed into his fist, took a deep, rattling breath and coughed again. ‘Excuse me. There’s only one thing to remember: if you speak freely from your heart, you have nothing to fear.’
His mother cut another slice of cake and poured a mug of thin tea. ‘And do remember not to mumble, dear.’
‘For goodness’ sake, he’s a Quaker!’ Paul’s father coughed again. ‘The judges won’t care if he mumbles, stammers or talks backward.’
Paul’s mother suggested he wrap himself in a blanket, but her husband waved her away while still coughing into his fist. Even indoors he wore a maroon scarf and a thick brown cardigan that his wife had knitted from unravelled old jumpers.
‘I’ll make some more tea,’ she mouthed, mindful of his father’s mood, and went into the kitchen.
When she was gone, his father pulled a plain brown envelope from the inside of his jacket and placed it on the table.
‘This is for you.’
Paul slid his finger inside the envelope. It was empty. He turned it upside down. A white feather slid out and slowly drifted to the floor. Paul picked it up and held it in his palm.
‘Someone gave this to me in the Great War,’ his father said. ‘It was intended as an insult, of course, a symbol of cowardice and all that, but in the end I grew rather fond of it. It occurred to me one day that it could well be the feather of a dove, and from then on I decided to keep it as a symbol of peace.’
‘Was that one of your epiphanies in Meeting?’
‘It was an epiphany on the 24 bus to Tottenham Court Road. I have most of my epiphanies on the 24.’
‘Fancy that. With me it’s usually the 168.’
‘To Euston? That one tends to be too crowded.’
‘I like crowds.’ Paul took a deep breath. ‘I find noisy, boisterous crowds more inspiring than the silence of Meeting, to be frank.’ He braced himself for his father’s reaction and wished Charlie could see him now. There it was, his bolder, louder new self, striding out into the world.
But his father seemed unruffled, as if he knew his younger son was only sampling the taste of rebellion. He shrugged and said: ‘You’ll learn to appreciate the silence of Meeting. There’ll be times when you’ll feel like the entire world is shouting at you, and then you’ll be grateful for silence.’
‘Or perhaps I’ll shout back. That would be another option, wouldn’t it? What did you say to the chap who gave you the feather?’
‘It was a girl.’ His father shook his head. ‘I came out of prison, went to Flanders with the Friends’ Ambulance and saw more blood and gore in a single day than that girl had seen in her entire life. But she was a sheltered little creature, people told her things and she believed them. I was back on home leave, and one day I was sitting under an apple tree with John Balding, a friend from school, who’d joined up as quickly as he could, gone to Flanders and got his arm blown off. Anyway, the two of us are sitting there, munching apples in the sun, and there comes the girl. She’s planned this, of course; I haven’t seen her since I left and I’m so happy I drop my apple and jump to my feet. And what does she do? She opens her purse, takes out two white feathers and gives each of us a feather. Some horrible old shrew had put her up to that. She wasn’t a mean girl; she thought she was doing something clever, or she’d seen it at the pictures or something. Anyway, she gives us our feathers and walks off, all pouting and dignified, and Balding gets up and runs after her, waving his empty sleeve. He grabs her with his good arm – not really the way to treat a lady, if you ask me, but he was, as it were, a bit touched after Flanders – so he grabs her and yanks her round and flaps his empty sleeve in her face, jabbering away about his arm. “Have you seen my arm? Have you seen my arm, miss? God knows, I must have left it in Flanders!”’
They sat in silence for a while. Paul put the envelope in his bag. ‘Well, let’s hope it brings me luck. You know, just in case . . . There are, of course, chaps who fail their tribunal, and then they go and join the Royal Army Medical Corps, which I suppose is just as good.’
‘Yes. And then their unit is ambushed and before they know it, they’ve pulled out a gun and killed three Germans who were forced to enlist just as they were forced to enlist.’
‘Perhaps I wouldn’t pull a gun. That’s just your assumption.’
‘Assumption, no. It’s my experience. You think this is war, don’t you?’ His rattling lungs struggled to support his voice. ‘Stacking up a few sandbags. You think this is where your faith is tested, going to a courtroom and telling a bored judge about your conscience? Well, imagine death swapping his scythe for a machine gun. That’s war. That’s a test. The officer walking up and down the line with his cocked revolver, ready to shoot anyone who isn’t going over. Thousands of men emerging from the trenches and walking into the fire and going down, and then the next thousand, and then the next. And you think in the midst of all that – when you’re cowering in a trench next to some trembling little soldier holding on to his rifle for dear life – you think in that situation, when that soldier asks you to grab a rifle and help him defend the trench, you’ll say: “Sorry old man, unfortunately I can’t touch a rifle, but how about a cup of tea?”’
Paul put up his hand to block the assault. The effect of the night’s tonic was beginning to fade. It irritated him that his father would burden his mind with unnecessary detail and complexity when he would have rather entered the courtroom fresh, clear and confident.
‘Your mother and I,’ his father continued, ‘spent an entire afternoon in Flanders trimming off the military insignia on the uniforms the army had asked us to wear even though we were with the Friends’ service. We cut them off with a pair of nail scissors. Then we dyed our uniforms grey, and after that we painted our ambulance grey, too. Do you think that was ridiculous? Do you think it was ridiculous to be so obsessed over details? Well, it wasn’t. Because that’s how we defend our faith, Paul. We don’t do it by ranting and shouting. We do it by etching our principles into our lives like a groove in a steel plate, and we follow that groove, and if it means sitting in a muddy field and fiddling with nail scissors, then that’s what we do. Because once you leave that groove, Paul . . .’ his father rapped his knuckles on the windowpane, ‘. . . once you leave it, you’ll be skidding and sliding over the steel plate with no moral direction at all. If it’s not important whether there’s an army badge on your shirt, then perhaps it’s not important if there’s a gun in your ambulance, and if that’s not important, then perhaps it’s not important if you’re taught to shoot as part of your training. And when you finally stand up and say, I draw the line here, well, then everyone else will stare at you and reply, but you accepted the badge, didn’t you? And you accepted the training and the camaraderie, didn’t you? You’re one of us now.’
Paul looked away.
‘That doesn’t he
lp me, though. What if I fail the tribunal? What if they tell me to go and join the army, or the Army Medical Corps?’
‘They won’t. And if they do, then you’ll do what generations of Friends have done, you’ll let them send you to gaol, and we will come and visit you and see to it that you’re treated reasonably well, and you’ll come out a stronger man, a man who knows that the world has tried and failed to break him. That, Paul, is a feeling of strength that will stay with you and nourish you all your life.’
His father was talking about himself, of course, and patted his chest to reinforce his point. But the gesture had the opposite effect. As soon as he touched his chest, he let out a cough, and another cough, and Paul remembered him saying that his lungs had never been the same after the cold dampness of the prison cell. That was what had stayed with his father all his life: weak lungs and a fragile constitution. Some nourishment.
‘Better not tell your mother about the feather,’ his father said when Paul took his coat off the hook in the hallway. ‘I never saw that girl again. I went back to Flanders and that was that, but you know what your mother’s like, she’d think it queer of me to keep a feather, wouldn’t she?’
He took off his scarf and wrapped it around Paul’s neck, as he had sometimes done when Paul was small.
4
In the waiting room of the court house in Bloomsbury, Paul sat down next to a dark-skinned man who studied him with open curiosity.
‘Conchie?’ the man asked.
Paul nodded and took off his father’s scarf.
‘Christian or Socialist?’
‘Quaker,’ Paul said.
‘Christian, then.’
Paul considered this. ‘Well, we do base our testimony on the teachings of Christ, of course, though you see, it’s quite different from Catholicism, for example, in the sense that it would be possible to be a Quaker and something else.’ He gave a nod. ‘It would be perfectly possible to be a Quaker and a devoted follower of Mr Gandhi.’
‘You think I’m a Gandhian?’
‘Oh, it was just an assumption, since you look like a Hindu.’
The man burst into full-chested laughter. Paul felt embarrassed but could not have said why.
‘It’s fascinating to follow the parade of your thoughts there,’ the man chuckled. ‘You see my brown skin, you think Hindu, you think Mr Gandhi, who also has brown skin. Oh, please don’t blush, comrade. I am absolutely delighted by your reply. You see, I am planning to study this subject in depth. “Thought and deliberation in the pre-revolutionary bourgeois mind” . . . now I’ve said it, it’s going to be the title of my thesis.’
‘So you’re not a Gandhian?’ Paul asked cautiously. How smoothly and eloquently the words had flowed last night by the pond, and yet here he was again, mumbling and struggling to keep up with another’s arguments.
‘It’s fair to say that I have much admiration for Mr Gandhi, but I’m not convinced by the idea of non-violence, no. I believe in armed revolution. From a theoretical perspective, of course. I’m too short-sighted for marksmanship.’ He stretched out his hand. ‘A. S. Chatterjee, truly pleased to meet you.’
‘Paul Lamb,’ said Paul, utterly confused now. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I support the idea of an armed revolution. You see, I’m a pacifist. Well, it goes with being a Quaker, really. I hope you don’t mind.’
A. S. Chatterjee smiled and locked his fingers behind his head. ‘Do I mind? Why, I’m delighted! I hope we’ll have a lifetime to discuss our views, Mr Lamb. You strike me as an interesting fellow, and frankly, an interesting case study.’
Paul exhaled with relief. ‘If I may ask . . . what are you doing here if you’re not a pacifist?’
‘Oh, I’m fully intent on refusing to serve the Empire. As you would say, it goes with being an anti-imperialist, really.’
A gruff-looking chap in a twill suit sat down next to them.
‘Conchie?’ Chatterjee asked.
‘Arsonist,’ said the chap.
‘Oh,’ Chatterjee said. ‘I beg your pardon. Different courtroom.’
Paul tried to give the arsonist a friendly, forgiving smile, but the man turned his back to him.
‘Is that what you’re going to tell the tribunal then, that you’re against the Empire?’ Paul asked his new friend, more sure-footed now that he found himself on the familiar terrain of forms and tribunals. ‘I hear objection on political grounds is awfully hard to pull off.’
Chatterjee dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. ‘My dear comrade, do you think anyone in there gives a hoot about the nature of your objection? If you took a more analytical view of the mind, you’d find the decisive factor at a much deeper level.’
‘Really?’ Paul’s throat tightened. The feeling that had kept him floating two inches above the ground all the way from the pond to his house had entirely vanished; the entire bathing party might as well have been a dream that left no trace in daytime. ‘What level?’
‘Class, obviously.’ Chatterjee replied, and locked his hands behind his head again. ‘It all comes down to class. Picture some clean-collared Etonians, their voices ringing through the room, loud and clear, and the old hams on the tribunal are practically sighing with pleasure because it makes them remember those sun-dappled days of their youth, those wine-splattered evenings with the debating society: “Fine young fellow, don’t quite agree with his views but I can see there’s a heart and a conscience . . . Conditional exemption. A few weeks in a wheat field will do him good.” In comes some example of the unwashed, a lumpen pig farmer perhaps – no, those are central to the war effort – well, you know what I mean. A carpenter’s apprentice, say. Picture him standing there, pigeon-toed, looking down at his scuffed brown shoes, and he mumbles something, and our honourable tribunal member cups a hand around his ear and bellows, “WHAT?” And the fellow mumbles again. He’s only ever spoken to the men working alongside him, see, or to his family, to his sweetheart maybe, but certainly never to a whole roomful of strangers. He blushes, and he tries to speak up, but now he is nervous and ashamed, and in the end the tribunal will conclude that his argument was, on the whole, not convincing: “Couldn’t even hear what the young blighter was saying, dash it!”’
‘Are you telling me,’ Paul said, swallowing hard, ‘that it is dangerous to mumble?’
‘My friend . . .’ Chatterjee placed his right hand on his heart. ‘It is fatal to mumble.’
5
The judges sat behind a barrier of polished carved oak. They did not wear wigs or gowns but simple suits. There were three of them: a wiry little man with round spectacles and a stiff, strangling collar on the far left; a taller man with tired, bloodshot eyes on the far right, and an enormous, slouching beast of a judge in the middle. The middle seat was slightly raised so that the senior judge towered a head above the others even as he slouched. He blinked and snuffled slowly like a large predator digesting a rabbit.
Paul was so mesmerized by the trio that it took him a moment to notice the painting behind them. It was a portrait of the late King in red and ermine, as tall as the room. One royal hand discreetly pointed at three rows of medals, the other was gripping a sword.
The sense of gravity was lost on the handful of journalists who sat to Paul’s left and scratched their scalps with their pencils.
The wiry little man cleared his throat.
‘Mr Lamb,’ he began, leaning over the barrier like an eager mouse, an impression that was reinforced by his squeaky voice, ‘would you be good enough to tell us a little more about your objection? You say you are against the taking of life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does that include animal life?’
‘I’ve lived as a vegetarian for the past year.’
‘Though you brush your teeth and would not hesitate to fumigate a flea-infested mattress, one should hope.’
‘Naturally.’
‘So you do appear to support the notion of taking a life in order
to ensure your own comfort. Very good, Mr Lamb. Enough of fleas, then. I would enjoy hearing your views on a different matter. Given that you think it is wrong to fight the Nazi hordes, even though they pose a somewhat greater threat than a few insects, could you tell us what we ought to do instead?’
‘I believe there’s still room for a negotiated solution,’ Paul said somewhat mechanically. ‘Even in the midst of war, it’s always possible to negotiate peace.’
‘And hand Europe to Hitler and his henchmen?’
The little man leaned back and looked up at his senior for approval. He was perhaps less experienced than his peers, who sat through the proceedings with weary indifference.
‘War will only lead to more war,’ Paul mumbled, glancing down at his freshly buffed shoes. ‘If you remember, the last war was meant to end all wars, and yet—’
‘And so on and so forth,’ said the tired judge on the far right, rubbing his eyes as if he had been up all night. ‘You do realize, of course, that if all of us took your attitude, Buckingham Palace would now be decorated with black eagles and flying the swastika flag.’
‘One could always engage in peaceful resistance, I suppose.’
The journalists emitted a few snorts.
‘I for one would refuse to learn German,’ he added uncertainly. He had read this in an essay by Russell. It had somehow sounded more convincing then.
‘Well, that would show them, wouldn’t it?’ the tired judge said. He propped up his head with his fists and his knuckles dug deep into his jowls. Paul wondered whether he had a son in the army: there was something personal in his contempt.
‘Mr Lamb, you describe yourself as a pacifist,’ squeaked the first judge. ‘What, then, would you do if a German soldier were to break into your house and attack your mother?’
It was not the best moment for Paul to discover that when under extreme mental strain, his face twisted into a grimace that could best be described as a grin.
Of Love and Other Wars Page 9
