Blasting and Bomardiering Page 7

  I will hand over the controls to Gantleman. For a chapter or two I will abandon my narrative in the first person singular. You shall see these things as I saw them, yes, but out of the eyes of a mask marked 'Cantleman'. When he stops speaking (which will be after the declaration of war, in London) I shall take up the narrative again.

  CHAPTER II

  Morpeth Olympiad

  (The account of the British Mobilization from the pages of Blast)

  MORPETH OLYMPIAD RECORD CROWD

  Wonderful Crowds, gathering at Olympiads! What is the War to you? It is you who makes both the wars and the Olympiads. When War knocks at the door, why should you hurry? You are busy with an Olympiad!

  Cantleman1 looked at the perfidious poster, announcing the Olympiad, and reflected as above, in a sombre amazement. The crude violet lettering, distillation of suffragetic years of minor violence! Celebrated for minor violence, too, was he, a rough Bohemian—he savoured violence for its own sake, as a coarse joke, or the crepitation of a Chinese cracker. He was not a man of blood.—He did not understand—he was very stupid. He was a suffragette.8

  Eager for news, he went into a shop and got all the big popular London papers, Mails and Expresses, the loudest shouters of the lot. How they hollered 'War' to a thrilled universe! He found all his horizons, by the medium of this yellow journalism, turned into a sinister sulphur. He was as pleased as Punch.

  Ah, the grand messengers of death, the three-inch capitals! With the words came a dark rush of hot humanity in his mind. An immense human gesture swept its shadows across him like a

  1 This was my character, my fictional diarist, the hero of several stories of that time.

  2 I've just put this in. The editor of Blast would never have admitted that he was a suffragette. I've had to put a lot more in, too. I've toned him down.

  smoky cloud. 'Germany declares war on Russia* seemed a roar of guns. He saw active mephistophelian specks in Chancelleries —'diplomats' like old Leo.1 He saw a rush of papers, a frowning race. He saw it with innate military exultation. His ancestor had stood beside Clive. His grandfather had served under Outram. The ground seemed to sway a little, as it would with the passage of a Juggernaut, or a proud and ponderous Express. He left the paper shop, gulping this big morsel down, with stony dignity.

  The party at the golf links took his News, Mails and Mirrors, as the run home started. Each manifested his gladness at the bad news in his own inimitable way, every shade of British restraint, phlegm, and matter-of-factness.

  Would Old England declare War? Leo said yes, 'she* would. But Cantleman was all for 'her' not being a silly girl. She would keep out of it, as she always had, said he, the crafty old shop-keeping hussy! But the 'yeas' had it—if you counted in the back of the chauffeur. That back, with the melancholy wisdom of the working man, could only think one thing: namely that whatever was bad for the general run of men would probably be done. He knew 'England' better than the others—he had no illusions about 'her'. (He knew there was no 'her' at all, to start with.) His highspirited masters would probably decide to blow his head off—he had learned that in a hard school. If it lay between letting him alone, and dragging him away to death in battle, almost certainly they would choose the latter course. They were like that. The silent back of the liveried servant said all and more than that. His lips were sealed, but his back was eloquent.

  The news brought into relief a novel system of things. Everything was going to be delightfully different. There was the closing of the Stock Exchange. What would happen as regards the Banks? Would there be a shortage of small change? No sixpence for a shoe-black, or penny to buy a paper! A host of fascinating contretemps presented themselves to the readers of the newspapers as the car rushed along. Food supplies had better be laid in at once. And what of course of invasion? What a change an

  1 Leo was Ford of course.

  invasion would be! Back to William the Conqueror! The exciting novelities foreshadowed pleased everybody, such a delicious earthquake made children of the party, and Leo was the biggest kid of the lot, in his knowing, fishlike way. For of course he ought to have known better! And yet he was a great big gourmand for sensation was he not!

  The next few days was a gay carnival of fear, or conventional horror. The Morpeth Olympiad poster was secured and stuck up in the hall—an adequate expression, it was felt, of the greatness of the English Nation.

  Then the news stopped. All the London newspapers began to be bought up in Edinburgh, and none ever got as far as this remote countryside. The 'cloud of war' had begun to descend already. So the trees and flowers and the bucolic amenities lost all their meaning. Even the Morpeth Olympiad poster began to pall and to take on a silly air and the servants became less wooden as backstairs hysteria developed.

  (Note. At this point the heroic Cantleman, of my simple story, abruptly leaves the house-party—just as I did myself, as a matter of fact: though of course the details of this diary must not be identified too closely with its original in life. But as I cannot imagine a better account than that provided by Mr. Candeman of these events, I will continue with that fictional person.)

  CHAPTER III

  Journey during Mobilization

  C. left Scotland by the night train, on the second day of the British mobilization order. There was a half-hour wait at Ged-des station, where he joined the midnight train from Edinburgh. Upon the platform two English youths in khaki leant upon their rifles. Several persons arrived in a larger car. One was a very tall man and rather fat—a man of influence. He moved up to the stationmaster, who touched his cap with a robust respect. For some minutes they stood talking; scraps of confidential news, no doubt, which a station-master might be supposed to know, and is prepared to impart to an influential traveller.

  Cantleman watched the new arrivals with a certain haughty dislike. In his dress and appearance nautical and priestly at the same time—a sky-pilot with a master's certificate, gone Bohemian—he stood guard over a couple of much-labelled suitcases. His eye registered with hauteur and distaste the public-schoolboyish puppy-play of the lesser newcomers.—Officers packing off southward to their depots a little late ? He supposed so.

  'Stupid fat slob!' he reflected, at the tallest and eldest, in conference with the station-master. 'I prefer the Prussian officer. He does at least read Clausewitz. He is conversant with the philosophy of his machine-made moustaches. When he does something unsuitable he knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it!' He scowled at the officer-class in the abstract, as turned out by Arnold of Rugby. 'Arrogant and crafty sheep P he said to himself quietly and coldly, as his eye dwelt upon the fresh and open schoolboy faces. 'Pfui! A la lanterne!'

  Talk about conscription being good for the physical health of the conscripted nation! Better, in the case of this nation, to conscript their mental facilities, say I. See if they could be smartened up a bit! Happily the 'masses' are not in such need of it as these monied mutts. Hard conditions keep the souls of the poor in better trim—if not their minds. Doctor Arnold (among others) was responsible for a soul-less nation.

  But the train came melodramatically into the station, out of the north, and Cantleman entered it, armed with his bags.

  Sailors were sprawled about in most of the compartments. He experienced a brotherly attraction for these coarse sea-animals, and sat down with the curly head of one practically in his lap.

  Mobilization was everywhere; the train was quite full. Ten people, chiefly women, slept upright against each other in one carriage. They revealed unexpected fashions in sleep. Their eyes seemed to be shut fast to enable them to examine some ludicrous fact within. It looked, from the corridor, like a seance of imbeciles.

  He decided to transfer. The sailors would probably wake up at the hours of the watches: he would sleep better among the vegetative shapes of the women. He forced two grunting bodies apart and joined in the female seance.

  He fell asleep. When he woke he was evidently upon a bridge. Newcastle-on-Tyne, he found it w
as. There were sentries on the bridge. It might be blown up otherwise—we were almost at war, and already spies were speeding towards all bridges with infernal machines ready for use. Stacks of rifles on the railway platform. More 'mobilization scenes', to delight the Mail or Mirror.

  There were no sailors in this carriage, but the ten or so sleeping people, travelling through England on this important and dramatic night, must be connected in some way with mobilization. They seemed quite indifferent, however, to what was afoot. Stuck up against each other, they looked as if they were mobilized every week or so. Disagreeable, no doubt but they had grown accustomed to it.

  Newcastle woke them up with a banging of doors. They stared glassily at it, but without disturbing the symmetry of their tableau vivant. A squat seafaring figure in a stiff short coat got in. Cantleman made room for him. Six a side made a more massive effect than five, and no one was in a mood of aloofness at this juncture of Britain's history! The newcomer aimed his stern at the fissure between Cantleman's and the neighbouring body. He began a gradual sinking movement, towards the seat. He reached it a short time after the train had restarted.

  This was not an attractive man. As he was on the way down to the seat he even showed a certain truculence. As it were defiantly, he announced that he was answering a mobilization call. The implication was that such a man had a right to be seated. He must have something to do with the Navy's food, thought Cantleman.

  'I'm not travelling for pleasure,' said the fellow later on, in a harsh and angry voice, looking at Cantleman with a bloodshot eye. 'No, I'm called up, I've been called up.'

  T guessed that,' said C.

  'You did, did you! Yes, what are we going for—can you tell me that?' That Cantleman could not guess. He shook his head. 'Why, to take the place of other men, as soon as they're shot down!'

  The trenchant hissing of the 'soon' and 'shot down' woke up one or two of the women, who looked at him resentfully out of one eye.

  'The Kayser ought to be bloody well shot!' he went on.

  'He's a bad emperor,' agreed Cantleman.

  'Bad! He's worse than bad!'

  'He's a wretched emperor,' said Cantleman, soothingly.

  'He's bin getting ready for this 'ere for twenty years. Now he's going to have what he's bin askin' for. Hot and heavy— a-ah! Spendin' his private fortune on it, he has. For twenty years. He'll get it where the chicken got the chopper! Shootin's too good for his kind.'

  'Who?' asked Cantleman.

  'Why the Kayser,' the man roared out suspiciously. 'Who did you think I meant? Napoleon Boneypart!'

  This fellow was round fifty, like a hardfeatured Prussian. Must be connected with catering, to be so bellicose! thought Cantleman. A sea-grocer? The white apron of the German delicatessen-butcher fitted him, in the mind's eye. Did battleships have sausage-and-snack bars? Too noisy by far to be a fighting man. Near his pension perhaps. A very savage character.

  But the warmth of the woman next to him appeared to Cantleman at last excessive. Her leg was fat, restless and hot. It moved spasmodically like a sick thing. Then he detected a thick wheeze : he remarked a shawl.

  The heat was the heat of fever, undoubtedly. He was pressed very closely against an invalid!

  Minutes of stolid hesitation elapsed. He might fall asleep himself and was not disposed to blend his slumbers with those of a deceased person. This was not an ambulance! Why were fever patients not discouraged from entering trains?

  He had a youthful horror of sickness. A little ashamed, he rose with stealth, and went out into the corridor, where he smoked a cigarette. After that he entered the next compartment, getting in between some slumbering sailors, pictures of health if nothing else. He expanded his lungs—as if to inhale the briny freshness of the ocean—and sat down.

  The light was uncovered and the carriage not so much packed as sprawled over. Facing Cantleman a sailor was awake and filling his cutty: a workman and he were conversing in sober tones. It was not about the war they were talking, but the mining industry.

  The sailor was a Scot, from near Glasgow, as black as a levantine, his features acquiline and baggy in the symmetrical southern way. Eyes brown and animal, lids like brown metal slides. One black eyebrow was fixed up with a wakeful sagacity.

  When the workman left the train, Cantleman took on the sailor. He was a naval reservist. He had been down to Chatham for the Test Mobilization a week or two before. No sooner back, and congratulating himself on no more derangement for some time to come, then the real mobilization arrives. And there he was; not too well pleased, but sensibly bovine. A great placid veteran.

  'The wife hauns me a letter, the Sunday morr-rening. I tuk a wee keek at ut, oot o' me richt ee. I see the offeeshal seal in the cornier'—all in the voice of Harry Lauder, if you can do it, with much nodding of the head, and humorous levitation of the eyebrows, the r's rolling, a chuckling drumfire of pawky vocables. 'Then I turrened over and had another wee wink.'

  The sailor's conversation gave no indication that he regarded this as a journey to journey's end, or anything out of the way of that sort. Just a freak of irksome duty.

  They ran into York. The platform was comparatively empty. It was the emptiest station yet.

  A naval reservist got into their carriage. A half-dozen people had come to see him off. His mother, a burly woman, with a kind square face, kept swaying from one foot to the other, with a Johnsonian roll. She was making heavy weather. A contemptuous grin curled her close mouth. With her staring tragic eyes she kept turning and looking at him, with her bitter grinning mouth, then back down the empty platform, into the reaches of the future.-

  Two girls, the young man's sisters probably, stood crying behind the heavy matron, one wiping her face with a very small handkerchief. An old man, no doubt the father, remained close under the window, deprecatory, distressed, absent-minded.

  This was a foretaste of other scenes for Cantleman. But the empty York platform, in the small hours of the morning, and this English family—without the wild possessive hugging of the French at the stations—sending off their young reservist, affected him more. It was the woman; whose sarcastic grin and fixed eyes, and her big body with one shoulder hunched up— almost a grace, like a child's trick—as her eyes wandered, were not easily forgotten. He prayed that the woman might get back her reservist son safe and well; for she was the unhappy child—not he—whose doll was being stolen.

  But the family of the young reservist was obscured. A couple of slum-youths, in smart sports-jackets, had jumped in and blocked up the window, talking to a third on the platform.

  The train started : the platform with its mourning party was left behind, and the new reservist took his place next to the Scot. The slum-youths stood in the corridor beyond, until the next station, when they left the train with a jerky clatter.

  The York reservist was reminiscent of a Breton conscript sailor. He had tobacco-coloured, rather staring eyes: a much developed Adam's apple and jaw muscles. He filled and lighted his pipe, and when that was done turned to the Scot with the question—

  'Are you for Portsmouth?'

  'Chatham,' said the Scot, with deep solemnity—removing his pipe from his mouth, and leaning towards him as he spoke. 'Chatham,' he said again, and returned his pipe to his mouth.

  The York reservist started a conventional grumble, regarding the disturbance to his private life. Both the Scot and he came from the pits. The Yorkshireman had a great deal to say about new German machinery which had recently been installed where he worked. It only functioned properly under certain conditions. The Scot too had seen German machinery. Not satisfactory, must they buy German machinery anyway. For a long time they talked about the pits and the unsatisfactory German machinery.

  The Crowd-proof Jack Tars were the first break in the continuity of the Crowd-spirit Cantleman had met with since the war began blowing up.—As sailors of course they were professionals, with a long top-dog tradition that made them proof against nervous excitement. They coul
d not foresee Jutland, any more than Jellicoe. They were still anchored on Trafalgar.

  The reservist of Scotland was a Syrian gem of craft and balance. The Yorkshire pitman was a more florid northern sailor.—Referring to the new Crowds, in process of formation, the Scot spoke in his measured way without respect. This new Crowd-spirit did not impress him, as a disciplined man.

  'They stood there as seeck as dugs till after twal,' he said. 'I had to go roond by Maryhill. I just gave one luk at the boarrd. Reserrvists reporrt! That's settled it, sez I. But they were still thairrr as I went back.'

  A young athlete of very heavy build, a coarse lemon blond thatch, but curly, woke up in the corner. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands like a schoolboy and grinned at finding himself conscious again. His dreams were realler than he was, probably. Large empty features, with a long pointed nose, lecherously twisted at the nostrils: a mouth of cupid's bow pattern. His hair was going on the temples, but a bunch of curls made a last bold stand in the middle. As he grinned sheepishly from one to the other of those not so newly woken, his scalp retreated and flushed. A painful expression, as if the result of the straining proper to a natural function, never quite left his face. Frequently he sprang up, dashed himself into the woodwork of the door, and sat down again with a bang. At last he rebounded as usual, charged for the fifth time, but straighter, and disappeared. He too was a pit hand, but brought no illumination to the commun fund of talk.

  A small wizened fellow, who had been sleeping curled up with his head on his service sack, woke up. He too was a miner. Gross-examined by the first Scot he gave an account of himself, and asked various questions in return. They told him his jersey wouldn't pass muster. Two stripes ornamented the sleeve. Chatham he was bound for. Cantleman began to think of all naval reservists as miners. The Scot, however, began talking of a postman who had been seen off at Ivanhoe or somewhere by the entire staff of the Post Office.