He asked his way to the townhall and in a species of dull resignation stood waiting his turn for the ordeal of medical inspection. When it came he went listlessly through the now familiar process, stripped, was weighed and measured, was pummelled, showed his teeth, answered questions. It was the stethoscope that had done the business yesterday, and would do it again today; not that there was anything the matter with him or his heart—it was just the blind cruel stupidity that was always and in everything against him. … While the doctor bent to listen he was wondering what he should do with tomorrow, what he should do with the next day, what he should do with his life!
He had made so sure of a third rejection that he could hardly believe his ears when he heard he was up to the physical standard required of a soldier of the King. “You’ve made a mistake,” was on the tip of his tongue, and though he checked the words before they were uttered, he stood dazed and staring, much as he had done on the day he was first refused. He could not remember clearly what happened to him next or what he did; he went where he was told, he sat and waited, he repeated words which he knew must have been the oath; his fellows talked to him and he answered back … but all he was conscious of was the stunning fact of his acceptance. It seemed to him Griselda must know and rejoice—and he had thoughts of her watching him, of her white soul blessing him to victory.
XVII
A pencilled scrawl despatched from a mushroom camp in the Home Counties told Edith Haynes that William was at last a soldier; it was brief, written shakily by a man tired in body but uplifted in spirit, informed her that he had just been absorbed into a London battalion, that he had not yet got his uniform, was sleeping in a barn and drilling hard and concluded with the words “Thank God!” She answered the scrawl by return of post and a few weeks later, hearing nothing, wrote again; but, in spite of her request for further news, for month after month she waited in vain for a successor to the shaky scribble.
When it came the war had been in progress a couple of years and the address was a procession of letters—whereof the three last were the B.E.F. that denoted service over-Channel. It was a restrained and correct little letter, on the face of it uninteresting and not much longer than the last, but differing from it in that it was written in ink and in the tidy, clerical hand which William had acquired in the days of his boyhood for the use of the insurance office. It expressed regret for his lengthy silence, but did not attempt to explain it; and went on to relate that before coming to France he had been an orderly-room clerk, that he was at present at an advanced base—he must not of course give its name—where he was employed in office work, principally the typewriting of letters. It concluded with an assurance that he had not forgotten her kindness and a hope she would write to him again … and she read and reread the polite little missive, half-guessing what lay between its lines.
It had been written in an interval of that typing of local official communications which was Private Tully’s daily contribution to the waging of the European War; and it had not been written earlier because Private Tully was too sullen of heart to write.
For a few weeks only he had known what it was to be a soldier of England in the making; he had drilled, he had marched, he had learned to hold a rifle and his body had ached with the discipline. He had lain down at night so weary that he could not sleep, and he had risen giddily in the morning in fear of the day that was coming. Other men filled out and hardened with their training, grew healthy, muscular and brown—and he set his teeth and argued with himself that this stage of sick exhaustion was only a stage and in time he would be even as they. What he lacked in strength he made up in fiery willingness, overtaxing his energy by dogged efforts to keep level with broader shouldered, tighter muscled men, and steadfastly refusing to admit that his bodily misery was more than a passing discomfort. More than once a good-natured comrade suggested a visit to the doctor—whereat William would flush as at an insult and turn on the meddler almost savagely.
He held on longer than he could have done unaided, by virtue of much kindly help. Once, in a sudden need for sympathy he had told to one of his fellows the story of Griselda and his own conversion to militarism; and, unknown to himself, the story went the round of his mess. From the beginning the men had treated him with the instinctive kindness that the stronger feels for the weakling, but from that time forth their kindness was more than instinctive; they ranged themselves tacitly on the weakling’s side in his struggle with his own deficiencies. Little odd jobs of cleaning and furbishing were done for him—often secretly, he knew not by whom—and no man was ever too weary to take on work that would spare him. They were in a conspiracy to save him from blunders—to warn him or
