All the same, and in spite of coddling, the breakdown came as it was bound to do in the end; the doctor who refused had been wiser than the man who passed him. There was nothing urgently or seriously wrong with his health; but he was not made soundly enough to stand the violent and sudden change from a sedentary life to a life of unceasing exertion. He had never taken much out-of-door exercise; had always trained or bussed it rather than travel afoot; and of late his days had been spent entirely between the four walls of his Camden Town sitting-room.
It was on the homeward stretch of a route march that his strength failed him suddenly and he knew that he could do no more; his pack was a mountain, his body was an ache, and a blackness closed upon his eyes. He fought very gallantly to save himself and, by the dogged effort of his will, kept going for a few minutes more. “I can do ten steps,” he told himself and counted each step as he took it; then, the first ten accomplished, “Now I can do ten more.” So he kept going for a few yards more and dragged foot after foot till he had reached the tale of two hundred; at which point—twenty tens—he staggered, fell out of the ranks in a faint and was brought back to camp on a stretcher.
That was the end of his soldiering with pack and rifle; from the day of his breakdown on the route march his platoon knew him no more and when he came out of hospital, some three weeks later, he was put on to clerical duties. As orderly-room clerk he handled a typewriter instead of a bayonet, and handled it steadily as the months lengthened into years. Others, his contemporaries, completed their training, left the camp, and went off to the front; he remained, at first savagely resentful and later sullenly resigned.
His conception of soldiering, derived as it was from his own brief and fiery experience in Belgium, from the descriptive articles of war correspondents and his reading of bygone campaigns, had never included the soldier who was merely a clerk. He had never realized that a man in uniform was not necessarily a man of blood; the revelation came to him only when he copied letters and routine orders, filed papers and, for all practical purposes, was back at his desk in the insurance office. His daily duties mocked and derided the hopes and ambitions wherewith he had joined the Army; and, ticking at his typewriter, he contrasted, half-ashamedly, the blank reality with the strenuous and highly coloured dream. One phase of that dream—inspiring then, ridiculous now—had shown him to himself as the hero of some bloody enterprise and the central figure of such a scene as he had read of in Napoleonic history; a scene of be-medalling and public praise in token of duty bravely done. He had pictured it often, awake and asleep … and fancied Griselda looking down.
Slowly, under the benumbing influence of office routine, his revengeful ambitions faded, and with them his half-acknowledged hope of emulating Murat and Augereau. His interest in the war had been fundamentally a personal interest, and though there had grown up in him, by force of circumstance, a tardy consciousness of his Englishry, it was hardly strong enough to inspire him with pride in a humble and wearisome duty done in the name of England. Be it said in excuse for him that few men could feel pride in the labour of dealing with daily official communications—the duty of copying out vain repetitions and assisting in the waste of good paper. The stilted uselessness of half the documents was evident even to William; and there were moments when he told himself, in savage discontent, that he would have been less unprofitable in civilian idleness than busied in promoting futility.
For a time he was jolted out of his rut by his transfer to France in the August of 1916. He was drafted out, at a few hours’ notice, with a batch of men destined for clerical duties, and found himself planted in a small French town round which camps were spreading in a fringe of tent and hutment, and where house after house was being rapidly annexed for the service of the British Army. But, save for change of scene and country, the new rut into which he had been jolted was twin to his old rut in England. It was the same clerk’s life—this time in the office of a military department—but with longer and more irregular hours than fall to the lot of the ordinary civilian clerk, and with restrictions on personal freedom unknown since his days in the City. The Army kept him as tightly as his straitlaced mother; demanded as regular hours and refused, as steadfastly as she had done, to let him wander o’ nights.
He filed, he copied, he ate his rations—and from the beaten track of his everyday life, the war seemed very far away. Sometimes in his off-hours, afternoon or evening, he would tramp up the hills that held the little town as in a cup to a point where, looking eastward, he could see the sudden flashes of the guns. The bright, fierce flashes in the evening sky were war, real war made visible and wickedly beautiful; such war as he had seen in the Ardennes village, and such as he had dreamed of fighting when he first donned his khaki tunic. And instead a chair and a typewriter in the Rue Ernest Dupont, the papers to be filed that a girl might have filed, the round of safe and disciplined monotony. That was war as he knew it: an office with flashes in the distance.
For a few days after his arrival in
