III
During my last week I was allowed out of the hospital in the afternoons, and I used to go up the Cherwell in a canoe. I found this recreation rather heavy work, for the water was a jungle of weeds and on the higher reaches progress had become almost impossible. Certainly the Great War had made a difference to the charming River Cherwell. But I had been feeling much more cheerful lately, for my friend Cromlech had risen again from the dead. I had seen his name in the newspaper list of killed, but soon afterwards someone telegraphed to tell me that he was in a London hospital and going on well. For fully a fortnight I had accustomed myself to the idea that his dead body was somewhere among the Somme shell-holes, and it was a queer experience, to be disentangling myself from the mental obituary notices which I had evolved out of my luminous memories of our companionship in the First Battalion. “Silly old devil,” I thought affectionately; “he always manages to do things differently from other people.”
By the end of August I was back at Butley with a month’s sick-leave and the possibility of an extension. So for the first week or two I forgot the future and enjoyed being made a fuss of by Aunt Evelyn. My outlook on the War was limited to the Battalion I had served with. After being kept out of the Line for nearly five weeks, they were expecting to be moved up at any moment. This news came in a letter from Durley. Suppressing such disquietude as it caused me, I put the letter in my pocket and went out to potter round the garden. It was a fine early September morning—almost my favourite sort of weather, I thought. The garden was getting wild and overgrown, for there was only one old man working in it now. The day before I had begun an attempt to recivilize the tangled tennis-lawn, but it had been too much like canoeing on the Cherwell, and today I decided to cut dead wood out of the cedar. While I climbed about in the tree with a billhook in my hand I could hear old Huckett trundling the water-tank along the kitchen garden. Then Aunt Evelyn came along with her flower-basket full of dahlias; while she was gazing up at me another brittle bough cracked and fell, scaring one of the cats who followed her about. She begged me to be careful, adding that it would be no joke to tumble out of such a big tree.
Later in the morning I visited the stables. Stagnation had settled there; nettles were thick under the apple-trees and the old mowing-machine pony grazed in shaggy solitude. In Dixon’s little harness-room, saddles were getting mouldy and there were rust-spots on the bits and stirrup-irons which he had kept so bright. A tin of Harvey’s Hoof Ointment had obviously been there since 1914. It would take Dixon a long time to get the place straightened up, I thought, forgetting for a moment that he’d been dead six months. … It wasn’t much fun, mooning about the stables. But a robin trilled his little autumn song from an apple-tree; beyond the fruit-laden branches I could see the sunlit untroubled Weald, and I looked lovingly at the cowls of hop-kilns which twinkled across those miles that were the country of my childhood. I could smell autumn in the air, too, and I thought I must try to get a few days clubbing before I go back to the Depot. Down in Sussex there were a few people who would willingly lend me a horse, and I decided to write to old Colonel Hesmon about it. I went up to the schoolroom to do this; rummaging in a drawer for some notepaper, I discovered a little pocket mirror—a relic of my days in the ranks of the Yeomanry. Handling it absentmindedly, I found myself using it to decipher the blotting-paper, which had evidently been on the table some time, for the handwriting was Stephen Colwood’s. “P.S. The Old Guvnor is squaring up my annual indebtedness. Isn’t he a brick?” Stephen must have scribbled that when he was staying with us in the summer of 1914. Probably he had been writing to his soldier brother in Ireland. I imagined him adding the postscript and blotting it quickly. Queer how the past crops up, I thought, sadly, for my experience of such poignant associations was “still in its infancy,” as someone had said of Poison Gas when lecturing to cannon-fodder at the Army School.
Remembering myself at that particular moment, I realize the difficulty of recapturing wartime atmosphere as it was in England then. A war historian would inform us that “the earlier excitement and suspense had now abated, and the nation had settled down to its organization of manpower and munition-making.” I want to recover something more ultimate than that, but I can’t swear to anything unusual at Butley except a derelict cricket field, the absence of most of the younger inhabitants, and a certain amount of talk about food prospects for the winter. Two of our nearest neighbours had lost their only sons, and with them their main interest in life; but such tragedies as those remained intimate and unobtrusive. Ladies worked at the Local Hospital and elderly
