I’d overheard Lady Asterisk talking about spiritualism to one of the officers; evidently she was a strong believer in the “unseen world.” Perhaps it was this which set me wondering whether, by concentrating my mind on, say, young Ormand (who was still with the Second Battalion) I might be able to receive some reciprocal communication. At three o’clock in the morning a sleepless mind can welcome inprobabilities and renounce its daylight scepticism. Neither voice nor vision rewarded my expectancy.
But I was rewarded by an intense memory of men whose courage had shown me the power of the human spirit—that spirit which could withstand the utmost assault. Such men had inspired me to be at my best when things were very bad, and they outweighed all the failures. Against the background of the War and its brutal stupidity those men had stood glorified by the thing which sought to destroy them. …
I went to the window and leant out. The gables of the house began to loom distinct against a clear sky. An owl hooted from the woods; cocks were crowing from distant farms; on the mantelpiece a little clock ticked busily. Oppressed by the comfort of my surroundings, I felt an impulse to dress and go out for a walk. But Arras and the Somme were a long way off; I couldn’t walk there and I didn’t want to; but they beckoned me with their bombardments and the reality of the men who endured them. I wanted to be there again for a few hours, because the trenches really were more interesting than Lady Asterisk’s rose-garden. Seen from a distance, the War had a sombre and unforgettable fascination for its bondsmen. I would have liked to go and see what was happening, and perhaps take part in some exciting little exploit. I couldn’t gainsay certain intense emotional experiences which I’d lived through in France. But I also wanted to be back at Nutwood Manor for breakfast … Returning to my bed I switched on the yellow shaded light. Yes; this was the Clematis Room, and nothing could be less like the dugout where I’d sat a month ago talking about Sussex with Ralph Wilmot. Through the discurtained window the sky was deep nocturnal blue. I turned out the lamp, and the window became a patch of greyish white, with treetops dark and still in the strange quietude before dawn. I heard the cuckoo a long way off. Then a blackbird went scolding along the garden.
I awoke to a cloudless Sabbath morning. After breakfast Lady Asterisk led me into the garden and talked very kindly for a few minutes.
“I am sure you have had a very trying time at the front,” she said, “but you must not allow yourself to be worried by unpleasant memories. We want our soldier-guests to forget the War while they are with us.”
I replied, mumbling, that in such surroundings it wouldn’t be easy to worry about anything; and then the old Earl came out on to the terrace, pushing the wheeled apparatus which enabled him to walk.
Often during the next three weeks I was able to forget about the War; often I took refuge in the assuasive human happiness which Nutwood Manor’s hospitality offered me. But there were times when my mental mechanism was refractory, and I reverted to my resolution to keep the smoke-drifted battle memories true and intense, unmodified by the comforts of convalescence. I wasn’t going to be bluffed back into an easygoing tolerant state of mind, I decided, as I opened a daily paper one morning and very deliberately read a despatch from “War Correspondents’ Headquarters.”
“I have sat with some of our lads, fighting battles over again, and discussing battles to be,” wrote some amiable man who had apparently mistaken the War for a football match between England and Germany. “One officer—a mere boy—told me how he’d run up against eleven Huns in an advanced post. He killed two with a Mills bomb (‘Grand weapon, the Mills!’ he laughed, his clear eyes gleaming with excitement), wounded another with his revolver, and marched the remainder back to our own lines. …” I opened one of the illustrated weeklies and soon found an article on “War Pictures at the Royal Academy.” After a panegyric about “Forward the Guns!” (a patriotic masterpiece by a lady who had been to the Military Tournament in prewar days) the following sentence occurred: “I think I like Mr. Blank’s Contalmaison picture best. He almost makes one feel that he must have been there. The Nth Division are going over the second line, I expect—the tips of their bayonets give one this impression—and it is a picture which makes one’s pulse beat a lot faster. …”
“The tips of their bayonets give one that impression.” … Obviously the woman journalist who wrote those words was deriving enjoyment from the War, though she may not have been aware of the fact. I wondered why it was necessary for the Western Front to be “attractively advertised” by such intolerable twaddle. What was this camouflage War which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations of people who had never seen the real
