It must not be supposed that I was ungrateful for my good luck. For several days on end I could feel obliviously contented, and in weaker moments there was an absurd hope that the War might be over before next autumn. Rambling among woods and meadows, I could “take sweet counsel” with the countryside; sitting on a grassy bank and lifting my face to the sun, I could feel an intensity of thankfulness such as I’d never known before the War; listening to the little brook that bubbled out of a copse and across a rushy field, I could discard my personal relationship with the military machine and its ant-like armies. On my way home I would pass old Mr. Jukes leaning on his garden gate, or an ancient labourer mending gaps in a hedge. I would stop to gaze at the loveliness of apple-blossom when the sun came out after a shower. And the protective hospitality of Nutwood Manor was almost bewildering when compared with an average twenty-four hours in a front-line trench.
All this was well enough; but there was a limit to my season of sauntering; the future was a main road where I must fall into step and do something to earn my “pay and allowances.” Lady Asterisk liked to have serious helpful little talks with her officers, and one evening she encouraged me to discuss my immediate horizon. I spoke somewhat emotionally, with self-indulgence in making a fine effect rather than an impartial resolve to face facts. I suggested that I’d been trying to make up my mind about taking a job in England, admitting my longing for life and setting against it the idea of sacrifice and disregard of death. I said that most of my friends were assuring me that there was no necessity for me to go out for the third time. While I talked I saw myself as a noble suffering character whose death in action would be deeply deplored. I saw myself as an afflicted traveller who had entered Lady Asterisk’s gates to sit by the fire and rest his weary limbs. I did not complain about the War; it would have been bad form to be bitter about it at Nutwood Manor; my own “personal problem” was what I was concerned with. …
We were alone in the library. She listened to me, her silver hair and handsome face bent slightly forward above a piece of fine embroidery. Outwardly emotionless, she symbolized the patrician privileges for whose preservation I had chucked bombs at Germans and carelessly offered myself as a target for a sniper. When I had blurted out my opinion that life was preferable to the Roll of Honour she put aside her reticence like a rich cloak. “But death is nothing,” she said. “Life, after all, is only the beginning. And those who are killed in the War—they help us from up there. They are helping us to win.” I couldn’t answer that; this “other world,” of which she was so certain, was something I had forgotten about since I was wounded. Expecting no answer, she went on with a sort of inflexible sympathy (almost “as if my number was already up,” as I would have expressed it), “It isn’t as though you were heir to a great name. No; I can’t see any definite reason for your keeping out of danger. But, of course, you can only decide a thing like that for yourself.”
I went up to the Clematis Room feeling caddishly estranged and cynical; wondering whether the Germans “up there” were doing anything definite to impede the offensive operations of the Allied Powers. But Lady Asterisk wasn’t hard-hearted. She only wanted me “to do the right thing.” … I began to wish that I could talk candidly to someone. There was too much well-behaved acquiescence at Nutwood Manor; and whatever the other officers there thought about the War, they kept it to themselves; they had done their bit for the time being and were conventional and correct, as if the eye of their Colonel was upon them.
Social experience at Nutwood was varied by an occasional visitor. One evening I sat next to the new arrival, a fashionable young woman whose husband (as I afterwards ascertained) was campaigning in the Cameroons. Her manner implied that she was ready to take me into her confidence, intellectually; but my responses were cumbersome and uneasy, for her conversation struck me as containing a good deal of trumped-up intensity. A fine pair of pearls dangled from her ears, and her dark blue eyes goggled emptily while she informed me that she was taking lessons in Italian. She was “dying to read Dante,” and had already started the Canto about Paolo and Francesca; adored D’Annunzio, too, and had been reading his Paolo and Francesca (in French). “Life is so wonderful—so great—and yet we waste it all in this dreadful War!” she exclaimed. Rather incongruously, she then regaled me with some typical gossip from high quarters in the Army. Lunching at the Ritz recently, she had talked to Colonel Repington, who had told her—I really forget what, but it was excessively significant, politically, and showed that there was no need for people to worry about Allenby’s failure to advance very
