Theoretically, today’s tea-party would have made excellent material for a domestic daydream when I was at the front. I was safely wounded after doing well enough to be congratulated by Captain Huxtable. The fact that the fighting men were still being sacrificed needn’t affect the contentment of the tea-party. But everything was blighted by those letters which were reposing in the local pillar-box, and it was with some difficulty that I pulled myself together when I heard a vigorous ring of the front-door bell, followed by the firm tread of the Captain on the polished wood floor of the drawing-room, and the volubility of Aunt Evelyn’s conversational opening alternating with the crisp and cheery baritone of her visitor. Captain Huxtable was an essentially cheerful character (“waggish” was Aunt Evelyn’s favourite word for him) and that afternoon he was in his most jovial mood. He greeted me with a reference to Muhammad and the Mountain, though I felt more like a funeral than a mountain, and the little man himself looked by no means like Muhammad, for he was wearing brown corduroy breeches and a white linen jacket, and his face was red and jolly after the exertion of bicycling. His subsequent conversation was, for me, strongly flavoured with unconscious irony. Ever since I had joined the Flintshire Fusiliers our meetings always set his mind alight with memories of his “old corps,” as he called it; I made him, he said, feel half his age. Naturally, he was enthusiastic about anything connected with the fine record of the Flintshires in this particular war, and when Aunt Evelyn said, “Do show Captain Huxtable the card you got from your General,” he screwed his monocle into his eye and inspected the gilt-edged trophy with intense and deliberate satisfaction. I asked him to keep it as a souvenir of his having got me into the Regiment—(bitterly aware that I should soon be getting myself out of it pretty effectively!). After saying that I couldn’t have given him anything which he’d value more highly, he suggested that I might do worse than adopt the Army as a permanent career (forgetting that I was nearly ten years too old for such an idea to be feasible). But no doubt I was glad to be going to the Depot for a few days, so as to have a good crack with some of my old comrades, and when I got to Cambridge I must make myself known to a promising young chap (a grandson of his cousin, Archdeacon Crocket) who was training with the Cadet Battalion. After a digression around this year’s fruit crop, conversation turned to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s message to the nation about Air Raid Reprisals. In Captain Huxtable’s opinion the Church couldn’t be too militant, and Aunt Evelyn thoroughly agreed with him. With forced facetiousness I described my own air-raid experience. “The cashier in the bank was as cool as a cucumber,” I remarked. There were cucumber sandwiches on the table, but the implications of the word “cashier” were stronger, since for me it was part of the price of martyrdom, while for the Captain it epitomized an outer darkness of dishonour. But the word went past him, innocent of its military meaning, and he referred to the increasing severity of the German air-raids as “all that one can expect from that gang of ruffians.” But there it was, and we’d got to go through with it; nothing could be worse than a patched-up peace; and Aunt Evelyn “could see no sign of a change of heart in the German nation.”
The Captain was delighted to see in today’s Times that another of those cranky Pacifist meetings had been broken up by some Colonial troops; and he added that he’d like to have the job of dealing with a “Stop the War” meeting in Butley. To him a Conscientious Objector was the antithesis of an officer and a gentleman, and no other point of view would have been possible for him. The Army was the framework of his family tradition; his maternal grandfather had been a Scotch baronet with a distinguished military career in India—a fact which was piously embodied in the Memorial Tablet to his mother in Butley Church. As for his father—“old Captain Huxtable”—(whom I could hazily remember, white-whiskered and formidable) he had been a regular roaring martinet of the gouty old school of retired officers, and his irascibilities were still legendary in our neighbourhood. He used to knock his coachman’s hat off and stamp on it. “The young Captain,” as he was called in former days, had profited by these paroxysms, and where the parent would have bellowed “God damn and blast it all” at his bailiff, the son permitted himself nothing more sulphurous than “confound,” and would have thought twice before telling even the most red-hot Socialist to go to the devil.
Walking round the garden after tea—Aunt Evelyn drawing his attention to her delphiniums and he waggishly affirming their inferiority to his own—I wondered whether I had exaggerated the “callous complacency” of those at home. What could elderly people do except try and make the best of their inability to sit in a trench and be bombarded? How could they be blamed for refusing to recognize any ignoble elements in the War except those which they attributed to our enemies?
Aunt Evelyn’s delphinium spires were blue against the distant blue of the Weald and the shadows of the Irish yews were lengthening across the lawn. … Out in France the convoys of wounded and gassed were being carried into the Field Hospitals, and up in the Line the slaughter went on because no one knew how to stop it. “Men are beginning to ask for what they are
