Thirteen Such Years Read online

  Thirteen Such Years

  by

  Alec Waugh

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter I

  Morocco is an unlikely birthplace for a hotel in Devonshire, but it was in Fez that a young Englishman, unsatisfactorily employed, a foreign legionary recovering from wounds in a hospital, and an American woman temporarily at a loose end on her daughter’s marriage, decided, under the encouragement of a member of the London Group of painters, to open a hotel in the West of England. The result of that conference is the Easton Court Hotel.

  Its atmosphere is difficult to describe. The house is old, oak-beamed, and thatched. Dartmoor stretches to the back of it. It is decorated by an antique dealer, and notices proclaim that the furniture is genuine and for sale. But it is upholstered by trans-Atlantic, not by Tudor taste. Thick mattresses take the impress of the body’s weight. A reading lamp is set beside each bed. There is a bath room, and there are bath salts in it. The first guests of a new hotel are necessarily the personal friends of the proprietors. Americans and English came there. There was a flavouring of France. From the painter came a Bohemian note. The drawing-room is not large. Conversation is general after meals. It travels between California and the South of France.

  It did, certainly, on the evening of the twentieth of September, 1931. There were five of us staying there of whom two had had their main roots in New York. But we had each of us during the past three years spent as much of our time outside our country as within it. We were discussing our immediate plans. We none of us regarded ourselves as more than temporarily perched upon a pleasant bough. We compared the advantages of an autumn in Villefranche, Munich, London or New England. And as we talked I reflected on how cosmopolitan life had grown for those whose means or the nature of whose work permitted them to employ the modern services of communication. By wireless and telephone any house in Europe can be in communication with the Pacific coast. Between the wireless and the aeroplane the difference is no more than relative. The boundaries of nationality are so dissolved that a person can conduct simultaneous personal lives in three different continents, commuting between them as our grandfathers did between their village and their market town, and our fathers between the city and their suburban home. We were almost, it seemed, citizens of one vast state. For me, personally, there were as strong magnets in New York and Villefranche as there were in London. I was uncertain where I should spend the autumn.

  Next morning I walked into Chagford after breakfast to send off a couple of telegrams, the answers to which would decide my plans. But I never sent them. The newspaper placards outside the post office were announcing that England had gone off gold.

  §

  Then it was not possible to guess; to-day, three months later, it is not possible to do more than guess, the consequences of the Bank’s decision. But at least on that September morning could be foreseen a crisis which would involve the revaluing of every standard by which government had been for years conducted.

  During the preceding month every political speech and article had, with a few exceptions, insisted on the importance of safeguarding the pound and maintaining the gold standard which was the symbol of a stable currency. The Labour government had gone out of power because it had not given sufficient proof of its resolve to balance the budget. To save the pound large sums of money had been borrowed from New York and Paris. Yet overnight the country had suspended its gold payments, and the papers, which, for the past month had demanded a gold-backed pound, were busy asserting that the gold standard was unnecessary. Had the press followed any other course there would very likely have been a panic. It was because of the press as much as anything that the public kept its head. At the same time that sudden overnight reversal of a long-held policy could not mean anything but an entire re-assessment of long-held values.

  §

  It is as dangerous as it is tempting to fix events by dates, since all things are part of an unceasing process of effect and cause. You cannot truthfully say “things began here; things ended there”; not truthfully. But for the ordinary necessities of computation you cannot dispense with landmarks. And it may be that historians will mark with that September morning the end of the ninteen-twenties, of that period of rapid change, drift, uncertainty and restlessness that was the war’s legacy to us. For thirteen years there was a general surrendering to a stream; a refusal in public and private life, in Europe and the United States to take stock of resources, obligations, liabilities, potentialities. The Victorian rudder had been flung away. No Georgian rudder had been fashioned. Nations and individuals drifted, substituting speed for direction, in the belief that provided one moved fast enough it did not matter particularly where one moved. It was the speed of the gyroscopic top. Only as long as the speed was maintained would the top stand erect. The top now was lying on its side. The time for taking stock had come.

  But, as I walked back that morning from Chagford to Easton Cross, it was less of that, I thought than of the decade that was just closing; the nineteen-twenties which had been for the greater part of them my own twenties; the roughly marked decade that began with demobilisation and had now ended with the abandonment of the gold standard; seeing it as the story-teller inevitably does see history; in a succession of episodes symptomatic of general tendencies; as a frieze of figures typifying the ideas, ambitions, bewilderments of a period; choosing the individual as the unit; accepting as the explanation of that decade the people and conditions against which that decade was in revolt.

  When I attempt to visualize the late Victorian and Edwardian eras out of which my own youth sprang, it is not of politicians and elections and acts of parliament that I think, but of the man whom my parents nicknamed “the tail-up-er.”

  §

  They nicknamed him “the tail-up-er,” because on the twenty-second of March, 1918, the second evening of the big retreat, he came to their house, his little pigeon-chest puffed out, his sandy-grey moustaches aggressively brushed back, to ask them if they were “tail-up-ers” or “dismal Jimmies.” “I’m a tail-up-er,” he announced.

  For as long as I can remember he has been a constant if infrequent visitor. A small man, under five foot six, bald-headed, with a straight-backed carriage and a complexion of faded ochra, punctilious in dress and speech, he typifies all that caricature connotes by the word Anglo-Indian. He has always something to be belligerent about. The Bolsheviks, the Trades Unions, Negro Bands, the education of the proletariat. Once he overheard a couple of young subalterns discussing military strategy in the smoking-room of his Club. He reported them to the committee. Talking shop inside their Club, indeed! What was the Service coming to! To his disgust the committee refused to take any action. It explained that young soldiers took their careers seriously nowadays. He resigned at once. Impertinence; as though he had not taken his career seriously. Poona and all that.

  His cheeks quiver slightly as he talks. He sits bolt upright in the hardest chair as though he were paying a formal call in Edwardian London. His articulation has the staccato quality of machine gun fire. Indeed, his conversation generally has a military air. He listens to one’s remarks, and replies to them, in the spirit of a gunner who is aware of his opponents’ fire, who answers it, but at the same time disregards it. In the way that eighteenth century printers set at the head of a new page the last word of its predecessor, he has the original and disconcerting habit of repeating the last word or phrase of one’s last sentence bef
ore he begins his own.

  You are talking to him, for example, about Malaya. “The Malays,” you may say to him, “are proud, sensitive, loyal, revengeful, indolent.” He will listen with apparent attentiveness. The moment you pause, he will swiftly exclaim: “Indolent,” clear his throat and begin to tell you about a shrimp curry that was served him at the Galle Face. His intention, I take it, is to show that while he has something to say on another subject, he has been polite enough to listen to what you have to say on yours. It is a habit that makes any exchange of ideas difficult. But, that is scarcely what one wants, with him. One does not want to express one’s own opinions, but to hear his. In the same way that one searches for back numbers of Punch to learn how the inhabitants of Victorian and Edwardian England dressed and thought and spoke, so when I wonder what the attitude of extreme reactionary opinion will be towards any contemporary personality or event, I invariably find myself saying, “Now, what will ‘the tail-up-er’ make of that?”

  My parents sigh when a maid announces his arrival, but he provides them with a great deal of entertainment. He is a museum piece.

  §

  To-day the ‘tail-up-er’ is a family joke. But twenty years ago he was a great hero to me. He was a soldier. He had fought at Ladysmith. On his left wrist was the scar of a sabre cut. It was because of a bullet wound in his left thigh that his walk stiffened in cold weather. He wore the medals of three campaigns. He used to show me photographs taken of himself in India. Seated on a fifteen hand black charger he looked very fine in his turban, high boots, white breeches, gauntlet gloves and broad-sashed tunic. I listened bright-eyed and breathless to the story of his adventures. He was my ideal.

  Such an ideal as any Victorian schoolmaster would have chosen for a pupil. The ‘tail-up-er’ was an essential and admirable part of the Victorian pattern. It was a simple pattern. A map hung above a classroom mantelpiece. A sixth of it was painted red. Dominions, colonies, protectorates, were alike possessions. The schoolboy thought: “All that is ours.” With that map staring back at him, it was easy for him to see his personal life in terms of a series of loyalties; to his family, his school, his country. Empire was ownership. It was for him to safeguard, maintain, and if possible increase that heritage. He did not formulate this belief in words, but it was the base upon which he stood. It was firm beneath his feet. One had, if not actually to have been an adult at least to have received the greater part of one’s education before the war, to realise its reassuring firmness. Equally one had to serve through the war to realise how, month by month, it softened.

  §

  In the September of 1914 I went to a recruiting meeting at which the ‘tail-up-er’ was to speak. Of the dozen or so upon the platform he was the smallest and the most effective. There was nothing very original about his speech. He made references to “little Belgium” and “a scrap of paper.” But those phrases were not clichés then. A spirit of crusade was in the air. Rupert Brooke’s sonnets expressed 1914 as thoroughly as Siegfried Sassoon’s satires expressed 1917. There were few in the audience who were not moved by his peroration.

  “You may think it an impertinence for me,” he said, “an old man, unfit for war, to stand here asking the young to fight. You may think that it should be a young man standing here, calling to his friends to join him. Perhaps it should be. But to-night I am speaking to you not as an old man, but on behalf of young men, the young men who joined the Service when I did: who served with me, who fell in actions that I survived. They gave their youth for their country, in their country’s danger, for their country’s glory. The country that they saved for us is again in danger. I ask you to see to it that their sacrifice was not in vain. They saved this country for you. Will you not save it for their grandchildren?”

  He seemed in that moment to typify a generation. Like the torch-bearers in the race, he was handing to our charge the imperial tradition his generation had defended. I saw him in a heroic mould.

  It was the last time I saw him so. Within a very few months he had become one of the “old men in Clubs,” of whom soldiers in the line spoke with such contempt and bitterness. His generosity turned acid. I remember him in the last weeks of 1917, a snarling, vindictive figure. What was the Government doing? Why wasn’t it combing out the shirkers? Why weren’t the Pacifists clapped in gaol? Why weren’t these traitors in the Trades Unions lined up against a wall? Conscientious objectors, indeed! He’d know how to deal with them. These Germans must be fought to the last drop.

  By the end of 1917 the soldiers knew well that they had no use any longer for the world as the Victorians had planned it. Just as the “tail-up-er” had appeared heroic in the first weeks of the war, and by its later stages had become tiresome and silly, so had the whole Victorian tradition which had seemed so proud a heritage, turned shoddy. The war telescoped events. A lesson that ordinarily one would have needed a hundred years to learn, got learnt in five. The imperial tradition that made Empire and Ownership synonymous was gone for ever.

  §

  A great deal else went with it. Nearly everything, in fact, that the Victorian age had stood for. The conception of war as a sport went first. When, as a schoolboy, I listened to the “tail-up-er’s” account of frontier-raids, I pictured war as a glorified football match. Articles and sermons spoke of “the great game.” At Loos certain regiments went over the top dribbling footballs. But after Loos there was not much talk of that kind; in the line. To present the soldier’s life in France as an affair of gloom and terror, lit as a thunderstorm by lightning by periodic orgies behind the line, is as false as to present it as a picnic. On the whole the average soldier was not unhappy. He had comradeship. He was relieved of the responsibility of material worries. He had concrete moments—reliefs, leaves, the arrival of mails and parcels—to count the hours to. There was peace to dream about. He was not unhappy. But he never regarded actual fighting as a game.

  War lost its glamour in the mud and rain: and the symbols of war’s glamour, uniforms, medals, and rank, no longer fired the imagination. Too many were aware of the intrigue and time-serving that secured promotion. Too many decorations had been “dished out with rations.” The V.C. was the only medal to retain its standard. By the end of the war the length of ribbons along a tunic had slight significance. In Europe as in England.

  “It was a matter of luck,” an Austrian said to me. “You cannot give medals to an entire army. Of ten brave actions one is noticed. The second bravest man I ever saw carried no ribbon on his tunic. The bravest was shot for cowardice.

  “It was on the Italian front,” he told me, “early in the war. The where and when do not concern this story; when you have heard it you will recognise that it is better not to define too closely the occasion. It was early in the war, when the Italians were hot-blooded and incautious; eager to attack, careless to prepare. Our spies in those days had an easy time of it. We knew ten days before it came the time and place of an offensive that was to cost them in casualties and prisoners some twenty thousand lives. Our information was within its limits, absolute. The offensive was fore-doomed. There was a chance, though, if only we could know a little more, of making it not a defeat, but a disaster. There were just one or two things our spies had not been able to discover. If only we could know those.

  “Two days before the offensive we had the good fortune to take prisoner an Italian Staff Officer.

  “He was a man of thirty-five; tall, lean, angular; with proud cold eyes and cheeks furrowed between the mouth and nose. I knew within a moment the type of man he was; a man not to be intimidated, cajoled, or lured into confidence by drink. As I looked hard into his eyes an idea came to me.

  “‘Bring him back in an hour’s time,’ I ordered.

  “I had my plan ready when he returned. A large scale map was spread out upon the table. Papers were prepared.

  “‘At six o’clock on Wednesday,’ I said to him, ‘you will open your offensive. You will attack here and here and here. Your main drive will be al
ong this valley. Here and here and here your reserves will be in waiting. We know. We are prepared. It will be a very big defeat.’

  “‘Possibly it may be less severe than you imagine.’

  “‘It may also be considerably more severe. It would be, certainly, were two or three pieces of information to pass into my possession. No, no,’ I added, quickly, ‘please do not interrupt. I can see you to be a brave man. I am not going to attempt to torture you. It would, I am very certain, be useless. You are a man of honour. I respect you as a man of honour. It is to that sense of honour that I now appeal.

  “‘In the first place, I need not tell you that, should you, after you have heard me speak, think fit to tell me what I wish to know, no one except myself will know how that information has come to me. You will be sent immediately to a prison camp behind the line. You will be treated as all other prisoners, neither worse nor better. No one will ever know. That is, of course, if you should act as I hope and believe you will act.’

  “‘If not?’

  “‘If not, when we retire from here, as we shall retire on Wednesday morning at about half-past five, we shall leave you, bound and gagged, with this message pinned upon your chest.’

  “I handed him a sheet of paper. On it was written in large characters: ‘Thank you very much. He has told us all we needed. You can have him back again.’

  “‘That paper,’ I said, ‘will be pinned upon your chest. And on the table there will be left two or three copies of this document.’

  “I handed him a sheet of foolscap. It was a memorandum drawn up for battalion commanders. ‘The following information,’ it began, ‘has been given by an Italian Staff Officer who was taken prisoner this morning.’ Then followed such facts as we had received already from our spies.

  “‘You realise what this means?’ I said.

  “‘I am not a fool.’

  “‘Your men will find you here. They will not believe your explanation. They will be convinced that through your treachery several thousands of their countrymen are dead. You will be shot ignominiously as a spy.’