His Second War Page 13

  68

  THURSDAY, 17 OCTOBER 1940

  It was what is called a typical, which is to say, it was an exceptional, late autumn day: a day that started with mist, and a chill in the air, a mist through which the sunlight began to break about eleven, that by lunch-time had become summer-hot. It was the perfect day to drive down into the country with a team of cameramen to film a demonstration and it was a perfect picnic site that had been chosen for a demonstration at the head of a valley, with the grass very green with dew and the trees red and brown and yellow and the spire of a church showing between the branches of an orchard.

  They got down early, set out their cameras and waited. On the previous night the blitz in his part of London had been heavy. It was a relief and contrast to lie out there with the sun upon his face and the air fresh and cool, in a countryside untouched by war; a contrast that was accentuated by the knowledge that they were here to photograph engines of war of a “frightfulness” beyond the imagining of last war’s war lords. The valley was quiet and deserted, looking much as it had looked for centuries. Nothing dramatic in the country’s history had ever happened here. But within an hour its slopes would be lined with redhatted officers; a whistle would blow, the handles of the cameras would begin to turn; explosion would follow upon explosion, the soft greensward would be scorched and ripped and scattered, an unrecognizable desert of smouldering fires and scarred iron.

  In fifteen minutes the beauty of the valley was destroyed, and it was just as the high-grade staff-officers were moving towards their cars as the final informal conferences were breaking up, that a horseman, a civilian, came trotting along the path above the valley. This was probably a favourite ride of his. He had no idea that this demonstration was to be held here. It would scarcely be a pleasant surprise for him. The officer beside the camera looked up, curious to read the expression on his face; to recognize with a start of surprise that the rider was Siegfried Sassoon.

  His first instinct was to jump up, run across and greet him. A second instinct checked him. There was an inscrutable expression on that drawn, handsome face as it looked down on the charred and littered grass.

  What thoughts, he asked himself, were moving behind that mask; how many different thoughts must be creating that mixed mood. Memories of the last war and his own revolt against it; his poems that had seemed then and later the battle-cry to a crusade; this present return of war that the sacrifice of his own generation had not prevented; the magnified and intensified horror of this new war exemplified by these new strange engines of destruction; with himself a quarter of a century later, in his fifties now, too old for service.

  What other thoughts, what other memories must not be mingling in that mixed mood? It was kinder to leave him to those thoughts.

  69

  INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

  It was decided at the time of Italy’s first attack on Greece, to dispatch a small mission to Athens to instruct the Greeks in the handling of one of the P(W)D’s devices.

  The mission was accompanied by two instructional films. They were silent films and it was necessary to translate the captions into Greek. The obvious course was to apply to the Greek Embassy for a translator. It was, however, considered on security grounds that the sending of the mission must be kept a secret.

  Students of modern Greek who possessed the necessary security qualifications were rare. It took Military Intelligence a morning’s search to find, in an obscure research department, a scholar for whose credentials they were prepared to vouch. Since the mission was to sail at once his work was of immediate urgency. The inscribing and photographing of the translated captions was a work moreover which on technical grounds could not be hurried beyond a certain point. And there were only available a limited number of technicians who both possessed the necessary security qualifications and were capable of the work.

  All manner of high-level priorities had to be obtained to get the job done in time. As regards “wangling” it was the most strenuous piece of work the department’s staff captain had undertaken. But finally the work was done, twenty-six hours ahead of schedule, and on the very day when it was decided that the Greek Embassy might after all be informed of the present that was to be sent to its soldiers. It was suggested therefore that a copy of the captions should be shown to the Greek Embassy, on the pretext that it would be as well to have them checked, but in fact to show how thoroughly the department had done its job. It was indeed with some pride that the staff captain took them round.

  An extremely puzzled expression came, however, into the face of the official to whom he showed them. At first he fancied that the official was puzzled by the intricate ingenuity of the device with which it was proposed to defend the defiles of the northern frontier. But no, it was not that. Sadly the official shook his head. No, he said, it would not do. If it were shown to a class of soldiers they would burst out laughing. A grisly doubt assailed the officer. The interpreter had seemed a very scholarly person.

  “You don’t mean to say that it’s been translated into Homeric Greek?” he asked.

  The official shook his head. “Nothing as good as that,” he said. “It’s been translated into our equivalent of cockney.”

  70

  THE LAWYER

  One of the minor but sadder tragedies of the war has been the extent to which one has been cut off from one’s own old friends.

  With how many people has one not lost touch completely. With little spare time, few facilities for travel, fewer for entertaining, it is only possible to know those with whom one is brought into constant contact through proximity and work. If one were to make out to-day from one’s 1938 diary a list of one’s acquaintances, one would probably find not only that one had not seen the quarter of them since the war began, but that one would not even know what the half of them were doing; how many of them indeeed were still alive. On the other hand every so often one has found one’s self brought back very pleasantly to someone from whom with the passage of years one has little by little grown apart. And for the staff captain of the Ministry of Mines the second year of the war brought a year of pleasant reunion with almost his oldest friend.

  Ten years earlier that friend, a lawyer and a man of letters, who had published under his own name a number of books of the type that are listed in booksellers’ catalogues under the heading of “Belles Lettres,” decided to issue anonymously, under the title of A Lawyer’s Notebook, a collection of the thoughts, epigrams, impressions, character studies that he had in the course of thirty years jotted down at odd times in the note-book that he kept beside his bed.

  It was necessary that such a book should be presented to the public through a preface. He discussed the matter with the author of these pages. A verbal and gentleman’s agreement was drawn up by which the novelist was to provide the lawyer with a preface and the lawyer was to provide the novelist with free legal advice for the next three years.

  The preface was as follows:

  PREFACE TO A LAWYER’S NOTEBOOK

  It is unusual for a first meeting to be significant. In novels and on the stage a new character is so introduced that his appearance is self-explanatory. He enters the action of the plot at a carefully chosen moment. He behaves and speaks so that the reader or the playgoer will be able to form a definite opinion of him within five minutes. But in real life this rarely happens. As often as not we have known a person several months before he does anything that is in character. My first meeting with the author of this book was, however, very definitely such a one as I would contrive were I to “put him in a novel.”

  It was on the first Sunday of January in 1917.

  I was home from Sandhurst for the Christmas recess. S. P. B. Mais was staying at my parents’ house. He had dined on the Saturday with the author of this book. He returned late and noisily and disturbed the dog. On the following morning he was not at breakfast. When I returned from church he was still in his room. He sent down a message that he was supposed to be going for a walk with his
host of the previous evening but that he did not feel particularly like walking, so could a telephone message to that effect be sent. At that time there was no telephone in my parents’ house. “Oh, well,” Peter Mais replied, “he did not expect his host would feel particularly like walking either.”

  At a quarter-past twelve, however, a large, hatless, comfortably-dressed man of middle age arrived. I told him that Mais had not expected him to appear that morning. Our visitor looked perplexed. “Why not?” he said. Those two words made a rapid thumbnail sketch of a personality. They defined three traits, a strong head, a refusal to let the new day be disturbed by the accidents of the previous night, and a rigid observance of routine. Fifteen years of deepening and affectionate friendship have only added details to that sketch.

  As the pages of this book will show, he places a high value on the pleasures of the table, but I have never known him affected by them, I have never heard complaint of “morning headaches.” Nor do I know any man whose routine is more immutably arranged. A solicitor, the son of a solicitor, a scholar of Eton and of Balliol, he has been bred in an atmosphere of precedence and tradition. He does nothing unexpected. You know at any moment of the day or week what he will be doing and where he will be doing it.

  His house is near Regent’s Park. He leaves it every morning at 9.30 to catch the Metropolitan train that will land him at Lincoln’s Inn soon after ten o’clock. He has the same chambers in which his father worked; for more than thirty years, for six days every week, his horizon has been bound by two long lines of Georgian windows. Between ten and two he does the bulk of his work. His practice is a family practice. He is a rare and unwilling litigant. His appearance in the lower courts is exceptional. At half-past two o’clock he goes out to lunch.

  He lunches in Chancery Lane in the back room of an oyster shop. It is unlicensed, so he provides his own wine, a light Moselle, and a tawny port. His lunch consists of shellfish. Talking more than eating he remains at the table till four o’clock. He has nearly always a guest with him at lunch; more often than not between a quarter and half-past three a friend at the end of his own luncheon will arrive to join him in a glass of port. There will not be a great deal of work awaiting him on his return. There will be letters to sign, there will be a conference with his managing clerks. He will leave his chambers at half-past five. Except when he is going to take a Turkish bath he goes straight home.

  He dines out seldom and reluctantly. At his own table he can be sure of surrounding himself with the people that he likes. He can be certain that the food and the wine will be good. He keeps a good table. He keeps also early hours. By eleven he is usually in bed. That, five days of the week, is what happens.

  On Saturday, he will work as strenuously as any other morning and feel that the walk to his club entitles him to a carnivorous lunch.

  The routine of Sunday is equally fixed. He starts off from his house at eleven o’clock for a walk from which he will not return till twenty past one. He will have a different companion for his walk each Sunday, but the walk will be substantially the same. He will reach Hampstead Tube Station by way of Fitzjohn’s Avenue; he will proceed past Romney’s studio to the White Stone Pond; he will turn left across the Heath to the Leg of Mutton Pond; through Golder’s Hill Park, he will turn into North End Road. Of recent years he has formed the pleasant practice of breaking his walk at my parents’ house and taking a glass of beer there.

  His return home will be by the site of the Blake cottages and the Spaniard’s Inn. He will arrive home at twenty past one, where, while his guest is entertained by his family, he will take the bath which will make him five minutes late for lunch. It will be a very typical English Sunday luncheon, a roast joint, a fruit tart and cream, Stilton cheese. There are no cocktails in his house. The apostolic succession of drinks will be observed; sherry, claret, port, and brandy. He will most probably sleep a little after lunch.

  That, for thirty-five years, has been his life. For perhaps twenty years more it will continue to be. On the surface it would seem such a life of routine as has stood for centuries—an Aunt Sally to youthful enterprise. How dull it can be made to sound, how prosaic. And yet in actual fact, as this book proves, few lives have been more varied; few people have seen more, few people have a wider and fresher experience of life.

  There are, it seems to me, two completely satisfactory ways of living, that amount in the end to the same thing. There is complete mobility and complete immobility. You can live without possessions, without obligations, ready at any moment to go anywhere, covering so vast a section of the world’s surface that you can feel yourself a citizen of the world, equally at home in a dozen different countries. You can live like that, searching for life, or you can stay in one spot and let life come to you. Both are paths of wisdom. Marco Polo followed the one road, Socrates the other.

  The author of this book has let life come to him, or rather he has been a magnet, drawing life to him. A scholar and a judge of men, he has been in close touch with what is most varied, most typical of his age. His acquaintance is vast. I should doubt if any man has inspired more affectionate friendship in men twenty years older and twenty years younger than himself. He is linked closely through his friendships not only with Victorian and Edwardian but also Georgian England. Many of the biographies that will appear in the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s will carry his name in their index. His acquaintance is not only vast but personal. He has made his contacts not in large gatherings where people are of necessity on parade, but in the oyster shop, on his morning walks, in his own home, where his friends have relaxed and have been themselves. The book to which these pages are a preface, covers in its narrow compass a wide range. It is the gleanings of a scrap-book kept at his bedside for the noting of forgotten engagements, and chance reflections on his business and on the day’s affairs. Wakeful hours over many years have enlarged the scope of the book’s first intention. There are epigrams such as one associates with the letter-press of the New Yorker; there are travel sketches; short essays on the sceptical historian, slogans, birth control, the scientific artist. There are anecdotes of personal experience. H. G. Wells and Hilaire Belloc make frequent, appropriate appearance. There is a critical study of Gilbert Murray, an exposition of the King’s Proctor, a delightful example of the humour which Charles ScottMoncrieff gave so lavishly to his friends in disregard of the large public he could so easily, had he cared, have reached. The pages on Eton in the nineties are a permanent contribution to Eton’s history. The reader will be indeed narrow who cannot find much to hold his interest in this record, gracious, provocative and challenging, of the leisure hours of an alert, informed, generous intelligence. The book is published anonymously because traditions of his profession disallow anything that might be taken for professional self-advertisement; but the personality of its author will emerge very clearly from its unsigned pages. It is the book of a man who has lived, in the widest sense of the word, adventurously.

  To those who imagine that adventure, variety of experience, wisdom, can only come from incessancy and speed of movement there is a homily implicit here. But that homily is incidental to the book’s intrinsic interest, to the charm, wit, wisdom of the impressions, opinions, anecdotes, conclusions, of a man who, seeing life from one self-chosen angle, has seen it steadily, if not whole.

  The book was a considerable success. It was followed by a second gleaning, then a third. Finally its authorship was acknowledged and a selected collection of passages from the three books was published under the signature “E. S. P. Haynes.”

  71

  E. S. P. HAYNES

  In the autumn of 1940 Haynes was a man of over sixty. His wife and second daughter were living in their country cottage, he was living alone in the large family house in St. John’s Wood Park, looked after by a Belgian refugee who, embarking from Antwerp in the belief that he was to be taken to Cherbourg to join the army, had found himself to his astonishment in Hastings.

  The Belgian was a man of for
ty. He was in the Home Guard and an efficient soldier, but he proved both ingenious and economical as a cook. He was an expert at sauces and he wasted nothing. One would never have thought at Haynes’s table that there was such a thing as rationing. His weekly bill per head for food was, however, only 12s. 6d.

  “I have never,” said Haynes, “been better looked after in my life.”

  He accepted the blitz with the same august stoicism with which he had faced the other vicissitudes of life. He maintained his fixed routine, lunching every day at the oyster shop with only such variations of menu as the necessities of war forced on him. He could no longer get the wine he wanted. Income tax and the maintenance of a second establishment in the country had enforced certain economies. One would find him on occasions eating sardines or even fish paste sandwiches. But there was always port.

  He still paid his Sunday visit over the Heath, with a companion and his dogs, though his health—he suffered from asthma—would no longer allow him to walk the whole way over. He arrived by taxi and on the return, at the White Stone Pond, a taxi waited for him.