Thirteen Such Years Page 4
“That’s what it’s like. I suppose this is the sort of thing that one’s got to expect at first. It’s a bit of job though.”
“But you love her still?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, I suppose so. Yes, of course I do. I couldn’t do without her. But there are times, I suppose it’s because I love her so much, that I should like to shake and shake and shake her, anything to keep her quiet.”
I wondered what would be the end of it, things could not go on like that for ever; what would happen when the armies had gone home, the German exchange had steadied, when there were no more bargains knocking about? They had nothing in common, these two. Their loving belonged to the war, they needed a new technique to deal with a post-war world.
He sat in silence for quite a little time, his head in his hands, gazing into the pale amber bubbles of the champagne. He reminded me of his own symbol; a man waiting in the stalls of a theatre for the show that obstinately refuses to begin.
“I don’t know what’ll happen,” he said, “but the world seems to me now so full of selfishness and deceit and double dealing, that anything that may happen to me is of small importance. One must try and keep oneself afloat; that’s about all there is to it. Besides, she’s going to have a child.”
I don’t know if he was glad or not. “It’ll keep her quiet,” was all he said. Probably it seemed to him like another bond holding him to this place. But I do not think he looked ahead. He hadn’t the courage to face the future honestly, to say to himself: “What am I doing, what is all this going to lead to? It can’t go on for ever.” I think he just went on from day to day. He was tired, and he thought that when she had a child she would be sweeter and calmer, that they would be able to live in the child and forget their troubles.
§
Two days later Morrison walked into the office of the British military police and said quietly:
“I wish to put myself under arrest. I have killed my wife.”
They had had another fierce quarrel the night before. It was after they had gone to bed; she had a bad cold, had not been able to get the particular medicine that she wanted and could not sleep. She had begun to abuse the English.
“I hate the lot of you,” she had said, “you’re killing Germany, you’re starving us. You talk about internationalism, which with you means getting as much as you can for yourselves: and you, you’re just like the rest of your nation. What sort of a life do you think I am having!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, shut up!” Morrison had said.
“I shan’t shut up; I’m tired of you, tired to death of you. I wish I’d never married you. I was happy before you came. I should have married one of my own people—I should—”
Morrison could stand it no longer; he took her by the shoulders and shook her till she was quiet, then he had turned over and had gone to sleep. In the morning he had found her dead.
He was handed over to the German authorities; it was a civilian case. But they assured us with great suavity, the little official bowing and scraping, that they would make it all right. “Crime passionel,” he said. “No jury would convict him. And besides—her state of health.”
The German police were anxious to keep on the right side of the British. There was a good deal of rowdyism in Cologne at that time. Discharged soldiers had been causing trouble; without the English it would have been hard for them to keep order. In the meantime, of course, Morrison would have to go to prison. He was sent to Düsseldorf.
§
The affair caused naturally a good deal of excitement in a society that depended on itself for entertainment; the general impression was that Morrison would get off free and that it was, on the whole, the best thing that could have happened to him.
“After all,” said Matthews, “what could it have led to? Think of the poor devil staying here when the armies went. There would have been no one for him to talk to. He’d have been an outcast. I doubt if his business would have paid. He could hardly have brought her back to England. She’d have hated the idea and here he’d have had to stick while his family increased, and his responsibilities along with them. It’s the best way out. What a life he would have had!”
I had it on the tip of my tongue to point out to Matthews that he had not done very much to make Morrison’s life in Cologne any easier, but it would have served no purpose. It was not his fault; it was no one’s fault. Things had turned out that way. It looked now as though the tide had begun to turn.
We awaited the trial confidently. A very strong evidence was prepared. Numberless instances of her exasperating habits were collected. A doctor was prepared to give evidence on the state of her health; to affirm that her constitution had been weakened by the privations of the war; the lack of milk, butter and dripping. And, after all, ‘Crime Passionel’—that was an unfailing argument, the Germans did not want a conviction. It would be reported in the English papers and mischievously misrepresented as another case of German injustice. Everything, indeed, was going along splendidly when revolution broke out in Düsseldorf. For a few days the town was in the hands of the Spartacists. The gates of the prisons were flung open. Morrison was again free.
Most of us thought that he would make straight for Cologne, though some were of the opinion that he would try and get across the frontier.
“After all he can’t be certain that he won’t be convicted. Things often go wrong. I shouldn’t run any chances if I were in his place.”
For the next few days he was the chief topic of conversation. Enquiries were made of the German authorities, but they knew nothing at all about him.
“He has escaped with the rest,” they said. “It is a little thing, that… at such a time.”
It was a fortnight before any news came through. Then the little suave official came up, bowing and scraping.
“We have heard about your friend. It is very sad. He has been found dead in Düsseldorf.”
His statement was confirmed. Morrison’s body had been found in a cellar in a small side street. The face was terribly disfigured, with the jaw shot right away, but every article of clothing on the body belonged to Morrison, the pockets were full of his letters and papers; he had no money on him; from a tear on the inside of his finger it would seem as though a signet ring had been torn from him by force.
“There is nothing to be done,” said the German. “We are very sorry, but, after all, in times like these…” he shrugged his shoulders.
§
It was amusing to see the way in which those who had before been most against Morrison hastened to make excuses for him now. We heard a great deal about ‘the rough diamond’ and the Colonel, who had been so affronted at the Opera, insisted on giving him a military funeral.
It was a good show. We had the Sapper’s band, and members of the townsfolk came out to watch. It seemed incredible to me that Morrison should be at an end, shut up inside a wooden box. I could not imagine him being beaten. I remembered how he had triumphed over Carter, how he had made the Australian officer show him round the line. And then that evening in the mess when Matthews had tried to make a fuss about his girl. He was a man. And, afterwards, even when he had come back and they had cut him in the Opera; I’m not sure that he hadn’t scored really. He had stuck to his self-respect and they must have been secretly ashamed of themselves as they hurried past him with their eyes turned away. They must have felt uncomfortable for a long time afterwards, talking loudly to pass it off. He had been only angry. I could not realise that he was done with, finished, and through a woman; he who had been so powerful in a world of men. And, as they played the Last Post, I had, for the first time in my life, a complete and utter faith in the survival after death. I could not believe that so much force could be dissipated, wasted, that it came from nowhere and went nowhither, that Morrison’s existence had been wiped out suddenly in a dark street by a chance bullet.
§
It was strange that I should have thought like that, that I should have refused to believe th
at Morrison was really dead, dead in the word’s fullest sense. I have often wondered whether some wind of telepathy did not warn me that the ending was not there. At any rate I was not as surprised as I suppose I should have been when, a few months later, I was buying a wedding present in a small jeweller’s in Hammersmith and I heard a familiar voice very voluble and insistent.
“I must show you these samples. No, I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer. You may say what you like. Yes, I know my firm is in Hamburg, but we can sell you the stuff at a third of the price that they can do it for you over here. Come now, a bargain’s a bargain; we’re men of business, not politicians.”
Yes, it was Morrison, his mouth and chin covered with a thick, bushy beard, but the same face, recognisable anywhere; and that insistence, that magnetic power of making men do what he wanted. No one I knew had ever possessed it to the same degree. It could not be anyone else. I stood back in the shadow and watched him. I saw the old jeweller take out his magnifying glasses and inspect the samples. I heard them arguing. Morrison talked and talked, finally the old man gave him an order and Morrison marched out, jubilant and content, always the master in a world of men.
I did not follow. Better, surely, to let the imagination play about his story; seeing him as I saw him on that wet afternoon by Bullecourt, a stranger among us, standing against the sky, letting in the wind and rain.
Chapter II
Much of Morrison’s trouble had been due to the fact that his marriage was to an enemy. Though by the time of his disappearance in Düsseldorf, the hate-motif had begun to die. Among soldiers it was never very strong. Indeed, for many of us, one of the war’s first lessons was the recognition that in a cosmopolitan and democratic world you could not talk about a country as though it were one person, that though there might be such things as national feelings and national characteristics, there existed in every country the same classes, the same tendencies, the same ideals, the same prejudices, with in one country one set of tendencies proving stronger than another. You could not speak of France wanting this and Germany wanting that as you could in the days when the power of a realm was centered in one person; when Cleopatra was known as Egypt; Louis XIV as France. The average soldier never associated the troops in the trenches opposite with the Germany against which the press and pulpit launched their jeremiads. Most of the hating was done behind the line. For myself, such feelings of hatred as I may have held were removed by the experience that would have been considered most likely to inspire them. On the eighth day of the March offensive I was taken prisoner.
§
It is only mental unhappiness that remains: or rather, it is only the reality of mental unhappiness that can be recalled after the actual unhappiness has passed; so that certain words can never be used, certain music never heard, certain perfumes savoured without the return suddenly of the state of mind with which they are associated. Mental unhappiness becomes a part of one: is a chord that will always vibrate when the key to it is struck. It is ours for ever. But the unhappiness that is built on physical sensations is transitory. Unless it becomes identified with fear, it passes with the condition that occasioned it. We cannot visualize ill-health when we are well. And so now, though I can recall the setting, I cannot relive those first hours of captivity: of a mood that was composed of boredom, hunger, weariness and cold. It is in a series of pictures that I see it now.
§
The march to the concentration camp behind the German lines at the end of a day that had begun at dawn with the strain and excitement of seven hours’ fighting. The rain fell heavily. Through its dim streets peered mournfully the eyes of ruined villages. We had had no food for twelve hours, no rest for at least sixteen, and to this physical weariness was added the depression that the bleak French landscape never fails to evoke—the grey rolling stretches unrelieved by colour; the dead-straight roads lined by tree-stumps, the broken homesteads; to which was again added the cumulative helplessness that the events of the day had roused; the knowledge of the ignominy of one’s position, the uncertainty of what was to come.
Gradually the succession of broken houses yielded to whole but deserted villages. These woke even more the sense of loneliness, of nostalgia. Formerly, on the way back from the line, there was nothing so cheering as the sight through early dawn at the first signs of civilisation. Then they were to the imagination as kindly hands welcoming it back to the joys from which it had been exiled. But now the shadowy arms of a distant windmill only served to increase the feeling of banishment and separation. Behind us we could hear the dull roll of guns; we could see the flares of the Vérey lights curving against the sky; these seemed nearer happiness than the untouched barns.
§
Then there were four days at Douai in a small house behind the bank. We were cold. We itched with lice. We had no books, no papers, no chess board. The only pack of cards was two aces short. All we could do was to sleep spasmodically, trying not to remember that we were hungry.
It was an impossible task. There was nothing else to think about. There was no chance of forgetting how little we had had for breakfast. Slowly we dragged from meal to meal.
For breakfast we got a cup of coffee made, we were told, from chestnuts, and an eighth of a loaf of bread. For lunch there was a bowl of vegetable soup. For supper another cup of coffee, and another eighth of a loaf. Each morning there was an infinitesimal issue of jam. That comprised our entire ration.
We also had nothing to smoke.
On our third day we discovered a detectaphone attached to the electric light appliances, in masquerade as a switch wire. But the interpreters who had listened to our conversation can have heard little pertinent but a string of unsavoury epithets preceding the word “Boche.”
§
After that a four day train journey from Marchiennes to Karlsruhe. There were eight of us and two sentries. We travelled in a third-class, unheated carriage. We were issued with rations for one day. We had nothing to read. Whenever the train stopped at a siding, it remained for any period from four to seven hours. It did most of its movement by night. For at least ten hours of daylight it presented us with a stationary landscape. We tried to sleep in the luggage rack; unavailingly.
§
Cold, discomfort, boredom, weariness, hunger; those were the main constituents of my first three weeks. The cold passed with summer: boredom passed to some extent in Germany when the Tauchnitz library became available. Discomfort and weariness passed with our arrival at our permanent camp, the citadel at Mainz. But hunger remained. For three months we were half starved. It is hard, indeed, not to make the first months of captivity a mere chronicle of food.
The Germans gave us as much food as they could afford, considering we were “useless mouths”; but it was little. There was only one proper meal a day: lunch. We then got two plates of soup, three or four potatoes, and a spoonful or two of beetroot or cabbage. The effect lasted for three hours. Supper rarely provided potatoes; usually two plates of thin soup, with sauerkraut or barley porridge. In addition there was a fortnightly issue of sugar, a weekly issue of jam, and a bi-weekly issue of bread. On this last issue the prisoner’s fate depended. Life resolved itself into an attempt to spread out a small loaf of bread over four days. It did not often succeed. On the first day one carefully marked out on the crust the limit at which each day’s plunderings must stop. The loaf was divided, first of all, into four equal parts, then each quarter was marked out in divisions; so much for breakfast, so much for tea, so much for supper. It did not work. Each day removed its neighbour’s landmark. By the third day only a little edge of crust remained. It was demolished by tea-time, Few days of depression could equal that of the third day’s evening. The worst time was at eight o’clock. The effect of a slender supper had by then worn off. For sixteen hours there was not the least likelihood of being able to lay hand on any food. One knew then the emotions of the man with threepence in his pocket; who is feeling ravenously hungry and knows that, if he spends that thr
eepence on dinner, he will have nothing left for the next day. It is an alternative that in terms of brown bread has presented itself to every prisoner of war.
They were strange days, and strange things happened. Money ceased to have any value unless it could be turned into edible substance. Those with big appetites carried on a kind of secret service to obtain bread. Fabulous sums were offered for a quarter of a loaf of bread that contained less flour than potatoes. At a time when a mark was worth a shilling, there were those who were prepared to pay seventy-five marks for a loaf. Twenty marks for half a loaf was the lowest rate of exchange.
§
There was, it is true, in the Kantine an unofficial method of supplementing the ordinary issue. Strange things passed across its counters. Every day provided a fresh experiment. A rumour would fly round the camp that there was a new sort of tinned paste to be had.
“I saw a fellow coming out with a biggish-looking tin,” some one would say. “I don’t know what was in it. But it was too big for boot polish.”
There would follow a general rush, and a queue thirty deep would prolong itself outside the door. The mixture would turn out to be a green paste purported to be made from snails and liver. For a day or two the unfortunates who had bought it spread it over their bread, and tried to make themselves believe they liked it. The only purpose it really served was to make the bread look thicker than it was.
Then another tin would appear; there would be another rumour, another rush to the door, another disillusionment. There was a crab paste, a vegetable paste, a nondescript brown paste. They were all bad but “Dried Veg” was the worst of all.