Chapter III Der Tag
I
I suppose I may be forgiven for having felt a trifle preoccupied upon the first of August, nineteen-fourteen. Most people did. But the European situation, desperate though it was, was not sufficiently desperate to excuse me for forgetting that the first Saturday in August is the inexorable date of Lady Christina’s annual garden party at Buckholm. So I blundered right into it.
I am a methodical person, and I like to do the same things at the same seasons. When it comes to revisiting the place of my birth, marriage and, I hope, interment, I make a practice of going to Baronrigg for Easter, Buckholm for the August cricket week, and The Heughs for the woodcock. On this particular occasion I had travelled from King’s Cross by the early morning express—it leaves at five o’clock, and is the best train in the day, if only people knew about it—with the result that by four o’clock in the afternoon I found myself rumbling along in the Craigfoot station fly, in lovely, summer weather, en route for the Buckholm cricket week. Lady Christina, whose foes—and their name is legion, for they are many—accuse her of parsimony, does not usually send the motor to the station to meet unencumbered males. She expects such guests to cover the last stage of the journey at their own charges and, in addition, to share the conveyance with such parcels and oddments as may be lying in the station office consigned to Buckholm.
On this occasion Mr. Turnbull, the station master, apologetically packed me into the fly in company with half a sheep and three bright new zinc buckets, freshly arrived from the stores in Edinburgh.
In addition to my personal luggage, I was laden with a limp, damp package, smelling to heaven of fish, which had borne me noisome company all the way from my flat in Jermyn Street, having been delivered there by an accomplice of Lady Christina’s the night before my departure, with the information that her ladyship had signified my willingness to convey it to Buckholm.
But things might have been worse. Lady Christina had played this fish trick upon me last year as well. (It is one of her most cherished economies.) On that occasion the fish was delivered at my flat five minutes after I had left for Scotland. It was marked “Very Important”; so the lift boy, a conscientious but unimaginative youth, sent for the pass-key and carefully deposited the package in my hall cupboard. I found it there, quite safe, when I returned from Scotland, three weeks later.
The first warning that all was not well came to me when my equipage drew up, to a symphonic accompaniment of rattling buckets, at the lodge gates of Buckholm. These were held, like the bridge across the Tiber upon a famous occasion, by a resolute trio composed of Mackellar, the under-gardener, and Mesdames Elspeth and Maggie Mackellar, Mackellar’s daughters, aged about fourteen. Horatius Codes (Mackellar) informed me that by her ladyship’s orders it was “hauf-a-croon to get in,” adding (quite incomprehensibly at the moment) that it was “on account of the Feet for Charity.”
My contention that, as a guest, I was entitled to exemption, or, at least, abatement of entrance fee, was overruled by a dour but respectful majority of three to one. I handed Horatius Codes a reluctant half-crown; Herminius and Spurius Lartius threw open the gates, and the experienced animal between the shafts, unusually braced by the eerie combination of sounds and smells conveyed to his senses by a following breeze, delivered me at the front door, with much spurting of gravel, four minutes later.
My worst fears were realised. Dotted about the wide lawns stood bazaar-stalls, under striped awnings. The band of our Third Battalion from the Depot was making music on the terrace, and fair women and brave men drifted here and there, shying nervously at the stalls. Too late, I understood Mackellar’s reference to the “Feet for Charity.” I had heard from afar of the existence of this recurrent and gruesome festival for many years. No one knew why it was held, or to what charity Lady Christina devoted the proceeds. I once asked Lord Eskerley if he could tell me. He replied that so far as he was aware it was a charity which was not puffed up, and began at home. But Lord Eskerley is a cynical old gentleman, and has been at war with Lady Christina for forty years.
A sympathetic butler received me and showed me my room. The ceremony was purely formal: I knew the room almost as well as I knew him.
“It will go on until ten o’clock, sir,” he announced mournfully, in reply to my anxious query. “The present company will leave about seven; but the townspeople begin to arrive then, when the admission fee is reduced to sixpence. Are we going to have a flare-up, sir?”
“No. What’s the use? We shall take it lying down, Bates, as usual. You know Lady Christina!”
“I was referring, sir, to the European situation.”
“Oh, sorry! Yes, it looks like it. If Germany joins Austria against Russia, France is bound to come in on the side of Russia; and if France comes in I fancy we shall all come in. And then God knows what will happen! Is there much excitement down here?”
“Very little at present, sir—less than when the South African War was imminent. But I understand that all the officers at the Depot are being recalled from leave. You will find several of them here, sir.”
“Mr. Eric is here, of course?”
“For the afternoon, sir, yes. But he sleeps at the Depot now. He is very busy. You will change into flannels, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“It will fill out the time a bit, sir, before you need go outside. Her Ladyship is not aware of your arrival. Shall I bring you a whisky and soda?”
“Please.”
By judicious dawdling I staved off the moment of my entrance into the “Feet” for another half-hour. Then, fortified by Bates’s timely refreshment, I went downstairs to search for my hostess.
The garden was full of people—sirens in lace caps proffering useless articles of merchandise; officers from the Depot; boys and girls just home for the holidays; local dames talking scandal in deck-chairs. Upon the distant croquet lawn I beheld my hostess engaged in battle. I could hear her quite easily, shouting: “Now then—no treachery, no treachery!” to her partner, a nervous subaltern who was furtively offering advice to a pretty opponent. I remembered Bates’s hint, also a maxim to the effect that what is not missed is not mourned. Perhaps it would be wiser—
“Yes, I would if I were you,” remarked a raven’s voice at my elbow. “She hasn’t seen you yet!”
Lord Eskerley is a very remarkable old gentleman, with certain pronounced and rather alarming characteristics. In the first place, he has an uncanny knack of reading one’s thoughts, which enables him to begin a conversation without wasting time over preliminaries, which he hates. Secondly, he has a peculiar habit of side-tracking a subject right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes because he is overtaken by a reverie, sometimes because another subject occurs to him—to return sooner or later, but always without warning, to the original topic—like brackets in algebra. I once met him coming out of Brooks’s Club, and accompanied him down St. James’s Street.
“Just been to a funeral,” he announced; and forthwith subsided into a brown study.
I offered a few appropriate observations regarding the uncertainty of human life, and then proceeded to the political situation. He replied with his usual incisiveness. Ten minutes later, as we passed through the Horse Guards into Whitehall, he stopped abruptly, shook me by the hand, and said:
“Good-bye! At Woking. We cremated him. Very interesting!”—and set off at a brisk walk in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.
These conversational acrobatics call for considerable agility on the part of the listener. The strain is increased by the circumstance that, owing to his uncanny powers of memory, Lord Eskerley is able (and usually proceeds) to take up a conversation with you exactly where he left it off, sometimes after an interval of months. I was once walking in the Park on Sunday morning with Lady Christina, whom I had encountered for my sins after church. Near the Achilles statue I was aware of Lord Eskerley, plunged in profound meditation. Suddenly he looked up and saw me. He hurried forward and shook hands, utterly ignoring Lady Christina.
“Courvoisier,” he said, “not Martell!”—and departed towards Stanhope Gate.
“What does the demented creature mean?” inquired Lady Christina.
I was able to explain that His Lordship had merely been unburdening himself of a name which he had been unable to recall at the time of our last conversation. Criminology is one of his numerous hobbies, and on this occasion he had been trying to tell me the name of one of the last murderers publicly hanged in England. (Thackeray went to see it.) All he could recall, however, was that the murderer had been a valet in Park Lane, and that his name had suggested liqueur brandy.
Decidedly he is a character. But he is a Pillar of State for all that, and, unlike some Pillars of State, he has done the State some service. He likes me, because I catch his references more quickly than most people.
“Well,” I rejoined, “suppose you assist me to find cover?”
“Certainly!” he replied. “By the way”—extending a hand—“how do you do? Wonderful day! Now come and find a seat, and we will smoke.”
We doubled a promontory of rhododendrons and sat down on a rustic bench, somewhat apart from the turmoil. The only person in sight was a girl, with very good ankles. (Eve always reproved me for beginning at that end.) She was standing fifty yards away from us, under the dappled shade of a copper-beech, surveying the scene—a little disconsolately, I thought. My companion, as usual, was ready with an appropriate but elliptic comment.
“Doesn’t know he’s here!” he observed.
“Why don’t you tell her?” I asked.
“No need. They’ll find one another all right.”
“Who is she? And he?”
The question partly answered itself, for at that moment the girl turned in our direction, and I recognised her as the unexpected young beauty of the Netherby pew. Aware that two inquisitive dotards were leering at her, she withdrew out of sight. Lord Eskerley did not answer the rest of my question, because his thoughts had run ahead of the situation.
“There is something particularly cruel and brutal,” he said, “about British snobbery. If this had been America, her hostess would have introduced her to every one in sight. (If she had not been prepared to do so, she would not have invited her at all.) On the Continent, young men would have led one another up, and clicked their heels together, and announced their names, with a view to a fair exchange. But here—well, she knows nobody, and every woman in the county will see to it that she continues to know nobody. Practically, that was why she was invited here. Tantalus, and so on!”
“I have often wondered,” I said, “why we never go in for introducing. It would save much discomfort to rustic persons like myself.”
“I’ll tell you. Roughly, our attitude is this. There are only a certain number of people in this world who are anybody—Us, in fact. You are either one of Us, or you are not. If you are, obviously there is no need to introduce you. If you are not—well, an introduction would imply that you are not one of Us! So it is almost more insulting to introduce people than to ignore them. Very ingenious system: I wonder what woman invented it! Still, she’s all right.” (Apparently His Lordship had switched back to the girl again.) “She and her mother only get invited to Gather-’em-Alls and Charity Sales-of-Work, but most of the boys have managed to scrape acquaintance with her by this time. She fairly bowled them over at the Third Battalion Gymkhana a few weeks ago. Looked a picture; won first prize for the motor obstacle race; and fairly had to keep subalterns off with a stick! And at least one field officer!”
“You seem to have taken considerable notice of her,” I observed.
“I take considerable notice of most things,” replied the old gentleman complacently, “even pretty girls. By the way, we are going to fight them.”
“The girls?”
“God forbid! Germany!”
“Oh!”
“Yes. I go back to town to-night. There seems little doubt now that we shall come in. We can’t leave France in the lurch. For one thing, we should be skunks if we did”—Pillars of State can be surprisingly colloquial in private life—“and for another, Germany means to gobble the whole of Europe this time, including this pacific little island of ours. It would be playing Germany’s game to allow her to take us on one after another, instead of all together. Of course, the peace-at-any-price crowd are yowling; but—if we don’t back our friends on this occasion, we can never hold up our heads again. It is just possible that the Germans may be fools enough to invade Belgium, in which case even the Cocoa Eaters and the Intellectuals will have to stop supporting them. But I think we shall fight anyhow. It will be a short war, but it will be the bloodiest war ever fought.”
“Why do you think it will be short?”
“Because it will be so expensive in money and men that no country will be able to stand the racket for longer than a few months. Modern weapons are so destructive, and modern warfare costs so much, that before we know where we are one side will all be dead and the other side bankrupt; so we shall have to stop! The South African affair cost us a quarter of a million a day, while it lasted. This enterprise may run us into two, or even three millions. Think of that! Twenty millions a week! A thousand millions a year! We can’t do it! Neither can France! Neither can Germany! No, it will be a short war. I am bound to admit K. of K. doesn’t agree with me. He puts it at three years. I lunched with him two days ago. He was getting ready to go back to Egypt then—sorely against the grain, naturally; but it did not seem to have occurred to anybody to tell him to hold back for a week or two. We can’t allow him to go out of the country at present; the thing’s preposterous! Let me see, where was I?”
“Lunching with K.”
“Oh, yes. He said three years. I asked why, and he replied that before this war finished every single able-bodied man of the combatant nations would be fighting in a national army, and it would take three years for this country to put its full strength into the field. But of course K. doesn’t understand economic conditions. He’s our greatest soldier, but not an economist. Still, that’s K.’s view. I don’t agree with it, but it’s K.’s view. And if we go to war, K. will probably lead us; so we must expect to provide for war on K.’s scale.”
All this was sufficiently stunning and bewildering in its suddenness and immensity; but it aroused my professional instincts.
“How is K. going to set about creating such an army?” I asked. “Raise supplementary Regular battalions; expand the Territorial establishment; or what?”
“I don’t think he knows himself. In fact, he said so, quite frankly. In the first place, he hasn’t been invited to help, as yet. In the second, he has been absent from England for the best part of fourteen years, and has not been able to keep himself conversant with the recent orgy of Army reform. He knew that the old Militia had been scrapped, but I found he was not sure whether its place had been taken by the Special Reserve or the National Reserve. And, of course, like all Regulars, he regards the Territorials with the utmost distrust. I think he shares the general soldier-man’s opinion that the ‘Terriers’ are the old Saturday afternoon crowd with a new label. His idea seems to be to take no risks with amateur organisations, but to create a pukka new professional army on regular lines. He’s wrong. He should take the present Territorial Army as a nucleus, and expand from that. The Territorial Associations are a most capable lot, and would build up big units for him in no time. Still, whatever way he does it, he will do it well; he’s our great man. And he will need all his greatness. Germany means to smash us this time. She has been calling up her reservists, on the quiet, for the last six months. Her intelligence people have told her that we are all so tied up with the Suffragettes and Ireland that we can’t come in, and that if we do, we cannot put up anything of a fight. I am almost tempted to believe Germany is right. I don’t suppose we have a thousand spare rifles in the country. As for artillery—it takes three years to make a gunner! How on earth—”
“Now, then, what are you two absurd creatures conspiring about?” Our hostess was upon us brandishing a croquet-mallet. We rose hurriedly. “Alan Laing, how do you do? Why didn’t you come and tell me you had arrived? As for you, Eskerley, I think you are getting into your second childhood. What’s all this nonsense I hear about war with Germany? Why, I have a signed photograph of the Emperor in my drawing-room! How can one make war on people like that? And yet there you sit, talking about the thing as if it were really possible, and disorganising my fête champêtre by mobilising all my young men! Come and play croquet!”
Croquet with Lady Christina resembles nothing so much as croquet with the Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.” It is true that she does not order our heads to be chopped off, but one sometimes wishes she would, and be done with it. Her success at the game—and she is invariably successful—is due partly to the nervous paralysis of her opponents, and partly to the uncanny property possessed by her ball of removing itself, while its owner is engaged in altercation, to a position exactly opposite its hoop. I bent my steps dutifully towards the lawn, leaving Lord Eskerley, who fears no one, not even Lady Christina, to fight a spirited rearguard action with that worthy opponent.
On the way I encountered Eric Bethune, my friend. It always thrills me, even at my sober age, to encounter Eric suddenly. I have never got over my boyish tendency to hero-worship. We shook hands.
“Come along the Green Walk with me,” he said. “My car is waiting at the West Lodge; I have to fly back to my orderly room.”
“We seem to be fairly for it, this time,” I said, as we strode along the avenue of grass.
Eric threw up his handsome head exultantly. The sloping sunlight caught his clean-cut profile and sinewy throat.
“Yes,” he said; “we’re for it! The Fleet has been ordered not to disperse after Manoeuvres. The Army is mobilising. We are going to have at them at last! It’s ‘Der Tag,’ all right! You are coming back to us, I suppose, Alan?”
“If they will have me,” I said.
“Have you? They’ll jump at you! They’ll give you a battalion! We shall all get battalions! Brigades, perhaps!” He laughed joyfully, like a schoolboy who sees his first eleven colours ahead. “There will be promotions all round—”
“In a month or two,” I said soberly, “there will be a lot more.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Eric. “We may finish Fritz off in one big battle. The German soldier is a machine: so is his officer. The whole German Army is a machine.”
“A damned efficient machine, too!” I observed.
“Yes, boy; but cumbrous, cumbrous! If we let it get into its swing, it will be hard to stop. But we won’t. The little British Army—and mind you, as a result of its South African lessons, it is the best trained, the best led, and the finest body of men that we have ever put into the field in all our history—will get the first move on, and it will chuck itself, like a flinty little pebble, plumb in the middle of the German machinery, and put all its gadgets out of gear! After that, the German, with his entire lack of initiative, will go to pieces, and we’ll eat him up!”
Eric’s old Scottish nurse was accustomed to say of him that he was “aye up in the cloods or doon in the midden.” There was no mistaking his whereabouts to-day. I began to feel the thrill too.
“Are you going back to the First Battalion?” I asked.
“No word of it as yet. My orders are to stay here and perfect mobilisation arrangements. The moment the word goes out from the jolly old War Office, we shall be swamped with reservists: we may have to start a recruiting station as well. Great work! Great work! So long, old son! Run home and polish your buttons!”
He leaped into his car, and disappeared in a cloud of dust—a most characteristic embodiment of the spirit that was flaming in the hearts of all the youth of England and Scotland during that hectic, unforgettable, blissfully ignorant week.
I walked slowly back down the Green Walk, prepared to serve my sentence on the croquet lawn. It was a perfect summer evening. Not a leaf stirred: not a bird chirruped. The shadow of my somewhat square and stocky person preceded me, flatteringly elongated and attenuated by the rays of the setting sun. Deep and abiding peace seemed to brood upon the land. Yet all the land, I knew, was making ready for battle. Well, for my part, I was satisfied. I was a soldier, a widow man, and a childless man. I had no farewells to make, no last embraces—
From among the trees on my right I was conscious of a flutter of white, and a murmur of voices. A man and a woman—no, no, in those days one still talked of boys and girls—were seated side by side on a fallen tree-trunk, with their backs to me. They did not appear to be concerning themselves with war, or strife, or hostilities of any kind. Their present relation, though decorous enough, appeared to be one of most cordial agreement. I recognised them both, and passed on discreetly, silently acknowledging the prescience of that aged but perspicacious student of humanity, my Lord of Eskerley.
“They appear to have found one another all right!” I said to myself.