Mr. Standfast
got back from the Greenmantle affair. That was the only kind of reward
he wanted, and, though he was absurdly over age, the authorities
allowed it. They were wise not to stickle about rules, for Peter’s
eyesight and nerve were as good as those of any boy of twenty. I knew
he would do well, but I was not prepared for his immediately blazing
success. He got his pilot’s certificate in record time and went out to
France; and presently even we foot-sloggers, busy shifting ground
before the Somme, began to hear rumours of his doings. He developed a
perfect genius for air-fighting. There were plenty better trick-flyers,
and plenty who knew more about the science of the game, but there was
no one with quite Peter’s genius for an actual scrap. He was as full of
dodges a couple of miles up in the sky as he had been among the rocks
of the Berg. He apparently knew how to hide in the empty air as
cleverly as in the long grass of the Lebombo Flats. Amazing yarns began
to circulate among the infantry about this new airman, who could take
cover below one plane of an enemy squadron while all the rest were
looking for him. I remember talking about him with the South Africans
when we were out resting next door to them after the bloody Delville
Wood business. The day before we had seen a good battle in the clouds
when the Boche plane had crashed, and a Transvaal machine-gun officer
brought the report that the British airman had been Pienaar. “Well
done, the old _takhaar!_” he cried, and started to yarn about Peter’s
methods. It appeared that Peter had a theory that every man has a blind
spot, and that he knew just how to find that blind spot in the world of
air. The best cover, he maintained, was not in cloud or a wisp of fog,
but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy. I recognised that
talk for the real thing. It was on a par with Peter’s doctrine of
“atmosphere” and “the double bluff” and all the other principles that
his queer old mind had cogitated out of his rackety life.
By the end of August that year Peter’s was about the best-known figure
in the Flying Corps. If the reports had mentioned names he would have
been a national hero, but he was only “Lieutenant Blank,” and the
newspapers, which expatiated on his deeds, had to praise the Service
and not the man. That was right enough, for half the magic of our
Flying Corps was its freedom from advertisement. But the British Army
knew all about him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as
if he were a crack football-player. There was a very big German airman
called Lensch, one of the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August
claimed to have destroyed thirty-two Allied machines. Peter had then
only seventeen planes to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his
score. Lensch was a mighty man of valour and a good sportsman after his
fashion. He was amazingly quick at manœuvring his machine in the actual
fight, but Peter was supposed to be better at forcing the kind of fight
he wanted. Lensch, if you like, was the tactician and Peter the
strategist. Anyhow the two were out to get each other. There were
plenty of fellows who saw the campaign as a struggle not between Hun
and Briton, but between Lensch and Pienaar.
The 15th September came, and I got knocked out and went to hospital.
When I was fit to read the papers again and receive letters, I found to
my consternation that Peter had been downed. It happened at the end of
October when the southwest gales badly handicapped our airwork. When
our bombing or reconnaissance jobs behind the enemy lines were
completed, instead of being able to glide back into safety, we had to
fight our way home slowly against a head-wind exposed to Archies and
Hun planes. Somewhere east of Bapaume on a return journey Peter fell in
with Lensch—at least the German Press gave Lensch the credit. His
petrol tank was shot to bits and he was forced to descend in a wood
near Morchies. “The celebrated British airman, Pinner,” in the words of
the German _communiqué_, was made prisoner.
I had no letter from him till the beginning of the New Year, when I was
preparing to return to France. It was a very contented letter. He
seemed to have been fairly well treated, though he had always a low
standard of what he expected from the world in the way of comfort. I
inferred that his captors had not identified in the brilliant airman
the Dutch miscreant who a year before had broken out of a German jail.
He had discovered the pleasures of reading and had perfected himself in
an art which he had once practised indifferently. Somehow or other he
had got a _Pilgrim’s Progress_, from which he seemed to extract
enormous pleasure. And then at the end, quite casually, he mentioned
that he had been badly wounded and that his left leg would never be
much use again.
After that I got frequent letters, and I wrote to him every week and
sent him every kind of parcel I could think of. His letters used to
make me both ashamed and happy. I had always banked on old Peter, and
here he was behaving like an early Christian martyr—never a word of
complaint, and just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the
high veld and we were off to ride down springbok. I knew what the loss
of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his
pride. The rest of life must have unrolled itself before him very drab
and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as if he were on the top of his
form and kept commiserating me on the discomforts of my job. The
picture of that patient, gentle old fellow, hobbling about his compound
and puzzling over his _Pilgrim’s Progress_, a cripple for life after
five months of blazing glory, would have stiffened the back of a
jellyfish.
This last letter was horribly touching, for summer had come and the
smell of the woods behind his prison reminded Peter of a place in the
Woodbush, and one could read in every sentence the ache of exile. I sat
on that stone wall and considered how trifling were the crumpled leaves
in my bed of life compared with the thorns Peter and Blaikie had to lie
on. I thought of Sandy far off in Mesopotamia, and old Blenkiron
groaning with dyspepsia somewhere in America, and I considered that
they were the kind of fellows who did their jobs without complaining.
The result was that when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier
temper. I wasn’t going to shame my friends or pick and choose my duty.
I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say,
Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.
It was not only Peter’s letter that steadied and calmed me. Isham stood
high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road
I was taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side. I
climbed through great beechwoods, which seemed in the twilight like
some green place far below the sea, and then over a short stretch of
hill pasture to the rim of the vale. All about me were little fields
enclosed with walls of grey stone and full of dim sheep. Below were
dusky woods around what I took to be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman
Fosse Way, straight as an arrow, passed over the hills to the south and
skirted its grounds. I could see the stream slipping among its
water-meadows and could hear the plash of the weir. A tiny village
settled in a crook of the hill, and its church-tower sounded seven with
a curiously sweet chime. Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter
of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.
In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had
been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep
and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which
would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It
was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my
country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been
the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the
Berg. But now I realised that I had a new home. I understood what a
precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and
comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of
her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what
it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made
a line of verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop
which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I
saw not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after
victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and wrap
myself in it till the end of my days.
Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral, I went
down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an old
red-brick façade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot lemons in
the June dusk. The car from the inn had brought on my baggage, and
presently I was dressing in a room which looked out on a water-garden.
For the first time for more than a year I put on a starched shirt and a
dinner-jacket, and as I dressed I could have sung from pure
lightheartedness. I was in for some arduous job, and sometime that
evening in that place I should get my marching orders. Someone would
arrive—perhaps Bullivant—and read me the riddle. But whatever it was, I
was ready for it, for my whole being had found a new purpose. Living in
the trenches, you are apt to get your horizon narrowed down to the
front line of enemy barbed wire on one side and the nearest rest
billets on the other. But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a happy
country.
High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad staircase,
voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls and the austere
family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in the hall I thought
their looks still less in keeping with the house. Both ladies were on
the wrong side of forty, but their dress was that of young girls. Miss
Doria Wymondham was tall and thin with a mass of nondescript pale hair
confined by a black velvet fillet. Miss Claire Wymondham was shorter
and plumper and had done her best by ill-applied cosmetics to make
herself look like a foreign _demi-mondaine_. They greeted me with the
friendly casualness which I had long ago discovered was the right
English manner towards your guests; as if they had just strolled in and
billeted themselves, and you were quite glad to see them but mustn’t be
asked to trouble yourself further. The next second they were cooing
like pigeons round a picture which a young man was holding up in the
lamplight.
He was a tallish, lean fellow of round about thirty years, wearing grey
flannels and shoes dusty from the country roads. His thin face was
sallow as if from living indoors, and he had rather more hair on his
head than most of us. In the glow of the lamp his features were very
clear, and I examined them with interest, for, remember, I was
expecting a stranger to give me orders. He had a long, rather strong
chin and an obstinate mouth with peevish lines about its corners. But
the remarkable feature was his eyes. I can best describe them by saying
that they looked hot—not fierce or angry, but so restless that they
seemed to ache physically and to want sponging with cold water.
They finished their talk about the picture—which was couched in a
jargon of which I did not understand one word—and Miss Doria turned to
me and the young man.
“My cousin Launcelot Wake—Mr Brand.”
We nodded stiffly and Mr Wake’s hand went up to smooth his hair in a
self-conscious gesture.
“Has Barnard announced dinner? By the way, where is Mary?”
“She came in five minutes ago and I sent her to change,” said Miss
Claire. “I won’t have her spoiling the evening with that horrid