The Passionate Friends
fists. I was too stupid to leave London, too disturbed for work or any
distraction of my mind. I wandered about the streets of London all day.
In the morning I came near going to the church and making some
preposterous interruptions. And I remember discovering three or four
carriages adorned with white favors and a little waiting crowd outside
that extinguisher-spired place at the top of Regent Street, and
wondering for a moment or so at their common preoccupation, and then
understanding. Of course, another marriage! Of all devilish
institutions!
What was I to do with my life now? What was to become of my life? I can
still recall the sense of blank unanswerableness with which these
questions dominated my mind, and associated with it is an effect of
myself as a small human being, singular and apart, wandering through a
number of London landscapes. At one time I was in a great grey
smoke-rimmed autumnal space of park, much cut up by railings and worn by
cricket pitches, far away from any idea of the Thames, and in the
distance over the tops of trees I discovered perplexingly the clustering
masts and spars of ships. I have never seen that place since. Then the
Angel at Islington is absurdly mixed up with the distresses of this day.
I attempted some great detour thence, and found myself with a dumb
irritation returning to the place from another direction. I remember too
a wide street over which passes a thundering railway bridge borne upon
colossal rounded pillars of iron, and carrying in white and blue some
big advertisement, I think of the _Daily Telegraph_. Near there I
thought a crowd was gathered about the victim of some accident, and
thrusting myself among the people with a vague idea of help, discovered
a man selling a remedy for corns. And somewhere about this north region
I discovered I was faint with hunger, and got some bread and cheese and
beer in a gaudily decorated saloon bar with a sanded floor. I resisted
a monstrous impulse to stay in that place and drink myself into
inactivity and stupefaction with beer.
Then for a long time I sat upon an iron seat near some flower beds in a
kind of garden that had the headstones of graves arranged in a row
against a yellow brick wall. The place was flooded with the amber
sunshine of a September afternoon. I shared the seat with a nursemaid in
charge of a perambulator and several scuffling uneasy children, and I
kept repeating to myself: "By now it is all over. The thing is done."
My sense of the enormity of London increased with the twilight, and
began to prevail a little against my intense personal wretchedness. I
remember wastes of building enterprise, interminable vistas of wide dark
streets, with passing trams, and here and there at strategic corners
coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street
suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on
a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque
block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I
have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky
that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an
almost dreamlike quality, so that years afterwards I went to Muswell
Hill to see if indeed there really was such a place on earth, or whether
I had had a waking nightmare during my wanderings....
I wandered far that night, very far. Some girl accosted me, a thin-faced
ruined child younger by a year or so than myself. I remembered how I
talked to her, foolish rambling talk. "If you loved a man, and he was
poor, you'd wait," I said, "you'd stick to him. You'd not leave him
just to get married to a richer man."
We prowled talking for a time, and sat upon a seat somewhere near the
Regent's Park canal. I rather think I planned to rescue her from a
fallen life, but somehow we dropped that topic. I know she kissed me. I
have a queer impression that it came into my head to marry her. I put
all my loose money in her hands at last and went away extraordinarily
comforted by her, I know not how, leaving her no doubt wondering
greatly.
I did not go to bed that night at all, nor to the office next morning. I
never showed myself in the office again. Instead I went straight down to
my father, and told him I wanted to go to the war forthwith. I had an
indistinct memory of a promise I had made Mary to stay in England, but I
felt it was altogether unendurable that I should ever meet her again. My
father sat at table over the remains of his lunch, and regarded me with
astonishment, with the beginnings of protest.
"I want to get away," I said, and to my own amazement and shame I burst
into tears.
"My boy!" he gasped, astonished and terrified. "You've--you've not
done--some foolish thing?"
"No," I said, already wiping the tears from my face, "nothing.... But I
want to go away."
"You shall do as you please," he said, and sat for a moment regarding
his only son with unfathomable eyes.
Then he got up with a manner altogether matter-of-fact, came half-way
round the table and mixed me a whisky and soda. "It won't be much of a
war, I'm told," he said with the syphon in his hands, breaking a
silence. "I sometimes wish--I had seen a bit of soldiering. And this
seems to be an almost unavoidable war. Now, at any rate, it's
unavoidable.... Drink this and have a biscuit."
He turned to the mantelshelf, and filled his pipe with his broad back to
me. "Yes," he said, "you---- You'll be interested in the war. I hope----
I hope you'll have a good time there...."
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
§ 1
Mary and I did not meet again for five years, and for nearly all that
time I remained in South Africa. I went from England a boy; I came back
seasoned into manhood. They had been years of crowded experience, rapid
yet complicated growth, disillusionment and thought. Responsibility had
come to me. I had seen death, I had seen suffering, and held the lives
of men in my hands.
Of course one does not become a soldier on active service at once for
the wishing, and there was not at first that ready disposition on the
part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out
young enthusiasts. I could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly I
decided to go on my own account to Durban--for it was manifest that
things would begin in Natal--and there attach myself to some of the
local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. This took me out
of England at once, a thing that fell in very well with my mood. I
would, I was resolved, begin life afresh. I would force myself to think
of nothing but the war. I would never if I could help it think of Mary
again.
The war had already begun when I reached Durban. The town was seething
with the news of a great British victory at Dundee. We came into the
port through rain and rough weather and passed a big white liner loaded
up feverishly from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going
England-ward. From two troopships against the wharves there was a great
business of landing horses--the horses of the dragoons and hussars from
India. I spent the best part of my first night in South Africa in the
streets looking in vain for a bedroom, and was helped at last by a
kindly rickshaw Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs. I
remember I felt singularly unwanted.
The next day I set about my volunteering. By midday I had opened
communications with that extremely untried and problematical body, the
Imperial Light Horse, and in three days more I was in the company of a
mixed batch of men, mostly Australian volunteers, on my way to a place I
had never heard of before called Ladysmith, through a country of
increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose
down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded
little trains full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown, and black,
stifled and starving. They were all clamoring to buy food and drink--and
none seemed forthcoming. We shunted once to allow a southbound train to
pass, a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to
see--prisoners of war! There they were, real live enemies, rather glum,
looking out at us with faces very like our own--but rather more
unshaven. They had come from the battle of Elandslaagte....
I had never been out of England before except for a little
mountaineering in the French Alps and one walking excursion in the Black
Forest, and the scenery of lower Natal amazed me. I had expected
nothing nearly so tropical, so rich and vivid. There were little
Mozambique monkeys chattering in the thick-set trees beside the line and
a quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers amidst the abundant
deep greenery. There were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of unfamiliar
cultivation upon the hills; bunchy, frondy growths that I learnt were
bananas and plantains, and there were barbaric insanitary-looking Kaffir
kraals which I supposed had vanished before our civilization. There
seemed an enormous quantity of Kaffirs all along the line--and all of
them, men, women, and children, were staring at the train. The scenery
grew finer and bolder, and more bare and mountainous, until at last we
came out into the great basin in which lay this Ladysmith. It seemed a
poor unimportant, dusty little street of huts as we approached it, but
the great crests beyond struck me as very beautiful in the morning
light....
I forgot the beauty of those hills as we drew into the station. It was
the morning after the surrender of Nicholson's Nek. I had come to join
an army already tremendously astonished and shattered. The sunny
prospect of a triumphal procession to Pretoria which had been still in
men's minds at Durban had vanished altogether. In rather less than a
fortnight of stubborn fighting we had displayed a strategy that was
flighty rather than brilliant, and lost a whole battery of guns and
nearly twelve hundred prisoners. We had had compensations, our common
soldiers were good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear that we
were fighting an army not only very much bigger than ours but better
equipped, with bigger guns, better information, and it seemed superior
strategy. We were being shoved back into this Ladysmith and encircled.
This confused, disconcerted, and thoroughly bad-tempered army, whose
mules and bullocks cumbered the central street of the place, was all
that was left of the British Empire in Natal. Behind it was an
unprotected country and the line to Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and the
sea.
You cannot imagine how amazed I felt at it. I had been prepared for a
sort of Kentucky quality in the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good
shooting, but to find them with more modern arms than our own, more
modern methods! Weren't we there, after all, to teach _them_! Weren't we
the Twentieth and they the Eighteenth Century? The town had been shelled
the day before from those very hills I had admired; at any time it might
be shelled again. The nose of a big gun was pointed out to me by a
blasphemous little private in the Devons. It was a tremendous, a
profoundly impressive, black snout. His opinions of the directing wisdom
at home were unquotable. The platform was a wild confusion of women and
children and colored people,--there was even an invalid lady on a
stretcher. Every non-combatant who could be got out of Ladysmith was
being hustled out that day. Everyone was smarting with the sense of
defeat in progress, everyone was disappointed and worried; one got short
answers to one's questions. For a time I couldn't even find out where I
had to go....
§ 2
I fired my first shot at a fellow-creature within four days of my
arrival. We rode out down the road to the south to search some hills,