The Fox in the Attic (13 page)

Their “we” too had been re-born; for the two-ended compass needle, ceasing to dither, cannot point to the north without faithfully pointing to the south as well. If war (and lesser crime too, for that matter) pointed to hate alone, would man find the difficulty he palpably does find in renouncing them both—war, and crime? Surely the love, rather, is the lode: it is the love two-ended war points to which will always suck us into it if deprived of enough natural loving to do in the ways of peace. Certainly the enthrallment over Britons in 1914 of this their war-dream was not hate but that it enabled Britons to love Britons again. Officers found themselves now able to love the Regiment, soldiers their officers: the non-combatant loved both—every uniform designated a Hero and a gallant grave among the nodding poppies of Flanders was to be their guerdon, so

The public dream was now in full pelt: moreover as the dream deepened everything grew even more symbolical.
Grey hordes of
“
THEY
”
raven on the lovely virginal flesh of La Belle France:
the Russian Bear turned into a Steamroller, but was thrown back on his haunches in an agonizing halt: indeed, now
tridented Britannia herself stands with her back to the wall;
but

Then Britain's bronzed sons overseas lay down the sheep-shears and the reaping-hook, hastening at the Mother's call
, and

After the war, in a “waking” state, it was just such potent love-fantasies as these which came most particularly to be derided: the most implausible materialist motives were invented to account for the Empire's whole-hearted entry into the war (as for Britain's too). Yet surely all this had been true dreaming! Why need there have been anything faked, anything despicable, anything wrong or ridiculous about these love-fantasies? Surely for the most part they were noble and quite true—come through the Gate of Horn.

After the war, war-emotion was assumed ex hypothesi to be all hatred because men then
wished
to believe war-making something easy to slough off; and hatred is akin to suffering ... so what sane man ever positively wishes to hate?

They deliberately forgot the love war stimulates too.

The public dream was now in full pelt: but not yet the public nightmare it was presently to become.

A private nightmare too can begin nobly, pleasurably. Silver ponies skimming summer meadows ... a soaring on wings among restless star-fronted towers, over alabaster domes mirrored in shining lakes ... but then suddenly the dream changes phase, the wings shrink to a tight winding-sheet and the dreamer plummets, the topless towers turn to dizzy unbanistered stairways climbing to nowhere up nothing.

Then the translucent lakes become the rocking oceans paved with accusing faces: then come the staring idiot monkeys and the hollow derisive parakeets, the stone coffin at the heart of the pyramid, the “cancerous kisses of crocodiles” the slimy things and the Nilotic mud ...

The
Flanders
mud, the slime of putrefying bodies. The accusing sunken eyesockets trodden in the trench floor. The gargled pink froth, and an all-pervading smell.

There had never been so much death in any earlier war: nothing comparable.

In the one battle of Passchendaele alone the British alone lost nearly half a million men. But mostly it was war hardly separable into battles—a killing going on all the time: with-out apparent military object, although in fact a deliberate military policy called “attrition.” For while so many men on both sides were still alive between the Alps and the Narrow Seas the generals on both sides had no room for maneuver; and in maneuver alone (they both thought) lay any hope of a decision.

But so prolific had civilized western man become it proved no easy task, this killing enough in the enemy ranks and your own to make room to move. Even after some four years, when some fourteen million men all told had been killed or maimed or broken in nerve, it had scarcely been achieved. Always there seemed to be new boys in every country growing to manhood to fill the gaps; whereon the gaps had to be made all over again.

Boys of Augustine's age had been children when the war began and as children do they accepted the world into which they had been born, knowing no other: it was normal because it was normal. After a while they could hardly remember back before it began; and it hardly entered their comprehension that one day the war could end.

Merely they knew they were unlikely to live much beyond the age of nineteen; and they accepted this as the natural order of things, just as mankind in general accepts the unlikelihood of living much beyond eighty or so. It was one of those natural differences between boys and girls: girls such as Mary would live out their lives, but not their brothers. So, generation after generation of boys grew big, won their colors, and a few terms later were ... mere names, read aloud in chapel once. As list succeeded list the time of other littler boys for the slaughterhouse was drawing nearer; but they scarcely gave it a thought as they in turn grew into big boys, won their football colors.

After all, it is only grown men ever who think of school as a microcosm, a preparation for adult life: to most boys at any time school
is
life, is itself the cosmos: a rope in the air you will climb, higher and higher, and—then, quite vanish into somewhere incomprehensible anyhow. Thus in general they seemed quite indifferent. Yet sometimes the death of someone very close—a brother, or a father perhaps—would bring home to them momentarily that being killed
is
radically different from that mere normal disappearing into the grown-up shadow-world: is being no more even a shadow on the earth.

When Augustine's cousin Henry was killed—the heir to Newton Llantony—the change in Augustine's “prospects” had meant nothing to him at all; for his real prospects were still unchanged: to tread the universal path that Henry had just trodden. But Henry's death did make a deep impression on him of this other kind, a sudden blinding intimation of mortality.

Augustine at this time had been seventeen, a sergeant in the school Officers' Training Corps. That afternoon with his mother's opened letter in his pocket he was taking a squad of little boys in bayonet-practice. Scowling as savagely as he could he jerked out the staccato commands “In!—Out!—On guard!” while the little boys struggled with their heavy rifles and bayonets to jab the swinging sacks of straw called “Germans,” piping as they did so the officially-taught obscenities supposed to arouse blood-lust in them.

Suddenly the moment of self-revelation came to Augustine, more vividly than he had ever felt it since the first time in childhood—the realization that within his “we” and distinct from it there was too one irreplaceable “I.” But this time there came with it the awful corollary: it is the “I” which
dies
...“I shall die ...” and at the same moment he felt the tender flesh of his belly and the very guts within shrinking back as from a stabbing bayonet-point.

For a moment his face went gray with fear.

Just then a pretty four-foot choirboy shrilled: “Knock his b ... s out of the back of his bloody neck!”—The child took a flying punt-kick at the swinging sack and landed on his behind in the mud, the rifle clattering from his hand.

Some bigger boys laughed. But Augustine angrily reproved their frivolity and the solemn bayonet-practice went on.

Augustine had left school and was on the last lap of all—at a training camp for young officers—when the guns stopped.

The war had ended. He was eighteen. The shock was stupendous.

No one had warned him he might after all find himself with his life to live out: with sixty years still to spend, perhaps, instead of the bare six months he thought was all he had in his pocket. Peace was a condition unknown to him and scarcely imaginable. The whole real-seeming world in which he had grown to manhood had melted round him. It was not till Oxford he had even begun to build a new world—he, and his whole generation—from the foundations up.

Perhaps then the key to much that seems strange about that generation is just this: their nightmare had been so vivid! They might think they had now forgotten it, but the harmless originals of many of its worst metamorphoses were still charged for them with a nameless horror ... Just as Polly that night, when after waking she saw Augustine's harmless real figure standing in her bedroom doorway, had screamed at it so. Just as next morning, her dream ostensibly forgotten, she had yet lain away from him on the mattress's extreme edge—as companionable as a three-foot plank of wood.

Oxford is always luminous; but at first in those post-war days Oxford had been an older and more hysterical society than in normal times. Colonels and even a brigadier or two twisted commoners' gowns round grizzled necks: young ex-captains were countless. But between the Augustines who had never seen the trenches and these, the remnant who for years had killed yet somehow had not been killed back, an invisible gulf was fixed. Friendship could never quite bridge it. Secretly and regretfully and even enviously the men yet felt something lacking in these unblooded boys, like being eunuchs; and the boys, deeply respecting and pitying them, agreed. But the older men understood each other and cherished each other charitably.
They
knew they sweated sometimes for no reason, and the sweat smelt of fear. Their tears came easily, making the boys ashamed: they had moments of violence. They tended to find knowledge difficult to memorize.

That was in the first twelve months or so, before they hardened over; and in two years most of them were gone. The young ex-captains and the uncrowned kings like Lawrence departed, their places were taken by freshmen younger than Augustine still—the Jeremies, milk-fresh from school. But one belief had been shared absolutely on both sides of the gulf, and in England continued for a long time to be held by those who came thereafter: it was built into the very structure of Augustine's new world:
never till the end of Time could there be another war
.

Life in the years so unexpectedly to come might hold many hazards for this and for succeeding generations; but that hazard could be discounted.

Any government which ever again anywhere even talked of war would next minute be winkled out of Whitehall or the Wilhelmstrasse or wherever by its own unanimous citizens and hanged like stoats.

IN HIS LITTLE office in Lorienburg, the castle Mary had visited in her girlhood before the war, sat the magnificent Otto von Kessen she had so lately dreamed of. He was rubbing his chin, which felt pleasingly rough to the touch after the papers he had been fingering all afternoon.

“Thursday November the Eighth” said the calendar on the wall. The cold had come early to Bavaria this autumn, with ten degrees of frost outside. But this office was in the thickness of the castle's most ancient part: it was a tiny twilight room with a sealed double window, and it was like an oven. There were beads of sweat on Baron Otto's forehead, and the hot air over the huge blue porcelain stove quivered visibly: it kept a loose strip of wallpaper on the wall in constant agitation like a pennon.

This monumental stove was too big: with its stack of wood it more than half filled the room and the space left only just housed the safe and the little kneehole desk Otto was sitting at. On the desk stood a huge ancient typewriter of British make, built like an ironclad and with two complete banks of keys (being pre-shiftlock), and that incubus also took up far too much space: the files and ledgers piled high beside it leaned, like Pisa. In such a cubbyhole there was no possible place to put the big wire wastepaper basket other than under the desk, yet that left a man nowhere to stretch his artificial leg in comfort and now the socket was chafing: a nerve in the mutilated hip had begun to throb neuralgically against the metal of the heavy revolver in Otto's pocket.

Otto tried hard to concentrate on the sheets of accounts in front of him (he acted as factotum for his half-brother Walther these crippled days). These were the last and craziest weeks of the Great Inflation when a retired colonel's whole year's pension wouldn't cobble him one pair of shoes: Walther's checks however vast were still honored, but only because he was able to keep his bank account nowadays in terms of the corn he grew and a check drawn for trillions of marks would be debited as so many bushels according to the price that actual hour. This galloping calculus of the currency, this hourly acceleration in the rise of all prices and the fall of all real values, made endless difficulties for Otto; and now the shooting pains in the leg which wasn't there were getting worse ...

“November the Eighth” said the calendar: almost five years to the day since the old world ended.

*

The sound of wind ... the bitter Munich wind which had swept down the wide spaces of the Ludwigstrasse that scudding winter day nearly five years ago, alternating with moments of unearthly calm: whipping the muffling rags of the uncertain crowd, wildly flapping the revolutionary red banners on the public buildings and then leaving them pendulous and despondent.

The sound of marching feet ... it was in one of the lulls of the wind that Otto had first heard that dead thudding sound, and a sudden stirring and a murmur had passed through the crowd for this could be none of Eisner's “Red Guard” rabble, only trained Imperial troops marched with such absolute precision. But to Otto's professional ear, keen as a musician's, from the first there was something wrong in the sound of that marching. A hollowness and a deadness. No spring in the step—it sounded ... wrong: like the knocking of an engine, which is also a precise and regular sound yet presages a breakdown.