IN the middle of December the cadet battalions were wound up, and the officers, after a few days’ leave, sent back to their units. I had orders to rejoin the Royal Welch Third Battalion, now at the Castle Barracks, Limerick, but decided to overstay my leave until the baby was born. Nancy expected it early in January 1919, and her father took a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny, born on Twelfth Night, was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had no foreknowledge of the experience – I assumed that she must have been given some sort of warning – and it took her years to recover from it I went over to Limerick, and there lied my way out of the overstaying of leave.
Limerick being a Sinn Fein stronghold, constant clashes occurred between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish always got on well together, just as Welsh and Scottish were sure to disagree. The Royal Welch had the situation comfortably in hand; they made a joke of politics and turned their entrenching-tool handles into shillelaghs. Limerick looked like a war-ravaged town. The main streets were pitted with holes like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. Old Reilly at the antique shop, who remembered my grandfather well, told me nobody built new houses at Limerick now; the birth-rate was declining and when one fell down the survivors moved into another. He also said that everyone thed of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia.
Life did not start in the town before nine in the morning. Once, at about that time, I walked down O’Connell Street, formerly King George Street, and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house flew open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, them a nearly naked girl-child, who sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for filthy pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. I had pictured Ireland exactly so, and felt its charm as dangerous. When detailed to search for concealed rifles at the head of a task force, in a neighbouring village, I asked Attwater, then still adjutant, to find a substitute; explaining that as an Irishman I did not care to be mixed up in Irish politics. That January I played my last game of rugger: as full-back for the battalion against Limerick City. We were all crocks and our opponents seemed bent on showing what fine fighting material England had lost by withholding Home Rule. How jovially they jumped on me, and rubbed my face in the mud!
My new loyalty to Nancy and Jenny tended to overshadow regimental loyalty, now that the war seemed to be over. Once I began writing a rhymed nonsense letter to them in my quarters overlooking the barrack square:
Is there any song sweet enough
For Nancy or for Jenny?
Said Simple Simon to the Pieman:
‘Indeed, I know not any.’
I have counted the miles to Babylon,
I have flown the earth like a bird,
I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
But no such song have I heard.
At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with The British Grenadiers. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. The British Grenadiers succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem:
Some speak of Alexander,
And some of Hercules,
and then were repulsed:
But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny,
Where are there any like these?
Had I ceased to be a British Grenadier?
I decided to resign my commission at once. Consulting the priority list of trades for demobilization, I found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again and would rather have been an agricultural worker – Nancy and I had spoken of farming when the war ended – but where was my agricultural background? And I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination I had already been excused because of a ‘higher certificate examination’ passed at Charterhouse; so there remained only the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford offered itself as a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like earning a livelihood. We were all accustomed to the war-time view, that the sole qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we expected our scars and our commanding officers’ testimonials to get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the employers’ patriotic spirit before it cooled again; sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.
I wrote to a friend in the War Office Demobilization Department, asking him to hurry through my release. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must not have had charge of Government moneys for the past six months. As it happened, I had not at the time; but Attwater suddenly decided to put me in command of a company. He complained of being disastrously short of officers who could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the New Army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunkenness on parade grew frequent; not to mention table manners at which Sergeant Malley stood aghast. We now had two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior; yet if a junior officer happened to be regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry, or came from Sandhurst) the colonel invited him to use the senior ante-room and mix with his own class. The situation must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured at Mons in 1914, now promoted captains by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice.
Attwater cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals now being arranged for St David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in Julius Caesar. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds, because next day the senior lieutenant of the company which I was to have taken over went off with the cash-box, and I should have been legally responsible for its loss. Before the war he used to give displays on Blackpool Pier as ‘The Handcuff King’. He got away safely to the United States.
I rode out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval commander, and the Sinn Feiners had begun burning his ricks and driving his cattle. Through the window he showed me distant herds grazing beside the Shannon. ‘They have been there all winter,’ he said despondently, ‘but I haven’t had the heart to take a look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill, and woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza.
Back at the barracks, I found that a War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the Troubles. Attwater, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help me with those theatricals.’ I protested; he stood firm; but I did not intend to have influenza at an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present condition.
I decided to make a run for it. The orderly-room sergeant had made out my papers on receipt of the telegram; all my kit lay ready packed. There remained only two things to get: the commanding officer’s signature to the statement that I had handled no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which the battalion demobilization officer alone could supply – but he was hand-in-glove with Attwater, so I dared not ask him for them. The last train before demobilization ended would be the six-fifteen from Limerick that same evening, February 13th. My one hope was to wait until Attwater left the orderly-room and then casually ask the commanding officer to sign the statement, without mentioning Attwater’s objection to my going. Attwater remained in the orderly-room until five minutes past six. As soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the necessary signature – fortunately my old friend Macartney-Filgate was now in command, saluted again, and hurried away to collect my baggage. I had counted on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but found none. About five minutes left, and the station a good distance away! A First Battalion corporal passed. I shouted to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men! I’ve got my ticket and must catch the last train home.’ Summers promptly called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it, left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it moved slowly out and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers. ‘Goodbye, corporal, drink my health!’
Yet still I had not got my code-marks, and knew that when I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon the officers there would refuse to let me go. Not that I cared very much. I should at least have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish, hospital. My temperature was running high, and my mind working clearly, as it always does in fever, with its visual imagery, which is cloudy and partial at ordinary times, defined and complete. We reached Fishguard after a rough crossing. I bought a copy of the South Wales Echo and read that a strike of London Electric Railwaymen would take place the next day, February 14th, unless the railway directors met the union’s demands. So as the train steamed into Paddington, I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up, and ran across to the station entrance where, in spite of competition from porters – a feeble crew at this period–I seized the only taxi in sight as its occupant paid the fare. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford to waste no time. I brought my taxi back to the train, where scores of stranded officers eyed me with envy. One, a fellow-traveller in my compartment, had been met by his wife. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I shall be getting out at Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ That delighted them, because they lived at Ealing and had no idea how to get home except by taxi.
On the way to Waterloo he said: ‘I wish there were some way of showing our gratitude – something we could do for you.’
‘Well, there’s only one thing in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me, I’m afraid. And that’s the set of secret code-marks to complete my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’
He rapped on the glass of the taxi, told the driver to stop, got down his bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I happen to be the Cork District Demobilization officer, and here’s the whole bag of tricks.’
Then he filled in my papers.
At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for the expected nine or ten hours, I got released at once; Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’, and demobilization from theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. After a hurried visit to my parents, now back in our own house half a mile across the Common, I went on to Hove. Arriving at supper-time, I warned Nicholson about my influenza, and hurried away to bed. Within a day or two, the whole family caught it, except Nicholson, Jenny, and the housemaid, a Welsh gipsy, who kept it off by a charm – the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new epidemic, as bad as the summer one, had started; not a nurse could be found in all Brighton. Nicholson at last rounded up two ex-nurses: one competent, but frequently drunk, and with the habit, when drunk, of ransacking all the wardrobes in the house and piling the contents into her own bag. The other sober, but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of the open window, arms outspread, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me!’ The husband, by the way, was not drowned, merely unfaithful.
A doctor, found with equal difficulty, gave me no hope of recovery; it was septic pneumonia now, and had affected both my lungs. But, having come through the war, I refused to the of influenza. This made the third time in my life that I had been given up, and each time because of my lungs. I should have mentioned in my first chapter the double-pneumonia following measles, which nearly did for me at the age of seven. Maggie, the gipsy-servant, wept whenever she dusted my room – I thought because of a tiff with her young man, but these were tears for me, my widow, and my orphan girl. I focused attention on a poem, ‘The Troll’s Nosegay’, which was giving me trouble; I had taken it through thirty drafts and still it would not come right. The thirty-fifth draft passed scrutiny, I felt better, and Maggie smiled again. Nancy’s attack was a light one, fortunately.
A few weeks later, I watched a mutiny of the Guards, when about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp and paraded through the Brighton streets, in protest against unnecessary restrictions. The troops’ impatience of military disipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried; he had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant to hang the Kaiser and make a stem peace. Siegfried, supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a Pacifist platform, had faced a threatening civilian crowd; he trusted that his three wound-stripes and the mauve and white Military Cross ribbon (which he had not thrown away with the Cross itself) would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald were now perhaps the two most unpopular men in England, and whatever hopes we had nursed of a general anti-Governmental rising by ex-service men soon faded. Once back in England, they were content with a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. Any overcrowding in their home was as nothing compared to what they had grown accustomed to; a derelict French four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. Having won the war, they were satisfied and left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak took place at Rhyl. There a two days’ mutiny of young Canadians caused much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the rising was a cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks!’
Nancy, Jenny, and I went up to Harlech, where Nicholson lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my trunk to see what civilian clothes I still had. The one suit, other than school uniform which I found, no longer fitted. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle, I was asked, as the senior Man of Harlech who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I spoke in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and earned loud cheers. But not only did I have no experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from school into the army: I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country, I could not help seeing it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how best to hold the Upper Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where to place a Lewisgun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog Farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best cover for my rifle-grenade section. I still had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth – it was always easier for me now, when charged with any fault, to lie my way out in army style. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and light – I ticked off each item as satisfactory.
Other loose habits of war-time survived, such as stopping cars for a lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever might be about. Also, I retained the technique of endurance: a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But at least I modified my unrestrainedly foul language. The greatest difficulty lay in facing the problem of money, which had not worried me since those first days at Wrexham; but at the moment my savings of some £150, my war-bonus of £250, the disability pension of £60 a year that I now drew, and occasional sums that came in from poems, seemed plenty. Nancy and I engaged a nurse and a general servant, and lived as though we had an income of a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of her time illustrating some poems of mine; I got my Country Sentiment in order, and wrote reviews.
Very thin, very nervous, and with about four years’ loss of sleep to make up, I was waiting until I got well enough to go to Oxford on the Government educational grant. I knew that it would be years before I could face anything but a quiet country life. My disabilities were many: I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping. I felt ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy, but had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.
Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as demobilized, expecting me to join him. However, after a couple of terms there, he accepted the literary editorship of the newly-published Daily Herald. He sent me books to review for it. In those days, the Daily Herald was not respectable, but violently anti-militarist and the only daily newspaper that dared protest against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British fleet. The Treaty of Versailles shocked me; it seemed destined to cause another war some day, yet nobody cared. While the most critical decisions were being taken in Paris, public interest concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s Atlantic flight and rescue; the marriage of England’s reigning beauty, Lady Diana Manners; and a marvellous horse called The Panther – the Derby favourite, which came in nowhere.
The Herald spoiled our breakfast every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country due to the closing of munition factories; of ex-service men refused reinstatement in the jobs they had left when war broke out, of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news, too, of the penury to which my mother’s relatives in Germany had been reduced, particularly the retired officials whose pensions, by the collapse of the mark, now amounted to only a few shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart and called ourselves socialists.
My family, who were living permanently in Harlech, having sold the house at Wimbledon, did not know quite how to treat me. I had fought gallantly for my country – indeed, of six brothers, I alone had seen active service, and my shell-shocked state entitled me to every consideration; but my sympathy for the Russian rebellion against the corrupt Czarist Government outraged them. I once more forfeited the good will of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over, reminding me that my brother Philip, once a pro-Boer and a Fenian, had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and come out all right in the end. Most of my elder brothers and sisters were in the Near East, either British officials, or married to British officials. My father hoped that when I recovered I would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family influence would help me, and there get over my ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’.
Socialism with Nancy was a means to a single end: namely judicial equality between the sexes. She ascribed all the wrong in the world to male domination and narrowness, and would not see my experiences in the war as anything comparable with the sufferings that millions of working-class married women went through without complaint. This, at least, had the effect of putting the war into the background for me; my love for Nancy made me respect her views. But male stupidity and callousness became such an obsession with her that she began to include me in her universal condemnation of men. Soon she could not bear a newspaper in the house, for fear of reading some paragraph that would horrify her – about the necessity of keeping up the population; or about women’s limited intelligence; or about the shameless, flat-chested modern girl; or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We joined the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society, and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.
What made things worse was that neither of us went to Harlech church, and we refused to baptize Jenny. My father even wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who happened to be my publisher, asking him to persuade Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, into giving her child Christian baptism. It scandalized them, too, that Nancy kept her own name for all purposes, refusing to be called ‘Mrs Graves’ in any circumstances. She explained that, as ‘Mrs Graves’, she had no personal validity. Children, at that time, were the sole property of the father; the mother not being legally a parent.