Chapter 7

The dipping sun slanted over the fields from Stilliands Tower, and made Tom Beatup’s khaki like a knight’s golden armour as he trudged home. The sky was a spread pool of blue, full of light like water, and moss-green in the east where it dipped towards the woods of Senlac. Soft whorls of dust bowled down the lane before a fluttering, racing wind, that smelled of primroses and rainy grass.

Tom heaved a deep sigh of well-being as he stopped to light his pipe. To-morrow he would have left these sun-swamped sorrowless fields and be back in the country [261] where the earth was torn and gutted as if by an earthquake, all scabbed and leprous as if diseased with the putrefaction of its million dead—where the air rocked with crashes, roars, rumbles, whizzes, caterwaulings, and reeked with flowing stenches of dead bodies, blood, and hideous chemicals—where any thornbush might conceal a sight of horror to freeze heart and eyeballs ... and yet he could put the dread of it out of his mind, and smile contentedly, and blink his eyes in the sun.

A few yards down the street his cottage showed its little misted shape, while its windows shone like garnets in the western radiance, and a tall column of wood-smoke rose behind it, blowing and bowing in the adventurous wind, which brought him snatches of its perfume, with the sweetness of wet banks and primroses and budding apple-boughs.... He knew that in the shop door Thyrza stood with the baby in her arms; she would be waiting for him there with the sunshine swimming over her white apron and purple gown, making the downy fluff on little Will’s head to shine yellow as a duckling’s feathers. The thought of wife and child was not cankered by the dread that he might never see them again. The parting when it came would be terrible—he might break down over it, as he had broken down before—but he had all a soldier’s solid fatalism and scorn of the future, and was, perhaps, strengthened by the inarticulate knowledge that if he were to die to-morrow he died a man complete. From the lumbering, unawakened lad of two years ago he had come to a perfect manhood, to be a husband and father, fulfilling himself in a simple, natural way, with a quickness and richness which could never have been if the war had not seized him and forced him out of his old groove into its adventurous paths. If he died, the war would but have taken away what it had given—a man; for through it he had in a short time fulfilled a long time, and at [262] twenty-two could die in the old age of a complete, unspotted life.

He passed under the sign of the Rifle Volunteer, straddling the road in his green uniform, with his rifle and pot of beer—“Queer old perisher,” thought Tom, looking up at him—“I shudn’t like to go over the top in that rig.”

The Rifle Volunteer creaked noisily on his sign, as if the soldier of bygone years challenged the soldier of to-day.

“I am the man armed for the War That Never Was, who marched and drilled and camped to fight the French, who never came. And you are the man unarmed for the War That Had To Be, who never drilled or marched or camped to fight the Germans, who came and nearly drove you off the earth.”

“Reckon he’d have bin most use a hunderd mile away,” scoffed Tom.

“I went of my free-will and you because you were fetched,” said the Rifle Volunteer. “Two years ago I saw you walking down this road under my patriotic legs, a wretched, drag-heel conscript.”

“He never fought in any war that I know of,” thought Tom, “and yit I reckon thur used to be wars in these parts in the oald days. Minister says the country’s full of thur naums. I doan’t know naun, surelye.”

The east wind blew from Senlac, sweet with the scent of the ash-trees growing on the barrow where Saxon and Norman lay tumbled together in the brotherhood of sleep.

[263]

“Here—when a great whinny moor rolled down from Anderida to the sea, and Pevens Isle and Horse Isle were green in the bight of the bay, and the family of the Heastings had finished building their ham by the coast—here used to be the Lake of Blood, where hearts were drowned. A red tun stands on it now, and good folk come to it on market-days. Thus shall it be with all wars—out of the red blood the red town, and under the green barrows friend and foe, tumbled together in the brotherhood of sleep.”

The east wind like a Saxon ghost whistled against Tom’s neck.

“We fought as you did once—we hated the Norman as you hate the German, yet look how peacefully we sleep together.”

“They must have been funny,” thought Tom, “those oald wars wud bows and arrows.”

“Harold! Harold!... Rollo! Rollo!” cried the ghosts on the east wind from Senlac.

“God save the Queen,” said the Rifle Volunteer.