Like a fool, I allowed myself to be persuaded to drink liqueur brandies after dinner that evening; and paid for it with a sleepless night. No doubt it was the unexpected meeting with Elizabeth which made me think a lot about George during those ghastly wakeful hours. I can’t claim that I had set up any altar to the deceased George in my heart, but I truly believe that I am the only person left alive who ever thinks of him. Perhaps because I was the only person who cared for George for his own sake, disinterestedly. Naturally, his death meant very little to me at the time – there were eighty deaths in my own battalion on the day George was killed, and the Armistice and getting out of the blasted Army and settling my own problems and starting civilian life again and getting to work, all occupied my attention. In fact, it was not until two or three years after the war that I began to think much, if at all, about George. Then, although I didn’t in the least believe in it, I got a half-superstitious, half-sentimental idea that “he” (poor old bag of decaying bones) wanted me to think about him. I half-knew, half-guessed that the people on whom he had counted had forgotten him, at least no longer cared that he had existed, and would have been merely surprised and rather annoyed if he had suddenly come back, like one of those shell-shocked heroes of fiction who recover their wits seven years after the Armistice. His father had taken it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in “unlicensed copulation” and brandy, and Fanny in tears and marrying a painter. But I hadn’t taken it out in anything, I hadn’t been conscious that George’s death meant anything in particular to me; and so it was waiting inside patiently to be dealt with in due course.
Friendships between soldiers during the war were a real and beautiful and unique relationship which has now entirely vanished, at least from Western Europe. Let me at once disabuse the eager-eyed Sodomites among my readers by stating emphatically once and for all that there was nothing sodomitical in these friendships. I have lived and slept for months, indeed years, with “the troops”, and had several such companionships. But no vaguest proposal was ever made to me; I never saw any signs of sodomy, and never heard anything to make me suppose it existed. However, I was with the fighting troops. I can’t answer for what went on behind the lines.
No, no. There was no sodomy about it. It was just a human relation, a comradeship, an undemonstrative exchange of sympathies between ordinary men racked to extremity under a great common strain in a great common danger. There was nothing dramatic about it. Bill and Tom would be in the same section, or Jones and Smith subalterns in the same company. They’d go on fatigues and patrols together, march behind each other on trench reliefs, booze at the same estaminet, and show each other the “photos” of “Ma” and “my tart”, if Tommies. Or they’d meet on trench duty, and volunteer for the same trench raid, and back up each other’s lies to the inspecting Brigadier, and share a servant, and stick together in a battle, and ride together when on rest and talk shyly about their “fiancées” or wives in England, if officers. When they separated, they would be glum for a bit, and then, in the course of a month or two or three, strike up another friendship. Only, the companionship was generally a real one, pretty unselfish. Of course, this sort of friendship was stronger in France than in England, more vivid in the line than out of it. Probably a man must have something to love – quite apart from the “love” of sexual desire. (Prisoners are supposed to love rats and spiders.) Soldiers, especially soldiers overseas in the last war, entirely cut off from women and friends, had perforce to love another soldier, there being no dogs available. Very few of these friendships survived the Peace.
After several months in France and a month’s leave, I felt pretty glum when I was sent to an Officers’ Training Camp in a beautiful but very remote part of Dorset. I was mooning about in a gloomy way before my first dinner as a potential though temporary gentleman, when I ran into another fellow similarly mooning. He was George, who had been seen off that day from Waterloo by Elizabeth and Fanny (although I did not then know it), and who was also feeling very glum about it. We exchanged a few words, found we were both B.E.F. (most of the others were not) and that we were allotted to the same barrack-room. We found we had certain tastes in common, and we became friends.
I liked George. For one thing, he was the only person in the whole of that hellish camp with whom I could exchange one word on any topic but booze, “tarts”, “square-pushing”, smut, the war, and camp gossip. George was very enthusiastic about modern painting. His own painting, he told me, was “pretty dud”, but in peace time he made a good living by writing art criticism for various papers and by buying modern pictures, chiefly French and German, on commission for wealthy collectors. We lent each other books from our scanty store, and George was quite thrilled to know that I had published one or two little books of poetry and had met Yeats and Marinetti. I talked to him about modern poetry, and he talked to me about modern painting; and I think we helped to keep each other’s “souls” alive. In the evenings we played chess or strolled about, if it was fine. George didn’t go square-pushing with tarts, and I didn’t go square-pushing with tarts. So on Saturday afternoons and Sundays we took long walks over that barren but rather beautiful Dorset down country, and had a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine in one or other of the better country inns. And all that kept up our own particular “morale”, which each of us had determined not to yield to the Army swinishness. Poor George had suffered more than I. He had been more bullied as a Tommy, had a worse time in France, and suffered horribly from that “tightness” inside, that inability to confide himself, induced by his singular home life and appalling mother. I feel quite sure he told me more about himself, far more, than he ever told any one else, so that eventually I knew quite a lot about him. He told me all about his parents and about Elizabeth and Fanny, and about his childhood and his life in London and Paris.
As I say, I liked George, and I’m grateful to him because he helped me to keep alive when a legion of the swine were trying to destroy me. And, of course, I helped him. He had a strong dose of shyness – his mother had sapped his self-confidence abominably – which made him seem rather conceited and very aloof. But au fond he was extraordinarily generous, spontaneous, rather Quixotish. It was that which made him so helpless with women, who neither want nor understand Quixotic behaviour and scrupulousness, and who either think they mean weakness or are veils for some devilish calculation. But with another man, who wanted nothing from him but a frank exchange of friendliness, he was a charming and inexhaustible companion. I was damned glad to get my commission and leave that stinking hole of a Camp, but I was really sorry to part from George. We agreed to write, and applied for commissions in the same regiment. Needless to say, we were gazetted to completely different regiments from those we had applied for. We exchanged one or two letters while waiting in depots in England, and then ceased writing. But by an odd freak of the War Office we were both sent to different battalions in the same Brigade. It was nearly two months before we found this out, when we met by accident at Brigade Headquarters.
I was rather startled at George’s appearance, he looked so worried and almost scared. I saw him on reliefs or at Brigade H.Q. or at Divisional Rest Camp several times. He looked whacked in May ’18. In July the Division moved down to the Somme, but George’s company front was raided the night before we left, and he was badly rattled by it. I had watched the box barrage from the top of Battalion H.Q. dugout (I was then signal officer), but I never thought that George was in it. He lost several men as prisoners, and the Brigadier was a bit nasty about it, which made George more rattled and jumpy than ever. I told him then that he ought to apply for a rest, but he was in an agony of feeling that he was disgraced and a coward, and wouldn’t listen to me.
The last time I saw him was at Herinies, in October ’18, as I mentioned before. I had come up from a course and found George had been “left out” at Divisional Rest Camp for that tour. There were some sacking beds in the Orderly room, and George got me one.