George was killed soon after dawn on the 4th November, 1918, at a place called Maison Blanche, on the road from Le Cateau to Bavay. He was the only officer in his battalion killed in that action, for the Germans surrendered or ran away in less than an hour. I heard about it that night, and, as the Brigade was “resting” on the 5th, I got permission from my Colonel to ride back to George’s funeral. I heard from George’s Colonel that he had got enfiladed by a machine-gun. The whole of his company were lying down, waiting for the flying trench-mortar squad to deal with the machine-gun, when for some unexplained reason George had stood up, and a dozen bullets had gone through him. “Silly ass,” was the Colonel’s comment, as he nodded and left me.
No coffins were available, so they wrapped George in a blanket and the Union Jack. The parson stood at the head of the grave, a mourning party of Tommies and N.C.O.s from his company on one side, and, facing them, the officers of his battalion. I was on the extreme left of the line. The Chaplain read the military burial service in a clear voice, and read it well. There was very little artillery fire. Only one battery of our own heavies, about a mile nearer the enemy, was shelling at regular intervals like a last salute. We stood to attention and the body was lowered. Each of the officers in turn stepped up to the graveside, saluted and turned away. Then the battalion buglers blew that soul-shattering, heart-rending Last Post, with its inexorable chains of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails. I admit I did a lot of swallowing those few minutes. You can say what you like against the Army, but they treat you like a gentleman, when you’re dead… The Tommies were numbered, formed fours, right turned and marched away; and the officers strolled over to the mess for a drink…
The death of a hero! What mockery, what bloody cant! What sickening putrid cant! George’s death is a symbol to me of the whole sickening bloody waste of it, the damnable stupid waste and torture of it. You’ve seen how George’s own people – the makers of his body, the women who held his body to theirs – were affected by his death. The Army did its bit, but how could the Army individually mourn a million “heroes”? How could the little bit of Army which knew George mourn him? At dawn next morning we were hot-foot after the retreating enemy, and did not pause until the Armistice and then we had our own lives to struggle with and disentangle. That night in Venice, George and his death became a symbol to me – and still remain a symbol. Somehow or other we have to make these dead acceptable, we have to atone for them, we have to appease them. How, I don’t quite know. I know there’s the Two Minutes’ Silence. But after all, a Two Minutes’ Silence once a year isn’t doing much – in fact, it’s doing nothing. Atonement – how can we atone? How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood? Something is unfulfilled, and that is poisoning us. It is poisoning me, at any rate, though I have agonized over it, as I now agonize over poor George, for whose death no other human being has agonized. What can we do? Headstones and wreaths and memorials and speeches and the Cenotaph – no, no, it has got to be something in us. Somehow we must atone to the dead – the dead, murdered, violently-dead soldiers. The reproach is not from them, but in ourselves. Most of us don’t know it, but it is there, and poisons us. It is the poison that makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless – us the war generation, and the new generation too. The whole world is blood-guilty, cursed like Orestes, and mad, and destroying itself, as if pursued by an infinite legion of Eumenides. Somehow we must atone, somehow we must free ourselves from the curse – the blood-guiltiness. We must fpind – where? how? – the greater Pallas who will absolve us on some Acropolis of Justice. But meanwhile the dead poison us and those who come after us.
That is why I am writing the life of George Winterbourne, a unit, one human body murdered, but to me a symbol. It is an atonement, a desperate effort to wipe off the blood-guiltiness. Perhaps it is the wrong way. Perhaps the poison will still be in me. If so, I shall search for some other way. But I shall search. I know what is poisoning me. I do not know what is poisoning you, but you are poisoned. Perhaps you too must atone.
PART I
vivace
1
A VERY different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. In some ways so fabulous, so remote from us; in others so near, terrifyingly near and like us. An England morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The wealth of that England, the maritime power of that England, its worse than R. L. S. optimism, its righteous cant! Victoria, broad-bottomed on her people’s will; the possessing class, heavy-bottomed on the people’s neck. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still Moody and Sankeyish, still under the Golden Rule of “Ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern.” The middle classes, especially the traders, making money hand over fist, and still “praying that our unexampled prosperity may last.” The aristocracy still pretty flip, keeping its tail up. Still lots of respect for Rank and Property – Dizzy not long dead, and his novels not yet grotesques, not yet wholly a fossil parody. The intellectuals aesthetic and Oscarish, or aesthetic and Burne-Morrisy, or Utilitarian and Huxley-Darwinish.
Come where the booze is cheaper.
Where I could live on a pound a week in lux-u-ry.
The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should ALL be as Happy as KING.
Consols over par.
Lord Claud Hamilton and White at the Admiralty, building, building, building.
Building a majestic ruin.
George Moore an elegant scandal in a hansom; Hardy a rural atheistic scandal, not yet discovered to be an intolerable bore; Oscar prancing negligently, O so clever, O so lad-di-dah.
Rummy old England. Pox on you, you old bitch, you’ve made worms’ meat of us. (We’ve made worms’ meat of ourselves.) But still, let me look back upon thee. Timon knew thee.
The Winterbournes were not gentry, but nourished vague and unfounded traditions of past genteel splendours. They were, however, pretty comfortable middle-class. Worcestershire, migrated to Sheffield. Methodist on female side; C. of E. on the Winterbourne side. Young George Augustus – father of our George – was pretty comfortable. His mother was a dominating old bitch who destroyed his initiative and courage, but in the eighties hardly any one had the sense to tell dominating bitch-mothers to go to hell. George Augustus didn’t. At fifteen he wrote a Nonconformist tract (which was published) expressing nothing but his dear Mamma’s views. He became top of his school, in conformity with dear Mamma’s views also. He did not go to Oxford, as he wanted, because dear Mamma thought it unpractical. And he did pass his examinations as a lawyer, because dear Mamma thought it so eminently right that he should have a profession and that there should be a lawyer in the family. George Augustus was a third son. The eldest son became a Nonconformist parson, because dear Mamma had prayed for guidance on her marriage night and during her first pregnancy (only, she never mentioned such horrid occurrences, even to her husband, but – she had “prayed for guidance”), and it had been revealed to her that her firstborn must take up The Ministry. And take it up, poor devil, he did. The second son had a little bit of spunk, and his dear Mamma made him a waster. Remained George Augustus, dear Mamma’s darling chick, who prayed at her knee, and was flogged regularly once a month by dear Papa, because the Scripture says: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Dear Papa had never done anything in particular, lived on his “means”, was generally rather in debt, and spent the last fifteen years of his life praying to the C. of E. God in the garden, while dear Mamma prayed to John Wesley’s God in her bedroom. Dear Mamma admired dear pious Mr. Bright and grand Mr. Gladstone; but dear Papa recollected and even read all the Works of the Right Hnble. the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G.
Still. George Augustus was pretty comfortable. The one thing he wanted in life was to be pretty comfortable. After he became a full-blown solicitor, at the age of twenty-four, a family council was held. Present: Dear Mamma, dear Papa, George Augustus. Nothing formal, of course, just a cosy little family gathering after tea,