Death of a Hero. Richard Aldington

joy was squabbling with Elizabeth Winterbourne, George’s wife, about his poor little “estate” and military effects. When George joined up, he thought he had to give his father as his next-of-kin. Later, he found his mistake, and when he went out to France the second time he gave his wife. The War Office carefully preserved both records, either under the impression that there were two George Winterbournes, or because the original record was never erased and so became law. At any rate, some of George’s possessions were sent to the country address, and, although directed to his father, were unscrupulously seized by his mother. And the remainder of his military kit and the pay due him went to his wife. Old Mrs Winterbourne was fearfully enraged at this. Stupid red tape, she said it was. Why! wasn’t her baby son hers? Hadn’t she borne him, and therefore established complete possession of him and his for the rest of her natural life? What can any woman mean to a Man in comparison with his Mother? Therefore, it was plain that she was the next-of-kin and that all George’s possessions, including the widow’s pension, should come to her and her only: Q.E.D. She bothered her harassed husband about it, tried to stimulate Sam Browne to action – but he evaporated in a would-be straight, clean letter to Elizabeth, who knocked him out in the first round – and even consulted a lawyer in London. Old Mrs Winterbourne came back from London in a spluttering temper. “That man” (i.e. her husband) had “insulted” her again, by timidly stating that all George’s possessions ought to be given to his wife, who would doubtless allow them to keep a few “mementoes.” And the lawyer – foul brute – had unsympathetically said that George’s wife had a perfect right to sue her mother-in-law for detaining her (Elizabeth’s) property. George’s will was perfectly plain – he had left everything he had to his wife. However, that small amount of George’s property which his mother got hold of she kept, in defiance of all the King’s horses and writs. And she took, she embraced, the opportunity of telling “that woman” (i.e. Elizabeth) what she thought of her – which, if believed, meant that poor Elizabeth was a composition of Catherine of Russia, Lucrezia Borgia, Mine de Brinvilliers, Moll flanders, a tricoteuse, and a hissing villainess from the Surrey side.

      But George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement for about two months. Just as the quarrel with Elizabeth reached stupendous heights of vulgar invective (on her side), old Winterbourne got himself run over. So there was the excitement of the inquest and a real funeral, and widow’s weeds and more tear-blotched letters. She even sent a tear-blotched letter to Elizabeth, which I saw, saying that “twenty years” – it was really almost thirty – “of happy married life were over, both father and son were now happily united, and, whatever Mr. Winterbourne’s faults, he was a gentleman.” (Heavily underlined and followed by several exclamation marks, the insinuation being apparently that Elizabeth was no lady.)

      A month later Mrs. Winterbourne married the sheik – alas! no sheik now – at a London registry office, whence they departed to Australia to live a clean sportin’ life. Peace be with them both – they were too clean and sportin’ for a corrupt and unclean Europe.

      George’s parents, of course, were grotesques. When, in a mood of cynical merriment, he used to tell his friends the exact truth about his parents, he was always accused – even by quite intelligent people – of creating a monstrous legend. Unless all the accepted ideas about heredity and environment are false – which they probably are – it is a regular mystery of Udolpho how George managed to be so different from his parents and the family milieu. Physically he looked like them both – in every other respect, he might have dropped from the moon for all the resemblance he had to them. Perhaps they seemed so grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never perceived it. They only worried about their rations. Old Winterbourne also worried a good deal about “the country”, and wrote letters of advice to The Times (which didn’t publish them), and then rewrote them on Club notepaper to the Prime Minister. They were invariably politely acknowledged by a secretary. But Mrs. Winterbourne only cared spasmodically about “the country”. Her view of the British Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the extermination of all “filthy vile foreigners”, making the world safe for straight, clean sheiks and pure, sweet, kittenish Englishwomen of fifty. Grotesques indeed, fanciful, unbelievable, like men’s fashions of 1840. To me, who only saw them a few times, either in company with George or as his executor, they seemed as fantastic, as ridiculous, as prehistoric as the returning émigrés seemed to Paris in 1815. Like the Bourbons, the elder Winterbournes learned nothing from the war, and forgot nothing. It is the tragedy of England that the war has taught its Winterbournes nothing, and that it has been ruled by grotesques and a groaning Civil Service of disheartened men and women, while the young have simply chucked up the job in despair. Gott strafe England is a prayer that has been fully answered – by the insanity of retaining the old Winterbourne grotesques and pretending they are alive. And we go on acquiescing, we go on without even the guts to kick the grotesque Aunt Sallies of England into the limbo they deserve. Pero, paciencia. Mañana. Mañana…

      I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don’t mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing. The situation he had got into with Elizabeth and Fanny Welford was not inextricable, but it would have needed a certain amount of patience and energy and determination and common sense to put right. But by November ’18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops were after six months in the line. Since Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves, and when I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October ’18 he struck me as a man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn’t see how he would face another barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle. We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth, until it was such a nightmare, such a portentous House of Atrides tragedy, that I began to think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering to each other – or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried to interrupt and couldn’t. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were certainly all to pieces.

      Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, etcetera. Such wise young women, you thought, no sentimental nonsense about them. No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come their way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship”, nothing could break it. Jealousy? it was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand tricks? insulting to make such a suggestion. No, no. Men must be “free” and women must be “free’

      Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth must know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence”. So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t know instinctively, and thought that George and