The Tree of Heaven. Sinclair May

the war Morrie's great drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they merged in one continual sickly soaking. And while other important and outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember, disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.

      He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war. He was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war meant not realizing what he had been through. He swore by some queer God of his that he would make them realize it. The least they could do for him was to listen to what he had to say.

      "You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all glory and pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns, and the British flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time and not caring a damn. Nobody caring a damn.

      "And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all the time. It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going to sleep and getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got warm again because your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the top of you. You get wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't anywhere about, and you crawl over to the next poor devil and lie back to back with him to keep warm. And just when you've dropped off to sleep you wake up shivering, because he's died of a wound he didn't know he'd got.

      "You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and when you start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's glued to the ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way like rotten fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck together without any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a head on it. And all the brains are in the other half, the one that's glued down. That's war.

      "Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It seemed to him that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to him. They were not looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they didn't want to look at him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't evoke one single clear image in their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to vision, to realization. They had not been there.

      Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had brought those horrors into the room. But even they missed the reality of it. They saw everything he meant them to see, except him. It was as if they were in the conspiracy to keep him out of it.

      He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling them, of trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some sign, made some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might have spared them. But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and Anthony annoyed him.

      "And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to sweat in a brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up country to Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your throat. You see the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad. You could kill the man if you were to see him drink it, when you know there's nothing for you but a bucket of green water with typhoid germs swimming about in it. That's war.

      "You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in a bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best thing you can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they make you hospital orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up all the muck of the butcher's shop from morning to night. When you're so sick you can't stand you get your supper, dry bread and bully beef. The bully beef reminds you of things, and the bread--well, the bread's all nice and white on the top. But when you turn it over on the other side--it's red. That's war."

      Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at last I've touched her; she can realize that."

      "Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's too awful. I don't mind your telling me and Anthony about it; but I'd rather you did it when the children aren't in the room."

      "Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You don't care a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as long as it isn't one of your own kids?

      "I'm simply trying to tell you what war is. It's dirt and stink and funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory in it, Nicky."

      "If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.

      "Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.

      "Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.

      "You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between England and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be glory."

      "Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."

      "I have read it," said Michael.

      Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why should he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these ideas from. But he'll grow out of them."

      It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But he had made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long as they lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with it.

      In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to California. The Boer War was ended.

      Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it had never been.