Death of a Hero (4 page)

I began this book almost immediately after the Armistice, in a little Belgian cottage — my billet. I remember the landscape was buried deep in snow, and that we had very little fuel. Then came demobilization, and the effort of readjustment cost my manuscript its life. I threw it aside, and never picked it up again. The attempt was premature. Then, ten years later, almost day for day, I felt the impulse return, and began this book. You, I know, will read it sympathetically for many reasons. But I cannot expect the same favour from others.

This book is not the work of a professional novelist. It is, apparently, not a novel at all. Certain conventions of form and method in the novel have been erected, I gather, into immutable laws, and are looked upon with quite superstitious reverence. They are entirely disregarded here. To me the excuse for the novel is that one can do any damn thing one pleases. I am told I have done things as terrible as if you produced asides and soliloquies into your plays, and came on to the stage in the middle of a scene to take part in the action. You know how much I should be interested if you did that — I am all for disregarding artistic rules of thumb. I dislike standardized art as much as standardized life. Whether I have been guilty of Expressionism or Super-realism or not, I don't and don't care. I knew what I wanted to say, and said it. And I know I have not tried to be “original”.

The technique of this book, if it can be said to have one, is that which I evolved for myself in writing a longish modern poem (which you liked) called “A Fool i' th' Forest”. Some people said that was “jazz
priate that is to the theme.

I believe you at least will be sympathetic to the implied or expressed idealism of this book. Through a good many doubts and hesitations and changes I have always preserved a certain idealism. I believe in men, I believe in a certain fundamental integrity and comradeship, without which society could not endure. How often that integrity is perverted, how often that comradeship betrayed, there is no need to tell you. I disbelieve in bunk and despotism, even in a dictatorship of the intelligentsia. I think you and I are not wholly unacquainted with the intelligentsia?

Some of the young, they who will “do the noble things that we forgot”, think differently. According to them, bunk must be parried by super-bunk. Sincerity is superannuated. It doesn't matter what you have to say; what matters is whether you can put it across successfully. And the only hope is to forbid everybody to read except a few privileged persons (chosen how and by whom?) who will autocratically tell the rest of us what to do. Well, do we believe that? I answer on your behalf as well as my own that we emphatically do not. Of course, these young men may be Swiftian ironists.

But, as you will see, this book is really a threnody, a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly, and suffered deeply. Others, of course, may see it all very differently. Why should they not? I believe that all we claim is that we try to say what appears to be the truth, and that we are not afraid either to contradict ourselves or to retract an error.

Always yours,

RICHARD ALDINGTON

Paris, 1929

PROLOGUE

MORTE D'UN ERÖE

allegretto

T
HE casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice – last spasms of Europe's severed arteries. Of course, nobody much bothered to read the lists. Why should they? The living must protect themselves from the dead, especially the intrusive dead. But the twentieth century had lost its Spring with a vengeance. So a good deal of forgetting had to be done.

Under the heading “Killed in Action,” one of these later lists contained the words:

“Winterbourne, Edward Frederick George, A/Capt., 2/9 Battn. R. Foddershire Regt.”

The small interest created by this item of news and the rapidity with which he was forgotten would have surprised even George Winterbourne; and he had that bottomless cynicism of the infantry subaltern which veiled itself in imbecile cheerfulness, and thereby misled a good many not very acute people. Winterbourne had rather hoped he would be killed, and knew that his premature demise in the middle twenties would be borne with easy stoicism by those who survived him. But his vanity would have been a little shocked by what actually happened.

A life, they say, may be considered as a point of light which suddenly appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a
luminous geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as suddenly disappears. (Interesting to have seen the lights disappearing from Space-Time during one of the big battles – Death dowses the glims.) Well it happens to us all; but our vanity is interested by the hope that the rather tangled and not very luminous track we made will continue to shine for a few people for a few years. I suppose Winterbourne's name does appear on some War Memorial, probably in the Chapel of his Public School; and, of course, he's got his neat ration of headstone in France. But that's about all. Nobody much minded that he was killed. Unassertive people with no money have few friends; and Winterbourne hadn't counted much on his scanty flock, least of all on me. But I know – because he told me himself – that he had rather relied on four people to take some interest in him and his fate. They were his father and mother, his wife and his mistress. If he had known what actually occurred with these four at the news of his death I think he would have been a little shocked, as well as heartily amused and perhaps a bit relieved. It would have freed him from certain feelings of responsibility.

Winterbourne's father, whom I knew slightly, was an inadequate sentimentalist. Mild, with an affection of gentility, incompetent, seffishily unselfish
(i.e.
always patting himself on the back for “renouncing” something he was afraid to do or be or take), he had a genius for messing up other people's lives. The amount of irreparable harm which can be done by a really good man is astounding. Ten astute rogues do less. He messed up his wife's life by being weak with her; messed up his children's lives by being weak and sentimentalish with them and by losing his money – the unforgivable sin in a parent; messed up the lives of his friends and clients by honestly losing their money for them; and messed up his own most completely. That was the one thing he ever did with complete and satisfactory thoroughness. The mess he got his life into would have baffled an army of psychologists to unravel.

When I told Winterbourne what I thought of his father, he admitted it was mostly true. But he rather liked the man, probably disarmed by the mildness, and not sufficiently hard to his father's soft, selfish sentimentality. Possibly old Winterbourne would have felt and have acted differently in his reactions to George's death, if circumstances had been different. But he was so scared by the war, so unable to adjust
himself to a harsh, intruding reality – he had spent his life avoiding realities – that he took refuge in a drivelling religiosity. He got to know some rather slimy Roman Catholics, and read the slimy religious tracts they showered on him, and talked and sobbed to the exceedingly slimy priest they found for him. So about the middle of the war he was “received,” and found – let us hope – comfort in much prayer and Mass-going and writing rules for Future Conduct and rather suspecting he was like François de Sales and praying for the beatification of the super-slimy Thérèse of Lisieux.

Old Winterbourne was in London, “doing war work,” when the news of George's death came. He would never have done anything so positive and energetic if he had not been nagged and goaded into it by his wife. She was animated less by motives of disinterested patriotism than by exasperation with him for existing at all and for interrupting her love affairs. Old Winterbourne always said with proud, sad dignity that his “religious convictions forbade” him to divorce her. Religious convictions are such an easy excuse for being nasty. So she found a war job for him in London, and put him into a position where it was impossible for him to refuse.

The telegram from the War Office – “regret to inform… killed in action… Their Majesties' sympathy…” – went to the home address in the country, and was opened by Mrs. Winterbourne. Such an excitement for her, almost a pleasant change, for it was pretty dull in the country just after the Armistice. She was sitting by the fire, yawning over her twenty-second lover – the affair had lasted nearly a year – when the servant brought the telegram. It was addressed to Mr. Winterbourne, but of course she opened it; she had an idea that “one of
those
women” was “after” her husband, who, however, was regrettably chaste, from cowardice.

Mrs. Winterbourne liked drama in private life. She uttered a most creditable shriek, clasped both hands to her rather soggy bosom, and pretended to faint. The lover, one of those nice, clean, sporting Englishmen with a minimum of intelligence and an infinite capacity for being gulled by females, especially the clean English sort, clutched her unwillingly and automatically but with quite an Ethel M. Dell appearance of emotion, and exclaimed:

“Darling, what is it? Has
he
insulted you again?”

Poor old Winterbourne was incapable of insulting any one, but it was a convention always established between Mrs. Winterbourne and her lovers that Winterbourne had “insulted” her, when his worst taunt had been to pray earnestly for her conversion to the True Faith, along with the rest of “poor misguided England.”

In low moaning tones, founded on the best tradition of sensational fiction, Mrs. Winterbourne feebly ejaculated:

“Dead, dead, dead!”

“Who's dead? Winterbourne?”

(Some apprehension perhaps in the attendant Sam Browne – he would have to propose, of course, and might be accepted.)

“They've killed him, those vile,
filthy
foreigners. My
baby
son.”

Sam Browne, still mystified, read the telegram. He then stood to attention, saluted (although not wearing a cap), and said solemnly:

“A clean sportin' death, an
Englishman's
death.”

(When Huns were killed it was neither clean nor sportin', but served the beggars – (“buggers,” among men) sob – right.)

The tears Mrs. Winterbourne shed were not very natural, but they did not take long to dry. Dramatically, she ran to the telephone. Dramatically, she called to the local exchange:

“Trrrunks. (Sob.) Give me Kensington 1030. Mr. Winterbourne's number, you know. (Sob.) Our
darling
son – Captain Winterbourne – has been killed by those (Sob) beasts. (Sob. Pause.). Oh, thank you
so
much, Mr. Crump, I
knew
you would feel for us in our trouble. (Sob. Sob.) But the blow is so sudden. I
must
speak to Mr. Winterbourne. Our hearts are
breaking
here. (Sobissimo.) Thank you. I'll wait till you ring me.”

Mrs. Winterbourne's effort on the telephone to her husband was not unworthy of her:

“Is that you, George? Yes, Isabel speaking. I have just had
rather
bad news. No, about George. You must be prepared, darling. I fear he is seriously ill. What? No.
George.
GEORGE. Can't you hear? Yes, that's better. Now, listen, darling, you must prepare for
a great
shock. George is seriously ill. Yes,
our
George, our
baby
son. What? Wounded? No, not wounded, very
dangerously
ill. No, darling, there is little hope. (Sob.) Yes, darling, a telegram from the
King
and
Queen.
Shall I read it? You are prepared for the shock, (sob) George, aren't you? ‘Deeply regret killed in action… Their Majesties' sympathy (Sob. Long pause.) Are you there, George? Hullo, hullo. (Sob.) Hullo,
hullo. HULLO. (Aside to Sam Browne.) He's rung off! How that man
insults
me! how can I bear it in my sorrow? After I had prepared him for the shock! (Sob. Sob.) But I have always had to
fight
for my children, while he squatted over his books – and
prayed,”

To Mrs. Winterbourne's credit, let it be said, she had very little belief in the value of prayer in practical affairs. But then, her real objection to religion was founded upon her dislike for doing anything she didn't want to do, and a profound hatred for everything distantly resembling thought.

At the fatal news Mr. Winterbourne had fallen upon his knees (not forgetting, however, to ring off the harpy), ejaculating: “Lord Jesus, receive his soul!” Mr. Winterbourne then prayed a good deal, for George's soul, for himself, for “my erring but beloved spouse,” for his other children, “may they be spared and by Thy Mercy brought to the True Faith,” for England (ditto), for his enemies, “though Thou knowest, Dear Lord Jesus, the enmity was none of my seeking, sinner though I be, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Ave Maria…

Mr. Winterbourne remained on his knees for some time.

But, as the hall tiles hurt his knees, he went and knelt on a hassock at the
prie-dieu
in his bedroom. On the top of this was an open Breviary in very ecclesiastical binding with a florid ecclesiastical book-marker, all lying on an ecclesiastical bit of embroidery, the “gift of a Catholic sister in Christ.” Above, on a bracket, was a coloured B.V.M. from the Place St. Sulpice, holding a nauseating Infant Jesus dangling a bloody and sun-rayed Sacred Heart. Over this again was a large but rather cheap-looking imitation bronze Crucifix, with a reproduction (coloured) of Leonardo's
Last Supper
to the right, and another reproduction (uncoloured) of Holman Hunt's (heretical)
Light of the World
to the left. All of which gave Mr. Winterbourne the deepest spiritual comfort.