was out when her telegram came from the War Office. She did not get it until nearly midnight, when she came back to the flat with a fascinating young Swedish painter she had met at a Chelsea “rag” that evening. She was a bit sozzled, and the young Swede – tall, blond and handsome – was more than a little fired with love and whisky. The telegram was lying on the door-mat with two or three letters. Elizabeth picked them up, and opened the telegram mechanically as she switched on the electric light. The Swede stood watching her drunkenly and amorously. She could not avoid a slight start, and turned a little pale.
“What’s the matter?”
Elizabeth laughed her high little nervous laugh, and laid the telegram and letters on the table.
“The War Office regrets that my husband has been killed in action.”
It was now the Swede’s turn to be startled.
“Your husband?… Perhaps I’d better…”
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” said Elizabeth sharply; “he went out of my life years ago. She’ll mind, but I shan’t.”
She cried a bit in the bathroom, however; but the Swede was certainly a very attentive lover. They drank a good deal of brandy, too.
Next day Elizabeth wrote to Fanny the first letter she had sent her for months:
“Only a line, darling, to tell you that I have a telegram from the W.O. to say George was killed in France on the 4th. I thought it would be less of a shock for you to hear it from me than acci-dentally. Come and see me when you get your weeps over, and we can hold a post-mortem.”
Fanny didn’t reply to the letter. She had been rather fond of George, and thought Elizabeth heartless. But Elizabeth too had been fond of George; only, she wasn’t going to give it away to Fanny. I saw a good deal of Elizabeth while settling up George’s scanty estate – mostly furniture and books in the flat, his credit at Cox’s, a few War Bonds, a little money due to him from civilian sources, and Elizabeth’s pension. However, it meant a certain amount of letter-writing, which Elizabeth was glad to have me do. I also saw Fanny once or twice, and took her the trifles George had left her. But I never saw the two women together – they avoided each other; and when my duties as executor were done, I saw very little of either. Fanny went to Paris in 1919, and soon married an American painter. I saw her in the Dome one night in 1924, pretty well rouged and quite nicely dressed, with a party. She was laughing and flirting with a middle-aged American – possibly an art patron – and didn’t look as if she mourned much for George. Why indeed should she?
As for Elizabeth, she rather went to pieces. With her father’s allowance, which doubled and became her own income when he died, and her widow’s pension, she was quite well off as poor people of the “artistic” sort go. She travelled a good deal, always with a pretty large brandy-flask, and had more lovers than were good for her – or them. I hadn’t seen her for years, until about a month ago I ran into her on the corner of the Piazzetta in Venice. She was with Stanley Hopkins, one of those extremely clever young novelists who oscillate between women and homosexuality. He had recently published a novel so exceedingly clever, so stupendously smart and up-to-date and witty and full of personalities about well-known people, that he was quite famous, especially in America, where all Hopkins’s brilliantly quacking and hissing and kissing geese were taken as melodious swans and (vide Press) as a “startling revelation of the corruption of the British Aristocracy.” We went and had ices together, all three, at Florian’s; and then Hopkins went off to get something, and left us together for half an hour. Elizabeth chattered very wittily – you had to be witty with Hopkins or die of shame and humiliation – but never mentioned George. George was a drab bird from a drab past. She told me that she and Hopkins would not marry; they had both determined never to pollute themselves with the farce of “legalized copulation”, but they would “probably go on living with each other.” Hopkins, who was a very rich young man as well as a successful novelist, had settled a thousand a year on her, so that they could both be “free”. She looked as nearly un-miserable as our cynical and battered generation can look; but she still had the brandy-flask.
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
