Jim Brent Read online

  We hit an iceberg, as you may remember, in the middle of the night, and the ship foundered in under twenty minutes.

  You can imagine the scene of chaos after we struck, or rather you can’t. Men were running wildly about shouting, women were screaming, and the roar of the siren bellowing forth into the night drove people to a perfect frenzy. Then all the lights went out, and darkness settled down like a pall on the ship. I struggled up on deck, which was already tilting up at a perilous angle, and there in the mass of scurrying figures – I came face to face with the Comtesse. In the panic of the moment I had forgotten all about her. She was quite calm, and smiled at me, for of course our relations were still as before.

  Suddenly there came a shout from close at hand, “Room for one more only.” What happened then, happened in a couple of seconds; it will take me longer to describe.

  There flashed into my mind what would occur if I were drowned and the Comtesse was saved. There would be no one to combat her activities in England; she would have a free hand. My plans were null and void if I died; I must get back to England – or England would be in peril. I must pass on my information to someone for I alone knew.

  “Hurry up! one more.” Another shout from nearby, and looking round I saw that we were alone. It was she or I.

  She moved towards the boat, and as she did so I saw the only possible solution – I saw what I then thought to be my duty; what I still consider – and, God knows, that scene is never long out of my mind – what I still consider to have been my duty. I took ber by the arm and twisted her facing me.

  “As Ginger’s wife, yes,” I muttered; “as the cursed spy I know you to be, no – a thousand times no.”

  “My God!” she whispered. “My God!”

  Without further thought I pushed by her and stepped into the boat, which was actually being lowered into the water. Two minutes later the Astoria sank, and she went down with her…

  That is what occurred that night in mid-Atlantic. I make no excuses, I offer no palliation; I merely state facts.

  Only had I not heard what I did hear in that alcove she would have been just – Ginger’s wife. Would the Expeditionary Force have crossed so successfully, I wonder?

  As I say, I did what I still consider to have been my duty. If both could have been saved, well and good; but if it was only one, it had to be me, or neither. That’s the rub; should it have been neither?

  Many times since then, old friend, has the white, twitching face of that woman haunted me in my dreams and in my waking hours. Many times since then have I thought that – spy or no spy – I had no right to save my life at her expense; I should have gone down with her. Quixotical, perhaps, seeing she was what she was; but she was a woman. One thing and one thing only I can say. When you read these lines, I shall be dead, they will come to you as a voice from the dead. And, as a man who faces his Maker, I tell you, with a calm certainty that I am not deceiving myself, that that night there was no trace of cowardice in my mind. It was not a desire to save my own life that actuated me; it was the fear of danger to England. An error of judgement possibly; an act of cowardice – no. That much I state, and that much I demand that you believe.

  And now we come to the last chapter – the chapter that you know. I’d been back about two months when I first realised that there were stories going round about me. There were whispers in the club; men avoided me; women cut me. Then came the dreadful night when a man – half drunk – in the club accused me of cowardice point-blank, and sneeringly contrasted my previous reputation with my conduct on the Astoria. And I realised that someone must have seen. I knocked that swine in the club down; but the whispers grew. I knew it. Someone had seen, and it would be sheer hypocrisy on my part to pretend that such a thing didn’t matter. It mattered everything: it ended me. The world – our world – judges deeds, not motives; and even had I published at the time this document I am sending to you, our world would have found me guilty. They would have said what you would have said had you spoken the thoughts I saw in your eyes that night I came to you. They would have said that a sudden wave of cowardice had overwhelmed me, and that brought face to face with death I had saved my own life at the expense of a woman’s. Many would have gone still further, and said that my black cowardice was rendered blacker still by my hypocrisy in inventing such a story; that first to kill the woman, and then to blacken her reputation as an excuse, showed me as a thing unfit to live. I know the world.

  Moreover, as far as I knew then – I am sure of it now – whoever it was who saw my action, did not see who the woman was, and therefore the publication of this document at that time would have involved Ginger, for it would have been futile to publish it without names. Feeling as I did that perhaps I should have sunk with her; feeling as I did that, for good or evil, I had blasted Ginger’s life, I simply couldn’t do it. You didn’t believe in me, old chap; at the bottom of their hearts all my old pals thought I’d shown the yellow streak; and I couldn’t stick it. So I went to the colonel, and told him I was handing in my papers. He was in his quarters, I remember, and started filling his pipe as I was speaking.

  “Why, Spud?” he asked, when I told him my intention.

  And then I told him something of what I have written to you. I said it to him in confidence, and when I’d finished he sat very silent.

  “Good God!” he muttered at length. “Ginger’s wife!”

  “You believe me, Colonel?” I asked.

  “Spud,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders, “that’s a damn rotten thing to ask me after fifteen years. But it’s the regiment.” And he fell to staring at the fire.

  Aye, that was it. It was the regiment that mattered. For better or for worse I had done what I had done, and it was my show. The Red Hussars must not be made to suffer; and their reputation would have suffered through me. Otherwise I’d have faced it out. As it was, I had to go; I knew it. I’d come to the same decision myself.

  Only now, sitting here in camp with the setting sun glinting through the windows of the hut, just a Canadian private under an assumed name, things are a little different. The regiment is safe; I must think now of the old name. The colonel was killed at Cambrai; therefore you alone will be in possession of the facts. Ginger, if he reads these words, will perhaps forgive me for the pain I have inflicted on him. Let him remember that though I did a dreadful thing to him, a thing which up to now he has been ignorant of, yet I suffered much for his sake after. During my life it was one thing; when I am dead his claims must give way to a greater one – my name.

  Wherefore I, Patrick Courtenay Trevor, having the unalterable intention of meeting my Maker during the present war, and therefore feeling in a measure that I am, even as I write, standing at the threshold of His Presence, do swear before Almighty God that what I have written is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me, God.

  The fall-in is going, old man. Goodbye.

  Private Meyrick – Company Idiot

  No one who has ever given the matter a moment’s thought would deny, I suppose, that a regiment without discipline is like a ship without a rudder. True as that fact has always been, it is doubly so now, when men are exposed to mental and physical shocks such as have never before been thought of.

  The condition of a man’s brain after he has sat in a trench and suffered an intensive bombardment for two or three hours can only be described by one word, and that is – numbed. The actual physical concussion, apart altogether from the mental terror, caused by the bursting of a succession of large shells in a man’s vicinity, temporarily robs him of the use of his thinking faculties. He becomes half stunned, dazed; his limbs twitch convulsively and involuntarily; he mutters foolishly – he becomes incoherent. Starting with fright he passes through that stage, passes beyond it into a condition bordering on coma; and when a man is in that condition he is not responsible for his actions. His brain has ceased to work.

  Now it is, I believe, a principle of psychology that the brain or mind
of a man can be divided into two parts – the objective and the subjective: the objective being that part of his thought-box which is actuated by outside influences, by his senses, by his powers of deduction; the subjective being that part which is not directly controllable by what he sees and hears, the part which the religious might call his soul, the Buddhist ‘the Spark of God’, others instinct. And this portion of a man’s nature remains acutely active, even while the other part has struck work. In fact, the more numbed and comatose the thinking brain, the more clearly and insistently does subjective instinct hold sway over a man’s body. Which all goes to show that discipline, if it is to be of any use to a man at such a time, must be a very different type of thing to what the ordinary, uninitiated, and so-called free civilian believes it to be. It must be an ideal, a thing where the motive counts, almost a religion. It must be an appeal to the soul of man, not merely an order to his body. That the order to his body, the self-control of his daily actions, the general change in his mode of life will infallibly follow on the heels of the appeal to his soul – if that appeal be successful – is obvious. But the appeal must come first: it must be the driving power; it must be the cause and not the effect. Otherwise, when the brain is gone – numbed by causes outside its control, when the reasoning intellect of man is out of action – stunned for the time; when only his soul remains to pull the quivering, helpless body through – then, unless that soul has the ideal of discipline in it, it will fail. And failure may mean death and disaster; it will mean shame and disgrace, when sanity returns…

  To the man seated at his desk in the company office these ideas were not new. He had been one of the original Expeditionary Force; but a sniper had sniped altogether too successfully out by Zillebecke in the early stages of the first battle of Ypres, and when that occurs a rest cure becomes necessary. At that time he was the senior subaltern of one of the finest regiments of ‘a contemptible little army’; now he was a major commanding a company in the tenth battalion of that same regiment. And in front of him on the desk, a yellow form pinned to a white slip of flimsy paper, announced that No. 8469, Private Meyrick, J, was for office. The charge was ‘Late falling in on the 8 a.m. parade’, and the evidence against him was being given by C-S-M Hayton, also an old soldier from that original battalion at Ypres. It was Major Seymour himself who had seen the late appearance of the above-mentioned Private Meyrick, and who had ordered the yellow form to be prepared. And now with it in front of him, he stared musingly at the office fire…

  There are a certain number of individuals who from earliest infancy have been imbued with the idea that the chief pastime of officers in the army, when they are not making love to another man’s wife, is the preparation of harsh and tyrannical rules for the express purpose of annoying their men, and the gloating infliction of drastic punishment on those that break them. The absurdity of this idea has nothing to do with it, it being a well-known fact that the more absurd an idea is, the more utterly fanatical do its adherents become. To them the thought that a man being late on parade should make him any the worse fighter – especially as he had, in all probability, some good and sufficient excuse – cannot be grasped. To them the idea that men may not be a law unto themselves – though possibly agreed to reluctantly in the abstract – cannot possibly be assimilated in the concrete.

  “He has committed some trifling offence,” they say; “now you will give him some ridiculous punishment. That is the curse of militarism – a chosen few rule by Fear.” And if you tell them that any attempt to inculcate discipline by fear alone must of necessity fail, and that far from that being the method in the army the reverse holds good, they will not believe you. Yet – it is so…

  “Shall I bring in the prisoner, sir?” The sergeant-major was standing by the door.

  “Yes, I’ll see him now.” The officer threw his cigarette into the fire and put on his hat.

  “Take off your ’at. Come along there, my lad – move. You’d go to sleep at your mother’s funeral – you would.” Seymour smiled at the conversation outside the door; he had soldiered many years with that sergeant-major. “Now, step up briskly. Quick march. ’Alt. Left turn.” He closed the door and ranged himself alongside the prisoner facing the table.

  “No. 8469, Private Meyrick – you are charged with being late on the 8 a.m. parade this morning. Sergeant-Major, what do you know about it?”

  “Sir, on the 8 a.m. parade this morning, Private Meyrick came running on ’alf a minute after the bugle sounded. ’Is puttees were not put on tidily. I’d like to say, sir, that it’s not the first time this man has been late falling in. ’E seems to me to be always a-dreaming, somehow – not properly awake like. I warned ’im for office.”

  The officer’s eyes rested on the hatless soldier facing him. “Well, Meyrick,” he said quietly, “what have you got to say?”

  “Nothing, sir. I’m sorry as ’ow I was late. I was reading, and I never noticed the time.”

  “What were you reading?” The question seemed superfluous – almost foolish; but something in his short, stumpy, uncouth figure interested him.

  “I was a-reading Kipling, sir.” The sergeant-major snorted as nearly as such an august disciplinarian could snort in the presence of his officer.

  “’E ought, sir, to ’ave been ’elping the cook’s mate until ’e was due on parade.”

  “Why do you read Kipling or anyone else when you ought to be doing other things?” queried the officer. His interest in the case surprised himself; the excuse was futile, and two or three days to barracks is an excellent corrective.

  “I dunno, sir. ’E sort of gets ’old of me, like. Makes me want to do things – and then I can’t. I’ve always been slow and awkward like, and I gets a bit flustered at times. But I do try ’ard.” Again a doubtful noise from the sergeant-major; to him trying ’ard and reading Kipling when you ought to be swabbing up dishes were hardly compatible.

  For a moment or two the officer hesitated, while the sergeant-major looked frankly puzzled. ‘What the blazes ’as come over ’im,’ he was thinking; ‘surely he ain’t going to be guyed by that there wash. Why don’t ’e give ’im two days and be done with it – and me with all them returns.’

  “I’m going to talk to you, Meyrick.” Major Seymour’s voice cut in on these reflections. For the fraction of a moment “Two days CB”. had been on the tip of his tongue, and then he’d changed his mind. “I want to try and make you understand why you were brought up to office today. In every community – in every body of men – there must be a code of rules which govern what they do. Unless those rules are carried out by all those men, the whole system falls to the ground. Supposing everyone came on to parade half a minute late because they’d been reading Kipling?”

  “I know, sir. I see as ’ow I was wrong. But – I dreams sometimes as ’ow I’m like them he talks about, when ’e says as ’ow they lifted ’em through the charge as won the day. And then the dream’s over, and I know as ’ow I’m not.”

  The sergeant-major’s impatience was barely concealed; those returns were oppressing him horribly.

  “You can get on with your work, Sergeant-Major. I know you’re busy.” Seymour glanced at the NCO. “I want to say a little more to Meyrick.”

  The scandalised look on his face amused him; to leave a prisoner alone with an officer – impossible, unheard of.

  “I am in no hurry, sir, thank you.”

  “All right then,” Seymour spoke briefly. “Now, Meyrick, I want you to realise that the principle at the bottom of all discipline is the motive that makes that discipline. I want you to realise that all these rules are made for the good of the regiment, and that in everything you do and say you have an effect on the regiment. You count in the show, and I count in it, and so does the sergeant-major. We’re all out for the same thing, my lad, and that is the regiment. We do things not because we’re afraid of being punished if we don’t, but because we know that they are for the good of the regiment – the finest regiment in the wo
rld. You’ve got to make good, not because you’ll be dropped on if you don’t, but because you’ll pull the regiment down if you fail. And because you count, you, personally, must not be late on parade. It does matter what you do yourself. I want you to realise that, and why. The rules you are ordered to comply with are the best rules. Sometimes we alter one – because we find a better; but they’re the best we can get, and before you can find yourself in the position of the men you dream about – the men who lift others, the men who lead others – you’ve got to lift and lead yourself. Nothing is too small to worry about, nothing too insignificant. And because I think, that at the back of your head somewhere you’ve got the right ideas; because I think it’s natural to you to be a bit slow and awkward and that your failure isn’t due to laziness or slackness, I’m not going to punish you this time for breaking the rules. If you do it again, it will be a different matter. There comes a time when one can’t judge motives; when one can only judge results. Case dismissed.”

  Thoughtfully the officer lit a cigarette as the door closed, and though for the present there was nothing more for him to do in office, he lingered on, pursuing his train of thoughts. Fully conscious of the aggrieved wrath of his sergeant-major at having his time wasted, a slight smile spread over his face. He was not given to making perorations of this sort, and now that it was over he wondered rather why he’d done it. And then he recalled the look in the private’s eyes as he had spoken of his dreams.

  “He’ll make good, that man.” Unconsciously he spoke aloud. “He’ll make good.”

  The discipline of habit is what we soldiers had before the war, and that takes time. Now it must be the discipline of intelligence, of ideal. And for that fear is the worst conceivable teacher. We have no time to form habits now; the routine of the army is of too short duration before the test comes. And the test is too crushing…