I have sometimes thought that if I put it all down on paper, precisely and exactly as it occurred, my mind might become easier. Certainly nothing has given me relief up to now. One, two, three, seven years ago it must be since it happened, and at a spot four or five thousand miles away, to which I am never likely to return; and yet there still come days, nights, sometimes even weeks, when the whole thing will break out in my brain again as though everything took place only yesterday. Curious – the odd, queerly inconsequent sort of causes to which I trace these outbreaks. Always, for instance, I seem to find myself worst when the grapes are in season (especially the small ‘black’ variety), or when the plovers are crying on bright moonlight nights; while there is one place which I have learned to shun as I might shun a plague. If I can possibly avoid it, nothing will ever induce me to climb the hill that stretches along the Surrey suburb in which I live, and look across the twenty-miles-wide valley to where the next range of hills loom, across the horizon.
But perhaps the most weird result of all is that I can never stay in a room for long where Tschaikovsky is being played – particularly his ‘Chanson Triste’.1 I like Tschaikovsky; yet when the orchestra played ‘Chanson Triste’ to-night I simply had to come out. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Joan, I could see, was as nearly furious with me as she has ever been since our marriage. She’s forgiven me now, for I have told her all about it, shown her the photograph and kept not a single detail back from her… but I could see quite plainly that she did not understand. And I want somebody to understand. Most of all, of course, I want Dimitri to understand. I’d give ten, twenty years of my life, I believe, if I could only make Dimitri understand.
No, Dimitri was not a woman: a soldier, just a common Bulgar soldier,2 but with this one supreme and startling difference – that of the men who died in the Great War Dimitri died the worst death of all. And although it was no weapon of mine – either held, directed, or commanded by me – that killed him, I am afraid I was responsible for that death. Of one thing, at least, I am certain: Dimitri thinks I was responsible. The whole tragedy lies in that.
It would be the most foolish, in some ways the most tragic, mistake in the world to suppose that this is just an ordinary war story that I have to relate. I wish it were. If I could only trace one experience similar to mine (as, indeed, I have spent hours and hours browsing over bookstalls trying to find it) I should feel comforted; but nowhere have I been able to discover the vaguest hint of a resemblance. It all happened not far from a town called Dorrain,3 which is situated at the far end of the valley where the river Struma runs between Bulgaria and Macedonia; but I would rather you immediately forgot those names, and pictured to yourself only the town and the valley – the town a poor, war-battered heap of buildings, and the valley a twenty-miles stretch of country, lying between ranges of hills so high and formidable that the military experts had long since given them up as impregnable. And I would have you imagine that while in the town war is being carried on in the best modern manner – two opposing swarms of rats gradually nibbling into one another’s territory – all the warfare that exists in the valley is conducted by small groups of men who creep down from their respective hills in the night-time, wander vaguely about the valley until dawn comes, and then creep weariedly back again. All night long the shriek of the shrapnel and the glare of the Very lights may be hovering over the town; but in the twenty-miles-wide valley the darkness may pass without the sound or the flash of a single rifle shot. And the valley is so strewn with ravines and little clumps of trees, and men are so very scarce there, that a group of men from one range of hills may pass a group of men from the other, barely a hundred yards away, and never be aware of it.
So I think you may very fairly visualize the scene in which the experience I have to relate to you occurred; and yet I find myself altogether at a loss to convey the feeling of a man suddenly withdrawn from his little rat-hole in the town, and sent roaming about the valley wherever the fancy moved him – the groping, childlike fright of it all, those first few nights, and then, as time wore on, the sweet, civilian scent of liberty that suddenly seemed to breathe over everything. I wish I could convey to you, for instance, only a fraction of the divine joy there was to be had in those secret little pilgrimages to the pomegranate orchard, near the five tall poplar trees; the breathless, perspiring excitement that was to be felt in stealing into those ruined, deserted little villages – deserted, that is, except perhaps by the fellows from the opposite hills. But most of all, I wish I could convey to you something of the sudden sense of awe that fell on me one night, when, entirely alone, and trying to locate a certain fig-tree, I came across a small straw-thatched hut, tucked away in a little ravine I never remembered having seen before.
Softly I crept up to the doorway, waited for a moment to make sure that no sound came from within, and then entered. Marking first that there were no cracks through which the moonlight was piercing, I struck a match and looked anxiously round the room. A small, rickety-looking table, and an equally rickety-looking chair drawn up to it – that was all. Then I noticed that on the table was a small piece of candle, and lying only a foot away from this, a thin, black-bound book – a copy of Rupert Brooke4 with the leaves turned down at the page:
… And I shall find some girl, perhaps,
A better girl than you,
With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
And lips as soft, but true.
And I dare say she will do.5
Oh God, this was rich! Who, in the name of all that was wonderful, was the lovesick buffoon in the battalion who stole away into this lonely little straw-thatched hut at nights so that he might the more reflectively read Rupert Brooke? Then I turned to the fly-leaf and read the name:
NICOLAS DIMITRI.
Several moments, I think, must have elapsed before I realized the tremendous significance of my discovery – that the book in my hand belonged to a man from the opposite hills, who, even as I stood there, might enter to claim it. Quivering with excitement I thrust the book hurriedly into my pocket, blew out the light, and went outside.
Do not ask me to explain why it was that the next time I visited the straw-thatched hut in the ravine I should leave on the rickety little table the only book of poetry I ever carried during the war – a small, leather-bound edition of Omar Khayyám.6 All that I know is that it seemed to me the only and natural thing to do; and I can still recall very vividly the excitement I felt when, a night or two later, I crept away from my patrol to see if the exchange had been accepted. Yes, the table was quite empty – quite empty except for the same innocent stump of candle. And then I suddenly noticed a certain peculiarity about that candle. Instead of standing erect, as I first saw it, it was now lying on its side, and trailing away from the wick was a long line of grease spots, stretching not only across the table, but half-way across the floor to where lay a large, flat boulder. In a flash the thought came to me that I was intended to lift that boulder; and two minutes later, hands quivering with excitement and heart throbbing against my ribs, I was eagerly deciphering, as a raw youth might read his first love-letter, the curiously stilted, Latin-looking hand of a man who told me that, although born a Bulgar, and now fighting as a Bulgar, he had spent the greater part of his life in America, where he had learned to understand and appreciate English art and literature beyond all other.
That letter still lies before me – one of the dozen, tattered, carefully hoarded pages I have just revealed to Joan; but little purpose could be served, I am afraid, by quoting it in full. He makes great fun, I see, because, above all poets, I should choose as my grand consoler in the war an old Persian who died eight hundred years ago. ‘I think you must be very, very English,’ he writes. ‘I do not wonder that the Rubáiyát so appeals to you. You English like to think yourselves stolid, unshakeable and imperturbable; but how much of this, I sometimes wonder, is due to some curious kink of Oriental fatalism about you?’ And then there is the letter in which he reflects on the mutually futile, bloody butchery that went on all round us in those sublime spring evenings of that mournful year of 1917. Bitter, searing things he writes, as only a man can write who has recently returned from ghastly, naked realities. But I will not trouble you with these. Poor Dimitri! To quote them now would be to mock him.
I leave it entirely to the psychologists to explain the strange compelling attraction, the almost romantic glamour, that somehow pervaded this friendship of ours, right from the very beginning. Times there must have been, of course, when both of us must have reflected that what we were doing was utterly wrong and deceitful: that we were committing a crime for which, had they discovered it, the countries whose uniforms we wore would immediately have had us shot, and buried like so much loathsome carrion; and yet, speaking for myself, I can only say that always uppermost in my mind was a feeling of stupendous glamour about our association – heightened a hundredfold, I suppose, because only two people in the world knew of it. And the very fact that it was illicit, I think, only grew in time to be a still further attraction. I began to understand, I am afraid, something of the irresistible lure that men have felt in illicit dealing and illicit love, ever since the world began. I am persuaded to think, indeed, that there were many ways in which this association between Dimitri and myself resembled very much an illicit love affair. All that I seemed to live for, at that time, was the weekly letters, hidden under the large, flat boulder in the little straw-thatched hut; and at all sorts of odd moments during the day I would find myself staring across that twenty-miles-wide valley picturing, somewhere on those opposite hills, the writer of them – wondering what he was doing and whether he ever similarly wondered about me.
And then, as time went on, it seemed that letters would no longer suffice; we began to make gifts to one another. I started by directing attention to a small box of cigarettes and a packet of chocolate that might be found hidden in the hollow of a certain fig-tree a dozen yards farther down the ravine; he responded by leaving me a bunch of grapes, of a small black variety I have never known surpassed for sweetness. Then the gifts no longer sufficed: Dimitri began to talk of photographs – ‘civilian preferred’, as he expressed it. For a long time I hesitated about that. Either of us, I pointed out, might at any time be killed, and to be found with enemy photographs in our possession might lead to an infamy which certainly neither of us deserved. But in the end I yielded; and even now, as I write, there stares mutely, half-defiantly up at me from the midst of the tattered letters the picture of a tall, rather lanky sort of youth, with that peculiarly elusive kind of face we are inclined to call ‘temperamental’, and with a mass of jet black hair brushed abruptly back from his forehead.
Only one thing remained for us now, of course, and that was to meet; but both of us, I think, shrank from mentioning this. For here, it seemed, we reached the one great forbidden sin: the pitch, once touched, that must inevitably defile. The wonder was, I often thought, that we did not meet by accident, and one night, I remember, we nearly did meet by accident. For some reason or other Dimitri seems to have been unusually indiscreet. When within twenty yards of the hut I could see the tiniest glimmer of light piercing through the door, which had evidently been closed with insufficient care. Then the light suddenly went out, and a minute later I heard footsteps moving towards the opposite end of the ravine, and a soft musical whistle mournfully mingling with the melancholy croaking of the frogs. The tune was Tschaikovsky’s ‘Chanson Triste’. For fully a quarter of an hour I must have remained there and listened, a cold sweat breaking over me lest on his return journey he should run into my patrol, whose duty (as, indeed, it was mine) would be either to take him prisoner or to kill him. But nothing happened.
Quietly I stole into the hut and sought for my usual letter under the large flat boulder. It amounted to nothing more than a note: ‘Shall be going from here end of this week,’ he had scribbled; ‘hope we shall meet sometime.’ What those words may convey to you – set out, as you will see them, in cold, matter-of-fact print – I do not know. I only know that as I stood there in that dull, flickering candle-light, and with the guns of the town ringing greedily, unappeasingly in my ears, there only seemed one course open to me.
‘We must meet now, Dimitri,’ I wrote. ‘Wednesday, midnight. Come, I shall be here. I shall not fail.’
Sometimes I find myself believing that hidden away somewhere in this stricken, blighted world lies some grim, smirking God of War whose awful charge it is to keep inviolate the relentless, age-long tenets of his creed. The fact remains that I never did meet Dimitri – not, at least, in the manner I had suggested. A thousand times my mind must have rehearsed, and endured again, the crowded incident of that tragic Wednesday – the wild, poignant fluctuation of it all: the glorious elation at our imagined meeting, the unspeakably abysmal depths of its realization. And a thousand times still, I am afraid, my mind must rehearse and endure it again.
Almost with the fastidiousness of a woman preparing to meet her lover you see me that Wednesday afternoon pottering about my little dugout, and paying what little attention I could to my personal appearance, my heart throbbing the while its mad, unrestrainable song of secret exultation. Emperors, Prime Ministers, Commanders, not even the ‘Bloody Beast of War’ itself, I sing to myself, can keep Dimitri and me – apostles of the new world that is to arise from all this crimson chaos – from meeting. Then, almost more quickly than I can write it down, the blow fell. Ryan suddenly came blundering into my dugout.
‘Heard?’ he said.
‘Heard what?’ I demanded.
‘Stunt on,’ he answered. ‘Patrol’s going out to-night with a definite job on. Going out to see if we can get hold of a “Johnny”,7 or nobble him. Don’t know whether you’ve ever seen it, old man, but in one of the ravines down there, there’s a little straw-thatched hut. Somehow had my suspicions about that hut for a long time; thought I saw a light there once, but wasn’t quite sure. But other night not only saw light but saw a “Johnny” too – passed within ten yards of me, other side of some trees, whistling away as cool as a cucumber. So surprised, didn’t know what the ’ell to do. Frightened to say anything about it at first; and then I thought I’d miss out that bit about being only ten yards away and tell the OC that I’d observed a whole outpost of ’em concentrating on this hut. “What time was this?” says the Old Man, as keen as mustard. “Somewhere about midnight, sir,” I said. “Right-o,” says the Old Man, “we’ll give ’em outpost to-night.”’
The glass by which I had been shaving threw back at me the ashen, livid impotence of my face. What happened in the next minute or two I cannot exactly say, but as soon as ever I decently could, I think, I forced my way out of the dugout, and stumbled half-blindly to where I could gaze, as I had gazed a hundred times before, across that twenty-miles-wide valley, over which Nicolas Dimitri, unless I could stop him, must shortly march to his death – and die thinking that I, the man whom he had hailed as an affinity of a nobler, cleaner world, had lured him to that death. Unless I could stop him! But how could I stop him? Even if it were possible for me to get to him I had not the slightest idea where to go. For that had always been an unwritten law of honour between us: we knew of no destination other than the little straw-thatched hut. All that I knew was that he was somewhere over there, somewhere spread over twenty miles, and unless I could stop him to-night he would be killed – thinking himself as surely killed by me as though mine were the hand that pierced a dagger through his heart.
I will not harass you with all the frenzied detail of that night. Only one agony seemed to be spared to me – and that was that, instead of being sent with the party actually attacking the hut, I was detailed to assist in cutting off any escape at the far end of the ravine. Of my reflections as we trailed down the hill into the valley that night I am afraid I can tell you very little. I do not think I had any. Why, I don’t know; but somehow I seem to have decided quite definitely that Dimitri would be killed, so that my mind became blank and numbed, as a man’s mind becomes numbed on the funeral journey of a very dear relative. I do not seem to have been aware of anything until, after we had been waiting at the end of the ravine for about half an hour, a dozen rifle shots rang out. Then immediately the stupor left me and I raced up the ravine.
‘Too late, old man.’ Ryan met me and laughed into my face. ‘Only one of ’em, but would persist in fighting. Fought like ’ell. Got it clean in the stomach – two places, poor beggar! Peg out any minute. Got a fag on you?’
Less than a dozen yards away, lying in the centre of the ravine, along which, less than five minutes ago, he had raced like a hunted beast, I could see him dying – not dying as the war artists so sinfully and successfully paint men dying, but in all the vulgar agony of a badly butchered animal.
He had just been feebly gulping at a bottle of water held to his lips by a stretcher-bearer when the moonlight fell on my face, and I could see that he knew me. A minute later and he was dead – but in that minute there came over his face such a look as I do not remember having seen on any human face before. The stretcher-bearer, I could see, accepted it as simply the dying spasm of a particularly painful death. But I knew differently. Physical pain was the least thing I saw there. I knew that Nicolas Dimitri died the most hopeless, the most despairing death that it is possible for any man to die – died thinking himself not only sacrificed to a world in madness, but taunted, in his last dying glimpse, by the irrefutable betrayal and degradation of all those finer, nobler impulses he had worshipped as a world’s redemption. Not pain, not hatred, not longing was written on that face, but just a look of infinite, unutterable despair…
And to-night, rising hazily above the violins, as they throbbed out ‘Chanson Triste’, gradually taking form and consolidating, until I could see every line and twinge of it, I saw that face again.