1914–1915
Wednesday, August 5th, the first day of war, proved to be more favourable for George's fishing: ‘Still rather wet, but the burns have gone down. I fished the Kinglass … getting 5 trout.’ Even when Peter arrived from London next day with news of the war, George took it in his stride: ‘Aug 6. Peter arrived for breakfast, bringing with him a letter to me about joining the Special Reserve or Territorials. We took lunch out up the burn that runs into the Kinglass under the railway bridge & each got 10 trout weighing 30 oz. Pouring rain. We went to London in the evening.’ Peter Davies wrote in his Morgue:
‘The letter proved to be a circular from the Adjutant of the Cambridge O.T.C., pointing out that it was the obvious duty of all undergraduates to offer their services forthwith. … This slightly disconcerting document – for great wars were a novelty then – was taken to apply to me also, as I had left Eton and was due to go to Trinity next term. Accordingly George and I travelled back to London the same night, in a carriage full of reservists rejoining the colours, who by their boozy geniality did a good deal to reconcile us to the dark fate which seemed to have descended on us so unexpectedly. Next day we went down to Cambridge, where the Corps Adjutant, a major in the Rifle Brigade, recommended the Rifle Depôt at Winchester as a suitable gambit. The “Pack up your troubles” philosophy caught from the reservists was by now beginning to recede from us, and I think George as well as I had odd sensations in the pit of the stomach as we emerged from Winchester Station and climbed the hill to the Depôt. At any rate George had one of those queer turns, something between a fainting fit and a sick headache, to which he had been prone since childhood, and had to sit for a few minutes on a seat outside the barracks. I would willingly have turned tail and gone back to London humiliated but free. George however, the moment he recovered, marched me in with him through those dark portals: and somehow or other … we found ourselves inside the office of Lt. Col. the Hon. J. R. Brownlow, D.S.O., commanding the 6th (Special Reserve) Battalion of the King's Royal Rifles. … [He] was busy writing, and looked up to ask rather gruffly what we wanted.
‘The burn that runs into the Kinglass under the railway bridge’
‘“Well – er – Sir, we were advised by Major Thornton to come here to ask about getting a commission – Sir,” said George.
‘“Oh, Bulger Thornton at Cambridge, eh? What's your name?”
‘“Davies, sir.”
‘ “Where were you at school?”
‘“Eton, sir.”
‘“In the Corps?”
‘“Yes, sir, Sergeant.”
‘“Play any games? Cricket?”
‘“Well sir, actually, I managed to get my eleven.”
George in 1914
George's fishing diary for 1914
‘“Oh, you did, did you?”
‘The Colonel, who had played for Eton himself in his day, now became noticeably more genial, and by the time he had ascertained that George was the Davies who had knocked up a valuable 59 at Lord's (which knock he had himself witnessed with due appreciation) it was evident that little more need be said.
‘“And what about you, young man?” he asked, turning to me.
‘“Please, sir, I'm his brother” was the best I could offer in the way of a reference.
‘“Oh, well, that's all right, then. Just take these forms and fill them in and get them signed by your father and post them back to me. Then all you have to do is to get your uniforms … and wait till you see your names in the London Gazette. I'm pretty busy just now, so good-bye.” And the Colonel dismissed his smile, waved dismissal to two slightly bewildered Second-Lieutenants designate, and went on with his writing.
‘So easy it was, in August 1914, to obtain the King's commission in the Special Reserve of the 60th Rifles.’
Meanwhile Barrie, at fifty-four, was feeling decidedly useless. He returned to London a few days after George and Peter and offered his financial aid to Lord Lucas, who had turned his family home, Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, into a hospital (henceforth known as Wrest in Beds). His money, as always, was gratefully received, but there was little else he could do, so he returned to Auch, where Michael and Nico had remained with Mary Hodgson. George and Peter were still waiting to be gazetted, and they too travelled to Scotland for a few more weeks of fishing. ‘Aug. 21. A slack day fishing Michael's burn. One trout of 6 oz. … Let me not be daunted.’ A few days later, Barrie received an indirect summons from Prime Minister Asquith requesting him to put aside his plans for a ragtime revue and write a stirring propaganda play extolling the cause of the allies. Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and several other authors had been asked to conjure up similar odes to patriotism, though few approached the task with any measure of enthusiasm. Barrie agreed to have a go, but needed time to think about it. He wrote to George in Scotland at the end of August: ‘I hope all is going well at Auch. You will have seen that the opening of the first real battle [Mons] has not gone too well for the allies tho' of course it is only a rebuff. It all goes to show that the war will be a long one. … Nothing in men's minds & faces here but the seriousness of the war. … Fish as much as you can just now. Loving, J.M.B.’ This was the first instance of Barrie using the signature ‘loving’ as opposed to ‘your affecte’ in his (surviving) letters to George, and it perhaps indicated both premonition and a maternal urge to protect him from the inevitable, to ‘envelop him as with wings’.1 George took his guardian's advice, fishing every day in the remote Highland rivers and lochs with his brothers. He was now unofficially engaged to Josephine Mitchell-Innes, and wrote to her frequently, confiding his fears of the future. Her sister Norma recalled, ‘Our brother Gilbert thought the war was going to be one long cavalry charge, everyone waving their swords – smash the Kaiser! – terrific! But George had absolutely no illusions whatsoever. He knew what he was in for from the word go.’ On September 9th, George and Peter received their orders to proceed to Sheerness for training. George wrote in his little fishing diary:
Sept 9.
In the morning I threw a farewell Jock Scott, Blue Doctor, & Silver Doctor over the Orchy. Not a rise. The fish were very lively, evidently owing to the rain that came after lunch.
Finis.
On the same day, Barrie wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis at Glan Hafren, who had now become a firm friend: ‘Jack is in the North Sea, he is scarcely allowed to tell me that much, and George and Peter are waiting for their commissions. So the world suddenly alters and we must hope for the better. But it has all at once passed into the hands of our young men, and for what they may be we are responsible. I believe they are to be as right as rain. … I am probably going to America on Saturday: we must all try to do something.’
The American visit was an impulsive attempt on Barrie's part to raise support for the allies. He persuaded A. E. W. Mason and his business manager, Gilmour, to go with him. Their journey was to be shrouded in mystery: nothing must leak out until they arrived, but when the Lusitania docked in New York, Barrie found letters awaiting him from the Consul-General and the British Ambassador, both urging him to call the mission off lest he offend American neutrality and embarrass the British Government. On September 20th, the New York Tribune published a front-page article:
SIR J. M. BARRIE CAUGHT TRYING TO SURPRISE NEW YORK:
Would Slip Into City Like Peter Pan to Look Around, but Reporters Catch Him and Make Him Talk –
‘It has been seventeen years since Sir James has been in America, and his arrival this time has been looked forward to with the utmost interest. There were stories that his trip … was made to further our interest in the cause of England. But this was all upset by Sir James.
‘“I've been coming for a long time,” he said, “and since we're out of the fighting – and writing – for some time, we came to look around.”…
‘It was a severe examination that he underwent before an ever growing audience, and when it was all over and he had again declared that his trip had nothing to do with the war in England, he said:–
‘“I had only one boast left. I was never interviewed. Now you have taken that away from me.”
Barrie locked himself away in the Plaza Hotel, but was cornered by a persevering reporter from the New York Herald, who managed to penetrate his suite and obtain a rare interview with the playwright:
‘Sir James found the ordeal of being interviewed a difficult one, so he fell to talking about children. …
‘“It's funny,” he said, “that the real Peter Pan – I called him that – is off to the war now. He grew tired of the stories I told him, and his younger brother became interested. It was such fun telling those two about themselves. I would say, ‘Then you came along and killed the pirate’ and they would accept every word as the truth. That's how Peter Pan came to be written. It is made up of only a few stories I told them.”
‘Once engrossed in the subject of children Sir James underwent a transformation that was remarkable.
‘“Do you know,” he said, “I like the moving pictures? In them I can see cowboys. I have always wanted to be a cowboy.”’
With the reporter out of the way, Barrie sat down and wrote to George, who had begun training at Sheerness:
c/o Messrs Scribner, New York.
24 Sept. 1914
My dear George,
A letter from M. & N. y'day tells me in a casual sort of way (as if it were not about the most important news in the world to me) that you have been summoned to Sheerness. I am looking forward so much to getting some details. …
Mason went off today to Canada to speak. Gilmour has been to Washington staying at the Legation … & I am mostly in hiding. Great placards outside, ‘BARRIE EXONERATES THE KAISER’ &c. &c. ‘BARRIE SAYS WAR WILL BE LONG’ varied with more social ones, such as ‘BARRIE LIKES OUR VIRGINIA HAM’.
Last night I had a Gin Whizz with a Long Tom in it. I slept well. Mason had two & slept better. …
Your loving
J.M.B.
P.S. I am going to stay with Roosevelt.
Sir James Barrie, Bart
On October 1st, a long interview appeared in the New York Times, in which the reporter stated that Sir James had escaped down an elevator shaft on seeing him approach, and that he was therefore obliged to content himself with interviewing Sir James's manservant, Brown. After much discussion about his master's pipe, in which Brown revealed, ‘He does not smoke any pipe … he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers’, the intrepid reporter asked him about Barrie's views on the Kaiser. ‘Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr. Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the destruction of Louvain … he wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with. … Sir James is of a very sympathetic nature.’ Barrie had evidently instructed Brown to maintain strict neutrality while he was in America, in accordance with the President's wish: ‘To express no preference on matter of food, for instance, and always to … walk in the middle of the street lest he should seem to be favoring either sidewalk.’ Sir James had further instructed him, ‘When we reach New York, … we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time they are taking down our observations, they will be saying to themselves, “Pompous asses.” … Above all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we are at war – and if you don't you will be the only person who hasn't – don't be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest America takes you for another university professor.’ The interviewer concluded his article, ‘A disquieting feeling has since come to me that perhaps it was Sir James I had been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped down the elevator.’ Barrie wrote to George the following day:
My dear George,
…I must get hold of an interview – ‘Barrie at Bay – Which was Brown?’ – that appeared in the New York Times y'day & is being a good deal talked of. It is all about Brown's views of the war, the President, the German Ambassador &c. including his ‘Sir James's pipe’, & they are trying to find out who the interviewer was. I flatter myself you will be able to guess! Brown has no suspicions & says ‘tut tut tut’ & ‘Did you ever!’ to which I reply that I never.
I am picturing you both as having very hard and laborious work with a tremendous lot of stiff marching. …
Your loving
J.M.B.
Peter described his training at Sheerness with George in the Morgue:
‘The afternoon we arrived, eight young officers (children, I should call them now) who had only joined a week or two earlier, with little or no more previous training than ourselves, had just received their orders from France, to replace casualties in the Battalions on the Marne and the Aisne. This somewhat abrupt confrontation with the exigencies of the service had, temporarily, a depressing effect, and I remember George, as we undressed in our tent that night, breaking a rather long silence with the words, “Well, young Peter, for the first time in our lives we're up against something really serious, **** me if we aren't.”
‘In a day or two his usual gaiety reasserted itself, and I believe our time “on the square” was a regimental record for light-heartedness of a most unmilitary kind, entirely due to George's unorthodox attitude. … [He] had quite made up his mind by now that life was going to be too short for much seriousness to enter into it. … The “young officers” of that Reserve Battalion, in those very early days of the war, were mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, with a few younger, straight from school. … Hardly any had thought of the army as a career. Looking back, I can see that they were what would nowadays be called a “cross-section” of the élite and cream of the nation. Average age about twenty-one; on the whole a devoted, laughing, fatalistic, take-it-as-it-comes company, often coarse of tongue, too young to have been coarsened in body or soul by the asperities of adult life – the bloom of youth on them still. … Among them George was unquestionably conspicuous; few that survive would recall anyone whose image serves better as the flower and type of that doomed generation.’
Barrie arrived back in London on October 22nd, and immediately wrote to George: ‘Here I am again and thirsting nightly to see you. … I thought of rushing out to Sheerness, … but I also wonder whether there is any possibility of you & Peter being able to run up to town. Reply, reply, reply!’ He wrote again on November 15th:
George, shortly before leaving for the Western Front
My dear George,
Very glad to get your letter and to hear there is some chance of your getting a couple of nights soon. I shall be your humble servant for the occasion. It is very strange to me to read of your being at your musketry practice, for it seems to me but the other day your mother was taking bows and arrows out of your hands and pressing on me the danger of giving you penny pistols. Last week or so darts to fling against a target were considered too risky. In some other ways it all seems longer than it is, however. … We seem farther away from July of this year than that July was from the days of crinolines. There is certainly some gain – a stirring of manhood, but at a terrible cost. I enclose you the Eton Chronicle, from which I see that 8 per cent of Etonians have been killed. In the Army all over the percentage of killed is under 2 per cent. … I dined at Asquith's the other day, and he was certainly hopeful and K. of K.* is also encouraging. Once they are back on German soil it mightn't take so long, but to get them back! … I've written a short play with the Kaiser as chief figure which has its points I think but unfolds a tragic tale. When I have copies I'll want your opinion. …
My love
J.M.B.
The short play was Barrie's attempt at dramatic propaganda, Der Tag – the German toast to victory. It took the form of a duologue between the German Emperor and the Spirit of Culture, reminiscent of Bernard Partridge's patriotic cartoons in Punch, but proved to be too sympathetic to Germany for the average Briton's taste. It is also among the very few examples of Barrie's writing in which there is none of his redeeming humour:
EMPEROR. … Britain has grown dull and sluggish: a belly of land, she lies overfed, no dreams within her such as keep Powers alive. … Britain's part in the world's making is done: ‘I was,’ her epitaph…
CULTURE. She fought you where Crecy was and Agincourt and Waterloo, with all her dead to help her. The dead became quick in their ancient graves, stirred by the tread of the island feet, and they cried out, ‘How is England doing?’ The living answered the dead upon their bugles with the ‘All's well.’ England, O Emperor, was grown degenerate, but you have made her great again. …
EMPEROR. God cannot let my Germany be utterly destroyed.
CULTURE. If God is with the Allies, Germany will not be destroyed. Farewell!
November 25th, 1914, would have been Sylvia's forty-eighth birthday; five days later Barrie wrote to George:
I was very gratified by your writing me for your mother's birthday. I would rather have you do so than any one alive; you can understand how I yearn to have you sitting with me now and at all times. What you don't know in the least is the help you have been to me and have become more and far more as these few years have passed. There is nothing I would not confide in you or trust to you. …
I was amused by a letter from your tutor [Hugh Macnaghten] in which he bewailed my having the son in The Will sent to Eton. He would undoubtedly, he says, have been sent by such a father to Harrow! But it was a werry nice letter indeed. … I was in Lord Lucas's hospital ‘Wrest in Beds’ the other day – 100 wounded. One of them told me (he had a broken leg) that he thought the French officers were better than the English. His explanation was thus – ‘They wouldn't have sent me here 'cos I had this bad leg. There was a Frenchy near me what had the top of his head blown off & his officer said to him “You run up to the tent & get your head bandaged & come back slippy.” He didn't come back slippy, so the officer went & fetched him. Yes, I think their officers are better than ours.’ Amazing, isn't it?
I've done Der Tag, my war play, and will get you a copy. It's also possible I'll turn the [Granville-]Barker revue into a shorter thing for Gaby. Jack wires he may get up tomorrow tho' whether only for the day he doesn't say.
Your loving
J.M.B
In early December, George was posted to the 4th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, prior to his departure for the Western Front. He wrote to Barrie, telling him he would be allowed a short leave – his first since joining. Barrie replied, ‘Your news is great, and … I'll keep the time as clear as the deck of one of H.M. ships!’ Peter Davies later speculated:
Gaby
‘Did George, during those last few hours of freedom, have anything more than just a mild flirtation with Gaby? I like to think so. Both were charmers, and it would have been a good finale. It is my belief that J.M.B., though so insulated himself … from the flesh and the Devil, had the perception and imagination and tolerance and sense of the fitness of things to smile on such a little piece of naughtiness, … and even pave the way for it. I have no evidence one way or the other, … but I will leave the theory in, because I think it a charming one, which George would have appreciated. And you never know. J.M.B. had his moments of profound insight and wisdom as well as his practically limitless generosity. And he loved George with an exceeding great love.’
A. E. W. Mason once referred to ‘the emotional frankness with which Barrie could always write but never speak’.2 In saying goodbye to George, Barrie doubtless had to exercise considerable self-control not to reveal his emotions and the premonition already in his notebook:
— The Last Cricket Match. One or two days before war declared – my anxiety & premonition – boys gaily playing cricket at Auch, seen from my window – I know they're to suffer – I see them dropping out one by one, fewer & fewer.
This theme later became Barbara's Wedding, written in 1917, but not produced until 1927. However, the departure of Second Lieutenant George Llewelyn Davies from Campden Hill Square provided Barrie with an idea for a more immediate play, The New Word. Its theme embodied his own periodic dilemma: the embarrassment which afflicts two males, both undemonstrative, who want to communicate their fondness for each other, but cannot. The two males in question are a father, Mr Torrance, and his son, Roger, a Second Lieutenant about to leave for the Front:
MR TORRANCE. Do you remember, Roger, my saying that I didn't want you to smoke till you were twenty?
ROGER. Oh, it's that, is it? … I never promised.
MR TORRANCE (almost with a shout). It's not that. (Kindly) Have a cigar, my boy?
ROGER. Me?
(A rather shaky hand passes him a cigar-case. ROGER selects from it and lights up nervously. He is now prepared for the worst.)
MR TORRANCE. … My boy, be ready; I hate to hit you without warning. I'm going to cast a grenade into the middle of you. It's this, I'm fond of you, my boy.
ROGER (squirming). Father, if any one were to hear you!
MR TORRANCE. They won't. The door is shut, Amy is gone to bed, and all is quiet in our street. Won't you – won't you say something civil to me in return, Roger?
(ROGER looks at him, and away from him)…
ROGER. Hum. What would you like me to call you?
MR TORRANCE (severely). It isn't what would I like. But I dare say your mother would beam if you called me ‘dear father’.
ROGER. I don't think so. … It's so effeminate.
MR TORRANCE. Not if you say it casually.
ROGER (with something very like a snort). How does one say a thing like that casually?
MR TORRANCE. Well, for instance, you could whistle while you said it – or anything of that sort.
ROGER. Hum. Of course you – if we were to – to be like that, you wouldn't do anything.
MR TORRANCE. How do you mean?
ROGER. You wouldn't paw me?
MR TORRANCE. … Roger! you forget yourself. (But apparently it is for him to continue). That reminds me of a story I heard the other day of a French general. He had asked for volunteers from his airmen for some specially dangerous job – and they all stepped forward. Pretty good that. Then three were chosen and got their orders and saluted, and were starting off when he stopped them. ‘Since when,’ he said, ‘have brave boys departing to the post of danger omitted to embrace their father?’ They did it then. Good story?
ROGER (lowering). They were French.
MR TORRANCE. Yes, I said so. Don't you think it's good?
ROGER. Why do you tell it to me?
MR TORRANCE. Because it's a good story.
ROGER (sternly). You are sure that there is no other reason? (MR TORRANCE tries to brazen it out, hut he looks guilty). You know, father, that is barred. …
(…MR TORRANCE snaps angrily)
MR TORRANCE. What is barred?
ROGER. You know.
When George left London for Winchester, prior to his embarkation for France, he took with him in his kit-bag a somewhat incongruous book to read in the trenches. It was not given to him by Barrie; he had bought it himself, a few days before his departure: The Little White Bird.
Barrie wrote to him on December 21st, 1914:
My dear George,
When your things arrived at 23, I thought it meant you were on the eve of starting, but I admit I hoped I was wrong, and now your letter comes and I know. You are off. It is still a shock to me. I shall have many anxious days and nights too, but I only fall into line with so many mothers. The Orea cigarettes will be sent weekly and anything else I can think of, to cheer you in a foreign land, tho' France and Belgium can scarcely seem that to us any more. I shudder over the weight of your pack, and know that for my part I would be down under it. … Michael was with me at Der Tag today. It was received with much applause, but it struck me that in their hearts the Coliseum audience thought it heavy food. In the programme were performing pigs, and immediately in front of it a man sang a war-song about the Kaiser saying he was ‘in a funk’ and the Crown Prince advising him ‘to do a bunk’. Good company!
I'll write often and will be so glad of any line from you.
Your loving,
J.M.B.
Madge Titheradge as Peter Pan in the 1914/15 revival
The following night, Peter Pan opened for its tenth revival, with Madge Titheradge as the new Peter, and Barrie's niece, Madge Murray, as Mrs Darling. Barrie wrote to his god-daughter, Pauline Chase, who had married Alec Drummond in October: ‘To wish you both a very happy Christmas. In a sense it is pretty grim to send Christmas greetings this year, but tho’ we cannot forget the war, it makes us think still more of the home, and I wish you much of the truest happiness in yours. … I am going to the P. Pan performance today, and hope all will be well, but you needn't be afraid, I shan't forget the Peter of the Past. I expect the fairies have their knuckles in their eyes today.’3 Barrie took his godson, Peter Scott, to see the play; at the end, he asked the five-year-old boy what he had liked best, and was particularly gratified by his answer: ‘What I think I liked best was tearing up the programme and dropping the bits on people's heads.’4 Peter gave him an empty box as a Christmas present, and Barrie duly acknowledged it:
Adelphi Terrace House,
Strand, W.C.
Dec. 30, 1914.
Dear Peter,
When I look upon my Box,
With pride and joy I rocks,
From my head to my socks,
And everybody knocks
At my door, and flocks
To see my box.
Signed by The Author.
The writes of translation are reserved.
Your Loving
Godfather,
J.M.B.
On the same day, George wrote to his brother Peter from France:
‘How goes it in Sheerness? I expect it's getting bloodier and bloodier. I invent little prayers of thanksgiving that I'm not there still. … We have been here for five days now, with no immediate prospect of moving. … I am becoming a most accomplished linguist. Next time we advance on Rue Pasquier I shall be irresistible! I have two reasons for writing to you. (1) Will you send me a pair of those things you put inside gum-boots? … (2) In the event of my being killed, wounded or missing, you might communicate with Josephine. A loathsome job for you, but otherwise she won't know till it's in the papers. … I did very well in the interval between Sheerness and Winchester (oh! Winchester was loathsome). I told you about meeting G. Deslys, didn't I? Of course, that was the great show, but I had a good time all round.’
Peter replied on January 10th, 1915:
‘I haven't got those gum-boot sock things yet but as soon as I can I will send them. The other duty I will try to perform if it becomes necessary, though it wouldn't be a particularly easy letter to compose, would it? … Perhaps by the time this reaches you you will have been “in the trenches”, receiving your baptism of fire, and all that sort of thing. I wish you would write and tell me exactly what your sensations are, and whether you experience any more of that jolly old depression which descended upon us during the first week at [Sheerness]. I still get it sometimes, and if I thought the war was bound to last more than a year from now, I believe I should commit suicide.’
George wrote to Barrie on January 13th:
Dear Uncle Jim,
I have got some spare time now that is not occupied with sleeping, & I'll try & see how much news I can give you.
The fear of death doesn't enter so much as I expected into this show. The hardships are the things that count, and one gets very soon into the way of taking them as they come. … [After a long account of trench routine] Don't you get worried about me. I take every precaution I can, & shall do very well. It is an amazing show, & I am unable to look forward more than two or three hours. Also don't get anxious about letters. I'll send them whenever there's a chance, but there are less chances than I expected.
Your affec.
George
One of George's letters from France. The ‘Passed by Censor’ stamp was a particular source of pride to Barrie
Barrie meanwhile was writing to George:
Jack in 1914
‘Hoping for another letter as soon as you have the time. You should see how I plunge thro' my letter-bag looking for one from you. It is almost too exciting, and I have some bad nights, I can tell you. I have an idea your Uncle Guy goes out this week. Jack is now on the Harpy, a destroyer as big as the Brazen, and I hope a bit more comfortable. … Peter is still signalling at Chatham, and I hope to have him up for Saturday night. Today Mick, Nick and I were at David Copperfield, a big [audience] of school girls largely, and every time Owen Nares came on as David there were loud gasps of ‘Oh how sweet!’ Almost too sweet I shd have thought. … There is what I believe to be a well grounded idea that we shall be visited in this isle, and probably in this metropolis very soon, by Zeppelins & other air craft. Have been making enquiries as to where the coal-cellar is at 23. … Johnstone said he thought you were near Ypres. Wherever you are, I hope you see near your bed the flowers I want to place there in a nice vase, and the illustrated papers, and a new work by Compton Mackenzie which I read aloud to you! I shall be so anxious till I get another line from you.’
Peter Davies wrote, ‘I think this letter well illustrates … the peculiar and characteristic form which J.M.B.'s affection for George and Michael took: a dash of the paternal, a lot of the maternal, and much, too, of the lover – at this stage Sylvia's lover still imperfectly merged into the lover of her son. To criticise would be easy; yet I don't think it did, or would have done, George any harm.’
Barrie's letter crossed in the post with George's news of the 22nd:
‘The malady that laid me low has been successfully vanquished, & I am now a young bull once again, & ready for our next show. We shall be in the trenches again either tomorrow night or the night after. … I don't think there's very much danger to expect, except from sickness, which is always ready in this weather to show its face. … But I take every care that can be taken, I can promise you. … I suppose Uncle Guy is somewhere about by now. I should like to come across him, but there isn't much chance. … I dare bet he won't have much to say for this game. Picturesqueness is distinctly lacking.’
Guy du Maurier, a professional soldier too sensitive for his job. During the Boer War he saw a man killed next to him; the shock was so profound that within a few days his hair had turned completely white
Guy du Maurier, now a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Fusiliers, was fighting four miles farther down the line from George. He too was sending home regular accounts of life in the trenches, to his wife Gwen. Unlike George, who clearly took great pains to shield Barrie from the reality of the trenches, Guy – a professional soldier and a veteran of the Boer War – gave his wife as accurate a picture as the Army Censor would allow him to paint:
‘The trenches are full of dead Frenchmen. When one is killed they let him lie in the squelching mud and water at the bottom; and when you try and drain or dig you unearth them in an advanced state of decomposition. … All the filth of an Army lies around rotting. … The stink is awful. There are many dead Highlanders just in front – killed in December I think – and they aren't pleasant. One gets used to smells. … Two hundred of my men went to hospital today – mostly frost-bitten feet; bad cases are called gangrene and very bad cases the toes drop off. … When we've done our four days I'll try and go over and see George who I think is only two miles off. I haven't seen anyone I know lately. I fancy most of the Army I know are killed or wounded.’
George wrote to Barrie on January 27th, telling him that ‘I have recovered entirely from my late sickness, and have never been better in my life. … On the whole then, my dear Uncle Jim, there's nothing for you to be anxious about. Of course, there's always the chance of stopping an unaimed bullet, but you can see it's a very small one. And I am far too timorous a man (I am a man now, I think) to run any more risk than I must. … Are you rehearsing with Gaby yet?’
Barrie had finished writing his revue for Gaby, entitled Rosy Rapture, or The Pride of the Beauty Chorus, and was out filming new sequences which had to be edited before rehearsals could begin. He wrote to George on February 8th: ‘I have not heard from you since the postcard sent Jan 31, which of course is not very long, and you warned me there might necessarily be these pauses. So I grin and bear it. Not much grinning. … How I wish I knew what you are doing at this moment. I wish I was your ghillie.’
George was also writing frequent letters to his four brothers, his girl Josephine, and Mary Hodgson:
Feb. 11 [1915]
Dear Mary,
The veteran is off to the trenches again soon, after a fine rest, & finds himself with terrible holes in his pants. Do send me out two pairs of long ones, new, you know the kind. Also some soap, or I must go unwashen.
By Jove, Mary, when I get home I shall never get up in the mornings at all. I shall be frightfully idle. That is one advantage of the firing-line trenches. As an officer I don't sleep at all in the night, so there is no getting up in the morning. But sheets! And a proper bed! Oh, I hope the war isn't going on for ten years.
Meanwhile life is very bearable here. And when I get back I shall be more conceited than ever. You'll all shudder.
Yours affec.
George
When George had been at Eton, Barrie had treated him to the occasional hamper from Fortnum & Mason in response to his claims that he was on the verge of starvation. The trenches were no different:
23 Campden Hill Square,
Kensington, W.
14 Feb. 1915.
My dear George,
Practical affairs first. The eatables were sent off instanter from Fortnum & Mason, and shd arrive to-day or tomorrow according to their calculation, but I can see that you are probably already back in the trenches. Besides the usual things in their hampers there is a tongue, ham & turkey, and if you find that those keep, we shall repeat. Mary is also sending you some new underwear. …
I can understand that getting ready to go back [into the trenches] is uncommonly like ‘putting on your pads’, but what I should feel worst … is that cutting across in the moonlight. Certainly it must be a bit creepy, and I don't feel as friendly to the moon as I once did. My own feeling about the moon is that it is at its best at Rustington, because we had many lovely moons there in the days when we were all so happy together. However I trust your best moons are still to come. …
I am always at Nico about writing to you, and he is always deciding to do it tomorrow, with results known to you. He seems to have got to a stage when letter-writing assumes the appearance of a Frankenstein to him. …
Loving
J.M.B.
Nico's confession for Charlie Chaplin. It was an enthusiasm shared by Barrie, who harboured an ambition that Chaplin should play Peter Pan on screen
Nico summoned up the requisite concentration a week later:
Sunday 21st [Feb. 1915]
Dear George,
Excusez-vous moi s'il vous plait for not writing before. … I am going to tea with Aunt Gwen to day and I shall see Angela and Daphne. Uncle Jim is at present laid up with a cold. Uncle Guy is having an awful time I believe. He went out with 900 men. He has only 200 left. The other 700 are laid up with their toes nearly off. … Jack wears a ring now. Have you fallen in love with any French girls yet? I guess so Eh! What!!? … I went to Peter Pan a few weeks ago and the new Peter is quite good. … Mary hopes you've got the underclothing. …
Love from your affectionate
Nico.
A postscript doodle from Nico to George
George received a slight leg-wound on the night of February 14th, but he made no mention of it to Barrie (the information was given in a letter from Guy to Gwen), and his next letter was as cheerful as ever:
‘We had an awful walk up to [the] trench, through a sea of mud, & it was a pitch dark night. … Oh, Lord it was muddy! I did badly that night. I had to go along behind, & by mistake I got into the communication-trench behind, which is full of liquid mud above the knees. Here, being a bit unsteady on my pins, I elected to fall over backwards. Behold me sitting with exceedingly cold water trickling into me everywhere, unable to move, & shouting for help! … Is Gaby still ill? How I long to see the revue.’
Barrie replied on February 19th:
‘Gaby is back so I expect the burlesque shd be on in about three weeks. I'm writing a little one-act thing [The New Word] to go with it, and as all my thoughts are with 2nd Lieutenants, it has to be about one. It is just a family talk between one & his people, chiefly his father, on his first appearance in uniform. I fancy “2nd Lieut” is the most popular word in the language today, tho' a short time ago it didn't exist to us. … Tomorrow is your father's birthday, and I feel he would be very pleased with you all, which was always the best birthday to him.’
The New Word was to be a short curtain-raiser to Rosy Rapture, now in rehearsal at the Duke of York's. Although it had been motivated by George's departure for the Front, an older theme had found its way into the play – a memory that had been in the author's mind since the age of six:
MRS TORRANCE. … Rogie dear, … I'll tell you something. You know your brother Harry died when he was seven. To you, I suppose, it is as if he had never been. You were barely five.
ROGER. I don't remember him, mater.
MRS TORRANCE. No – no. But I do, Rogie. He would be twenty-one now; but though you and Emma grew up I have always gone on seeing him as just seven. Always till the war broke out. And now I see him a man of twenty-one, dressed in khaki, fighting for his country, same as you. …
George wrote to Barrie on February 20th:
‘Fortnum & Mason's goods have just arrived – boxes & boxes of them. We are a grateful party of officers, & shall be in clover for the six days' rest that is coming. It is good of you. I shall probably ask for more in a fortnight or three weeks. This time I ask you for a new novel. I ask for the devil of a lot, but everything I get here is worth thirty times what it was in the piping times of peace. … P.S. Cash is running short. Could you get me 100 francs from the bureau de change at Charing Cross in notes?’
Barrie replied on February 28th:
Peter
My dear George,
Your letter dated 20th Feb arrived yesterday and made me happy for the moment at all events. I had hardly finished reading and re-reading it (quite as if I was a young lady) when there arrives, unexpected, a gent of the name of Peter. He had managed at last to get two days by bearding his colonel, and in he walked, larger than ever, and between you and me a d-v-1-shly handsome fellow in my opinion and I guess in that of any candid person. Peter, whom a few years ago we chuckled over as rather a comic, is a werry fine youth indeed. … Life, sir, is odd, as you have been seeing this last two months, but it is even odder than that. Such a queer comedy of tears and grimness and the inexplicable – as your du Maurier blood will make you understand sooner than most. It will teach you that the nice people are the nastiest and the nastiest the nicest, and on the whole leave you smiling.
A few things to note from your last. For one thing I enclose four pounds in French money, and for another it is always a blessed thing for me when you want something. So if you don't want, go on inventing. I'll send you a book or two tomorrow (this is Sunday). Then I'll also send tomorrow a hamper similar to the last from Fortnum & Mason as it, thank goodness, seems to have been a success. … The one great doing for me is when we are all together again.
Loving
J.M.B.
The white chateau in 1914
Although Guy and George gave widely differing accounts of the miseries of trench warfare, both shared a similar response to the stark beauty of ruins. Guy had written to Gwen of ‘a lone and much-shelled chateau, looking picturesque in the rising moonlight’. George came across the same chateau a month later, writing to Barrie:
‘It was a bright moonlit night, & the chateau looked wonderful. It was all white with four great pillars in front, one of them broken. I walked up to it feeling, in spite of mud & dirt, like a Roman Emperor. It is the best sight I've seen yet. And then of course romance was a bit spoiled by an N.C.O. just behind me making some low remark about spotted fever (alluding to the shrapnel marks that covered the walls). … Next day I prowled round the chateau. It was really nothing but a shell, with whole rooms battered to bits. There was a little shrine out in the garden, practically untouched by gunfire. On the altar, just in front of the figure of Christ, there was a charger of four cartridges. To a sentimental civilian like me, not yet hardened into a proper mercenary, this had rather a striking effect. Perhaps it sounds a bit cheap, but the chateau, which was rather beautiful, had made me feel romantic.’
Peter Davies commented, ‘No word could be more aptly applied to George than romantic. He was romantically minded … and romantic in appearance. He had a nice “dirty” mind, too, and that makes a delightful combination, particularly when it is seasoned with a gay and at times extravagant sense of humour.’
Michael was now fourteen, still unhappy at Eton, but, according to Hugh Macnaghten, ‘resolved to face every event with absolute self-possession, however much it costs him. … Very full of anxieties, a boy of a tender heart and delightful feelings, full of promise. … Very anxious not to give himself away or show any excitement.’5 Michael's only surviving letter to George is distinctly lacking in the usual Etonian slang adopted by boys of his age:
George. ‘It is impossible to do justice to the charm of his modesty or to his character,’ recorded the Eton College Chronicle in March 1915; ‘the Greek epithets σώϕρωνobwise] χαρίɛις[elegant], καλóς κἀγαθóς [honourable and good] express him best.’
Windsor.
3rd March 1915.
X A.M.
Dear George,
As I am at the present moment afflicted with a belly-ache, and 蝖 staying out, I seize the chance to write this news letter. Leave is passed, last week-end I found Peter at 23, having got leave from Friday to Sunday evening. And Uncle Jim rehearsing plays with a bad cold. I went to the Coliseum, which was not at its best. … The evening [of returning to Eton] passed in the usual way: – Tea: then wait, wait, wait, with futile attempts to play Rat-tat etc: books for Mary to pack: taxi comes early: wait: bag in taxi: hurried farewells, and station: crowds of boys: greetings which freeze on sight of Sir James: shouts of Good Lord here's Davies! on finding a carriage: walk up to tutor's [i.e. Macnaghten's House] on arriving, to feel you haven't been to leave at all, except for the atmosphere of purses replenished and change suits: supper & prayers after which [Macnaghten] comes in & asks all about George & Peter & Leave in general, while doing his best to obliterate the foot of the bed. Then lights suddenly go out at ten when a new book by Wells or Bierce becomes very interesting. Wake in morning to the refrain of ‘Nearly a quarter to seven, Mr Davies. Are you awake, sir?’ To which the only possible reply is a grunt. A superhuman effort drags you to the shower-bath, etc. …
My dame has just come in, and on my suggestion asks me to give you her best regards. … Again enters [my dame] with castor-oil in Brandy, which now reposes in my belly. … I had a letter from Jack this morning, in which he says he has done over 3,000 miles in the last twelve days, which seems rather a lot. … My source of information is now beginning to diminish rapidly and I feel that you will have to be satisfied with nine pages or thereabouts. … I cudgel my brains, but I can find nothing more to say, so I fear I must finish. J'ai fini.* Now for a letter to Jack, and then the night only.
Michael.
George wrote to Barrie on March 7th:
‘There is nothing to chronicle, except the gruesome fact that I've seen violent death within a yard of me. I was quite safe myself, Uncle Jim, as I was right down underneath the parapet. The poor chap wasn't one of my fellows, & put his head up in a place where at that time he could scarcely fail to stop a bullet. The top of his head was shot off, so he didn't feel it. But it was a dreadful sight. I oughtn't to write about these things, but it made an impression. Good luck with the burlesque. I am longing to see it. … Fortnum & Mason has again rolled up in abundance. It is so good of you.’
On the evening of Thursday, March 1 ith, Barrie wrote the last letter to reach George alive:
Envelope containing Barrie's last letter to George
My dear George,
I don't know when news from quite near you may reach you – perhaps later than we get it – but we have just heard that your Uncle Guy has been killed. He was a soldier by profession, and had reached a time of life when the best things have come to one if they are to come at all, and he had no children, which is the best reason for caring to live on after the sun has set; and these are things to remember now. He certainly had the du Maurier charm at its best – the light heart with the sad smile, & it might be the sad heart with the bright smile. There was always something pathetic about him to me. He had lots of stern stuff in him, and yet always the mournful smile of one who could pretend that life was gay but knew it wasn't. One of the most attractive personalities I have ever known.
Of course I don't need this to bring home to me the danger you are always in more or less, but I do seem to be sadder to-day than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. For four years I have been waiting for you to become 21 & a little more, so that we could get closer & closer to each other, without any words needed. I don't have any little iota of desire for you to get military glory. I do not care a farthing for anything of the kind, but I have the one passionate desire that we may all be together again once at least. You would not mean a featherweight more to me tho' you came back a General. I just want yourself. There may be some moments when a knowledge of all you are to me will make you a little more careful, and so I can't help going on saying these things.
It was terrible that man being killed next to you, but don't be afraid to tell me of such things. You see it at night I fear with painful vividness. I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.
Loving
J.M.B
Peter Davies wrote, ‘Surely no soldier in France or Flanders ever had more moving words from home than those in this tragic, desperately apprehensive letter. … Plenty of other people, no doubt, were thinking and writing much the same sort of thing, but not in such perfection. Indeed, taking all the circumstances into consideration, I think it must be one of the great letters of the world. Its poignancy is so dreadfully enhanced, too, by the realisation that, whatever of the pathetic there may have been in Guy du M., … far, far the most pathetic figure in all the world was the poor little genius who wrote these words, and afterwards, no doubt, walked up and down, up and down his lonely room, smoking pipe after pipe, thinking his dire thoughts.’
On the following Monday, March 15th, Nico and Mary Hodgson were asleep in the night nursery at Campden Hill Square. ‘Suddenly there came a banging on the front door, and the door-bell ringing and ringing. Mary got out of bed and went downstairs, while I sat up with ears pricked. Voices soon came up the stairs, but stopped just short of the landing. Then I heard Uncle Jim's voice, an eerie Banshee wail – “Ah-h-h! They'll all go, Mary – Jack, Peter, Michael – even little Nico – This dreadful war will get them all in the end !” A little later, realising I was awake, he came and sat on my bed for a while. I don't think he spoke, but I knew that George was dead.’
George had been killed in the early hours of March 15th. Lord Tennyson's son, Aubrey, wrote to Peter from Flanders a few days later, giving him as many details as he could gather:
‘The battalion was advancing to drive the Germans out of St. Eloi. … Stopford Sackville was marching alongside of George part of the way up, & he says he fancied George had a sort of premonition that he was going to be killed & said he hoped that they would not take him back into one of the villages behind but would bury him outside his own trench, & that he considered it was the finest death one could die & he wished to be buried where he fell. He was the first officer to be shot that night. The Colonel was talking to all C Company officers before the attack was made, & George was sitting on a bank with the others, when he was shot through the head, & died almost immediately, so that he can have felt nothing. It was impossible to comply with his wishes & bury him there, [so] they took him back and buried him in a field on the left of the road … outside Voormezeele … and they took a lot of trouble making the grave look nice, & planting it with violets. … I do not stand alone in this battalion in my affection for George. When I first asked about him when I got here, I was told by an officer who has been in the battalion for some years that he had never known any officer come into the battalion, who after so short a time had won the love of everyone, so much so that all his brother officers felt when he was killed that even though they had only known him such a short time, they had lost one of their best friends. As regards myself I don't think anyone can ever take his place, as there is no one whom I have ever loved more.’
Peter Davies wrote in his Morgue:
‘I remember getting a telegram at Sheerness from J.M.B. – GEORGE IS KILLED, HOPE YOU CAN COME TO ME. – And I remember arriving at the flat in Adelphi Terrace, … and that it was all very painful. … The effect on J.M.B. was dire indeed, poor little devil. Oh, miserable Jimmie. Famous, rich, loved by a vast public, but at what a frightful private cost. Shaken to the core – whatever dark fancies may have lurked at the back of his queer fond mind – by the death of Arthur; tortured a year or two later by the ordeal of his own divorce; then so soon afterwards prostrated, ravaged and utterly undone when Sylvia pursued Arthur to the grave; and after only four and a half years, George; George, whom he had loved with such a deep, strange, complicated, increasing love, and who as he knew well would have been such a pillar for him to lean on in the difficult job of guiding the destinies of Sylvia & Arthur Llewelyn Davies's boys – “my boys”.’
A telegram from the King and Queen conveying their sympathies arrived later in the day, followed by other telegrams and letters of condolence as the news spread that one of Sir James Barrie's adopted sons had been killed. Among them was a small white envelope, addressed in pencil, and stamped ‘PASSED BY CENSOR’:
March 14 [1915]
Dear Uncle Jim,
I have just got your letter about Uncle Guy. You say it hasn't made you think any more about the danger I am in. But I know it has. Do try not to let it. I take every care of myself that can be decently taken. And if I am going to stop a bullet, why should it be with a vital place? But arguments aren't any good. Keep your heart up, Uncle Jim, & remember how good an experience like this is for a chap who's been very idle before. Lord, I shall be proud when I'm home again, & talking to you about all this. That old dinner at the Savoy will be pretty grand. …
The ground is drying up fast now, and the weather far better. Soon the spring will be on us, & the birds nesting right up in the firing line. Cats are the only other thing left there. I wonder what spring will bring for us in this part of the line. Something a little different from the forty-eight hours routine in the trenches, I daresay. …
Meanwhile, dear Uncle Jim, you must carry on with your job of keeping up your courage. I will write every time I come out of action. We go up to the trenches in a few days again.
Your affec.
George
George's last letter. At the foot of the page, Barrie has written: ‘This is the last letter, and was written a few hours before his death. I knew he was killed before I got it.’
By the week-end, the four surviving brothers had forgathered at Campden Hill Square. Nico, aged eleven, remembered ‘seeing Jack standing by the dining-room window looking down the square, with big tears running down his cheeks. For myself, I'm afraid, my chief feeling was the thrill at seeing Jack and Peter in their uniforms.’
Peter concluded his Morgue with his own retrospective thoughts on George, and the effect of his death on their lives:
‘For his brothers, George's death was, with no exaggeration, a bad business. … The fortunes of war brought me pretty close to him for a short time within a few months of his death, and I had in the preceding five or six years been with him a great deal, fishing latterly, and bug-hunting in the more childish days before that; but it would be untrue to say that there existed tremendous intimacy between us, or that we were bound together by that ineffable love of brother for brother which one has occasionally read of. On the other hand it is not in the least untrue to say that I have gone on missing him possibly ever since I last saw him, leaning out of the window as his train steamed away from Sheerness station and calling out, “Till our next merry meeting!” He had so much that was really good without being in the least goody-goody, and was such fun, and so tolerant, and would have been such value always; and blood and background and memories are a mighty strong bond; and how few, after all, are those in all one's life with whom one can be completely at ease. That he had his fair share of the celebrated du Maurier charm or temperament, is certain; there was also a good leavening of sound, kind, sterling Davies in him too. I think he had that simplicity which J.M.B. and [Hugh] Macnaghten saw in Arthur, and which, though I only partly understand it, I dimly perceive to be perhaps the best of all characteristics. In fact I think he had in him a very great deal of all the best and finest qualities of both Arthur & Sylvia. But it was all thirty years ago, and he was only twenty-one, and what do I know about him really?
‘This much is certain, that when he died, some essential virtue went out of us as a family. The combination of George, who as eldest brother exercised a sort of constitutional, tacitly accepted authority over us, who was of our blood, and on whom still lingered more than a little of our own good family tradition, with the infinitely generous, fanciful solicitous, hopelessly unauthoritative J.M.B., was a good one and would have kept us together as a unit of some worth; as it was, circumstances were too much for J.M.B. left solitary, as well as for us, and we became gradually, but much sooner than would or should have been the case, individuals with little of the invaluable, cohesive strength of the united family. …
Oh well, bugger it. To make an end of this penultimate chapter of the family morgue, the epitaph which a poet wrote for George and his kind seems as appropriate as anything I know of:
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung;
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
George's grave in the British War Cemetery at Voormezeele. Peter visited the cemetery in 1946.‘I had the place to myself, and never remember feeling more alone. It was a grey, lowering, dismal sort of day, shivery too, in spite of the month. All sorts of vague thoughts came and went in my head, of dust and skeletons and the conqueror worm, and old, unhappy, far-off things, and older days that were happier. What with one thing and another I am not ashamed to admit that I piped an eye.’
