Willie was kept very busy that winter and the time passed quickly. If there were few casualties it was some consolation to him to know that there was so little fighting, and therefore that he was not missing much. He seldom came to London, and when he did he found it difficult to see Felicity, whose time also was occupied with small, tiresome duties, and who was intensely disliking her apparently unnecessary job, which increased the dreariness of the hard winter, the black-out and the uneventful war.
The only casualty that occurred in Willie’s regiment was one that he least desired. The Colonel greeted him one morning in high spirits with the information that Hamilton had suffered some injury and was coming home.
‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that he had a fall out riding. It has lamed him, and he’s coming home for a bit, and I am to take his place. He’ll take over here for the time being. He’s fit for light duty.’
‘What was he riding a horse for?’ grumbled Willie. ‘Why doesn’t he stick to his dirty old tank? He can’t fall off that.’
That the Colonel should go out and that Hamilton should come home was a double-barrelled disaster for Willie, and made a bad beginning to the second six months of the war. Events of so much greater importance, however, followed that for a while Willie forgot his own grievances while the German armies swept through Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. His reaction to these tremendous events was that of many Englishmen. After the dim frustration of the first eight months he felt a new enthusiasm and a kind of spiritual exaltation. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that defeat was possible, but it was a possibility that did not appal him. There could be no defeat unless the enemy landed, and if they landed there could be no defeat so long as there was one true Englishman alive. Then at last he would have the opportunity of fighting for his country and of dying for it, if need be.
On one of his visits to London at about the time of the fall of France he spent an evening with Felicity. She greeted him with the news that Horry had been killed in Boulogne. She had only just heard, but she was quite calm about it, although Willie knew that it meant even more to her than it did to him.
‘Garnet told me this morning,’ she said. ‘He had had the telegram as being next of kin.’
‘It’s too bad,’ said Willie.
‘Too bad,’ she said.
‘I sometimes think,’ he went on, ‘that we shall all be killed. I’d sooner be, if we’re going to lose the War.’
‘Of course,’ she said quietly. ‘But it won’t be so easy for women.’
‘Will they let you fight?’ he asked.
‘Can they stop us?’ she answered. ‘We had a lecture yesterday about Molotov bombs. You throw them out of the window at a tank, and if you hit it the tank goes up in smoke. It sounds fun, but nobody has seen one yet.’
Then they went on to talk of Horry, of how much they had loved him and how deeply they would miss him for the rest of their lives. It was a calm, sad evening. When they parted and Willie took her in his arms and kissed her cheek, he felt they had never been so close to one another before.
The important thing for Willie at this time was that the regiment, having suffered very lightly, was home again, and that he was with it. The Colonel was no longer there. He had had the final satisfaction of commanding during the retreat to Dunkirk, and had been transferred to some non-combatant job. Hamilton had been cured of his disability, promoted to the substantive rank of lieutenant-colonel and was in command. This slightly, but only slightly, mitigated Willie’s happiness in being with his comrades again. He felt that the greater part of what was left of the Army was now in England, so that he was happy to be there too, and he secretly hoped that the enemy would invade.
The Battle of Britain damped his hopes, but he was uplifted by the glory of it, and cursed his fate that he had never learned to fly. His friends consoled him with the assurance that, judging by his prowess at the wheel of a car, he would certainly have destroyed any aeroplane he was in charge of, and himself with it. And even if he had survived he would have been permanently grounded long ago.
He still had his flat in London, and he went there as often as he could. He was there on the Sunday evening in September when the first serious bombing attack took place. Felicity was on duty that night. He was able to have only a few words with her on the telephone the following morning before he travelled back. When he pressed her for some account of her experiences she was reticent.
‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘tell me more about it. What sort of time did you have?’
‘Pretty bloody,’ she said, and he could get nothing more out of her, but he felt as he returned to the country that she had come closer to the war than he had.
As the days shortened and the frequency of bombing raids increased, the rumours of invasion began to be discredited, and in Willie’s regiment they were replaced by whispers that the regiment would shortly be moving to the Middle East. Now, so it seemed to Willie, the great crisis of his life must come. When they had crossed the Channel without him, the blow had been severe, but they had been distant only a day’s journey, or a few hours in the air, and he had always hugged to his heart the hope that any morning the summons to join them might arrive. But if they went to the Middle East, and it was said that troops now travelled round the Cape to get there – if they went to the Middle East without him, he felt that his fate would be sealed. Speculation on this subject occupied his mind day and night. Here at home he was treated like any other officer. He was senior captain and performed all the duties and received all the respect belonging to his rank. His health was excellent. He had worked conscientiously to make himself efficient. Conceit was the least of his failings, but he quite honestly believed that he was as good an officer as the majority. But, that terrible word which came at the end of all his optimistic reasonings, but he had been left behind a year ago when he was thirty-nine, he was now forty and soon he would be forty-one. The next youngest captain in the regiment was thirty-four. This captain was married with children, as so many of these young men were, while he himself was single, with no dependants in the world. That was a consideration that ought surely to be taken into account.
The men liked him – that he knew – and so did his brother officers. He was not brilliantly clever, but nor were they. He knew his job as well as they did, and had more experience. It was true that he had been away from the regiment for some years, but he had worked hard to catch up, and thought he had succeeded. Did they think that because he was a little older he was more likely to go sick? A doctor had assured him that a healthy man of forty was in every way as sound a proposition as a man of thirty. He had passed his medical examination with flying colours. Since he had rejoined he had not had a day’s illness, which was more than most of them could say. But, but they had left him behind a year ago, why should they take him with them now?
Willie became so haunted by this obsession that he finally decided that he had better take some action that would put himself out of his agony. Between the decision and the action many days passed. At last one night, which was selected for no better reason than that he had had an extra glass of port after dinner, and that he found himself alone with Hamilton, the others having gone to the cinema, he boldly broached the subject.
‘They say we may be going overseas again,’ he began.
‘Do they?’ said Hamilton, stretching for a newspaper.
‘Oh, I’m not trying to extract confidential information about the movement of troops. I’m only interested in the movements of Captain Maryngton. I don’t want to know whether the regiment is going or not, but what I do want to know – pretty damned desperately bad I want to know – is whether, if the regiment does go, I am likely to go with it.’
Hamilton was silent.
‘Look here, Colonel,’ Willie went on. ‘You’ve known me for a long time, and you must know what this thing means to me. I missed the last war by a few weeks, and all I have hoped for all my life is to see some fighting with the regiment. I had given up hope some years ago, when I left the Army. I thought there wouldn’t be another war in my time, and then I thought I might get married. You were the only fellow I told, and I don’t believe you ever repeated it, for which I’m damned grateful. Well, it didn’t come off, and now I don’t expect it ever will. I’m alone in the world, hale and hearty, just the sort of cannon-fodder they ought to be looking for – and, and, oh Hamilton, for God’s sake tell me – have I got a chance?’
Hamilton replied, ‘Not an earthly.’
Willie put his face in his hands, and Hamilton went on calmly:
‘As you have asked me, it is better that you should know the truth. No officers, under field rank, of your age, or anything like your age, are being sent abroad. You may have heard of exceptions. There are exceptions to every rule, but I can see no chance of your being one. It’s bad luck, but that’s how it is.’
‘I see,’ said Willie, ‘I see.’
He got up slowly, left the room and walked upstairs to bed. As he went he thought he might have asked whether he had any chance of promotion. But he knew what the answer would have been.
The final calamity comes often almost as a relief after long anxiety, and Willie, although he assured himself that life no longer held any interest for him, slept better that night than he had done for some time. Next morning he felt very miserable, but told himself that he must bear sorrow with fortitude, and that at such a moment in the world’s history there were more important things to think about than the fate of Willie Maryngton. There was still the regiment and there was still Felicity.
In a few days came confirmation of the rumours about the regiment’s movements, and it was followed by definite orders to sail. Henceforth they all lived in a turmoil of preparation, where there was as much work for Willie to do as for anyone else. His heart was in the work and he threw himself into it with passion, resisting firmly any inclination to pause and think. Like a discarded suitor employed on the preparations for the wedding of his beloved, he tried to think only of the task in hand, and to forget what must be the end of it. But too soon the end arrived. There could be none of those festivities or farewell parties that used to celebrate the departure of troops. The demands of security insisted that to the public eye the regiment should be there one day, carrying on their normal functions and giving no sign of departure, and on the morrow they should have disappeared, leaving no trace behind. Willie travelled with them to the port of embarkation, and actually went on board the ship in which they were sailing. When he had shaken hands with some of his friends, and came over the side for the last time, he had a curious and most uncomfortable feeling in his chest, and he found himself foolishly wondering whether people’s hearts really do break, whether it might not be more than a mere figure of speech.