Knight Without Armour

The effect of his weeks in hospital was to give him an extraordinarily real and deep affection for these simple-hearted men as well as a bitter indignation against the scheme of things that had driven them from their homes to be maimed and shattered in a quarrel they did not even understand. The fact that they did not complain themselves made him all the more inclined to complain for them, and the constant ingress of fresh wounded to take the place of men who died had a poignantly cumulative effect upon his emotions. He had already cabled Aitchison about his illness, promising to resume his job as soon as he could; now he began to feel that his real message might be sent as appropriately from a bed in hospital as from a position near the lines. After all, it was the tragic cost of war that people needed to realise; they were in no danger of forgetting its excitements and occasional glories. In such a mood he began to compose cables which a friendly nurse despatched for him from the local telegraph-office. He described the pathos and heroism of the Russian wounded, their childlike patience and utter lack of hatred for the enemy, their willingness to endure what they could not understand. After his third cable on such lines a reply came from Aitchison—’Cannot use your stuff advise you return immediately sending out Ferguson.’ So there it was; he was cashiered, sacked; they were sending out Ferguson, the well-known traveller and war-correspondent who had made his name in South Africa. A.J. was acidly disappointed, of course, and also (when he came to think about it) rather worried about the future. There was nothing for it but to pack up and return to Europe as soon as he was fit to leave hospital—to Europe, but not to England. The thought of London, of the London streets, and of Fleet Street, especially, appalled him in a way he could not exactly analyse. He had a little money still left and began to think of living in France or Germany as long as it held out, and as the most obvious economy he would travel back third-class. He left hospital at the beginning of August and caught the first train west. The discomfort of sleeping night after night on a plank bed without undressing did not prevent him from enjoying the journey; the train itself was spacious and the halts at stations were long and frequent enough to give ample opportunity for rest and exercise. His companions were nearly all soldiers, most of them returning to their homes after sickness or wounds, and their company provided a constant pageant of interest and excitement. The long pauses at places he felt he would almost certainly never visit again and whose names he would almost certainly never remember, gave an atmosphere of epic endlessness to the journey; and there was the same atmosphere in his talks to fellow-travellers, with some of whom he became very intimate. Sometimes, especially when sunset fell upon the strange, empty plains, a queer feeling of tranquillity overspread him; he felt that he wanted never to go back to London at all; the thought of any life in the future like his old Fleet Street life filled his mind with inquietude. And then the train would swing into the dreaming rhythm of the night, and the soldiers in the compartment would light their candles and stick them into bottles on the window-ledges, and begin to sing, or to laugh, or to chatter. Siberia surprised him by being quite hot, and sometimes the night passed in a cloud of perfume, wafted from fields of flowers by the railside. Then, early in the morning, there would be a halt at some little sun-scorched station, where the soldiers would fetch hot water to make tea and where A.J. could get down and stretch his legs while the train-crew loaded wood into the tender. Often they waited for hours in sidings, until troop trains passed them going east, and for this reason the return journey took much longer than the eastward one.

At a station a few hundred miles from the European frontier A.J. got into conversation with a well-dressed civilian whom he found himself next to in the refreshment-room. The man was obviously well educated, and discussed the war and other topics in a way that might have been that of any other cultured European. He made the usual enquiries as to what A.J. was doing and who he was; then he congratulated him on his Russian, which he said was surprisingly good for one who had had to learn so quickly. The two got on excellently until the departure of the train; then they had to separate, since the Russian was travelling first-class.