The General Read online

  The Battle of Volkslaagte – a very great battle in the eyes of the British public of 1899, wherein nearly five thousand men had been engaged a side – was won, and Curzon was marked for his captaincy and the D.S.O. He was not a man of dreams, but even if he had been, his wildest dreams would not have envisaged the future command of a hundred thousand British soldiers – nor the bathchair on Bournemouth promenade.

  Chapter Two

  To Curzon the rest of the South African War was a time of tedium and weariness. His wound kept him in hospital during the Black Week, while England mourned three coincident defeats inflicted by an enemy whom she had begun to regard as already at her mercy. He was only convalescent during Roberts’ triumphant advance to Pretoria. He found himself second-in-command of a detail of recruits and reservists on the long and vulnerable line of communications when the period of great battles had come to an end.

  There were months of tedium, of army biscuit and tough beef, of scant water and no tobacco. There were sometimes weeks of desperate marching, when the horses died and the men grumbled and the elusive enemy escaped by some new device from the net which had been drawn round him. There were days of scorching sun and nights of bitter cold. There was water discipline to be enforced so as to prevent the men from drinking from the polluted supplies which crammed the hospitals with cases of enteric fever. There was the continuous nagging difficulty of obtaining fodder so as to keep horses in a condition to satisfy the exacting demands of column commanders. There were six occasions in eighteen months during which Curzon heard once more the sizzle and crack of bullets overhead, but he did not set eyes on an enemy – except prisoners – during that period. Altogether it was a time of inconceivable dreariness and monotony.

  But it could not be said that Curzon was actively unhappy. He was not of the type to chafe at monotony. The dreariness of an officers’ mess of only two or three members did not react seriously upon him – he was not a man who needed mental diversion. His chill reserve and ingrained frigid good manners kept him out of mess-room squabbles when nerves were fraying and tempers were on edge; besides, a good many of the officers who came out towards the end of the war were not gentlemen and were not worth troubling one’s mind about. Yet all the same, it was pleasant when the war ended at last, and Curzon could say good-bye to the mixed rabble of mounted infantry who had made up the column to which he was second-in-command.

  He rejoined the Twenty-second Lancers at Cape Town – all the squadrons together again for the first time for two years – and sailed for home. The new king himself reviewed them after their arrival, having granted them time enough to discard their khaki and put on again the glories of blue and gold, schapska and plume, lance pennons and embroidered saddle-cloths. Then they settled down in their barracks with the fixed determination (as the Colonel expressed it, setting his lips firmly) of ‘teaching the men to be soldiers again’.

  The pleasure of that return to England was intense enough, even to a man as self-contained as Curzon. There were green fields to see, and hedgerows, and there was the imminent prospect of hunting. And there were musical comedies to go to, and good food to eat, and pretty women to be seen in every street, and the Leicester Lounge to visit, with a thrill reminiscent of old Sandhurst days. And there was the homage of society to the returned warriors to be received – although that was not quite as fulsome as it might have been, because public enthusiasm had begun to decline slowly since the relief of Mafeking, and there was actually a fair proportion of people who had forgotten the reported details of the Battle of Volkslaagte.

  There was naturally one man who knew all about it – a portly, kindly gentleman with a keen blue eye and a deep guttural voice who had been known as H.R.H. at the time when the Lancers had been ordered to South Africa, but who was now King of England. He said several kindly words to Curzon at the investiture to which Curzon was summoned by the Lord Chamberlain. And Curzon bowed and stammered as he received his D.S.O. – he was not a man made for courts and palaces. In the intimacy of his hotel bedroom he had felt thrilled and pleased with himself in his Lancer full dress, with his plastron and his schapska, his gold lace and glittering boots and sword, and he had even found a sneaking pleasure in the stir among the people on the pavement as he walked out to get into the waiting cab, but his knees knocked and his throat dried up in Buckingham Palace.

  On the same leave Curzon had in duty-bound to go and visit Aunt Kate, who lived in Brixton. The late Mr Curzon, Captain Herbert Curzon’s father, had married a trifle beneath him, and his wife’s sister had married a trifle beneath her, and the Mr Cole whom she had married had not met with much success in life, and after marriage Mr Curzon had met with much, so that the gap between Curzon and his only surviving relatives – between the Captain in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own and the hard-up city clerk with his swarm of shrieking children – was wide and far too deep to plumb. Curzon drove to Brixton in a cab, and the appearance of the cab caused as much excitement in that street as did his full-dress uniform in the West End. Aunt Kate opened the door to him – a paint-blistered door at the end of a tile path three yards long, leading from a gate in the iron railings past a few depressed laurels in the tiny ‘front garden’. Aunt Kate was momentarily disconcerted at the sight of the well-dressed gentleman who had rat-tat-tatted on her door, but she recovered herself.

  ‘Why, it’s Bertie,’ she said. ‘Come in, dear. Uncle Stanley ought to be home soon. Come in here and sit down. Maud! Dick! Gertie! Here’s your cousin Bertie home from South Africa!’

  The shabby children came clustering into the shabby parlour; at first they were shy and constrained, and when the constraint wore off they grew riotous, making conversation difficult and hindering Aunt Kate in her effort to extract from her nephew details of his visit to Buckingham Palace.

  ‘What’s it like in there?’ she asked. ‘Is it all gold? I suppose there’s cut-glass chandeliers?’

  Curzon had not the least idea. And –

  ‘Did the king really speak to you? What was he wearing?’

  ‘Field-Marshal’s uniform,’ said Curzon briefly.

  ‘Of course, you’ve been presented to him before, when you went into the Army,’ said Aunt Kate enviously. ‘That was in the dear queen’s time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Curzon.

  ‘It must be lovely to know all these people,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Are there any lords in your regiment now?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Curzon. ‘One or two.’

  It was irritating, because he himself found secret pleasure in serving in the same regiments as lords, and in addressing them without their titles, but the pleasure was all spoilt now at finding that Aunt Kate was of the same mind.

  More irritating still was the arrival of Stanley Cole, Aunt Kate’s husband, whom Curzon felt he could not possibly address now as ‘Uncle Stanley’, although he had done so as a boy. Mr Cole was an uncompromising Radical, and no respecter of persons, as he was ready to inform anyone.

  ‘I didn’t ’old with your doings in South Africa,’ he announced, almost before he was seated. ‘I didn’t ’old with them at all, and I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave fought with the Boers in the first place. And burning farms, and those concentration camps. Sheer wickedness, that was. You shouldn’t have done it, you know, Bertie.’

  Curzon, with an effort, maintained an appearance of mild good manners, and pointed out that all he had done was to obey orders.

  ‘Orders! Yes! It’s all a system. That’s what it is.’

  Mr Cole seemed to think that in this case the word ‘system’ was deeply condemnatory – to Curzon, of course, the word was, if anything, of the opposite implication. He was roused far enough to suggest to his uncle that if he had undergone the discomforts of two years of guerrilla warfare he might not be so particular as to the methods employed to suppress it.

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone,’ said Mr Cole. ‘Not if they had tried to make me. Lord Roberts, now. ’E’s trying to introduce conscription. Ought to
’ave more sense. And now there’s all this talk about a big Navy. Big fiddlestick!’

  There was clearly no ground at all which was common to Mr Cole and his nephew by marriage.

  ‘Look at the rise in the income tax!’ said Mr Cole. ‘Two shillings in the pound! Peace, retrenchment, and reform. That’s what we want. And a sane Government, and no protection.’

  Curzon might have replied that Mr Cole had nothing to complain about in the matter of income tax, seeing that his income was clearly below the taxable limit, but his good manners would not permit him to say so while he was conscious of his own seven hundred a year from his private means. Instead, he rose to go, apologizing for the briefness of his visit and pleading further urgent matters demanding his attention. He declined the tea which Aunt Kate belatedly remembered to offer him; he said truthfully enough, that he never had tea, and the children goggled up in surprise at a man who could so lightly decline tea, and Aunt Kate said, ‘You’ll be going to have late dinner, I suppose.’

  She accompanied him to the door.

  ‘Good-bye, then, Bertie,’ she said. ‘It was nice of you to come. We’ll be seeing you again soon, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Curzon, and he knew it was a lie as he said it, that he would never be able to bring himself again to penetrate into Brixton. He thought the lie had succeeded, if he thought about it at all, but Aunt Kate dabbed furtively at her eyes before she went back into the parlour to talk over the visitor with her family. She knew perfectly well that she would never see ‘Lily’s boy’ again.

  Meanwhile Curzon, out in the cabless suburban street, had to make his way on foot to the main road to some means of conveyance to take him back to his hotel. Before he took a cab he was constrained to go into a saloon bar and order himself a large whisky-and-soda, and while he drank it he had to mop his forehead and run his fingers round underneath his collar as recollections of his visit surged up within him. He thanked God fervently that he was an orphan, that he was an only child, and that his father was an only child, and that his mother had had only one sister. He thanked God that his father’s speculations in Mincing Lane had been early successful, so that preparatory school and Haileybury and Sandhurst had come naturally to his son.

  In a moment of shuddering self-revelation he realized that in other circumstances it might have been just possible that he should have breathed naturally in the air of Brixton. Worse still he felt for a nauseating moment that in that environment he too might have been uncertain with his aitches and spoken about late dinner in a respectful tone of voice. It was bad enough to remember that as a child he had lived in Bayswater – although he could only just remember it, as they had early moved to Lancaster Gate. He had ridden in the Park then, and his father had already decided that he should go into the Army and, if possible, into the cavalry among the real swells.

  He could remember his father using that very expression, and he could remember his father’s innocent pride in him at Sandhurst and when he had received his commission in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own. Curzon struggled for a moment – so black was his mood – with the realization that the Twenty-second Lancers was not really a crack regiment. He could condescend to infantrymen and native Indian army – poor devils – of course, but he knew perfectly well when he came to admit it to himself, as on this black occasion, that the Households and Horse Gunners and people like the Second Dragoons could condescend to him in their turn.

  His father, of course, could not appreciate these distinctions and could have no realization that it was impossible for a son of a Mincing Lane merchant to obtain a nomination to one of these exclusive regiments.

  Perhaps it was as well that the old man had died when he did, leaving his twenty-year-old son the whole of his fortune – when his partnership had been realized and everything safely invested it brought in seven hundred a year. Seven hundred a year was rather on the small side, regarded as the private means of a cavalry subaltern, but it sufficed, and as during the South African War he had been unable to spend even his pay, he was clear of debt for once, and could look forward to a good time.

  The world was growing rosier again now, with his second whisky-and-soda inside him. He was able to light a cigar and plan his evening. By the time his cab had carried him up to town he was able to change into dress clothes without its crossing his mind even once that in other circumstances to change might not have been so much of a matter of course.

  Chapter Three

  There were twelve years of peace between the two wars. It was those twelve years which saw Herbert Curzon undergo transformation from a young man into a middle-aged, from a subaltern into a senior major of cavalry. A complete record in detail of those twelve years would need twelve years in the telling to do it justice, so as to make it perfectly plain that nothing whatever happened during those twelve years; the professional life of an officer in a regiment of cavalry of the line is likely to be uneventful and Curzon was of the type which has no other life to record.

  They were twelve years of mess and orderly room; twelve years of inspection of horses’ feet and of inquiry why Trooper Jones had been for three days absent without leave. Perhaps the clue to Curzon’s development during this time is given by his desire to conform to type, and that desire is perhaps rooted too deep for examination. Presumably preparatory school and Haileybury and Sandhurst had something to do with it. Frequently it is assumed that it is inherent in the English character to wish not to appear different from one’s fellows, but that is a bold assumption to make regarding a nation which has produced more original personalities than any other in modern times. It is safer to assume that the boldness and insensitiveness which is found sporadically among the English have developed despite all the influences which are brought to bear to nip them in the bud, and are therefore, should they survive to bear fruit, plants of sturdy growth.

  Whether or not Herbert Curzon would have displayed originality, even eccentricity, if he had been brought up in another environment – in that of his cousins, Maudie and Gertie and Dick Cole, for instance – it is impossible to say. It sounds inconceivable to those of us who know him now, but it might be so. There can be no doubt whatever, on the other hand, that during the middle period of his life Curzon was distinguished by nothing more than his desire to be undistinguishable. The things which he did, he did because other people had done before him, and if a tactful person had been able to persuade him to defend himself for so doing he could only have said that to him that appeared an entirely adequate reason for doing them.

  When as a senior captain in the regiment he quelled with crushing rudeness the self-assertiveness of some newly arrived subaltern in the mess, he did not do so from any feeling of personal animosity towards the wart in question (although the wart could not help feeling that this was the case), but because senior captains have always quelled self-assertive young subalterns.

  He was a firm supporter of the rule that professional subjects should not be discussed in the mess. Whether the subject rashly brought up was ‘The Tactical Employment of Cavalry in the Next War’ or the new regulations regarding heelropes, Curzon was always on the side of propriety, and saw to it that the discussion was short-lived. It did not matter to him – probably he did not know – that the convention prohibiting the discussion in mess of professional matters and of women dated back to the days of duelling, and that these two subjects about which men are more likely to grow angry had been barred then out of an instinct of self-preservation. It was sufficient to him that the convention was established; it was that fact which justified the convention.

  And that his conviction was sincere in this respect was obvious. No one who knew him could possibly doubt that he would far rather receive another wound as bad as the one at Volkslaagte – more, that he would far rather go again through all the mental agony of Volkslaagte – than appear in public wearing a bowler hat and a morning coat. Even if he had thought such a combination beautiful (and he really never stopped to wonder whether a
nything was beautiful or not) he could not have worn it; indeed, it is difficult to imagine anything which would have induced him to do so. The example of the royal family over a series of years might have contrived it, but even then he would have been filled with misgivings.

  The feeling of distaste for everything not done by the majority of those among whom he moved (wherever this feeling originated, in the germ or in the womb or at school, or in the Army) had its effect, too, on his professional career. The majority of his fellows did not apply to go through the Staff College; therefore he did not apply. There was only a small proportion of officers who by their ebullient personalities attracted the attention of their seniors; therefore Curzon made no effort to be ebullient in his personality – quite apart from his dislike of attracting attention.

  These pushful, forceful persons had a black mark set against them in Curzon’s mind for another reason as well, distinct although closely connected. They disturbed the steady even tenor of life which it was right and proper to expect. If routine made life more comfortable and respectable (just as did the prohibition of shop in mess) the man who disturbed that routine was an enemy of society. More than that, no man had any right whatever to upset the arrangements of his seniors.

  There was a very painful occasion when Curzon was commanding a squadron and had just arranged a much-desired shooting leave – it was during the five years that the regiment was stationed in India. Squires, his senior captain, came to him in high spirits, and announced that the War Office had at last seen fit to sanction his application for the Staff College; he would be leaving in a month. Curzon’s face fell. A month from now his leave was due; a fortnight from now would arrive the new draft of recruits and remounts – hairy of heel all of them, as years of experience of recruits and remounts had taught him to expect. He had counted on Squires to get them into shape; Squires could be relied upon to keep the squadron up to the mark (as Curzon frankly admitted to himself) better than any of the remaining officers. Curzon had no hesitation when it came to choosing between the squadron and his leave. He must postpone his shooting, and he had been looking forward so much to the thrill and danger of following a gaur through blind cover.