R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield Read Online Free PDF Page B

It was easy to introduce them to the same theme, and be sure of their attention. He took the same line, stating the basic causes of the war and inviting questions. Foster Major's question gave him his cue; Foster Major, six feet tall, and already sprouting golden hairs on his upper lip. He asked, eagerly, 'How much longer will it take us to beat the Hun, sir?'
    'We can't beat him now, Foster!'
    The murmur that greeted this heresy dismayed him so he added, quickly, 'Not in the real sense, not in the way we might have done if the Gallipoli show had been a success.' He waited for that to sink in, then said, 'Now we've no alternative but to crush him and don't fool yourselves into believing that that is a final answer. It'll buy us time but that's about all. Jerry is bled white, but then, so are we. I don't know what you fellows think of the Americans but I'll tell you what the chaps think of them over there. Our one chance of avoiding a stalemate.'
    They digested this. He could sense incredulity doing battle with other, less complicated reactions. Indignation, possibly, something that ran counter to everything they had been told over the years by men fighting the war from Fleet Street. Finally Gosse, a languid, smartly dressed boy, whose heavy horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a slightly aesthetic look, raised his hand. 'Are you saying, sir, that we couldn't beat the Hun without the Yanks – without the Americans, sir?'
    'I'm saying it would take us another two to three years, and that's only another way of saying there wouldn't be a victory. The object of war, as the men over there see it, is to preserve our way of life. That's what they've been told and that's what they believe, those of them that still believe in anything except each other. In three years there would be nothing worth preserving. One other thing, Gosse. Over there nobody uses the term “Hun” any more. I stopped using it at a place called St. Quentin. Two Germans carried me in a blanket across four hundred yards of open ground under a box barrage. If they hadn't I wouldn't be here arguing the toss with you.'
    But Gosse, a diehard if ever there was one, stuck to his point.
    'I take it they were prisoners, sir?'
    'Yes, they were. But shell-splinters aren't particular where they find a billet. They risked their lives to save mine.'
    'But in 1914 they burned Louvain, sir.'
    'Yes, they did. But I like to think they've learned since then. We've all learned something, or should have. If we haven't, getting on for a hundred chaps who occupied those desks of yours a few years ago died in a circus, not a war.'
    He hadn't meant to say as much as this but later he was glad. For two reasons, separated by a few hours. In the first place, when the bell sounded marking the end of morning classes, they crowded round him, asking all kinds of questions, a few baffled and even hostile, but every one of them prompted by a burning curiosity. Then, as dusk was setting in, and he was closeted in what Herries called Mount Olympus – the ground-floor lavatory in the head's house with its opaque window opening on to the covered part of the quad – he overheard Gosse and two other Fifth Formers discussing him. Dispassionately, as though they already accepted him as a queer fish. He made haste to get out then but before he could escape he heard one boy say, 'All right, he's a Bolshie. But what he says makes sense to me, Starchy!'
    He was getting to grips with the Bamfylde obsession for nicknames. There were two Gosse boys at the school. The elder, a beefy extrovert, was called 'Archibald', so it followed that he should be labelled 'Archy' and his elegant brother 'Starchy'. Starchy Gosse was a pedant but fair-minded, it seemed, for he said, mildly, 'It depends on how long he's been out there,' and the thirdboy asked, 'Why, Starchy?'
    'They say it gets a man down in the end. That chap talks just like my uncle Edward. He was invalided out two years ago, but my governor has stopped inviting