In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

Both boys, The Preshutian assured him, had died gallant deaths. Just like every other Preshute student who had been killed so far in the War.

Despite Ellwood’s tactile relationship with his other friends, he rarely laid a finger on Gaunt unless they were play-fighting. Gaunt would have died rather than let Ellwood know how it bothered him.

Ellwood frequently compared himself to Tennyson and Gaunt to Tennyson’s closest friend. Mostly, Gaunt found it charming, except when he remembered that Arthur Hallam had died at the age of twenty-two and Tennyson had spent the next seventeen years writing grief poetry. Then Gaunt found it all a bit morbid, as if Ellwood wanted him to die, so that he would have something to write about.

“The Shell have been perfectly beastly to him, just because he told them all on his first day that he was a duke.” “Is he?” asked Gaunt, skimming the tops of tombstones with his fingertips as he walked. “Yes, he is, but that’s the sort of thing one ought to let people discover. It’s rather like me introducing myself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m Sidney Ellwood, I’m devastatingly attractive.’ It’s not for me to say.”

“If you’re waiting for me to confirm your vanity—” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Ellwood with a cheery little skip. “I haven’t had a compliment from you in about three months. I know, because I always write them down and put them in a drawer.” “Peacock.”

“Listen,” said Ellwood, closing his eyes and tilting up his face. “Can’t you just imagine the Romans thrashing the Celts if you’re quiet?” They stopped. Gaunt couldn’t imagine anything through the silence.

“Do you believe in magic?” he asked. Ellwood paused for a while, so long that if he had been anyone else, Gaunt might have repeated the question. “I believe in beauty,” said Ellwood, finally. “Yes,” said Gaunt, fervently. “Me too.”

He wondered what it was like to be someone like Ellwood, who contributed to the beauty of a plac...

Ellwood’s England was magical, thought Gaunt, picking his way around nettles. But it wasn’t England. Gaunt had been to the East End once, when his mother took him to give soup and bread to Irish weavers. There had been no cricket or hunting or ices, there. But Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt—because of Maud, perhaps, because she read Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and wrote mad things about the colonies in her letters—feared that ugliness was too important to ignore.

“We won’t lose,” he said, finally. “We’re the greatest empire that’s ever been.” _________

He was a big-eared, clumsy, disastrous sort of person: stupid at lessons, average at games, a cheerful failure.

“Perhaps I shall develop a habit. I think Byron had a habit.” “So do monks,” said Gaunt. “That was nearly funny, Gaunt,” said Roseveare encouragingly. “You’ll get there.”

Gaunt took a swig of whisky. He didn’t much like the taste, but it made him feel light, as if people weren’t looking at him. Or, perhaps, it made him feel as if he shouldn’t mind it if they did.

“Say you were on a sinking ship,” said Pritchard, as if Roseveare had never left. “Wouldn’t you rather drown than live, knowing you’d been a slimy little coward?”

“I’m sorry, I know it makes you uncomfortable when I talk about him.” It did. From everything Ellwood told Gaunt about Maitland, and from what Gaunt could see for himself, Maitland was only a step removed from a Renaissance prince. He was handsome and talented and brilliant, and yet Ellwood didn’t want him. If Maitland wasn’t capable of keeping Ellwood’s affections…!

Ellwood gave easily of himself, always had, but to Gaunt it had never seemed like a true sign of his feelings. Ellwood just liked being loved.

“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable,” said Gaunt, uncomfortably. “Yes, it does. I can feel how tense you’ve gone now,” said Ellwood. He put one hand on Gaunt’s neck. “Like you’re waiting for me to hit you.” “I don’t m...

Maud laughed. Ellwood always made her laugh. When he came to stay in the holidays, he’d lounge in the garden, trying to provoke her into flirtation. He never succeeded—Maud wasn’t the flirting type—but Gaunt could tell she liked it. “He’s very silly,” she had said once, fondly. “Do you think,” said Gaunt, to whom this seemed a profound misinterpretation, like calling Napoleon a bit of fun. “Of course, he doesn’t care about anyone,” said Maud, and Gaunt had been too devastated to answer. He never could, when she said things that were new and true and terrible.

“You’re welcome to use my room,” said Ellwood. “Thanks,” said Gaunt, who had intended to use Ellwood’s room with or without Ellwood’s permission.

“You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.”

They hadn’t touched since the day Cuthbert-Smith died. Not that Gaunt kept track of these things.

Gaunt wanted to scream. The bridge should break in half under the weight of us, he thought. I’m cracking up.

Ellwood behind his back: “We all know what Ellwood gets up to when he calls boys in to look at the lower-school cricket teams….” Ellwood burnt through people. He didn’t want them, once he’d had them. He thought of Ellwood leaning against him, fully clothed in that empty bathtub. “You’re just passing the time until you can marry Maud, aren’t you?” “Yes, I suppose so.”

But Ellwood was never more callous than when speaking of boys he’d once seemed to love.

Gaunt did not hesitate before he signed, although he felt as if his name was being ripped from him. He was simmering with a restlessness like that he felt in the boxing ring; a determination to hurt and be hurt, an impulse towards disaster and destruction, and nothing else would have satisfied him. He would not be a pansy German pacifist. He could not help that he was German, and he could not seem to help whatever he felt when Ellwood pressed himself close. But he could jolly well kill people.

“I wish I could join up,” said Ellwood. “My mother made me promise I wouldn’t until I finished school.” “Mine, too,” said Pritchard. “Mothers just don’t understand about war.”

Of course Ellwood was proud of Gaunt. He recognised that bravery could only exist where there was fear, and so of all of them, only Gaunt was truly capable of heroism.

He longed to save Gaunt’s life.

It was an uncomfortable, unspoken thing between them. Ellwood was in love with Gaunt. Gaunt was thoroughly decent and conventional.

“Gaunt’s a puzzle,” said Pritchard. “He’d be the most terrific rugby player if he tried at all.” “He hates rugger,” said Ellwood. “Hates everything,” said Pritchard, “except for Greek, and you.” Ellwood laughed. He had never explicitly confessed to Pritchard, yet somewhere along the way, Pritchard had understood.

It was amazing how much less affectionate “With affection” sounded than “Affectionately.”

Do you suppose the Romantic poets would have had anything to write about if it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic Wars? I can’t tell you how glad I am to be alive and young when we are. A war is what we needed: an injection of passion into a century of peace. It will galvanise us into a twentieth-century Renaissance, says Master Larchmont, and he would know.

“Henry.” I hated saying it aloud in that trembling dugout. Henry is the name I’m called by people who care for me: to bring it here is to collapse the world.

He knew the lines Ellwood had quoted. They were from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20. Ellwood had written them in pencil on the wall above Gaunt’s bed, and Gaunt had hoped they meant something.

The point is, after that no one ever said another word. Now I wonder whether one of those silent boys who did not speak up for me waited till you were gone to sneak into my room and burn my poems.

I do remember thumping Burgoyne. He jolly well deserved it, but I can’t say that it changed him much for the better. Sometimes I wish we had tried a different tack with him. Perhaps if we’d been more patient, he wouldn’t have got so twisted up.

David and I share letter-censoring duties, and it’s much less fun than you would think. David in particular is very disappointed. “I thought we’d find out that everyone was secretly a pervert or a murderer!” he said. Murder. What a quaint idea.

Mostly the men talk about the mud and the rats and God. We have to censor the mud and the rats, but God is allowed to remain, which strikes me as ironic.

What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

Burgoyne let out a high-pitched laugh. “Me, sneaking! I’m not the one who’s a Jew.” Mr Hammick says I was quite right to hit Burgoyne in the eye (“You can’t help being a Jew,” he said, in somewhat misguided sympathy), but that because Burgoyne’s father is on the school board, he has to punish me.

A friend of mine was blown up last week. I found him before anyone else. He was still alive, just about, but not in pain yet. I wanted to kill him. You wouldn’t let a horse or a dog suffer like that. But I’m a gentleman, and gentlemen don’t kill their friends. I hovered with my hand at my revolver, trying to force myself one way or the other. What is civilised in such circumstances? But then another officer arrived. He saw where my hand was and looked at me with revulsion. I felt a monster.

No one could survive with so many pieces of them missing, but we had to save him, or else we wouldn’t be civilised any more. He died this morning, thank God. If I am ever in his position, I hope there’s no one civilised nearby, only a quick-moving angel of death with a bullet in his barrel.

I’m sorry. I wish I could be more articulate, but the English language fails me. It sometimes feels as if the only words that still have meaning are place names: Ypres, Mons, Artois. Nothing else expresses.

You were far braver than I was. I wonder if your bravery then sustains you now that you have lost him.

Perhaps I would rather Ellwood had played at loving me, if only for a few weeks, than never to have had anything at all. (Ellwood would tell me there’s a Tennyson quotation for that.) There’s an empty space in my mind where those memories might have been.

“If he so much as looks at me funny, I’m breaking his face. I don’t care how good-looking he is.” “You can’t hurt him,” said Gaunt, his voice suddenly raw. Sandys stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “That’s the most human I’ve ever seen you look, Gaunt. And I’ve seen you in all sorts of compromising positions.” “Say you won’t hurt him.” “Good gracious, fine, I won’t touch him.”

“We’re all getting married, Gaunt. To nice women.”

“I’ve realised,” said Sandys, as they dressed, twenty minutes later. “You’re thinking ahead. That’s why you won’t kiss me, or tell Ellwood you’re in love with him.” “I’m not in love with him.” “You’re anticipating what they’ll say about you, when you’re forty and still a bachelor. ‘Oh, Gaunt was utterly decent at school. None of that naughty schoolboy amorousness. No, Gaunt’s an upstanding fellow.’ That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Gaunt fixed his tie. “I’m not thinking at all,” he said, more honestly than he had intended.

It is most peculiar how grief affects you differently each time. My infant sister died when I was seven, and I remember every moment leading up to the funeral with a clarity that throws the rest of my childhood into darkness. Since hearing about Stephen, however, I am aware of time only as a blur of images. In billets, I saw a worm in the earth, an innocent thing in a flower bed, and I was struck suddenly with a blinding vision of Stephen, whose face I knew so well—and the worms don’t distinguish—you and I know that.

We have seen how they make feasts of Germans, French and English alike. What does it matter, now, that he had memorised half of Paradise Lost?