The Impregnable Women, page 29
I want a real life!
And I want to see old England once again.
Graham, like everybody else, was worried by the lack of English news. For nearly a week there had been no delivery of letters or papers. All leave had been stopped. Soldiers due to return from leave had not come back, and no drafts had crossed. The censorship had been complete, and no word of the love-strike had yet reached the armies abroad. But many wild rumours had circulated despite the official communiqués that daily asserted the normality of life in Britain, and described the censorship as a temporary measure necessitated by the discovery of widespread espionage. Fortunately for discipline, the rumours were so many and various that belief in any one of them had never time to graw large enough to be dangerous, before it was dispelled by the eager acceptance of another, and that was soon ousted by a third. Bur the soldiers were worried, They grumbled without much cause, their temper was brittle and uncertain. There was uneasy defiance in their voices when they sang:
I want a nice life, a pipe-and-beer life,
You can keep your Iron Crosses where the monkey made its name,
I want a safe life!
I’ve had my fill of bombing-raids and seen enough of strife,
I want my own life,
And I want to see old Scotland once again!
The song died at once, however, when Graham gave the order to march at attention, and the Royal Scots wheeled into camp with all the arrogance of perfect discipline. On the parade-ground they formed close column, and halted. But the parade-ground was a scene of great disorder. It was surrounded by soldiers of many different regiments, all noisily excited, and while his companies were still dressing their ranks, Graham was approached by the Camp Commandant, an elderly and agitated Colonel; the Camp Adjutant, a thrice-wounded and weary Captain; and several other officers, all showing perturbation according to their nature. The censorship had broken down, and they had just heard of the love-strike. All the troops had heard of it. An American newspaper had been smuggled in, and hundreds of copies distributed. The men had refused to obey orders. They were on the verge of active mutiny. Could Graham answer for his battalion? The Commandant would authorize an issue of ten rounds a man . . .
‘No,’ said Graham.
The Royal Scots stood unmoving in the midst of tumult. Their ranks were perfectly dressed, their rifles at the slope steady in their hands. They wore the rigid impersonal expression of men under absolute discipline – but their eyes betrayed them. Their eyes had lost the blank look of the drill-ground, they were alive and eager. The other soldiers, pressing closer to the battalion, were shouting news of civil war. The women of Britain were in revolt. They were going to stop the war. There was fighting throughout England and Scotland. The women were fighting. They were besieged in Edinburgh Castle. There was a battle raging in Edinburgh between men and women. Their wives were being attacked . . .
The left-hand man of the front rank of ‘A’ Company was a tall soldierly fellow called Adam. He wore the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and a red seam on his cheek was the relic of a shrapnel-wound. His eyes grew bright with anger, his face darkened as he listened to broken tidings of the love-strike and the shouted fragments of news. Suddenly he threw down his rifle and marched out of the ranks.
‘Where the hell are you going, Adam?’ demanded the Company Sergeant-major.
Adam paused for a moment, looked over his shoulder, and bellowed the one word: ‘Hame!’
During the weeks of preparation for the love-strike, Lysis-trata had managed to establish communication with women in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and other capital cities; and the strike had become international. The women of Britain had been the first to rebel, but elsewhere results came quicker. In Paris the strike did not begin till the fifth day after Lysistrata had seized the Castle, but its effect was immediate chaos. For a day or two the news of it was kept from the armies in the field, but further censorship proved impossible.
About the same time as Private Adam of the Royal Scots initiated the homeward march, one of the most distinguished of French generals was presenting decorations for valour in the Place St Denis in Amiens. Three sides of the square were lined with troops, and the General was attended by a numerous Staff. Solemnly he pinned medal after medal on the breasts of the most gallant of France’s heroic defenders. Solemnly he kissed the brave cheeks of the bemedalled warriors. Solemnly, in the name of the Republic, he thanked them all for their most valiant service.
At his side an officer read the name of Sergeant Baradat of the Chasseurs Alpins – it was M. César Baradat, sometime Minister for Labour, whose fiery eloquence had done so much to precipitate the war – and proceeded: Engagé volontaire pour la durée de la guerre, il a fait preuve en ioutvs cronstances d’entrain et de courage. Le 14 juin, est alié sous un fen de mitrailleuses des plus violents au secours de son Chef de bataillon. . .’
The General was already pinning the Médaille Militaire on the broad chest of Sergeant Baradat, when a Colonel of cavalry – spurs jingling, leather creaking, lungs panting – came running up and without apology thrust before his eyes a copy of an America newspaper across the front page of which ran the streaming headline: LOVE STRIKE SPREADS TO PARIS.
The General took the paper, and read. He uttered an extraordinary noise, a groan of horror shrilling roughly into anguish, and with shaking hands turned the page towards Baradat. ‘Lisez!’ he exclaimed in quavering tones.
Baradat read; and in his tremendous throat there sounded the rising growl of an infuriated lion. With instant decision and a violent gesture, he shouted: ‘À Paris!’
‘À l’instant!’ said the General hoarsely; and arm-in-arm they marched in the direction of the capital.
Less immediate, but much more astonishing, was the effect of the strike – or rather of the news of it – in Italy and Germany. For many years the inhabitants of these countries had heard no real news of any kind. Their Ministries of Propaganda had supplied them with well-edited statements about selected occurrences at home and abroad, and these official bulletins were, on the whole, piously believed. But anything except official news was held to be at the least a dastardly perversion, and often a direct reversal of the truth. It was widely known, for example, that the French always called white black, and so had the English till the war made them allies of Germany. When, therefore, the strike broke out in a small way in Rome and Berlin, and news of it went with all the swiftness of illicit rumour through the two countries, the people were at first bewildered. But then the natural perspicacity of the Latin, and the remorseless logic of the Prussian, triumphed over obscurity and they perceived the truth. The truth must be the direct opposite of that which rumour stated! It was not their women but their soldiers who had declared a love strike!
Throughout Germany and Italy there was consternation, then terror, then a dreadful anger. The women of these countries had long since been taught that a woman’s function was purely domestic, and though at first many had protested against so ancient a restriction, they had become reconciled to it, and now could hardly envisage any other sort of life than that which ran for ever between ample board and double bed. And here was a rebellion that would lay waste the half of their kingdom! Women, they cried, cannot live by bread alone, and from all their towns and villages a monstrous army set forth, more esurient than daughters of the leech, more shameless than Zuleika, and strong with many years of scrubbing, ironing, blanket-washing, and drubbing their ceaseless offspring. Over the parados of every trench on every battlefront of the Fatherland and Roma Rediviva they descended upon their astonished soldiers, and by the slack of their collars and the seat of their small-clothes took them, shouting, home in a pandemonium of topsy-turvy rape; and like Sabine women playing one-good-turn-deserves-another, never relaxed nerve or muscle till they had them safe between bolted door and the reproachful vacancy of the nuptial couch. And that was Italy and Germany out of it.
In Russia the end of the war came with a singular poignancy. The women of the Soviet Union had been trained and accustomed to do anything from managing a boot-factory to hewing forests in Siberia or staffing a university in Transcaucasia. They had acquired a real taste for experiment, and taking to the idea of the love-strike with much enthusiasm, organized it with great efficiency. – It was, of course, unanimous, because unanimity had become second-nature in Russia. – The men were unspeakably dismayed. They realized and admitted that their wives, free-born and equal citizens, had every right to refuse them that gracious office which only a bourgeois mentality could describe as obligatory. Were they to insist on being loved, they would undoubtedly be arraigned as bourgeois, and enemies to the Communist State; but should they acquiesce in not being loved, then their lives would be barren indeed. For love was all they had left that they could call their own. All else in their world had been communized and collectivized, and all their activities had been disciplined according to the habits of the workman Stakhanov: a carpenter who had been used to drive in his nails with five blows of the hammer, must drive them in with two; a team boilermakers who had always taken three leisurely weeks to create their boilers, were compelled to construct them in one; a poet who had proposed to spend a lifetime in the perfecting of his art, was ordered to produce his punctual canto month by month. That was the Stakhanov system, and the sole activity immune from it was love. A man could still make love at whatever speed he chose, as lazy and light-hearted as he cared to be. And so love had increased in value. It was the one treasure of life, the flower in a slum window, the child of old age, the found shilling of destitution. It was not Venus, proud in white marble or from loud Olympus tormenting a boisterous people; but the hidden bird in its nest, the dream of a workaday world too long and wearily awake. So when the soldiers heard that love was to be taken from them, they did not quarrel and curse and shout. They wept. All over Russia sounded the low wailing of intolerable grief, and if the men had lost every other attribute of manhood, they could still have been known by their tears. The war ended in a passion of fear and remorse, and the soldiers hurried home to beg forgiveness.
In a very short time, indeed, the strike in one way or another achieved the desired result in every warring country but one. The exception was Bulgaria. The Bulgarians proved strangely impervious to female threat, and treated the strike with contemptuous indifference. Austere and disciplined, they continued the war long after everybody else had abandoned it, and for some time it looked as if they might establish their hegemony over all Europe. Fortunately, however, they behaved in a very reasonable manner, and having compelled the World Court to admit their claim to be the victors in the Last Great War, they retired with an enormous indemnity, and decorated Sofia with innumerable statues of their successful generals.
Hostilities were therefore concluded with satisfaction to everyone – except the Ministers, Cabinets, Field Marshals, Dictators, and Chancelleries of the late-warring states, who for long grumbled at the taking away of authority from their accustomed hands – and the Great Powers discovered that since all had been equally defeated, they could now live together in reasonable amity. No one resented, because few saw it, the enormous Arch of Triumph that overspanned the railway at Dragoman Pass, and bore upon its frieze the gigantic legend: BULGARIA VICTRIX.
II
The marriage of Rose Armour and Julian Brown was celebrated early in August in the Church of St John in Edinburgh. There was as large a congregation as the church would contain, and outside a multitude that entirely filled the confluence of roads at the west end of Princes Street. In a front pew sat Lady Lysistrata and General Scrymgeour. Immediately after his surrender in the Castle he had offered to resign his commission, but as the whole Cabinet had acquiesced in the capitulation he was persuaded to withdraw his offer. ‘Consensus facit legem,’ the Prime Minister had gravely observed. ‘Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur,’ he added more cheerfully.
Lord Pippin attended the wedding with several of his colleagues, and in the pew behind him were Major and Mrs Graham, now happily re-united. Mrs Graham was impatiently waiting till the service should be concluded, when she hoped to find a chance of talking to the Prime Minister and resuming her lecture on politics. Not far away was Delia Curie with the Secretary for War on one side of her, and Commander Lawless on the other; and beside Lysistrata were Lady Oriole and her husband, a tall man with a very red face, completely bald, who sang hymns, psalms, and responses with deafening enjoyment. Mrs MacLeod of Rhidorroch, her daughter, and half a hundred other Highland ladies were present, and Lieutenant Mc-Combie was in attendance on his wife, a person of handsome but rather frosty appearance. In all the large and fashionable congregation, however, there was no one more magnificently attired than Mrs McLafferty of the Gallowgate in Glasgow. She had been given a grant of £100 for her valiant defence of the steps, and she had spent it all on entertainment and fine clothing, much of which she wore to the wedding. At intervals during the service she could be heard to mutter, with most reverent amazement, ‘Ay, Christ, ay!’
It was generally agreed that Rose Armour had never looked more lovely, and her ten tall bridesmaids attracted much attention. They had all played a prominent part in the defence of the Castle, and the heroic figures of Miss McNab and Miss McNulty were particularly admired; as was the fine emerald in Miss Hepburn’s engagement ring. In such an environment it was inevitable that Julian should be more perfunctorily noticed, but ir was observed that he carried himself well and spoke clearly when called upon to do so.
When they left the church he was ignore d completely, however, and this humiliation was exacerbated by the behaviour of his wife, of which he strongly disapproved; as any new-made husband would have done. The enormous crowd vociferously welcomed her, and would not let her go. They implored, they demanded a song. And Rose, enchanted by their obvious affection, tucked up her wedding-dress, and assisted by a policeman and the ever-helpful Mr Pelham-Blair, climbed to the roof of her waiting limousine, where she clutched her hands in a familiar gesture, and inquired in her sweet husky voice, ‘What shall I sing?’
The answer was immediate and unanimous. In the church the organist, intoxicated by the occasion and his own virtuosity, was playing over and over again the Wedding March; and Rose, outside, began to sing her famous codicil to it, in which the delighted multitude presently joined:
Up in the morning and fry the bacon,
Make him a nice cup of tea!
Who would think yesterday I was forsaken,
Now I’m as happy as happy can be?
If you feel rotten because you’re a woman,
Seek for a suitable spouse –
Say what you like, but we’re all of us human,
And better for having a man in the house!
At the subsequent reception, however, she was commend-ably serious. She made a speech – it was a good deal longer than Julian’s – in the course of which she said that she expected soon to have very little time for singing, as she had agreed to stand for Parliament in the forthcoming General Election. Her constituency was to be Linlithgow, a county with which she was closely associated inasmuch as she had traversed part of it in her ride to the Hawes Inn. Her husband, she added, would also be devoting himself to public work, for he had been appointed Assistant Director of Personnel under the new Board of National Reconstruction.
The abrupt and unexpected conclusion of the war had released a flood of energy which, in reaction against the purposes of destruction for which it had been lately dammed, now turned with immense enthusiasm to the task of rebuilding Britain closer to the heart’s desire of those whose hearts were benevolently in league with some intelligence. The damage done by air raids, in the initial phase of the war, had obviously to be repaired; but the large migration of industry which had followed the destruction of central London and the removal of Government, showed clearly that reconstruction must mean more than rebuilding on old sites and the sedulous refashioning of what had hitherto existed. In its pre-war condition Britain had been like an ill-loaded tramp-steamer. The Ship of State had had to navigate the Seven Seas with most of her cargo lumped into the south-east corner. She had been, in nautical language, badly by the head. But now her cargo was to be properly stowed, and industry more equally situated throughout the length and breadth of the country.
With this prospect in view, there was a great resurgence of local pride, and city after city produced plans for re-building which combined a stately aspect with every convenience for those who were to live in them. The old disfigurement of municipal architecture and industrial sprawling was steadily to be effaced, and instead would rise proud and spacious cities whose inhabitants would find comfort to their hands, and whenever they raised their eyes, delight.
The Board of National Reconstruction gave advice where it was needed, and coordinated local plans and organization; but it did not impose any outward uniformity, though it insisted on the maintenance of certain standards of comfort and convenience in domestic building, in this freedom the cities chose according to local imagination, and built in the high-rearing bride of splendid competition. Liverpool, as the gateway by which travellers from the New World should enter the Old, recaptured the soaring spirit of the Middle Ages and built itself in a Gothic style that made all the music of its traffic sound like a fugue of Bach’s; and Bradford put on the magnificence of baroque. In Birmingham a group of architects gave birth to a new Classicism: and Glasgow rose white and massive in a sky-scraping forest of concrete and steel. No more could the traveller go by night from yorkshire to Renfrewshire, from Lancashire to South Wales and never know he had moved, such was the grimy squalor that he left, of railway-station, slum, and paltry offices; and such the dirty mediocrity to which he came, of factory and Council house and jerry-built sore of bungalows. But every city was itself, and took delight in being so; and every town had a face and spirit of its own.
The triumph of all was London, and much of the reason for its triumph was the Thames. The Thames was given its proper due and reverence. London obeyed its course, and presently every curve and flexure of the river offered noble views of parks and terraces and stately buildings that adorned its banks. London shrank to a quarter of its previous size, but became a capital worthy of the empire over which it ruled, and a befitting consort for the river the had given it life.
