“What could you do?” asked Mary.
“I think we ought to have drilling on the links.”
“They’d cut up the greens,” said Mary.
“We could keep ’em off the greens,” said Edward Albert.
“We could keep a member on the links to see to that.”
The Local Defence Volunteers became a useful receptacle for elderly military men conversant with the tactics of fifty years ago, but still anxious to impart ideas of duty, discipline, social respect and restrain the notorious panic possibilities of the lower orders. Presently the Volunteers were actually drilling, three days a week, with sticks and old rifles, while representatives of the committee watched over the amenities of the links.
These formidable preparations were subjected to a certain amount of ungenerous criticism by people who had seen something of the fighting in Spain, France, Holland and elsewhere, and after due consideration the military authorities issued their white armlets and changed their names to the Home Guard, H.G.s.
The larger and richer British Tewlers had always had a profound and perhaps justifiable fear of an armed population, and for a time it was debated whether such weapons as were available ought not to be kept under armed guard at some strategic point and only actually issued to the men when the invader was already in ^he country. Time enough then for a policeman or somebody to knock them up and tell them what was afoot. In the event of German troops actually appearing, the Home Guard was to communicate the sinister news to the nearest policeman, who would act according to the printed instructions which in most cases had not yet been delivered to him. All road signs were removed, all maps called in, and every arrangement made for any British forces that might be in being, to get hopelessly lost in their own country.
Meanwhile the detonations of the war mounted to new levels of horror and violence. The ever-mounting flames advanced more and more closely towards Edward Albert. He found his own anxiety reflected in the faces of his neighbours, He talked in his sleep. He dreamt of a gigantic figure, the War God Mars, but rather like Lord Kitchener in the early posters, pointing a vast forefinger at him. “What is that fellow there doing? I want him”
It was no good pleading his defective health. He had already gone down to a Brighthampton doctor for a thorough overhaul. He had said nothing about it to Mary for fear of alarming her needlessly. He had been stripped, punched, X-rayed, sampled, tested for eyesight (slight astigmatism), everything. “Sound as a bell,” said the doctor. “Congratulations. They’ll be calling up you forty-twos in no time now,”
“I can’t stand by and do nothing,” he told Morningside.
“I’m going to qualify for the Home Guard now.”
His action brought Mr Droop to the same decision, but Mr Copper and Mr Stannish preferred to do clerical work in Brighthampton that would release younger men for the forces. But the designer of tessellated pavements who had been holding out as a conscientious objector with an unsound lung, was suddenly excited by Edward Albert’s example, recanted his objections and joined up for training. His wife was already in uniform as a tram conductor. Mrs Rooter also appeared in an authoritative get-up. She was some sort of accessory policewoman, detailed to protect the stray girlhood of Brighthampton from the immoral impulses that brought them up like moths at twilight to the Prospect Estate. Her flickering electric torch, her sudden challenge like the voice of conscience, was apt to be belated. “What’s this?” she would say. “You can’t do this, you know, here. You really can’t.”
They had thought otherwise, and more often than not they had.
Naturally enough Edward Albert and his friends discussed the Home Guard from various points of view. At first very few people had considered it as an actual fighting force. It was just another unimplemented threat to Hitler. “Let him come and he’d jolly well see,” was the idea. “We’d see what Jerry would do first and then we’d tackle him,” We were not like these here Frenchies. And so forth.
Mr Copper’s idea was that the job of the Home Guards was first and foremost to keep order and prevent any guerrilla fighting that might provoke Jerry to reprisals. “Don’t give him an excuse,” said Mr Copper. “And when the war is over you’ll be a sort of supplementary police to suppress strikers and mutineers and all that sort of thing. The country’s bound to be in a rotten state.”
But Mr Droop held that when the war began to turn at last against Germany we might send an expeditionary force into Europe (“God help us!” said Mr Stannish), and then the Home Guards would have to defend the country against any counter-raids. So it ought to be armed and trained as a real modern fighting force. Apparently that was being done in some parts of the country, but not in others. There was, said the authorities, “considerable local autonomy.” That is to say, the authorities suffered from the common characteristic of Homo Tewler the whole world over, an undetermined confusion of ideas. So long as they behaved with a certain mean discretion, the particular things they did were of secondary importance.
Throughout the early months of ’41, the Brighthampton Home Guard was a black-out and curfew Home Guard. Then came a violent change of policy. Somewhere higher up, there was positive knowledge that Jerry had carefully worked-out plans for an experimental raid on the Brighthampton district. There was to be a try-out in the Cretan fashion with parachutists and crashed troop carriers. There was to be a support of small swift craft. The British were in possession of the German plans a month ahead of the event. At a stroke preparations became swift, secret and competent. Suddenly Canadian and some Polish troops appeared in the district in a sort of unobtrusive abundance, and the local Home Guard reinforced by specially trained key men, was put through a course of combatant training at headlong speed.
“Practically I’m a guerrilla so’jer,” said Edward Albert to his wife. “Think of it I If I see a German I’ve got to shoot him or disarm him and he has the right to shoot me at sight, if he sees me first. It isn’t at all the sort of thing I’m good at. I’ve said that very likely I’d be much more useful somewhere else. And now they’re asking for you to come and help with this here camouflage. They paint a chap up so’s he don’t look like anything on earth, green and black and great dabs like cow droppings and things. They say I’ve got to paint my face and hands green. Then I’ve got to crawl about there on the links with a rifle, ready to take up a position and pot at them when they come.”
“Maybe they won’t come.”
“We got to be ready.”
“The world’s gone mad,” said Mary Tewler, and added after reflection; “I suppose we got to ’umour it.”
So she camouflaged Edward Albert until you might have trodden on him before you realised he was there.
IV. Heroic Moment
Inch by inch Edward Albert was sucked nearer and nearer towards the vortex of this ever more frightful war. He who had always dressed so carefully, became a jumble of garbage crouching on the links, a flattened Jack on the Green....
If you had told him late in 1940, that in a year’s time he would be an invisible man crawling through the midst of a raid to some position of comparative personal security, with a deafening anti-aircraft barrage beating the wits out of him, and flares and parachutists and a number of gigantic troop carriers raining down upon him, he would probably have contrived some minor mutilation that would have absolved him from any active participation in that sort of thing. A vague self-reproach floundered through the thudding and jumping in his brain.
“Bloody fool I been,” he muttered. “Never saw a thing ahead.”
That was his state of mind, within ten minutes of the moment that transfigured him into a national hero.