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 6. Early Childhood
7. Middle Childhood
8. Adolescence
9. Emerging Adulthood
10. Young Adulthood
11. Middle Adulthood
12. Late Adulthood
13. Death and Afterlife Beliefs

Help students understand how culture impacts development – and why it matters
Human Development: A Cultural Approach, Second Edition leads students to examine
all stages of development through the engaging lens of culture. The first author to take a
wholly cultural approach to human development, Jeffrey Arnett integrates cross-cultural
examples throughout the narrative to reveal the impact of cultural factors both in the US
and around the world. Arnett’s emphasis on culture fosters a thorough, balanced view of
development that prepares students to face challenges in our diverse and globalized
world – whether they travel the globe or remain in their hometowns.

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grave defect. He was conscious—more, he was proud—of being an
amateur soldier, and knowing himself to be modest, he did not fear
any comparison between the actual results obtained by English
amateurs like himself, and the far more largely professional armies
of other countries. And now these over-brainy ones had gone and
done it. He knew as well as anyone the hardships and dangers of
soldiering, had experienced them, shared them with the ranks, in the
trenches. Why even in this beastly Vanderlynden affair, it would have
puzzled him to say if he were more sorry than glad that the private
soldier had never been brought to Justice. But English—and even
Frenchmen—as he had seen with his own eyes, if they mutinied, got
over it, and went on. It was only people like the Russians that went
and pushed things to their logical conclusion.
He had a hatred of that, being subconsciously aware that the logical
conclusion of Life is Death. Naturally, from his upbringing and mental
outlook, he had no sympathy with the alleged objects and
achievements of the Russian Revolution. He could not see what
anyone wanted with a new social order, and as for the domination of
Europe by the Proletariat, if he understood it, he was all against it in
principle. He was against it because it was Domination. That was
precisely the thing that had made him feel increasingly antagonistic
to Germany and German ideas. It had begun long ago, during brief
continental holidays. He had met Germans on trains and steamers,
in hotels and on excursions. He had grudged them their efficient way
of sight-seeing, feeding and everything else. But he had grudged
them most their size and their way of getting there first. If it had not
been for that, he had a good deal more sympathy with them, in most
ways, than with the French. Subsequently he had found Germans
infringing on the business of his native town, selling cheaper, better-
tanned hides than its tanners, more scientifically compounded
manures than its merchants. Then they invaded politics and became
a scare at election times. And after the false start of 1911, in 1914
they had finally kicked over the tea-table of the old quiet comfortable
life. He did not argue about this. He had felt it simply, truly, directly.
Under all the hot-air patriotism and real self-sacrifice of August,
1914, it had been this basic instinct which had made him and all his
sort enlist. The Germans had asked for it, and they should darn-well
have it. If they didn’t they would go on asking. They were after
Domination.
That craze had started something that would be difficult now to stop.
Dormer saw very well that other people besides Russians might find
grievances and the same wrong-headed way of venting them. The
Russians would probably go on with their propaganda, all over the
world. The Germans, on the other hand, had probably set the
Japanese off. And so we should go on, all the aristocratic classes
calling for Domination by their sort, all the ultra-brainy democracies
calling for their particular brand.
So when he was passed as fit and told to rejoin the depôt of his
regiment, at a seaport town, he went without any panic fear of the
future, German or otherwise. He went with a deep conviction that
whatever happened, life had been cheapened and vulgarized. It was
not by any means mere theory. He had seen what sort of a home he
might hope to make after the Peace, with his mother or sisters, or if,
conceivably, he married. Not a bad home, his job would always be
there, and certain remnants of that bourgeois comfort that had grown
up in all the old quiet streets of the provincial towns of England
during the nineteenth century, privileged, aloof from the troubles of
the “continent,” self-contained. But remnants only, not nearly
enough. He and all his sort had been let down several pegs in the
social scale. Without any narrow spite, or personal grievance, he felt
that the Germans had caused this upset and the Russians had put
the finishing stroke to it, made it permanent, as it were. He happened
to be opposite the Germans in the particular encounter that was not
yet ended, and he was able to draw upon an almost inexhaustible
supply of obstinate ill-will.
He went to the depôt in its huts on a sandy estuary. It was
commanded by a Major of the usual type, and no one knew better
than Dormer how to keep on the right side of such a one. He was, of
course, a Godsend to the Major. He had all the practical experience
and none of the fussiness. He merely wanted the job finished. That
suited the Major exactly, who didn’t want it to finish in a hurry, but
wanted even less to have to find ideas for training troops. Dormer,
with his two and a half years in France, was the very man. He looked
trustworthy. He was set to instructing the raw material, of which the
camp was full. He disliked it intensely, but, as always, took what was
given him in his sober fashion and did his limited best with it. He was
amazed to find such reserves of men still untouched. His own
recollections of early 1915 were of camps filled with an eager
volunteer crowd of all ages and conditions, who were astounded
when it was suggested to them that certain of them ought to take a
commission. Now he found that his sort went a different way, direct
to O.T.C. or Cadet Corps. There was a permanence about the camp
staff that he had never seen in the old days. But most of all he was
impressed with the worn appearance of the camp. Thousand after
thousand had passed through it, been drafted overseas, and
disappeared. Thousand after thousand had followed. In the town and
at the railway, there were no longer smiles and encouragement.
People had got painfully used to soldiers, and from treating them as
heroes, and then as an unavoidable, and profitable incident, had
come to regard them chiefly as a nuisance. He forgot how he had
wondered if the men would stand it, he forgot how often he had
heard the possibility of an early Peace discussed. He began to
wonder now if people at home would stand it—the lightless winter
nights, the summer full of bombing, the growing scarcity of comforts,
the queues for this, that, and the other, the pinch that every gradually
depleted family was beginning to feel, as one after another of its
members had to go. He had been so long out of all this, up against
the actual warfare, glad enough of small privileges and of the
experience that enabled him to avoid the more onerous duties, the
worst sorts of want, that he only now began to realize what he had
never grasped, in his few short leaves, that there was still quite a
considerable, probably the greater portion of the nation, who did not
share his view of the necessity of going on. Another avenue of
speculation was opened to him. What if all the people at home made
Peace behind the backs of the Armies. Yet, being Dormer, he did not
submit to this home-grown philosophy. He just went on and did the
next thing that his hand found to do.
Of one thing he became pretty certain. All these people at home had
“got the wind up.” He didn’t know which were the worst, the lower
middle class, who were beginning to fear invasion, as a form of
damage to their shops and houses. He thought of those ten
departments of France that were either occupied by, or shot over, by
the Germans. Or again the newspapers, with their scare-lines, their
everlasting attempt to bring off this or that political coup. Or again the
people in power, who were keeping this enormous number of troops
in England, presumably to defend the beaches of the island from an
armed landing. He had become during the three years that had
contained for him an education that he could not otherwise have got
in thirty, a more instructed person.
An offensive was an offensive, could be nothing more or less. Every
offensive had been a failure except for some local or temporary
object, and in his opinion, always must be a failure. The idea of an
offensive conducted across a hundred leagues of sea made him
smile. It was hard enough to get a mile forward on dry land, but
fancy the job of maintaining communications across the water! He
attended enough drills to fill in the time, organized the football of the
Brigade to his liking and let it go at that. At moments he was tempted
to apply to be sent to France, at others to try and join one of these
Eastern expeditions, Salonika, Palestine or Mespot. But the certainty
of being more bored and of being farther than ever from the only life
he cared for, made him hesitate. He hesitated for two long months.
Then on the 21st March he was ordered by telegram to proceed to
France. He felt, if anything, a not unpleasant thrill. With all his care,
he had not been able to dodge boredom altogether. The depôt camp
had also been much too near the scenes of his pre-War life. He had
gone home, as a matter of duty, for several week-ends and had
always returned finely exasperated, it was so near to and yet so far
from home as he had pictured it, in his dreams. Now, here was an
end to this Peace-time soldiering. The news, according to the
papers, seemed pretty bad, but he remembered so well the awful
scurry there was for reinforcements on the morning that the nature of
the Second Battle of Ypres became known. This could not be so
desperate as that was. Practically the whole of the rank and file in
the depôt were under orders. He took jolly good care not to get
saddled with a draft, and spent the night in London. People were in a
rare stew there. He had a bath and a good dinner and left it all
behind. He took a little more note of the traffic at the port of
embarkation. On the other side, he found lorries waiting and went
jolting and jamming away up to Frecourt, forty miles. He rather
approved. It looked as though our people were waking up.
At Corps reinforcement camp—a new dodge evidently—he got
posted to a North Country battalion; and proceeded to try and find
their whereabouts. He was told that they were going to Bray, but it
took him some time to understand that they were falling back on that
place. When, by chance, he hit upon the Division to which they
belonged, they were on the road, looking very small, but intact and
singing. He soon found plenty to do, for he grasped that practically
the whole battalion was composed of reinforcements, and had only
been together two or three days. They set to work at once to
strengthen some half-completed entrenchments, but after two days
were moved back again.
It was during those two days that he saw what he had never to that
moment beheld, an army in retreat. The stream of infantry, artillery
and transport was continuous—here in good formation, there a mere
mass of walking wounded mixed up with civilians, as the big
hospitals and the small villages of the district turned out before the
oncoming enemy. He thought it rotten luck on those people, many of
whom had been in German hands until February, 1917, and had only
had a twelvemonth in their small farms, living in huts, and had now to
turn out before a further invasion. The bombardment was distinctly
nasty, he never remembered a nastier, but as usual, the pace of the
advance soon outdistanced the slow-moving heavy artillery, whose
fire was already lessening. He had no feelings of sharp despair, for
as he had foreseen, a modern army could not be crumpled up and
disposed of. What he did now anticipate, was any amount of
inconvenience.
Amiens, he gathered, was uninhabitable, that meant many good
restaurants out of reach. New lines of rail, new lateral
communications would be necessary, that meant marching. Just
when they had begun to get the trenches fairly reliable, they were
entrained and sent wandering all round the coast. The wonderful
spring weather broke with the end of March, as the weather always
did, when it had ceased to be of any use to the Bosche, and had he
been superstitious, he might have thought a good deal of that. It was
in a cold and rainy April that he found himself landed on the edge of
the coal-fields, behind a canal, with a slag heap on one side of him,
and a little wood on the other, amid an ominous quiet.
The company of which he had been given command was now about
a hundred and fifty strong and he had done what little he could to
equalize the four platoons. He had one officer with him, a middle-
aged Lieutenant called Merfin, of no distinguishable social status, or
local characteristics. The day when a battalion came from one town
or corner of a county, under officers that were local personages in
the civil life of its district, was long past. Dormer placed his second-
in-command socially as music-hall, or pawnbroking, but the chap
had been out before and had been wounded, and probably knew
something of the job. The men were satisfactory enough, short,
stumpy fellows with poor teeth, but exactly that sort of plainness of
mind that Dormer appreciated. They would do all right. Perhaps a
quarter of them had been out before, and the remainder seemed
fairly efficient in their musketry and bombing, and talked pigeons and
dogs in their spare time, when not gambling.
The bit of line they held was Reserve, a bridge-head over the canal,
a strong point round a half-demolished château in the wood, and
some wet trenches to the right, where the next battalion joined on.
Battalion Head-quarters was in a farm half a mile back. Dormer and
Merfin improvised a Mess in the cellar of the Château, saw that the
cooker in the stables was distributing tea, and let all except the
necessary guards turn in. He had some machine gunners at the
strong point, and across the canal were two guns, whose wagons
had just been up with rations and ammunition. His own lot of rations
came soon after and he told Merfin to take the first half of the night,
and rolled himself in his coat to sleep.
As he lay there, listening to the scatter of machine-gun fire, and the
mutter of officers’ servants in the adjoining coal-hole, watching the
candle shadows flicker on the walls that had been whitewashed, as
the draught stirred the sacking over the doorway, his main thought
was how little anything changed. Two and a half years ago he had
been doing exactly the same thing, a few miles away, in the same
sort of cellar, in front of an enemy with the same sort of advantage in
ground and initiative, machine guns and heavy artillery. He was as
far from beating the Germans as ever he had been. He supposed
that practically all the gains of 1916 and 1917 south of Arras had
been lost. On the other hand, the Germans, so far as he could see,
were equally far from winning. What he now feared was, either by
prolonged War or premature Peace, a continuance of this sort of
thing. And slowly, for he was as mild and quiet-mannered a man as
one could find, his gorge began to rise. He began to want to get at
these Germans. It was no longer a matter of principle, a feeling that
it was his duty as it had been in the days when he enlisted, took a
commission, and had come to France. He was no longer worrying
about the injustice of the attack on Belgium or the danger of a
Germany paramount in Europe. He had now a perfectly plain and
personal feeling. But being Dormer, this did not make him cry out for
a sortie en masse like a Frenchman, nor evolve a complicated and
highly scientific theory as to how his desire was to be realized. The
French and Portuguese who fought beside him would have found
him quite incomprehensible. The Germans actually invented a logical
Dormer whom they had to beat, who was completely unlike him. If he
had any ideas as to what he was going to do, they amounted to a
quiet certainty that once the enemy came away from his heavy and
machine guns, he, Dormer, could do him in.
So he went on with the next thing, which was to turn over and sleep.
He woke, sitting bolt upright, to the sound of two terrific crashes. One
was right over his head. The candle had been blown out, and as he
struggled out of the cellar, barking his shins and elbows, he was
aware that the faint light of the sky was obscured by a dense cloud
all round him. Instinctively he pulled up his gas mask, but the sound
of falling masonry and the grit he could taste between his lips,
reassured him. It was a cloud of brick dust. Across the canal, the
barrage was falling on the front lines with the thunder of a waterfall.
The Bosche had hit the Château, and if he were not mistaken, had
put in another salvo, somewhere near by. At the gate of the little
park-like garden he ran into a figure he recognized for Merfin, by the
red light of the battle, just across the canal.
“What is it?”
“Aw—they’ve knocked in the bridge!”
“Every one standing-to?”
“Can’t help ’emselves.”
They went to look at the damage. The bridge was a small, one
vehicle affair, with steel lattice sides, and an asphalt roadway. The
bridge piers at the near end had been blown away, and the whole
had settled down some four or five feet, on to the mud of the tow-
path.
“Can you get across?”
“Aw—yes—easy!”
“Better get across and wait a bit!”
He himself went back to find up his stretcher bearers, who, he had
always noticed, wanted an order to get them in motion. The guard on
the bridge was dead so far as he could see, but some one was
shouting, behind, at the Château.
He found the C.S.M with two men digging out the servants whose
coal-cellar had been blocked. One of them was badly crushed, but
his own man only shaken. Then there were horses on the road.
Gunners, trying to get their teams up to the advanced guns.
Hopeless, of course. Then came a runner from battalion. Send
Merfin with two platoons. He saw to that, and rearranged his
depleted company. It took some time. The barrage appeared to be
creeping nearer. The ground shook with the continuous concussion
and whiffs of gas were more and more noticeable, but the heavier
stuff was already falling farther to the rear. Then came a runner from
across the bridge. There was a crowd on the road. Dormer went and
found just what he expected. Walking wounded and those who
wanted to be treated as such. He sorted them out, directing the
former down the road to the dressing station, and setting the others
to dig. If he had got to hang on to this place, and he supposed he
had, he meant to have some cover. The stream of people across the
broken bridge increased. Trench mortars and machine gunners,
platoons of his own regiment. The Bosche was “through” on the left,
and they were to come back behind the canal. The barrage died out,
to confirm this. The machine-gun fire came nearer and nearer.
In the cold grey light of a wet April dawn, a tin-helmeted figure
dashed up on a borrowed motor-cycle. It was the Brigade Major.
What had Dormer got? He heard and saw, and took a platoon and all
the sundries. His last words were: “Hang on here, whatever you do!”
Dormer heard the words without emotion. He realized that it meant
that he was expected to gain time. He got hold of his Sergeant, and
overhauled the rations and ammunition. They were not too badly off,
and the cooker lay stranded in the stable yard. That meant hot water,
at least. He took a turn round the place. The Château grounds had
once been wired as part of some forgotten scheme of defence of
1915 or early 1916. That was all right. On the other hand, the
“bridge-head”—a precious half-boiled concoction—was full of gas
and the barrier on the road blown away.
He got his few men out of it, with their several casualties, and started
them carting brick rubble from the dilapidations of the Château to
make an emplacement for a machine-gun on the near side of the
bridge. He stood looking at the road by which the Bosche must come
—a mere lane that led from one of the neighbouring coal-pits, and
was used, he imagined, for transport of coal that was required
locally. It meandered out of sight, among low fenceless fields, until
the shallow undulations of the ground hid it. In the distance was the
steamy reek of last night’s battle, but nothing that moved, amid the
silence broken only by long-distance shots, and fusillade somewhere
on the left. Then, down that road he saw a party advancing, led by
an officer. There was no doubt that they wore khaki. He waited by
the bridge for them, and shouted directions to them how to cross. He
got an answer:
“Hallo, you old devil, what are you doing?”
It was that Kavanagh. There had been an advanced signal
exchange, and he had gone to bring his men in. They were tired,
hungry and disgusted, but Kavanagh had the jauntiness of old. He
wasn’t going back to Division, he was going to stay with dear old
Dormer, and see this through. Dormer thought a moment, then said:
“All right.”
“All right. I should think so. I don’t suppose I could catch Division,
even on a motor-byke. They must be nearly at Calais. It’s all rot. The
Bosche are done!”
“Are they?”
“Sure. What are they waiting for now?”
“Bringing up their artillery?”
“That won’t blow the water out of the canal.”
“Possibly not. But we may as well have some food while it’s
possible.”
“You old guts. Always eating!”
“Yes, when I can. Aren’t you?”
“Now, Dormer. You know me better than that. Glory is my manna.”
“Will you take cold bully and tea with it?” asked Dormer as they
dropped into the cellar.
Kavanagh made no objection, and they ate in silence, fast, for ten
minutes. Then they saw the men were being fed, and relapsed, in
their hiding-place, into pipes, and whisky out of Kavanagh’s flask.
“How did you get into this show?” Dormer asked.
“The Division—your old Division, my boy, left me here to hand over!
They might have spared themselves the trouble. But I’d got a most
lovely scheme of lateral communication. Corps gave me a lot of
sweet words about it. I suppose I shall get the M.C. Now the silly old
Hun has gone and blown it all to bits. What about you?”
“You know I got wrong and was sent home sick.”
“I heard all that. It was about that Vanderlynden affair, wasn’t it?”
“It was!”
“Well, you’ve no idea what a sensation you created. Vinyolles got
simply wet behind the ears with it. Some French Deputy said, after
the Somme show, that English troops did more damage to France
than to Germany. Of course every one on Divisional H.Q. has
changed in the last few months. They all established an alibi or
Habeas Corpus or something. It was one of the things that made the
French Press go for unity of command! You were a boon to them!”
“I wish them joy of the business. I don’t know why you mix me up
with it.”
“Why, it was your pet show, wasn’t it?”
“It got fathered on to me because I could understand what it was
about.”
“Yes, you told Vinyolles, didn’t you?”
“The ignorant brute asked me.”
“I know. He’s all fresh. I find him trying also. Well, he knows all about
it now.”
“Tell you the truth, I’ve no idea what I said, Kavanagh! I was feeling
queer!”
“Vinyolles thought you’d gone potty.”
“He wasn’t far wrong.”
“He said you told him the whole British Army was guilty of the
Kerrime at Vanderlynden’s!”
It was the first time Dormer had heard it called that.
“Well, in a sense, so they are.”
“In a sense, War is a foolish business!”
“I thought you liked it?”
“I was trying to talk like you——”
Before Dormer could reply, the sacking over the door was lifted, by
Dormer’s Sergeant.
“Cop’l Arbone is back, sir!”
“Very good. Did he get in touch with the Major?”
“He only found a Lewis-gun section, sir. The Major moved most of
the men along the canal, where there’s more trouble!”
“All right!”
“Well, I suppose I may as well go and have a look at my lot,”
Kavanagh stretched himself.
“I told ’em to hunt round and see if they could get this place wired
up!”
“Umpteenth Corps ought to have thought of that, long ago!”
“Did you ever know Corps think of anything.”
While Kavanagh was so engaged, Dormer took a turn round the
various guards and posts he had established. There appeared to be
fair cover from view, and even from small-arm and field-gun fire. Of
course when the Bosche really wanted to get the place, nothing
Dormer and Kavanagh and some forty men could do would stop it. In
coming round to the stables behind the Château he found his
Sergeant with two men, laboriously trundling on a hand cart what he
soon verified to be slabs of marble. What would they think of next?
The explanation was, “There was a champion bathroom, sir, an’ I
thought we could set up our Lewis better with these!”
When Kavanagh saw what was going on, he laughed.
“More damage in billets, Dormer!”
“Well, the stuff will be smashed up anyhow, won’t it?”
“Two blacks don’t make a white. I understand why you told Vinyolles
the whole army was guilty. You’re doing just what your friend did
about his mules.”
“Why will you drag in that beastly business? This has nothing in
common with it.”
“To the common all things are common. You tell the owner of the
Château that when he finds out.”
Dormer was going to say “He won’t find out!” but refrained. He
disliked arguing. This seemed a particularly bad argument. Also, at
that moment, a Lewis gun began, just below. Then another. He went
to the garden wall, and peered out. Nothing visible, as usual. He
thought of all the battle pictures he had ever seen. The prancing
horses, the gay uniforms, the engrossing action of figures that
pointed muzzle or bayonet at each other, that wielded sword or
lance. Here he was, an incident in one of the biggest battles in the
world. All he could see was neglected arable, smashed buildings, a
broken bridge and a blocked by-road, all shrouded in steamy vapour.
He made out that it was the Lewis opposite the end of the bridge that
was firing. He crawled along the gully that had been dug from the
Château gate to the roadway, and so to the emplacement by the
step-off of the bridge. The Corporal in charge of the section turned to
him.
“Got ’im, sir!”
“What is it?”
“Bosche in the ditch, under them bushes!”
Dormer waited a moment, but nothing happened. He crawled back,
and sent his Sergeant round to see that every one was under cover.
Back in the cellar he found Kavanagh, and told him.
“I know. Once more into the breach!”
“It’s not poetry, Kavanagh. This is the start. Once they find we’re
stopping them here, they’ll shift us, you may bet!”
“I shouldn’t wonder. My lot are trying to get into touch with Brigade.
They’re running a line back behind the wood. There’s no one on our
left, as far as can be found.”
“Must be some one.”
“Why should there be? Brigade have probably moved by this time.”
“Ah, well, can’t be helped.”
No use telling the chap that it was all useless. He just sat down and
lit his pipe. He perceived clearly enough that they were being
sacrificed—just left there to hold the Bosche up for a few hours,
while the Division went back.
During the day there was sporadic machine gunning. The Bosche
was feeling his way for crossing the canal, but had found it far less
easy than in the sectors farther north. Tolerably certain that the main
attack would come at dawn, Dormer and Kavanagh got what rest
they could, though proper sleep was out of the question. Their
servants had found a well-upholstered sofa, and a superior brass
bedstead, which now adorned the cellar, causing Kavanagh to gibe
about damage in billets. Their vigil was lightened by the sounds of
song from the stables where such men as they had set apart as
reserves were lodged.
“Old soldiers never die,
They only fade away.”
to a well-known hymn tune, made Dormer home-sick, but delighted
Kavanagh.
“Listen to that!”
“I can’t help it, unless I send and stop them.”
“Never, man, never stop men who can sing at such a moment. It
means philosophy and courage!”
“It means foolishness and rum!”
“Dormer, I fear you are no born leader!”
“No, of course I wasn’t.”
“But you’ve got to lead men now, and lead ’em to victory.”
“I don’t mind much so long as I lead ’em to Peace!”
“Yes, but don’t you see, mere Peace will mean Revolution!”
“I don’t believe it. I saw that affair at Étaples. I saw the trouble
among the French troops in May. Those chaps prefer to take orders
from you and me rather than from their own sort.”
“How do you account for Russia, then?”
“I can’t. But it’s an object lesson rather than an example, I should
say.”
“You used not to talk like that. You used to say that the men wouldn’t
stand it.”
“I’ve lived and learned!”
“Both, I am sure.”
“You needn’t be so superior. No one knew what any of this would be
like until it was tried. We’ve something to go by, now! This War
depends on turning a crank. The side that goes on turning it
efficiently the longer will win. Our chaps look like lasting!”
“So do the Bosche. No, Dormer, you’re all wrong——”
At that moment a fresh burst of song came from the stables. A
Cockney voice to a waltz tune:
“Orl that I wawnt is larve,
Orl that I need is yew——”
“There,” cried Kavanagh, his voice rising into his excited croak.
“That’s what we want!”
Dormer did not reply. With dusk came a few long-range shots,
gradually broadening and deepening into a bombardment towards
dawn. Both of them had to be out and about all night. They had
several casualties, and the whole place reeked with gas. As the grey
light of another day began to change the texture of the shadows,
movement was discernible about the road. It was their chance and
with a higher heart and the feeling of relief, they were able to let
loose the Lewis guns, which they had managed to save intact. For
more than an hour, Dormer crawled from one to the other, seeing
that they did not overheat or jam, for the fact that they were killing
Germans pleased him. Then there was a slackening of fire on both
sides.
They waited and the suspense from being irksome, became
tolerable. There was a good deal of noise each side of them, and
Dormer began to wonder if his detachment were surrounded,
especially as the servants whom he had sent back to get into touch
with Brigade, had not returned. It was a dull rainy afternoon
prematurely dark, and the rain as it increased, seemed to beat down
the gunning, as water quenches a fire. He must have been in that
half-waking state that often superimposed on sleeplessness and the
awful din, when he was thoroughly roused by trampling in the trees
round the Château. He called to Kavanagh but got no reply. Then
there was a pushing and scrambling at the wall behind the stable,
and English cavalrymen came swinging over it. Dormer and
Kavanagh were relieved, and were shortly able to hand over and
prepare to march their command back to rejoin their Division, which,
depleted by four weeks of continual mauling, was being taken out of
the line.
The battle was by no means over. They next went in farther north,
and Dormer had the queer experience of going into trenches where
Corps H.Q. had been, of billeting in rooms where Major-Generals
had slept. Gradually he became aware of lessening tension, reduced
shelling, and slackened machine-gun fire, but it was the end of May
before he found, when sent to raid an enemy post, that there was no
one there. He had been right after all. The German offensive also
had failed. Anticlimax was the rule of the War. He was glad that he
had parted from Kavanagh, who had gone back to his proper job
with his Division, goodness knew where. He felt that the fellow would
remind him that for several hours while they lay together in those
scratched-out trenches round that little Château by the canal, he had
given up hope. He need not have bothered. If the Bosche could not
win on that day, he never would. Slowly now the British lines were
creeping forward. Then he found American troops behind him.
It was during this phase of things that he found himself upon familiar
ground. Except on Kavanagh’s lips, he had not heard of the crime at
Vanderlynden’s since before Christmas. It was now September. Here
he was, detrained and told to march to Hondebecq. He passed what
had been Divisional Head-quarters in 1916 and noticed the shell-
holes, the open, looted, evacuated houses. He passed along the
road which he and Major Stevenage had traversed all those years
ago. The Brigade were in Divisional Reserve, and were quartered in
a string of farms just outside the village. He looked at the map
squares attentively, but on the larger scale map he found it actually
marked Ferme l’Espagnole. Being Dormer, he just saw to the
billeting of his company and then learned that the Battalion Head-
quarters were located at the Vanderlyndens’, and had no difficulty in
finding good reason to walk over there, after tea.
The place was not much changed. It was soiled, impoverished,
battered by War, but the German advance, which had stopped dead
a few miles short of it, had been spent by the time it reached its limits
in this sector, and had early been pushed back. Trenches had been
dug and camouflage erected all round the place, but it had not
suffered damage except by a few long-distance shots, the routine of
trench warfare had never reached it. In the kitchen, darkened by the
fact that the glass was gone from the windows, which were blinded
with aeroplane fabric, stood the familiar figure of Mademoiselle
Vanderlynden. He asked for the Colonel, and was civilly directed to
the parlour on the other side of the door. Not a word of recognition,
hardly a second glance. He did not know if he were sorry or glad. He
would have felt some relief to hear that the claim that had caused all
that trouble had been settled. But he did not know what he might
bring down upon his head by inquiry and held his tongue. His
business with the Colonel was the usual regimental routine, nominal
and numerical rolls, reinforcements and indents, training and
movements. It did not take long. On his way out he passed the
kitchen door and said just:
“Good night, Mademoiselle!”
“Good night, M’sieu!” And then calmly: “They are going to pay us for
the damage to La Vierge!”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“I thought you would like to know. It has been a long time.”
“Yes, a long time. I hope it will soon be settled.”
“Ah, not yet. I know these offices at Boulogne! They have a good
deal to pay for, no doubt.”
“No doubt. Good night, Mademoiselle!”
“Good night, mon capitaine.”
Walking back to his billet, he had once more that sensation of
escape. Was he really going to get away from that business, this
time, for ever? True, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden seemed little
enough inclined to be vindictive. He could not help feeling that her
view of the affair was after all reasonable and just. She bore no
malice, she wanted things put right. Money would do it. She was
going to get the money, or so she seemed to think. She had no
animus against the man who had broken a piece of her property.
She had neither animus against nor consideration for himself, the
representative of the British Army, who had so signally failed to
hasten the question of compensation. She took it all as part of the
War, and she was seeing it correctly. It was the British Army that had
done it. Her home, where she was working so peacefully in 1914,
had become first a billet, then all but a battlefield. The Crime at
Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more nor less. That was
exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been done to any
furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to get out of it
with his body intact, and resume the broken thread of existence,
where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago. True he had
not been badly paid, but he had taken a considerable risk—it was
much more dangerous to be an officer than a private, more
dangerous to be a private than a civilian. She had gauged the whole
thing correctly, right down to the necessarily slow and complicated
process of getting it adjudicated by some set of fellows down by the
coast, who ran these things off by the hundred and had a whole set
of rules that had to be complied with. He turned at the end of the
farm road and took a look back at the old place. There were worse
billets than the Spanish Farm and people more awkward to deal with
than the Vanderlyndens. In the Somme he had come across farms
where they charged you for the water and people who removed
everything right down to the bedsteads. Vanderlynden had only
wanted to be paid for what was wantonly damaged. They were
French, you couldn’t expect them to be sympathetic about other
people’s mules. What a queer world it was, he would never have
suspected all the crotchets that human nature could present, had he
not been thrust nose-foremost into this infernal show.
All his philosophy forsook him, however, on entering the billet where
his company was lodged. The woman had been selling not merely
beer, which was connived at, but spirits, to the men. Two of them
had got “tight” and had been arrested, and he would have them up
before him in the morning. Then there would be the question as to
where she got the spirits from, whether some Quartermaster-
sergeant had been making away with the rum, or whether she had
induced some one to buy it for her at the Expeditionary Force
Canteen. It all came back to the same thing. Men kept under these
conditions too long.
No one had been more surprised than Dormer, when the Allied
Armies took up the initiative again in July, and appeared to keep it.
With a lugubrious satisfaction he found himself retracing the
advances in the Somme district of 1916. It was an ironical comment
on his hard-earned War-wisdom, two years devoted to doing
precisely the same thing at precisely the same place. Of course, he
had learned some lessons, but his estimate of one hundred and
eighty years was still too small. But when the movement became
perpetual and he found himself on ground he no longer recognized,
among villages that showed all the signs of methodical German
occupation, he began to wonder. A slight wound in the forearm threw
him out of touch for a week or two, and when he went back, he found
himself in a more northern sector again, and for the first time found
cavalry in front of him. It suited him all right, he didn’t want to have
the job of bombing out little nests of machine gunners, that marked
each step in the line of advance. His feelings were pretty generally
shared. Men began to ask themselves whether there was any glory
in being knocked out at the moment of victory. When his battalion
was again obliged to move in advance of the cavalry, against
obstacles which, although always evacuated, were out of the sphere
of cavalry tactics, he found for the first time a definite unwillingness
among his command to obey orders in any but the most perfunctory
manner.
He had sufficient sense to see that it was very natural. In the early
days the job had been to keep men under cover, to avoid useless
and wasteful casualties. The lesson had been learned at length with
a thoroughness that he could never have instilled. The old, old boast
of the Territorial Colonel who had first enlisted him, and whose
tradition was actually of pre-Territorial days, from the period of the
Volunteers of before the Boer War, was far better founded than he
had ever supposed. He had been inclined to scoff when he had
heard the old boy talk: “Our motto was Defence not Defiance!” He
did not scoff now. It was deeply, psychologically true. The army that
had survived was an army that had been made to fight without much
difficulty, while its back was to the sea, with the knowledge that
trenches lost meant worse, if possible, conditions of existence, and it
was moved by some rags of sentiment, as to holding what one had
got; an army which displayed all the slowly aroused, almost passive
pugnacity of the English working class, so docile, yet so difficult to
drive out of a habit of mind, or an acquired way of living. They had
no real imperialism in them, none of the high-faultin’ Deutschland
über Alles, none of the French or Italian bitter revengefulness, nor
peasant passion for acquisition. The Rhine had never figured in their
primary school education. They had no relatives groaning under
Austrian or German domination—no rancorous feelings bred from
the attempt to force alien language or unassimilated religious forms
down their throats.
He had always regarded the boast about an Englishman’s House
being his Castle as so much claptrap. He knew by daily experience
of business, that any Englishman was governed by economic
conditions. Religious and racial tyranny were so far removed from
the calculations of all his sort, and all above and below it, that the
very terms had ceased to have any meaning. This War had no effect
on the lightly borne if real tyranny of England, the inexorable need to
get a permanent job if possible and keep it, with constant anxiety as
to the tenure of one’s lodging, and the prospect of old age. These
fellows who fell in with blank unmeaning faces, in which there was
no emotion, and who marched with the same old morose jokes, and
shyly imitated the class standards which he and those like him
handed down to them from the fount of English culture and fashion in
the Public Schools, had done what they had promised to do, or had
(the late comers) been conscripted to do. They had engaged or been
called up for duration. That was a typically English slogan for a