Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington Read Free Book Online

sense to put right. But by November ’18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops were after six months inthe line. Since Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves, and when I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October ’18 he struck me as a man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn’t see how he would face another barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle. We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth, until it was such a nightmare, such a portentous House of Atrides tragedy, that I began to think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering to each other – or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried to interrupt and couldn’t. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were certainly all to pieces.
    Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, etcetera. Such wise young women, you thought, no sentimental nonsense about them. No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come their way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship”, nothing could break it. Jealousy? it was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhandtricks? insulting to make such a suggestion. No, no. Men must be “free” and women must be “free’
    Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth must know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence”. So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually antipathetic”. That was just before the war. But in 1914 something went wrong with Elizabeth’s period, and she thought she was going to have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more talk of “freedom” then! If she had a baby, her father would cut off her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn’t be asked to Lady Saint-Lawrence’s dinners, she… Well, she “went at” George in a way which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on a special licence, and they were married at a Registry office in