Part 8

With me it’s 6.30 in the evening. I’m sitting in a farmhouse overlooking the usual French farmyard. The chickens fly in at the window—also the cats. The window is my own mode of entrance; I feel like a burglar when I enter my “bedroom” in this fashion after midnight. Two other officers share the floor with me—literally the floor, for we use our sleeping-sacks.

There’s a little boy about three, with long hair, so that at first we mistook him for a girl, who has become the temporary mascot of the battery. He carries the broken remains of a toy rifle and falls in with the men on parades, holding one of the fellows’ hands. He’s picked up the detail for “'Shun!” and “Stand at Ease!” and carries out the orders as smartly as anyone, looking terrifically serious about it. The men call him “little sister” on account of his appearance, and make him a great pet. I left him sobbing his heart out to-day when I had to leave him behind after he had fallen in with a squad of riflemen.

There’s a genuine little girl who is our friend, of whom I am even fonder. She’s a refugee kiddy of about thirteen—slim and pretty as a fairy, with a long corn-gold plait of hair down her back.

As soon as we start the gramophone going she peeps noiselessly as a spirit through the window; then one of us lifts her across the sill and she sits on our knees with her face hidden shyly against our shoulders.

I’m at present reading Gulliver’s Travels. That I should be reading them in such different circumstances from any that Swift could have imagined, kindles the art of writing books into a new romance. To be remembered years after you yourself have forgotten, to have men prying into the workings of a brain which has been dust in a shell for two centuries, is a very definite kind of immortality. To be forgotten—that is what we most dread. Never to have happened would not matter; but to have happened, to have walked the world, laughed, loved, created, and then to be treated as though we had not happened, there lies the sting of death. The thought of extinction offends our vanity; we had thought that we were of more consequence to the universe. It doesn’t comfort us to be recalled impersonally in the mass, as the men who captured Vimy or thrust the Hun back from some dangerous objective. In the mass we shall go down through history, no doubt, but not as human beings—only as heroes. We would rather be recalled by our weaknesses—as so-and-so who loved a certain girl, who played a good hand of poker, who overdrew his bank-account. Out here, from the moment a man places foot in France, the anonymity of death commences. No one cares who he was in a previous world, what he did for a living, whether he was a failure or a success. None of his former virtues stand to his credit except as they contribute to his soldier-life of the present. None of us talk about our past; if we did, our company would yawn at us. Only the mail arriving at irregular intervals keeps us in knowledge that we once had other personalities. Letters are like ghosts of a world abandoned, tiptoeing through the dream of a sleeper. Between you and us there is a great gulf fixed——Not that we resent it. Someone has to pay a price for the future safety of the world; out of all the ages we have been chosen as the persons. There is nothing to resent,—quite the contrary. Only, now and then creeps in the selfish longing that we may be remembered not as soldiers, but as what we were—in our weakness as well as in our strength.

You’re in a country place where I have not been and which I cannot picture. I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves. There’s no need to worry on my account.

LIII

France June 20,1918

Here I am in the kind of place that William Morris wrote about. My room is in a monastery, from which all but two of the monks have long since fled. The nunnery, in which the rest of the officers are billeted, was long since vacated. A saint was born here, and there used to be pilgrimages to his shrine; now only the two monks remain to toll the bell, play the organ, and to go through all the religious observances. The walls of the room in which I am writing are covered with illuminated prayers. Pinned on the door outside is the list of all the duties for the day. From my window I can see the two faithful ones pacing in the overgrown garden, counting their beads, murmuring their prayers, and behaving in every way as though the war had not commenced. Such despising of external happenings, even though it be mistaken, calls for admiration of sorts.

The country is lovely and green now, all except the immediate battle-line. Birds sing, flowers bloom, and fleecy white clouds go drifting overhead. One takes chance baths in chance-found brooks, and the men spread their tents in the meadows. There’s everything that life can offer to tempt us to go on living at present. There are moments so happy that I almost wish that you could be here to share them.

To-day I’m out of touch—no letters have arrived. Perhaps they will overtake us tomorrow. A thrush is singing in the monastery garden and the slow blue twilight is falling. Mingling as an accompaniment to the song of the thrush is the slow continual droning of a plane. The reminders of war are persistent and incessant. Nevertheless, in spite of war, I found a strawberry patch this afternoon and glutted myself.

I see by to-day’s paper that a racket has started on the Italian front. The Central Powers are declaring their weakness by striking out in too many directions. We give and we give, but we never break. We’re waiting for America and her millions. How long before we can count on them to help us to attack?

It’s extraordinary how the belief in America has grown. First of all we said, “She has come in too late”; then, “She’ll help us to win more quickly”; and now, “We need her.” If America has done nothing else, she has strengthened our moral all along the line; we fight better because we know that she is behind us.

You’re somewhere where the world is intensely quiet. I shall think of you where the world is happy.

LIV

France June 20, 1918

I’ve just finished reading a big batch of mail, and have had dinner and now sit looking out on the drenched country which is covered with a shabby evening sky. In the church, which adjoins the monastery in which I stay, monks are chanting. They are always chanting. One wonders for what it is that they pray; deeds at any moment, let alone the present, are so much better. I can picture what would happen here if the Germans came. I have caught myself thinking of Marie Odelle; our scenery is similar to that pictured in the play. Strange how one goes to imagination in search of illustrations of reality!

You, at your end, seem to have been having some wildly exciting times with your processions in which the Kaiser has been publicly done away with. It’s a phase which all countries go through, I suppose. England did at the beginning of the war. But now we entrain for the Front without bands playing, and do our best not to attract attention. We’re a little ashamed of arousing other people’s emotions on our behalf. All we want is a “Cheerio and God bless You,” for our good-bye. If we come back, it will be “jolly fine”; and if we don’t, “C’est la guerre”—we shrug our shoulders. In either event we see no reason why the feelings should be harrowed of those who stop behind.

After a series of very early morning rises, I have been picturing to myself the day when I once again wake up at the Ritz, with a camouflaged foreigner to bring my breakfast to my pillow and then leave me in peace till twelve o’clock. I wonder now why I ever left my bed in peace times and find myself marvelling at my unnecessary energy. The French patriot who held receptions and did the business of the day while sitting in a bath of milk, had mastered the art of life. Unfortunately, if I remember rightly, he was made a glaring example of sloth by being “done in” while thus pleasurably occupied.

I’m off to do my rounds as orderly officer now. My sergeant is waiting, so, as the men say, “I must ring off.”

LV

France June 23, 1918

Here I sit on a summer’s evening in the red-tiled kitchen of an old farmhouse. Immediately under the open window to my right is the inevitable manure-heap—the size of which, they say, denotes the extent of the farmer’s wealth. Barn-roofs, ochre-red, shine vividly in the pale gold of the sunset; at the end of the yard the walls fall away, giving the glimpse of an orchard with gnarled, lichen-covered fruit-trees. All kinds of birds are twittering and singing; house-swallows dart and dive across open spaces. In the distance the guns are booming. War affords one strange contrasts of sight and sound. Not many of the peasants have moved away; they have great faith in the Canadians. Every now and then a forlorn group will come trailing down the road between the hedges: an old tumbledown cart, drawn by an old tumble-down horse, piled and pyramided dangerously high with old tumble-down furniture. The people who accompany the vehicle are usually ancient and tumbledown as well. They make me recall someone’s description of the Irish emigrants on the St. Lawrence, travelling with “ragged poverty on their backs.” In contrast with these few straggling fugitives, hounded by avaricious fear, is the calm of a country billowy with grain and sociable with the grinning contentment of quite-at-home British Tommies. Everything in their attitude seems to assure the French peasant, “Don’t worry, old dear. We’re here. Everything’s all right.” From barns and houses and bivouacs come the sounds of gramophones, playing selections from quite the latest musical comedies. If you wander back into the fields you will find horsemen going over the jumps, men playing baseball and cricket, officers getting excited over tennis. We even held our Divisional Sports the other day—and this in the midst of the war’s greatest offensive. This “'Arf a mo’, Kaiser,” attitude of the Canadians would give you some idea of the esteem in which we hold the Hun. Our backs are not against the wall. We still have both the time and the inclination to be sportsmen and to laugh. I’m sure the enemy, grimly obsessed by the idea of breaking our line, never allows himself a moment for recreation, and I should think his balloon-observers, spying on us from the baskets of his distant sausages, must be very chagrined by our frivolity. The papers say, and very probably they’re right, that German strategists are far ahead of those possessed by the Allies; but our men have learnt a trick worth all the strategy—they have learnt to laugh both in success and adversity. In this war, I believe we shall find that he who has acquired the habit of a light heart will do the laughing last. I should very much like to know how many gramophones travel with the German Tommies; hardly any, I’ll bet. They have their bands with their patriotic music, keeping always before the men the singleness of their purpose. The singleness of their purpose tires them out. On our side of the line patriotism is the last thing you hear about. Thank God, we’ve got time to forget it.

Whenever I start trying to explain to you the psychology of our fighting-men I’m always conscious that, even while I’m telling you the absolute truth, with the same words I’m creating a wrong impression. Fighting-men aren’t magnificent most of the time; they’re not idealists; they’re not heroic. Very often they’re petty and cynical and cowards. They’re only magnificent and idealistic and heroic in the decision that brought them here, and in the last supreme moment when they bring their decision to fulfilment.

In a letter I received from Paris the other day the puzzle of the modern soldier was very well expressed. “I don’t believe,” it said, “I will ever get used to the courage of the men who go on and on with this terrible game. I’m thinking more now of the French and the British soldiers, who are mended up only to go at it again. I never can get used to it or take it as a matter of course. When I think for a minute how it hurts to have a tooth filled, I wonder that all the armies of the world don’t get up and run away from each other of one accord—every one who isn’t a hero or a fool, that’s to say.”

When I think over the problem calmly I have the same wonder. The problem was so neatly expressed that I read the passage out to the mess. They stopped in a round of poker to listen. “Well, which are we,” I asked; “heroes or fools?” “Fools,” they said unanimously, and then went on playing their hands again. They’re right; we are fools. We’re certainly not heroes. We’re fools for a kind of kingdom of heaven’s sake—but we don’t act like the heaven part of it any more than we talk about our patriotism. Any mention of either would make us shudder.

I wonder what motive brought the heathen Chinee to the Western Front. I’ve been told that he came that he might buy food for his family, because there’s a famine in China. Maybe. His bronze face stares up into ours from out the green-gold of the standing wheat—stares up into ours with the inscrutable gaze of an age-old Buddha. He’s the one human being on the Western Front who neither by acts nor words explains his nobility. Nobility there must have been to induce him to come; no reasoning creature would have jeopardized his body out of lust.

Last night I rode beneath a full white moon for miles through the standing crops. I only struck a road to cross it and say good-bye to it—then on and on with the soft swish of the swelling stalks against my stirrups. Shall we recall our old panics and delights if we live to reach normality again? Will normality satisfy? Shall we be content to know that all the hoard of the future years is ours? In a word, shall we ever again desire to be safe? Questions which none of us can answer!

LVI

France June 27, 1918

Here’s a glorious June morning with a touch of chill in the air and a jolly gold sun shooting arrows into the wheatfields. The chief sound I hear is the rattling of head-chains, for the drivers are hard at work shining up their harness. These summer days go by very pleasantly, but they throw one’s thoughts back a little wistfully to the Junes of other years—especially those in which the train came skidding down the mountains from Spokane to the ranch and the lake. All day, from first waking in the morning, we begin to gamble on our chances with the mail. It arrives any time between two and five o’clock; the evening passes in reading and re-reading our letters and concocting replies. I think some letters from you are nearly due again and I’m hoping for one this afternoon.

I think I mentioned that our battery has a French baby boy of three for its mascot, just at present. He has been christened Bully Beef, but for what reason I don’t know. Bully Beef falls in beside the Sergeant-Major on all parades. During stables he inspects the horses, toddling round the lines and hanging on to the finger of an officer. The other day he fell into the river while the horses were watering. No one noticed his disappearance for a minute or two; then he was discovered standing nearly chin-deep, doing a very quiet cry. He was consoled with pennies, and I undertook to lead him up to his mother. There are many stories about Bully Beef’s origin. Some say that his father is a rich Frenchman already married; others, a dead poilu; others, a sergeant of a Highland Division which was encamped in this neighbourhood. His mother is an exceedingly pretty French girl and she is not married. I can’t help feeling that Bully Beef must be half British, for he isn’t timid like a French child. On the contrary, he hides in the hedges and throws stones at us when he is offended, and has a finely exaggerated sense of his childish dignity. What memories he’ll have when he’s become a man.

There was another character I mentioned in a previous letter—I called him “Battling Brown”—the chap has D.S.O. and Military Crosses with bars to them and delights in putting on raids. I’ve since found that he cuts a notch in his revolver for every Hun he has killed with it. His present weapon has eighteen notches and the wooden handle of the first is notched to pieces.

It’s refreshing to find a man on our side of the line who knows how to hate. If we had hated more at the first, the war would be ended. Personally I can only hate ideas and nations—not persons; I acknowledge this as a weakness in myself.

I don’t think any of us realize quite how much war has changed us, particularly in our relations to sex. Women had grown discontented with being wives and mothers, and had proved that in many departments they could compete with men. This competition was responsible for a growing disrespect. Men were beginning to treat women in a way they demanded—as though they were men. Women were beginning to regard men with a quiet sex-contempt. It looked as if chivalry and all that made for knighthood were at an end. Then came war, calling men to a sacrifice in which women had no share—could not share because they were physically incapable of fighting—and women to the only contribution they could make, mercy and motherhood. We’ve been flung back on our primal differences and virtues. War has cut the knotted sex-emancipation; we stand up to-day as elementally male and female as when the Garden of Eden was depopulated. Amongst our fighting-men, women actually hold the place which was allotted to them by idealists in troubadour times.

Mothers and sisters and sweethearts, remembered at this distance, have made all women sacred. A new medievalism and asceticism have sprung out of our modern tragedy, enacted beneath the sea, on the land and in the clouds. The tragedy, while modern to us, is actually the oldest in the world—merely death.

It’s evening now. No letter from home came this afternoon.

LVII

France July 4, 1918

I am now attached with two guns to the infantry on a special job. I live with the battalion—speak about “our battalion,” in fact—and share quarters with the Trench Mortar officer. The country is green and fragrant with dog-roses. The dead have been gathered up and lie in little scattered graveyards. Our living men spread their blankets between the mounds and at night hang their equipment on the crosses. War robs men of all fear of the supernatural—or is it that the dead have become our brothers?

One writes a description of battlefields to-day and it is untrue to-morrow. Everything has changed in the past year. Siege warfare, with deep trenches and guns in positions of observation, is becoming more rare; we are more mobile now and see more of the country. I believe, before many months are out, the dream of every gunner along the Western Front will have come true, and we shall be firing at the enemy over open sights and coming into action on the gallop. It will be far more sporting and exciting. The Trench Mortar officer with whom I am living remembers that kind of work in the early days, when my battery was still firing on the enemy while the Hun was bayoneting the batteries behind. He has a great tale of how he came right through the enemy without knowing, bringing up with him a precious load of small-arms ammunition to his General, who was cut off by the enemy. He and his five men were given rifles, and together with the waifs and strays of many broken regiments held the line against the advance on Calais. Experiences such as that are worth living for; I’m hopeful that before I take off khaki I may be in something of the kind.

You needn’t think of me any more—at least for the present—as living in beastliness and corruption. I daresay the country where I am is almost as beautiful as where you are spending your holidays. The Hun did the Allies a good turn when he advanced, for he shoved us back out of the filth of three years’ fighting into cleanness. One can see deserted cottages with their gardens full of flowers, and green woods shaking their plumes against blue skies. At one of our halts the men did themselves very well with baskets of trout; they caught the trout by the simple expedient of flinging bombs into the river. The concussion killed the fish and they floated to the surface.

For the present that is all my news.

LVIII

France July 10, 1918

I am delighted to see that every day the prophecies I made in Out to Win are coming true. The attack that the Americans put on on 4th July is, to my mind, one of the most significant things that has happened yet. Their battle-cry, “Lusitania,” says everything in one word concerning their purpose in coming to France. If I were a Hun I should find it more terrifying than the most astounding statements of armaments and men. I can picture the enemy in those old shell-holes of the Somme that I know so well. It’s early morning, and a low white mist steals ghost-like over that vast graveyard, where crumbling trenches and broken entanglements mark the resting-places of the dead. The enemy would be sleepy-eyed with his long vigil, but with the vanishing of night he would fancy himself safe. Suddenly, hurled through the dawn, comes the cry, “Lusitania!” It must have sounded like the voice of conscience—the old and boasted sin for which medals were struck, the infamy of which was worn as a decoration, rising out of the past to exact suffering for suffering, panic for panic, blood for blood. Whoever chose that battle-cry was a poet—he said everything in the shortest and most rememberable way. America is in France to act as the revenge of God. She has suffered in the spirit what France has suffered in the flesh; through being in France she has learnt from the French the justice of passionate, punishing hate. I can think that somewhere beneath the Atlantic the bodies of murdered children sat up at that cry; I can believe that the souls of their mothers went over the top with those American boys. “Lusitania!” The white-hot anger of chivalry was in the cry.

Yes, and we, too, are learning to hate. For years we have hesitated to dogmatize as to which side God favours; but now, since hospitals have been bombed and the women who came to nurse us have been slaughtered, Cromwell’s religious arrogance has taken possession of our hearts—“Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered.” When it was only we men who were wounded and killed by the Hun we could afford to regard him with an amused tolerance, but now——This is how we have changed: we should welcome our chance to kill at close quarters and to forget mercy. This time last year we were proud to say that we had no personal animosity for the individual German; it sounded so strong and impartial. We don’t feel that way now; can’t feel that way. At last, because of our women who are dead, we have learnt the magnanimity of hatred. Germany has entered a new phase of the war—a phase which her persistent brutality has created. She will find no more smiling faces on our side of No Man’s Land when she lifts up her hands, shouting “Kamerad!” We are not her comrades; we never shall be again so long as our race-memory lasts. Like Cain, the brand of murder is on her forehead and the hand of every living creature is against her. When she pleads with us her common humanity, we will answer “Lusitania!” and charge across the Golgotlias and the mists of the dawn, driving her into oblivion with the bayonet. No truth of the spirit which her voice utters will ever be truth for us again. It has taken four years to teach us our lesson; we were slow; we gave quarter; but we have learnt.

LIX

France July 11, 1918

I’ve returned from being with the infantry and am back with my battery now. For the next few days I shall probably be out of touch with my incoming mail.