PART ONE
FOUR LANDSCAPES
I
_To Introduce Gringoire_
The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel and Gretel.”
This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.
So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and availing himself of the singularly open hospitality of the poet and his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and, above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.
We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but excellently economical cook.
But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely pencilled brows and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons--whom I took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive stable boy--to clear up after he had boiled an egg.
How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in the trenches had taught him one thing--to be an eccentric economist, _in petto_, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful, poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.
Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.
But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent--but _so_ meticulous!--mind that will let him sit down and write _many_ paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once, together, got as far as this:
“_Chops, Mutton, to deal with._
“_Fritto Misto_: Stock: Mixed Meats _en casserole_.
“Take two chops. Pare off _all_ the fat till you have two _noisettes de mouton_. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little divisions: two _noisettes_ for the _Fritto Misto_; two chop bones for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if you like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this simmer for thirty-six hours.[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify; one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are _very_ young and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of two rashers of bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish half filled with water.
“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling fat will be absolutely still--stiller than any waters at even; as still as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It will have ceased to bubble, and, above its surface, will float a filmy wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready for what follows.)
“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which will be large enough later to support the _noisettes_ and which will be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in a frying basket your two _noisettes_ of mutton and the sliced cold potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a clean plate ... _D--n it, that’s enough!_”
The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.
It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens; the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in meditating over his onion bed.
And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the Gingerbread Cottage:
“I do _love_ to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia. But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income--that is a subject for endless thought.
It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The calculations concern manure--for the accounts of agriculture are the most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig--and yet its droppings may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or unattractive--but, fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully adorn your board on Christmas day.
So in the Gingerbread Cottage--and it is, in all but looks, a very bad cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp, cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred the very largest spiders that can be imagined--Gringoire pursues at once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.
But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If Madame Sélysette asks him how to make _potage_ this or that, he says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was weeding whilst he dug.
“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”
“Manure, sir.”
“What is the next most important thing?”
“Tools, sir.”
“And the next?”
“Money to buy seeds, sir.”
“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The first thing is brains; and the second thing is brains; and the third thing is brains. Do you understand?”
The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure, no tools, and no money--but you will see in the autumn that I shall have the most productive garden in the country!”
From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at all points impress a French gardener--but in some it would. For, in his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the mystical sentence: “_Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser._”
And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got his results, he answered:
“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom of God within me!”
The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is attacked that alone can sanctify the job--and that, in that way, the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war changed his heart is here recorded.
This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.
[Footnotes]
[1] This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire ever simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was woe to the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or who did not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band came around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the esteem of his fellow men.
II
_Gardens and Flats_
“I wonder,” Gringoire[2] began one evening, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people....”
It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long established in his cottage--which, because of the nature of the poet himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire, with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.
Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls. Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the evenings we sat and listened to his talking.
For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming, and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.
As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer secured these records of his monologues:
“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August, 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.
The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush. Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth--_orbis terrarum veteribus notus_--seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the world, as the green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.
There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its breath and waited.
“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade--the platoons of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess turned housekeeper, because it has young to feed. Think of noticing that!”
During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and birds only once--to know that he was noticing them--for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects of the world--but of a world that was only a background for emotions.
Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight, some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had forgotten--even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets, and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning in an abandoned attitude from the church tower--even then one was so preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks. Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore one must pass it to reach Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.
So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.
It was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw during the war. There was the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens suddenly grew visible. There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry. There were motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk--parts of the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise and blue. And Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the tall windows onto the lawns and, holding tasseled canes to their lips, bow, pirouette and make legs, till the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff rosebushes. Not _very_ gallant; not _very_ royal. No Rois Soleils or Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering mercilessly, intriguing, smiling, betraying, much as in Versailles, only a little more rustically, in front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.
Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that Gringoire could never get away from--that they would be personally humiliated, shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully bow or avert their heads if ever field-gray troops passed down the Broad Walk, or the park keeper at the gates wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the early days of the war--August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the air. There was no knowing, still, where the dam might give way and the mud-colored tide pour toward us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from the W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham: high, gray, reaching from the legions on the ground to the gray airships towering on high--a solid, perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave of which one reads--of humiliation for the trees and the very grass.
“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the land--not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect. And I wonder why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want of imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined, fleeing and martyred populations. And yet, when I had seen enough of those, the feeling did not alter. I remember that what struck me most in ruined Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling of abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and wall-paper exposed to the sky--not the sufferings of the civilian population, who seemed to be jolly enough--or at any rate sufficiently nonchalant--with booths erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages, selling fried fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me as infinitely pathetic was lace curtains: for there were innumerable lace curtains, that had shaded vanished windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be more forlornly ashamed than any human beings I have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach that: old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs when they go away into bushes to die.”
He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had it too. The Germans certainly seemed to. But he had, naturally, never seen any of our own people in that condition. They are represented to us as remaining erect and keeping most of their _esprit de corps_. That may be why, in August, 1915, it was difficult to think of the sufferings of our possibly invaded peoples but only of the humiliation of desecrated herbage and downlands.
“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if neither I nor Mme. Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy or have no particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any rate, at that moment, the feeling of dread that those gray-blue, motionless trees under the high sky might, under heavens more lowering, feel that final humiliation--that feeling was so strong that I remember it still as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly that it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized wound. For of course, it would have connoted that the broad and the small fields, copses, spinneys, streams, and heaths, stretching away to the quiet downs and the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed and alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the sky in an agony. And then he became again interested in the Guards at drill beneath the trees--whose dressing never altered. Why did they turn in fours at the command “Left turn” when they were in column of route? Why didn’t they form two deep? They were not doing sentry drill or any form of ceremonial that the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not: “In fours: left turn.”
So the workaday frame of mind came back--and we carried on.
On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had another short moment. “I don’t know,” he wrote this in a letter, “whether the news had anything to do with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived at that little shanty, the stationmaster, whom I remember as quite an old man, came to the car-stop and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that both my companion and I laughed. I should say that I even laughed loudly. In those days and frames of mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining only amongst rather simple people--and the joke underlying the idea of the drowning at sea of a man so supported by a whole land might have been quite ingenious in idea--like some joke of the reign of Queen Anne involving the raising of the sea above the dome of St. Paul’s.
“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener had been drowned. ‘The Field Marshal Commanding in Chief had been last seen on the nearly vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’--A good death for the man who had saved his land--and Europe.
“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a student of the temper of war and the _moral_ of what in the Army is called ‘the men’ I have no hesitation in saying--and I don’t apologize for saying here--that without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army would have remained negligible in numbers and would have taken a very small part in the war. And I suppose that, without the British Army, the war could hardly have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”
At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared to Gringoire with a mind suddenly jumped into attending to this shocking fact from the designing of an aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon nine hundred returned British Expeditionary Force, all time-serving men, and in consequence the toughest customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them.
They had every guile from a military point of view. They were adepts in absences, swingings of the lead, drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings, cheerful lies, and a desperate determination not to exhibit any glimmerings of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the use of any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle, which was a gimcrack concern at the best, with aperture sights and fittings like watch springs and innumerable ways of being put out of order. And you could put your nose in half and get yet another month in hospital as easy as winking by pulling back the bolt in any sort of rapid practice.
They lived--these desperadoes--in a tumble-down skating rink, and they exercised amongst the backyards and dust-bins of a great city, and such was the moral atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in which this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire proposed to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of the Roman Catholics with more convenience to them, the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a deputation to him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk three miles to confession and to perform all his Easter duties faithfully sooner than that a priest should see them as they lived.
A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls like a cattle market, where the officers labored intolerably filling up innumerable forms with an immense sense of pressure and of striving with tough men. A great sense of pressure. And he would walk up and down in front of the worst-dressed line that had ever been imagined--a fantastic line, for not one of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand straight on his legs--and Gringoire would exclaim gloomily and in alternation: “Thank God we’ve got a Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going to last another three years; hang me if you blighters will wangle out of going back to France.” Whereupon there would be groans down the line and a near-drunk man would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”
It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in whose shafts of vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights moved these troublesome green-brown shapes that he had come for a very brief period of leave in a world that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas, standard roses, tall rooms, servants--not batmen, but with caps and aprons--pianolas--and no one, really, to clean one’s belt; as well as discussions of that higher, wilder, finer strategy, in which, in one’s capacity of a more or less professional student of tactics, one was so decidedly at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the Chelsea Course. But there, amongst the Guards, the Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner and more insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going back to that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the desperate effort to teach thousands and thousands bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against venereal disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were going to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of jam-tins, the history of the regiment, and _esprit de corps_--and doing it all in desperate and bewildered haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under the auspices of an orderly room driven mad by endless reproofs from brigades, divisions, the War Office, the civilian police, Boards of Agriculture, county asylums, parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young women who had married privates too often married already.... But coming from it or not, Gringoire was certainly going back to it and, in its desperate and fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was the one solid thing onto which our poor poet could catch.
So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord Kitchener was dead.
It was just one of those situations in which one thinks nothing--a change in the beat of the clock. Gringoire was sitting in the little open shed of a waiting-room, the only idea present in his mind being that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of him, their weight upon his left heel and both hands in his breeches pockets. Nothing whatever! Absolutely nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little open shed with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where they served out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick signal-box with clocks or things ticking; a brick house, no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The whole world, that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no France on the horizon; no English Channel. There was no awaiting of Zeppelins; there was no Right or Wrong.
And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky. He speculated on the crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay. Plenty of heart in it, no doubt they would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on the whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex, but “the Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one wouldn’t know the postman, the tax collector, the old standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows, the habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the brooks, the birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the local history--or the dead. A friendless, foreign country, the Essex Flats....
And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s mind: “You see yon man: he cooms from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk and ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the world--just as no doubt it is Essex and Hertford; and Somerset and Devon; the North and East Riding and Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint, against the world--and it’s _never_ safe to put long straw under potatoes when you dig them in, trusting to the wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire remembered in 1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,” out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a big price; one hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight, I think. And he dunged them beautifully with rather long straw and artificial manure. But a long, long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to the south, and the straw dried, and the artificial manure never soaked down. He didn’t get a quarter of a ton to the quarter acre.
On the other hand, under maize, if you can water heavily once or twice, long straw arranged in trenches, like pipes, is rather a good wheeze. It holds the water to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like fire if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful ears of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and buttered after toasting...!
He changed heels under the puttees and considered his garden in Kent. He was going to try growing potatoes from seeds--not from seed-potatoes, but from the little seeds that form in the green berries. And he was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind the sweet corn, on the north--to reflect the rays of the sun. It should ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...
The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with war-food. An airplane was going toward Bishop Stortford; the train was overdue because a unit was entraining up the line--once again every fact in the world was just a part, just a side light of the immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for itself. Trains were carriers of men and munitions. Stretched-out legs were encased in puttees, put in military boots; servant girls travelling with horn-handled black umbrellas and elastic boots were going to see their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with white side whiskers were explaining why they had kept all six sons at home--in defiance of the gaze of Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that wee small station. And railway fares were going to be increased for civilians!
I have little doubt that what, at that moment and for that minute space of time, had set our poet intent on planting potatoes and seed corn--perfectly certain that he was going straight down into Kent to plant potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills--was that his unconscious mind was certain that the war was done and over with that death in the North Sea. I do not mean to say that he thought it--or even that he was conscious that something inside thought it for him. His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent and Sussex; the subconscious mind seemed to be aware that his puttees were badly put on, that he had mislaid his warrant in one of several pockets--he had a vague consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like Japanese clouds. But some deeper center still was probably appalled and benumbed and was saying:
“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘_appry la gair finny_’ as the Tommies say, _je vais planter mes choux comme un maître d’école_.” There seemed to be nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.
[Footnotes]
[2] “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him--as it has been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.
III
_Blue of Swallows’ Backs_
Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire had planted out his kitchen garden; the onions, the lettuces, the carrots, the kohl-rabi, the spinach were aligned; that battalion was parading in full strength. Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato plants, grown from little seeds: under a twenty-foot quick-set hedge, beautiful and close like a wall, the sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long straws, like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the deluge of water, warmed because it comes from a dip on which the sun blazes all day, washed the deep roots; the nightingale was running in and out of the beanstalks; the swallows were throwing themselves through the air; over the low brick the sun was setting on the longest day of the year, and, D.S.G., the war was over and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q., M.L.E., T.M.B.--but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory in the quiet garden evening.
“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in June, “but in gardens amongst woods, beside streams, there are so many curious things to tell of that I don’t know where to begin! I am like a child with the largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing shops. I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four landscapes--the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have written of only two, of yet a fifth.”
We--Gringoire and the writer--had been for a slow walk, round three sides of a patch of heath. A man, leaning over a white gate, with a thin, red face, a blue suit and some very bright regimental tie, just said: “The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And, speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the garden beside the hammock of Mme. Sélysette, Gringoire said:
“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape, the commonplace, friendly landscape of elms, rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and park-wall suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera had suddenly clicked, readjusted itself--as if it grew--though before one hadn’t known it for anything but all that was possible of tranquillity, breadth, security, and peace--grew quieter, calmer, broader, more utterly secure and inviolable. English country!
“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray of dog-roses; a whitethroat dropping over the hedge; some gorse; the long, rolling land; the high skies and clouds above the downs.... Well, it is one stage more toward a forever of security, of that being forever inviolable that one prays may be its portion. A great stage forward.”
For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all but too old lattice, giving onto a deep wall of verdure, we had heard suddenly the heavy guns through the voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that, at the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming orchestra of birds, he had seen distinctly, against the warm brick of the house-wall, a tin hat.... But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light, and a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki aprons, and an immense long train with innumerable shapes dropping out of it, their cries muted by the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel, before the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead behind the Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious of the innumerable voices of birds singing the sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came over the little hills and darkling trees of that downland country. It continued.... Incessant, engrossed, almost as it were tranquil, almost like the bubbling of water in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on, not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to Tommy or of footsteps to footsteps--and, rising through it, as if lances of sound were protruding upward through something soft and vaporous, the voices of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down getting whiter; and the “Fall In There’s” and the men moving off ...
So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns would stop--five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders; fifteen-inch guns--whatever they are. One doesn’t want to hear them again, or again to feel them--dully on the air. Not at any rate in peace time.
The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the thrushes in the shaw on the opposite hillsides; the swallows throwing themselves through the air! He did not remember any nightingale during the war; but he remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on a date in July ’16. And he remembered some swallows--an immense sea of the blue of swallows’ backs. And he said that the Portsmouth guns of the 28/6/’19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have these visions.
It sounds, of course, queer--but it was like that. Up on a hillside that was covered mostly with thistles there was an Artillery Observation Post which consisted of a Lombardy poplar--though one did not see how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a pile of dud Hun shells on the roadside bank at the foot of the tree and beneath the O.P. was a pretty rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The Battalion Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he had a view of a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky line of trenches; Martinpuich looked down on him, which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre wound away--to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun wheel going along the road would catch its spokes in the corrugated iron of his roof--lift a corner and drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench Mortar officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his roof and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing in it. He thought the bottom of hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war. I shouldn’t wonder if it were not the worst shock any one ever had between the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it, he said, because it probably accounted for his immediately subsequent exultation; it was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that.
At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had come in--Gringoire had been waiting to give him a message--downhill through the thistles, dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those days! And an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.
“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained breasts against high, blotted, gray clouds--and I wonder if they are thinking of the near rising mayfly. I remember thinking on the other occasion that there were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that I must be putting up a huge number of flies. But that, again, was the thought of my subconscious mind. On the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek god, immortal, young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the eddies of a dark blue and eternal sea.”
The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of somebody’s First Line Transport, where he borrowed a terrible old brute of a horse, to take him to Divisional H.Q.
It would be interesting to know what that class of feeling comes from--possibly from some sort of atavistic throwback to days when the gods were nearer. You get them now and again in action--but not so often as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are engaged in agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has vanished before myriads of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe it, read White’s “Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is the worst feeling in the world.
Drought is nearly as bad.
IV
_The Kingdoms of the Earth_
It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without, you will observe, suggesting a remedy, that he continued:
“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes that remain real to me--for the detraining in the dawn at Rébimont-Méricourt is not one of those that are just always in my mind. I have to remember back to--to be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns pierced by the multitudinous voices of thrushes that brought back to me that first-heard, unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war through which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable birds. But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied with the job of seeing that one’s valise was all right, that the men had all their kit and equipment at least potentially there--and no doubt with the job of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute--one recorded less of visible objects, so that fewer visible objects return, and they return less vividly.”
He remembered--and he knew that he remembered, accurately and exactly--every detail of Kensington Gardens on that day of August, 1915; of the Essex Railway Station he said that he could tell you what advertisements were on the walls and how many people awaited the train as well as every word of the conversation he had had whilst driving to the station. And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste. Ursule at Brûges, the swallows and the thistles of the ridge going down in the clear July weather behind Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true--but not one calling for any immediate or complicated action. Besides, at that moment he had felt himself to be immune from danger and proof against death. So that those three landscapes became part of his immediate self.
“They will probably remain part of myself to the end of my life: my grandchildren will probably be tired of them and, when I am quite aged, so probably will guests and casual strangers.” But--did you ever take a walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day, perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over the forehead of downs--the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester, from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in 1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could, he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say from the North Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he couldn’t really, but he could have a pretty good try and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the base of the Salient, or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or Armentières; and plenty of other places of the Lines of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and St. Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”
For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that dawn: he had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a plantation of trees in which the thrushes sang, right up against the flat of the line. There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion, that there were only high elms against flat, champaign country with a muddy stream. However, there was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And the thrushes had certainly sung.
But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front line fairly well. On the right of the station, in the elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut, where the officers got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs and coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines on the mess tables in amongst the breakfast utensils. Twenty or thirty numbers of the “English Review,” like the dominoes, of a date when our writer used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing to see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near--too near--the hut were the men’s latrines; a little further, the officers’. On the left, then, as the Draft passed, was the station. A very fat old gendarme was standing, well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him were four market women, with bundles, and baskets containing fowls. They were grouped around the gendarme like pullets around chanticleer, as he watched the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company of Jocks was waiting outside the office of the Railway Transport Officer. The ground was soft dust, so that the reinforcement might have been marching in sandals.
They continued their march parallel with the railway line, along a soft road, beside the little stream, between osier-bushes and elms--for about fifty yards. There were some stray mules belonging to a Kitchener’s battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires--Nineteenth Division anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any drivers. There was a good deal of shouting; the Draft about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere? It was rather like a dream--not at all a bad dream--but, anyhow, a numbness.
Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of doctors, on the way to an operation. Probably the anaesthetic would be all right; it wouldn’t hurt. At any rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved; one’s haversack was a bit heavy--not very. One went on, one didn’t know where.
In the same way you may remember the anteroom of your dentist. There is a big table in the center of the room; on the table some writing materials--and old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst the solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the one hand there is, solid and real, say, Mandeville Place: taxis drive about in it; the faces of the houses are of black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon feel as real, even while one is waiting in the outer room. But the anteroom itself is a dream-landscape.
So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.
When you come out of the station yard, on the right there is a high, white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm. Australian First Line Transport men were watering their mules there, lounging on the steps with their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left, on top of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded our poet of the nutwalk, on a high bank, belonging to a certain farm in Kent--at the bottom of Aldington Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope, on the right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s shop. A superior butcher’s shop with grilles, green paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and a gilded copper sign.
The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse between houses: in England it would have been a village green. There were house walls, windows, archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards or stables. Two men were harnessing a black mare into a hooded, two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four black Percheron stallions were standing in a string in front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years before, outside the blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger. In those days it had seemed to be odd that stallions could be left unattended in a village-street. But in 1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then, was that any civilian should have four stallions at his disposal. For they certainly were not French cavalry, or divisional or other transport.”
The civilians seemed extraordinarily--not unreal--but, as it were, super-real! North French peasants, slow, ungainly, with heavy legs and feet. They were just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like granite--not comparatively soft and comparatively gray, like our own old peasants, who, when they look hard have the aspect not of wrinkled stone but of old, crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland, that country--but like the people, harder, unsmiling.
To the left of the Place--if you can call a flat space of dust a Place--there was a narrow street, high, mud walls; archways, semi-circular topped, gray wooden doors. On one of these was nailed a large white placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary Corps. (I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The reinforcement had to drop some men of the Draft they had brought out--men for the poor 38th Division that was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood--at some other sort of headquarters at the end of the street; that was why some of us penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow and high-walled--more Wiltshire than Sussex! There must have been vegetation on the top of some of the mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a little, thatched, sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises were growing on the thatch. I daresay they would not be there in peace time: you would say it was more Irish than French.
In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture postcards with English regimental badges, picture postcards with views of Albert and the toppling Madonna; silk-worked postcards of bright reds, whites, and bright blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted with spangles. The women behind the low counter were very unreal: a motionless old witch with black eyes, a brown face, and dead white, parted hair; she stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared, not malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image with moving eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even looking at us or at a perplexed Tommy who was pricing postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated: “Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”--patiently, and as if from a great distance. She said: “Ten” very fast, then paused and added “a penny” slowly and as if with boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ... a penny, ten ... a penny,” without either movement or expression.
“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall this itinerary, for many pages and for many hours: past the farm on the right, with the great dung heap, past the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past another crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a great, dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and fallen chimneys, which was once a sugar factory--the timekeeper’s office and the iron gates were still intact--we delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers only, between the bearded wheat on the left and the immense field of thin oats to the right--upward to the Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put up that day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with the long down-grass still untramped in their interiors....
“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and for many hours,” Gringoire said, “but I am not so much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the psychological facts about the other four landscapes.” He had just gone back into memory, without any particular effort--without indeed any effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from a ball. His eyes must have been at work but not his registering brain. The mind was working otherwise.
“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later, “that, all the way, on all the roads, proceeding generally with caution because of the worn _pavés_, but sometimes getting a swift run for a couple of hundred or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor traffic in Piccadilly--the ambulances passed us, on the left.”
That was a detail of the mind rather than of the eyes. Gringoire knew in 1919 that they were there, because he remembered that several of the officers had to count them for a time. But they appeared to be rather symbols than concrete objects. They stood for BLIGHTIES--going home! They were part of what made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel always a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always, turned one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was fear--or perhaps that is how fear really manifests itself.
Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the Officers’ Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t officially called that, though that was what it was. It may have been an Officers’ Rest Camp--which it certainly was not. At any rate, there it was on an open, sloping downland field--seven new tents pitched, two more being pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines, batmen’s quarters, and the rest of it, down to the incinerator, were all, also, in process of being erected. The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled about on the bare hillside with the downland winds running over the grasses just as they do in Sussex on a cloudless day.
“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since I was a small boy and used to ride on the downs behind Folkestone that the sun has a peculiar quality in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.” Anyhow, the field sloped downwards; there was a white cart--or plow--track; then up went a great shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I suppose cultivation for the time ended in the huge field of thin oats between the camp and the destroyed sugar factory. There was a very old man in a short blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs--doing something with a scythe. It didn’t appear to be mowing.
The down rising over against them appeared--so unable is the eye to measure these swelling distances--quite a small affair. But, halfway up it, seeming to tight-rope along a white thread, with an extreme slowness in passing from point to point, went transport wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august, shoulder. A near-mountain!
Gringoire said he could not just remember where the sun was: he ought to be able to work it out by the place and time. But I daresay it doesn’t really matter. At any rate, over the shoulder of the down--not in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated by the sun--silver and French gray, very slowly, a great body began to rise. One hadn’t much--one hadn’t indeed any--sense of proportion. It seemed immense--and alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced as the eye was to look into the pellucid sky, there became visible a number--some one counted fourteen--of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to be globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing straight from them and they turned end on. So, but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the immense one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went with its movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like films of gold dust floating in blue water and like peach blossom leaves--yes, incredibly pretty in the sunlight--airplanes were there. Because the--just as pretty--little mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside the sunlit dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly white, one officer said:
“Hun planes!”
The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers were lounging in a group of six or seven. Another said: “_Their_ sausages too ... Out there! Fourteen!”
The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind into the sky. A broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic young officer--he had a rich voice, a slight stutter, and one eye that frequently winked--said:
“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.” Then: “From a high place, you know, old dear,” he explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire. “His career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with mine; in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed together--at Cardiff, in Rouen twice on June afternoons, and even after the Armistice, once in Coventry Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved Equanimity,’ as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and though I called him ‘Old Dear,’ and later, as the fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name. He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’ club armchair, at mess, dropping usually some single, rather apposite, slightly literary remark--with just the trace of a stutter and always in an extraordinarily sympathetic voice--a deep, modest, affecting being.... I wish I knew who he was--but I suppose I never shall.
“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,” this officer said--and his voice just seemed homelike.
Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in the true Welsh tone and accent, and several: “Yes, yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see everything.... Surely to goodness, let’s not miss it....”
And they figured to themselves a glorious run down, and a glorious run up, the shoulder and then a great, flat gray view--of everything, and of all who mattered--of the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual voice--Conscience, Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe said: “We’d have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant, you know.... Eh, what, you fellows?...”
The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily excited Highlander, voiceless with gas and gesticulating because of shell-shock--threw papers about, threw off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked. “I knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he once hauled me out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing morning because some sort of Scots Brigadier wanted some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks of Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another hut, I permit myself to talk of him as he was, capless, exacerbated, grasping a telephone and throwing things about.”
He didn’t know whether he could or could not give them leave to go up the brae; he didn’t care if they went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t they see he’d only been there forty meen-its and there were two hundred contradictory memoranda awaiting him? And oh to hell, and oh to hell....
They loafed once more; they fell back into that eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war. They contemplated and made remarks about the veering of the sausage.
It was then that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives the note of this book. “I suppose it was my friend’s sympathetic and suggestive voice that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of a landscape that has pursued me ever since--until now here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy--the closed up end of a valley; closed up by trees--willows, silver birches, oaks, and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea--a sanctuary.”
There were, in those days, you will remember, no more sanctuaries. All nooks of the world were threatened by the tide of blue-gray mud. We were out there to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?
So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said “Feignits” to destiny--with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. You were a Haensel, holding some Gretel’s hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in a southern country--the English country.
“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,” Gringoire uttered the words slowly. “It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You know. And that would be true too. Anyway this is....”
He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at that moment: calm, no doubt; contemplative certainly--and certainly gently ironic. So many officers were fussy about things--air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement cards, how to post picture-cards, where their battalions were, and so on. The place no doubt brought it out. It left a good deal to be desired. So that, if he could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have been without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back of the skull; they oppressed, a little, the breathing.
And yet--ever since he had been a tiny child--he had, he said, been so much a creature of dreads that this was, in a sense, much less than dreads to which he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness, of insults, misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of succumbing to blackmailers, forgers, brain-troubles, punishments, undeserved ingratitudes, betrayals.--There was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t dreaded in a sufficiently long life “which had been, mostly, a matter of one dread knocking out another.” So that, on the whole, the dread of what lay over the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty well, to how one’s self would behave--except of course that one was damned afraid of being taken prisoner. Oh, damned afraid....
Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out of contact with one’s civilian friends at home--for, as far as the Army was concerned, Gringoire said he never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness, but just contentment and making allowances--it was on the whole such a relief that he was more contented than perturbed. Nevertheless, the strain was a long strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a strain concerning itself with the English Country and not at all with one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment would go out, if things went wrong. It would go out, disappear, as sands disappear under great waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter anyhow ... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed elms--that was the long strain. And suddenly, at that point it came--the castle in the air; the simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.
I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness at that time--but it came, no doubt as a progression from the train of thought in Dunmow Station. There, you may remember, Gringoire thought that he would have a garden in a southeastern county--and his thoughts had connoted that it would be a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and that looked over a not very distant sea--a great view, showing on the horizon, during clear days, the coast of France; a view, as it were, from which one could see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there have,” said Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered for me--our own land for its country and France for her people, her arts, her point of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a garden with a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown from seeds and sweet corn--also several rows of beans for which, whether for the flowers or the aligned stalks, Gringoire always had a great affection.
In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea: as who should say, “After the war, we will take a cottage in the country and grow things and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a rest.” But, on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came like one of these visions that one’s eyes, when tired, will see just before one falls asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered, precisely as you will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took shape as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century vignettes. Gringoire said that it became perfectly definite--“The little view that I shall see at this moment if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any locality: it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the vicinity of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of Dungeness.... It was just country--but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather hidden spot without a hard road going to it ... and with the feeling that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch. You see the idea--sanctuary!”
“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted to get out of the battle of the Somme. I certainly didn’t, either consciously, subconsciously, or with any plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so much militarism. But my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a sanctuary where I would cross my second and my index fingers in the face of destiny and cry ‘Feignits’ as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay it has been the main desire of the lives of all men since recorded time began. Unrecorded time too, no doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that has given to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule, the Cassiterides, the Garden of the Hesperides, the land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran about in the street asking to be eaten--the peace of God which passes all understanding.”
And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little threatened nooks of the earth that Gringoire found himself on that hillside. For, then, as on the 4/8/’14, when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near a place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea that a field-gray tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm the small, verdure-masked homes, the long, white, thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire into political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have been fighting German scholarships, German modes of learning, of instruction, of collectivism.” But, before that date he hadn’t much imagined--or imagined at all--that he would ever indulge in political polemics. He had always had a dreamy contempt for politics: one is an artist, one is a poet, one is a builder of castles in the air, one is a gentleman, a farrier, a grocer, a miller--what you will--but a politician! “_Ah, mais non._ That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”
But the field-gray tide threatened--not only the Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered, but the little, sacred homes of artists, poets, gentry, farriers, grocers, millers--menaced then the subjects of one’s pen, the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote endless, interminable propaganda; until the brain reeled and the fingers stiffened.
Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy Jewell. Or perhaps it was only that Teddy Jewell went. Certainly he was killed sooner or later. “Such nice, good boys both--though I didn’t know either of them well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do. And indeed there was not anything else to do....
Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the battered sugar factory, he had the feeling that, if they could have had leave and have looked over the rim of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen the Huns, a white, tumultuous line, like advancing surf or like gnashing teeth. That was, of course, a feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that the German lines didn’t look like that--though, indeed, at times they did, when our gunners really got onto them in a chalky country. Then it was rather like surf--the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up together in the sunlight.... Still ...
And anyhow that was a moment of complete idleness--a moment of the completest idleness that those officers had known for many, many months. They were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the hill-brow, that would have been something, but, with the Camp Commandant’s refusal of leave, complete idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour, perhaps; certainly before the passage of four or five hours, they would get the order to report that would take them beyond that hill past the battered sugar factory....
Possibly that little vision of English country, coming then, was really a prayer, as if the depths of one’s mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary, ask your kind Son that we may have the peace of God that passes all understanding, one day, for a little while in a little nook, all green, with silver birches, and a trickle of a stream through a meadow, and the chimneys of a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most prayers before battle. And of course that would mean that the Allies had won out and that the band would have played in the last war parade, with the white goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight, and even the Adjutant smiling--and all the Welsh dead appeased, and all the country nooks of the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free to potter off to his café in the cool of the evening. No doubt it was a prayer of the unconscious, tired mind.
“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host went on, “since my fourth landscape took in very nearly the whole, if not quite the whole, of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth--and that the smallest that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply from the others in that the observing of it happened to be Gringoire’s job of the moment. He had been sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready to point out to a number of senior officers all that immense prospect.
And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough, one of those little, commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots that, months before, had formed itself for his eyes behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed space, shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of the steep escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a little, gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. In front of it was a small, flat garden--not an acre in extent; in the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks were aligned, already yellowed too; and there may have been three or four rods of tobacco plants and as many of haricots, yellowing too, for the fringes of autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of the garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you looked over the hedge you saw Bailleul, Armentières, away to queer, conical, gray mountains that were the slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward the Somme itself.
On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark plantation of birches and firs so that the gingerbread cottage--of white plaster, with little green shutters and a bright red roof of those S-shaped tiles that lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright green, like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter, right along the face of the cottage, bunches of haricot plants, hung up so that the white beans should dry in the rattling pods--the little cottage, then, had the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.
But it was only trees, so that, if you went between their trunks you saw another great view. A flat, almost incredibly immense, silver-gray plain ran right to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was an oval--poor Poperinghe--with an immense column of snow-white smoke, descending upon it from a great height, and then little plumes of smoke here and there--and then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills, church towers--and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant skyline, illuminated under drifts of smoke.... One imagined that one was seeing into Germany!
I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.
On the east and the west, the views were cut into by “mountains”--the peaks of that little range of hills that formed practically all that remained of a Kingdom of the Earth--of the Low Countries! There was the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont Rouge with its windmill atop; the Scharpenberg, with its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined tower, from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air, the sighting shells continuously let down their clouds like torsos of flawless, white marble.
Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a long time to wait. You may not know it--but, if a senior officer tells you to await him at a given point at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters in at 11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M., according to his rank.
On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence Officer, and, having to familiarize himself with a landscape in which his division had only just arrived, he came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having left Locre at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to receive his final instructions from Headquarters. He did not think that at Divisional Headquarters his zeal was appreciated. A sleepy, but eminently indignant, General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly, in pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early rising. These, his eyesight improving as sleep departed, he modified somewhat, because he could not tell who the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two nights before, our poet had been court-martialed for being in unlawful possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.) But the Major would not modify his statement that he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to it. I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth. He was wearing khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords. Gringoire, on the other hand, stuck with equal firmness to the fact that he was deputizing for a brother officer who was sick--so sick that he had mislaid his orders. Orderly Room had sent them to him with a slip attached: “_Passed to you, please. For attention, immediate action and compliance._” They had had a copy of _that_ slip in the Battalion Orderly Room--but no copy of the memo itself.
Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters either. It appears that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued the memo was sick too--had gone sick the night before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him. Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions from a drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal of the type that one usually finds around Divisional Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table covered with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut. _He_ knew that some one answering to the description of my friend was to meet some one on the top of Mont Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal couldn’t remember the name--it was a name like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine--an ordinary sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously. He didn’t know what sort of General he was. The General Staff Officer Number Two ought to have taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so also had Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II. So there he was.
(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident, “it occurs to me at this moment this was intended as a friendly attention on the part of somebody. Either my friend--who was highly connected in an Army sense--or, failing him, I--was to wangle a soft job out of the General. But all I thought about was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set my map, get my field telescope into position ... Well, I am telling you what I thought about....”)
He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top of Mont Vedaigne and the map and the compass and the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest remembrance of the road thither from Dranoutre.[3] He said he could give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps H.Q. from Locre to Dranoutre by the chaussée; or from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class road and field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne and so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne from Divisional Headquarters nothing remained--except that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and at that date, in good repair.
So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage without looking at it, between the potatoes and the tobacco and the tobacco and the haricots, looked over the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of country, looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.
He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For each point of the compass, he “set” his map, finding a convenient, flat piece of ground on which to lay it. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without associations--just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain. Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune; further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple meant the ten block letters _Poperinghe_; an immensely distant series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in printed capitals DUNKIRK.... You see, his mind was just working in the watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to make--and he did make by 11:00 A.M.--four cards, like the range cards one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows, running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres, in capitals or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of the arrow, and identify the place. I don’t know whether any other Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow, he got it done by 11:00 A.M.
It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his last fair copy. He went to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had registered positions truly. Returning from the west to the east, he noticed an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above Bailleul. She was escorted by eight or nine relatively little monoplanes--Bristol scouts, I should say. But, at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were not brought much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects, they hardly came within the scope of Gringoire’s professional attentions. “Airmen,” he said, “were brilliant beings, who treated us with contempt and carried off the affections of our young women. Otherwise they lived in the air whilst we plodded amongst mud and barbed wire. Professionally, they rivaled the Cavalry; obtained information for the Artillery--but, as for cooperating with us, we were below their notice.” So that the great, beautiful machine--which was, I believe, the first Handley Page to reach France in safety--passed overhead without Gringoire’s thinking of more than that it was beautiful.
But his time for consideration of the beautiful had not yet come. It being then eleven and his work as a man from Cook’s being accomplished, he had time to think of breakfast.
He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the potatoes, the haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious mind had dismissed it, since it had obviously no topographical value as an object of interest for a General, name unknown. His subconscious mind--that of an Infantry Officer--had also dismissed it--as just a cottage; too frail to be of much use for cover, even against rifle fire. For you are to understand that whilst his surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to his immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken note of the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the hedges, the copsewood, the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled, the underwood that might be useful, supposing the Artillery had failed to knock it to bits or set fire to it--it was very dry still--before the Enemy Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little thoughts had flitted, like shadows, to be registered somewhere.--For our poet learned that, when, ten minutes later, he went over the ground again, for the definite purpose of considering it with conscious, infantry-eye, he had already noted and stored somewhere in the gray matter of his brain most of the details of dead ground, field of fire and sites for trenches, too ... and a good deal of the detail as to timber, underwood, and the like.
That, however, was only after he had had some breakfast. For a little old Belgian woman with a pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a black cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of the green door of the cottage, just as the lady does in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s request in Flemish for coffee, “_Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?_” she answered nothing, disappearing backwards behind the green door, which shut as if automatically. She was there again, however, in less than a minute, with a plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their gingerbread!
The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent inhabitant of a gingerbread dwelling. He only noticed that it did not go so very well--nor yet so very badly--with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a hurry. It was a keen air up there. He secured some more ham and another cup of coffee and, with that in his hand, proceeded to the clearing in the east from which the best view of the Salient was obtainable.
It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious, professional mind rose to the surface and became the conscious one. In the four hours that he had waited in that frame of mind, he had noticed, of course, an infinite number of details--a great number of airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk; huge columns of smoke rising from far back in German-held Belgium, behind Brûges. A great number of signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like a candle flame burning in a windless air! Gringoire was looking through a telescope, of course. But I will trouble the reader only with two apparitions of those that he collected: they were apparently unconnected, since they took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other in front of Wytschaete. But very likely they had a grim connection.
Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry Officer had noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge seen in perspective. From it rose several church towers--bulbous, Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his eyes from the telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding in the air above the towers, two great white swans. They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow. Then a trunk descended from each of them. After a time they resembled, exactly, immense torsos of Hercules, headless and armless statues, as solid-looking as brilliant white marble, new from the quarry. The Tommies called them Statue Shells.
And then he noticed that there were statue shells over the observation post on Kemmel Hill. With his telescope, also, he began to see that shells were bursting on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took them to be gas shells, bracketing.
He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap between Mont Noir and Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical bit of landscape seen over what is called technically a saddle between two hills. Over the very center of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather high.[4] Extending, like a long string, above this, on rising ground, there was a brown rope--five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed tooth. Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale yellow--as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in the sun--but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white balls went on coming into existence--one every half second. One to the right at the extreme end of the line; one on the extreme left; one in the middle; one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a sole? It goes so quickly that you hardly see the hammer. But a small brass nail is there--and another and another--a line of brass nails on the smooth leather. Well, they went like that, along the brown line--the little white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My mind,” Gringoire said, “was filled with joy and my soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn sunshine, looking over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.
“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Some one’s ducking over there.’” Because, of course, the brown line was the Hun trenches on the Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have knocked the trenches pretty considerably already for the disturbed earth to show at all at that distance.
At that moment--it was just gone three--a man in khaki made Gringoire jump by appearing at his elbow. He said that the General who had ordered Gringoire to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he have some lunch and report again at the same spot at five?
And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape, with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no longer a strategical point or a tactical position. It was all that remained of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth; one could hardly look at the gray plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle flames toward the horizon--one avoided looking at it, because it was Lost Territory, held down, oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe grew to appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians were being butchered by gas shells for the love of God. So the poet’s mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters, as neither the mind of Intelligence, or Infantry, Officer need work.
“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at leisure in that long two hours that I even wrote in my Field Pocket Book a preface to a volume whose proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded my emotions of the moment and there, in a printed volume, they stand. It does not alter their value as a record of emotions that I subsequently learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not gas shells but had been discharged so as to give the German Heavies the range, or that, upon reflection, it appears to me that the Germans were hardly shelling the town so profusely just for the love of God. They must either have heard that we had a considerable body of troops in the town, or else they were trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own artillery’s heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”
But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding and irrepressible. So that, just before, in the dusk, at seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the bright red flash of a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he noticed, with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak, behind the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.
“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me an intense longing to be beyond that sea.” It was a longing not for any humanity--but just for the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just showed over the fruit trees--for the feelings and the circumstances of a sanctuary in which one could cross one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face of destiny cry: “Feignits.”
It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and through the falling twilight to point out hardly visible towns to a nearly invisible Senior Officer. And immediately the mind went back to its original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,” and it was just a geographical fact.
[Footnotes]
[3] I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor--who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
[4] This would be the remains of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall at Ypres.
V
_Intermezzo_
The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler an excellent moment on which to remonstrate with our poet as to one of his characteristic locutions. The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still; some gardening operation of Gringoire’s had consummately succeeded. I forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied contrivance of his had checkmated the slugs in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the long grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the bottom of the garden over a great blue china bowl of strawberries which Gringoire characteristically insisted on moistening with red wine and sugar. He said that taken that way they were less gross than with cream and I am bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared his views with which I could never agree.
In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying on his side in the long grass, Gringoire answered my remonstrances.
“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one should object to the use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied to such members of the late Enemy nations as were not in arms against us. I do not care much about the matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I think about it, not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly never thought about it much at any time. It is a convenient phrase to use about what was evil in the people we were fighting against. I should not now--and I never did--call Brahms anything but a German composer nor should I ever think of calling Holbein a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm of the fairy-tales, Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians, painters, poets, working men, postmen and soldiers in the trenches or at their Headquarters were never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think it was true of the majority of my comrades--except that the majority of my comrades had never heard of Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was true that the majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the subject at all seriously, though they may have used the word you dislike, never--when talking seriously--used it as a term of hatred. Humanity will inevitably use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can get the chance and so will I.
“But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called ‘Huns,’ to the furthest extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it, it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away from ours....
“I am not much set to talk to you about the trenches or even about fighting. The point that I want to put into the spotlight of your mind is mostly the fact that if we do not economize in food there will be another war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I regard the past with much greater equanimity. You remember that, when we were both writing propaganda I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It will be long before I forget your emotions when I wrote an article suggesting that, instead of atrocity-mongering we were sufficiently advanced along the road of civilization to write--at least of the German troops--as ‘the gallant enemy.’
“Today our positions have changed and you are shocked because I style certain of those who belong to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that you wish to forget having employed. The point is that I stand where I did whereas you have reacted against what now appear to have been your extravagances. My propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely a matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed out that the war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia being mostly composed of immense sand wastes--the Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest--the Teutoberger Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where Hindenburg massacred the Russians on their own border. That being the condition of Prussia, the country would not produce enough food for the population which was also a population of the most prolific breeders in the world. I also pointed out--and I think I was almost the only person to do so--that the Enemy Empire instead of being the flourishing concern that she had bluffed the world into considering her was actually on the point of bankruptcy and losing trade after trade to foreign nations. That again was merely a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food-prices rose the world over the wages of the German laborer had to go up so that, even with subsidies, the German manufacturer could no longer compete with us, the Italians, the French or even the South Americans. That Germany invaded Belgium may or may not have been the _triste nécessité_ that her statesmen alleged it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may be perfectly convinced. Prussia was starving, her population was increasing by leaps and bounds, emigration had been forbidden by the government....
“Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population that seeks for bread, but I do propose to dislike and go on disliking the professors and publicists who preached that the only way to obtain bread was by invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet you object to is any too strong. And indeed, if you use it merely to designate what was hateful in the late Enemy nation and if you employ the word ‘German’ for everything that was and is ‘_gemütlich_’ for those who since yesterday have been our friends, you will be doing them a service by emphasizing what they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still ... I do not much care about that.
“I do not believe that there will ever be another war if you put it only on the baser ground that the great financiers who alone can make or stop wars got hideously frightened by the last one. And in addition to that you can consider the educative effect of the Armageddon that finished yesterday. It will take a good many decades before any human soul will again regard war as a means of enrichment and a good many centuries before any Great Power will again imagine that to have an aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots and with the saber rattling is of advantage to itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June, 1919, than it was on August the 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its deathblow.
“Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple people are freed of an enormous incubus; we can sit still for a space and think, which we never could before in the history of the world. But of this I am certain--that what danger there is to the world and us is a food danger. I do not believe there will ever be another war: I believe our sufferings, great as they were, achieved that and were a small price to pay for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even the Huns as having been the occasion of our learning that lesson. But if there were ever another war it would be a war purely and simply for food.
“The food-producing soil of the earth is already occupied; the population of our small planet increases by leaps and bounds. I know enough about agriculture--and scientific agriculture at that--to know that the pretensions of scientists to increase the production of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when set against the consideration of the increase in the numbers of mankind. The most honest scientist that I know refused to reveal a method of increasing the yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because he satisfied himself that to do so in one year rendered that plot of ground absolutely barren for ten years and the milder improvements of agricultural processes that are evolved each year do not suffice to provide enough food for the extra mouths that each year are produced by Prussia alone.
“So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but I remain an optimist, at least in the matter of war for if, as I think will prove the fact, there will be no war till the world is driven to it by starvation, then the coming of war may be so long delayed that, all races of the world being at last at much the same pitch of education, it will be obvious to them all that war is no way to increase the production of food. I heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating to his countrymen to consider that, whilst they were overpopulated and cramped up on an infertile soil, down in the fertile south there was the nearly empty and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And how, he asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants who regulated their birth-rate--or who at any rate selfishly refused to beget children to the limit of their capacity--how could France expect to enjoy immunity from invasion by the healthy, voracious and formidable Northern races who openheartedly and with splendid generosity begot children, to use his own phrase, by the bushel?
“I did not, as you might imagine, because of my obvious Gallophilism try to bite off that blond beast’s head because what he said was, as to its premises, true enough. France _is_ sparsely populated and wealthy, Sweden _is_ overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy for that is not to be found in invasion: the solution is there, waiting. France which is the only country civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at present the only country in the world that welcomes immigration and facilitates to the extreme the naturalization of immigrants.
“The Swede went on grumbling that it was very hard that his compatriots must expatriate themselves in order to enjoy those _Südfrüchte_--fruits of the South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their graynesses and contracted terrible melancholias beneath Southern suns.... So that the only thing was raiding!
“I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish at the moment to hate a Swede. But that in essence shows the root of the matter. Wars will cease when nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently civilized to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit races to flow freely from inclement, overpopulated and infertile regions into those that are sparsely populated and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.
“You may put it that hatred and overpopulation go hand in hand, their destination being war, and you would not be far wrong. For it is not the hatreds begotten after wars are declared that matter; those die natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted activities of warfare are over and done with, so that it is only the hatreds that precede wars that need much concern us.”
He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from those inculcated by hungers of one sort or another, arose largely from differences of manners. We used to hate the French because they ate frogs and were elegant; they hated us because we said “goddam” and ruled the seas. But manners tend to approximate the world over with the extension of means of intercourse. They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today and tomorrow they will speak American in the county of Clackmannan even as in Monte Carlo.
That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to the good to have a dance that all could dance. Before the war the vigorous poor went to dogfights, cockfights, badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a progress towards sweetness and light, part of what we had paid for with our sufferings....
It was at this point that your Compiler became a little impatient. He had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet--but these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of wills, Gringoire persisting in dilating on the future as seen by the practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed, scenting that your Compiler was essaying to head him off from the topic on which his mind was fixed, he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture and French cooking that lasted until dusk was well falling on his garden. And Madame Sélysette, raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated sufficiently plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had better not be interrupted.
The main points of his harangue were to the effect that humanity would be saved--if it was to be saved--by good cooking, intensive horti-, as opposed to agriculture. And of course by abstract thinking and the arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the avoidance of waste.
To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he opposed the claims of hand-culture, to those of the popular restaurant upholder those of the meticulous chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or vegetables gave a better product, the careful and intelligent cook gave you more appetizing food. The more appetizing your food the better you digested it and the less you needed to support you. He said--but that was on the question of waste--that in a French residence of the size of the Gingerbread Cottage you would not find enough waste to fatten a chicken with; in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided by Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half fatten a pig....
In short the world was to be saved by observing the precepts of the recipe for mutton chops with which your Compiler opened this little work. But all this seemed so apart from anything that his readers could be supposed to want from a book devoted to the war-reminiscences of a poet that your Compiler had long ceased to use his pencil and notebook before Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that, having no notes of the arguments we may well, as to that matter, here inscribe the words: “_cetera desunt._”
But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured, and, becoming good-natured he was awake to the outer world. So he observed that Mme. Sélysette and your servant had for a long time made neither objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues. His voice had gone on sounding alone save for the churnings of an early night-jar that sat upon the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly he stopped and laughed maliciously.
“Poor old Compi,” he said, “how extraordinarily this isn’t what you come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw. Still you are not the sort of person to see that and, in a minute I will reward your patience with a landscape that, though it has nothing to do with our main theme, may make a nice _bonne bouche_ for your little book.
“But I do want to get in--just for the sake of pointing it out to the world--that the late hostilities, whilst they profoundly modified the manners of the world did, in their very nature, hold up to the world a moral that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is in any condition at all to notice it. That is to say it did teach us what a hell--what a hell!--of a lot we can do without.
“Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing amongst the suns and luxuries of the _haute bourgeoisie_ of the South. Do you suppose that if, before the 3rd of August, 1914 you had proposed to her to unite her destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up her residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually lugubrious but at all times capricious skies of this septentrional land--do you suppose that, if you had then made that proposal she would not have crushed you to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn? Or take me. Would you, knowing me as you did in earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy days--would you have imagined me spending what till then, but not till now, were certainly my happiest hours in a bare hillside in a tent with absolutely no furnishings but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used to a good deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found peace though the German artillery was actually at that moment shelling that spot and I was for the first time under fire.
“That is one of the things that I remember most vividly, not because it was the first time I was under fire but because I felt that for the first time I had cut absolutely and finally loose from all the bedevilments of life at home--from the malices as from the luxuries. Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or its methods, I wondered a little that they should be so persistently shelling _us_ and that they should find us with such accuracy.
“I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking to an extremely intoxicated and disheveled elderly officer who was nevertheless a man of no ordinary talent. That is to say that his harangues about everything under the sun were interspersed with a great number of classical quotations of singular aptness and he had also made several inventions that eventually proved very useful during the war and that saved him from a courtmartial for drunkenness. I was--as was so frequently my case--in charge of him and, although he was in no position to get away, I did not care to go into a dugout as did all my brother officers who had hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed the fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested me....
“The German shells came in groups of three, doing obviously what we infantry were taught to call bracketing. That is to say that the first three shells whined wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus in our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind us, and immediately afterwards a rocket or something like it let itself down from the heavens. A few minutes later three more shells fell short of us by perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There was an obvious German plane overhead and it was in the late evening, nearly dark in the tent and quite dusk in the calm light outside.
“My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained that the Germans were trying to find with their shells something that that plane thought it had seen--probably the great park of German captured guns that were just above us. They would fire three sets of three shells each. Then our heavy artillery would open on them as a gentle hint to them to be quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening. They might take the hint or they might not. If they did not a regular duel between the heavies would begin, and the earth would shake for miles ’round.
“But, in any case, he said--and his air of wisdom convinced me as if Solomon were returned to earth and judging artillery--that we should be left in peace very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of three shells arrived right on us. That is to say that one landed right in the middle of the captured German guns, one in the fortunately soft ground of a spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in the middle of the canteen tent that was just next to ours; so that immediately after the immense concussions innumerable crepitations sounded from the canvas above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from where it had been precipitated into the skies. And a tin of sardines, coming through the tent-flap, landed as if miraculously in my lap....
“But that old fellow went on nodding his head as if he had been a Chinese bronze and exclaiming: ‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will be the last of it!’
“And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards Bloody Mary and two of her lady friends let off, enormous and august, breaking the quiet night. And I suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any extended artillery duel. They had probably satisfied themselves that the German guns parked above us were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed them earlier in the evening and had signaled their presence with rockets....
“But the point that I want to make is that no matter how simple your surroundings or limited your income you can find happiness as long as you are also surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly exiguous who are contented with their surroundings. The German shells were an added discomfort which I don’t adduce as part of my argument--as if it should be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of weather that one cannot control.
“Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut or even in a dugout than ever I was in a night-club before the war or in the sort of a hotel they call a Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef boxes and sluice myself with cold water in the open on a freezing morning than dwell among Park Lane millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if I can do that, all humanity can. I am no exception, and it is in that way that salvation lies and the extinction of wars.
“Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most troubled moments of the war happened when, as I will later tell you, I was sent for to Paris by the French Government and by them lodged in circumstances of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue de l’Opéra. For apart from the botherments of being asked to do propaganda that I did not want to do and the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as again I will tell you later, the extreme botherment of being introduced suddenly into the sequelæ of a very violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer had used a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying off his little daughter who had been taken there by his wife on her elopement with a ‘fiddler-fellow.’ And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel Splendide et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of as Maisie--that Maisie of Henry James’ book--came and without a word of any introduction, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. She was bothered because she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they said her mother had gone to Heaven.
“You would say that such things do not happen in war. But they _do_.... And the distracted cavalry officer having left me in charge of his sleeping daughter went on some business that he had at the Embassy. But before he went he pointed to the swinging doors of the hotel giving into the streets and told me that at any moment he expected his wife to rush in and use a revolver.... And I was due at the French Foreign Office for an interview upon which my future in the service and the world might turn.
“Eventually my publisher came in and I dropped the sleeping Maisie into his lap. He was to have accompanied me to the Ministry but I thought he would be more useful to me there, so I left him.... But I assure you I was much more frightened of the idea of Maisie’s mother whom I pictured as a sort of infuriated Carmen than ever I was of any German shells. It was she, with her revolver, who typified for me real hatred--the woman robbed of her child. Whereas, as for the only man that I actually and consciously shot at and who actually and consciously shot at me, I never felt the ghost of an emotion of hatred. I was aware of imbecilely grinning when he missed me--as if it were any other sport--and of saying to myself: ‘That’s the sort of dud _you_ are,’ when I--and repeatedly--missed him. And I believe I felt regret when some one else killed him. At any rate I am glad that I cannot remember his face....
“But Maisie’s mother would have been a different affair. _She_ would have been filled with hatred--as I don’t believe that other fellow was--and I should have been paralyzed.... Why, even at this moment I can almost feel her revolver bullet entering my stomach. And I should have deserved it. One should not connive at the carrying off of a woman’s child however righteous the case of the husband. It is perhaps a worse crime than crossing the Belgian frontier, ‘near a place called Gemmenich.’
“To die thus would be to die in a bad cause. And I daresay that why I don’t believe that any great hatred existed between the actual combatants in the late war--and why I don’t, when I think about it, stigmatize the fellows who lately stood armed over against us as ‘Huns’--is simply that we thought we had a good cause and that we knew that they also thought that they had a good cause. They thought that we endangered their homes as much as we thought that they endangered ours.
“So that I simply do not believe in atrocities. The worst fellow that I ever came across on our own side--an enormous Scot whose principal conversation was taken up with the topic of the prisoners he had murdered--I have seen become lachrymosely sentimental over a German prisoner who was in a lamentable state of funk at having to undergo a medical examination. That Scot almost blubbered over that Hun in his efforts to assure him that the doctor would not operate on him against his will....
“No, I don’t believe in atrocities. Or at the most I half believe in one. It is asserted--the Huns asserted it themselves but I found it difficult to believe--that they filmed the _Lusitania_ whilst she was sinking. That I find atrocious. It is bad enough with premeditation--and the presence of a film operator would seem to prove premeditation--it is bad enough, then, with premeditation to sink a ship loaded with sleeping women and children. But if we concede that those responsible believed--as they may have done--that the _Lusitania_ carried munitions of war even that may be nearly condoned. But that you should take a cinema machine to represent, for the gloating of others, the ruin and disappearance of a tall ship--that seems to me the most horrible of crimes. _Spurlos_ is in itself a suspect word, a part of the vocabulary of ruthlessness that lost the Huns--not the fighting men--the war. But the real lives of men are enshrined in their products. To kill a poet is a small thing; to destroy his work is an irremediable offense.... And the most beautiful of all the handiwork of men is the tall ship. It is horrible to see houses go down in ruin under artillery fire; it is horrible to see fields mutilated and rendered unfertile or merely humiliated by the heels of alien conquerors. But to see a ship, its heart broken, its bows appealing to the heavens, slowly and mutely disappear. That is horrible. The sea shudders a little where it was. Only a little. But still the sea shudders.
“Obviously in wars you must sink ships. And I suppose you may make records of the sinking of ships if it be done pitifully. But, in a spirit of gloating, to represent for the purpose of affrighting others or making yet others gloat in turn--to make cold-bloodedly the record of the disappearance of the proudest ship in the world, that seems to me the most horrible of ... _Schrecklichkeiten_.... But perhaps they never did it. Perhaps they only said that they did. That would be a queer way to make yourself popular!
“But there was a landscape that I wanted to tell you about.
“A little in front of Kemmel Hill we had some trenches--horrible trenches because of the nature of the ground. You could not dig down three feet because you came to water so the parapets were merely sandbags and the parados nothing at all. They must have been responsible for the loss of more lives than any other position of the whole war. In addition, when it rained, all the flood-water of the uplands poured down into them. Why I have seen them filled with cigarette packets washed down from our always luckless canteen--after the great storm in September ’16.
“Well, it was just before then that we had been set to occupy those lines. If they had been retired a hundred and fifty yards they would have been on the slope of the hill and dry and safe. But the staff--or some bellicose individual on the staff--in spite of every representation preferred to lose a third of my battalion, let alone thirds of all the other battalions that occupied them, rather than to lose the little bit of prestige that it would have meant, by a retirement. Of a hundred and fifty yards! Think of that!
“Anyhow, there we came down in the early hours of a September moonlight--into a world of beautiful, bluish and misty calm. There were those calms in the line when the vengeful activities of seven or so million men had exhausted themselves and their imaginations had just gone to sleep. You would have long periods of quiet. They would be broken by sudden bursts of machine gun fire and flares of Verey lights when some bemused sentry had taken it into his head that half a dozen corpses in No Man’s Land were stealing upon him. One’s nerves did that in quiet, moonlit moments. You would look at a corpse, or some sacking, or some sandbags until you could swear they were creeping upon you. Then in a crisis, ‘bang’ would go your hipe, and off would go the machine guns, and up would flare the Verey lights. The guns too might come in and some poor devil or another lose his life. But as a rule silence would settle down again for another long period.... I wrote a poem about that, in French. But I never heard of any one having read it.”
It was at that moment that your Compiler burst in with the words:
“Oh, it begins with: ‘I should like to imagine a moonlight in which there will be no machine guns.’ I heard my friend Mrs. Carmody recite it only yesterday. Recite, not read it!”
Gringoire grunted slightly.
“The point was that it was most beautiful moonlight, before a blue, silent mountain with mists dim all up its flanks. And the other point was that we, as you may remember, were a flying division. We were used for reinforcing threatened points or for resting overtired troops. And, facing us, the Germans had similar divisions that they called ‘_Sturmtruppen_.’ The curious thing was that either their Intelligence was so good or ours was so good that whenever we were moved up or down the line we found the same regiments in front of us so that when we were on the Somme we fought the Second Brandenburgers, and when we moved up to the Salient there we found the Second Brandenburgers in front of us and after we had been in front of Armentières for a little, there sure enough were the famous Second Brandenburgers. The Cockchafers, they were nicknamed. After that they began to desert to us a good deal and they were replaced by the Würtembergers whom we used to consider better fellows, I don’t know why, for we never, in the nature of the case, consorted much with either.
“On the occasion of that moonlight night the Brandenburgers had got in before us and displayed a natural curiosity to know who we were when we got in. The German--or rather the Hun--method of trying to unmask the identity of opponents was to sing national anthems. I use the word ‘Hun’ here because only a Delbrueck or a Bethmann-Hollweg--a professor or a politician--would have thought of anything so ingeniously imbecile. For naturally we did not fall in with that little idea.... The idea, by the bye, was that if we were Scots and they sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or Irish and they sang ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or for us ‘Hen Wlad Wy Nadhau’ we should, in a burst of patriotic emotion either cheer or join in the chorus. We didn’t. I remember that once when, no doubt suspecting who we were, they had tried singing “Ap Jenkin,” which is our quickstep, our men replied by singing the imperial Chorus from the ‘Mikado’ as if to show that we were Japanese. That irritated them so much that they pounded our trench for an hour and a half with everything they could think of.
“On this occasion they tried everything from ‘Rule Britannia’ to ‘Australia, Australia,’ and elicited no reply. And then they suddenly touched off an immense gramophone that sang, through the still moonlight ... the ‘Hymn of Hate.’ And in English!
“It was curious and eerie to hear that passionless machine let off those dire words devoted solely to ourselves, for they never evolved anything like it for the French or the Belgians or the Italians or Annamites or Cochin Chinese or Brazilians. Now it screamed and brayed:
“Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the breed and hate of the land ENGLAND Hate of the standing and hate of the lying, Hate of the living and hate of the dying ENGLAND ... ENGLAND”
(“And as a detail I may add that they had to get an English renegade--for there was one!--to make that translation.)
“I am bound to say that it made one shiver a little. There were the moonlight, and the mists, and the lights of poor Wytschaete far away on the ridge. And those words creeping towards us. It is perhaps more disagreeable to think of being prayed to death than of being shelled. One shivered.
“And when it fell silent one wondered if anything in the war or in the world could surpass it for drama. But one was wrong. You don’t know the Welsh. They are the incomparable singers of four-part music in the open air.
“I remember, years ago, being on the side of a Welsh mountain on a Saturday evening at sunset and far below a Welsh miners’ beanfeast was going along a thread of a road in char-à-bancs. And as each filled car passed there came up the sounds of four-part songs, incredibly sweet and incredibly mournful in the falling darkness. They are a conquered people, the Welsh, and their music is the music of a conquered people.
“But on that occasion the Germans had delivered themselves into their hands in the endless struggle between Saxon and Celt. For suddenly a single voice in ‘B’ Company began to sing with extraordinary clearness:
‘Maxwelton braes are bonnie When earlie fa’s the dew....’
“And extraordinarily, before the singer had come to ‘there that Annie Laurie,’ the whole of ‘B’ Company was crooning out the other parts of the song. Beneath the moon. And then the whole Battalion, along a front of a mile. Crooning, you know, rather softly, not shouting....
“And for Bonnie Annie Laurie ...”
“It was a good answer.
“They were forbidden of course to sing Welsh songs, or it might have been ‘Land of My Fathers’ or the ‘Men of Harlech.’ As it was, it was better.
“But there was not much hatred about that. And you will observe that even the Huns had had to get a machine to do their hating.”
VI
_Just Country_
It is one of the burdens of advancing age--as it is one of the penalties of having been unreasonably prolific--that one is always haunted by a vague dread of repeating one’s self. One’s mind, presumably, progresses, one touches and retouches one’s ideas; hammers at the wording; seeks after a final clarity of expression. It is all one that one may have already printed the matter of the theme; the mind continues to work at the phraseology until one, finally, isn’t certain that one has or hasn’t sought the crystallization of the press. So it happens that I cannot be certain whether I have or haven’t printed already what I am about to write. It can’t, however, in the nature of things, have been more than a shortish article; so that if I have to apologize to any readers, the apology can’t be for any great fault.
I fancy that what I then tried to put on paper was suggested by a letter that our poet wrote, having another moment of leisure, at about the time of his long wait for the General on Mont Vedaigne. I wrote an article, and certainly it was suggested by a passage in one of Gringoire’s letters to a friend, at some one’s request, for the journal called the N--. And that journal called the N-- refused to print the article because it was too militarist. I don’t myself see where the militarism can have come into the expression of what was pure speculation of a psychological kind--but censors, whether military or anti-military, are queer people, and I presume that their main job, as it presents itself to their minds, is the suppression of ideas.... The more I think about it now, the more the thought hardens and takes shape; some one--connected with the propaganda-ministry--_did_ ask me to write an article for the N-- and the N-- did refuse to print it. I daresay the journal had quarreled with the department in between whiles.
Anyhow, the psychological speculation wasn’t very profound, or, as far as I can see, very likely to render conscription a permanent institution in these islands. Stated in its baldest terms, it merely amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not much notice what is going on around you. You don’t, of course.
And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state--or rather to illustrate--the fact that, during the whole of the period from the 4/8/’14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries appended, in the Salle des Glaces, their signatures to the peace treaty, he only four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape that surrounded him.
“I don’t mean to say,” our poet summed the matter up, “that I didn’t have ‘leaves,’ but, for one cause and another, my leaves weren’t ever pensive or leisurely. One was snatched into the civilian frame of mind--but into a civilian frame of mind that was always preoccupied with ‘The War’--that was, indeed, in odd ways, far more preoccupied with the war than were one’s self and one’s friends. Thus I remember that, on the occasion of my first return from France, being in a Tommy’s tunic, before I had arrived at the barrier of Viltona, I was stopped by an Assistant Provost Marshal and told that if I didn’t immediately procure leather gloves, another sort of hat, a collar, a tie, and get rid of my divisional mark, I should be put under arrest and returned to my battalion. In the booking office, I found a telephone--which cost thruppence, instead of tuppence--and when I remonstrated with a lady who three times gave me a wrong number, I was told to remember that there was a war going on. When, there being no one in my own house, I tried to go by omnibus to my club for lunch, I being in mufti and a little lame, a lady conductor put her hand on my chest, exclaimed: ‘There’s a war on,’ and very neatly threw me back into the road.
“When I got to my club, a civilian of an eminently moral appearance was lunching at my table. He addressed me condescendingly--as no doubt one would address a Tommy if one were a civilian at a club. I had the feeling that he was about to offer me a glass of beer--therefore I hurriedly began to talk of peace. I wanted, you see, to consider peace and to avoid at once the offer of a free drink and the remembrance of my comrades who were still in danger of their lives. I admit that my words were inconsiderate, for I simply said:
“‘Won’t there be a high old fortnight’s drunk after that day!’
“My table companion drew himself up, pursed dry lips, and as it were hissed:
“‘I think we have taken very good steps to prevent that.’
“He wouldn’t, you see, let me forget my poor comrades who were still in the trenches. I do not remember what I said then; but only his attitude as with his napkin very white and crumpled in his hand, he removed to another table. Straight from that club I went to the house of an Eminent Reformer who told me that he would rather we lost the war than that the Cavalry should have a hand in winning it.[5] He couldn’t know that it wasn’t so very long since I had seen the empty saddles of the Deccan Horse, as, all intermingled with the men of some battalion of Gordons, they returned from an adventure in No Man’s Land, during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. So I went and had tea with a lady who gave me three milk biscuits from a silver tray and said: ‘This _must_ be a change from your hardships over there!’
“They _wouldn’t_, you see, let me forget the poor dear fellows who were still in the trenches. So I passed the night in a Y.M.C.A. hut, discussing Mametz Wood of the 14/7/’16 with an officer of the 38th Division.”
That, of course, was rather a special day, Gringoire said--though it was nothing out of the common. Given his age, former career, and surroundings, he couldn’t be expected to come in for any huge amount of the salutary dissipation or the healing hospitality which did so much to _remonter_ the _moral_ of the troops. Moving mostly amongst the Intelligentsia, he came a good deal in contact with Conscientious Objectors who abused him to his face for militarism or with literary civilians of military age who, after calling at his house, returned to their own and wrote him anonymous but easily recognizable letters, the purport of which was that he had never heard a shot fired and that the only gas he had ever smelled had been emitted by himself. To balance them, he received a number of letters from the German population of London, threatening to murder him on account of his propagandist writings, whilst one of the most frequent preoccupations of his military career arose from the anonymous letters addressed to the War Office, to his various Colonels, and to the officers and other ranks of his regiment by a professional man whom he had once employed and who, after he lost that particular job, found that his conscience as a patriot demanded that he should continuously but unsuccessfully denounce our poet as a German spy.
That is all in the day’s journey. _Homo homini lupus._ But it is not to be wondered at that in his periods of leisure Gringoire was not in a position to pay what he would have called a hell of a lot of attention to landscapes--or, in the alternative, that the essential call, of the land, of the war, was not the humanity that England contained--but just the country.
Possibly the idea of country--just country--postulates the idea of human companionship--but that is not the same thing as humanity.
“When I was a boy,” as Gringoire put it, “every hedge and every turn of a white, long road, concealed a possible Princesse Lointaine.” In those days one walked on and on--from the North Foreland to the Land’s End; from Kensington to Winchelsea, from Minehead, by Porlock and Brendon, to Water’s Meet. Or one cycled from Calais to Beauvais, by way of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire, somehow ending at Houlgate and Caen. Or one went in a slow fiacre from Amiens to Albert, ostensibly to see the new brick and mosaic cathedral, with the Madonna atop. But, no doubt, whether one went to Mevagissy or Mentone; Port Scathow, Pontardulais, Château Gaillard, or Curt-yr-Ala, one was really chasing the Only Possible She.
“Nowadays one sits in a green field--any green field--and longs for nothing more than just a little bit of loyalty. One longs, that is to say, that one may at last find the _hominem bonæ voluntatis_ that one has chased all one’s life. Possibly one desires that, resting one’s eyes in the green of the grass as--do you remember, old Dai Bach?--according to the maxims of Color-Sergeant Davis of Caerphilly, we used to rest our eyes from the targets by looking into the trampled green blades, one longs to discover some formula that shall make us ourselves forever loyal to some ideal or other....
“Or perhaps it is just rest that one wants. Anyhow, one wants the country that is just country--not heaths, moors, crags, forests, passes, named rivers, or famous views. No--just fields, just dead ground, or fields of clover that have never heard and will never hear the crepitation of machine guns; hedgerows unwired and not too trim, with a spray or so of bramble just moving in a wind from which one is sheltered. That, until the other day, one so seldom saw in France--or in England either, for that matter.”
“I remember,” Gringoire said in one of his anecdotes, “being in a wood--behind Tenby, I think, or near Manorbier or Pembroke, in 1915. It was very warm, and that part of Wales is a sleepy country. I had bicycled ahead of troops afoot to inspect some sort of position that, the day before, with my over-meticulousness, I had already spent hours in surveying, when I might have been listening to Pierrots. At any rate, I had three-quarters of an hour of entire leisure.
“The sun beat down; I was just inside the edge of a wood. A little marsh--a reëntrant--ran right in under the trees. There was a mill where the insignificant valley opened out; a little dam where the road mounted an opposite slope. And then, though I had sketched, in a military sense, every clump of rushes, every contour, every bridge, every railway cutting and bit of embankment, many times--suddenly this place of greenery assumed--that too!--the aspect of being just country.
“A little Welsh sheep poked its horns through the hedge and looked at me; a wren crept through a tangle of old thorns at my elbow, a nuthatch pursued a curious and intricate course amongst the netted, coarse fibers of ivy on a wild cherry-trunk. I lay still in the dappled sunlight and thought nothing, except that it was good to stretch out one’s limbs, recumbent. Because the level, green ground in front of me was so grown with rushes, I began to try to remember what were the provisions of the Field Drain Act of the middle of last century. Surely the farmer could obtain from the State, on easy terms, a loan with which to defray the expense of soil-pipes and labor for the draining of that land. And I began to think about the queer, stodgy, Victorian mind; and about Albert the Good, and the Crystal Palace, which in those days was known as the Temple of Peace; and I remembered John Brown and John Morley and John Bright and John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin and the rest of them, and mahogany chairs with horsehair seats and Argand lamps and the smoke and steam that used to fill the underground at Gower Street station. And in those days I had a 13-hand New Forest pony and a very old governess car and went to market on a Tuesday....
“And then, quite suddenly, I felt that, for thousands and thousands of miles, on the green fields and in the woodlands, stretching away under the high skies, in the August sunlight, millions, millions, millions of my fellow men were moving--like tumultuous mites in a cheese, training and training, as we there were training--all across a broad world to where the sun was setting and to where the sun was rising--training to live a little, short space of time in an immense long ribbon of territory, where, for a mile or so the earth was scarred, macerated, beaten to a pulp, and burnt by the sun till it was all dust.... The thought grew, became an immense feeling, became an obsession. Then Major Ward, on a bay with a white forehead, appeared on the little bridge that carried the waters of the marsh beneath the road. The others were coming!”
[Footnotes]
[5] Our friend is here venting a little of the bile that, as will be seen, at times obscures his outlook on life and makes him, elsewhere, appear ungenerous to the civilian population that so loyally did its bit. The train of thought of his friend the Eminent Reformer would seem to be as follows: (a) this is a war for liberty; (b) the Cavalry are officered mainly by the hereditary aristocracy; (c) if the hereditary aristocracy wins out in the war, liberty will suffer; (d) it would be preferable to lose the war. This seems logical. Our poet, however, refuses to see matters in this light. He says that he has never since spoken to that Eminent Reformer, who was once the closest of his friends--and that he never will again. This is lamentable. But is there not a tag beginning “_Irritabile genus_”...?
VII
_Playing the Game_
As will appear in my last chapter Gringoire insists that I shall include in this volume a specimen of his prose written under fire. As that was written in French your compiler flatly refused to insert it in the body of his book so that, since Gringoire flatly refused to let the book appear at all unless it _was_ included, it will be found elsewhere than in the body and what follows is his translation. I confess to regretting its inclusion for although I myself and a great number of my friends including even Mrs. Carmody who is the wife of the headmaster at the ancient grammar-school, a foundation of Edward VI’s in the XVI century at which I have the honor to teach English Literature--although I and my friends consider him a very great poet, if not the greatest poet in the world at the moment, poet’s prose is well known to be too florid for the real connoisseur of prose. And what follows is actually his own translation and Gringoire himself has asserted many times both in private and in public that he is entirely unable to translate his own prose. It does however present a picture of the poet under fire--a matter as to which he here refuses to say anything elsewhere under the plea that to talk about actual fighting disturbs his subsequent sleep with nightmares and also that he intends to treat of fighting subsequently himself when both the public bitterness and his own emotions shall have diminished. This decision I regret. For who in ten years’ time will be found to take an interest in the late struggle whereas enshrined here in the amber of my own prose the record of his emotions might well interest people who have such memories still vivid within them. I may say that I myself, a journalist of considerable pre-war practice, never went to the front though I served during the whole war in the depot of Gringoire’s regiment.
Here then is Gringoire’s prose, the original French of which he says was written at Pont de Nieppe during September 1916 after his visit to the French Ministry which he will describe in my next chapter.
A CRICKET MATCH
BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT IN FLANDERS TO CAPTAIN UN TEL IN PARIS.
_Mon cher monsieur, camarade et confrère_ (Gringoire’s addressee was also a poet soldier):
Behind Bécourt Wood, on a July evening, whilst the shells of the Germans were passing overhead, we were playing cricket. The heavy shells went over, seeming to cry in their passage the word “We; e; eary”; then, changing their minds farther on they exclaimed peremptorily: “Whack!” But when one plays cricket one forgets the Hun orchestra; one does not even hear the shells that pass overhead. We were running about; we were cursing the butterfingered fool who dropped a catch; we even argued about points of play, because the rules of such cricket as one plays with a tennis-ball, two axe-helves for bats and bully-beef-cases for wicket--those rules are apt to be elastically interpreted. But no match England v. Australia at Lords’ itself was ever so full of incident nor so moving as our game behind Bécourt Wood. The turf was of clay, baked porcelain-hard by the almost tropical sun; for grass there was only an expanse of immense thistles; boundaries and spectators at once were provided by the transport mules in their lines. But we cheered, we gesticulated, we rushed about, we disputed, we roared ... we--British infantry officers who are said to be phlegmatic, cold and taciturn.
I present the considerations that follow in the form of a letter to you, my dear Un Tel, though I would rather have written a balanced, careful and long-thought-out essay. But I cannot chisel at my prose today. “Ker wooley woo,” as our Tommies say, “say la gair!” I have passed twenty-five years of my life in trying to find new cadences; in chasing assonances out of my prose, with an enraged meticulousness that might have been that of Uncle Flaubert himself. But today I only write letters--long, diffuse, and in banal phrases. The other demands too much time, too much peace of mind.... Ah, and too much luck!
Well, then, we were playing cricket when I saw passing close to us a French officer of my acquaintance--an officer of one of those admirable batteries of seventy-fives whose voices were so comforting to hear by day and so let us sleep at night. For when they spoke in their level and interrupted roll, hour on hour, at a few furlongs behind our backs--when _they_ spoke, no Hun barked. And they were at that time aligned wheel to wheel from Albert to Verdun. The man was a gray-blue Colossus, his eyes brown and somber, his mustache heavy and dark. He stayed there, planted on his legs and his heavy stick, like some instrument of war, three-legged, silent and of steel. And when I left the game and went to talk to him he said to me in English:
“I find that a little shocking. _Very_ shocking!”
And he continued to look at the players who went on gesticulating and running about amongst the giant thistles and the dangerous legs of the mules. I exclaimed vehemently:
“_Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?_”
He did not take his eyes from the players and reflected for a long time before answering. And I, getting impatient, went on talking vehemently and even indulged in gesticulations. I said in French:
“_Nous sortons des tranchées_.... We are only just out of the trenches.” This game made you fit, _remettait le moral_, made you forget the war.... What do I know of what I said? He kept on reflecting and I talking French. At last he said:
“I find”--he was still talking English--“that this war should be a religion. On coming out of the trenches one should sit ... and reflect. Perhaps one should even pray a little....”
And I ... I went on arguing with him for a long time without his answering anything but:
“I find it, all the same.”
And suddenly I burst out laughing. The situation seemed suddenly allegorical. And if you think of it, my dear friend, you will see how it was that I laughed. It was because it was he, the descendant of Cyrano de Bergerac, who spoke English in the monosyllables of a stage Lord Kitchener whilst I, the representative of so many officers and gentlemen who for many centuries have never found anything more to say than “O ... ah!”--I who ought to have been wearing an eyeglass and blond whiskers was engaged in waving my arms and shouting a French that was rendered almost incoherent by emotion. And all my comrades--officers as well as other ranks--went on shouting, gesticulating, running about, cursing and laughing like children of Tarascon in the French South.
* * * * *
And in truth the change is astonishing and a little moving. We have always had the idea--even the French have had the idea--that the French people, and above all the French soldiers and French officers, were gay, debonnair, loquacious, pawky--“Swordsmen and tricksters without remorse or scruples,” as Cyrano sings.
Well, the other day I went on service from Steenewerck to Paris--a journey which lasted seventeen hours. And during the whole of those seventeen hours although there were always French officers in my railway carriage or standing in the corridors of the train, the journey was the most silent of my whole life. No one talked. But no one! There were colonels, commandants, captains, marine officers, gunner officers. And I cannot believe that my presence was responsible for this taciturnity. It is true that in every suitable spot in the train were inscribed the words: “Be silent; be on your guard”--and the fact that enemy ears might be listening to you. But it was impossible that _all_ those gentlemen attributed such ears to me. I was wearing the uniform of my sovereign. And they none of them addressed the others.
No, certainly the voyage lacked incident. I will tell you the incidents there were: from Hazebrouck to Calais five French officers did not exchange two words; from Calais to Abbéville thirty who did not speak. I spoke to an artillery captain, grumbling at the slow progress of the train. He answered in English:
“Many troops moving!”
Then silence.
At Amiens there entered a civilian. It was on a Saturday towards eight o’clock in the morning and the train had the air of not wishing to reach Paris until after three. As I had business in Paris and should have to leave early on the Monday I asked this gentleman if I should find the banks shut, and the ministries and shops. He answered that he did not know. He was not a Parisian. He was going to Jersey to take possession of the body of a young girl who, having been drowned at Dieppe, had floated as far as that island.... As if there had not been enough deaths.
He began crying very unobtrusively.
But he, too, had spoken to me in English!
And then ... silence. The officers regarded the civilian with eyes that said nothing at all.... I assure you that it was not gay.
At Creil there got in two ladies. They were pretty and very well-dressed. _They_ talked enough, those two.... Red Cross, charitable activities, colonels, families. But the officers never looked at them. Not one raised his eyes although the girls were young, very pretty and well-dressed!
But, when _we_ had been going up to the Front from Rouen to Albert--and we were not going on leave like all these silent officers--we sang, we joked with young women whom we saw on the railway platforms; we kicked footballs along the corridors of the train; we climbed on the roofs of the carriages. You would have thought we were going to the Derby.
I naturally exaggerate these differences a little. This is not an article but a letter. But I am nevertheless telling you what my eyes have seen and my ears heard. And how is it to be explained?
It is not enough to say--as has been said so often--that if in England, the Germans had been established between York and Manchester, if they had seized the factories, pillaged the downs, and indulged in whatever the Hun Practices may be, we also should be gloomy, sad, taciturn. I am not talking of the civilian population of my country; I am speaking of us people out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated, far from our homes and who suffer, I assure you, from a very real nostalgia. For, _là-bas_ ... on the Somme or in Flanders one feels one’s self very forgotten, very deserted, and very, very isolated with an isolation like the isolation that is felt by ... Oh, well, it is as if we were suspended--we, seven million men--on a carpet in the infinitudes of space. The roads which stretch out before us cease suddenly at a few furlongs from our faces--in No Man’s Land. And it is very saddening to contemplate roads which suddenly end. And then the roads and paths that we have taken to get here--and which lie between ourselves and our _pays_--the nooks where we were born--are roads which we may not travel.... And I assure you that, just like any other men, we love our wives, our houses, our children, our parents, our ingle-nooks, our fields, our cattle and our dung-heaps. The French soldier has at least that to his advantage, that he fights at home. That is something for him, as individual. When he steps out of the trenches he is at least in the land that bore him.... But we ...
I suppose that it is in order to forget, not only the Hun shells but also those other things that are dear to us, the chimney corner beside which we have so often sat chatting, the fields upon which we have labored, the herds and the woods--it is in search of the herb oblivion, that we play cricket behind Bécourt wood and go over the top kicking footballs across No Man’s Land--footballs which pass over the corpses of the fallen, towards the Huns.... And crying “Stick it, the Welsh!”--is that weakness? Is it the source from which we draw--such as they are--what we have of tenacity and courage? I do not know.
Like myself, my dear confrère, you have known the difficulty of exactly defining the shades of differences that distinguish differing peoples. We commence by theorizing and we theorize much too soon, or else we take the opposite view to theories that have been accepted for centuries. We have had in England the nineteenth century caricaturists of the French during the Napoleonic wars which showed us the Frenchman as he was in the British popular imagination. He was a meager, famished barber who lived exclusively on frogs. And on your side you had your John Bull, as big as an ox, his belly as big as the belly of an ox, and devouring whole oxen. And you had the figure of the milord with his millions, his spleen which drove him to be suicidal. They were stupid, those caricatures, but it is impossible to allege that they were not sincere. The English who fought in France in 1815 sought for what they saw--but they found it. And the same with the French.
The same perhaps with myself. I have always considered the French a grave people, and when I came from an excited England, covered from the Isle of Anglesey to the North Foreland with patriotic and colorful placards and then found, from the Belgian frontier to Paris, a France quite without colored placards and gray, silent and preoccupied, it was natural that I should look for grave people and find them. But for me there was nothing new in finding France preoccupied, because for me France always was the France of fields, villages, woods and peasants. And the France of the peasants is a very laborious and pensive place where men labor incessantly between wood and pond or beneath the olive trees of the Midi.
For me, on the other hand the population of Great Britain has always been a town people. Well, it is the inhabitants of great cities who, work as they may, have need from time to time to go, as our saying is, on a spree--each according to his nature. And that is perhaps the reason of the differences that have so struck me, between the French Army and ourselves. The British Forces are made up preponderatingly of townsmen, the French army is an army preponderatingly peasant--for even the famous Parigots are mostly country born and bred. And the peasantry of all countries, but particularly the French peasant, is inured to confronting the harshness and the inevitable necessities of Nature. They meet them without ceasing for weeks, for months, for years--for their lifetimes. They can never escape from hardships and the contemplation of the evils of life, the bitter winds, the worms that devour the buds of whole harvests; their thoughts can never be diverted by taking a day’s leave, in making puns or by that humor which is acrid and rather sad and which is yet the sovereign quality of the British Tommy. For to inscribe on an immense gray shell that is about to be fired at the Hun lines--to inscribe on that in huge whitewash letters “Love to Little Willie” may seem stupid and shocking to folk who were never _là-bas_. But human psychology is very complicated and it is certain that the reading of such inscriptions on the great shells by the stacks of which we pass along the highroads of France much lightens our hearts when we advance from Albert to La Boisselle.
Why? It is difficult to say. It is perhaps because, the shells being terrible and threatening, here is a shell that has been rendered ridiculous, a cause for joy--or even merely human. For we are all anthropomorphic--and that one sole shell can suffer itself to become the vehicle for humor, that is sufficient to give to superstitious minds the idea that shells may be a little less superhuman than they seem. They are the messengers of gods athirst for blood, who proclaim their gigantic weariness but nevertheless destroy in a minute dungheaps, whole fields or all the houses of a village. But they have become a little humanized.
And it is the same for our game of cricket which we played behind Bécourt Wood amongst the giant thistles, hidden in thick dust and concealing in turn the bodies of so many of our dead. But I assure you, my dear comrade, that landscape--of Bécourt, Fricourt, Mametz, Martinpuich and the rest--was not gay. It was July and the sun let down its rays upon those broad valleys, upon the dust and the smoke that mounted to the heavens and upon the black and naked woods. And it did not smile, that territory. No; Nature herself there seemed terrible and threatening--in that domain where Destiny who is blind and implacable, must manifest herself to several million human souls.... And then we played cricket there--and, all of a sudden that threatening and superhuman landscape became ... just a cricket field.
For an Intellectual a field will be always just a field whether there descend upon it shells, thunderbolts--or merely tennis balls. But for us a countryside where we have played cricket becomes less affrighting and we shall there pass our days more contentedly in spite of the bones that there lie hidden amongst the thistles. It is stupid; it is even, if you will, sacrilege. But that is how we are made--we others who are not the intelligentsia and who issue forth from the great cities to go upon bloody wars. I, I have felt like that, down there, behind Bécourt Wood of a July evening during the Somme push in 1916.
And I remain always yours affectionately
G.
And I beg you to observe that all the persons who spoke to me between Steenewerck and Paris used English. That is already something.
And _I_ beg you to observe that when Gringoire is moving his prose up to its most emotional pitch he employs a ‘Hun’ expression. For the phrase ‘the herb oblivion’ is merely the literal translation of the almost hackneyed German expression: “_Das Kraut Vergessenheit_.”
--_Note by the Compiler._